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Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
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Loxley, J 2012, 'Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell' SEL Studies in English Literature
1500-1900, vol 52, no. 1, pp. 165-185. DOI: 10.1353/sel.2012.0007
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1500-1900, 52(1), 165-185. 10.1353/sel.2012.0007
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Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
James Loxley
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 52, Number 1,
Winter 2012, pp. 165-185 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2012.0007
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sel/summary/v052/52.1.loxley.html
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SEL 52, Loxley
1 (Winter 2012): 165–185
James
ISSN 0039-3657
165
165
Echoes as Evidence in the
Poetry of Andrew Marvell
JAMES LOXLEY
That Andrew Marvell’s poetry is particularly allusive is an
organizing critical and editorial assumption. Pierre Legouis and
E. E. Duncan-Jones’s revision of H. M. Margoliouth’s Poems and
Letters (1971) brought together in a single erudite commentary
the plentiful echoes and resemblances to the works of other poets,
both ancient and modern, that these and other attentive readers had noted over the years.1 Nigel Smith’s more recent edition
(2007) of the poems has arguably given even greater prominence
to the echoing nature of Marvellian song, drawing attention to its
reverberations both in the extensive headnote to each poem and
in detailed and comprehensive textual annotations.2 Less ambitious editions in the intervening years similarly emphasize the
many apparent borrowings that make up an important part of the
weave of Marvell’s poetry.3 Such editorial emphases are hardly
unusual, of course—the identification and unpacking of likely
allusions is a customarily central component of an editor’s work
in annotating the texts in his or her care—but in Marvell’s case it
has long been complemented by, or perhaps has complemented,
a steady reliance on echoes and resemblances in developing
critical readings of his work. The twin pillars of modern Marvell
James Loxley is Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars (1997), Ben
Jonson (2002), Performativity (2007), and Stanley Cavell: Philosophy, Literature, and Criticism (2011; coedited with Andrew Taylor), as well as articles on
many aspects of seventeenth-century writing. He has jointly curated a recent
exhibition at the National Library of Scotland entitled “Beyond Macbeth:
Shakespeare Collections in Scotland,” and his current projects include a
critical edition of a manuscript account of Ben Jonson’s walk to Edinburgh,
a coauthored book on Shakespeare and Jonson, and an anthology of Renaissance literature for Oxford Univ. Press.
166
Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
criticism—J. B. Leishman’s The Art of Marvell’s Poetry and John
Wallace’s Destiny His Choice—both posit and elaborate a vast
range of such connections, in support of very different critical
projects.4 Wallace’s emphasis is on the elucidation of political
and ideological context, while Leishman is more concerned with
how Marvell’s poetry manages to borrow so extensively from his
predecessors and contemporaries while remaining “unmistakably his own and no one else’s.”5 Hence Wallace is principally
interested in resemblances at the level of argument or idea, while
Leishman’s attention is more readily engaged by verbal echoes.
If Wallace’s focus on the political poetry and its context has generated more vigorous critical growth over the years, those who
have developed his approach have had a keener eye for linguistic
isomorphism.6 Meanwhile, the full range of the poetry continues
to be inexhaustibly generative of hitherto unnoticed parallels and
allusions. No doubt future editors will, like their predecessors,
see the gathering up of such echoes as an important aspect of
the work of annotation.
Unsurprisingly, parallels are rarely noted for their own sake.
In editorial and critical work alike, they are given in evidence:
some offer useful or illuminating points of comparison, parallel
or similar handlings of motifs, metaphors, or topoi, while others—perhaps more weightily—are deployed in support of claims
regarding Marvell’s reading, the dating of particular poems, the
circulation of his writings, and the nature and extent of his social circles. To some extent, the emphasis on these latter is a
consequence of what has usually been seen as the paucity of
external evidence capable of resolving textual and biographical
uncertainties. Thus, for example, both Blair Worden and Nicholas
McDowell rely heavily on textual echoes in the poetry in making
different, but not incompatible, cases for Marvell’s connections
and activities in the later 1640s.7 The only bonds to his literary
contemporaries at this time for which we have absolutely definitive evidence are his address to Richard Lovelace in commendation of Lucasta, first published in 1649, and his presence among
the elegists for Henry Hastings in Lachrymae Musarum the same
year; in addition, the promotion of his elegy from the addenda of
the first edition to a more central position in the second, surely
indicates his involvement with, or recognition by, contemporary
poets and their readers.8 Building on this relatively meager evidence, Worden and McDowell have crafted persuasive portraits
of a poet at home among the London wits of the turbulent few
years after the royalist defeat, engaged in amicable exchanges
James Loxley
167
not just with Lovelace but also with James Shirley, John Hall,
Marchamont Nedham and Alexander Brome. This is a sociable
rather than a private Marvell, linked comfortably into the circles
and networks of his age, including those of both Thomas Stanley
and Samuel Hartlib.9 Verbal echoes and other similarities between
Marvell’s poems of this period and those of such contemporaries
offer abundant support to the claims of McDowell and Worden
alike, which would otherwise remain primarily speculative. To
see such echoes as evidence of friendship changes our sense of
Marvell’s commitments, too: where Wallace portrayed a figure
consistent in his political orientation despite the turning of the
world around him, and others have seen his writing as fractured
by the political turmoil of this time, McDowell’s Marvell works out
a transcendent commitment or allegiance to poetry, and to wit,
which coincides with the bonds of friendship among poets and
wits evidenced in the poems’ allusive engagements.10
Given, then, the particular kind of evidential weight that the
Marvellian echo is now required to bear by editors and critics,
one might have thought that it would have been the focus for
some fairly rigorous stress testing. McDowell and Worden both
acknowledge the vulnerabilities of the “argument from poetic resemblance,” its notably ineliminable conditionality and its reliance
on the potentially distorting or selective pursuit and extraction of
quotations, yet both remain broadly sanguine about its capacity
not only to demonstrate the attitude or illocutionary force of an
echoic poem (assuming it has, or can be said to have, one) but also
to substantiate essentially factual claims regarding its writer.11
Perhaps, though, a cautionary note or two might be entered. For
a start, echoes that are obvious or compelling evidence of influence or dialogue to some are unconvincing to others. For Christine
Rees, the fact that Lovelace’s poem “On Sanazar’s Being Honoured
with Six Hundred Duckets by the Clarissimi of Venice” shares a
disparaging reference to literary Goths and Vandals along with
Marvell’s “Tom May’s Death,” points to Lovelace’s direct borrowing from his friend and commender. Yet Martin Dzelzainis is not
convinced: “this was a commonplace,” he says, though referring
the reader to Alexander Brome’s use of the phrase in his poetic
address to Lovelace does not extend its commonality that far.12
Similarly, Allan Pritchard argues for a post-Restoration date for
“The Garden” on the basis that it features significant resemblances
to poems by Abraham Cowley and Katherine Philips that were not
published until the later 1660s.13 His claims have been judged
“strong” by Smith, and the proposed date of 1668 accepted in this
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Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
edition.14 Yet Andrew Barnaby has argued that some of Pritchard’s
parallels are less compelling than they might at first appear, and
that his case substantially consists of “rather dubious sourcehunting.”15 Certainly, Pritchard’s mining of Philips and Cowley
generates an accumulation of parallels, and he himself suggests
that they are more convincing as a group than individually.16 But
this triangulation of the three writers perhaps leads to the misjudgment of the evidential value of such details as shared rhymes.
Pritchard sees the presence of the rhyming couple “power” and
“devour” in both Cowley’s “Upon Liberty” and Marvell’s “To His Coy
Mistress” as an “example of Cowley’s possible influence,” but this
is not an especially uncommon pairing in early modern verse.17
The pairing of “ark” and “embark,” which Pritchard describes
as a “rather striking rhyme” and traces to a Donnean origin, is
neither Donne’s invention nor at all unusual.18 The fact that the
image of the industrious bee is evoked by Philips, Cowley, and
Marvell’s “The Garden,” that the rhyme of “rude” with “solitude”
is shared by Philips and Marvell, and that Cowley and Marvell
alike repeat the phrasal pairing of “herbs and flowers,” might
seem cumulatively persuasive. But it perhaps ought to be noted
that all three markers are also to be found in Henry Vaughan’s
poem “The Bee.”19 Rather than positing Vaughan, too, as a source
for Marvell, we might want to reconsider other explanations for
these kinds of parallels.
There are, in short, what we might rather grandly call epistemological questions raised by the use of poetic resemblance as
evidence for certain types of claims.20 We sometimes face the problem of how to tell what makes a resemblance an allusion, and thus
at least a candidate for bearing the kind and range of evidential
significance it is often held to carry. It is frequently argued, for
instance, that a particular echo is too close to be coincidental.21
This is, in essence, an appeal to probability, not entirely unlike
Pritchard’s suggestion that the accumulation of parallels between
“The Garden” and the poems of Cowley and Philips made each echo
more persuasive. Yet arguments grounded in an accumulation
of parallels were long ago found to be vulnerable in attribution
studies, and even though the problem here is significantly different we would do well to note the potential for fallacy inherent in
such claims.22 By the same token, it is hard to know whether or
not an echo is too close to be a coincidence unless we possess a
judicious sense of the degree of proximity between two texts that
“coincidence” could generate. It is not clear that we actually do.
There is even a problem within this problem: the alternatives of
James Loxley
169
“deliberate allusion” and “coincidence” are surely far too stark
to account for the range of ways in which an echo might come
about. “Coincidence” for Andrew Shifflett is synonymous with
“generic tradition working itself out”; all potentially causal factors
other than the conscious authorial will are thus grouped together
as “merely … accidental confluence,” to borrow R. F. Thomas’s
equally stark formulation, “inevitable between poets dealing with
a shared or related language.”23 However, this lumps causal, but
nondeliberate, relationships in with those arising from something
closer to pure chance. As Stephen Hinds remarks, “the occlusion
of dynamics of language and literary discourse in the phrase
‘merely an accidental confluence’ is notable.”24
Adopting a typology that assimilates the nondeliberate echo
to pure accident inhibits the effort to examine other kinds of causation that might be at work, and thus makes it much harder to
judge when, or whether, some resemblances are indeed too close
to be anything other than deliberate. Some of these causal forces
are best described as grammatical or linguistic; others arise from
the demands of poetic language and form in particular, and from
the not at all coincidental molding force, operative in all aspects
of the writing process, of genre. But more complex issues can also
arise. Should our assessment of the evidential power of Pritchard’s
shared rhymes, for example, be at all influenced by the knowledge
that power/devour, ark/embark, and -ude/rude are all familiar
or obvious enough to be included in Edward Phillips’s “Dictionary
for the More Expeditious Finding Out of Any Rime,” published
in The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658)?25 Might the assumption that such resemblances are not just verbal parallels,
and are thus all the more persuasive, be in any way challenged
by the recognition that combinations such as “power/devour” and
“ark/embark” constrain the semantic field within which they can
meaningfully operate, thus making it more likely that the rhyme
will occur in some connotative contexts—predation, sea travel—
rather than others? Such grammatical, rhetorical, and discursive
features of poetic utterance—Hinds’ “dynamics of language and
literary discourse”—are a vital part of the compositional process,
and neither random nor the work of the authorial will.
The same lack of discrimination between different kinds of
causality and their relative strengths also produces the somewhat
diminishing or dismissive labeling of an echo as a commonplace.
That a line or phrase participates in a topos or recites a sententia
does not render it empty or inert, as if collapsing into cliché.26 The
closing lines of Marvell’s “Horatian Ode,” one of the finest politi-
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Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
cal poems in the language, rehearse a commonplace, as editors
and critics have long recognized.27 “The same arts that did gain
a pow’r / Must it maintain” (lines 119–20) has antecedents that
reach back at least as far as Sallust; more contemporary citations
in historical writing include John Speed’s History of Great Britaine
(1611), Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King John (1623),
Charles Aleyn’s Historie of that wise and Fortunate Prince, Henrie
of that Name the Seventh (1638), and John Davies’s Microcosmos
(1603), in which “That which is gotten with the Sword must soe
be mainetained” is offered as a marginal comment on Edward I’s
campaigns against Wales and Scotland.28 To recite the formula in
this meditation on Oliver Cromwell is to place him in a long line
of rulers—specifically, kings—for whom the sword loomed large.
Scholars have also noted a range of highly topical tracts and pamphlets in which the sententia, or something like it, occurs.29 While
some of these, such as Anthony Ascham’s A Discourse, Wherein
is Examined, What is Particularly Lawfull During the Confusions
and Revolutions of Government (1648), share the poem’s ambition
to map a basis on which the legitimacy of republican rule can be
established, others are more directly hostile.30 Act 3 of the anonymous burlesque Famous Tragedie of King Charles I contains an
exchange in which Cromwell is advised: “The People we will Rule
by the Sword’s power, their lives and goods (by Conquest) we have
gain’d, our sway must be maintain’d by Strength, not Law. The
Sword that cut a passage to our Sphere / ’Tis that alone must
secure us there.”31 Here there are lexical similarities to the “Ode,”
as well as a familiar insistence on the sword and a directly sententious presentation of the commonplace. Sententiae, as Annabel
Patterson has pointed out, are very important to the poem. The
Horatian form accommodates or creates them, and helps the kind
of archepolitical grasping after rules and necessities (the poem’s,
and the commonplace’s, insistent “must”) that is a central part of
its general coming to terms.32 To incorporate a commonplace in this
form is therefore both to appropriate its regularizing power and
to establish an intertextual relationship with its other iterations,
those situations, events, or figures that are in the same way cases
subsumed under it. The Famous Tragedie is therefore parodying
and attacking the resort to such archepolitical language by the
republic’s founders. That its strategies should be familiar enough
for parody, even before it was written, perhaps makes the “Ode”
a less adventurous poem than has sometimes been suggested.
But the identification of an echo as commonplace does
compromise its utility as evidence in both a genetic ordering of
James Loxley
171
sources and the identification of a grouping of friends or fellows.
One of the most compelling aspects of recent arguments from
poetic resemblance is the claim that such parallels demonstrate
the existence of dialogue or collaboration, of a friendship, community, or intimacy that reflects shared interests or values at
some level, and from which others are necessarily excluded.33
Such arguments, entirely properly, deploy resemblances within
poets’ works as supplementary evidence for connections attested
otherwise, either externally, referentially, or paratextually. That
Marvell commended Lovelace in Lucasta makes him a likely interlocutor on at least some other occasions; that he appeared
among the contributors to Lachrymae Musarum might corroborate
otherwise more speculative or inferential suggestions of amity
or affiliation with some of his fellow contributors. It is therefore
not unreasonable to make the case the other way around and to
argue that resemblance is evidence for dialogue, collaboration,
or membership in a delimited community of readers and writers
even in the absence of some other kind of witness. Perceptive and
fruitful though it can be, this move also carries some risks that
go beyond the more general judgments of probability or likelihood
identified above. In particular, it might lead us to downplay the
chances of resemblance arising from more attenuated connections, through the kinds of action at a distance made possible,
classically, by the written word. Here, our tendency to think of
literary production and circulation in this period through the
metaphor of the circle can be rather unhelpful. Catherine Gray,
for example, in mapping the reach of the literary community
organized around Philips, speculatively identifies contributors
to a 1643 collection elegizing Sir Bevill Grenville in which the
contributions are signed only with initials by projecting back
from the list of commenders and elegists whose poems prefaced
the 1651 collection of William Cartwright’s works.34 This move is
seemingly justified by the considerable overlap between the two
groups, the latter of which she sees as instantiating “a heterosocial
coterie of Royalist men.”35 Thus, the Grenville volume becomes
further evidence of this single grouping. Such speculation is not
unreasonable, as long as a presumption of continuity and some
degree of exclusivity is justifiable. In this instance we can show
that it is not: a second edition of the Grenville volume, in which
the full names of the contributors are included, disproves Gray’s
hypothesized identifications.36 The argument for a “coterie” here
consequently becomes more tendentious.
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Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
We might want to think, instead, less circumferentially: such
groupings emerge through patterns of institutional, familial, local,
patronage, and amicable affiliation, and they are rarely exclusive.37
Having strong and independent evidence for a close grouping of
friends organized through, and celebrated by, Stanley, we clearly
have good reason to see the resemblances between their works as
signs of ongoing intimacy and intellectual collaboration.38 Edward
Sherburne’s discussion of his acquaintance with Robert Herrick
and John Denham has prompted scholars to add their names to
the community, and to see echoes between their works and those
of Stanley’s known intimates as further justification for such a
move.39 The writing or exchange of commendatory verses, and
shared appearances as commender or elegist, further add Alexander Brome, Richard Brome, Thomas Jordan, John Berkenhead,
Charles Cotton, and, eventually, Marvell.40 Marvell’s possible links
to some of Stanley’s friends and relations might also explain the
otherwise surprising echoes of Aleyn’s Historie in “An Horatian
Ode”: Aleyn had been Sherburne’s tutor, and the pupil’s praises
of his teacher prefaced the volume.41 Yet as the circle grows like
this, it becomes less obviously circular. Each “member” has his
own institutional, familial, and accidental connections, which in
turn open onto others elsewhere. An account of Shirley’s patronage relations at this period, for example, would need to take in a
connection to the Prestwich family too, which also encompassed
Cotton and Jordan.42 Jordan’s relationship to Stanley was possibly enabled, and perhaps mediated, by a prior acquaintance
with Shirley, so perhaps we could say that in this instance at
least Stanley was a member of Shirley’s circle rather than the
other way around.43 If the evidence suggests that such circles do
not simply overlap, then instead of a bounded space of coextensive friendship—the corporeal or social analogue of the spiritual
and intellectual union celebrated in a highly wrought exchange
between Stanley and William Fairfax—we have paratactic and porous groupings of acquaintance and affiliation.44 Denser and more
enclosed where amicitia is being self-consciously rehearsed, they
nonetheless accommodate the attenuations of distance; extended,
they comprise both friends and friends of friends. Moreover, their
manifestations in books are rarely without remainder. Each list
of commenders or contributors differs from others, featuring
unexpected or, sometimes, obscure names, bringing together a
diverse range of contacts who sometimes share no more than a
connection to a stationer, author, or dedicatee. In mapping this
world of encounters and exchanges, it would be problematic, a
James Loxley
173
kind of confirmation bias, to pursue the connections we recognize
and simply overlook everything else. In volumes such as Lachrymae Musarum, or the Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
(1647) and Cartwright (1651) editions produced by Humphrey
Moseley, a variety of different sets of connections, some still obscure, would seem to be in evidence. Such collections manifest
a degree of contingency, or miscellaneity, which the idea of the
coterie or the metaphor of the circle is unable to render but which
we ought to consider.45
This picture of poetic affiliation has consequences for how we
might read resemblance. While it can certainly witness to intimacy, dialogue, and collaboration, it might also bespeak shared
institutional or educational bonds. Beyond those, it can demonstrate the kinds of highly mediated and multilayered connections
in which the early modern literary world abounds. Sometimes, as
with Aleyn’s Historie and “An Horatian Ode,” we can trace a plausible interpersonal route between the texts in question; sometimes
such trajectories can be guessed or inferred. Much of the time we
might indeed have to invoke the kind of action at a distance, or
the functioning through absence, of which the word is said to be
primordially capable. Out past mere reading, we can look to the
“dynamics of language and literary discourse” on which Hinds
insists. What we should only carefully do, without external, referential, or paratextual evidence, is make a presumption in favor
of intimacy. We have to be cautious, too, in our interpretation of
this evidence. If the metaphor of the circle held, a connection to
one would be a connection to all. But in the more diffuse, less
consistently textured but more interconnected networks indicated
by the forms in which much early modern poetry circulated, such
a presumption is not so obviously secure. It is possible, of course,
that the necessary evidence is simply lost, but since there were
so many opportunities for bonds to be given a material affirmation, consistent absence makes a difference. We might therefore
want to be wary of treating such details as Marvell’s absence
from Stanley’s “Register,” his apparent failure to exchange commendatory poems with any of the possible participants other than
Lovelace, and Sherburne’s neglecting to mention him in his notes
on his poetic acquaintances, as mere oversights or insignificant
omissions.
This is not, I hope, a prescription for unwarranted scholarly
fastidiousness in the face of the Marvellian echo. Paying due attention to the various textual and social matrices of its production
need not rob us of precise or compelling insights into the place
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Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
that the poems can plausibly be said to occupy in a climacteric
England’s ferment. It can, in fact, add a dimension to which the
search for sources and influences, or biographical imperatives,
is not always attuned. Here is an example.
“Tom May’s Death” is apparently the fourth and final poem
by Marvell to emerge from the nexus of poetry and royalism that
also generated his tribute to Lovelace and his elegies on Hastings
and Francis Villiers. In the revised Margoliouth edition, the poem’s
debts to Ben Jonson were suggested, its parody of the opening
of Tom May’s translation of Lucan noted, and its kinship with
other examples of Lucianic satire and raisings of Jonson’s ghost
sketched out.46 Such hints have been developed in subsequent
critical and editorial work. Rees identified the echo of Jonson’s
Masque of Queens at the poem’s conclusion;47 Smith notes its reorganization of some of the phrasing and imagery with which Jonson
begins his commendatory poem for May’s Lucan, “To his Chosen
Friend,” and its generic affinity, via Lucian, with Jonson’s play
Poetaster, or His Arraignment.48 Others have noted further echoes
of Jonson’s Roman plays, particularly Catiline His Conspiracy.49
Most of these echoes cluster around what are undoubtedly the
poem’s most famous, and most resonant, lines:
When the sword glitters o’er the judge’s head,
And fear has coward churchmen silenced,
Then is the poet’s time, ’tis then he draws,
And single fights forsaken virtue’s cause.
He, when the wheel of empire whirleth back,
And though the world’s disjointed axle crack,
Sings still of ancient rights and better times,
Seeks wretched good, arraigns successful crimes.50
Worden has noted, in addition to echoes of Jonson himself, the
multiple evocations and invocations of the poet in the commendatory verses prefaced to the 1647 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher,
singling out for special mention James Howell’s conjuration of a
“grim Ben” lashing the world in “rage” and “high-swollen fury,”
and John Berkenhead’s longing backward glance to a time when
“high crimes were still arraigned.”51 McDowell suggests a source in
Herrick’s “The Apparition of His Mistresse Calling Him to Elizium,”
which also focuses on Jonson’s ghost. For Berkenhead, at least,
we can trace extra-textual parallels with Marvell: as McDowell has
argued, he is probably the author both of a poem in Lachrymae
Musarum and of a combative elegy on Villiers.52 Berkenhead’s
James Loxley
175
description of Charles’s trial as “People-cheating Pageantry” in
Loyalties Teares, an elegy for the king, also chimes with the denunciation of republican heroes as “the people’s cheats” (“Tom
May’s Death,” line 18).53
Just as significant as the picking out of possible sources and
echoes in Marvell’s poem has been the discernment of traces of
the poem’s reception by possible interlocutors. Chief among these
has been Lovelace, whose lengthy satire “On Sanazar’s Being
Honoured … by the Clarissimi of Venice,” as we saw above, has
been noted for its resemblance to Marvell’s attack on “mercenary”
May.54 Rees suggests that the invocation of Jonson’s ghost in
Lovelace’s poem produces “a shock of recognition” in readers of
Marvell’s poem.55 McDowell further argues that Alexander Brome’s
commendatory poem for his namesake Richard’s Five New Plays
(1653) includes a citation of Marvell’s satire:
And the Stern Poet, challenging as due
His ancient right, with freedome to speak true;
Div’d into secrets, and ’cause hee’d not be brib’d
To silence, nor compliance, was proscrib’d.56
Though he does not give this figure Jonson’s name, Alexander
Brome’s use of the phrase “ancient right,” as much as his sense of
the corruption and censoriousness of the poet’s range of enemies,
aligns his poem with Marvell’s satire.
This use of echoes to track both sources and readers has done
much to help make sense of the place of “Tom May’s Death” in
the Marvellian canon. If we broaden the range within which such
echoes are audible, though, the picture changes accordingly.
The records of the relationship between May and Jonson include
another poem of praise, this time by the former on the latter. As
critics have long known, May contributed an elegy on Jonson to
Brian Duppa’s 1638 collection, Jonsonus Virbius, which gathered
together paeans by many of the best-known poets of the 1630s.
May’s own elegiac address to the departed “King of English Poetry”
begins by recalling Statius’s poem on Lucan’s birthday, written
some years after the latter’s death, casting Jonson as a modern
Lucan; toward its end, he is likened to Virgil too, for good measure.57 Despite its promising invocation of Lucanic possibilities,
there is little evidence for suggesting that this tribute caught
Marvell’s eye—verbal or thematic echoes are absent. Later in the
same volume, though, we find a poem by a different voice that
plausibly could have stimulated Marvell’s compositional imagina-
176
Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
tion. Untitled, but signed “R. Meade,” it contains a forceful and
not unfamiliar characterization of a poet’s virtue:
Where shall we now find one dares boldly write,
Free from base flattery yet as void of spight?
That grovels not in’s Satyres, but soares high,
Strikes at the mounting vices, can descry
With his quicke Eagles Pen those glorious crimes,
That either dazle, or affright the Times?
Thy strength of Iudgement oft did thwart the tide
O’ th’ foaming multitude, when to their side
Throng’d plush, and silken censures, whilst it chose,
(As that which could distinguish Men from cloathes,
Faction from judgement) still to keepe thy Bayes
From the suspition of a vulgar praise.58
The image of the poet developed here bears both general and
some quite specific resemblances to the vindication of the poet’s
proper function that Marvell puts into Jonson’s mouth in the
lines from “Tom May’s Death” quoted above. In sketching Jonson, its author proffers a portrait of a defiantly independent and
free-speaking author, an evocation of the Horatian ideal that
was a not infrequent if rarely untrammeled presence in Jonson’s
own poetic self-imaginings, and which recent critics have identified as the shaping conception behind Marvell’s revivification.59
Given that both poems are recalling Jonson in crafting their pen
portraits of the free poet, the resemblance between the resulting
images should not perhaps surprise us, and would not of itself
be enough to justify a suggestion of indebtedness on the greater
poet’s part. If we add into our consideration the shared, though
reversed, rhyme, and the similar effect produced by the adjectival
modification of crimes as “glorious” by Robert Mead and as “successful” by Marvell, the case appears stronger—though it ought
to be noted that “crimes/times” is hardly an uncommon rhyme,
and the semantic field of the pairing is likely to ensure that it
often occurs in censure of an age’s deeds and morals.
Mead was not, as far as we know, a member of the poetic
“circles” operating at the beginning of the 1650s. The son of a
prominent London bookseller, he had been schooled at Westminster alongside Cowley, and contributed one of the two commendatory poems prefacing the latter’s Poetical Blossomes on its
first publication in 1633.60 Their paths diverged when Mead went
on to Oxford, joining the group of Christ Church poets fostered
James Loxley
177
by Brian Duppa. He contributed verses to a few other collections
besides Jonsonus Virbius, and wrote at least one play, The Combat
of Love and Friendship, which was described on its title page as
“formerly … presented by the Gentlemen of Ch[rist] Ch[urch] in
Oxford” on its eventual publication in 1653. From 1640 onwards
he served in the royal armies, and as Captain Mead was one of
the commissioners for the king’s side during the negotiations for
the surrender of Oxford in 1646. He subsequently served as a
royalist agent overseas before returning to London in 1652; he
died in February the following year, and was described in the
stationer’s address to the reader that prefaced The Combat of
Love and Friendship as “a Person, whose eminent and general
Abilities have left him a character, pretious and honourable to
our Nation.”61 While the author of Mead’s entry in the Dictionary
of National Biography states that he “appears to have relinquished
literature” prior to taking up his military career, this is not quite
true. In 1643 he contributed two poems to the volume produced
by royalist Oxford to celebrate the Queen’s return from her foreign
travels, in which Cartwright and Berkenhead were also featured.62
So it is not impossible that Marvell might have known of Mead in
the later 1640s. If so, he offers a vivid instance of the poet armed,
someone who “strikes at the mounting vices” in a literalization of
the military metaphor common to both his and Marvell’s poem.
Yet it is just as interesting to contemplate the possibility that
the echoic resemblance between these two characterizations of
Jonson is not the effect of deliberate recall; that it is, instead,
the work of one or more of the other causal processes mentioned
above. To let Mead break into the circle of reverberations is to
open it up to a broader and shifting arrangement of tropes and
topoi, texts and intertexts, communicating with each other across
the variously ordered and contingently intersecting processes and
vehicles of literary exchange. It places both Lovelace’s invocation
of Jonson and Alexander Brome’s characterization of the “Stern
Poet” within a broader range of plausible resonators, despite the
verbal parallel with “Tom May’s Death.” That very parallel recalls
further antecedents such as Denham’s satirical “Humble Petition
of the Poets,” which complains of the Long Parliament’s violation
of the poets’ “Priviledge Antient and Native … to speak whatever
we please / Without fear of a Prison, or Pursuivants fees,” or even
Joseph Hall’s much earlier encouragement to poets to “holde
your auncient right: / Write what you will, and write not what
you might.”63 Such echoes also serve to sharpen the differences
between Marvell and Alexander Brome: while the latter, like Den-
178
Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
ham, Hall, and, implicitly, Mead, identifies the ancient right in
question as the poet’s freedom to speak, Marvell’s pointedly plural
“ancient rights” are the subject of the poet’s song. If the Jonson of
Marvell’s poem is exercising his freedom, he is doing so to sing of
other ancient rights as well as, or rather than, his own.
Joseph Hall is certainly a relevant point of reference, given his
status as controversialist and satiric innovator—his poetry helped
to fuel the debates around the propriety of satire that were a political as well as literary concern fifty years previously. This, too,
was the milieu from which Jonson’s configuration of his satiric
persona emerged, to be given its clearest outline in Poetaster in
1601.64 If the arraignment of May in Marvell’s poem distantly recalls this play, Lovelace’s “On Sanazar’s being Honoured … by he
Clarissimi of Venice”— subtitled “A Satyre”—does so much more
directly, by both reference and quotation. Flagging up its multiple
reverberations, it incorporates a couplet from Jonson’s play that
Jonson himself adapted from Marlowe’s translation of Ovid, and
refers to the character of Crispinus, Jonson’s mock portrait of
John Marston.65 Its invocation of Jonson quotes and rearranges
lines from the “Apologetical Dialogue” appended to Poetaster, in
which Jonson dramatizes his own authorial persona in order
to defend his satiric art.66 Indeed, while the “mist of Insects” in
Lovelace resembles the “swarms / Of insects” assailing him in
Marvell’s commendatory poem for Lucasta, as critics have noted,
his earlier mention of “Gnats and Wasps” is at least as close to
the “flies,” “angry wasps,” and “hornets” that “fly buzzing, mad,
about my nostrils” in Jonson’s self-portrait.67 The proximity to
“Tom May’s Death” plausibly arises from a common fascination
with the timeliness of this vision of the undaunted poet at bay,
a vision that had grown more vivid, rather than fading, in the
decade after Jonson’s death.
The exchange between Marvell and Lovelace that critics have
detected in the relationships between these poems has been seen
as a mutual marking of the differences between them, separating
“us” from “them,” “now” from “then,” as Marvell comes to see a
future for the free-speaking poet in a kingless world—a vision that
Lovelace is unable to share, even if Alexander Brome is prepared to
hope for it.68 Lovelace’s poem, though, may well be measuring its
distance from more than one version of poetry’s postwar present.
A preoccupation with a range of models appears plausible from a
passage in which his contempt for the corrupt poetasters who fall
short of a Jonsonian ideal gives way to a more profound lament:
James Loxley
179
Faction and Envy now is downright Rage;
Once a five knotted whip there was, the Stage,
The Beadle and the Executioner,
To whip small Errors, and the great ones tear.
Now as e’re Nimrod the first King, he writes,
That’s strongest, th’ablest deepest bites.
The Muses weeping fly their Hill, to see
Their noblest Sons of peace in Mutinie.
Could there nought else this civil war compleat,
But Poets raging with Poetick heat,
Tearing themselves and th’endlesse wreath, as though
Immortal they, their wrath should be so too.69
It is not immediately clear who such rebellious sons might be—
given the different tone of the poem’s alarm at their actions, they
are not perhaps to be lumped in with the venal or unlettered
scribblers. Some clarification becomes possible if we follow an
echo here of lines from Berkenhead’s praise of Beaumont and
Fletcher in the 1647 folio, a volume to which Lovelace also contributed a commendatory poem.70 Berkenhead’s tribute bemoans
the “Relapse of Wit,” and complains that “What strength remains,
is like that (wilde and fierce) / Till Johnson made good Poets and
Right Verse.” Such wildness produces “boyst’rous Trifles,” “savage
Metaphors (things rudely Great),” a tendency to “butcher a Conceit,” in stark contrast to the virtues of the poets here revivified:
Nor art Thou Loud and Cloudy; those that do
Thunder so much, do’t without Lightning too;
Tearing themselves, and almost split their braine
To render harsh what thou speak’st free and cleane;
Such gloomy Sense may passe for High and Proud,
But true-born Wit still flies above the Cloud.71
Such aesthetic strictures make it likely that Berkenhead’s target
here is the startlingly dense and violent satire of John Cleveland, a
poet not easily dismissed as mercenary, ignorant, or incompetent.
The date of composition—not before December 1646—also supports this suggestion. Cleveland’s poetry was already in reasonably
wide manuscript circulation, and erupted from the presses early
in 1647, with six editions and a separate publication of his poem,
“The Kings Disguise,” appearing within five months.72 In his most
famous poem, “The Rebel Scot,” he adopts a fierce persona and
style that Berkenhead clearly found unpalatable:
180
Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
Ring the bells backward, I am all on fire,
Not all the buckets in a Countrey Quire
Shall quench my rage.
Come keen Iambicks, with your Badgers feet,
And badger-like, bite till your teeth do meet.
Help ye tart Satyrists, to imp my rage,
With all the Scorpions that should whip this age.73
When Berkenhead praises Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Strength
and Mirth” and “Sanguin Wit,” and pointedly comments on their
lack of “Rage,” he is seeking to fend off Cleveland’s rendering of
satire as much as anything else. To some extent, this is because
he judges such ferocity to be ineffective, or symptomatic of a loss
of power: “Who blusters strong i’ th’ Darke … creeps i’ th’ Light.”74
Nearly a decade later and at the height of Cleveland’s fame,
Lovelace considered such uncivil, biting poetry with more dismay as a Parnassian mutiny, wit turned against itself. While he,
like Marvell, imagined a literary world corrupted by “Scorpions,”
Cleveland sought to incorporate them into his art.75 Furthermore,
Lovelace’s antipathy to “poetic rage” was shared by friends and
kinsmen. Sherburne complained of it in his poem for Moseley’s
Cartwright volume, while John Hall pointedly characterized Stanley’s style as “admit[ting] no wildfire in poetic rage.”76 Cleveland’s
poetry represents an outbreak of the poetical unconscious, an
eruption of the incivility tamed by Jonson, and over which Jonson’s authorial persona boasted of his control in Poetaster. To give
in to one’s rage is “but a feminine humour,” Jonson says, “And far
beneath the dignity of a man,” sentiments recalled in Lovelace’s
praise of the “masc’line Spirit” of “Father Ben” and his ridicule of
writing women.77 Cleveland is therefore an unruly third term in
any mapping of poetry’s way between a cavalier past and a present commonwealth, the demands of loyalty and the temptations
of infidelity—marked by the barbarity of the age, but no more of
it than his fellow cavaliers. Marvell was of course to find his own
way, much later, to speak back to Cleveland in “The Loyal Scot”;
here, though, we can pick out a note or two in the echoic interplay
of which both Marvell’s poetry, and those of his contemporaries,
is unendingly capable.
James Loxley
181
notes
1 Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M.
Margoliouth, Pierre Legouis, and E. E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
2 Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, Annotated English Poets ed.
Nigel Smith, rev. edn. (Harlow UK: Longman, 2007).
3 Marvell, Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno
(Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1972); Andrew Marvell, ed. Frank Kermode
and Keith Walker, Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990).
4 J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell’s Poetry (London: Hutchison, 1966);
John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968).
5 Leishman, p. 29.
6 See, for example, Derek Hirst, “That Sober Liberty: Marvell’s Cromwell
in 1654,” in The Golden and the Brazen World, ed. Wallace (Berkeley: Univ.
of California Press, 1984), pp. 17–53, and Blair Worden, “The Politics of
Marvell’s Horatian Ode,” Historical Journal 27, 3 (September 1984): 525–47.
7 Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 54–115; Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance
in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2008).
8 Hilton Kelliher, Andrew Marvell: Poet and Politician 1621–78 (London:
British Library, 1978), p. 39.
9 Worden, Literature and Politics; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance.
10 Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 114–37; David Norbrook, Writing
the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 271–80.
11 McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, pp. 3–4; Worden, Literature and
Politics, p. 9.
12 Martin Dzelzainis, “Literature, War, and Politics, 1642–1668,” in A
Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, ed. David Womersley (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), pp. 3–19, 11.
13 Allan Pritchard, “Marvell’s ‘The Garden’: A Restoration Poem?” SEL 23,
3 (Summer 1983): 371–88.
14 Marvell, Poems, ed. Smith, p. 152.
15 Andrew Barnaby, “The Politics of Garden Spaces: Andrew Marvell and
the Anxieties of Public Speech,” SP 97, 3 (Summer 2000): 331–61, 341, 360.
16 See Pritchard: “It is when the parallels are considered cumulatively
that they become really impressive,” p. 373.
17 Pritchard, p. 385.
18 Pritchard, p. 380.
19 Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum, rev. edn.
(Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1983), pp. 381–4, esp. lines 19–20, 37. “The
Bee” and “The Garden” are discussed and compared in Leona Spitz, “Process
and Stasis: Aspects of Nature in Vaughan and Marvell,” HLQ 32, 2 (February
1969): 135–47, though the verbal parallels are not noted.
182
Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
There are also what we might call “ontological” questions about the
workings, scope, and limit of allusion, but there is no space to consider these
here. See also Joseph Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power
of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1998), pp. 3–48, which provides an overview of modern and contemporary
theories of allusion.
21 See, for example, Christine Rees, “‘Tom May’s Death’ and Ben Jonson’s
Ghost: A Study of Marvell’s Satiric Method,” MLR 71, 3 (July 1976): 481–8,
486; Andrew Shifflett, “By Lucan Driv’n About: A Jonsonian Marvell’s Lucanic
Milton,” RenQ 49, 4 (Winter 1996): 803–23, 809; and David Roberts, “Two
Shakespearian Allusions and the Date of Marvell’s ‘The Nymph Complaining
for the Death of Her Faun,’” N&Q, n.s., 49 (September 2002): 338–43, 341.
22 See M. St C. Byrne, “Bibliographical Clues in Collaborate Plays,” The
Library, 4th series, 13 (1932): 21–48, and the discussion of this problem in
Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2002), p. 90.
23 Shifflett, p. 809; R. F. Thomas, “Virgil’s Georgics and the Art of Reference,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 90 (1986): 171–98, 174.
24 Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in
Roman Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 19.
25 Edward Phillips, The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (London: N.
Brooks, 1658), pp. 198, 217–8; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) P2066.
26 See Hinds, pp. 34–47.
27 See Wallace, pp. 96–7; Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew
Marvell, ed. Margoliouth, Legouis, and Duncan-Jones, 1: 302–3; Marvell,
Poems, ed. Smith, p. 279.
28 For John Speed, see Wallace, pp. 96–7 and Speed, The History of Great
Britaine Under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans Their
Originals manners, Warres, Coines & Seales: With ye Successions, Lives, Acts
& Issues of the English Monarchs from Iulius Caesar, to Our Most Gracious
Soueraigne King James (n.p., 1614); EEBO SCT (2d edn.) 23046; for Shakespeare, see David Womersley, “King John and Marvell’s Horatian Ode,” N&Q,
n.s., 34, 3 (September 1987): 327 and Shakespeare, The Life and Death of
King John, ed. Herschel Baker, Anne Barton, Kermode, Harry Levin, Hallett
Smith, Marie Edel, 2d edn., 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); for
Charles Aleyn, see Lisa Hopkins, “A Possible Source for An Horatian Ode Upon
Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” N&Q, n.s., 48, 1 (March 2001): 19–20 and
Aleyn, The Historie of that VVise and Fortunate Prince, Henrie of that Name the
Seventh, King of England With that Famed Battaille, Fought Betweene the Sayd
King Henry and Richard the Third Named Crookbacke, Upon Redmoore Neere
Bosworth (n.p., 1638); EEBO STC (2d edn.) 353; John Davies, Microcosmos.
The Discovery of the Little World, With the Governement Thereof (Oxford: John
Barnes, 1603), p. 133; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 6333.
29 See especially Wallace, pp. 97–8, and Norbrook, pp. 260–1.
30 Anthony Ascham, A Discourse, Wherein is Examined, What is Particularly Lawfull During the Confusions and Revolutions of Government (London:
Humphrey Moseley, 1648), p. 86; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) A3919.
31 The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I ([?London], 1649), pp. 21–2;
EEBO Wing (2d edn.) F384.
20 James Loxley
183
Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton Univ. Press,
1978), p. 66.
33 In addition to McDowell and Worden, see Lois Potter, Secret Rites and
Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641–1660 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989),
pp. 113–55.
34 Catherine Gray, “Katherine Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie,” ELR
32, 3 (Autumn 2002): 426–51, 431.
35 Gray, p. 427.
36 Verses by the University of Oxford on the Death of the Most Noble and
Right Valiant Sir Bevill Grenvill, Alias Granvill, Kt. ed. Henry Birkhead (London,
1684); EEBO Wing (2d edn.) O989.
37 See the cautionary words of P. W. Thomas, Sir John Berkenhead,
1617–1679: A Royalist Career in Politics and Polemics (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1969), pp. 139–45.
38 The key sources are Stanley’s “Register of Friends,” in which he celebrated or memorialized his kinsmen William Hammond, Edward Sherburne,
and Richard Lovelace, his tutor William Fairfax, James Shirley (who may
also have had a connection to Hammond that preceded his friendship with
Stanley), John Hall, Robert Bowman, Justinian Isham, and Thomas Salmon;
the poetic addresses, including commendatory verses, between some of these
individuals; and the information provided to Anthony Wood by Sherburne.
See Stanley, The Poems and Translations of Thomas Stanley, ed. Galbraith
Crump (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. xxiii–xxxiv, 354–66.
39 Bodleian Library, MS Top. Oxon. 160c and MS Wood F. 44, fol. 261;
see Stanley, p. xxv; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, pp. 13–24; Susan A.
Clarke, “Royalists Write the Death of Lord Hastings: Post-Regicide Funerary
Propaganda,” Parergon 22, 2 (July 2005): 113–29. See also McDowell, “Herrick
and the Order of the Black Riband: Literary Community in Civil-War London
and the publication of Hesperides (1648),” in “Lords of Wine and Oile”: Community and Conviviality in the Work of Robert Herrick, ed. Tom Cain and Ruth
Connolly (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 106–126.
40 Kelliher, p. 39; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, pp. 17–8, 29.
41 See Aleyn, Historie, sig. A2r; Eleri Larkum, “Aleyn, Charles (d.
1640),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn., doi:10.1093/
ref:odnb/339 (14 January 2011).
42 See Edmund Prestwich, Hippolitus Translated Out of Seneca (London:
George Boddington, 1651), Sigs. b1–b2r; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) S2512; Thomas
Jordan, “Congratulatory to the Bountiful Lover of the Liberal Sciences, Sir
Thomas Prestwich Baronet” in The Muses Melody in a Consort of Poetry (London: J. C., n.d.), n.p.; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) J1048.
43 Indeed, to Ira Clark, Shirley in the later 1640s is “the poetic centre
of a coterie promoted by Thomas Stanley” (“Shirley, James [bap. 1596, d.
1666],” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25427
[14 January 2011]). For the possibility of Jordan’s relationship to Shirley
in the later 1630s, see Lynn Hulse, “Jordan, Thomas (c. 1614–1685),” in
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/15122 (14
January 2011).
44 See Stanley, pp. 66–7.
32 184
Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell
On the range of contributors to Lachrymae Musarum, see James Loxley,
Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars, Early Modern Literature in
History (Houndmills UK: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 196–7, and John McWilliams,
“A Storm of Lamentations Writ: Lachrymae Musarum and Royalist Culture
After the Civil War,” YES 33 (2003): 273–89, esp. 276–80.
46 Marvell, “Tom May’s Death,” in Poems and Letters, 1: 304–6.
47 Rees, p. 487.
48 Marvell, Poems, ed. Smith, pp. 118, 120.
49 Norbrook, p. 279; Worden, Literature and Politics, pp. 78–9. To these
we can add Cato’s declaration in act IV: “Though heauen should speake,
with all his wrath at once, / That, with his breath, the hinges of the world /
Did cracke, we would stand vpright, and vnfeard” (Jonson, Catiline, act IV,
lines 30–2, in Ben Jonson, ed. Charles Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn
Simpson, 11 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52], vol. 5, p. 499).
50 Marvell, “Tom May’s Death,” lines 63–70.
51 Worden, Literature and Politics, p. 78.
52 The connection between these poems was noted in Loxley, “Marvell,
Villiers and Royalist Verse,” N&Q, n.s, 41 (1994): 170–2; for the attribution
to Berkenhead, see McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, pp. 168–9.
53 [John Berkenhead], Loyalties Teares Flowing after the Blood of the
Royal Sufferer Charles I (London?: 1649), p. 5; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) B2967.
54 Manfred Weidhorn, Richard Lovelace (New York: Twayne, 1970), p. 157.
55 Rees, p. 486.
56 Alexander Brome, “Upon the Ingenious Comedies of Mr Richard Brome,”
in Richard Brome, Five New Plays (London: Humphrey Moseley, Richard
Marriot and Thomas Dring, 1653), sig. A4r, lines 27–30; EEBO Wing (2d
edn.) B4870. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, p. 266.
57 Jonsonus Virbius, or the Memorie of Ben: Johnson Revived ed. Brian
Duppa (London: Henry Seile, 1638), p. 21; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) 14784.
58 Robert Mead, untitled poem in Jonsonus Virbius, p. 59.
59 See McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, pp. 259–71; see also Andrew
McRae, Literature, Satire, and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 220–4.
60 Abraham Cowley, Poetical Blossomes (London: Henry Seile, 1633), sig.
A4v; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 5906. For details of Mead’s life, see Charles Brayne,
“Mead, Robert (1615/16–1653),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, doi:
10.1093/ref:odnb/18468 (12 January 2011). Robert Mead senior was Master
of the Stationers Company in 1644, 1645 and 1649: Henry Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at work in England, Scotland and
Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1907), p. 125.
61 Mead, Combat of Love and Friendship (London: M[ercy] M[eighen], G.
Bedell, and T. Collins, 1653), sig. A2r; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) M1564.
62 Musarum Oxoniensium Epibateria (Oxford: for Leonard Lichfield, 1643),
sigs. C4r, A3r; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) O903.
63 John Denham, The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. Theodore
Banks, 2d edn. (New York: Archon Books, 1969), p. 128; Joseph Hall, Virgidemarium, Six Bookes. First Three Bookes, Of Tooth-lesse Satyrs (London:
Robert Dexter, 1597), p. 11.
45 James Loxley
185
Jonson, Poetaster, or His Arraignment, ed. Tom Cain (Manchester UK:
Manchester Univ. Press, 1996).
65 See Lovelace, The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. C. H. Wilkinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 199 and note, p. 333; Jonson, Poetaster,
1.1.77–8.
66 Lovelace, p. 336.
67 Dzelzainis, p. 12; McDowell, pp. 270–1; Jonson, Poetaster, “Apologetical Dialogue,” lines 107–10.
68 Dzelzainis, pp. 11–4; McDowell, pp. 268–71.
69 Lovelace, p. 197.
70 Berkenhead, “On the happy Collection of Master Fletcher’s Works,
never before Printed,” in Beaumont and Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies
(London: for Humphrey Robinson and Humphrey Moseley, 1647), sigs. E1v–
[E2v]; EEBO WING (2d edn.) B1581.
71 Beaumont and Fletcher, sig. [E2].
72 Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington, introduction to The Poems of
John Cleveland, ed. Morris and Withington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967),
pp. xli–xliii.
73 Cleveland, p. 29, lines 5–30.
74 Beaumont and Fletcher, sig. [E2v].
75 Lovelace, p. 199.
76 William Cartwright, Comedies, Tragicomedies, and other poems (London:
Humphrey Moseley, 1651), sig. b8r; EEBO WING (2d edn.) C709; Stanley,
p. xxxv.
77 Jonson, Poetaster, “Apologetical Dialogue,” lines 176–7; Lovelace, p.
200.
64