‘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.
Davenant's Prefatory Rhetoric
In the legend that makes up a good part of History of Criticism Sir William Davenant's Preface to Gondibert has acquired the role of a forerunner. It marks " a new stage in English literary criticism " ; it is " the manifesto of neo-classicism" and " a boldly independent utterance." 1 I shall contend that these descriptions, though of long standing, could not survive an attentive reading of Davenant's text. Without being entirely wrong, they nevertheless misrepresent the text, and they do so in a way common to histories of criticism: they ignore its rhetorical particulars and mistake the topics of Davenant's argument for his argumentative performance. I hope to show that if you do attend to its rhetoric you will find Davenant's preface a more interesting document than these monochromatic descriptions let it appear. For half its length his preface illustrates a burden of modern writers, the need that they have often felt to claim originality. The preface has two ambitions. Its first is to herald Davenant s heroic poem, Gondibert, as an original work. For this purpose Davenant professes to spurn the heroic-poem conventions of his predecessors from Homer through Spenser. It is for this rejection that he has received the title of forerunner, and I do not doubt that he would have preferred being remembered as a forerunner to being what he feared he was, a fag-end latecomer. In one sense, though not the sense that historians have meant to impart by it, the title does fit him. The sense of belatedness from which Davenant