‘Lett none our Lombard author rudely blame for's righteous paine’: An Annotated Copy of Sir William Davenant's Gondibert (1651)
The article focuses on hostile annotations on a copy of the 1651 quarto edition of Sir William Davenant’s epic poem ‘Gondibert’, now held at the National Library of Scotland. It describes the problems of interpreting the annotations; their likely date, social context, and political stance; the secondary reading used alongside ‘Gondibert’; and their literary-critical responses to the text. The annotations can be related to the satires on ‘Gondibert’ written by the circle around Sir John Denham; one of the annotators may indeed have been Denham himself. The annotators were employing traditional humanist collaborative reading practices in a manner designed to make nonsense of Davenant’s poem, objecting to Davenant’s departures from the humanist tradition.
Turncoat poets of the English Revolution
Edmund Waller, William Davenant, Andrew Marvell, and Abraham Cowley were royalist poets who changed sides following the English Revolution, attracted to Cromwellian military power, and the reforming aims of the Independents. This thesis contributes to existing scholarship by showing that the poets engaged strongly with theories of allegiance, self-consciously returning to first principles—the natures of sovereignty and obligation—to develop a concept of allegiance that was contingent and transferrable. Their crucial influence was Hobbes. Hobbes collapsed partisan perspectives into a general theory of sovereignty constituted by a de facto protective and coercive power; this was grounded on a psychological analysis of humans' restless appetite for power. The poets' approach to Hobbes was crucially mediated by Machiavelli, who provided a less abstract account of the relationship between individual agency and collective institutions, and whose concept of virtu offered a model for how restless ambition could be harnessed to political order. An introductory chapter sketches out the intellectual background to this body of theory and reflects on the methods used to show how the poets dramatized it in their works. Chapter two considers the disintegration of Waller's courtly poetry under the pressure of civil war, and his resulting turn to rationalist theory. Chapters three and four focus on the immediate aftermath of the revolution, considering the synthesis of Hobbes' and Machiavelli's theories of military power ventured by Davenant, and the influence of Davenant's ideas on Marvell's Machiavellianism. Chapter five focuses on Cowley and his more religiously-inflected account of Hobbesian psychology and political obligations. Chapter six asks how the poets responded to the Restoration of Charles II, and in particular charts their influence on the younger poet John Dryden. With their emphasis on materialist psychology, the turncoat poets abandoned allegory in favour of a mode of dramatization which observed the contingent circumstances in which allegiances could be generated, dissolved, and transferred. They possessed a political conservatism, but a conceptual radicalism which presented a serious challenge to Anglican and constitutionalist discourses of Stuart monarchy.
Hero and Leander
IT is one of the most delightful features of classical study that so many classical authors are practically anonymous. Too often nowadays is the student of literature turned aside from his examination of a work by his examination of the writer. This may, and frequently does, assist in explaining why the author said what he did. But there is always the temptation to read the elicited biographical knowledge into the actual words, so that literary criticism becomes psychoanalysis, fascinating, fashionable-and an altogether different subject. This is a temptation from which the student of classical literature is at times saved in spite of himself. In the present instance, the poet under discussion has withdrawn behind a singularly thick veil of obscurity. His name was-perhaps-Musaeus. He lived-probably-in the latter half of the fifth century after Christ. He may have been a "grammarian", and-possibly-Procopius of Gaza addressed two letters to him. This being all our information about the poet, we can dismiss him without reluctance and turn to his poem. It is a miniature epic of three hundred and forty-two hexameters on the subject of Hero and Leander. John Addington Symonds has described it as the "last pure rose of Greek summer."' In other and more cumbrous words, it is in the traditional style, with qualities which characterize Greek literature of the best period. But before inquiring what those qualities are, let me first outline the plot of the poem. Facing each other across the Hellespont at the eastern end of its narrows, lay two Greek cities, Sestos and Abydos. Sestos, on the Thracian side, was the home of Hero, priestess of Aphrodite, a maiden no less respected for her dignity than admired for her beauty. At a festival of the goddess, Hero encountered young Leander who had come across from Abydos, and the two at once fell in love. Marriage of a revered priestess to a foreigner being impossible, Leander resolved upon a nocturnal visit to the lonely tower on the shore where Hero lodged, and urged her to kindle a lamp which would guide him in his swim across the strait. Argument and her own emotion conquered the maiden's scruples. The nightly tryst once accomplished was repeated until at length winter set in, and swimming became not merely a feat but a peril. The lovers were, however, powerless in the grip of Fate; Hero could not refrain from her nightly ritual of lighting the lamp, nor Leander from his passage of the storm-tossed waters. At last they overcame his strength, the beacon was extinguished by the wind, and he was drowned. In the grey dawn which followed,