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The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook

by Marshall Grossman

The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook Blackwell Literature Handbooks

This new series offers the student thorough and lively introductions to literary periods, movements, and, in some instances, authors and genres, from Anglo- Saxon to the Postmodern. Each volume is written by a leading specialist to be invitingly accessible and informative. Chapters are devoted to the coverage of cultural context, the provision of brief but detailed biographical essays on the authors concerned, critical coverage of key works, and surveys of themes and topics, together with bibliographies of selected further reading. Students new to a period of study or to a period genre will discover all they need to know to orientate and ground themselves in their studies, in volumes that are as stimulating to read as they are convenient to use.

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Grossman, Marshall. The seventeenth-century literature handbook / by Marshall Grossman. p. cm. – (Blackwell guides to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-631-22090-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-631-22091-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English literature–17th century–History and criticism. I. Title. PR71.G76 2011 820.9004–dc22 2010029814

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9-781-4443-9011-7; Wiley Online Library 9-781-4443-9009-4; ePub 9-781-4443-9010-0

Set in 10/13 pt Sabon by Thomson Digital, Noida, India Printed in [Country]

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Contents

Preface xi Chronology xv

Part 1 Texts and Contexts: An Overview 1 Reading the Historical Landscape 3 Renaissance and/or Reformation: From Elizabeth to James 5 New Science Leaves All in Doubt 14 Business and Trade 34 Breaking the State 59 The 86 The Short Reign of James II and the of 1688 97 The Production of Culture in the Seventeenth Century 104

Part 2 Topics in Seventeenth-Century Literature 125 Aemilia Lanyer and the Gendering of Genre 127 Changing Conventions: Hamlet and The Alchemist 141 Pamphlet Wars: To Kill a King! 149 Everything Happens Twice 166

Part 3 Some Key Texts 189 The Winter’s Tale 191 Areopagitica 203 Paradise Lost 212 The Pilgrim’s Progress 220 viii Contents

Part 4 Writers of the Seventeenth Century 225 Astell, Mary (1666–1731) 227 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626) 229 Baxter, Richard (1615–1691) 236 Beaumont, Francis (1584–1616) 240 Behn, Aphra (1640?–1689) 243 Boyle, Robert (1627–1691) 247 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605–1682) 250 Bunyan, John (1628–1688) 253 Burton, Robert (1577–1640) 257 Carew, Thomas (1594/5–1640) 259 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673) 261 Cowley, Abraham (1618–1667) 263 Crashaw, Richard (1613–1648) 265 Davenant, Sir William (1606–1668) 267 Donne, John (1572–1631) 270 Dryden, John (1631–1700) 278 Filmer, Sir Robert (1588–1653) 283 Fletcher, John (1579–1625) 285 Fox, George (1624–1691) 287 Hartlib, Samuel (1600–1662) 290 Herbert, George (1593–1633) 293 Herrick, Robert (1591–1674) 297 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679) 299 Hutchinson, Lucy (1620–1681) 303 Hyde, Edward, First Earl of Clarendon (1609–1674) 306 Jonson, Ben (1572–1637) 309 Lanyer, Aemilia (1569–1645) 314 Locke, John (1632–1704) 316 Lovelace, Richard (1617–1657) 322 Marvell, Andrew (1621–1678) 325 Middleton, Thomas (1580–1627) 330 Milton, John (1608–1674) 333 Otway, Thomas (1652–1685) 342 Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703) 345 Philips, Katherine (1632–1664) 347 Shadwell, Thomas (1640–1692) 350 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) 353 Suckling, Sir John (1609–1641) 358 Traherne, Thomas (1637–1674) 360 Vaughan, Henry (1621–1695) 364 Contents ix

Webster, John (1578?–1638?) 367 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) 370 Wroth, Lady Mary (1587–1653?) 373 Works Cited 375

Index 387

Preface

The seventeenth century is one of the richest periods of literary production in English history. It is bracketed by the plays of Shakespeare at the beginning and the great narrative poems of Milton toward its end. It is also perhaps the most tumultuous period in English history, punctuated by three regime changes: civil war between king and Parliament culminated in the beheading of Charles I and the founding of a republic in 1649; the republic failed, the Stuart was restored in 1660, and the second Stuart king of the restored was driven into exile and replaced by his daughter and Dutch son-in-law in 1688. In the larger world of intellectual history, the seventeenth century is the century of Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, and in social theory, of Hobbes and Locke. This book attempts to integrate a coherent narrative of the literary production of seventeenth-century Britain and a succinct account of the historical developments within and against which it took place. It is designed to be used by anyone with an interest in seventeenth-century British literature, either independently or in conjunction with a school or university course. It may be read sequentially or used as reference source in which to look up specific items. The first and longest of its four parts, Texts and Contexts: An Overview, seeks to give as clear an account as possible of what happened, of the sequence of events encountered by a person living at the time, and of the literary representations that accompanied those events. In addition, I try to make comprehensible the pressing issues of the time and to understand the literature in specific relation to them by observing a small selection of tropes, or figures of speech, as they are used differently in different contexts. The Texts and Contexts section endeavors to give a brief literary history of the seventeenth century. It is the heart of this book and reading it through will provide students of seventeenth-century literature with the basic sequence of events around which everything else in the volume may be organized and understood. To integrate the complex social and political history of the xii

seventeenth century with the literary history, I have supplemented the necessary identification of important publications and influential events with Preface an attempt to trace the changing uses to which a few very common rhetorical tropes or figures of speech were put. Most notable among these is the analogy of large social structures with the workings of the body: the metaphor of the “body politic,” which is itself a variety of the even more comprehensive and commonplace analogy of the macrocosm and the microcosm. That is the expectation that divinely instituted structures observed on one scale will be repeated on all scales, so that the organizations of heaven, the universe, and the human body, of the family, the village, the city, and the nation, will be expected to resemble each other in salient ways. I have written at length elsewhere about the breakdown of this expectation under the pressure of scientific discovery during the course of the seventeenth century. Here I have tried to suggest something of that change by analyzing the changes in the way the body politic is deployed in samples from the beginning, middle, and end of the seventeenth century. Part 2, Topics in Seventeenth-Century Literature, offers four free-standing chapters on four different aspects of seventeenth-century writing: “Aemilia Lanyer and the Gendering of Genre” looks at the work of the first middle- class Englishwoman to publish a book of religious verse, asking what her poems might tell us about the gender specificity of the generic conventions she inherited from her male predecessors and contemporaries, and how reading her story might change the way we read history. “Changing Conventions: Hamlet and The Alchemist” provides a more extended look at two important and much studied plays with a view toward understanding why one might feel more “modern,” even more “natural” or transparent today than the other. As in the chapter on gender, the idea is to work outward from a few specimen texts toward an understanding of how conventions are established, so that a particular way of representing the world may seem transparent and simple in one time period but opaque and difficult in another. The two concluding essays, “Pamphlet Wars: To Kill a King!” and “Everything Happens Twice” return to the intricate interrelationship of political and literary history in the period. They examine the contesting representations of the execution of King Charles I by supporters and opponents of the republican regime, and look at the literary coding and recoding – in the rapid give and take of political polemic – of a major crisis in the early days of the Stuart dynasty, and the way that crisis – the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 – was reused and revalued during the Restoration. Part 3, Some Key Texts, singles out for closer consideration four works: Shakespeare’s late play, The Winter’s Tale, Areopagitica, John Milton’s 1644 plea for freedom from pre-publication censorship, Milton’s epic xiii poem “doctrinal to a nation,” Paradise Lost, and John Bunyan’s hugely popular allegory of spiritual renovation, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Many other texts are discussed in the course of the book, but these four chapters are Preface intended to take up specific questions of genre, audience, and function as they are posed by each text in its historical moment and in ours. Finally, Part 4, Writers of the Seventeenth Century, provides an alphabet- ized and cross-referenced set of entries dedicated to individual writers, some of whom are discussed in the narrative sections of the book and some of whom are not. These entries are intended to give salient facts, point toward important texts and indicate areas for further study and reading. Wherever possible I have included a sampling of pertinent texts to provide a sense of the language of each writer. Along with the comprehensive list of the Works Cited section of this volume, which is offered for reference and documen- tation but also as a reasonable bibliography which may facilitate readers who wish to pursue further the topics treated in this book, Part 4 is dedicated to the reference function of this volume. I have relied so heavily on one work included in the reference section, the online edition of the monumental Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as to feel it merits a special mention here. I have tried my best to cite its entries specifically where appropriate, but add a general acknowledgment now that it is the first resource I have consulted for a large variety of background material about individuals whose names appear in this volume. Any single volume work that attempts to survey a century of literature and its historical contexts is going to be culpable in its omissions. I have tried to tell a story, not, the story of seventeenth-century literature in Britain, and I make no claim that the story I have told is comprehensive. In making many, many decisions about what (and whom) to include and what to pass over in silence, I have made some recourse to the definition of the literary historical event put forth in my book The Story of All Things, but I have relied much more heavily on my experience as a teacher. The particular story told here resembles the one told in my seventeenth-century literature survey, and in the many, many instances when one choice of material or emphasis has had to be made over another, I have chosen to tell the story that has worked best in the classroom; and as I have thought of my students over the years as collaborators in this project, I hope now for collaborative readers, readers who will be happy to find new and harder questions, even where they have sought answers. In assembling a work as broad as this book is, one necessarily finds oneself sometimes writing about things one knows fairly well, but many other times, one feels the need to turn to friends and colleagues. When I began this project it seemed like a good way to fill in the lacunae in my own knowledge of the seventeenth century. As work on it progressed, however, the metaphor of a xiv

field of knowledge in which here and there a hole had to be filled in, often gave way to that of an ocean of ignorance in which the writer stood like a forlorn Preface polar bear clinging to small ice floes of factual acquaintance. For constant rescue from this cold sea of my own inadequacies, I am indebted to the uniquely wonderful community and facilities of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the breadth and expertise of my colleagues at the University of Maryland. If working scholars designed paradise, the Folger is what it would be like, and all the angels would be library staff. Among my colleagues at Maryland, I am particularly indebted to the generosity and critical inquis- itiveness and knowledge of Elizabeth Bearden, Kent Cartwright, Kim Coles, Gary Hamilton, and Theodore Leinwand. Of singular glory among my colleagues is Gerard Passannante, who undertook the duty of reading the manuscript, catching errors and offering many sage suggestions. If I have made a fool of myself in anything here, it will be attributable to my own obstinacy and despite his greater than due diligence. I am indebted also to the extraordinary patience and support of my students, especially, Margaret Rice Vasileiou, who volunteered to read a draft of “Texts and Contexts,” along with my Readings in Seventeenth Century Literature class and to offer a running commentary on its adequacy as a supplementary text. I also thank Emma Bennett, Isobel Bainton, and the editorial staff at Blackwell for their extraordinary patience and support. I am especially grateful to Felicity Marsh for her meticulous and informed copy editing, which has countless times intervened to repair obscure passages and correct embarrassing errors. I could not have completed this project at all without the generous financial support of the Graduate Research Board of the University of Maryland and of a long-term Folger fellowship provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Finally, I owe the greatest and most special debt to Karen for her patience, caring, and goodness in support of this book and of all things else. Chronology Some Significant Events Political and Literary

1587 Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

1588 Defeat of the .

1590 Edmund Spenser publishes The Faerie Queene books 1–3.

1596 The Faerie Queene, books 1–6.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet performed at the Globe; Earl of Essex 1601 executed after an abortive uprising. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; Troilus and Cressida.

Death of ; James VI of becomes James I of 1603 . Shakespeare’s Alls Well that Ends Well. Jonson’s Sejanus. Essays of Montaigne translated into English by John Florio.

1604 Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure; Othello.

Gunpowder Plot: conspiracy to blow up the King, court and 1605 parliament and raise rebellion among Roman Catholics is foiled. King Lear. Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning.

1606 Macbeth performed; Jonson’s Volpone.

1607 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra. Beaumont and Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Jamestown, VA settled.

1608 John Milton born. xvi Chronology

1609 Shakespeare, Coriolanus performed; Sonnets published.

1610 Shakespeare, Cymbeline. Jonson, The Alchemist.

King James Bible published. Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex 1611 Judeorum. Donne, The Anatomy of the World. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale; The Tempest.

1612 Death of Prince Henry. Donne, The Anniversaries. Webster, The White Devil.

1613 Webster, The Duchess of Malfi. Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.

1616 Jonson’s Works published in folio edition. King James’s Works. Death of Shakespeare.

1620 Mayflower leaves for America.

1621 Bacon impeached.

Shakespeare first folio published. Prince Charles and 1623 Buckingham fail in negotiations for Charles’s marriage to the Spanish Infanta.

1625 Death of James I and accession of Charles I. War with Spain.

1626 Charles dissolves parliament after impeachment of Buckingham.

1627 John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Phineas Fletcher, Locustae. Tom May’s translation of Lucan’s The Civil Wars.

1628 becomes . Buckingham assassinated.

1631 John Donne dies.

Laud becomes . Donne’s Poems 1633 published. George Herbert dies. Herbert’s The Temple is published. Cowley, Poetical Blossoms. Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island. Chronology xvii

1634 Milton’s Mask (Comus) performed at Castle.

1637 Milton’s Mask published anonymously. Jonson dies.

1639 First Bishops’ War with Scotland.

The “Short Parliament.” Second Bishops’ War. 1640 crosses the Tweed into England. Charles calls the “Long Parliament.” Wentworth and Laud are impeached. Carew’s Poems published. Jonson’s Works vol 2.

1641 Laud imprisoned. Wentworth executed. Irish rebellion. Milton enters anti-prelatical polemic.

Charles I enters Parliament with armed guard in failed attempt to arrest five opposition MPs. Bishops are excluded from the House 1642 of Lords. King withdraws to Oxford, fails in attempt to control the arsenal at Hull, raises his standard at Nottingham, Civil War begins. Theaters are closed as of September 2.

1643 Episcopacy is abolished. Solemn League and Covenant signed. Milton begins publishing Divorce Tracts.

1644 Laud tried. Parliament begins to prevail in Civil War. Milton, “Of Education,” Areopagitica.

1645 Laud executed. abolished. New Model Army organized. Milton, Poems. Waller, Poems.

Royalist forces defeated. King surrenders to Scots. Suckling, 1646 Fragmenta Aurea. Crashaw, Steps to the Temple. Vaughan, Poems with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished.

Scots turn Charles I over to parliament; Charles is seized by 1647 army; escapes to Isle of Wight. Army Levelers engage in Putney Debates.

Second Civil War. Army seizes the king. Colonel Pride excludes 1648 Presbyterian MPs from Parliament (Pride’s Purge). Herrick’s Hesperides and Noble Numbers published. xviii Chronology

King tried, executed January 30. Eikon Basilike, the king’s book, appears. abolished. Commonwealth 1649 proclaimed. Cromwell suppresses Irish rebellion. Milton becomes secretary for Foreign Tongues. Lovelace, Lucasta; Milton’s regicide tracts: The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; Eikonoklastes.

1650 Davenant, Gondibert. Vaughan, Silex Scintilans. Marvell, “An Horation Ode.” Baxter, Saint’s Everlasting Rest.

Charles II crowned at Scone; Battle of Worcester destroys last royalist threat. Cromwell campaigns in Scotland, after Fairfax 1651 resigns his commission. Hobbes returns to England from exile in Paris. Leviathan published. Milton, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio. Vaughan, Olar Iscanus.

Cromwell dissolves the Rump. Barebones Parliament. 1653 Protectorate established. First Anglo-Dutch War. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Poems and Fancies and Philosophical Fancies.

1654 Milton, Defensio Secunda. Hobbes, Of Liberty and Necessity. Vaughan, Flores Solitudinis.

War with Spain. Marvell’s “First Anniversary of the 1655 Government under O. C.” Vaughan, Scilex Scintilans (expanded). Waller, Panegyric to my Lord Protector. Hobbes, De Corpore. Milton Pro Se Defensio.

Cowley, Poems (including Davideis and Odes). Bunyan, Some 1656 Gospel-Truths Opened. Hobbes, Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance.

Cromwell dies and is succeeded by his son Richard. Hobbes, De 1658 Homine. Davenant pushes against ban on theaters, by staging “operas” in the Cockpit at Drury Lane.

Army forces dissolution of third protectorate parliament. Rump 1659 is recalled. Monk moves his army south from Scotland. Suckling, Last Remains. Chronology xix

Monk recalls the Long Parliament. Charles II signs the declaration of . Convention Parliament restores the 1660 monarchy. Royal Society chartered. Dryden, Astraea Redux. Killigrew and Davenant given patents to build two theaters and form two companies.

1662 Act of Uniformity reestablishes . Dissenting clergy are purged. The Book of Common Prayer is reintroduced.

1665 Second Anglo-Dutch War. Severe plague in London.

1666 Much of London destroyed by fire. Waller, Instructions to a Painter. Bunyan, Grace Abounding.

Dutch destroy British ships in the Medway and threaten London. Clarendon is impeached and goes into exile in France. Milton 1667 publishes Paradise Lost, a poem in 10 books. Dryden, Annus Mirabilis, Marvell, Clarendon’s Housewarming; Last Instructions to a Painter.

Dryden becomes Laureate. Cowley, Works. Denham, Poems 1668 and Translations. Dryden, An Essay on Dramatic Poesy. Shadwell, The Sullen Lovers.

Milton, The History of Britain. Behn, The Forced Marriage. 1670 Dryden, The Conquest of Granada, pt 1. Shadwell, The Humorists.

Milton, Paradise Regained, to which is added Samson 1671 Agonistes. Dryden, The Conquest of Granada, pt 2. Wycherly, Love in a Wood. Buckingham, The Rehearsal.

Third Anglo-Dutch War. Shaftesbury becomes chancellor. William of , later to be William III of England, becomes 1672 Dutch Stadholder. Marvell, The Rehearsal Transprosed. Wycherly, The Gentleman Dancing-Master. In theater: Dryden, Marriage-a-la-Mode and The Assignation. Shadwell, Epsom Wells.

Declaration of Indulgence revoked and Test Act passed. 1673 Marriage of Duke of York to . Shaftesbury dismissed as chancellor. Davenant’s Works published. Behn, The Dutch Lover, Dryden, Amboyna. xx Chronology

1674 End of Third Anglo-Dutch War. Death of Milton; Paradise Lost published in revised, 12 book version.

1675 Dryden, Aureng-Zebe. Wycherly, The Country Wife. Shaftesbury, Psyche. Otway, Alcibiades.

1676 Shadwell, The Virtuoso. Otway, Don Carlos. Behn, The - Fop. Wycherly, The Plain Dealer.

Buckingham and Shaftesbury sent to the Tower. William of 1677 Orange marries the Duke of York’s daughter Mary. Marvell, An Account of Popery, Dryden, All for Love and The State of Innocence. Behn, The Rover.

Titus Oates and Israel Tongue give evidence of a “” against Charles II. Danby impeached. Marvell dies. Vaughan, 1678 Thalia Rediva. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, pt. 1. Shadwell, Timon of Athens and A True Widow. Behn, Sir Patient Fancy; Otway, Friendship in Fashion.

End of . Whigs take control of Commons. Duke of York sent out the country, but recalled and made High 1679 Commissioner of Scotland when Charles II becomes ill. Monmouth meets and defeats in Scotland. Dryden, Troilus and Cressida. Behn, The Feigned Courtezans.

Monmouth, seeking legitimation as heir, makes progress through West. Bill to exclude the Duke of York fails in the House 1680 of Lords. Otway publishes The Poet’s Complaint of his Muse. Rochester, Poems. Filmer’s Patriarcha printed. Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Otway, The Orphan and The Soldier’s Fortune. Dryden, The Spanish Friar.

Charles II dissolves new parliament to prevent it from passing an exclusion bill. Shaftesbury charged with treason but freed by London Grand Jury. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel. 1681 Marvell’s Miscellaneous Poems posthumously published by Mary Marvell. Hobbes, Behemoth. Behn, The Rover, pt. 2; The False Count and The Roundheads. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches. ’s reworking of King Lear. Chronology xxi

Duke of York returns from Scotland. Shaftesbury goes into exile in . Monmouth makes a second progress and is arrested. 1682 Dryden, The Medal; MacFlecknoe; Absalom and Achitophel, pt2; Religio Laici. Bunyan, The Holy War. Behn, The City Heiress. Otway, Venice Preserved.

1683 Death of Shaftesbury. Rye House Plot. Monmouth goes into exile in Holland. Otway, The Athiest.

1684 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, pt. 2. Rochester, Valentinian performed at court. Tate, A Duke and No Duke.

Charles II dies, February 6 and is succeeded by James II. Scottish 1685 rising for Monmouth is defeated. Monmouth defeated at Sedgemoor and executed. Waller, Divine Poems. Dryden, Albion and Albanius.

1686 James II begins to empower Catholics. Anne Killigrew, Poems. Behn, The Lucky Chance.

1687 Buckingham dies. Dryden, Song for St. Cecilia’s Day; The Hind and the Panther. Behn, The Emperor of the Moon.

Birth of James II son sets up prospect of Catholic dynasty. William of Orange lands at Torbay, November 5 and marches 1688 on London. James goes into exile in France. Bunyan dies. Dryden, Britannia Rediviva. Behn’s novel . Shadwell, The Squire of Alsatia.

Convention Parliament offers to William and Mary. 1689 . Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration. Shadwell, Bury Fair. Dryden, Don Sebastian.

Waller, Poems, pt2. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human 1690 Understanding; Two Treatises of Government; Second Letter Concerning Toleration. Dryden, Amphitryon.

1691 Rochester, Poems on Several Occasions. Dryden, .

Tate named Poet Laureate. Dryden, Eleonora. Bunyan, Works, 1692 v.1.Locke, A Third Letter of Toleration. Dryden, Cleomenes. Shadwell, The Volunteers. xxii Chronology

1693 Locke, Thoughts Concerning Education. Rhymer, A Short View of Tragedy. Congreve, The Bachelor and The Double Dealer.

Addison, An Account of the Greatest English Poets. George Fox, 1694 Journal, ed. by Thomas Ellwood. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning. Dryden, Love Triumphant.

1695 Whigs take control of government. Vaughan dies. Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity. Congreve, Love for Love.

1696 Baxter, Religuiae Baxterianae. Toland, Christianity not Mysterious. Colley Cibber, Love’s Last Shift.

1697 Dryden, Alexander’s Feast; trans. of Virgil. Congreve, The Mourning Bride.

1698 Milton, Prose Works, ed. John Toland. Farquhar, Love and a Bottle.

1699 Farquhar, The Constant Couple.

Dryden dies. Dryden, Fables Ancient and Modern. Harrington, 1700 Works. Congreve, . Part 1 Texts and Contexts: An Overview

Reading the Historical Landscape

The seventeenth century was a turbulent period in English history during which government, agriculture, and manufacture, learning, letters, and religion, underwent irreversible changes with broad and lasting effects on production, exchange, and culture. From a literary historical standpoint the seventeenth century continued the great European projects of renaissance and reformation. In its last decades it prepared the groundwork of the Enlight- enment. Its rediscovery of the ancient world extended from the Greek and Latin languages and cultures to the languages and contexts of the Hebrew Scriptures and the republican politics of ancient Rome. The expanding recovery of ancient knowledge combined with the development of experi- mental science, technological advances in optics and navigation, and increas- ingly precise instruments of measurement combined to disrupt and rework the ways in which people thought about the world and their relationship to it. New technology and the increasing rationalization of agriculture changed the material conditions of daily life; the work of religious reformation became urgent, its claims and counterclaims issuing finally in the fitful violence of the civil wars, the , and the . In a more secular, less millenarian form, these forces also shaped the revolution of 1688 and the political supremacy of Parliament over monarchy that survives today. For the purposes of this introduction, the seventeenth century in Britain will be understood to encompass four distinct settlements of uneven and over- lapping duration: the last years of Elizabeth I and the Stuart succession, the mid-century civil wars and the interregnum, the restored Stuart monarchy, and the more decisively limited monarchy after 1688. Division into these four

The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook By Marshall Grossman Ó 2011 Marshall Grossman 4

periods privileges political history as the index of the time, but it should be remembered that each of these regimes may also be understood at a higher level of generalization as a continuous series of reactions to changes in the underlying infrastructures of thought, technology, and economics. As this is to be a literary history, we will be most interested in the way these events are manifest in the distinctive writing of the time and how these writings were, in themselves, events. Thus we will be offering not the history of social or political or material life in seventeenth-century Britain but rather an episodic narrative of the literature in which that life was presented by and to those who

Texts and Contexts: An Overview lived it. Any such narrative must be selective and exclusionary, for the writing of a time, speaking with many voices, addressing many, differently situated ears, necessarily tells more than one story. To render a coherent account of what must have been experienced as inchoate, partial, and fragmented by those who lived it, one must be reductive. It is my view that a frankly reductive story will serve better than either the brutish imposition of a false compre- hension and coherence or the collocation of a number of limited and contradictory stories. This latter course, aiming at presenting the multiplicity of voices, ends only in suppressing the criteria of their selection and the interactions among them. I have pursued the first course, endeavoring to make my choices and the reasons for making them as clear as possible while suggesting the indistinct shapes of other, less fully told stories, that lie just beyond its horizons. History of any sort is necessarily retrospective. In this respect it ought also be said at the outset that, as this is to be a literary history, its narrative will be shaped according to what turns out to have mattered to the literature of succeeding times, and it will necessarily also include some attempt to think about how what matters came to matter. Therefore we will ask two parallel questions of the literary records we interrogate: what did they do for and to the people that produced and consumed them? and in what ways do they continue to matter now, for us? “You cannot have your history in the future tense.” So, W. H. Auden playfully tweaked Vergil for structuring the Aeneid as a “historical” account of events that will have turned out to be the founding of the empire of his patron, Augustus. Literary history, however, must be told in the future tense because what will turn out to have been historical is revealed only to those who come after, noting and appraising change. The literary historical event is visible in the literary works that succeed it. Renaissance and/or Reformation: From Elizabeth to James

The seventeenth century begins in the closing years of the Tudor reign. To assess the state of affairs at this juncture, it is necessary to review some of the unsettling events of the reigns of the queen’s famous and infamous father, her younger brother, Edward VI, and her older sister, Mary. Not surprisingly, then, an understanding of the seventeenth century begins with a review of the sixteenth century. There are many ways in which the history of seventeenth- century England was shaped by Henry VIII, who determined England’s anomalous route to and the succession of two female rulers of opposed religions. When the English monarchy came under attack in the middle of the seventeenth century, one of the issues republicans raised against monarchy in general was its structural inability to distinguish between public and private motives. The marital difficulties of Henry VIII are a case in point. The public motives for the king’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon were her failure to produce a male heir and the king’s assertion that he had come to believe his marriage to his brother’s widow was incestuous and thus invalid, despite the papal dispensation that had allowed it. Only one generation removed from the Wars of the Roses, Henry wanted to see the succession settled in a self-perpetuating dynasty. However, this legitimately public concern was complicated by the king’s very personal attraction to Anne Boleyn. Thus, the divorce controversy wove reasons of state, theology, and personal desire into an intractable knot that would not soon be untied; the

The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook By Marshall Grossman Ó 2011 Marshall Grossman 6 Texts and Contexts: An Overview

willful efforts of the desirous king and his courtiers to untie it would be consequential long after they had left the scene. In 1534, when, to secure his divorce, Henry broke with Rome and declared himself the head of the English church, his motives were not those of Luther or Calvin and their followers, and he preserved the episcopal structure and sacramental orders of the old church. His new Church of England was much the old Roman church without the Roman pope. However, the king’s claim during the dispute that he had come to see his marriage to his brother’s widow as incestuous and the papal dispensation that allowed it “a mistake,” made the protracted struggle over the royal divorce a question of scriptural interpretation and aligned it with the much broader and more potent question of authority over the meaning of Scripture that was to be a crucial element in the European Reformation. Henry’s subsequent dissolution of the monasteries – also more urgently economic and political than theological in motive – further alienated the adherents of Rome and encouraged those who favored theological and ecclesiastical reformation beyond Henry’s adjustment of church government. By making formerly ecclesiastical land available for royal gifts that advanced Henry’s followers, the dissolution also diluted the power of the older peerage and gentry and abetted the central- ization of power in a national administration at the expense of the regional magnates and their feudal privileges. It is interesting to consider in the light of this history that an earlier, influential synthesis of Elizabethan culture, Tillyard’s (1943) The Elizabe- than World Picture, emphasized the orderliness of an imagined world in which a stable and divinely designated monarch presides over a hierarchal social order in which individuals participate by fulfilling their (usually hereditary) role. Subsequent historians have dismantled this picture of an orderly world by exploring the instability of the social hierarchy disrupted by changes in the organization of labor and wealth as well as the ample evidence of the roiling of conflicting interests beneath and sometimes erupting through the apparent perpetuity of a divinely ordained political settlement. However, the idea of an Elizabethan world picture remains valuable, as long as we remember that it is a picture and not a world. If Tillyard went awry it was in suggesting that this picture answered to the world it presumed to depict sufficiently for the broad range of contemporaries to mistake it for truth. Understood as presenting an imagined rather than an existing world, the Elizabethan world picture directs our attention to what must have seemed – at least from the perspective of the social elites that generated it – a delightful world to which one could escape in fantasy or to which one could aspire in action – an unfallen Eden from which present-day reality could be seen as a dispossession. Place, for example, the prospect of a stable Renaissance and/or Reformation 7 monarchical government mirroring on earth God’s rule in heaven against what Tudor subjects (variously placed in the hierarchy) must have experi- enced in the years leading up to Elizabeth’s long reign. Henry’s reformation without reform would significantly shape national events through the end of the seventeenth century. Henry left three heirs, each of whom would succeed him in turn, in accordance with his will and the last of the three acts of succession passed during his reign: Jane Seymour’s son, Edward (and the Protestant who ruled in his name), Catherine of Aragon’s daughter Mary, who was raised in the Roman church, and Anne Boleyn’s Protestant daughter Elizabeth. England’s top-down reformation would thus stutter along through the regencies of Somerset and Northumber- land during Edward’s minority, the foreshortened reign of the Protestant , and an unprecedented period of female rule under two queens of opposed religious commitments. As it happened, the succession of Henry’s three childless children was determined not by the putatively divinely ordered principles of primogen- iture and patrilineal descent, but by the post-mortem extension of the will of Henry VIII. Having broken with Rome and declared himself head of the English church, in 1534 Henry obtained from Parliament the first of three Acts of Succession. The 1534 act declared Mary Tudor the illegitimate child of an incestuous union and settled the succession on the children of Henry’s new wife, Anne Boleyn, thus making the seven-month-old Princess Elizabeth heir to the throne. In 1536, with Anne Boleyn on trial for adultery and treason and Jane Seymour the object of Henry’s affections and dynastic hopes, the first act was superseded by a second. The Second Act of Succession rendered both Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate and made Jane Seymour’s children heirs to the throne. In 1543, four years before his death, Henry reconsidered once more. The Third Act of Succession restored Mary and Elizabeth to the succession, in age order, following the male heir. Edward was nine years old when he ascended the throne in 1547. Brought up under the supervision of his father’s widow, Catherine Parr, Edward was educated into a Protestantism more reformist than that of his father’s pragmatic establishment. Under the regency of his uncle the Duke of Som- erset, the became more earnest, and after Somerset fell to the machinations of Northumberland, an anti-Catholic policy continued to be pursued, culminating in the failed attempt to nullify Henry’s will and install Edward’s Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, as his successor. Mary’s brief reign (1553–1558) was marked by her unpopular and violent attempt to reverse the Reformation and restore England to the papacy and by fears that the minions of Philip II, her Spanish husband, would try to subvert English 8 Texts and Contexts: An Overview

sovereignty. When Elizabeth came to power, Catholic courtiers were again displaced by Protestants and the Church of England was again established as a reformed church. While the reigns of her half-brother and half-sister were short, Elizabeth would reign for 45 years, during which William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) and Sir Francis Walsingham, among others, would begin to build an administrative bureaucracy that allowed England to seek itself in its imagined world picture for nearly a half-century. Elizabeth, like the siblings who preceded her, failed to produce an heir. The literature produced as her reign and the Tudor dynasty came to an end, while the succession remained – at least publically and officially – undetermined, is an important arena in which the dissonance between expectation and reality, ideology and expe- rience, is explored and worried over and in various configurations presented as resolved or irresolvable. Of course there were forces at work shaping English history apart from the exigencies of monarchical succession, but these exigencies informed the anxious experience of contemporaries and the literature they produced. When Henry VIII devised and twice revised the Tudor succession he could not have anticipated that each of his children would reign but that none would produce an heir. Had any of these monarchs produced an heir English history might have been radically different. Had Edward been survived by a son, the Tudor dynasty would have been asserted into the fourth generation and possibly beyond, possibly resembling the self-perpetuating dynasty evoked by the “Elizabethan world picture.” But, of course, Edward did not survive the regency of the dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, and his older sister Mary came to the throne less than two weeks after it had passed to her cousin Lady Jane Grey. For an even more radical “what might have been,” had the hysterical pregnancy Mary experienced in 1554 been real and produced a living child, a Catholic England might have been ruled, possibly from Madrid, as a Hapsburg principality. The “what-if” most immediate to the seventeenth century is also the hardest to predict. Certainly, during the protracted negotiations over Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to the Duc d’Alen¸con, the potentiality of, yet another, Catholic reversion occupied the minds of those who thought and wrote about such things. At the start of the seventeenth century, Elizabeth had been on the throne for 42 years. With the aging queen unmarried and past child-bearing, the Tudor dynasty was coming to its end, and the succession was a question of anxious speculation. The literary shadow of the events leading to Elizabeth’s accession could easily have been seen in a play performed at the Globe Theatre in 1601. Hamlet is not about Tudor history. It has clearly identifiable sources in the Danish Chronicles of Saxo Grammaticus; it had been recently retold in the French prose of Belleforest, and a now lost play on the subject had been Renaissance and/or Reformation 9 performed in London in the late 1580s. It is, however, noteworthy that its author had recently explored a series of similar crises of succession in the cycles of plays covering the vicissitudes of the monarchy from the deposition of Richard II to the beginning of Tudor rule. The 1601 audience is also likely to have felt the pressure of historical affiliation in Hamlet’s constant assertion that Claudius’s marriage to his brother’s widow is incestuous – as Henry had belatedly claimed of his marriage to his brother Arthur’s widow – and the unexpected succession of the younger brother to the throne. Knowingly or not, the play’s ending, with the entry of a strong-armed prince from the north, to receive Hamlet’s dying election and resolve the question of succession, even foreshadows the accession of James VI of Scotland two years later to replace the exhausted Tudor line. Elizabeth’s reign was deeply marked by religious divisions on both sides of the Church of England’s proposed “via media.” Coming to the throne after Mary’s determined effort to re-establish the Roman Church, the Protestant Elizabeth faced an aggressive, if illegal, Jesuit mission, the intrigues of her late sister’s pro-Spanish courtiers, and the threat of invasion through Catholic or religiously divided and politically unstable Scotland, which was then ruled by an infant queen under the regency of James V’s widow, Marie de Guise. Marie first tried to appease the Protestant followers of John Knox, but the betrothalof her daughter Mary to the dauphin and herattempts to establish a Franco-Scottish union were violently resisted by Protestants, on whose side, Elizabeth intervened. Turmoil and intrigues in Scotland would continue until Elizabeth had her cousin Mary Stuart, queen of Scots executed in 1587. Severe anti-Catholic laws were capriciously enforced during Elizabeth’s reign. The effect of these laws was to impoverish and intimidate. While to be Catholic was not, in itself a crime, harboring a priest was – as the young John Donne personally experienced when taken by his mother on her visits to his Jesuit uncle, who was imprisoned in the tower, and, more dramatically later, when his brother Henry died in a pestilent prison after being apprehended for harboring a priest. Recusants, Catholics who refused to abjure loyalty to the pope, were prevented from taking university degrees or holding public office and were subjected to ruinous fines for not attending Anglican services. Still, Ben Jonson, who became a Catholic in 1598, while serving a prison term, was able to maintain his adherence to the creed, while making his way through the upper reaches of the worlds of theater and patronage. By 1570 Elizabeth’s commitment to the Reformation had become clear, and she was officially excommunicated by Pope Pius V, who encouraged Catholics to depose and/or assassinate her should the opportunity arise. A covert Jesuit mission active in England was thus perceived as a serious threat to the queen’s person and government as well as her church.1 10 Texts and Contexts: An Overview

Struggle between Catholics and Protestants continued through the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and into the reign of James I, culminating in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and its aftermath (see below, “Everything Happens Twice”). WalsinghamandCecil largelysubduedanyserious threatofCatholic reversion apart from foreign invasion, but Elizabeth’s church also faced growing opposition from another direction: diffuse agitation for further reformation, mostly in the direction of continental but encompass- ing a wide range of Protestant sects. The supporters of continued reformation, derided as Puritans and Precisians by their enemies, would dominate the political and ecclesiastical history of the mid-seventeenth century. While Elizabeth’s administration demanded membership of the Anglican Church and reintroduced Cranmer’s 1552 Book of Common Prayer, it blunted sectarian agitation by accommodating significant non-conformity within the church. Members might belong to more or less reformist con- gregations so long as they did not challenge royal authority or proselytize too broadly. A fairly wide range of opinions was allowed to develop even among the bishops, some of whom leaned toward supralapsarian Calvinism (with its belief that the saved and the damned were determined as such before Creation and that fallen man is helpless and can do nothing to affect his own salvation), some, toward a form of Arminianism (which argued that salvation was broadly offered and an individual’s choices and actions could affect his or her fate), and others, toward crypto-Catholic rites and ceremonies. When James I came to the throne, the commitment to Reformation hardened somewhat – as James considered himself a theologically serious Protestant, despite his continued reluctance to aid embattled Protestants in France and the and his distaste for persecuting Catholics. Relatively broad tolerance of limited non-conformity within the Church of England continued until his son Charles installed William Laud as archbishop of Canterbury. Laud’s efforts to suppress sectarianism and enforce conformity to Arminian theology and High Church rites and ceremonies disrupted the Elizabethan accommodation, ultimately cost the archbishop his head, and helped to spark the civil war that, in 1649, took off Charles’s head and, for a time, the monarchy as well. Our interest, however, is the specifically literary history of the seventeenth century, and perhaps a better way to appreciate the ecclesiological landscape as the Elizabethan period neared its end will be to examine the record of it left in John Donne’s “Satire III,” a poem – probably written in 1594 or 1595, shortly after the persecution and death of the poet’s brother Henry – which asserts the imperative “to seek true religion” but asks plaintively, “But where?” Born into a distinguished recusant family, related, on his mother’s side, to Thomas More, and with two Jesuit uncles and a martyred brother, Renaissance and/or Reformation 11

Donne would, after agonized meditation and financial hardship, become a polemicist against the Jesuits, take orders in the Anglican Church and serve as Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. In his third Satire he compares one’s devotion to religion to the devotion of a gallant to his mistress and provides thumbnail caricatures of five available responses to the broadening spectrum of clai- mants to “true religion.” Catholic Mirreus

Thinking her unhoused here, and fled from us, Seeks her at Rome; there, because he doth know That she was there a thousand years ago, He loves her rags so, as we here obey The statecloth where the Prince sat yesterday. (“Satire 3,” 43–48)2

It should be noted that Donne’s satirical description of Catholic reverence of its ancient tradition is framed so as to implicate those for whom loyalty to the crown trumps the question of religion. If the former obey the pope because he sits on Peter’s throne, the latter are on no more substantial ground obeying the prince. Catholic fidelity to the trappings of Rome is thus a mirror image of abject loyalty to the insignia of monarchy. The Calvinist, “Crants,” is then presented as simply the negative or inverse case of the Catholic and the loyalist. His rejection of all traditional adornment is as thoughtless as their adoration of papal throne or cloth of state:

Crants to such brave loves will not be enthralled, But loves her only, who at is called Religion, plain, simple, sullen, young, Contemptuous, yet unhandsome; as among Lecherous humours, there is one that judges No wenches wholesome, but coarse country drudges. (49–54)

Erastians, who preferred to leave the choice of religion to the monarch, are represented by Graius:

Graius stays still at home here, and because Some preachers, vile ambitious bawds, and laws Still new like fashions, bid him think that she Which dwells with us is only perfect, he Embraceth her, whom his godfathers will Tender to him, being tender, as wards still Take such wives as their guardians offer, or Pay values. (55–62) 12 Texts and Contexts: An Overview

Mirreus, Crants, and Graius embrace different dispensations, but they have in common a faith that avoids confrontation with doubt. Each chooses an affiliation by displacing the decision onto external authorities rather than exploringtheconfrontationofreasonandbeliefwithintheindividual.Another of Donne’s characters avoids this stressful confrontation by rejecting orga- nized religion entirely: “Careless Phrygius doth abhor/All, because all cannot be good, as one/Knowing some women whores, dares marry none” (62–64). Finally, Donne juxtaposes as Phrygius’s inverse what today might be called a liberal or pluralist position:

Gracchus loves all as one, and thinks that so As women do in divers countries go In divers habits, yet are still one kind, So doth, so is religion; and this blind- ness too much light breeds. (65–69)

The poem’s speaker rejects this ecumenical accommodation in favor of taking seriously the idea that God reveals a single truth: “but unmoved, thou/Of force must one, and forced but one allow” (69–70). One is left at this point in an impossibly stressful position. Salvation depends on making the right choice, but on what grounds can that choice be made? Faced with this dilemma, the satire’s speaker assumes a posture of committed skepticism and strenuous inquiry:

He’s not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best. To adore, or scorn an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill, Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go; And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so; Yet strive so, that before age, death’s twilight, Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night. To will, implies delay, therefore now do. (75–85)

Such a commitment to religious truth (and thus to salvation) requires not just intellectual diligence, but also political courage:

That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know; Those past, her nature and name is changed; to be Then humble to her is idolatry; Renaissance and/or Reformation 13

As streams are, power is; those blessed flowers that dwell At the rough stream’s calm head, thrive and prove well, But having left their roots, and themselves given To the stream’s tyrannous rage, alas, are driven Through mills, and rocks, and woods, and at last, almost Consumed in going, in the sea are lost: So perish souls, which more choose men’s unjust Power from God claimed, than God himself to trust. (100–110)

Despite Donne’s Roman Catholic upbringing, the poem’s speaker rejects papal as well as state authority in religious matters. By making perpetual inquiry the recourse of the just, the Satire makes salvation a private trans- action between God and the individual soul. In this respect we can see the degree to which Protestantism – and its political implications – have taken hold, even where its ecclesiastical institutions are questioned and their adherents lampooned. The speaker of “Satire III” sharply distinguishes the powers of temporal rule and the ambitions they generate from a private world, governed by the transmission of grace from an invisible God, to an individual soul. The vast communal apparatus that had for centuries circu- lated the presence of grace through a system of public rites (the Mass) and visible sacraments is compressed into a transfer of perpetual desire privately pursued. In this preference for a ruthless examination of one’s own motives over confident adherence to the sacramental performance of ritual under the auspices of a visible church, Donne accepts and endures one of the concrete outcomes of the Protestant Reformation. Like all major historical motions, the political of the seventeenth century had multiple causes. But one factor underlying the interruption of monarchy and the disestablishment and reestablishment of the Church of England was surely the vacuum created by the fading of socially mediated communion and the parallel rise of the private self.

Notes

1 For a useful survey of anti-Catholic persecution, see Flynn (1996, pp. 98–146). 2 Citations of Donne’s poetry are from Donne (1990) unless otherwise noted. New Science Leaves All in Doubt

Cosmos: The Revision of the Sky

And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him, where to look for it. And freely men confess, that this world’s spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot. (“An Anatomy of the World,” 205–215)

As we have seen, the Reformation was one factor in elevating the sense of interiority over that of what Donne summarily calls “Relation” in “The First Anniversary,” which was written to commemorate the death of a young girl named Elizabeth Drury. As the passage indicates, however, a revised under- standing of nature was another. Donne wrote and published these lines in 1611. Two years earlier, Johannes Kepler had published Astronomia Nova (New Astronomy), which presented two new laws of planetary motion: (i) planets move in elliptical orbits of which the sun is one foci, and (ii) planets move through equal areas in equal times. These two insights into the physics of the heavens gave mathematical coherence to the lifetime of meticulous observations which Kepler had inherited from Tycho Brahe. To quickly recount a well-known story: Aristotle envisioned the cosmos as a series of concentric spheres, nested one inside another, with Earth at the

The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook By Marshall Grossman Ó 2011 Marshall Grossman 15 center and the center of Earth as the center of the universe. The Aristotelian cosmos gave to thought a physical universe that was already a symbolic universe. The circular motions and spherical forms bespoke a perfect regu- larity. Circles have neither beginning nor end, and the curvature of a circle remains the same everywhere on its circumference. Medieval Christianity easily extracted from this that the universe itself resembled its creator, who was both the beginning and the end of being, and who could be described as a circle whose center was everywhere and whose circumference was nowhere, and the spheres turning one inside another could be imagined as a giant celestial organ whose music eluded mortal ears. New Science Leaves All in Doubt This appealing symmetry, however, could not accurately predict the movement of the planets, even as observed in the ancient world, until its revision by Claudius Ptolemy in the mid-second century CE. To account more accurately for the movement of the planets, Ptolemy sacrificed some of the elegance of the Aristotelian cosmos. Notably, he introduced the concept of epicycles, or small circular orbits which the planets described as they simultaneously followed a circular path whose center was equidistant between Earth and a point, the equant, from which it would appear to an observer that the planet was moving at a uniform speed. Earth was no longer at the center of the system. These modifications preserved the shape and regularity of the cosmos, but only by introducing disruptive eccentricities that challenged the ready availability of the cosmic map for symbolic uses. Ptolemy did not claim to describe things as they were, but rather to devise what he called a mathematical syntax according to which the motions of the planets could be predicted. In modern parlance, we might say that Ptolemy’s was a virtual astronomy, a mathematical abstraction that yielded reasonable predictive results but left in place the symbolically important aspects of Aristotelian astronomy: the nested spheres and the circular motions in a geocentric cosmos. While the positions of the planets could be mathemat- ically calculated, their relations to each other and to the elements of fire, earth, air and water, remained available as a cosmological rhetoric from which meaning could be derived. Two socially important problems commanded the attention of mathema- ticians and astronomers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the need to accurately predict the date of the vernal equinox, from which the date of Easter (and, in turn, certain other dates of the liturgical calendar) could be calculated, and the need for reliable means of celestial navigation to serve expansions in trade and exploration. These requirements drove more accu- rate observations, which, in turn, challenged Ptolemy’s predictions. Even when corrected by the addition of more various and complicated epicycles, eccentrics, and equants, the predictive power of the geocentric cosmos failed. 16

Moreover, these Ptolemaic additions to Aristotle’s concentric spheres, along with observations of “new planets” muddled the elegant perfection of circular motion about an exactly geocentric point and compromised the symbolic value of an orderly and unchanging cosmos. It was to “save the appearances” of perfect circularity that Nicholas Copernicus proposed a heliocentric cosmos (De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revo- lutions of the Celestial Orbs), Nuremberg, 1543). The Copernican system correctly ordered the known planets and relieved some of the anomalies that had plagued the geocentric model, but its commitment to the elegance and

Texts and Contexts: An Overview symbolic necessity of circular motion degraded its capacity to move from mathematical abstraction to observable description. Although it made Earth one of the planets, it did not seriously disturb the assumption that the universe could be read as a hieroglyph of the unchanging regularity and perfection of its creator. A much larger shock to this cosmological aesthetics came when the mechanically aided observations of Tycho Brahe were translated by Johannes Kepler into his far more disturbing cosmic map. In 1610, the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger) popularized both the new cosmos and the instruments used to observe it Kepler’s discovery rationalized the motion of celestial bodies and made unnecessary the increasingly complex supplementary motions that had been necessary to account for the discrepancies between the predictions of previous cosmologies and what could actually be observed. Kepler’s model, therefore, actually reduced the complexity of the cosmological map to a relative clarity. Why then would Donne associate the new science with incoherence and the loss of relation? To answer this question, it will be necessary to explore a little further the confrontation of the Renaissance poetic imagination (here represented by Donne) with an increasing reliance on observation and measurement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Returning to our discussion of Donne’s third Satire, we may notice that its comparison of the quest for truth as the ascent of a steep mountain renders space as at once physical and symbolic:

On a huge hill, Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go; And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so. (79–82)

The intellectual work of spiritual inquiry is realized as a steep ascent and the need to research, review, and revise one’s ideas is comparable to the switch- backs that flatten the grade of a mountain trail. Climbing a hill and searching for truth are both strenuous and time-consuming; the word “suddenness” in