The Chameleon or the Sponge?: Marvell, Milton, and the Politics of Literary History
Andrew Marvell’s critical stock has never been higher. Long admired for a handful of widely anthologized lyrics, more recent interest in his prose writings has revealed Marvell to be among the most penetrating observers of the debates over liberty and toleration that convulsed the seventeenth century. As a result of this attention Marvell himself has become—along with his friend John Milton—closely identified with the founding of modern liberalism. My concern in this essay however is to interrogate the ways in which Marvell’s politics have been read under the shadow of Milton; and indeed I discover a “Miltonizing” hermeneutic in common between the High-Church controversialists who repudiated Marvell’s tolerationist pamphlet The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) and modern historians and critics who have sought to write Marvell into the history of English liberty. Without seeking to nullify Marvell’s significant contribution to that history, I argue here that the lyric poet of “inconclusiveness” is more continuous with the Restoration politician than we have thought; and moreover that by taking Marvell’s politics on his own terms we stand to gain valuable perspective on the unstable divisions and contingencies of seventeenth-century political experience.
Marvell Studies Ten Years After the Longman Annotated English Poets Edition of Andrew Marvell's Poems
This article is an account of how the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell's poems that came about after I was asked to provide editorial samples in 1988, prior to being approved as editor in 1990. The edition appeared in hardback in the spring of 2003 and then in a revised paperback in 2007. I explain the principles behind the edition, the help I was generously given by other scholars, and how its construction evolved in the context of 17th century studies in the 1990s and early 2000s, before moving on to its reception. I point to the significance of Marvell archival discoveries since my edition appeared, and future major Marvell projects, including editions of his poetry, prose and letters, and the context of scholarly collaboration in which those projects have developed and will be completed. I try above all to give a sense of what opportunities an extensively annotated edition of a major poet gives to the reader, to teaching and to further scholarship, in addition to significantly enhancing the status of Marvell himself and his verse.
The writing of royalism, 1628-1660
Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The halcyon days: 1628-37 2. The Bishop's Wars and the Short Parliament: July 1637-October 1640 3. The Long Parliament and the trial of Strafford: November 1640-May 1641 4. The beginnings of constitutional royalism: May-October 1641 5. The emergence of the constitutional royalists: October 1641-March 1642 6. The beginning of hostilities: March 1642-April 1643 7. Learning to write the war: April-September 1643 8. Declining fortunes: from Newbury to Marston Moor: September 1643-June 1644 9. Defeat, captivity, and exile: July 1644-September 1647 10. Trial and martyrdom: September 1647-January 1649 11. Lamenting the King: 1649 12. Coping with defeat and waiting for the King: 1649-60 Index.