Ingo Berensmeyer Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Ingo Berensmeyer Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630–1700 Angles of Contingency This book is a revised translation of “Angles of Contingency”: Literarische Kultur im England des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts, originally published in German by Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2007, as vol. 39 of the Anglia Book Series. ISBN 978-3-11-069130-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-069137-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-069140-5 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691375 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934495 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available from the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. ©2020 Ingo Berensmeyer, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com. Cover image: Jan Davidszoon de Heem, Vanitas Still Life with Books, a Globe, a Skull, a Violin and a Fan, c. 1650. UtCon Collection/Alamy Stock Photo. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Preface to the Revised Edition This book was first published in German in 2007 as volume 39 of the Anglia Book Series. In returning to it for this English version, I decided not simply to translate but to revise it thoroughly in order to correct mistakes, bring it up to date, and make it a little more reader-friendly by discarding at least some of its Teutonic bag- gage. The German text was my Habilitationsschrift (the monograph whose main purpose is to demonstrate one’s eligibility to a professorship in Germany), and this may explain, though not excuse, its lengthy footnotes and occasionally arcane ex- pressions. In fact, this German version already was a translation – required by aca- demic rules and regulations – from the English original I had first written in 2003 and 2004, in blissful ignorance of the rules at my then home university of Siegen, which required it to be submitted in German. I have since returned to this English version now and then in my teaching and come to regret the fact that it was not avail- able in English for a wider readership. This new book, then, is – for me – a recovery as much as a revision. Over the years, I have incurred many debts of gratitude to friends and colleagues in many countries, as well as numerous research institutions and libraries whose generosity contributed to the making of this book. Its beginnings owe much to J. Hillis Miller, who invited me to spend a year at the University of California at Irvine in 2002, and to the late Richard Kroll, whose wit and expertise helped foster many ideas for this project. I miss his disagreement. In Germany, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer knows how much of his inspiration is in this book. I would also like to thank Nicola Glaubitz for an amazing co-teaching experience that has left distinct traces in these pages. Also, over the years, conversations with colleagues have indirectly contributed to the reworking of this book. I would like in particular to thank Andrew Hadfield, Margaret Ezell, and the late Herbert Grabes. Obviously, any remaining mistakes should be laid firmly at my door. Speedy revision was made possible by a research sabbatical generously granted by LMU Munich in the summer of 2018. Finally, thanks – as ever – to my family: Hella, Henrik, Niklas, and Talea. Open Access. © 2020 Ingo Berensmeyer, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691375-202 Contents Preface to the Revised Edition V List of Figures IX List of Abbreviations IX “Seeking the Noise in the Depth of Silence”: A Naval Prelude with Spectators, 1665 1 The Sensibility of Dissociation 6 1 Historicising Literary Culture: Communication, Contingency, Contexture 13 Communication 13 Contingency 15 Contexture 18 Literary Culture 23 2 Literary Cabinets of Wonder: The ‘Paper Kingdomes’ of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne 28 Early Modern Knowledge Technologies 28 Reading the Theatre of Writing: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy 34 “Collaterall Truths” in the “Multiplicity of Writing”: Sir Thomas Browne 47 3 Writing, Reading, Seeing: Visuality and Contingency in the Literary Epistemology of Neoclassicism 70 Literary Epistemology 70 “Not Truth, But Image, Maketh Passion”: Optics and the Force of Reading in Milton and Hobbes 77 “The Conquests of Vertue”: Mimesis and Strategic Visuality in Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert (1650) 96 Visuality and Imagination between Science and Fiction: Margaret Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and The Blazing World (1666) 104 Literary Worldmaking 114 4 Literature as Civil War 117 Ciceronian Moments: State of Nature and Natural Law in the Cultural Imaginary 117 Words as Weapons: Rhetoric and Politics in Hobbes and Milton 124 VIII Contents Pastoral Politics: Crypto-Royalism in Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653–1676) 134 Between Astræa Redux and Paradise Lost: Cultural Memory and Countermemory in the Restoration 144 Contingency, Irony, Sexuality: Nature, Law, and Kingship in Absalom and Achitophel (1681) 161 Spaces of Distinction 176 5 Private Selves and Public Lives: Neoclassical Perspectives 179 Inwardness, Probability, and Wit 179 The ‘Rhetoric of Love’: Inwardness, Reading, and the Novel in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87) 184 ‘This Deed of Trust’: Law, Literature, and the Unbearable Politeness of Being in Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700) 200 The Augustan Angle: Civilised Contingency and Normative Discourse 214 Bibliography 225 Index 249 List of Figures Fig. 1 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, title page (detail), London 1676. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 38 Fig. 2 Frontispiece by William Marshall and title page of Eikon Basilike. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Wikimedia Commons 78 List of Abbreviations AM Anatomy of Melancholy EL Elements of Law L Leviathan Open Access. © 2020 Ingo Berensmeyer, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691375-204 . humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity, unto which all others must diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in Angles of contingency. Sir Thomas Browne, Urne-Buriall List of Figures Fig. 1 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, title page (detail), London 1676. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 38 Fig. 2 Frontispiece by William Marshall and title page of Eikon Basilike. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Wikimedia Commons 78 List of Abbreviations AM Anatomy of Melancholy EL Elements of Law L Leviathan Open Access. © 2020 Ingo Berensmeyer, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110691375-204 “Seeking the Noise in the Depth of Silence”: A Naval Prelude with Spectators, 1665 John Dryden opens his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668), one of the birth documents of English literary criticism, with a scene of naval warfare that establishes a connection between an event of the utmost political and economic importance and the effect that such an event has on the public as it occurs: It was that memorable day, in the first Summer of the late War, when our Navy ingag’dthe Dutch: a day wherein the two most mighty and best appointed Fleets which any age had ever seen, disputed the command of the greater half of the Globe, the commerce of Nations, and the riches of the Universe. While these vast floating bodies, on either side, mov’d against each other in parallel lines, and our Country men, under the happy conduct of his Royal Highness, went breaking, by little and little, into the line of the Enemies; the noise of the Cannon from both Navies reach’d our ears about the City: so that all men, being alarm’d with it, and in a dreadful suspence of the event, which they knew was then deciding, every one went following the sound as his fancy led him; and leaving the Town almost empty, some took towards the Park, some cross the River, others down it; all seeking the noise in the depth of silence. (Dryden 1971, 8) ‘The public’ as a site of social observation and self-reflection, theatrical in its flexible formations of actors and spectators, has only recently emerged as a dimension of col- lective awareness among the upper ranks of Restoration London’s population, express- ing itself in patriotic terms, mediated by newspapers, coffee-house conversations, and plays (Schweikart 1986, 63–70; Frank 1961; Pincus 1995). Public curiosity about the Battle of Lowestoft (3 June 1665), a naval engagement that remains invisible because it happens offshore and is yet barely audible in London, is motivated by a patriotic im- pulse, registered in Dryden’s use of the first person plural in reporting and even in re- cording sense perceptions (“our Navy”, “our Country men”, “our ears”). This impulse is the result of a new social awareness outside of traditional notions of court and com- monwealth that articulates itself in nationalist and incipiently imperial terms (“the riches of the Universe”).1 The disintegration of the traditional social order in the violent upheavals of Reformation, Civil War, and the English Republic seems all but forgotten in this new language of national unity after 1660. But Dryden’s text does more than observe the common and unifying impulse of public curiosity; it also registers a social reality of disintegration, dissociation, dis- persal, and individualisation contingent upon it.