Achinstein, Sharon - Milton's Spectre in the Restoration-Marvell, Dryden and Literary Enthusiasm...

Milton's Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden, and Literary EnthusiasmAuthor(s): Sharon AchinsteinReviewed work(s):Source: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1 (1996), pp. 1-29Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817903 .Accessed: 15/11/2011 23:36

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Milton's Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden, and Literary Enthusiasm

SHARON ACHINSTEIN

No doubt but the thoughts of this Vital Lamp lighted a Christmas Candle in his brain.

-The Transproser Rehears'd (1673)

A s good almost kill a man as kill a good book," Milton had written in 1644: the Restoration government saw fit to do both. Milton some- how escaped the death penalty after the Restoration, but his books

did burn in bonfires throughout the summer and into the fall of 1660-one of many rituals that were part of the exhilaration and vehemence of the festiv- ities greeting the new king and that purged the previous period into oblivion. The author judiciously went into hiding, where he lay perhaps "in darkness, and with dangers compast round, / And solitude," and he was finally sent to prison in October.1 In the Restoration, Milton himself and even his name were no "things indifferent" to those in power; on 13 August 1660 an official proc- lamation of the restored king condemned him for "treasons and offenses."2 No matter that his objectionable books had appeared a decade earlier; they seemed

very much alive to the shaky new regime, which sought to eradicate the liter-

ary output of the Interregnum years by removing books from the Bodleian

library and by listing condemned titles.3 Moreover, Milton's name was still a

I would like to express my gratitude to Martin Mueller, Steve Pincus, and Nicholas von Maltzahn for their help- ful comments on earlier versions of this essay, and to David Norbrook for lively conversation on this topic. I thank Nigel Smith for making available material from his edition of Marvell (Longman, forthcoming). Preliminary research for this essay was supported by a Huntington Library research fellowship in 1992.

1. John Milton, Paradise Lost, VII.27-28. Quotations of Paradise Lost are from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis, 1984); line references are given subsequently in the text.

2. See J. M. French, The Life Records ofJohn Milton (New Brunswick, N.J., 1956), 4:22, 329. 3. Leo Miller shows that at Oxford the books were not burned but hidden; see "The Burning of Milton's Books

in 1660: Two Mysteries," English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988): 424-37.

HUNTINGTON LIBRARY QUARTERLY - 59.1

SH-ARON ACHINSTEIN

ready weapon in the debates over religious toleration in the early 1670s, a bludgeon used against Andrew Marvell's defense of toleration for religious Dissenters, The Rehearsal Transpros'd (1672). In the Restoration, it is clear, Milton's name was synonymous with rebellion, the author and his books evok-

ing among Anglican royalists a shrill memory of all the fury and chaos of the

previous twenty years. In 1673, the author of The Transproser Rehears'd accused Marvell of writ-

ing "nothing but iconoclastes drawn in Little, and Defensio Populi Anglicana in Miniature," taunting, "there are many Miltons in this one Man." Marvell was a "Martin-Mar-Prelate, a Milton. ... Every day produces not such Wonders."4 Samuel Parker wrote, in A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed (1673), that "Once perhaps in a century of years there may arise a Martin Marprelate, a Milton," likening Marvell to both.5 By pointing to the Marprelates, the authors sharpened the identification of Marvell not only with Milton but also with radical and rebellious religion, with a tradition that stretched back to the sixteenth century. Parker dismissed Marvell with an allusion to Milton: "your Collection will afford as good Precedents for Rebellion and King-killing, as

any we meet with in the writings of J. M. in defence of the Rebellion and the Murther of the King."6 Although the republican experiment and the Crom- wellian regime had suffered defeat in the Restoration and Milton no longer defended the killing of kings, still the author posed a threat, especially in the minds of those who, like Parker, defended the persecution of Dissenters.

It may be the case, as scholars have recently argued, that during the Restoration Paradise Lost appeared freighted with implicit if not explicit revo-

lutionary political content, but it is certain that Milton's name and the poem he produced bore political meaning.7 In the early 1670s, Paradise Lost was

4. [Richard Leigh, attr.], The Transproser Rehears'd (1673), 72, 147, 55. The authorship of this tract is in

dispute. In The Life ofJohn Milton (London, 1880), David Masson ascribes it to Samuel Parker (6:704); Nicholas von Maltzahn attributes it to Samuel Butler in "Samuel Butler's Milton," Studies in Philology 92 (1995): 482-95. George F Sensabaugh, in That Grand Whig Milton (Stanford, Calif., 1952), ele-

gantly traces the way the Milton myth-Milton as the first Whig-was created by both royalists and

republicans in the Restoration. 5. Samuel Parker, A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed (1673), 55. 6. Parker, A Reproof, 212. 7. Although scholars have examined the poetic relations between Marvell and Milton, they have often

neglected the political implications; see G. F. Parker, "Marvell on Milton: Why the Poem Rhymes Not,"

Cambridge Quarterly 20 (1991): 183-209; Judith Scherer Herz, "Milton and Marvell: The Poet as Fit Reader," Modern Language Quarterly 39 (1978): 239-63; and Dustin Griffin, "The Beginnings of Modern Authorship: Milton and Dryden," Milton Quarterly 24 (1990): 1-7. For a Bloomian reading of Marvell's poem, see Kenneth Gross, "'Pardon Me, Mighty Poet': Versions of the Bard in Marvell's 'On

MARVELL, DRYDEN, AND LITERARY ENTHUSIASM

taken up by two opposing sides that also clashed in the political crisis over reli-

gious toleration. Dryden had rejected Milton's verse by means of an adaptation, his operatic The State ofInnocence (1673-74), specifically rejecting in his preface to the work Milton's self-styled "liberty." Marvell, on the other hand, defended Milton against Dryden's implicit critique of his chosen literary form. For Marvell, having just survived the firestorm of his pro-toleration pamphlets, it is possible that Milton was to be made fit for further deployment in "the Good Old Cause," even though Marvell himself admitted that "the Cause was too good to have been fought for."8 Despite this acknowledgment of England's failure to meet a republican ideal, however, Marvell sought to preserve some-

thing of Milton's by his defense of Milton's choice of blank verse. The question is, what precisely was he defending?

In discussions of the prefatory poem to the twelve-book edition of Paradise Lost (1674), Marvell is acknowledged chiefly for his defense-in rhyme no less-of Milton's blank verse. It is possible to view Marvell's attention to matters of literary form as a covert defense of Milton's revolutionary politics: Marvell might indeed have been defending Milton within the constraints of Restoration censorship of the press.9 Throughout the 1660s Milton had lived in fear of assassination, and even in the 1670s his political pamphlets were burned at regular intervals. Though Paradise Lost was duly entered into the Stationers' Register in 1667, Milton's name was not given to the licenser, only "J. M." He was named, however, on the title pages of the 1667 and 1674 editions of Paradise Lost. The bookmen associated with these editions, bookseller Peter Parker and printer Samuel Simmons, had already had at least one run-in with the government, having been arrested in 1667 for their association with a Quaker tract. Marvell, too, had many a close call with the censor's lash. For instance, in 1671 Marvell's printer, Thomas Palmer of Westminster, was fined

Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost,"' Milton Studies 16 (1982): 77-96. Joseph Anthony Wittreich sees Marvell's stance toward Milton as Marvell's own self-justification in "Perplexing the Explanation: Marvell's 'On Mr Milton's Paradise Lost," in C. A. Patrides, ed., Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures (London, 1978), 280-305. See also Rosalie Colie, My Ecchoing Song (Princeton, N.J., 1970), xi-xii, 3-4.

8. Andrew Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros'd and The Rehearsal Transpros'd: The Second Part, ed. D. I. B. Smith (Oxford, 1971), 135. All citations are from this edition. Some scholars suggest that Marvell was continuing in Milton's revolutionary, or at least republican, political tradition; see Christopher Hill, "Andrew Marvell and the Good Old Cause," in Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1963); and Austin Woolrych, "Milton and the Good Old Cause," in Ronald G. Shafer, ed., Ringing the Bell Backward: The Proceedings of the First International Milton Symposium (Indiana, Pa., 1982), 135-50. Nicholas von Maltzahn shows how another of Milton's first readers saw Milton as Calvinist and republican; see "Laureate, Republican, Calvinist: An Early Response to Paradise Lost (1667)," Milton Studies 29 (1992): 181-98.

9. Christopher Hill, "Milton and Marvell," in Patrides, Approaches to Marvell, 1.

SHARON ACHINSTEIN

twenty marks and pilloried for two days for selling a satirical "Painter" poem, most likely Marvell's own Further Advice to a Painter.'0

Marvell was well aware of the dangers of Restoration censorship. He excori- ated censors in The Rehearsal Transpros'd for their actions against "ugly Printing- Letters, that look but like so many rotten-Teeth, How oft have they been pull'd out by B. and L. the Public-Tooth-drawers!"1' The Licensing Act of 1662 had required that all manuscripts be presented for approval to the official censor who, after any emendations were made, had to testify that nothing in the work was "contrary to Christian faith or the doctrine or discipline of the Church of England or against the state or government of this realme or contrary to good life or good manners."12 In the debate over religious toleration, "doctrine and

discipline" were precisely the unsettled issues. Choosing a biblical theme, as Milton did, was hardly a neutral choice under the Anglican imposition of uniformity. 13 The printer John Twyn was one of only two men executed during the Restoration period for publishing a pamphlet; the charge, in 1663, was using the Bible for treasonous intent.14 There was a slight relaxation of censorship in 1670-73, however, because of policies of greater toleration for Dissenters-just before the publication of the twelve-book edition of Paradise Lost containing Marvell's prefatory poem. Nonetheless, books such as Marvell's Rehearsal Transprosd still had to undergo cuts, and Marvell's printer Nathaniel Ponder was imprisoned in 1676 for publishing the second part of it.15

Such conditions provoked these authors and others to "write between the lines," as Christopher Hill has shown us. Because Milton wrote under threat of censorship, argues Hill, in Paradise Lost "references to England, his analysis of the failure of the Revolution, could not be direct." Milton could only "hint" at the things that mattered to him most, and thus "his allusions are never

explicit, but for the alert reader they do not need to be."16 It follows from this

10. See Richard L. Greaves, Enemies under His Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664-1677 (Stanford, Calif., 1990), 174-75, 232. See also Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers (London, 1968), 144, 230.

11. Marvell, Rehearsal Transprosd, 4. 12. Cited in Frederick S. Siebert, Freedom ofthe Press in England, 1476-1776 (Urbana, Ill., 1952), 221-63;

and Christopher Hill, "Censorship and English Literature," in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, vol. 1, Writing and Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst, Mass., 1985), 51.

13. For an overview of nonconformists' difficulty with the press, see Greaves, "The Radical Press, 1664-1772," in Enemies under His Feet, 167-190.

14. Twyn's book had cited Eglon's assassination by Ehud (Judges 3) as a lawful precedent for overthrowing the Stuart government. See Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us fom Evil The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660-1663 (New York, 1986), 221-24; see also Siebert, Freedom of the Press, 267.

15. See Hill, "Censorship and English Literature," 53; and Greaves, Enemies under His Feet, 232. 16. Hill, "Censorship and English Literature," 56.


kind of argument that Paradise Lost should bear traces of deliberate mystification, set there to divert the censor's gaze;17 and because Marvell was among that privileged audience able to read between the lines, it would have been his job to keep the messages he found there well hidden from others. In Censorship and Interpretation, Annabel Patterson sketches out the literary tradition of this kind of elliptical writing. Unlike Hill, however, she does not search out the "key" to the politics of Paradise Lost but sees deliberate mystification-or as she puts it, "functional ambiguity"-as leading to an indeterminacy about meaning that constitutes the sphere of the aesthetic itself.18

In his defense of Milton's rhyme, then, perhaps Marvell writes an allegory in defense of Milton's revolutionary politics. By using rhyme to commend the lack of rhyme, Marvell sets Milton's poetic achievement apart from his own, perhaps presenting Milton as the "one just man," who remains loyal to his principles in the face of powerful opposition.19 Indeed, Marvell explicitly prompts Milton to remain committed to his principles, here poetic ones, in a hostile environment. Marvell may allude to the exemplary figure for resistance in Paradise Lost, Abdiel, who, "Among the faithless, faithful only hee; / Among innumerable false, unmov'd, / Unshak'n, unseduc'd" (V.897-99). Both Mar- vell's Milton and Milton's Abdiel are "of thy own sense secure." Both poets applaud the individual's choice to confront convention, whether poetic or political.20 In Paradise Lost, God alone is capable of "circumscribing" human

17. Many modern readings of the poem assume there are precise topical and political meanings to be found. See, for example, Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford, 1987), 205-31; Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, 1977), 354-412; and David Loewenstein, "An Ambiguous Monster': Representing Rebellion in Milton's Polemics and Paradise Lost," Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992): 295-315. See also Blair Worden, "Milton's Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven," in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1990), 225-46.

18. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, Wis., 1984), 18. In Reading between the Lines (Madison, Wis., 1993), Patterson has also elegantly shown the connections Milton made use of between political freedom and the aesthetic agenda of the Longinian sublime; she argues that concealment was associated with both (pp. 256-75).

19. David Loewenstein discusses Milton's depiction of the "one just man" as an exemplary figure of godly virtue in Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 1990), 101-7.

20. Poetic form may be read as an allegory for Abdiel's resistance: read wholly out of context, the following lines from Paradise Lost may be exchanged for a message about rhyme: "Nor number, nor example with him wrought / To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind / Though single." By applying these words to the field of poetic-and not to Abdiel's explicitly political-endeavor, we find that Milton defends Abdiel, or his own lack of rhyme-the "single" truth-against Satan's crew, or rhyming couplets-"double." Hill, in "Milton and Marvell," also proposes Abdiel as the figure both poets sought to emulate, but in terms of political, rather than poetical, resistance (p. 23).

SHARON ACHINSTEIN

beings (as in Eden); God alone has the power and the authority to put bound- aries around, or to number, things. Rhyme, by contrast, is only an artificial or satanic circumscription. Abdiel defends the "just Decree of God" by asking Satan: "Shalt thou give Law to God, shalt thou dispute / With him the points of

liberty, who made / Thee what thou art, and form'd the Pow'rs of Heav'n / Such as he pleasd, and circumscrib'd thir being?" (V822-25). Marvell's poem thus may be said to imply Milton's adherence to his poetical principles and-reading between the lines-to his revolutionary political aims.

Milton's own notes on the literary form of Paradise Lost seem to have a political register, defending that same "liberty" he had championed in the Cromwellian period. Using the language of the Good Old Cause, Milton jus- tified his blank verse on the grounds that "it rather is to be esteem'd an exam-

ple set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming."21 Milton's Restoration enemies knew precisely what political allegory was being expressed by this defense of blank verse, namely, the possible revival of doctrines of "ancient liberty" that had infused English revolutionary rhetoric. Theodore Haak, Milton's old friend and fellow translator, upon hearing the poem's title, had feared "it would be a lament for the loss of England's happiness with the downfall of the revolutionary regime."22 Perhaps his friend, like Samson, chose revenge rather than acquiescence; perhaps reading Paradise Lost invited a reader to discover the coded revolutionary message hidden beneath the surface.23

Thus there is much evidence to confirm the conclusions of scholars who have found in Marvell's prefatory poem a defense of Milton's revolutionary politics, an allegory for political ideology.24 Current scholarship has also looked at the relation between literary form and political content in terms of

disguises, where "ambiguity becomes a creative and necessary instrument," used by authors and readers in systems where none may freely speak.25 Such strategies of deliberate concealment have also been uncovered in contemporary

21. Hughes, Complete Poems and Major Prose, 210. On the "language of the Good Old Cause," see Patterson, Reading between the Lines, chap. 7.

22. Hill, "Milton and Marvell," 23. 23. Most commentators on Marvell's poem spot a resemblance between Milton and Samson; see, for exam-

ple, Wittreich, "Perplexing the Explanation," where Samson is the "false prophet, the destroyer," who is to be distinguished from Milton "the true prophet and creator" (p. 295).

24. As reads Christopher Kendrick in Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form (New York, 1986): "Milton's

preface should indeed be taken to indicate a general displacement of his political intent-of his radical- ism-from the level of narrative content to that of form" (p. 83). See also Hill, "Censorship and

English Literature," 34. 25. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 18. See also her Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political

History (Durham, N.C., 1991), 1-12.


theories of political resistance. As Richard Ashcraft showed, in the context of the Rye House conspirators of the 1680s, Locke and others used "a language filled with ambiguity, irony, double meanings, and falsehoods, in order to protect themselves in a situation in which imminent death was likely to be the

consequence of discovery."26 Indeed, political writing was so dangerous that Sir Algernon Sidney was executed for defending, if only in private, political disobedience. When we think about such language as a "disguise" for inner

meaning, we make a claim that meaning could be discovered if we could cast off the cloak. Steven Zwicker has introduced the language of clothing into this discussion, arguing that poets in the Restoration consciously used "disguise" as a means to protect themselves from the political consequences of their opin- ions.27 Lying, disguise, masquerade-all these concepts suggest that we would know what authors really meant if they had been able to speak without fear. For ignoring the hidden inner meanings, Hill chastises historians who, "look-

ing only at the words on the page risk entering into an unwritten conspiracy with seventeenth-century censors."28

Yet what does it mean to challenge that conspiracy, to dig into "censored" texts to unearth political meaning therein? Our approach to strategies of concealment needs rethinking, specifically in light of the Restoration debate over

religious toleration; and I propose to show that obscurity does not always call for a search for an esoteric inner meaning. The toleration debate made a crucial issue out of the relation between outward action and inner belief, and this relation corresponds to the problem of esoteric, or coded, meaning. As the

Anglican Church leaders sought to compel uniformity of belief through enforcement of outward conformity in religious practice, those defending toleration for religious nonconformists sought to protect religious liberty on the

grounds of conscience, a space where meaning could remain undisclosed. The search for a hidden meaning, as engaged in by Restoration thinkers or by modern critics, is part of an altogether different hermeneutic. Milton's chosen lit-

erary form, I shall argue here, does not just "stand for"-stand in place of- his subversive political ideas. Rather, style and political ideologies were aspects of an agenda that was both political and aesthetic. Milton's poem did become

26. Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Lockes Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 341; see also chap. 8, "The Language of Conspiracy," 338-405. For a discussion of the philosophic bases for practices of dissimulation, see Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), esp. 257-58.

27. Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Drydens Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton, N.J., 1984); see also his Lines ofAuthority: Politics and Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 9-36.

28. Hill, "Censorship and English Literature," 50.

m- 7

SHARON ACHINSTEIN

a field over which opposing parties clashed, not because it concealed a political meaning that had to be discovered, but because it involved questions vital to several important Restoration debates: over the relation between inner states and external acts; over the potential dangers of inspired actions for the state; and especially over the scope allowed for individual choice in religious matters.

Just what kind of a threat was Milton imagined to be? I suggest that in the Restoration, Milton was not associated with a dissenting tradition strictly because of his ideas; rather, he represented what I shall call literary enthusiasm, a powerful force that embodied the most dangerous aspects of revolutionary energy: the conviction that one's ideas were divinely inspired and the belief that individual choice and experience could guide moral actions. Thus Milton's literary mode was not merely conceived as an allegory for a political ideology but was politically meaningful in itself as a marker of a type of commitment- to religious enthusiasm. The enemies of enthusiasm claimed that this mode was dangerous not only because of its rhetorical power-its encoding of subversive political opinion in ambiguous or dense language-but also, and more importantly, because those who used it made unverifiable claims for their own private authority. Enthusiasm, it was feared, could spiral out of control and thus lead to rebellion and anarchy.

Historians have argued that there was a "cooling down" of religious enthusiasm toward the end of the seventeenth century as politicians sought to exclude individual inspiration from the grounds of social order.29 J. G. A. Pococks definition of enthusiasm serves here: in the Restoration, enthusiasm was "thought of as the essential characteristic of Puritanism: the claim to personal inspiration by an indwelling spirit, with all its chiliastic and antinomian capacity to turn the social as well as the metaphysical world upside down."30 That "cooling down," as I hope to show in the writings of Marvell and Dry- den, was a campaign with an aesthetic as well as a political agenda. What Dryden-and even Marvell-confronted in Milton's spectre was the problem of direct individual inspiration.

In their different responses to Paradise Lost, I suggest, Marvell and Dryden were sharing political anxieties over the role of dissent, a concern central to the

29. G. S. Holmes, Politics, Religion, and Society in England 1679-1742 (London, 1986), 181-216; and Michael Heyd, "The Reaction to Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth Century: Towards an Integrative Approach," Journal ofModern History 53 (1981): 258-80. See also Blair Worden, introduction to Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce fom the Watchtower (London, 1978), 51.

30. J. G. A. Pocock, "The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse," in his Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the

Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 219. There were many different meanings of anti-enthusiasm, just as there were many different types of dissent; see J. G. A. Pocock, "Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment," in P. Zagorin, ed., Culture and Politics (Los Angeles, 1980), 91-111.


Restoration state. In their treatment of Milton, both authors came to terms with the scope allowed to literary inspiration. In struggling with Milton, these authors came to formulate protocols for alternative Restoration cultures: Marvell's, in which dissent-both religious and literary-is tolerated, and Dryden's, in which it is not. The reception of Paradise Lost became the occa- sion for a discussion of how an enthusiastic literary form, no less than revolutionary ideas, might coexist with an orderly state. Rather than reading between the lines of Marvell's poem to identify Milton's veiled political position, I find that, for Marvell, Milton's literary enthusiasm stands for itself. Of the debate over rhyme, the question is not "Is it or is it not political?" but rather "Can individual choices-and therefore diversity-be tolerated?"

THE AESTHETICS OF DISSENT IN THE RESTORATION

Dissent had been a chief political and religious problem during the Restoration. Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence, issued on 15 March 1672, just two days before war was declared on the United Provinces, was the culmination of a series of actions by which the king sought to consolidate royal power by eco- nomic means and by cabalistic agreements, including the secret Treaty of Dover (in which Charles promised a future conversion to Catholicism) with the French. The king's Declaration of Indulgence reversed the previous twelve-year sway of the Clarendon Code, a policy of identifying the restored monarchy with the Church of England and imposing religious uniformity by coercive means. In the declaration Charles claimed he wished to unite the nation, and he

proposed the suspension of all laws against nonconformists and recusants.31 Yet the trouble with Indulgence was that it not only allowed Protestant sects

to practice freely (Presbyterians, Independents, and the more visible and visibly persecuted Baptists and Quakers) but also opened the door for English Catholics, ever seen as enemies of state, to practice their religion openly. The declaration also posed a political problem for those who supported toleration but not royal prerogative; Indulgence showed that the king was capable of suspending law, of

31. Accounts of Restoration political controversy over toleration may be found in Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1990); Mark Goldie, "The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England," in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds., From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), 331-68; and G. S. De Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the FirstAge of Party, 1688-1715 (Oxford, 1985), 75. See also C. F Mullett, "Toleration and Persecution in England 1660-89," Church History 16 (1949): 18-43; and M. R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1978).

10 ' SHARON ACHINSTEIN

acting arbitrarily. Charles rescinded the declaration the following March in response to pressure from anti-Catholic and anti-French members of Parliament, yet Dissenters practiced their worship with little harassment over the next few years. Parliament was able to pass anti-dissenting policies during 1673, however, as anti-papist fever ran high, especially when in 1673 the duke of York refused to take Anglican communion, thus implicity declaring his Catholicism. With an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the London populace dissenting from the Church in the early 1670s, with Charles's queen barren and a Catholic successor in the duke of York (who made an unfortunate marriage to the Catholic Mary of Modena), all signs pointed to a future Catholic ruler. In this context, Indulgence for Dissenters was seen as a real danger to Protestant consensus.

Literary history and debates over toleration crossed paths in the duke of Buckingham's farce drama, The Rehearsal (1671). In addition to attacking his political enemies, including Henry Bennet, the earl of Arlington-one of Charles's chief ministers in the period that has been described by historians as his bid for absolutism (1667-72)-Buckingham viciously satirized the poet Dryden in the figure of Mr. Bayes. The play suggested that Charles's regime had been glorified by pompous but empty heroic poetry (such as Dryden's) and that it was promoting pompous and empty ministers (such as Arling- ton).32 Writing in support of toleration, Marvell took Buckingham's political satire one step further in his tract The Rehearsal Transprosd.33 Cued by Buck-

ingham's mock-heroic attacks on the poet and politician, Marvell attacked the "zealous Anglican" Samuel Parker, the ardent opponent of toleration.34 But he made the conceptual link between literary and political positions clearer than Buckingham had, writing of Dryden and Parker, "Mr. Bayes and he do

32. See George McFadden, "Political Satire in The Rehearsal," Yearbook of English Studies 4 (1974): 120-28. For a revisionary discussion of Buckingham's support for nonconformists, see Bruce Yardley, "George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, and the Politics of Toleration," Huntington Library Quarterly 55 (1992): 317-37.

33. Marvell, though sympathetic to dissent, did not present himself as a Dissenter. On the contrary; in The Rehearsal Transpros'd he kept his distance from them, asserting, "Not on the other part to impute any errors or weakness of mine to the Nonconformists, nor mistake me for one of them, (not that I fly it as a reproach, but rather honour the more scrupulous:) for I write only what I think befits all men in

Humanity, Christianity and Prudence" (p. 186). Stressing his loyalty to the king, Marvell insisted that toleration for Dissenters was not a revival of the old antimonarchical revolutionary energy. On the

political situation of this tract, see Warren Chernaik, The Poet's Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1983), 120, 122.

34. See Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, N.J., 1978), 189-210; and John Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism ofAndrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968), 184-207. On Samuel Parker, see Gordon Schochet, "Between Lambeth and Leviathan: Samuel Parker on the Church of

England and Political Order," in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, eds., Political Discourse in

Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), 189-208.

10 s SHARON ACHINSTEIN


very much Symbolize; in their understandings, in their expressions, in their humour, in their contempt and quarrelling of all others.... both their Talents do particularly lie in exposing and personating Nonconformists" (pp. 9-10). Marvell kept up the offensive against Dryden in his prefatory poem to Paradise Lost, where he mocked the "Town-Bayes" who, "like a Pack-horse," "writes all the while and spells." By equating Parker and Dryden in The Rehearsal Transpros'd, Marvell figured the political agenda of toleration as at one with the literary agenda of preserving freedom from rhyme. Literary style was thus an allegorical equivalent of a political opinion.

On the other side, Anglicans similarly allegorized political faction in literary terms, charging that nonconformists' use of literary form went hand in hand with rebellion, a technique Samuel Butler applied in Hudibras to dis- credit Presbyterianism. Marvell was trounced for his poetical and political proximity to that "libeller" Milton, the revolutionary Milton who was a "Schismatick in Poetry" and "nonconformable in point of Rhyme."35 In the outrage over Marvell's The Rehearsal Transprosd, critics taxed Marvell for his bad literary style ("play-book style") in the course of attacking his political views. As the author of The Transproser Rehears'd noted, nonconformity was consistent with three things: the "doctrine of killing kings," "the People's Propriety in Language (a new Privilege of Subject for which our Author con- tends)," and a "play book"-that is, popular style.36 A good Anglican royalist opposed all three.

Yet how had these aesthetic and political ideologies come to be linked? Anglicans associated nonconformity with populism, which was feared all the more because of the Dissenters' use of the press.37 Marvell's style and form were attacked for catering to the "rabble."38 Dryden, a popular playwright himself, admitted that prose drama did appeal to the vulgar, and proposed that the "better sort" preferred a drama in which strict verse forms were main- tained.39 Distinctions in social rank inhered in literary style as well as in religious style. As Anglicans saw it, the danger was not only aesthetic populism but also an enlarged political audience: "The Argument if improv'd," wrote the

35. Transproser Rehears'd, 147, 43. 36. Ibid., 72, 123, 9. 37. N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, Ga.,

1987), 82-88. 38. Transproser Rehears'd, 43, 29. 39. John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, in The Works ofJohn Dryden, vol. 17, ed. Samuel H. Monk (Los

Angeles, 1971), 73. Cedric D. Reverand III examines Dryden's theme that the poet can straddle the worlds of both poetry and politics in "Dryden's 'Essay of Dramatick Poesie': The Poet and the World of Affairs," Studies in English Literature 22 (1982): 375-93.

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12 SHARON ACHINSTEIN

author of The Transproser Rehears'd, "might have been of force for the People's Propriety in Language (a new Privilege of Subject for which our Author con- tends) for how justly may he plead, that they give names to their Dogs and Horses, . . . they exercise a petty Royalty in pinfolding Cattle, and pounding Beasts, in making Wills and Testaments. Leases made with no less Caution than Laws pass (in the Imperial style) under their Hand and Seal."40 This conservative writer attacked the inclusion of the people in political debate by means of an attack on their use of language. In 1663, when L'Estrange made

proposals for licensing the press, his targets were "the great masters of the popular style," those who "speak plain and strike home to the capacity and humours of the multitude."41

Dryden took up the question of a popular, or vulgar, style in an attack on his Whig enemies in the preface to his poem The Medall (1681-82). Noting that Dissenters numbered among their party such lowly folk as "Footmen," Dryden remarked, "A Dissenter in Poetry from Sense and English, will make as

good a Protestant Rhymer, as a Dissenter from the Church of England a Protestant Parson." But not only were dissenting poets poor rhymers, they were also immediately recognizable by stylistic tics: "if you encourage a young Beginner, who knows but he may elevate his stile a little, above the vulgar Epithets of prophane, and sawcy Jack, and Atheistick Scribler ... when the fit of Enthusiasm is strong upon him: by which well-mannered and charitable

Expressions, I was certain of his Sect, before I knew his name."42 Dissenting style, vulgar style, unrhyming while at the same time enthusiastic and sub-

limely elevated: these dangers were all linked.

Through repeated parallels between religious freedom and literary freedom,

popular style and populist politics, Restoration authors expressed political as well as poetical desires. By invoking a familiar allegory of literary form in which the place of rhyme was clear, Dryden and Marvell both may be said to have

given Milton's poem some political placement in their visions of literary culture. But it was not so simple as a one-to-one mapping: rhyme was not the only object of attack. Other aesthetic crises arose over the spectre of nonconformity, and it is to these I now turn.

40. Transproser Rehears'd, 123-24. 41. Quoted in Hill, "Censorship and English Literature," 51. For a discussion of the Dissenters' use of a

"plain style," see Keeble, Literary Culture ofNonconformity, 240-62. 42. Dryden, Poems, vol. 2 in The Works ofJohn Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg Jr. (Los Angeles, 1972), 42.

SHARON ACHINSTEIN 12 N


THE ANGLICAN ATTACK ON ENTHUSIASM

Anglican propagandists attacked nonconformists by imputing to them a vul-

gar style; regardless of this apparent concession to popular taste, they were also charged with obscurity. The author of The Transproser Rehearsd jeered at the "absurdity of [Milton's] inventive Divinity," selecting passages from Paradise Lost that baffled him: "What dark meaning he may have in calling this . . . I am not able to say." Nathaniel Lee, in an encomiastic preface to the State of Innocence, described Dryden as a civilizer and rationalizer of that

"rough" Milton:

For Milton did the Wealthy Mine disclose And rudely cast what you could well dispose: He roughly drew, on an old-fashioned ground, A Chaos, for no perfect World was found.

Milton is the natural ore that Dryden mines and refines. Though Paradise Lost was still in print when this encomium was published in 1677, Lee wants readers to view Milton's poem as "old-fashioned," a relic of a rougher age. Lee derides Milton's rude "heap," through which Dryden's "mighty Genius shin'd." What needed emendation and civilization was precisely the inspired quality Restoration writers often found so threatening:

So when your Sense his mystic reason clear'd, The melancholy Scene all gay appear'd; New Light leapt up, and a new glory smil'd, And all throughout was mighty, all was mild.43

Lee applauds Dryden's "sense," expressed by "new light" and "new glory," in lan-

guage that recalls the God of the New Testament: If Milton was the Old Testament creator, drawing "chaos" out of the "wealthy mine," Dryden, like Jesus, brought form to this chaos, "new light" out of darkness. A new day was

dawning after a mysterious night-as the grace of Christ followed and corrected the rough judgment of the Old Testament God, as the Restoration followed the Revolution (such tropes were widely used to greet the returning Charles in

43. Transproser Rehears'd, 41. Nathaniel Lee, "To Mr. Dryden, on his Poem of Paradice," in Dryden: The Dramatic Works, vol. 3, ed. Montague Summers (London, 1932), 415. For strictly literary connections, see

George Williamson, "Dryden's View of Milton," in his Milton and Others (Chicago, 1970), 103-21; and Anne Davidson Ferry, Milton and the Miltonic Dryden (Cambridge, 1968).

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1660). Conversely, the analogy to the Hebrews recalls the stereotype of the enthusiastic religious Dissenter, driven by "mystic reason" and "melancholy."

Lee drew here upon a rhetoric common among those opposing religious dissent. High Church Anglicans also portrayed nonconformists as melancholy and morose, as suffering from mental disorders. Parker called Dissenters "Brain- sick People," repeatedly contrasting their irrational or "fanatique tempers" to his own "sober," "rational," and "civil" approach to religion. Nonconformists' irra- tionality resulted in obscurity of expression: "hiding themselves in a maze of Words . . . rowling up and down in canting and ambiguous Expressions." Parker added that "'tis no wonder if Non-sense run so lamely, when Truth and Reason tread so close upon its heels; and the babble of a Fool never appears so fulsom, as when he discourses with a Philosopher."44 Thomas Hobbes had blamed the unintelligibility of crafty preachers for seducing the gullible in the Cromwellian period, writing in Behemoth in the 1660s that the people "admire nothing but what they understand not," and that they were "cozened" with "words not intelligible."45 For Parker, the source of all this muddle was Dissenters' emphasis on individual conscience: "their Consciences are seized on by such morose and surly Principles, as make them the rudest and most bar- barous People in the World; and that in comparison of them, the most inso- lent of the Pharisees were Gentlemen, and the most salvage of the Americans Philosophers."46 Their reliance on conscience rendered nonconformists no better than savages.

In this Anglican fantasy, mental defects led to nonconforming populist anarchic energy and in turn to rebellion. Parker narrated the progress of enthusiasm: "Zeal is a fire in the Soul, which ... doth not only prey upon the mind, and devour its intellectual Powers, and enflame all the Passions, but its rage breaks forth, and sets whole States and Kingdoms into a combustion, and reduces the whole World to Ashes; the greatest Zealots always proving the

greatest Incendiaries."47 The language recalls the recent Fire of London, blamed by Tory propagandists on Dissenters and papists. In this line of think-

ing, calls for freedom of conscience were really calls for a dangerous sort of individualism, the setting free of an irrational force. Parker attacked liberty of conscience as leading directly to rebellion: "of all Villains the well-meaning Zealot is the most dangerous: Such men have no checks of Conscience, nor

44. Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670), iv, xii, xiii, xvii-xviii.

45. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies, introd. Stephen Holmes (Chicago, 1990), 96, 164. 46. Parker, Discourse of EccelsiasticalPolitie, xiii. 47. Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford, 1666), 27.



fears of miscarriage to damp their industry, but their Godliness makes them bold and furious."48 These attacks on liberty of conscience were attacks also on individual choice when it came to religion. Church uniformity was needed to help keep individual consciences in line with one another, to rein in such bold fury. At bottom, perhaps Anglican Tories believed individuals lacked sufficient reason to make their own decisions about religious practices.

Reason would not reach such people; persecution and force were the only means of silencing them: "to think to argue rude and boysterous Zealots out of their folly meerly by the strength of calm and sober Reason, is as likely a matter as to endeavour by fair words to perswade the Northern Wind into a Southern Point. If you will ever silence them, you must be as, vehement, as they: nothing but Zeal can encounter Zeal."49 In their defense, in A Sober Enquiry (1673) the nonconformist Robert Ferguson fought back by insisting on a measure of ratio- nality as the basis of religion and on "sobriety"-precisely the characteristics clerics like Parker found most wanting in nonconformist discourse.50

In literary representations also, Anglican propagandists caricatured Dissenters. The religious radical was a favored target, very often for his imaginative frenzy. In Dryden's immensely popular play Sir Martin Mar-All, or the Feigned Innocence (1668), the titular character reminds the audience once more of Martin Marprelate and of a cultural lineage of religious enthusiasm stretch- ing back to the sixteenth century. A buffoon who is always "plotting" to gain his mistress, Mar-All boasts of his imaginative reach:

I have play'd such a Prize, without thy help, of my own Mother- wit ('tis true I am hasty sometimes, and so do harm; but when I have a mind to shew myself, there's no man in England, though I say't, comes near to me as to point of imagination) I'le make thee acknowledge I have laid a Plot that has a soul in't.51

Praised for his "rare invention" (4.1.127), Mar-All is at the same time reviled as "a confounded busie-brain, with an eternal Wind-mill in it" (4.1.155-59); Dryden here associates radical inspired religion with the mad Quixote, one who suffered from mistakes in reading and interpretation. Dryden's satire preys

48. Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, liii. 49. Ibid., xi. 50. On nonconformists' ideas on "rational theology," see Richard Ashcraft, "Latitudinarianism and Toleration:

Historical Myth versus Political History," in Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin, eds., Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640-1700 (Cambridge, 1992), 151-77.

51. John Dryden, Sir Martin Mar-All, 4.1.122-26, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 9, ed. John Loftis (Los Angeles, 1974), 253.

15


upon a very real fear of zealous rebels. Both Dryden and Parker represented religious enthusiasts as dangerous to social order because of their proclivity for mystery or non-sense:

Now the unavoidable consequence of this way of trifling is to betray the People into Enthusiastick and giddy conceits of Religion: it fills their heads full of something, they know not what; and this heats their Fancies, and sets their Brains awork, and makes them talkative and impertinent; and then they abound and overflow with Mystery and Non-sense, and the whole neighborhood is annoyed with the Rattle of their Phrases, and canting Noise. But that which is worst of all is, that if once men fall into this Crazedness of mind, as there is little hopes of their recovery, so there is no end of their Frenzy. Non-sense and Enthusiasm are unbounded things, and they sel- dom stop till they run stark mad with zeal and reformation.52

In the attack on Marvell offered by the author of The Transproser Rehears'd, Milton was himself represented as this type of excessively imaginative plotter: "No doubt but the thoughts of this Vital Lamp lighted a Christmas Candle in his brain." Milton was accused of suffering from "chimerical conceits," being "struck blind with his own Idea of the Sun, and admiring those imaginary heights which his fancy has rais'd."53 Milton's poetic imagination was thus linked to dangerous religious enthusiasm, not solely for its blank verse, but also for one of its prime literary methods, inspired poetry: what might later be called the sublime.54 In their treatments of Milton's poem, Dryden and Marvell both associated Milton's poetic effects with radical religion, connect-

ing literary inspiration with religious enthusiasm. Perhaps the obscurity of Milton's work did not hide an interior or veiled meaning but stood for the

52. Parker, A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed, 56-57. 53. Transproser Rehears'd, 41. For attacks on the obscurity of the Cromwellian religionists, see also Dryden,

Astrea Redux, lines 191-94, The Works ofJohn Dryden, vol. 1., ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T.

Swedenberg Jr. (Los Angeles, 1961), 27. The terms of this attack were formed before the Restoration; they informed the poetic theory of William Davenant in the Cromwellian period; see "Author's Preface to his Much Honor'd Friend, M. Hobbes," in Sir William Davenants "Gondibert, "ed. David F Gladish (Oxford, 1971), 22.

54. Annabel Patterson has argued that the sublime was used as a literary veil for subversive political intention, and this confirms my own sense that Dryden and Marvell were both afraid of this powerful kind of writing. The "politics of the sublime" as a tradition of subversion dating from Longinus is explored in Patterson, Reading between the Lines, 256-75. See also George Williamson, "The Restoration Revolt against Enthusiasm," in his Seventeenth-Century Contexts (London, 1960), 202-39; and on the

seventeenth-century sublime into the Romantic period, see Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

SHARON ACHINSTEIN 16 -


obscurity of inspiration itself; such irrationalism was perceived as a real threat. Milton's own "mystic reason," as Nathaniel Lee would call it, needed urgently to be cleared up.

In his literary criticism as in his dramatic works, Dryden expressed worries about the power of inspiration. In the preface to The State of Innocence, enti- tled "The Author's Apology for Heroique Poetry, and Poetic License," Dryden explains, "Poetique License I take to be the Liberty, which Poets have assum'd to themselves in all ages, of speaking things in Verse, which are beyond the

severity of Prose."55 For Dryden, verse is a counter to prose's directness; verse is the vehicle for transcendent, for the "beyond." Yet it is clear from Dryden's adaptation of Paradise Lost that the beyond must not go too far. Dryden's opera sets his original straight, limits such "license," not only by wrapping Milton's

rough language in rhyme but also by condensing the plot and narrative struc- tures of Paradise Lost to a more "ruly" order.56 Dryden rewrites Milton's com-

plex chronology of plot in order to simplify and unify it, formally inscribing the principle of temporal uniformity. Dryden's work is not just a tagging of Milton's lines but rather a thoughtful condensation and tightening of his lan-

guage and structure.57 By means of this tightening, Dryden attempted to make rational order triumphant.

In his concept of poetic license, Dryden finds an aesthetic solution to the

political problem of unbounded enthusiasm or inspiration.58 "For if this License be included in a single word," he argues, "it admits of Tropes; if in a Sentence or

Proposition, of Figures: both which, are of a much larger extent, and more

forcibly to be us'd in Verse than Prose." Poetic "License," rather than supplying a discourse of liberty, consists precisely in the presence of restraint and control

(suggested by the ambiguity of"more forcibly") in verse expression.59

55. John Dryden, preface to The State of Innocence, in J. Montague Summers, ed., Dryden: The Dramatic Works (London, 1932), 3:423. For discussions of the influence of Milton on Dryden, see Ferry, Milton and the Miltonic Dryden; and Alan Roper, Drydens Poetic Kingdoms (London, 1965), 89-92.

56. Although the play was not published until 1677, it was circulating in manuscript as early as 1673 and 1674, according to James Winn; see John Dryden and His World (New Haven, Conn., 1987), 294.

57. Ibid., 266-67. See also Morris Freedman, "The 'Tagging' of Paradise Lost: Rhyme in Dryden's The State of Innocence," Milton Quarterly 5 (1971): 18-22.

58. Maximillian E. Novak argues that Dryden was "consciously" attempting "to develop an Augustan myth"; see "Shaping the Augustan Myth: John Dryden and the Politics of Restoration Augustanism," in Paul J. Korshin and Robert R. Allen, eds., Greene Centennial Studies: Essays Presented to Donald Greene (Charlottes- ville, Va., 1984), 1-21 at 2. Laura Brown, on the other hand, finds conflict and contradiction in Dryden's repeated attempts at unification through poetic form; see "The Ideology of Restoration Poetic Form: John Dryden," PMLA 97 (1982): 395-407.

59. Dryden, preface to The State ofInnocence, 423. Steven Zwicker has posited that in Dryden's work, "art is made to imply political neutrality," suggesting that Dryden leeches political implications from his own liter-

ary style, appealing to a neutral discourse of reason; see "Politics and Literary Practice in the Restoration," in Barbara Lewalski, ed., Renaissance Genres (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 284.

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18 '. SHARON ACHINSTEIN

In his Essay ofDramatic Poesie, Dryden reiterates the idea that poetic forms could control dangerous energy. Verse, he argues, properly puts "bounds to a wilde over-flowing Fancy" and is both "a great help to a luxuriant Fancy" and a "Rule and line by which he [the Poet] keeps his building compact and even, which otherwise lawless imagination would raise either irregularly or loosly."60 Parker, writing of dissenting preachers, follows the same logic, even the same

language: "Thus their wanton & luxuriant fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason, do not only defile it by unchast and illegitimate Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of Things, impregnate the mind with nothing but Ayerie and Subventaneous Phantasmes." Dryden, in opposition, offers

something he calls "judgment," which is what good rhyme expresses, that of "maturest digestion," and "second thoughts."61 A discourse of reason is cast in

opposition to that of inspiration. The problem with inspiration was that it spoke from the interior of the

individual, and Dryden repeatedly represented prophetic utterance as dangerous misapplications of individual intention.62 In The Medall Dryden faulted the Puritans' claims to inspiration-that is, to prophetic utterance based on the reading of hidden meaning in the Bible:

Twas fram'd, at first, our Oracle t'enquire; But, since our Sects in prophecy grow higher, The Text inspires not them; but they the Text inspire.

(Lines 164-66)

Dryden insists that interpretation needs to be limited by those authorized to read the text; the Puritans, however, read into it: "they the Text inspire." Religious enthusiasts not only misinterpreted the Bible-think of Quixote- they took altogether the wrong attitude toward the Bible, inspiring it, accord-

ing to their own authority. The conservative minister Benjamin Laney, preaching to the king in 1664,

rejected the claims of those defending liberty of conscience, those who sought to protect just such interior authority:

Let loose to the prejudices and fancies of every man; for then it will fall out, as with those that look in a Glass, in which every

60. Dryden, Essay, 79-80. 61. Parker, A Free and Impartial Censure 76; Dryden, Essay, 80. 62. Cf. Thomas F. Woods, "John Dryden's Interest in Prophecy," in Jan Wojik and Raymond-Jean Frontain,

eds., Poetic Prophecy in Western Literature (Cranbury, N.J., 1984), 81-93.

SHARON ACHINSTEIN 18 ,^


one sees his own face, though not anothers; the reason is because he brings his face to the Glass, not because it was there before. So every Sect sees the face of his own Religion in the Scripture, not because it was there before, but because his strong fancy and prejudice brought it thither; he thinks he sees that in the Scripture, which in truth is only in his own imagination.63

It is significant that Laney, preaching in defense of uniform Anglican confes- sion, and of imposing set forms of the Church service, needs to argue against the claims of individual interpretation. He dismisses that position as self- serving, self-reflective: a mirror of error. Interpretations will only reflect the interpreter's interests-their "strong fancy and prejudice"-unless properly contained by external authority.

ANDREW MARVELL'S JEALOUSIES AND FEARS

In his prefatory poem to Paradise Lost, Marvell also addressed the problem of individual inspiration, but in a completely different way from Laney and Dryden. The solution is not found in regulation through legislated forms such as verse but in the judgment of readers. For Marvell, Milton indeed may be inspired, but whether that inspiration is authentic is left up to readers to judge. Marvell offers an account of reading Milton's poem, one in which he works out the difficult relations between interpretation, text, and the public display of inspiration. He finally preserves Milton "inviolate," and provides an alternative to the views of authority discussed above.

My reading of Marvell's poem lays emphasis on the opening forty lines, often overlooked by critics who jump to the poem's conclusion, the much discussed treatment of rhyme. Marvell begins by fending off charges of false inspiration directed against Milton-as we have seen, precisely the kind of charges leveled against enthusiastic nonconformists by ministers like Parker and Laney and by Dryden. He resolves that issue in terms of his own reactions to the text, recreating the steps in his reading of Milton. Only after that does he shift his focus to the issue of rhyme (lines 45-54). The debate over rhyme, I suggest, not only follows the consideration of Milton's "Intent" but is also consequent on Marvell's settling his own initial doubts about the inspired nature of the poem.

Why emphasize his personal response? Defending a realm of personal and private reflection was a chief task of those defending the rights of Dissenters to

63. Benjamin Laney, Five Sermons (1669), 44.

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practice their religion. John Locke, writing in 1667, had defined religious worship as "that homage which I pay to that God I adore in a way I judge accept- able to him, and so being an action or commerce passing only between God and myself."64 Locke's use of the first person here is unusual, and therefore notable: matters of worship are to be left to the individual, and Locke is wary of refer- ring-even grammatically-to any one other than himself. His aim is to secure a space for individual choice. Those seeking toleration for nonconformists defended personal choice in religion; as Sir Charles Wolseley put it-again in the first person-"No man can or ought to command me to alter my Judgment and Conscience, guided by the best Light I have, till he can shew me, that as I am fallible, so he is infallible." Wolseley's language concerning conscience may remind us of Laney's treatment of the "glass" in which every Dissenter would read his own prejudices: according to Wolseley, "The proper seat of Conscience is in the understanding, and is no other thing, but this reflect act of our knowl-

edge back upon our selves, dictating to us God's liking or disliking, what we do, as good or evil... is to each man, the Rule of all other Rules God is pleased to

govern him by." Conscience, rather than being a mirror for prejudice, is the

proper reflection of God's rule. Wolseley, like Milton in Areopagitica, repeats the motto of those defending liberty of private conscience: "Prove all things, and hold fast that which is good."65 Through personal experience, led by conscience, one was sufficiently capable to arrive at the good.

To record his changing reactions to Paradise Lost, Marvell also uses the first

person; his "I" is the subject of the first three sentences of the prefatory poem. At first, he beheld the book, "misdoubting his Intent." What were Marvell's initial doubts and fears? Paradise Lost, by its mere title, provoked some anxiety among Milton's friends (we recall Haak) that Milton was mourning the Good Old Cause. Milton's friends may have felt relieved for political reasons that the

story of the fall of Adam would not be used here to represent England's fall, but Marvell seems less concerned with political allegory than with the theo-

logical ramifications of Milton's choice of subject-the "sacred Truths" that were engaged in the work.66 And this concern about Milton's heterodoxy did have a political meaning, too, especially given the fears of enthusiasm, with its claims to direct inspiration and inspired interpretation of the Bible.

64. John Locke, "Essay on Toleration," in Political Writings ofJohn Locke, ed. David Wootton (New York, 1993), 189. On the contexts and motives for Locke's "Essay," see Gordon Schochet, "Toleration, Revolution, and Judgment in the Development of Locke's Political Thought," Political Science 40

(1988): 84-96; and John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994), 49-72.

65. Sir Charles Wolseley, Liberty of Conscience (1668), 42, 5, 43. 66. For the early, worried responses, see von Maltzahn, "Laureate, Republican, Calvinist."



Marvell worries that Milton "would ruin (for I saw him strong) / The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song." He reflects on the challenge to ortho-

doxy in Milton's chosen genre-"fable" and "song"-and at the same time

emphasizes his own particular act of witnessing-"I saw." Marvell admits that the poem did make him "fear"and become "jealous"; Restoration slogans used

by both sides about the causes of the civil wars had repeatedly tapped into these two emotions. In the opening lines of Hudibras, Samuel Butler wrote of the "jealousies and fears" as the causes of the English civil wars; Dryden's rebellious Achitophel "fills the ears / Of list'ning crowds with jealousies and fears."67

By using these terms-established code for the false inspiration that led to the rebellion-to describe his misgivings, Marvell signals that he, too, is concerned that false inspiration could lead to political turmoil. Thus he begins by acknowledging that Milton's inspiration could pose a threat with dangerous political consequences.

Marvell's "jealousies" and "fears," however, do not stifle his interest in pro- ceeding; they are the first steps in the reading that he reenacts in the poem. With suspicion, he goes on to investigate Milton's epic task of rendering God's

totality: "Messiah Crown'd, God's Reconcil'd Decree, / Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree, / Heav'n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All." Milton's mode-his "All" -indeed suggests his competition with God for the title of Supreme Being. Lee, we recall, had praised Dryden for reducing the scope of Milton's poem, for fashioning form out of that Chaos; and even Marvell seems to fear this reach into the matter of Creation. Such ambition was remembered as among the most arrogant claims of the Puritan divines, and its force was still a matter of concern in the Restoration. As Dryden put it in The Medall, "They, for God's Cause, their Monarchs dare dethrone; / And they'll be sure to make his Cause their own" (lines 199-200).

Marvell is also "jealous" because of the possibility that a poet other than Milton might attempt the same task; claims to prophecy might be contagious:

Jealous I was that some less skilful hand (Such as disquiet always what is well, And by ill imitating would excel) Might hence presume the whole Creation's day To change in Scenes, and show it in a Play.

These lines have been understood as a swipe at Dryden for tagging Milton's verse-for turning Paradise Lost into a drama, for copying it at the expense of

67. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, in vol. 2 of The Works ofJohn Dryden, 210-11.

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22 '.- SHARON ACHINSTEIN

the original. I see additional meanings here. Marvell is talking not just about other poets' imitations of Paradise Lost but also about the task of falsely imi-

tating God's work. Milton is after all running the risk of ruining "the sacred truths" and blaspheming God-as no one knew better than Milton himself. "I11 imitation" is the work of Satan, who committed the sin of pride in his "God-like imitated State" (Paradise Lost, 11.511).

Anglican ministers accused those with false inspiration of disseminating their evil to an unsuspecting populace. Laney preached to Charles in 1661 that those professing liberty of conscience could easily "mislead" others-the familiar anti-populist trope: "If a man should be so unreasonable as to say, his conscience may be bound by himself, but not by any else, . . . though the truth is, they bind none but themselves, and that to repent for corrupting Gods word, and misleading the people into Faction, Sedition and Disobedience, to say no worse."68 False inspiration results in circularity, "binding by himself," a dan-

gerous reliance on an individual's own authority. Thus while Marvell rebukes Dryden for turning Milton's epic into a play, the danger of imitation is that there are social and not just literary or theological consequences.

To distinguish true inspiration from false, Marvell locates the source of

judgment in himself-particularly in his own capacities as a reader. His poem introducing Paradise Lost is an autobiographical account of a reader's intellectual progress from doubt to certainty. The text takes on the crucial mediating role of breaking the tautology of individual authority. "As I read," Marvell recounts, "soon growing less severe, / I lik'd his Project." The severity of Marvell's initial response is a counter to Dryden's notion of severity, which was the chief attribute of prose as distinct from verse.69 For Marvell, "severity" is not intrinsic to either literary mode but something involved in interpreting a text. It is the reader who is severe, and such an interpretation demands that the reader establish meanings in the text.70 Marvell thus places the fears of the

political opposition-that the works content might have socially dangerous impact-within a framework of personal judgment.

The question remains, however: Does Milton's vast topic hold out the

potential for violence? Marvell's comparison of Milton to Samson is apposite: "So Sampson grop'd the Temple's Posts in spite." The figure of the iconoclastic Samson appears doubly powerful in the Restoration, suggesting both the vio-

68. Laney, Five Sermons, 31. 69. Dryden, preface to The State of Innocence, 423. 70. This mode of reading places emphasis on individual readers' capacities, and its origins in civil war dis-

course are traced in Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, N.J., 1994), esp. chap. 5.

SHARON ACHINSTEIN 22 t


lence of the past and the religious enthusiasm of the present. Royalists had asserted that Milton's blindness was God's punishment for his actions during the Interregnum, and Marvell, though not endorsing this interpretation, here confronts it. Milton was seen to be possessed with Samson's revolutionary irrationalism, still liable to break forms, to pursue his iconoclastic acts of tearing down the "Temple's Posts." After all, Milton himself sought to break free from the "bondage" of rhyme. Marvell "feared" that project's success, and what he

expected turns out to be something like the effects of enthusiastic dissent, obscure and resistant. Marvell wonders,

... how he his way should find O'er which lame Faith leads Understanding blind; Lest he perplex'd the things he would explain, And what was easy he should render vain.

(Lines 11-16)

Marvell's use of the word perplex especially reflects his acknowledgment that Milton might offer a radical kind of obscurity like that mocked by Anglican preachers. The very presence of Paradise Lost itself induces a state of perplexity in its potential readers, as Marvell admits, for example, in announcing his own initial "misdoubting." In the minds of Anglicans, the attitude of perplexity or of "amazement"-attributed to Samson, Mar-All, and Milton-is a sign for potentially dangerous inspiration itself. Yet it is also the stance of a reader who wonders, who seeks for himself to understand what is in the world, or in a text. Because such a stance is independent-perhaps inspired- in the context of the Restoration it allows for the possibility of violence, even for Marvell, and here his interpretation of the Samson text is once again crucial. Over the course of the poem, Marvell disrupts the comparison between Milton and Samson, converting Milton from Samson into Tiresias. The

inspired prophecy of the avenging Samson is translated into that of the impo- tent soothsayer: "Just Heav'n thee like Tiresias to requite / Rewards with

Prophecy thy loss of sight." Milton is metamorphosized from biblical avenger to pagan prophet, shedding masculine frenzy for more submissive, hermaph- roditic truth-telling. Inspiration in itself need not be a threat, Marvell seems to say, as Marvell protects Milton's poem-and the project of inspiration- from its detractors.

A more specific reading is relevant here, one that involves the clash between rationalist and antirationalist discourse that we have been tracing in

Anglican attacks on nonconformists. In the choice between spite and truth, Marvell refers perhaps to his own exchange with the bitter Samuel Parker, who

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gave up on reason and finally chose spite. As Parker put it, "if you will ever silence them, you must be as, vehement, as they: nothing but Zeal can encounter Zeal."71 On this vitriolic exchange Robert Ferguson, the Indepen- dent minister, commented, "something might be pleaded for [Parker's] keen- ness against A[ndrew] M[arvell] being a sacrifice to Revenge rather than Truth."72 In evoking Tiresias in place of Samson, Marvell seems to take up the case of truth against revenge once more. Marvell takes upon himself the

authority as a reader to judge that the poem is indeed imitative of true divine order, finally insisting that Milton's poem, "In number, weight and measure, needs not rhyme," an echo of a Renaissance trope that typifies God's order of Creation.73 In contrast to this spiteful Samson, Marvell finds that Milton has not broken the sanctity of the "sacred Truths" of the Bible ("Temple's Posts") in his act of writing the poem. Milton will leave the pillars of those truths intact. What it means for the current Anglican Church, however, is much less clear, and hardly reassuring.

Having decided that the meanings of the poem Paradise Lost are indeed true-that which "Draws the Devout, deterring the Profane"-Marvell asks

forgiveness for his initially suspicious reading. He addresses Milton directly, now a "thou," welcoming him into the Restoration world of letters and asking for his blessing: "Pardon me, Mighty Poet, nor despise / My causeless, yet not

impious surmise." Marvell rebukes himself for the false "surmise" that divine truth would be "ruined" to "Fable and old Song" in Milton's treatment.74

Marvell's surmise, however, could be taken as "causeless" in another, quite literal sense, for Milton is presently without his (political) cause. Is this merely an idle pun? Though Marvell overtly addresses only the problem of authentic

inspiration, he does not exclude secondary political meanings. But he will leave such interpretation to the private judgment of his readers. Marvell himself

judges that Milton had adhered to the essence of "sacred truth":

That Majesty which through thy Work doth Reign Draws the Devout, deterring the Profane. And things divine thou treat'st of in such state As them preserves, and thee, inviolate.

71. Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, xi. 72. Robert Ferguson, A Sober Enquiry into the Nature, Measure, and Principles of Moral Virtue (1673), A6v. 73. Allan G. Debus has tracked how the phrase, "Number, weight, and measure," from the Wisdom of

Solomon, was repeatedly used by medieval and Renaissance mathematicians; see "Mathematics and Nature in the Chemical Texts of the Renaissance," Ambix 15 (1968): 1-28.

74. By means of these words, Marvell forges a link (how deliberately it is hard to say) to Milton's own earlier iconoclasm, however, recalling the language of Lycidas, where the speaker rebukes himself and some unnamed "us" for a "false surmise" (line 153).



Milton, in successfully adapting biblical truth to poetic genre, has suc- ceeded in "preserving" the "things divine" in an "inviolate" state. Other meanings will of course be found in the double language of this encomium: "Majesty" obviously refers to England's ruler, under whose complaisance Milton publishes his poem; but it also refers to God's rule, perhaps at odds with that of the former. Marvell reassures his readers that in Milton's poem "Majesty" does "reign," and he thus makes an ambiguous or obscure equation between biblical decorum and political submission, one that requires interpretation. Doubting, perplexity, are necessary risks in Marvell's poem: these modes moreover express Marvell's individual autonomy and agency, his ability to choose, albeit carefully, what meanings are to be found within Milton's text.

Marvell points in fact to a literary style of obscurity that protected an interior space-of conscience, of interpretation, of individual rational action and

agency: all of these defended by those urging toleration against Anglican com-

pulsion. In his tract defending toleration, Robert Ferguson argued for the con- nection between obscurity and individual understanding. Obscurity was one of God's ways:

The Sun doth not more overpower and dazle the eye, than those

things of the Gospel from which all our pardon and peace flow's, do overmatch our understandings.... It is enough that we are

perswaded of the infallibility of the Testimony, we must not hope to comprehend the things testified.... The obscurity of the

Mysterious truths of the New Covenant is not to be reflected on the darkness of the Declaration, but is to be ascribed to the

Majesty of the things declared.

Quoting the French Calvinist theologian Amyraut, Ferguson goes on to the nature of God's mystery: "The things are in themselves so sublime, that were our understandings pure and unspotted they could not be grasped or compre- hended; our finite capacities bearing no proportion to them."75 If Milton's is a "theme sublime"-and for Marvell, it is-perhaps it is similarly obscure. Marvell works toward the political end of defending Dissenters by his insistence on freedom for personal reflection, a space apart from scrutiny, and finally by his defense of that obscurity. He sets out to make Milton's poem palatable to Restoration literary culture not merely by veiling revolutionary political intent but also by granting the integrity of Milton's obscurity and his inspiration. Marvell's politics here are those of the Restoration, not of the Revolution.

75. Ferguson, A Sober Enquiry, 141-42. The Calvinist implications of this quotation are too broad a topic to be treated here.

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26 SHARON ACHINSEIN

MILTON A LA MODE

When Marvell turns to the question of rhyme, it is as the conclusion to a poem concerned to demonstrate the ability of an individual reader to judge what he reads. In this context, Marvell suggests that the form of the poem (rhymed or

unrhymed) is not inherently treasonous or religiously heterodox; further, this matter is not of concern to the state.

Almost by second nature, Marvell knew that literary form was no idle

thing (we think of the ambiguous, ambidextrous praise of Cromwell in his "Horatian Ode," for example). Yet, with his closing section on rhyme (lines 45-54), Marvell firmly anchors Milton's formal choice in Restoration literary practice, a context in which Milton's writing could be made safe. Here the tone shifts abruptly. Though still addressing himself to the "Mighty poet," Marvell turns satirical, writing a jaunty, snaky piece of poetry more closely resembling his Restoration squibs than the first forty-four lines of this poem:

While the Town-Bayes writes all the while and spells, And like a Pack-horse tires without his Bells: Their Fancies like our Bushy-points appear, The Poets tag them, we for fashion wear.

We are suddenly in the urbane world of Restoration satire-the streets of London with their packhorses, the hack poets of Grub Street, the ornaments of couture, "bushy-points" and fashion-a far cry from the "sacred truths," "gravity and ease," and the inspired bird from Paradise of the earlier lines.

Here Marvell figures Dryden as a beast of burden without the agency of a

freely rational being, a packhorse that slavishly adheres to the forms of rhyme. Marvell himself of course uses rhymed couplets to praise blank verse, but para- doxically in order to announce a conscious choice. Further, at the end of the

poem the couplets take on a "fallen," topical mode: rhyme, he thus demon- strates, can accommodate both stylistic extremes. In the final section of the

poem, Marvell still defends individual judgment, the role of style and choice, here in the context of literary form. He argues that aesthetic choices cannot be

disengaged from political or moral ones: fashion, or style, is not mere orna- ment but an opportunity for the expression of individual choices. The relation of fashion to individual agency is suggested by John Locke, who in his 1685 Letter Concerning Toleration described religious differences in terms of"mode." In writing of "frivolous things" that "breed implacable Enmities amongst Christian Bretheren," Locke also turns satirist, mocking those who wish to reg- ulate private taste: "perhaps I wear not Buskins; because my Hair is not of the

26 '- SHARON ACHINSTEIN


right Cut; because perhaps I have not been dip't in the right Fashion."76 Locke relegates such personal choices-along with those concerning religious worship-to the private sphere. In his response to Paradise Lost, Marvell, differing from Dryden, promotes a tolerationist stance in the realm of letters, siding with John Locke, who had argued that differences in religious protocols, though significant, were not inherently dangerous to social order.

We are nonetheless left with an enthusiastic Marvell, "transported" by the "mode" of rhyme. However, his transport, it is clear, is not that of a dangerous religious radical but that of a fashionable wit, who finally merely "commends" the poem to his audience, coyly refusing to "praise" it. Marvell acknowl- edges-perhaps even parodies, here-the fears of Milton's potential critics that the poem rested on dangerous claims to inspiration, but he suggests a solution other than regulation through legislated forms. Because the forms of poetry were not inherently pernicious, they need not concern the state. At the close of the prefatory poem, Marvell does raise the spectre of the political and social stakes of literary genres, reminding readers that poetic form might carry messages-but likely more than one: form itself does not convey information about essential inner meaning. There is the matter of his own formal choices, not only of rhymed couplets but also, at the conclusion, of the language and tone of Restoration satire. Marvell uses the most "public" form to secure Milton's much more obscure intent "inviolate." As others have suggested, this move may indeed reflect Marvell's desire to keep what was between the lines safely hidden. Instead I would propose that Marvell reveals how rhyme itself is a "thing indifferent." In rendering Milton "inviolate," he turns the discussion away from outward compulsory forms and toward the context of individual choice. He thus preserves the power of the reader to make judgments, and of the poet to remain obscure, if he so chooses.

The reactions to Paradise Lost open up a chapter in the study of Res- toration literary and political culture. Because of its coincidence with current radical energies, the poem was linked to radical religion. Marvell's poem, in turn, has been read as a defense of the Good Old Cause, of Milton's Crom- wellian antimonarchical politics. Marvell's enemies certainly felt the heat of Milton's fire-breathing politics in Marvell's writing, and Dryden, for his part, made literary form serve the interest of state regulation by arguing that it should inhibit an extravagant imagination that was linked to religious enthusiasm. I see Marvell's poem, however, carving out a third position, a defense of

76. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis, 1983), 36, 35. See also Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 85, 88-92.

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Milton's freedom to create inspired poetry. If Milton, to some Restoration writers, represented dangerous enthusiasm, Marvell comes to his rescue by means of a theory of literary toleration that parallels an argument for toleration of religious dissent. Paradise Lost in Restoration literary culture could offer a counterdiscourse to Anglican uniformity not only through hidden messages but also by inviting readers to respond to its inspired poetry. Those supporting and those opposing toleration differed over whether or not humans had choice when it came to matters of conscience. From the High Anglican perspective, conscience was wild and irrational; from the pro-tolerationist, it was not. This

disagreement over the abilities of humans to make rational choices is at the bottom of the debate over interpreting Paradise Lost, and it is fundamental to Marvell's defense of the work. What Marvell is defending is not Milton's revo-

lutionary political ideology of radical revolution or republicanism, or even the Good Old Cause, but rather his revolutionary political ideology of rational choice and individual agency.

I have sought to restore a pro-tolerationist understanding of the relation-

ship between literary style and political content, and thus to begin to undo what might be called a Tory bias in literary criticism, one that has labeled the Restoration period "The Age of Dryden." How it is that after 1688 the Whigs "won" the political battle, and the Tories the aesthetic, is a continuing riddle. The attempt to solve it entails risks, but a recovery of the prehistory of Whig literary discourse is worth the effort. If, as James Winn writes, the Tory Dryden's "published works and critical judgments shaped ... the emerging culture of the Restoration, and thus ultimately the culture of the eighteenth century," it is essential to find out what literary culture looked like from another vantage point-that of what it was that culture needed to reject.77 We might begin by asking how attitudes toward literary modes contributed to distinctions made between the public and private spheres. Locke's political theory attempts to carve out such a distinction, but we know very little about how this transaction occurred in the realm of the literary imagination. In

reconstructing the Restoration discourse on toleration, I believe scholars need to complicate the relation between external form and inner meaning. Not all

obscurity was hiding an inner meaning that was meant to be decoded; rather, some meanings were unassailably hidden, to be preserved in the inner space of conscience. Those debating toleration were very interested in the relation

77. Winn, Dryden and His World, xiv. For an idea of what such a literary history might look like, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, "The Whig Milton," in Quentin Skinner, Armand Himy, and David Armitage, eds., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995), 229-53.

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MARVELL, DRYDEN, AND LITERARY ENTHUSIASM < 29

between exterior actions and inner states, particularly as they considered obe- dience to requirements for religious performance within Anglican ritual. An

Anglican Tory understanding of the relation between "inner" and "outer" allowed that the Church could impose conformity on the external forms of

worship on the grounds that a reliance on inner conscience was a primary threat to order. Those arguing in favor of toleration condemned the imposition of such forms as an affront to the promptings of conscience. Like Marvell, some believed that individuals were equipped to interpret texts apart from external authority. For Restoration readers, Milton's obscurity might just have stood for the importance of guarding private opinion.

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