Looking for Lovelace: Identity, Style and Inheritance in the Poetry of the Interregnum Thesis Submitted by Dosia Reichardt, BA (Hons) James Cook, BA York in September 2003 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities Faculty of Arts, Education and Social Sciences James Cook University Abstract This thesis discusses the work of the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace in two contexts in particular: first, within the political and cultural constraints operating during the period of the English Civil War and the Interregnum; second, against the background provided by the work of contemporary, often obscure, poets whose aesthetic and political attitudes help illuminate Lovelace’s own. The study examines a number of apparent paradoxes in the work and status of poets in Lovelace’s milieu. The desire to fashion an individual and lasting literary persona in the mould of Ben Jonson, for example, conflicts with the practice of circulating essentially un-authored lyrics within an educated and exclusive male coterie. Lovelace’s amatory verse is viewed through the prism of contemporary attitudes towards female constancy, but also through seventeenth-century poets’ habitual borrowings from Latin and Greek sources. Lovelace’s attempt at a lengthy pastoral partakes of the cultural poetics of nostalgia for a vanished Court and the genres associated with it. His interest in music and the fine arts inspires many poems which comment on contemporary politics while participating in an immemorial debate about art and artificiality versus nature. His prison and drinking songs have earned him a place in anthologies of poetry as a minor classic, but they also crystallize a conjunction of genres peculiar to the years between 1640 and 1660. The thesis draws on much unpublished material and on rare early books and pamphlets, and hopes to provide an unprecedented sense of Lovelace’s creative conditions. Recovering Lovelace’s verse as much as possible in the context of his contemporary admirers, imitators, influences, and readers brings to the fore the intense intertextuality of seventeenth-century poetry generally speaking, but also illustrates the ways in which poets transcended those “trans-shifting times” of political and religious unrest. Contents Acknowledgments 1 Introduction 2 1. Picnics on Parnassus and the Liberty of an Imprisoned Royalist 15 1. 1 Lovelace’s other prison poems 20 1. 2 “No such liberty”: Lovelace in prison 26 1. 3 “To Althea”: inheritance, imitation and echoes 28 1. 4 “I will ever follow/The juice of Apollo”: drinking up the ocean 32 1. 5 Lovelace’s drinking songs 40 2. Love and War: Valediction, Parting and Grief 50 2. 1 Poems of parting 58 2. 2 Expressing grief: “I must from whence these forward tears should flow” 63 2. 3 Platonic illusions and the chivalrous hero 68 2. 4 The woman abandoned 80 3. “My Mistress is a shuttlecock”: Cupid’s Games and the Constant Inconstancy of Women 89 3. 1 A choice of mistresses 92 3. 2 The valuing of women 98 3. 3 Cupid’s deathly power 104 3. 4 “Thankes, Cupid, but the Coach of Venus moves/For me too slow” 112 3. 5 The “wilde boy” becomes a man 116 3. 6 Love’s like a game at tables 119 4. “The Devil’s Looking-Glasse”: Woman as Muse 124 4. 1 “Truth and the Graces best when naked are”: reading women 131 4. 2 “Their mistris glove, her ring, her fanne, her looking glass, her pantofle” 146 4. 3 “I have made my song a coat” 157 5. Lovelace’s Poetry and the Sister Arts: ars et coelare artem 160 5. 1 “The picture of the mind in purer verse”: Lely and the visual arts 161 5. 2 Veils, disguises and reversals 170 5. 3 Poets, musicians and the making of harmony 176 5. 4 Lovelace’s untuneable times 182 5. 5 Moving trees, moving hearts: Orphic powers and poetry 188 5. 6 Feminine arts and feminised triumphs 195 6. “Aramantha” and the Poetry of Pastoral 201 6. 1 “Aramantha” in context 209 6. 2 Woman and metamorphosis 215 6. 3 The grove, the wood and a magical restoration 221 6. 4 Court, country and city: love in a changing landscape 226 6. 5 The architecture of retreat: country house as grove 231 6. 6 The Golden Age rejected 238 Bibliography 240 Acknowledgments With many thanks to the staff of the School of Humanities at James Cook University, especially Professors Peter Pierce and Anthony Hassall for their helpful editorial suggestions. I am also very grateful to Dr Robert Woodhouse, University of Queensland, who translated the Greek commendatory poems to Lovelace, and to Dr Stephen Torre at JCU, who helped with Marino and Petrarch. Many thanks are due to the library staff at JCU Cairns campus for their patience and efficiency over the years. I was greatly assisted by the staff of the British Library and the English Faculty Library, Oxford, and owe a large debt of gratitude to those at the Bodleian Library. Dr Helen Porter of Worcester College Library, Oxford, kindly allowed me to consult material in situ. I am very grateful to the School of Humanities and to the Faculty of Arts at JCU for financial support towards research conducted interstate and in the United Kingdom. My fellow graduate students — especially Susan-Alice Clarke at the Australian National University and Christopher McMahon at the University of Queensland — have provided stimulating discussions of seventeenth-century poetic practice. I owe my introduction to the Cavalier poets to Dr Michael Sharkey at the University of New England, and I owe my completion of this work to the dedicated support of my family. My principal supervisor, Dr Richard Lansdown, deserves, however, the eulogy only a seventeenth-century poet could write, for his continuing guidance, inspiration and encouragement in every sphere of this endeavour. 2 Introduction Lovelace’s poetic reputation has begun to shift in the past two decades, although he has not been subject to any major re-evaluation or textual revision, and he remains linked with the Cavalier love poets who, as Lawrence Venuti points out, are generally marginalised in literary studies.1 Reviews of the most recent edition of his selected poems (1989) commented that Lovelace and others “are undeservedly neglected by the majority of modern readers”,2 but the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century consensus that he was both slovenly and obscure has given way to a recognition of Lovelace as an ambitious and politically aware writer.3 A larger than usual selection of his work has been included in two major anthologies of Cavalier verse from the 1970s, and he has moved towards the front rank of poets writing during the civil wars.4 The volume of scholarly criticism directed at Lovelace, either singly or in the company of other Cavalier poets with whom he is often associated, has also gained momentum in recent years. Previously he had been joined with the metaphysicals of an earlier generation, or with the neo-classical self-styled “Sons of Ben”, or was regarded as one of that “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease” but with currently unacceptable attitudes towards women. Historical criticism, however, has revealed 1 Lawrence Venuti, Our Halcyon Days: English Prerevolutionary Texts and Postmodern Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 212. 2 Michael G. Brennan, “Review of Gerald Hammond’s Richard Lovelace: Selected Poems”, Notes and Queries, 36: 1 (1989), pp. 105-6. 3 Generally dismissive comments by Edmund Gosse (in The English Poets, Vol II: Ben Jonson to Dryden, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward, (London: Macmillan, 1892), pp. 181-2), Herbert Grierson (in Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of The Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. xxxvi), and W.J. Courthope (in A History of English Poetry, Vol. III (London: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 287-91) should be compared with extended treatments in Raymond A. Anselment (Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988)), Thomas N. Corns (Uncloistered Virtue; English Political Literature 1640- 1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997)), James Loxley (Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997)), and L.E. Semler (The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998)). 4 See Hugh MacLean, ed., Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets (New York: Norton, 1974) and Thomas Clayton, ed., Cavalier Poets: Selected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 3 him as writer who confronts the turmoil of his times and articulates the changing dimensions of the Cavalier world.5 Lovelace’s reception has been varied. In his own time he was not a literary success. Between 1640 and 1660, most publications of verse were a nostalgic act of homage to the vanished court, or tributes to the Royalist dead. Lovelace’s two volumes appeared in company with the works of those who were deceased (Carew, Suckling, Cartwright), or exiled (Waller, Heath).6 Royalist publishers such as Humphrey Moseley encouraged a taste for retrospective delights: an expectation which Lovelace’s poetry does not entirely conform to, resisting the trend towards the production of unified volumes of love poetry such as Cowley’s The Mistress or Nicholas Hookes’ Amanda. A century later, Samuel Johnson found no room for him in the Lives of the Poets (though he did find room for Lovelace's direct contemporary, Abraham Cowley); nor was he rediscovered by inquisitive Romantic critics like Coleridge and Lamb. The first posthumous edition was by W. Singer in 1817. Though another edition, by Hazlitt, appeared in1864, Lovelace failed to attract heavyweight critical attention, and lived on in anthologies of English verse, becoming almost entombed in faint praise by the end of the nineteenth century.