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English Renaissance Prose : History, Language, and Politics / Edited by Neil Rhodes English Renaissance Prose History, Language, and Politics English Renaissance Prose History, Language, and Politics cneOiev^L & ReKiAissAKice xexTS & sxaOies J Volume 164 English Renaissance Prose History, Language, and Politics edited by Neil Rhodes cneOievAL & RewAissAMce re^Ts & sruDies Tempe, Arizona 1997 ©Copyright 1997 Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University Library of Congress Cataioging-in-Publication Data English Renaissance prose : history, language, and politics / edited by Neil Rhodes. p. cm. — (Medieval &. Renaissance texts &. studies ; v. 164) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-86698-205-1 (alk. paper) 1. English prose literature — Early modern, 1500-1700 — History and criticism. 2. Politics and literature — Great Britain — History — 16th century. 3. Politics and literature — Great Britain — History — 17th century. 4. English language — Early modern, 1500-1700 — Style. 5. Literature and history — Great Britain — History. 6. Great Britain — Intellectual life — 16th century. 7. Great Britain — Intellectual life — 17th century. 8. Renaissance — England. 1. Rhodes, Neil. II. Series. PR769.E53 1997 828 '.30809— dc21 97-15525 GIF @ This book is made to last. It is set in Goudy, smyth'sewn, and printed on acid-free paper to library specifications. Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction: History, Language, and the Politics of English Renaissance Prose Neil Rhodes 1 The Sore and Strong Prose of the English Bible Gerald Hammond 19 The Tyrant Being Slain: Afterlives of More's History of King Richard III Daniel Kinney 35 "Take away preaching, and take away salvation": Hugh Latimer, Protestantism, and Prose Style N. H. Keeble 57 Richard Hooker's Discourse and the Deception of Posterity P. G. Stanwood 75 Sidney's Arcadian Poetics: A Medicine of Cherries and the Philosophy of Cavaliers Claire Preston 91 The Strangle] Constructions of Mary Wroth's Urania: Arcadian Romance and the Public Realm Paul Salzman 109 Virgins of the World and Feasts of the Family: Sex and the Social Order in Two Renaissance Utopias Susan Bruce 125 "A Knowledge Broken": Francis Bacon's Aphoristic Style and the Crisis of Scholastic and Humanist Knowledge-Systems Stephen Clucas 147 1 vi Contents Shapeless Elegance: Robert Burton's Anatomy of Knowledge Jonathan Sauiday 173 Milton and the Limits of Ciceronian Rhetoric Martin Dzelzainis 203 The Powers of the Beast: Gerrard Winstanley and Visionary Prose of the English Revolution David Loewenstein 227 In the Land of Moles and Pismires: Thomas Browne's Antiquarian Writings ) Graham Parry ' - 247 Bunyan's Grace Abounding and the Dynamics of Restoration Nonconformity Thomas N. Corns 259 Bibliography of Works Cited 27 Index 298 Notes on Contributors 301 * * * The editor is most grateful to Kirsty Allen, Rita Bodlak, Jeffrey Macko* wiak, and the School of English at St Andrews University for research assistance in the preparation of the bibliography and index. NEIL RHODES Introduction: History, Language, and the Politics of English Renaissance Prose ENGLISH PROSE OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES has no "Casebook" or "Critical Heritage," and there is no general account of the critical reception of the subject. But if the term Renaissance remains serviceable as a description of a literary period, then Sidney's Arcadia, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the writings of Bacon, Milton, and Browne, and above all the development of the English Bible, are clearly part of that cultural phenomenon. There are, of course, many studies of Renaissance prose written by and for specialist scholars, but little that can be offered to the student as a way into reading these rich but often chal- lenging texts. So the present volume is designed principally to act as an introduction to some of the major figures and works in the field, though some of the essays will undoubtedly also be of interest to the specialist. Any account of the critical reception of English Renaissance prose should probably begin with the Romantic movement, since it is within that movement that the subject was constructed as a distinct entity and granted a literary status comparable with the achievements of Renaissance poetry and drama. In particular, it was Coleridge and his circle, whose enthusiastic rediscovery of the prose writers of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries reversed (in Coleridge's view) "the common opinion that the English style attained its greatest perfection in and about Queen Anne's reign." For Coleridge "the great models of Ithe classical stylel in English are Hooker, Bacon, Milton and Taylor," and while this style was "easily open to corruption ... it is the existence of an individual idiom in NEIL RHODES each, that makes the principal writers before the Restoration the great patterns or integers of English style."' Coleridge had Sir Thomas Browne in mind here, but it was Jeremy Taylor who won the most extravagant accolades of Romantic criticism. Charles Lamb, also a Browne enthusiast, claimed that you could find in Taylor "more knowledge and description of human life and manners than linl any prose book in the language: he has more delicacy and sweetness than any mortal, the 'gentle' Shakespeare hardly excepted,"^ and in a final flourish to his comparative essay on Bacon, Browne, and Taylor, Hazlitt predicted that "when the name of Jeremy Taylor is no longer remembered with reverence, genius will have become a mockery, and virtue an empty shade."^ Taylor is, in fact, less remembered now than his contemporaries, though his work was frequently reprinted in the eighteenth as well as the nineteenth centuries. This was atypical, since the eighteenth century found much Renaissance prose writing "unreadable," and a better illustration of its fortunes in that period is The Anatomy of Melancholy which reached a seventh edition in 1676 but was not reissued until 1800, when it was claimed for Romanti- cism by Lamb and Keats.'* Coleridge's claim that Renaissance prose writers each had an "individ- ual idiom" is a characteristic piece of Romantic essentialism. This is reflected in further claims that they were also essentially English, formed by the nurturing properties of the native soil. Hazlitt's introduction to his Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, which included the lecture on Bacon, Browne, and Taylor, makes this point about Renais- sance literature in general: ' S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature 2, ed. R. A. Foakes, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 235, 233, 234. 1 am greatly indebted to Shirley Rhodes for references to Romantic criticism of English Renaissance prose. ^ Lamb to Robert Lloyd, 1801, The Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas (London, 1935). 1:257. * William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London and Toronto, 1930-34), 345. * Lamb adopted Burton's sobriquet Democritus Junior; his copy of the Anatomy (now lost) seems to have been annotated by Coleridge. See S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia 1, ed. George Whalley (1980), vol. 12 of Collected Works, 854: "As a mark of the currency of Burton's book in C's circle, it is noticeable that the sale catalogues show that there were copies in the libraries of Green, Gillman, WW [Wordsworth] and RS [Southey]." On Keats and Burton sec Janice C. Sinson, John Keats and The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: KeatS'Shelley Memorial Association, 1971) and the essay by Jonathan Sawday in the present volume. Introduction Perhaps the genius of Great Britain (if I may so speak without offence or flattery), never shone out fuller or brighter, or looked more like itself, than at this period. Our writers and great men had something in them that savoured of the soil from which they grew: they were not French, they were not Dutch, or German, or Greek, or Latin; they were truly English The mind of their country was great in them, and it prevailed.^ The interchanging of the terms "British" and "English" will be irksome to modem readers, particularly Scots, but it was certainly prevalent at the time. Writing in The Edinburgh Review in 1812 the Scot Francis Jeffrey speculated as to whether "the force of the Reformation had much effect in producing this sudden development of British genius," before referring to "a certain raciness of English peculiarity" in Renaissance literature which "in all this splendour of native luxuriance can only be compared to what happens on the breaking up of a virgin soil."^ Jeffrey went on to single out the prose writers, citing Taylor, Barrow, Hooker, and Bacon as exam- ples of a native poetic genius which outdid any verse that had "since been produced in Europe."^ Coleridge complained that these views had been appropriated from himself, but the significant point is that, whatever their other differences. Romantic critics agreed that English Renaissance prose was a distinctive national product which had been superseded by the homogeneous European taste developed in the Restoration and eighteenth century.^ And the most distinctive national product of all was the English Bible, as De Quincey sums up: "Amongst our many national blessings, never let us forget to be thankful that in that age was made our final translation of the Bible, under the State authority. How ignoble, how "^ unscriptural would have been a translation made in the age of Pope! The Coleridge circle devised various projects to demonstrate the supremacy of English Renaissance prose writing. One was the extensive study of English prose style proposed by Coleridge for the Bibliotheca ' Hazlitt, Complete Works, 6:175. * Peter F. Morgan, ed., Jeffrey's Criticism: A Selection (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), 106-7. ^ Ibid.. 108-9. * See S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Uteraria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (1983), vol. 7 of Collected Works.
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