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“Plastic Power”: Imagining Adaptability in Seventeenth‐Century England

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“Plastic Power”: Imagining Adaptability in Seventeenth‐Century England “PLASTIC POWER”: IMAGINING ADAPTABILITY IN SEVENTEENTH‐CENTURY ENGLAND Nathaniel Doyle Stogdill A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English. Chapel Hill 2011 Approved by: Reid Barbour Mary Floyd-Wilson Megan Matchinske Ruth Salvaggio Jessica Wolfe ©2011 Nathaniel Doyle Stogdill ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT NATHANIEL DOYLE STOGDILL: "Plastic Power": Imagining Adaptability in Seventeenth-Century England (Under the direction of Reid Barbour) “Plastic Power”: Imagining Adaptability in Seventeenth-Century England argues that English authors used generic conventions to imagine and experiment with the advantages of adaptability in times of social crisis and change. I focus on the ways in which the literary imagination was used to develop a “flexible social identity” that could accommodate the continual disruption of social, institutional, and economic relationships in the decades surrounding the English Civil War. By revising a scholarly tradition that views the period and its literature in strict partisan terms, this study recovers the importance of the imaginative as a tool for early modern authors to maintain sociability against the demands of ideological divisiveness. iii For Jane iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project is as much a product of relationships as it is of resources. I am, foremost, grateful to Reid Barbour, Jessica Wolfe, Megan Matchinske, Jason Rosenblatt, and Michael Ragussis, who, in their unfaltering support, have modeled what it means to be an enthusiastic, kind, and expert scholar. The loss of Michael before this project was complete caused me to reflect on how abiding these influences can be. Whatever successes I enjoy come when I strive to match their examples. The keen critiques and encouragements of Mary Floyd-Wilson, Ruth Salvaggio, and Tom Reinert have assisted me in these attempts. As both colleagues and friends, Jen McDaneld, Lynn Badia, Joe Wallace, Bill Russell, and Dustin Mengelkoch have made me a better scholar and person by demonstrating that the two are inseparable. Dissertation fellowships from the University of North Carolina Graduate School, English Department, and Medieval and Early Modern Society provided me with crucial time to research and write, and research grants from MEMS further furnished me with the support necessary to do archival work here and abroad. I am grateful to the staff at the UNC, Folger, Houghton, British, and Bodleian Libraries for their patience and expertise as I learned where and how to direct myself as a researcher. The generosity of Michael Leslie and the British Studies at Oxford Program made an extended stay in Oxford possible and enjoyable. I am, daily, thankful for my family, who encouraged me because I was doing something I cared about. v Above all, Jane’s love, enthusiasm, and encouragement were always clear when my thoughts were not. The greatest joys of this project came from sharing it with her as we built a life together. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: "Plastic Power"..............................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Abraham Cowley's "Pindaric Way": Adapting Athleticism in Interregnum England.........................................................................................................12 Chapter 2: "Chang'd Yet Constant": Thomas Stanley's Philandering Loyalty..................66 Chapter 3: "Hastings Dead": Elegy and Instantaneous Interpretation in Lachrymae Musarum.......................................................................................................140 Chapter 4: Margaret Cavendish's Spectacles of Severalness and Restoration Sociability........................................................................................................................188 Epilogue: The Making of the Papist Milton....................................................................239 Bibliography....................................................................................................................261 vii INTRODUCTION "PLASTIC POWER" In 1659, Abraham Cowley finally relented. Following the encouragement of his patron, Henry Jermyn, he wrote to Charles II and asked the incensed king to forgive the insult of a few lines and extend the same indemnity that he seemed ready to grant even “his most outrageous enemies”: But though I am fully satisfied in conscience of the uprightness of my own sense in those [two] or three lines which have been received in one so contrary to it, and though I am sure all my actions and conversation in England have commented upon them according to that sense of mine, and not according to the interpretations of others, yet because it seems they are capable of being understood otherwise than I meant them, I am willing to acknowledge and repent them as an error [. .]1 This is, at best, a half-hearted apology. His confession is qualified and dampened by a dense series of adverbial clauses, beneath which the error is finally contingent on the impreciseness of language and the interpretive failures of his readers, not his intent. Cowley concedes that he may have miscalculated the reception of “those [two] or three lines,” but he does not retract their meaning. This evasiveness was not lost on Charles, who denied Cowley both his promised post in the restored government and the living granted to him by Henrietta Maria. After a series of failed suits, Cowley permanently retired to a country estate at Chertsey in what was seen to announce a final, disaffected 1 Quoted in Arthur Nethercot, Abraham Cowley: The Muse’s Hannibal (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 189. abandonment of a frustrating political career. At the center of this controversy was a short passage in the preface to his 1656 edition of Poems. In a digression on the role of poets in a “warlike, various, and a tragical age,” he urges his contemporaries that we must march out of our Cause it self, and dismantle that, as well as our Towns and Castles, of all the Works and Fortifications of Wit and Reason by which we defended it [...] The Names of Party, and Titles of Division, which are sometimes in effect the whole quarrel, should be extinguished and forbidden in peace under the notion of Acts of Hostility.2 This call to abandon commitments to the partisan causes that had both disrupted and defined the period is also a call to abandon the major sources of identity-making in the period. In the fallout that followed these comments, Cowley experienced first-hand the hostilities of the partisan culture he attempted to correct, in which even non-partisanship was politicized. Once partisan positions began to solidify in the 1640s, non-affiliation became political territory: polemicists for all parties derided the invidious “Neutralls” as agents for the opposition. Cowley’s absence from England during the Civil Wars, and his affiliation with Henrietta’s Louvre faction, had already raised suspicions among Charles’s advisors that his commitment to the king’s cause was only half-hearted, and his return to England in 1654 prompted reports that he was operating as a double-agent for the Commonwealth. His call to “march out of [. .] Causes” and extinguish “Names of Party” seemed to already suspicious partisan minds a final abandonment of the king’s cause. Like his opponents, Cowley’s defenders interpreted his plea for non-partisanship as a partisan maneuver. His friend and posthumous editor, Thomas Sprat, regards these controversial comments as “the only part of his life, that was liable to mis-interpretation.” 2 Abraham Cowley, Poems (London: 1656), sig. a4r-v. 2 In his “Life of Abraham Cowley,” he assures his readers that Cowley’s remarks were likely a form of subterfuge meant to deflect attention away from his activities as a loyal spy for the exiled monarchy. And even if they did represent a genuine endorsement of the Protectorate, he argues, Cowley’s critics should consider it “the errour of one Paragraph, and a single Metaphor” that holds little significance of his longer career as a contributor to the “Royal Cause.” 3 Sprat must have sensed that these sympathetic reinterpretations were somehow still misinterpretations: rather than testing their viability on his readership, he omitted the original statement from the preface of the posthumous edition of Cowley’s works, hoping to obviate further controversy. Nonetheless, the controversy survived. Modern critics continue to revive Cowley’s “single Metaphor,” reading it into contemporary political contexts in order to reconstruct the political motivations and functions of Cowley’s poetry. Arthur Nethercot reads it as a genuine, prudent, but miscalculated acquiescence to the Cromwellian government: if not for the restoration of the monarchy, he argues, “this statement of the situation would probably have been accepted as eminently fair and sane.”4 Thomas Corns sees it as a bolder gesture of disaffection with the royalist cause, in which Cowley “[wraps] himself in the white flag of surrender” in repudiation of the party that led to his imprisonment and interrogation in 1655.5 Raymond Anselment, on the other hand, sees in it evidence of Earl Miner’s notion of “Cavalier retreat”: far from abandoning the royalist cause, Cowley is withdrawing from an inhospitable contemporary political environment 3 Thomas Sprat, “An Account of the Life of Abraham Cowley” in Abraham Cowley, Works (London: 1684), vii. 4
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