Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature

qqqqqqq EXCESS AND THE MEAN IN EARLY qqqqqqqMODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE LITERATURE IN HISTORY SERIES EDITORS David Bromwich, James Chandler, and Lionel Gossman The books in this series study literary works in the context of the intellectual conditions, social movements, and patterns of action in which they took shape. OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverly Novels Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815–1850 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family qqqqqqqq qqqqqqqqJOSHUA SCODEL Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD COPYRIGHT 2002 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 3 MARKET PLACE, WOODSTOCK, OXFORDSHIRE OX20 1SY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA SCODEL, JOSHUA, 1958– EXCESS AND THE MEAN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE / JOSHUA SCODEL P. CM. (LITERATURE IN HISTORY SERIES) INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX. ISBN 0-691-09028-9 (ACID-FREE PAPER) 1. ENGLISH LITERATURE—EARLY MODERN, 1500–1700—HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 2. MODERATION IN LITERATURE. 3. LITERATURE AND SOCIETY—ENGLAND— HISTORY—16TH CENTURY. 4. LITERATURE AND SOCIETY—ENGLAND—HISTORY—17TH CENTURY. 5. DIDACTIC LITERATURE, ENGLISH—HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 6. ENGLISH LITERATURE—CLASSICAL INFLUENCES. 7. TEMPERANCE IN LITERATURE. 8. POLARITY IN LITERATURE. 9. ETHICS IN LITERATURE. I. TITLE. PR428.M63 S36 2002 2001059168 THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN GOUDY PRINTED ON ACID-FREE PAPER. ∞ WWW.PUPRESS.PRINCETON.EDU PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 13579108642 qqqqqqqq qqqqqqqqCONTENTS Acknowledgments and Note on Citations vii Introduction: Ancient Paradigms in Modern Conflicts 1 PART ONE Two Early Modern Revisions of the Mean 19 1. Donne and the Personal Mean 21 2. “Mediocrities” and “Extremities”: Baconian Flexibility and the Aristotelian Mean 48 PART TWO Means and Extremes in Early Modern Georgic 77 3. Moderation, Temperate Climate, and National Ethos from Spenser to Milton 79 4. Concord, Conquest, and Commerce from Spenser to Cowley 111 PART THREE Erotic Excess and Early Modern Social Conflicts 143 5. Passionate Extremes and Noble Natures from Elizabethan to Caroline Literature 145 6. Erotic Excess versus Interest in Mid- to Late-Seventeenth-Century Literature 170 PART FOUR Moderation and Excess in the Seventeenth-Century Symposiastic Lyric 197 7. Drinking and the Politics of Poetic Identity from Jonson to Herrick 199 8. Drinking and Cultural Conflict from Lovelace to Rochester 225 PART FIVE Reimagining Moderation: The Miltonic Example 253 9. Paradise Lost, Pleasurable Restraint, and the Mean of Self-Respect 255 Postscript: Sublime Excess, Dull Moderation, and Contemporary Ambivalence 285 Notes 289 Index 353 This page intentionally left blank qqqqqqqq qqqqqqqqACKNOWLEDGMENTS I AM DEEPLY INDEBTED to Gordon Braden, David Bromwich, Jim Chandler, Michael Murrin, Janel Mueller, and Richard Strier for extraordinarily helpful readings of earlier versions of this book. For immensely useful responses to portions of this study (as well as for much else), I am very grateful to Ullrich Langer and David Quint; my sister Ruth Scodel; and cherished Chicago col- leagues David Bevington, Sandra Macpherson, Lisa Ruddick, and Jay Schleu- sener. I thank Philip Gossett and Geoffrey Stone for graciously providing me with invaluable leave time, and Mary Murrell, Fred Appel, and Henry Krawitz for their editorial efficiency. For advice and aid let me also express my gratitude to Lauren Berlant, Douglas Bruster, Laura Demanksi, Heather Dubrow, David Engster, Richard Goodkin, Achsah Guibbory, Paul Hunter, Ralph Johnson, Aaron Kitch, Adam Krantz, Jim Lastra, Stephen Lewis, Paula McQuade, Steve Monte, Maria Parks, Steve Pincus, Hank Sartin, Christopher Segrave-Daly, Joshua Shaw, Steven Streed, Katie Trumpener, Peter White, and David Wil- son-Okamura. I can also now, at last, thank Mayumi Fukui, Sarah Scodel, Harvey Scodel, Bettie Scodel, Barbara Scodel, and Lewis Kopel, who endured my volubly anxious travails with loving grace; and Hatsuaki and Kiku Fukui, who spurred me on with polite but nudging queries. Earlier versions of portions of this book appeared as articles: chapter 1 in Modern Philology 90 (1993): 479–511, and sections of chapter 1 in John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances Malpezzi (Conway, Ark., 1995), 45–60; chapter 2 in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint et al., MRTS, vol. 95 (Binghamton, N.Y., 1992), 89–126 (copyright Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University); and chapter 9 in Comparative Literature 48 (1996): 189–236. I am grateful for permission to reprint them here. NOTE ON CITATIONS Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is abbreviated throughout as NE. All citations and translations of classical texts are from the Loeb Classical Library except where it is noted that I have modified the Loeb translation or substituted my viii A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S own. Citations of church fathers are from the Patrologia Cursus Completus . Series Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1857–1866) and the Patrologia Cursus Completus . Series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1878–1890). Citations of Milton’s poetry are from John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2d ed. (London, 1998), and Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2d ed. (London, 1997). qqqqqqqq qqqqqqqqINTRODUCTION Ancient Paradigms in Modern Conflicts “WE MAY QUICKLY EXCEED a mediocrity, even in the praise of Mediocrity,” cautioned John Donne in a 1625 sermon.1 With a destabilizing paradox, Donne invoked the venerable norm of “mediocrity” or the “golden mean” to warn his contemporaries against the danger of overuse. Twenty-first-century readers might well conclude that early modern authors, including Donne, cel- ebrated the mean to excess. Yet, as his admonition suggests, the mean was not only a cultural commonplace but also a source of controversy. This book studies English literary representations of means and extremes from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Classical in origin, the notion of a virtuous mean between two vicious extremes figured crucially in the writings of educated early modern English authors. Historians and literary scholars have studied the concept’s importance for the period’s struggles con- cerning the national church and the constitution. This study is the first, how- ever, to examine a broad variety of literary treatments of the mean-extremes polarity as representations of major cultural tensions extending far beyond— though often related to—ecclesiological and constitutional conflicts. Early modern authors apply the schema to numerous aspects of personal and collec- tive life in innovative, surprising, and contentious ways. Writers not only con- struct highly original versions of the mean; they also advocate various extremes. Donne himself transforms the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while the aggressively modern Francis Bacon holds extremism necessary for human empowerment. Erotic literature pits extreme passion against temperate conjugal love; symposiastic or drinking-party poetry extols polemically defined norms of sociable moderation or of intoxicating excess. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgic poets laud the nation as the embodiment of the golden mean, warn against national excesses, or urge extreme ways of increas- ing the nation’s power and wealth. Challenging his predecessors’ and contemporaries’ erotic, symposiastic, and georgic writings, John Milton deploys the mean to celebrate ideals of pleasurable restraint and self-respect that his coun- trymen have ignored to their peril. Such literary adaptations and transforma- tions of an ancient opposition figure centrally in the emergence of a deeply divided, ambivalent, yet self-consciously modern English culture. In both con- spicuous and subtle ways, furthermore, these clashing treatments of means and extremes continue to resonate within contemporary cultural debates. 2 INTRODUCTION The Classical Mean in Early Modern England The social and intellectual elite of early modern England often espoused Aris- totle’s definition, most fully developed in his Nicomachean Ethics, of ethical virtues as habits that preserve a mean between excess and deficiency in actions and emotions. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as in the medieval period, Aristotle’s works remained the core of the university curriculum. Accompanied by various medieval and early modern commentar- ies and epitomes, the Nicomachean Ethics was the major university text in ethics.2 Numerous Latin translations made the work accessible to those with little Greek.3 Cicero’s De officiis, which invokes the “mean” (“mediocritas”) and the closely associated notion

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