Hindsight As Foresight: Virgilian Retrospective Prophecy in Coopers Hill and the Destruction of Troy
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Calvert, I. (2019). Hindsight as Foresight: Virgilian Retrospective Prophecy in Coopers Hill and The Destruction of Troy. International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 26(2), 150-174. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-017-0456-4 Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record License (if available): CC BY Link to published version (if available): 10.1007/s12138-017-0456-4 Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document This is the final published version of the article (version of record). It first appeared online via Springer at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12138-017-0456-4#copyrightInformation . Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher University of Bristol - Explore Bristol Research General rights This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ Int class trad https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-017-0456-4 ARTICLE Hindsight as Foresight: Virgilian Retrospective Prophecy in Coopers Hill and The Destruction of Troy Ian Calvert1 Ó The Author(s) 2017. This article is an open access publication Abstract This article discusses how the Virgilian intertexts of the stag hunt in the 1642 edition of Coopers Hill support the interpretation of the passage as a com- mentary on the trial and execution of the Earl of Strafford, and how they allow Denham to criticize Charles I’s involvement in Strafford’s death. Despite this criticism, other texts, including Denham’s revised (1653/5) edition of the poem, subsequently adapted the stag-hunt episode to commemorate Charles’s own trial and execution. The false presentation of the 1653/5 Coopers Hill as an edition that prints an original, authentic version of the poem from 1640 draws on the Virgilian technique of retrospective prophecy to make its status as a commentary on Charles’s execution more explicit. Denham repeated this technique in The Destruction of Troy (1656), which heavily revised an excerpt from his 1630s manuscript translation of Aeneid II–VI, and asserts the composition date of this earlier version in order to ‘foretell’ Charles’s execution. Analysing these Virgilian post eventum prophecies shows how both texts simultaneously censure and mourn Charles I, and also identifies increasingly self-recriminatory elements to Denham’s own royalism. Introduction John Denham’s two most significant literary projects, Coopers Hill and his translations from Virgil, exist in multiple manuscript and published versions that he & Ian Calvert [email protected] 1 Department of English, University of Bristol, 3/5 Woodland Road, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1TB, UK 123 I. Calvert revised periodically throughout his career.1 They both helped to popularize an aesthetic Augustanism: the attempt ‘to find an equivalent in English of those ideal properties of style’ that writers in the early modern period found in Virgil’s versification and clarity of expression, hence Robert Herrick’s account of Denham’s ‘brave, bold, and sweet Maronian [Virgilian] Muse’ in his commendatory poem on Coopers Hill and John Dryden’s claim that Denham’s poetry provided ‘the exact Standard of good Writing’.2 Each project has also been placed at the head of respective literary traditions that became highly influential during the long eighteenth century.3 These were topographical poetry in the case of Coopers Hill and, with regard to his Virgil, a mode of translation that abandoned ‘that servile path’ of ‘tracing word by word, and line by line’ in favour of representing the animating spirit of the text.4 Coopers Hill and Denham’s first published Virgil translation, The Destruction of Troy (1656, but deriving from the manuscript rendering of Aeneid II–VI that Denham produced in the 1630s),5 have, in addition, attracted considerable attention for the commentary they offer on contemporary politics. The precise nature of 1 In this article I retain the taxonomy of the Coopers Hill editions delineated by B. O Hehir in Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill, Berkeley, 1969 (henceforth EH); that is, I refer to the 1642 edition of the poem, its manuscript predecessors and its reissues dated 1643 and 1650 as the ‘A’ Text, and the 1653 edition, its 1655 reissue with added prefatory material, and the slightly revised version of 1668 as the ‘B’ Text. All quotations from Coopers Hill are from the relevant original editions, but line numbers have been supplied from EH. Quotations from Denham’s Virgil are taken from Early Augustan Virgil: Translations by Denham, Godolphin, and Waller, ed. R. Sowerby, Lewisburg, 2010 (henceforth EAV). Denham’s other poetry is cited from The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. T. H. Banks, 2nd edn, Hamden, 1969. For ease of reference, and because Sowerby has discussed how it is not possible to discern which particular editions of Virgil Denham knew and used (see EAV, pp. 30–1), Virgil is cited from the most recent Loeb edition: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, ed. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols, Cambridge, 2014. The Loeb text has been checked against the seventeenth- century Virgil vulgate. All glossing translations are my own unless otherwise stated. 2 R. Sowerby, The Augustan Art of Poetry: Augustan Translation of the Classics, Oxford, 2006, p. 2; The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. T. Cain and R. Connolly, 2 vols, Oxford, 2013, I, pp. 221–2 (H- 673, l. 12); The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker et al., 20 vols, Berkeley, 1956–2000, VIII, p. 100. 3 Samuel Johnson’s ‘Life of Denham’, in Lives of the Poets, ed. R. Lonsdale, 4 vols, Oxford, 2006, I, pp. 235–41 (238–9), was particularly significant in granting the poems this context; but Johnson himself was responding to the earlier comments by Herrick and Dryden, as well as, among others, Matthew Prior and Alexander Pope. 4 ‘To Sir Richard Fanshawe’, ll. 15–16. For Coopers Hill and topographical poetry (and a survey of previous criticism on the topic), see D. Landry, ‘Poems of Place’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Poetry, 1660–1800, ed. J. Lynch, Oxford, 2016, pp. 335–55. For Denham and translation, see L. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, London, 1995, pp. 44–65; T. Caldwell, ‘John Dryden and John Denham’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 46, 2004, pp. 49–72 (50–56); P. Davis, Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646–1726, Oxford, 2008, pp. 19–39; Sowerby, Augustan Art (n. 2 above), pp. 94–113; EAV, pp. 11–13, 23–30, 118–30, 145–60. 5 This manuscript translation survives in a commonplace book that belonged to Lucy Hutchinson. J. de Groot, ‘John Denham and Lucy Hutchinson’s Commonplace Book’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 48, 2008, pp. 147–63 (154), discusses how the likeliest connection between Hutchinson and Denham came courtesy of Denham’s status as a contemporary of Hutchinson’s brother (Allen Apsley) at the inns of court in the early 1630s. The translation is thus thought to date from the 1630s, but it may not have been copied into Hutchinson’s commonplace book until the early 1650s. 123 Hindsight as Foresight: Virgilian Retrospective Prophecy in… Denham’s political sympathies remains a contentious issue, but it is generally agreed that his poetry signals a loyalty to the royalist cause in a manner which allows censure as well as support of Charles I.6 The call for moderation and balance in Coopers Hill, particularly in the ‘Thames couplets’ ‘B’ Text, can be readily applied to a political standpoint, with the result that Denham’s politics are often aligned with his aesthetic principles.7 Whilst such links did undoubtedly exist, they were not necessarily inextricable or simultaneous. Within the context of Denham’s poetry, it is helpful to consider, in addition to an aesthetic Augustanism that emulates a Virgilian versification, a related but distinct political Augustanism motivated by a desire to emulate Virgil’s presentation of heads of state. Here, too, there is no consensus on this topic, but for the present purposes it is important to register that Virgil’s portrayal of such individuals, like Denham’s portrayal of Charles, frequently involves criticism as well as praise.8 In this article I examine Denham’s political and aesthetic Augustanism to outline the extensive cross-fertilization between Coopers Hill and his engagement with Virgil. Critics have already established points of contact between Coopers Hill and the Georgics, but here I focus on the Aeneid to suggest that Denham thought of his topographical poem within an epic, as well as georgic, framework.9 The most useful point of entry to discuss these issues is the passage in the Coopers Hill ‘A’ Text where ‘our Charles’ gives chase to and kills ‘the royall Stagge’.10 This passage concludes with an account of how the stag: tries his friends, amongst the lesser Heard, Where he but lately was obey’d, and feard, Safety he seekes, the heard unkindly wise, 6 Connections between Denham’s poetry and his politics are discussed in EH, pp. 165–256; J. Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660, Oxford, 1979, pp. 58–60; R. Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 75–89; N. Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660, London, 1994, pp. 321–4; J. R. Curlin, ‘‘‘Is There No Temperate Region…?’’: Coopers Hill and the Call for Moderation’, in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed.