[gerald maclean] culture and society in the restoration

CHAPTER I

Literature, culture, and society in RestorationEngland

Gerald MacLean

What we mean when we talk about the Stuart Restoration might atfirst seem clear enough. But like similar terms used to indicate botha specific historical event and a period, "Restoration" has been usedin different ways for different purposes and has different meanings indifferent contexts. Most often, the Restoration appears simply as adate that marks the beginning or ending of some other period.Marking either the final exhaustion of the "Renaissance," or thestart of the long eighteenth century, the Restoration is frequentlyconceived as simply an adjacency. When studied as a political event,the Restoration can refer to those circumstances that made necessaryand possible a return to monarchical government, and so primarilydesignates those events and negotiations of 1658-60 surrounding andimmediately following Charles's return.1 But political historians havealso taken a longer view and regard the Restoration as an uneasy,brief settlement within longer-term political negotiations amongCrown, Parliament, Church, and people, the struggles over whichcontinue through the Revolution of 1688 to reverberate well into theeighteenth century and beyond.2

For social and cultural historians, the years following the Res-toration constitute a period of contending activities and attitudes,ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, that cannot entirely beaccounted for in terms of the attempted political settlement of 1660.

1 See, for example, Godfrey Davies, The Restoration of Charles II, 1658-1660 (San Marino, Calif.,1955), and Hutton, Restoration.

2 SeeJ. R.Jones, ed., The Restored Monarchy, 1660-1688 (1979), Introduction; Paul Seaward,The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, i66i-i66y (Cambridge, 1986),and "The Restoration, 1660-1688," in Blair Worden, ed., Stuart England (Oxford, 1991)pp. 147-55; a n d Tim Harris, Politics Under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a DividedSociety 1660-1715 (1993).

4 GERALD MACLEAN

It has long been clear that the nation which summoned Charles backin 1660 differed considerably from the realm over which his fatherhad once attempted to rule. The traditional scholarly emphasis onthe self-consciously neo-classical style in conversation, theatricalstaging, music, oil-portraiture, and clothing, initially introduced bymembers of Charles's Court to London and thence to the nation atlarge, has shifted toward study of those continuing forms of resistance,dissent, and control, of contending political and religious languagesand practices, that were inherited from the 1640s and 1650s.3 Theking's return was accompanied by various constitutional and socialchanges that might appear to indicate a general return to conditionsprevailing before the civil wars, but the Restoration was, as TimHarris puts it, "a deeply contradictory affair, the product of analready divided society."4 Church courts were reopened, somesequestered estates were given back, Court censorship returned. Withmonarchy came the return of the House of Lords, of bishops, tithing,the licensing of clergymen, and attempts to legislate religiousuniformity. Women, though granted certain novel freedoms like thatof professional acting, often found themselves again subjected togender codes that they had been busily undoing during therevolutionary decades.5

3 See Harris, London Crowds', Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society inthe Provincial Town, 1660-ijjo (Oxford, 1989); Andrew Colby, Central Government and theLocalities: Hampshire, i64g-i68g (Cambridge, 1987); David Underdown, Revel, Riot, andRebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985); Jona than Scott,Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623-1677 (Cambridge, 1988), and Algernon Sidney andthe Restoration Crisis, 1677-1683 (Cambridge, 1991); Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us FromEvil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660-1663 (New York, 1986); N. H. Keeble, TheLiterary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester, 1987); NigelSmith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion (Oxford, 1989);David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan andStuart England (1989); and J o h n Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646-1689 (NewHaven, 1991). In a useful review article, "Reconstructing the Restoration," Journal ofBritish Studies 29: 4 (1990): 393-401, Victor L. Slater concludes that "the Restorationreconstruction was a vital turning point" (p. 401). 4 Harris, Politics, p. 26.

5 See Hobby, Virtue of Necessity. Despite considerable interest in women writers of theRestoration period, there is still no detailed social and cultural history of how theRestoration affected women's lives. On women writers, see also Janet Todd, The Sign ofAngellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 (1989); J ane Spencer, The Rise of the WomanNovelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford, 1986); Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds,Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox, eds., Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (1989). Roger Thompson's Women in Stuart England and America: AComparative Study (1974) can still prove useful, but in the category of general histories hasbeen superseded by Antonia Fraser's The Weaker Vessel (1984). See also important newspecialized work such as Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern

Literature, culture, and society 5

What recent scholarship has been making increasingly clear is thatnot all of these measures were similarly successful or long-lived.Public theaters were back in business, the publishing trade flourished,often in defiance of government controls, and women continued towrite and to publish.6 Religious dissent by no means came to an end;despite evidence of initial support for a return to the Anglican liturgy,widespread absenteeism and Nonconformity bedeviled attempts toimpose an established state Church.7 With England's continuinggrowth as a commercial nation, expansion overseas in search ofresources and new markets led to conflicts with other powers, andbrought about increased contacts with, and colonization of, Asia,Africa, and the "New World." Questions of national identity anddifference, of what it meant to be English or British or both, could beframed in terms of international trade and imperial ambition thatoperated independently of loyalty to the Crown.8 For political, socialand cultural historians, the Restoration constitutes a complexintersection of changing practices and ideas that are central to ourunderstanding of early-modern Britain, and what was to pass forcivility in much of the modern world.

Of course, for literary historians, the Restoration has usuallyappeared to be a rather more literary phenomenon. Treated ascontextual background to the literature, the years following Charles's

England (Oxford, 1988), and Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women'sWork in England, 1300-1660 (New York, 1987).

6 For the public theaters, see Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: EnglishTragicomedy, 1660-1671 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 102-37. On the continuing activities of theradical press, see Greaves, Deliver Us, pp. 207-25. On publications by women writers beforeand after the Restoration, see Patricia Crawford, "Women's Published Writings 1600-1700," in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society ijoo-1800 (1985), pp. 211-82. KathrynShevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (1989)provides a useful neo-Foucauldian take on how English periodicals published between 1690and 1760 helped construct the discursive figure "woman."

7 Geoffrey Holmes writes of" the sheer confusion of practice at parish level," in his recent TheMaking of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain (1993), p. 40; and see Spurr,Restoration Church, p. xvii, and Cressy, Bonfires, pp. 48—49. For a summary of recentscholarship, see Tim Harris, "Introduction: Revising the Restoration," in Harris, et al.,Politics of Religion, pp. 1-28; on absenteeism, see pp. 17-18. See also J. A. I. Champion, ThePillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660-1730 (Cambridge,1992).

8 See Holmes, Great Power, pp . 93-105; Brian Levack, The Formation of the British State:England, Scotland and the Union 1603-1707 (Oxford, 1987); Peter Earle, The Making of theEnglish Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660-1730 (1989); and, moregenerally, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (1983). And see Cressy's argument throughout Bonfires, that the peculiarity of"the calendar in seventeenth-century England ... was based on, and gave expression to, amythic and patriotic sense of national identity" (p. xi).

O GERALD MACLEAN

return provide seemingly self-evident examples of how the disci-plinary distinction between "literature" and "history" arises bothinevitably and inexorably. The traditional literary-historian's versionis a familiar one. In 1660, after a period of bloody civil unrest duringwhich arms flourished and arts withered, the king returned. Nowthat the "Puritan" revolution was over, everyone wanted peace andorder: satire flourished to translate disruptive anger and hostility intoeither companionable irony and innuendo or partisan indignation,the public theaters reopened (with women actors) to entertain anurban public, poets started writing in heroic couplets that structurallyreplicated principles of social order and civic harmony, and the novelfiguring the rise of the bourgeois self began its problematic emergenceas the dominant literary genre.

In various forms, this pragmatic version of events as background toliterature has encouraged what we might call a division of textual orarchival labor. To literary scholars belongs the study of the works ofSamuel Butler, Andrew Marvell, John Bunyan, John Dryden, theEarl of Rochester, Daniel Defoe, William Congreve, WilliamWycherley, and Aphra Behn; to historians the study of the lives andworks of Charles, Clarendon, Shaftesbury, Samuel Pepys, GilbertBurnet, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Robert Hooke, together withall the Court records, Parliamentary debates, parish registers, andother published and unpublished archival materials. Yet this divisionof the archive, to the extent that it has helped to shape the waygenerations of scholars have set about understanding the period,corresponds more readily to the subsequent development of academicdisciplines than it does to Restoration beliefs or practices. And it hasrecently begun to show signs of breaking up, to the advantage of allconcerned.

Scholars of Restoration literature have traditionally acknowledgedthe importance of historical context, in part, no doubt, because of thisliterature's highly developed engagement with the history of its owntimes. But if it is difficult to imagine reading Absalom and Achitophelwithout some understanding of the high politics of the time, theliterary critic's use of historical background to explain topicalreferences in Restoration literary texts has often depended upon andserved to reinforce the archival and disciplinary distinction betweenliterature and history. To read a literary text as referring in someprecise way to otherwise knowable historical events is one way ofdemonstrating how the literary and the historical differ categorically:


here is the literary text, and here are the historical events to which itrefers and which make available some of its specific resonances.Sometimes the evidence seems intractable, but the groundingdistinction remains clear. Earl Miner, for example, reports a numberof places where Dryden " has been supposed to have related historicalfact, although the only evidence derives solely from what he wrote. "9

Even when it contains little or nothing relevant, the archive ofhistorical information can nevertheless be supposed to offer necessaryand independent evidence confirming a text's claim to accuratehistorical documentation, as well as reinforcing its literary status.Literature, Miner assumes, is not history; a formulation that wouldhave made sense in Restoration Britain, but not perhaps in quite thesame ways it does today.

To paraphrase Miner, both literature and the Restoration seem torequire greater attention than has been given to what people werewriting about literature in the seventeenth century, and to therelationship of literature to other cultural activities.10 When Minerwrites that "critics and poets during the Restoration hold to aconcept of literature that was dignified, grand, and perhaps evenexorbitant in its claims, " n we might wonder if "poetry" — or betteryet "poesy" - would not be more appropriate than "literature." Forour current academic understanding of the ways "literature" differsfrom "history" can come dangerously close to misreplicating theneo-classical, and largely rhetorical, distinction between "poesy"and "history" still being discussed by critics and poets following theRestoration. At that time, the question involved the differing formal,generic and compositional practices appropriate to treating differentsubject-matter in a particular national language; this is the thematicsof Dryden's important preface to Annus Mirabilis (1667), and itunderlies many of his concerns in Of Dramatic Poesy (1668), both ofwhich imaginatively frame their discussion of literary concerns withinthe nationalistic enterprise of naval supremacy. Although "poesy"or "poetry" had started becoming restricted to signifying metricalcomposition rather than prose from the middle of the seventeenthcentury — most notably in the exchange between Hobbes andDavenant over the latter's Gondibert (1650) -"li terature" did notbecome associated with specifically imaginative writing, as opposed

9 Earl Miner, "The Restoration: Age of Faith, Age of Satire," in Antony Coleman andAntony Hammond, eds., Poetry and Drama, 1570-1700 (1981), pp. 90-109; this passage p.108. 10 Ibid.,p.9o. n /te/.,p.98.

8 GERALD MACLEAN

to historical or scientific writing, until much later. Poetry, after all,was commonly written on historical themes. If it meant anything atall to Dryden and his contemporaries, then, distinguishing "litera-ture" from "history" would have meant marking the generaldifferences between writing and past events. Not until long after 1660did "literature" start assuming the imaginative and fictionalspecificity formerly indicated by "poesy."

In Keywords, Raymond Williams reminds us that "as late as" Dr.Johnson, the principal meaning of "literature" continued to be"polite learning through reading,"12 a usage corresponding moreclosely to our notions of literacy than to the material objects ofimaginative writing. The association between reading and skilledknowledge is given a specifically practical turn by the single instanceof the term in Shakespeare's works, where it appears in the significantcontext of a scene that parodies Renaissance learning in the cause ofarousing patriotic sentiment across striking national and socialdifferences. In the midst of the battle of Agincourt, Act 4 scene 7 ofHenry V opens with Fluellen's horrified discovery that the Frenchhave slaughtered the unarmed baggage-boys back at the Britishcamp. The Englishman Gower assures him that Henry's command tokill any captured French soldiers is a noble and just revenge, causingthe Welsh soldier to launch into his memorable panegyric of theirking, in dialect, which nevertheless displays a very specific kind ofhistorical learning and understanding of rhetorical form by humor-ously elaborating an extended Plutarchan parallel between the livesand achievements of Henry and Alexander the Great, one that makesmuch of topographical similarities between Macedonia and Wales.Ever keen to display his reading in the chronicles of British history,Fluellen is soon able, when the king enters, to remind Henry himselfof his Welsh ancestry. Thus it is in the accent of Fluellen, this scion oflearning and spokesman for what might be called an ethnicallydivided, yet resolutely "national" history, that we hear Shake-speare's only use of any form of " literature," when Fluellen assuresHenry that "Gower is a good captain, and is good knowledge, andliteratured in the wars" (4.7.153-54).

This basic sense of being literatured as being well read and wellversed in something of national significance, a personal condition

12 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, (1976; rev. ed. New York,1983), p. 184.


entailing the acquisition by reading of cultural skills and knowledges,also informs Johnson's terse definition in the Dictionary — "Learning;skill in letters."13 In his Life of Cowley (1779), Johnson later praisedhis subject's "pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language"as the conditions which "have deservedly set him high in the ranks ofliterature," a shift from the personal condition to include theobjective sense of "literary work or production."14 Williams associ-ates this emergence of literature as "a practice and a profession ofwriting" with the seventeenth-century shift in literary productionfrom patronage to commercial publishing, but he also notes thatliterature nevertheless retained its traditional emphasis on "thewhole body of books and writing" produced by a national languagewell into the nineteenth century.15 By this time its Shakespeariancontexts had become its contents. The OED cites a typical usage of1857 that marks the association with national identity as definitive:"Literature, when it is a healthy and unforced state, is simply theform in which the knowledge of a country is registered."

This general development, from the personal qualities and culturalcondition of being well-read, to the objective range of material texts,accompanied by the socially evaluative and nationalistic conno-tations of great books by great English men, places the history of theconcept of "literature" centrally amidst the development of a precisecritical vocabulary suited to making these very distinctions. For theemergence of this critical language, with all its social and culturalimplications, we are largely indebted to the efforts of Dryden, towhom literature meant the production of writings in English, whetheron historical or imaginative topics. Before 1660, there had been littlegeneral concern over questions of the national literature as such. Butby the time Dryden died at the end of the century, literary historyhad become a key component of a nationalist cultural enterprise.Various literary texts, and even entire genres, had served nationalisticpurposes before, but the development of a specifically nationalliterature, one which could look backward into its own past in orderto trace its origins and progress from a distinguished body ofvernacular writing: this development took on new and distinctimportance as a public discipline of knowledge. In short, theRestoration period saw the development and dispersal of a soph-

13 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (1770); cited in Williams,Keywords, p. 185. 14 Cited OED 2. 15 Williams, Keywords, p. 185.

10 GERALD MACLEAN

isticated critical vocabulary suited to the needs of a great nationalliterature, one with a distinguished history that was eagerly beingwritten, and with a future that was no less eagerly being projected.The theatrical success of attempts to improve Shakespeare's playsindicates something of this historical shuttle between continuouslyrevised pasts and projected futures in the construction of a nationalliterature.

A central aim of the present book is to restore the contemporarysenses of "literature" to the literatures produced, in English, duringthe period following the return of monarchy. The increasinglyemphatic understanding of literature as a key to national identitysituates Restoration literary activity as a whole within the broadersocial and cultural developments of the modern era. Consequently,this book adopts a historicized sense of literature that includesscientific, economic, religious and political texts, as well as theconditions of, and constraints upon, their production and reception.

II

When Charles arrived in England, literature was already thoroughlypoliticized in ways that would have been unthinkable at hisgrandfather's Court.16 During the 1640s and 1650s, writers, printers,and booksellers had become confidently aware of the special intimacyenjoyed between literature and politics, and had grown accustomedto assuming the freedom and authority to comment in public uponthe personal lives and policies of national leaders in the hopes ofguiding opinion and, thereby, the course of events. This self-authorizing freedom, of using print to challenge and even ridiculepolitical leaders, was a direct and irreversible inheritance from therevolutionary decades. It can be traced back at least to the collapseof censorship in 1641 and the immediate appearance of theoppositional and insurgent writing that led people to take up armsagainst the traditional authority of the Crown, Lords, and Bishops.17

16 See Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, 1983); GrahamParry, The Golden Age Restored: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42 (Manchester, 1981). Seealso Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Complaint: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I(Cambridge, 1987). For a recent assessment of how Restoration England inherited a literaryculture that had been transformed by the 1640s and 1650s, see Thomas Corns, Uncloister'dVirtue: English Political Literature, 1640-1660 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 294-308.

17 See Christopher Hill, "The Restoration and Literature," in A Nation of Change and Novelty:Radical Politics, Religion and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (1990), pp. 218-43; and


After 1641, subsequent attempts at censorship by no means stoppedwriters from attacking authority; the threat of possible prosecutionrather redirected the languages of irreverence and protest bychallenging writers to continue adopting imaginative forms of codingand disguise.18 Criticizing royal policy obliquely by mockingpowerful Court favorites or royal advisers - such as the attacks on theDuke of Buckingham in the 1620s, and Archbishop Laud and theEarl of Strafford in the early 1640s - gives way to bolder and moredirect forms of criticism during the revolutionary decades, includingpersonal attacks on the king. Satiric character assassinations of royalpersons and powerful governmental leaders continue after theRestoration: in the anti-Rump satires of 1659—60, in the work ofwriters as different as Behn, Samuel Butler, Milton, Marvell, andRochester, and even in the muted ironies of Dryden's portrayal ofCharles in Absalom and Achitophel.

Restoration literature is characteristically political not onlybecause it commonly addresses social and political issues with anirreverent attitude toward established authority, but also because ofthe ways in which reading and writing had made public debateincreasingly central to the political experience of ordinary peopleliving through the social and cultural changes of the 1640s and1650s. Attacks on political authority published during the early yearsof the Civil War both accompanied and encouraged widespreadpublic debates on other questions of received authority, most notablythose formerly regulated by the established Church, such as biblicalinterpretation, baptism, communion, and marriage. For two decadesand in unprecedented numbers, works of religious and theologicalcontroversy, moral tracts, biblical commentaries, sermons, and worksof prophecy, often expressing not simply anti-prelatical but evenheretical ideas, found their way into print and into the conversations,attitudes, and expectations of an increasingly critical readingpublic.19 In 1661 one commentator warned: "The liberty of the late

Gerald M. MacLean, Time's Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603-1660(Madison, 1990), pp. 64-126.

18 See Zwicker, Politics and Language) Margaret Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan PoetryReconsidered (Cambridge, 1985); Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: TheConditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, 1984); and most recently,Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 (Cambridge, 1989).

19 See Paul S. Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560-1662(Stanford, 1970), and Wallington's World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London(Stanford, 1985). It is a shame that Nehemiah Wallington, upon whose writings Seaver's

12 GERALD MACLEAN

times gave men so much light, and diffused it so universally amongstthe people, that they... are become so good judges of what they hearthat the clergy ought to be very wary before they go about to imposeupon their understandings, which are grown less humble than theywere in former times."20 Although the return of the king broughtwith it the return of bishops, tithing, and the licensing of clergymenauthorized to preach and interpret the Bible, the authority of theChurch of England never fully recovered from the effects of twodecades during which "ordinary men and women became ac-customed to liberty of debate and liberty of printing. "21

These decades of public irreverence toward traditional politicaland religious authority also involved widespread questioning ofestablished gender codes. Legally defined only in relation to men, asdaughters or wives, women from all walks of life evidently found thatthe cultural climate of the 1640s and 1650s was conducive to speakingand writing both as women and as socially responsible agents. Somewomen found themselves with little or no choice. Changes in civiladministration meant that women could now be called upon totestify before the newly instituted county committees, often againstformer social superiors.22 Some women found themselves forced intoprint by the need to defend themselves, their actions, and theirreputations. In 1653, Hester Shaw claimed that she wrote to defendherself against charges of "immodesty" which, if left unanswered,would have ruined not simply her personal reputation but also herability to continue making a living as a professional midwife.23 But forthe most part, the women who entered public discourse did so inorder to insist that their social and political agency be recognized aslegitimate. During the Civil War, women of all ranks assumedincreasing responsibility for domestic, social, and economic activitiesas men went off to fight and sometimes die. As Elaine Hobby

marvelous case-study of artisanal literacy is based, did not survive the Restoration. Onliteracy and print in the period, see also Natascha Wiirzbach, The Rise of the English StreetBallad, 1350-1650, trans. Gayna Walls (Cambridge, 1990); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print andPopular Piety 1550-1640 (Cambridge, 1991); Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press:English Almanacs 1500-1800 (1979); Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories:Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens, Ga., 1981); Smith,Perfection Proclaimed, and Literature and Revolution in England 1640-1660 (New Haven, Conn.,1994); Christopher Hill, Barry Reay, and William Lamont, The World of the Muggletonians(1983) ; a n d Ba r ry R e a y , ed. , Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (New York , 1985).

20 C i t ed by S p u r r , Restoration Church, p . 219.21 Hi l l , Change and Novelty, p . 2 1 9 ; a n d see C h a m p i o n , Pillars.22 G r a h a m , et al., eds. , Her Own Life, p . 12. 23 H o b b y , Virtue of Necessity, p p . 9 - 1 0 .


observes, "the challenges being made to the status quo involved newfreedoms and activities for women."24

During the 1640s and 1650s, women from all sides of the politicalspectrum started to petition Parliament on matters ranging frompersonal grievances over property settlements to trade regulations,poor relief, and the conduct of criminal trials. The women petitionersinsistently asserted the right of women to speak out on public mattersand to expect that what they had to say would influence governmentpolicy since "we have a very equal share and interest with men in theCommonwealth. "25 During the same period, other women spoke outpublicly on social and political issues in the form of prophecy,sometimes writing and publishing their views.26 As Patricia Crawfordhas shown in her analysis of women's published writings in Englishfor the entire century, women wrote for publication during the 1640sin unprecedented numbers, and continued to do so after 1660.Although the actual numbers of women writing for publicationremained relatively small, by the end of the century women had"gained a sense of their own developing literary tradition ... By 1700it was no longer a wonder that a woman should write forpublication."27

in

The relative freedom enjoyed by the press during the 1640s and 1650smeant that, by 1660, literature had established its own irreversibleauthority as a socially constitutive field of public activity. The returnof monarchy was, in part, accomplished through large scale socialreorganization that required a great deal of cultural work, includingthe writing and production of texts of all sorts. So crucial had thecommercial press become by 1660 that, during the months im-mediately preceding and following Charles's return, all manner ofcommemorative and celebratory publications appeared which setabout giving symbolic and cultural meaning to the social and

24 ibid., P . 11 .25 England's Moderate Messenger (1649) , c i ted b y A n n M a r i e M c E n t e e , ' " T h e [UnJCiv i l l -

Sisterhood of Oranges and Lemons': Female Petitioners and Demonstrators, 1642-53," inJames Holstun, ed., Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (1992), pp. 92-111, thispassage p. 98. See also Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, pp. 13-17; Patricia Higgins, "TheReactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners," in Brian Manning,ed., Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (1973), p p . 179-97.

26 See Phyllis M a c k , " W o m e n as Prophe ts d u r i n g the English Civil W a r , " Feminist Studies 8 :1 (Spr ing 1982) : 19-47 . 2? Crawford, " W o m e n ' s Publ ished W r i t i n g s , " p p . 231.

14 GERALD MACLEAN

political changes in British life.28 The return to monarchy was thefirst time that the commercial press in Britain played so direct andcentral a role in establishing the terms of a national politicalsettlement. There had, of course, been previous occasions when thepress had flexed its political muscles in opposition: we might think ofthe Marprelate controversies of the late 1580s, or the insurgentpamphleteering of the early 1640s.29 But the Restoration was the firsttime that the commercial press played so massive a part in helping tobring in and legitimate a new government, and in so doing, helped todefine and set conditions for the terms of the political settlement. By1660 the social agency of the press had produced an irreverent,secularizing, commercial, literary culture that had already capturedmuch of the political high ground once claimed by the authorizeddiscourse of the established Church.

Literary production was a major cultural ingredient of the king'sreturn. Writers and printers produced an unprecedented number ofcelebratory publications in a wide variety of kinds — formal poems,sermons, prose characters, ballads, closet dramas and masques,histories, scientific treatises, biographies and autobiographies, ro-mances and histories, translations of Virgil, and even a cookbook. Forwriters seeking to legitimate Charles's accession during the earlyspring and summer of 1660, the tasks included accounting for therecent past, interpreting the startling events making up the present,and constructing a desirable future that only monarchy couldguarantee.

Robert May's The Accomplisht Cook, Or The Art and Mystery ofCookery, which appeared in May 1660, provides an intriguingpalimpsest of literary strategies and cultural concerns common to therevisionary historiography of Stuart propaganda.30 In part, May'stext exemplifies a favorite method for dealing with the social effects of28 See Carolyn Edie, "Right Rejoicing: Sermons on the Occasion of the Stuart Restoration,

1660," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 62 (1979-80): 61-86, and "News From Abroad:Advice to the People of England on the Eve of the Stuart Restoration," Bulletin of the JohnRylands Library 76 (I984): 382-407; Gerald M. MacLean, "An Edition of Poems on theRestoration," Restoration 11 (1987): 117-21, and Time's Witness, pp. 256-67; and seeJonathan Sawday, "Re-Writing a Revolution: History, Symbol, and Text in theRestoration," The Seventeenth Century 7: 2 (1992): 171-99.

29 See Chr i s topher Hil l , " F r o m M a r p r e l a t e to the Level le rs , " in Collected Essays Volume One:Writing and Revolution in ijth Century England (Brighton, 1985), p p . 75 -95 .

30 George T h o m a s o n d a t e d his copy somet ime in M a y ; see George Fortescue, ed., Catalogue ofthe Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers, and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, The Commonwealth,and Restoration, Collected by George Thomason, 1641—1661, 2 vols. (1908), 2: 315, entry E.1741.For more on May, see Elaine Hobby's essay in this volume.


the previous two decades, which was to suggest that they could beforgotten now that the king's return promised a return to the goodold days. Following a dedicatory epistle, an address "To the MasterCooks," and a brief narrative describing the author's life in service tovarious Royalist families, a section entitled "Triumphs and Trophiesin Cookery, to be used at Festival Times," seeks to achieve a nostalgiccancellation of the past two decades by describing the kind ofcelebratory festivity and conspicuous consumption to be enjoyed byloyal Englishmen now that monarchy has been restored. The sectionprovides a curiously detailed account of how to stage-manage abanquet that would be suitable for the new age precisely because,according to May's claim at least, it promises to revive social formsand practices that "were formerly the delight of the Nobility, beforegood House-keeping had left England, and the Sword really acted thatwhich was onley counterfeited in such honest and laudable Exercisesas these. "31 What are these honest entertainments to be retrievedfrom the aristocratic past?

First of all, the would-be cook is instructed to manufacture a paste-board model of a ship, complete with bamboo cannons on each sidewhich are to be linked by "such holes and trains of powder that theymay all take fire," and to place it at one end of a banquet table on a"great Charger" filled with "salt" and studded with "egg-shells fullof sweet water." For the other end of the table, "at a distance fromthe Ship to fire at each other," the reader is invited to imaginemanufacturing a castle, also complete with bamboo cannons on allsides, and similarly surrounded by water-filled egg shells. Betweenthese, and also surrounded by egg shells filled with "rose-water," isto be placed a model of a stag "with a broad arrow in the side of him,and his body filled with claret wine."32

What is already abundantly evident from these instructions is thatthe " accomplisht" cook is conceived of as no mere producer of tastyfood and wholesome drink, but as a highly skilled craftsman andpyrotechnician with the authority to produce symbolic interpre-tations of political history. May's cook is obviously an advocate, if notentrepreneur, of conspicuous consumption.33 Everything that May

31 R o b e r t M a y , The Accomplisht Cook, Or the Art and Mystery of Cookery (1660), sig. [ A 8 ] .32 Ibid., sig. [A7v].33 Among studies of the development of consumerism in early-modern Britain that have

appeared since the ground-breaking study, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercial-ization of Eighteenth-Century England (1982) by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H.

l6 GERALD MACLEAN

instructs him to make (and May's accomplished cook is unquestion-ably male) is designed to be wasted. Even the two huge pies, to bemade from "course" pastry and placed on either side of the stag, arenot for eating: "in one of which let there be some live Frogs, in theother live Birds."34

Once this inedible collation has been arranged before a suitableassembly, May instructs: " before you fire the trains of powder, orderit so that some of the Ladies may be perswaded to pluck the Arrowout of the Stag, then will the Claret wine follow as blood running outof a wound." Since May doesn't specify who, if anyone, is permittedor likely to drink the claret, we might presume that, like the sacrificialblood of royal stags and martyrs, it too must be seen to be wasted."This being done," May continues, "with admiration to thebeholders, after some short pawse, fire the traine of the Castle ... thenfire the trains of one side of the Ship as in a battle." Once the ship andcastle have been turned around and all the cannons have been fired,other elements of the festivity come rapidly into play, not so muchrecalling the formal Court entertainments of Charles I and HenriettaMaria as anticipating the pleasure-seeking values and attitudes of theRestoration Court:

This done, to sweeten the stinck of the powder, the Ladies take the egg shellsfull of sweet waters and throw them at each other. All dangers being seemedover, by this time you may suppose they will desire to see what is in the pies;where lifting first the lid off one pie, out skips some Frogs, which makes theLadies to skip and shreek; next after the other pie, whence comes out theBirds; who by a natural instinct flying at the light, will put out the candles;so that what with the flying Birds, and skipping Frogs; the one above, theother beneath, will cause much delight and pleasure to the whole company:at length the candles are lighted, and a Banquet brought in, the musicksounds, and every one with much delight and content rehearses their actionsin the former passages. These were formerly the delights of the Nobility.. ,35

The final sentence, which has already been quoted, ends the entiresection entitled "Triumphs and Trophies." I have broken it off herein order to draw attention to how the section ends; not only does May

P l u m b , see especially L o r n a Weather i l l , Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain,1660-1770 ( C a m b r i d g e , 1988), a n d Caro le S h a m m a s , The Pre-Industrial Consumer in Englandand America (Oxford, 1990).

34 M a y , Accomplisht Cook, sig. [ A 7 V ] . Fo r recent work on consumerism, see J o s e p h P. W a r d ," R e i n t e r p r e t i n g the C o n s u m e r R e v o l u t i o n , " Journal of British Studies 29:4 (1990) : 408 -14 .

35 May, Accomplisht Cook, sig. [A8] .


reinvent aristocratic desire and pleasure, but he does so in order toforeclose on the revolutionary decades by linking the Restorationpresent directly to the pre-revolutionary past. May's text imagina-tively invokes the social upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s, but only inorder to displace and then cancel their social meaning. In the scenedescribed, the participants are imagined as having a delightful timesymbolically reproducing a " counterfeit" of the years separatingthem from a time of "good House-keeping," an activity specificallydesigned to produce sociability by providing everyone with memoriesof a shared experience to talk about while food is being served. Thefantasy of victorious sociable consumption figures doubly here, bothas nostalgia for, and as itself an essential component of, the pastaristocratic pleasures to which May seems keen his readers shouldwant to return. Constructing political authority by characterizing adesirable past now being recovered through recreation and identifi-cation, this textual fantasy links past and present by makingimaginatively available that delight at rehearsing triumphs formerlyenjoyed by the "Nobility."

It is hardly surprising that May advises his cook to "order it so thatsome of the Ladies may be perswaded " to start things going, since theentire "exercise" figuratively thematizes the return of aristocraticmale domination over unruly women. Following the unsettling noiseof cannon and the smell of gunpowder, direct male control begins torecede and decorum disappears. Once the guns have been dis-charged, the impresario in command of the entertainments with-draws, like a providential dramaturge, to permit the predictable:"the Ladies take the egg shells..." In such circumstances, it seems,ladies can be trusted to behave in certain ways, causing the world toturn upside down.36 The reader is invited to imagine ladies throwingegg shells about the place and drenching themselves and each otheruntil " all dangers being seemed over, by this time you may suppose "that female curiosity will bring social chaos, mayhem, and darkness.May's fantasy displaces the possibility of female authority, ridiculingand trivializing female agency by representing women voyeuristically

36 Nearly a generation later, things seem not to have altered greatly. On 27 March 1683,Francis Gwyn writes to the Earl of Conway: "The King came hither about 4 yesterdayafternoon and the whole Court and had hardly recovered the fright they were put into bythe fire at Newmarket, especially the ladies, who were all in great confusion," CSPD, p. 136.My thanks to Nancy Klein Maguire for this reference. On the popular seventeenth-centurytaste for noise and pyrotechnic displays, see Gressy, Bonfires, pp. 80—90, especially pp. 88-89.

l8 GERALD MACLEAN

as objects of the male gaze, as spectacles and animal bodies. All thosewomen shrieking and skipping about in their wet clothing amongstthe terrified frogs and panicked birds, "the one above, the otherbeneath": in producing this fantasy of the cook's power, Maycasually alludes to the key tenet of hermetic philosophy, reminding usthat his general project in writing The Accomplisht Cook is to insist onand protect the professionalized status of the "Art" and "Mystery"of cookery. And as was sometimes the case with traditional guildmysteries, the powerful knowledges and skills required of the cookseem to have been a male preserve; at least May addresses his book"to all honest well intending Men of our Profession."37

May's aristocratic and eroticized fantasy of absolute subjectivemale power indicates how triumphant male heterosexuality couldfiguratively be used to contain the "uncertainty at the heart of theRestoration. "38 Like other writers celebrating the king's return in1660, May evidently realized that literary production was itself asocially constitutive activity in which gender and sexuality providednecessary terms for imaginatively negotiating the return of royalauthority and canceling the effects of the previous two decades.Jonathan Sawday has recently examined how, throughout the springand summer of 1660, "the Restoration itself" came to be "trans-formed into a marriage ceremony with Charles in the role of thebridegroom, and England in the role of the bride - an iconographywhich carries with it triumphal scriptural echoes. "39 That same year,in Vota, JVon Bella, Ralph Astell varies the formula, transforming theRestoration not into a wedding, but into Britain's successful deliveryof a king after twelve years of agonized labor pains.40 Thesemetaphors of marriage and childbirth figure doubly, representing theRestoration as the return of legitimate male authority over keymoments in the reproduction of social life, while also legitimatingthat return as itself the necessary consequence of the patriarchalnarrative of dynastic succession.

37 M a y , Accomplisht Cook, sig. A4. M a y ' s work is in a long line of cookery books wr i t t en by m e nfor w o m e n ; see S u s a n n e W . H u l l , Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women,1475—1640 (San M a r i n o , Calif., 1982) ; H o b b y , Virtue of Necessity, p p . 1 6 9 - 7 1 .

38 J o s e , Ideas of the Restoration, p . 29. 39 S a w d a y , " R e - W r i t i n g a R e v o l u t i o n , " p . 181.40 The title page reads: [border design] / VOTA, / NON BELLA. / [line] / NeW-CastLe's

/ Heartle GratULatlon / TO HER / SaCreD SoVeralgn / King CharLes The SeConD;/ ON / His noW-GlorloUs RestaUratlon / To His BIrth-rlght-PoWer. / [line] / ByRalph Astell, M. A. / [line] / Gateshead, Printed by Stephen Bulkley, 1660.1 have quoted fromthe copy in the British Library, shelfmark G 18923.


Writers who supported the king's return in the early months of1660 set about revising national history, and in doing so produced avariety of often self-contradictory accounts through which to explainaway the interruption in monarchical succession. By no meansunivocal, the literary discourse of the king's return was highlyopportunistic in its use of historical evidence and explanation. Butthose producing it were surely in general agreement that they wereauthorized to use the public press in this way. For Ralph Astell, theagency of literary culture is central to the formation of the new nationstate. In Astell's poem, the scene of Britain's agonized lying-in andfinal delivery is framed within a national literary contest beingconducted by female muses, complete with discussions of literarydecorum, poetic form, and the contingencies of regional difference.Thematically, the poem focuses throughout on questions of literaryauthority; who is authorized to interpret and represent recentevents? what is a proper poetic response to the king's return? Inpursuing these questions, the poem warns that the political promiseof national unity signified by the king's rebirth can only be madegood in the terms provided by a national literary culture; it dependsupon the appearance of a poet capable of resolving regional andcultural differences.

Uncle and tutor to Mary Astell, the pioneering English feminist,41

Ralph Astell was evidently much concerned with questions of genderand sexual difference, and in particular with women's education andthe roles women played in the construction of a national literaryculture. Published in Gateshead, just across the river Tyne fromNewcastle, where Ralph Astell lived, his poetic celebration of theking's return is one of the very few poems written and publishedduring 1660 from a regional perspective.42 It is spoken by the femalepersonification of Newcastle, who calls herself a "black NorthernLass" and begins by humbly daring herself to join in "the glisteringTrain / Of Britain's fairest Nymphs" (lines 13-14), those muses whoare currently busy inspiring poets to celebrate the king's return. Shedescribes for the king how, in London, those " Southern Ladies" first

4 1 See Bridget Hill, ed., The First English Feminist: 'Reflections Upon Marriage' and Other Writingsby Mary Astell, (Aldershot, Hants., 1986); and the useful biographical study by Ruth Perry,The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago, 1986) which containsinteresting details about uncle Ralph.

42 O n Newcast le , see R o g e r Howel l , Newcastle-upon- Tyne in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1967),a n d D a v i d Levine a n d Ke i th Wr igh t son , The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham,1560-1765 (Oxford, 1991).

20 GERALD MACLEAN

lay their "High-born Strains of Poetry" at his feet, then imagines hisrebirth amidst the ashes left behind once these dazzling and flashyephemera have done their job:

Nay, Phoenix-like (me thinks) I see them bringArabian Spices on their nimble Wing,And build a Pile; which on your New-birth-dayKindly aspected by Your Solar Ray,Becomes a Royall Bon fire, in whose flashesThey gloriously expire; yet 'midst those AshesA Seed is couch'd; which, influenc'd by You,A self-born Phoenix yearly doth renew. (lines 27-34)

Humility, it seems, is partly a guise by means of which competitiveliterary production comes to figure regional difference and poeticauthority. Imaginatively setting fire to the poetic tributes beingpublished in London is a bold move, but it enables Astell to establishtextual production as a prior condition of the king's magical returnand rebirth. It also clears the scene for Newcastle to offer her ownversion of recent events, which describes startling regional andcultural differences that will only be resolved by the appearance of anational literary culture.43

In Newcastle's version of events, the king may have returned butthe nation remains socially divided, not only by region but also bylanguage and culture, as illustrated by Newcastle's own irreverencetoward the manners and poetry of the Court. Unlike those fair-skinned southerners whose flashy performances blaze aromatically,coal-faced Newcastle insists on the humble origins of her own plainstyle, since humility is both a condition of her ability to tell the truthand evidence of her loyalty:

Whilst I, black Northern Lass, from Kedar's TentsApproach your Court with no such Fragrant Scents:Nor can I Greet You in a Golden Strain,Whose finest Metall runs through a Cole Vein... (lines 35-38)

Newcastle later recalls that her loyalty to the king, which fills herhonest heart with language of joy at his return, is not a hidden secretbut a matter of public record (lines 81-88). After reminding us of her

43 See Borsay, Urban Renaissance, pp. 311-20.


known loyalty to the Stuarts throughout the Civil Wars andProtectorate, Newcastle castigates the outward displays of poeticloyalty being produced not only in London, but also Oxford andCambridge, by recalling how the muses in those cities had inspiredpoets to praise Cromwell:

Recant your fawning Protectorian Notes,And to an higher Key skrew up your Throats,Your warbling Tongues re-tune, let her be shentWho to that bloudy Tyrant durst presentHer [Olive Branch of Peace:) may that soul crimeHereafter ne'r attaint her Nobler Rhyme!Our CHARLES is born again! your Fancies fearse,And once more measure His Genethliack Verse, (lines 189-96)

Poems on the births of kings provide language in which differencestemporarily seem to disappear and nations can be imagined toexist.44 In this account, questions of literary discourse silently replaceeven the king himself as the key to national identity; the nationalunity promised by the king's return is in large part a cultural matterof appropriate poetic form. Rather than a wedding ceremony, Astellimagines a grotesquely overdue birth that could only be brought toterm when Monck, the providentially ordained man-midwife, arrivesfrom the North "t'obstetricate" (lines 197-239). Britain is deliveredof her king, and the celebrations can begin.

In the excitement of the occasion, Newcastle feels free to sing herown brief stanza of loyal joy. Insistently, this song returns to thepolitics of literary form, and the need for a poetic resolution to theregional and cultural differences still threatening national unity.Literary change figures a new political settlement. George Monckhas transformed the legendary tale of rescue by St. George intonational history (lines 287-92), so what is needed now is an Englishpoet capable of filling up the empty cultural spaces which preventnational unity:

Oh, for a Virgil now! whose Skilfull QuillWith new Georgicks might our Country fill, (lines 293-94)

After this last dig at the failures of Court panegyric to achieve whatthe occasion demands, Newcastle retreats from the public arena intoprovincial retirement, utterance gives way to admiration, and the

44 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, p . 132.

22 GERALD MACLEAN

poem closes with a self-deprecatory fantasy of pastoral otiumregionalized amongst the coal smuts:

Unto my smutchy Cell I will retire,And what I cannot utter, there admire.

Fie sit me down, and wonder how You made(O're-come at Wor'ster... (lines 300-03)

Astell finally depoliticizes this female figure for literary agency,showing her leaving behind the activities of public life for thepleasures of retirement and imagination; just like many a cavalier.The general celebration at the king's return requires textualproduction on a huge and popular scale, but as soon as it is over,poets should not presume to make policy. The provinces will nodoubt cease to figure in or matter very much to the new courtlyculture. And, by extension, might we not also gather that womenshould retire from public life? Newcastle withdraws, however, onlyafter characterizing the cultural crisis at the heart of the Restorationsettlement as the need for a national literature.

IV

The celebratory writings produced in 1660 do not necessarily providea reliable guide to Restoration literature as a whole. AstelPs poemreminds us, for example, that neo-classical panegyric poetry provedto have only a short-lived revival during the early months of Charles'sreturn to English soil; within a very short time, even the poet laureatewould be writing satirically. In 1660, however, Dryden's vision inAstraea Redux- "Our Nation with united Int'rest blest / Not nowcontent to poize, shall sway the rest" - employs panegyric in order tooffer advice.45 Charles has been brought in to rule, not a realm, buta nation. According to this view of things, the key to national unitywill be an aggressive foreign policy that will promote an expansion oftrade. Conspicuously absent from Dryden's political program withwhich his panegyric ends, is any role for an established Church. By1660, a secular and sometimes irreverent literary culture had come toadjudicate and regulate many aspects of social life formerly thedomain of the Church. For two decades and more, religious discoursehad provided terms in which social and regional differences hadbecome matters of political dissent and national division. And it45 Dryden, Poems, lines 296-97. See Gerald M. MacLean, "Poetry as History: The

Argumentative Design of Dryden's Astraea Redux," Restoration 4 (1980): 54-64.


continued to do so in the partisan disputes which followed theRestoration. Yet in subsequent decades, literary culture contestedtraditional Church authority in the formation of both personal andnational identities.46 The chapters in this book identify and examinedifferent ways in which various literary forms and genres wereemployed during the decades following the Stuart Restoration toestablish a claim upon the national identity.

The relicensing of the public theaters in London after 1660 was asignal event in the literary culture of the nation. The politics of dramain Restoration London, however, extend beyond the theaters ontothe streets, as John Montafio recalls in his detailed examination of thescripts by John Ogilby, John Tatham, and Thomas Jordan used forpublic ceremonies such as the coronation and the Lord Mayor'sShows of the 1670s. Royal and civic pageantry of this sort, and thewhole iconographical tradition of ostentatious public performanceand display which gave it substance, had fallen out of favor long ago.They were revived and articulated at the Restoration, Montanoargues, in order "to consolidate belief in a national consensussupporting the restored monarchy." Although contributing to whatMontano calls " the ideology of consensus," the Lord Mayor's Showsfailed to survive the fragmentation of London politics by the end ofthe century.

Another dramatic genre that was revived at the Restoration, theCourt masque, did not long survive its revival intact; its dominantfeatures were largely transposed into public opera and, as NancyKlein Maguire has recently argued, the rhymed heroic play.47 ButChristopher Hill and others have underestimated the politicalsignificance of the masques composed after 1660, as Andrew Walklingargues here in his study of Nahum Tate and Henry PurcelPs Dido andAeneas}* This masque, Walkling shows, requires carefully detailedhistorical analysis if its political nuances are to be fully understoodsince, like other Court masques, it serves "as both commentary andcritique" upon specific political controversies.

Turning to the public theater in her chapter here, Nancy KleinMaguire also analyzes topical political allusions in order to examine46 See Harris, Politics; Spurr, Restoration Church; and Richard W. F. Kroll, The Material Word:

Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1991).47 See M a g u i r e , Regicide and Restoration, p p . 8 3 - 1 0 1 .48 " T h e masque , wi th all its facile magical solutions to all problems, and the panegyrics to

royal ty which accompanied the divine r ight of kings, could no more survive the 1640s t hancould t r a g e d y , " writes Hill in Change and Novelty, p . 234.

24 GERALD MACLEAN

the ways John Crowne adapted Shakespeare's Henry VI plays in hisresponse to the "problem of being a 'Tory' during the religious andpolitical crisis of 1678-83." Such was the authority of dramaticliterature in the years following the Restoration that playwrightsused adaptations of earlier plays to analyze current events. In thehistorical installation of a national literature, Shakespeare providedCrowne with a safe position from which he could loyally criticizeroyal persons and policies.

Fascination with daily events in the personal lives of the royalfamily was not uniformly critical, entirely irreverent, or even alwayssatirical. James Turner reminds us that the sight of the king's dogdefecating could make even Samuel Pepys, that loyal servant ofOliver Cromwell who became a dedicated fan of the royals, brieflyreflect in a republican fashion "that a King and all that belong tohim are but just as others are." Yet for Pepys, Turner argues, thismomentary sense of physical community encouraged him to imitateCharles, to construct and live through a personal fantasy of what itmeant to inhabit the king's body and be a royal person, someonewhose private life was predicated on public gossip and the constantthrill of possibly impending public exposure. Turner reads Pepys'scoded accounts of various sexual exploits and fantasies not as evidenceof Pepys's guilty need for privacy but as deliberate strategies of publicbeing. "However private the experience," Turner points out, "it isstill couched in a language that reveals the social formation of Pepys'sconsciousness and implies the scrutiny (and applause) of an audi-ence." For Pepys, authorship creates that implicit audience.

If both writing and the return of a profligate king authorized Pepysto carry on in the ways he tells us he did, Milton and other well-known republicans experienced the king's return as the occasion forconfronting quite different problems of authority and authorship.Blair Worden examines responses to the failure of the Englishrepublic in writings by Edmund Ludlow, Algernon Sidney, and SirHenry Vane in order to cast fresh light on the political ambiguities ofMilton's Samson Agonistes. Worden shows how Milton's languageconstantly rings with idiomatic usages that place his closet dramafirmly inside republican discourse after the Restoration, one filledwith tropes of betrayal and resistance. Suggesting that SamsonAgonistes was composed close to publication date, Worden seesauthorship providing Milton with a means of struggling to live whento do so involved actively serving a God who seemed to have deserted


both him and the good old cause. "If," Worden speculates, Miltonwrote the central section of Paradise Lost " amidst the nationalcatastrophe and personal danger and affliction of 1660, then theachievement, like Samson's, is one to defy human calculation."

Milton was one of the few republicans to survive the experience ofdefeat and live long enough to write about that experience at lengthand in differing forms. After Paradise Lost, Milton's status as thegreatest living poet of his generation meant that he soon foundhimself, like Shakespeare, being assigned a place in the emergingnational literature. And he also found his epic being rewritten for theRestoration stage, by none other than John Dryden. Steven Zwickerrereads the encounter between Milton and Dryden amidst theshifting fortunes of literary authority after the king returned, "fromwhat might have been Milton's point of view" in order "to suggestwhy Dryden might have made Milton nervous, where in Milton'swork the anxiety might be confronted, and how it might have shapedhis masterpiece Paradise Regained."

For the new men of science, like Isaac Newton, the anxieties overpublication and literary authority were also especially acute. In part,it was argued that this was because the scientific claim upon the truthof what one wrote could easily be compromised were one's writingsaccepted as truth simply on the basis of the author's reputation. Thenew literary culture of Restoration England soon demanded celebri-ties from among its greatest scientists, and Newton the iconoclastfound himself cast as the great man, an idol of his disciples. RobertIliffe examines Newton's struggle to maintain control not only overthe publication of the Principia, but also over his public reputation,going on to "demonstrate how he controlled accounts of the meaningof the Principia by selectively allowing access to himself and to hisprivate notes."

For women writers too, publication could work in complex andcontradictory ways, offering an honest means of intellectuallysatisfying employment at the same time that it exposed the femaleauthor to public ridicule, contempt, and exploitation. Elaine Hobbyshows how the market for domestic manuals and cookbooks led anunscrupulous bookseller and hack writer to issue The Gentlewoman'sCompanion as if it had been written by Hannah Wolley. Examiningthis best-selling work in the contexts of Wolley's life and writings,Hobby argues that while "Wolley's books do not, of course, give usan unmediated access to the 'truth' of a woman's life," they

26 GERALD MACLEAN

nevertheless challenge "the stereotypes offered through Restorationcomedies" of how the middling sort of English women could gainaccess to social agency through writing.

For aristocratic women, writing offered a different sort of socialempowerment and a different genre from the domestic conduct bookswhich Hannah Wolley wrote to make a living. N. H. Keeble arguesthat for Anne, Lady Halkett as for Ann, Lady Fanshawe, theconventions governing the writing of loyalist memoir, those "testi-monies of loyalty and obedience to prince and to husband," couldprovide opportunities for political and cultural disobedience. De-prived of their husbands during the wars, aristocratic women hadlearned how to " act on the public stage independently of men," andso they plotted their memoirs "as a series of challenging adventures,casting their authors in the role of dynamic and initiating protago-nists, rather than repining and lonely wives."

If Royalist women wrote memoirs in order to challenge dominantgender ideologies, Quaker women preached and wrote in order toretain some degree of the institutional control they had exercised overthe Society of Friends during the 1640s and 1650s, but which GeorgeFox's quietist accommodation to the Restoration had brought to anend. Moira Ferguson examines the writings of Quaker women who"fought to hold their own and... refused to be bound by the newconservative politics," especially Fox's "pro-slavery accommoda-tions." Although not entirely free from complicity in culturalimperialism, Alice Curwen, Elizabeth Hooton, and Joan Vokinswere among the first to articulate an emancipationist agenda inEnglish. As a result of their efforts, Ferguson points out, " the Quakerposition on slavery changed qualitatively as they became the firstunified group of British men and women to demand abolition andemancipation."

Slavery was not the only controversial issue arising from Britain'sincreasing centrality in world trade during the years following theRestoration. The commercial press provided plenty of material tofeed what Steven Pincus calls the "native and lively populardiscussion about European affairs in England throughout the laterseventeenth century," a discussion that, he observes, "alwaysconnected domestic and foreign concerns" and that "turned on theproper identification of the universal monarch." Royalists wrote insupport of the third Anglo-Dutch war of 1672-74, insisting that therepublican Dutch were seeking universal dominion. Against this

Literature', culture, and society 27

claim, Pincus argues, "English radicals proclaimed with a unitedvoice that universal monarchy was in fact the sole aim and purposeof French policy." Pincus reads the published debates to show howreports of events eventually disproved Royalist claims, causing publicopinion to turn against the war - but not before "English moderatesshifted their foreign policy orientation... because they were wellaware that the struggle for European mastery had begun."

For Britain, and so perhaps for Europe and the world, that struggleresulted in the events of 1688-89, when a foreign but Protestant kingacceded to the throne. Had he lived this long, Milton might not havebeen satisfied with a constitutional monarch, even in preference to aCatholic one. But the "Glorious Revolution" showed how theradical and republican ideals of the 1640s and 1650s continued toinfluence the political debates shaping Britain's future as an imperialnation. This book ends with Bridget Hill's study of how, written withthe hindsight of a century, Catharine Macaulay's history of thesecond half of the seventeenth century "not only influenced Englishradicalism profoundly but also contributed substantially to Americanand French revolutionary ideology." Like other radical thinkers ofthe 1760s who were critical of the inadequacies of the 1688-89settlement, Macaulay called for " a fundamental reform of the wholesystem of representation involving not only a more equable dis-tribution of seats, but an extension of the franchise and secret ballot."The Restoration might have put an end to the English republicanexperiment, but it could not put an end to those competing traditionsof radical and republican thought that English men and women hadbecome accustomed to seeing debated in print since the 1640s.Although religious differences helped shape partisan disputes, socialidentities, and political allegiances after the Restoration, ecclesi-astical authority gave way before the secular authority of a literaryculture geared to the demands of a developing commercial andimperial nation.

[gerald maclean] culture and society in the restoration

Documents