restoration and eighteenth century || lady state's first two sittings: marvell's satiric...

18
Rice University Lady State's First Two Sittings: Marvell's Satiric Canon Author(s): Annabel Patterson Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 40, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 2000), pp. 395-411 Published by: Rice University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1556253 . Accessed: 18/12/2014 00:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Rice University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Upload: annabel-patterson

Post on 11-Apr-2017

213 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

Rice University

Lady State's First Two Sittings: Marvell's Satiric CanonAuthor(s): Annabel PattersonSource: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 40, No. 3, Restoration and EighteenthCentury (Summer, 2000), pp. 395-411Published by: Rice UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1556253 .

Accessed: 18/12/2014 00:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Rice University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in EnglishLiterature, 1500-1900.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

SEL 40, 3 (Summer 2000) 395 ISSN 0039-3657

Lady State's First Two Sittings: Marvell's Satiric Canon

ANNABEL PATIERSON

Twenty years ago, I strongly supported the case made by George de Forest Lord for Andrew Marvell's authorship of the two Restoration sat- ires, the Second and Third Advices to a Painter, to which Marvell's Last Instructions to a Painterwas obviously a sequel.1 These poems were writ- ten in parodic response to Edmund Waller's Instructions to a Painter, for the Drawing of the Posture and Progress of His Majesties Forces at Sea, which appeared in the spring of 1666 as a progovernment eulogistic ac- count of the first phase of the Second Dutch War, and especially of the con- duct of James, duke of York, as admiral. Manuscript copies of the Second and ThirdAdvices appeared on the streets respectively in December 1666 andJanuary 1667, when Samuel Pepys recorded their existence in his Di- ary. In the first printed editions of 1667, they were attributed to Sir John Denham, who, for several good reasons, including his temporary mad- ness at the time, could not have been responsible for them. The question of who actually wrote them has never been definitively resolved.

Lord's original argument was based primarily on internal evidence: the Second, Third, and Last "painter" poems showed a marked similarity of attitude to the major figures in the Restoration government.2 In his edition of Marvell's poems, which included the Advices, Lord was further im- pressed by the provenance and testimony of what is now known as the "Popple" manuscript, which came from the family of Marvell's beloved nephew, William Popple, and is now in the Bodleian library. Lord's argu- ments about the value of this manuscript in establishing the Marvell canon,

Annabel Patterson, who now teaches at Yale University, is the author of many books and articles on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and history. Her books include Marvell and the Civic Crown (1978), Censorship and Interpretation (1984, 1990), Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989), Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (1994), Early Modern Liberalism (1998), and Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (2000). She is general editor for the Yale edition of the Prose Works of Andrew Marvell.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

396 Marvell's Satiric Canon

however, were somewhat discredited by his overdependence on certain cross marks in the manuscript which he interpreted as attributing or deny- ing particular poems to Marvell;3 and my own arguments in support of his position focused the question of attribution on the unusually intelligent deployment of pictorialist conventions in the Advices, which linked them with the LastInstructions rather than with later "painter" poems. Since then, Marvell critics have tiptoed around this issue. But, with a new edition of Marvell's poetry by Nigel Smith pending from Longman, with a modern edition of his prose in progress at Yale University Press, and a revised ver- sion of my 1978 book-Marvell and the Civic Crown-in print, along with an appendix publishing for the first time these Advices as they appear in the Popple manuscript, the time seems ripe, if not overdue, for providing a less timid answer than those currently available to the question raised by Lord.4 Did Marvell write the first two satirical "painter" poems, as well as the Last Instructions? He evidently did.

Since 1978, 1 have only become more confident that the external evi- dence demands their inclusion in Marvell's canon, especially since nobody has been able to produce a plausible rival candidate for their authorship. I now offer a more detailed account of the Popple manuscript and its claims to authority; but, in addition, there is new internal evidence that Marvell wrote them, since they contain unmistakable echoes of his earlier poems. As distinct from similarities between them and the LastInstructions, which could perhaps have been the product of a shared satirical program, the echoes (specific rhymes and locutions) from Marvell's earlier unpublished poems provide proof that the same mind and ear produced them. For those who are wary of proof by echo, I can only hope that the initially skeptical will become convinced by the number and force of these cross-references, as it were, to Marvell's earlier work. In addition, I shall show that Marvell not only recalled himself in these satires, but in important instances delib- erately parodied his poems to and about Oliver Cromwell, in order to show how the heroic days of the Protectorate had been replaced by the mock heroics of the Second Dutch War.

I. THE AUTHORITY OF THE POPPLE MANUSCRIPT

The external evidence for attributing the Second and ThirdAdvice to Marvell consists of the provenance and bibliographical characteristics of the Popple manuscript. When, in 1776, Captain Edward Thompson, editor of the first edition of Marvell's collected works, was nearly finished with his task, in which he had had access to the Marvell collection of Thomas Hollis, he received what is assuredly an editor's bane: proof that his edi-

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Annabel Patterson 397

tion was incomplete. In the preface to his edition, he reported that, when the three volumes were already complete, he "was politely complimented by Mr. Mathias (Marvell's grandnephew) with a manuscript volume of po- ems" that had belonged to Popple, "being a collection of his uncle Andrew Marvell's compositions after his decease." "By this manuscript," Thomp- son continued, "I also find, that those two excellent satires, entitled A Di- rection to a Painter concerning the Dutch War in 1667, and published in the State Poems ... as SirJohn Denham's, are both of them compositions of Mr. Marvell; but as the work is already so largely swelled out, I shall beg leave to omit them."5 He thereby initiated a tradition whereby Marvell's canon would be limited by the constraints of space (and possibly time), rather than by rational conviction.

In 1945, the Bodleian library acquired a copy of Marvell's Miscella- neous Poems of 1681, which contained manuscript corrections to many of the poems, and had been interleaved so as to provide space at the appro- priate places for transcriptions of the three Cromwell poems cancelled from all but one surviving copies of the book, and for some parts of other poems that had been truncated. Indeed it provided the only text of lines 185-324 of A Poem upon the Death of 0. C, missing from the unique Brit- ish Library copy which otherwise preserves the Cromwell poems as origi- nally planned. Bodleian MS. Eng. poet. d.49 also contains, after the Cromwell poems, manuscript copies of a number of Restoration satires, the first four of which are as follow:

I The Second advice to a Painter for drawing the History of our navall busy- ness. In imitation of Mr Waller. (pp. 157-71) There follows a quotation from Persius, Satire 5, and a date: London, April 1666. 2. The third Advice to a Painter. London. October 1st, 1666. (pp. 172-85). 3. Clarindon's House-Warming. 4. The Last Instructions to a Painter. London, 4 September 1667.

All of the missing sections of poems originally published in the Miscella- neous Poems, and most of the satires, including these four and the full text of The Loyal Scot, were copied in the same meticulous late-seventeenth- century hand, with a precision to which I shall return.6 We know that this was the volume so belatedly presented to Captain Thompson because, on the page where the SecondAdvice begins, there is another kind of manu- script note: "This hath been unjustly attributed to Sir John Denham, and are given as such, in the first book of State poems. p. 24. E. Thompson, 1775." We also know that Thompson used this manuscript as the basis for his texts of the Cromwell poems, so that its importance to Marvell's canon is indu-

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

398 Marvell's Satiric Canon

bitable. Subsequent editors, however, have been chary of granting the same authority to the texts of the two "painter" poems, ignoring Thompson's conviction that they were Marvell's, although willing to in- clude in their editions Clarindon's House-Warming (H. M. Margoliouth/ Pierre Legouis) or The Loyal Scot (Elizabeth Story Donno). The scepticism expressed by Donno, who was not convinced that Popple would have been a reliable collector of Marvell's poems, fails to take account of the unusual nature of the manuscript. It is in no sense a commonplace book or miscellany of state poems, such as Bodleian Ms. Don. b. 8, which was compiled over fifteen years, or British Library Harley Ms. 7315, profession- ally compiled for Robert Harley, first earl of Oxford, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, or the "Okeover" manuscript in the Brotherton Col- lection at Leeds University, which is a miscellany and contains only extracts of the Advices;7 rather, it seems to have been deliberately prepared, all at one time, as a complete collection of Marvell's verse, as if for a new edi- tion. This suggestion was made by Margoliouth himself (though the sig- nificance it gave the manuscript's contents escaped him), accepted by Lord as fact, and tentatively endorsed by Peter Beal, whose knowledge of the other manuscripts of these poems is encyclopedic.

There are proofs of this hypothesis. To begin with, the unusually spe- cific dates given in Popple for the three "painter" poems are found nowhere else. Their very specificity implies that those responsible for the creation of the transcripts had access to Marvell's original manuscripts, which must have recorded the dates of composition, and that the chronology of com- position was important to the collection. Thus, 1 October 1666 is an ap- propriate completion date for the Third Advice, which deals with naval affairs in May andJune 1666 and the Great Fire of London of 2-6 Septem- ber of that year. The 4th of September 1667, the date attached to Last In- structions, computes with Margoliouth's inference that the poem "was probably completed at some time after 30 August 1667, when Clarendon resigned the seals."9 It was probably begun, however, soon after the de- bate on the Excise Tax which took place in October 1666, so that Marvell had a year's events to include, and a year in which to write the poem. The presence of Clarindon's House-Warming between the Third Advice and the Last Instructions is consistent with such a program, since the poem is self-dated as written between 25 June and 25 July 1667.10 It is worth noting that Donno prints the Popple date for the LastInstructions, while denying the manuscript's authority with respect to the Advices.

Secondly, the transcription seems to have been made with another audience in view than the volume's owner. In the Third Advice, proper names are distinguished in a larger version of the hand, as if to indicate to a

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Annabel Patterson 399

printer the need for italicization; and in one or two instances difficult or unusual words are written in the manuscript equivalent of print, as if to anticipate words that the printer might have difficulty with: Oltramarinish, Remora, Trou-Madam, foible, Dilemmas, viraginous, cartalaginous, Con- sents, four-millioneer, effigie. "Oltramarinish," in the couplet making fun of Coventry ("And more exactly to expresse his hew, / Use nothing but Oltramarinish blew," SecondAdvice, line 28) is a reading almost unique to Popple, for most other witnesses print "Ultramarine must do't, the richest blue."11 "Dilemmas" occurs, in the phrase "chaind Dilemmas," as a witty but completely unexpected metaphor for unbroken showers of shot-that is, unpleasantly conjoined arguments against an adversary (7hirdAdvice, line 81). More importantly, two of these highlighted terms point to mis- takes in the earlier printings, as well as to readings unique to Popple. "Foible," at line 80, in the ThirdAdvice, was printed as "feeble" in all other instances, and Lord, who in his edition of Poems on Affairs of State uses Popple somewhat eclectically as copy text, accepts it as the correct read- ing.12 "Consents," however, in the following passage from the duchess of Albemarle's tirade, also appears only in Popple:

Then Bishops must revive, and all unfix With Discontent for Consents twenty six. The Lords House drains the Houses of the Lord For Bishops voices silencing the Word.

(lines 239-42)

Lord prints "to content twenty-six," which seems clearly the inferior read- ing, since the passage refers to the voting bloc of the twenty-three bishops in the House of Lords, to which both "voices" and "consents" refer. Marvell's hostility to bishops, not incidentally, is everywhere testified to in his canon, from the "prelat's rage" of Bermudas and "Th'Ambition of [the] Prelate great" in Upon Appleton House through the two parts of the Rehearsal Transpros'd and the Short Historical Essay on General Councils, which specifically deplores their voting practices.13 And, on 1 June 1661, he had reported to his Hull constituents: "For news there is litle else then that the bill for restoring the Bishops to the Lords house and their temporall juris- diction hath to day had its first reading." 14

In addition to difficult words that appear to be written with exceptional care, the Popple text also contains readings which are superior by virtue of the principle of durior lectio. "Foible," mentioned above, would be an instance of this principle, a reading superior to the easier "feeble" which a printer unsure of what he saw would substitute. On page 175, lines 75-6 of

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

400 Marvell's Satiric Canon

the ThirdAdvice read: "Yet Shee observd, how still his iron Balls / Bricold in vain against our oaken Walls." According to Lord's collation, almost all witnesses here give the more familiar "Recoil'd" for "Bricold."'15 Yet "to bricolle," to cause to rebound, a word of French origin relating to tennis, existed, and Marvell used it in the Rehearsal Transpros'd: The Second Part: "I remember within our time one Simons, who rob'd alwayes upon the Bricolle, that is to say, never interrupted the Passengers but still set upon the Thieves themselves after, like SirJohn Falstaff"1'6 Another French im- port appears at page 158, lines 57-8, of the Second Advice: "See then the Admirall, with Navy whole / To Harwich through the Ocean caracole." "Caracole," from horsemanship, to execute a sudden turn, or the turn it- self, was utterly misunderstood by the early printers and copyists, who with two exceptions substituted the semantically nonsensical but linguistically familiar "carry coal."'17

These textual claims for Popple's authority can only be made by means of collation, which is unlikely to persuade readers unwilling to follow its intricacies. 18 But, there is another aspect of Popple that is immediately vis- ible to the eye. The SecondAdvice is accompanied by the kind of explanatory note, written in a different hand, that would help a later reader understand some of the more topical or difficult allusions. Thus, in the couplet "Mus- covy sells us hemp and pitch and tarre; / Iron and Copper Sweden, Munster Warre ," a cross mark before the name "Munster" is followed up by this "foot- note" (p. 159): "Bishop of Munster who was feed by us to make warr with Holland." In the couplet alluding to the origins of the Second Dutch War, "its Birth / From Hide, and Paston, Burthens of the Earth," similar footnotes identify the first as "Chancellor," the second as "Parlement man for Yarmouth: He proposed in Parlament the giving the King and was after- wards made a Lord." Thus, the original satiric intention is not only clarified but intensified by the provision of facts no longer current by the time the note was written; that is, the Cabal maneuver, instigated by Clarendon (Hyde) himself, by which the first Supply to support the war, in the un- precedented amount of two and half million pounds, was moved by Sir Robert Paston, a previously respected member of the Country party, as a way of lulling the suspicions of that party about the king's motives in de- claring the war in the first place. Beside the obscure allusion to "A Bastard Orange, for Pimp Arlington," is a cross directing the reader to the essential information that "L. Arlington maried a Duch Lady a Bastard of the Family of the Prince of Orange" (p. 170). More detailed still, though the issues that lay behind it were not quite so serious, was the gloss on the couplet de- scribing the earl of Sandwich's "Cousen Montague, by Court Disaster / Dwindled into the wooden Horse's Master" (p. 168). The note in this instance

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Annabel Patterson 401

tells a minihistory of disgrace that encapsulates the emphasis throughout on both political and sexual corruption: "Montague was Master of the Hors to the Queen. One day as he led her, he tickled her palm; she ask'd the King what that ment: the King, by this means getting knowledge of it, turn'd Montague out of his Place. After which disgrace he went to sea" (p. 168). So much for the professional standards of the Navy. The gloss therefore enriches in advance the poem's final warning to the king to "hark to Cassandra's Song, ere Fate destroy, / By thy own Navy's wooden horse, thy Troy" (p. 185).19 But, perhaps more to the point for the importance of Popple as witness, this note is a unique source of information about Ed- ward Montague's demotion.

Lord assumed that these notes were added by Thompson, which does not compute with Thompson's prompt recognition that the poems could not be included in his edition; nor do they seem to match his handwriting as its appears in his introductory note to theAdvices.20 They are more likely to have been added in the 1690s by those who prepared this volume for the printer, of whom the most obvious candidate is Popple himself.

Popple, Marvell's nephew, is known outside the circles of Marvell scholarship as the author of the English version ofJohn Locke's Letter con- cerning Toleration. Popple is a crucial figure in our understanding of Marvell, since all of Marvell's most candid (and most satiric) letters of the Restoration period are addressed to him. Popple was himself an author, and a daring one; his Deist Rational Catechism of 1687 preceded the Williamite settlement. He was a friend of William Penn and, in 1688, pub- lished Three Letters advocating universal freedom of conscience and the abolition of the penal laws against dissenters. Popple's translation of Locke's Letter concerning Toleration was published in 1689, when, in the liberating political climate of the Williamite Revolution, all sorts of Whig texts began to appear or reappear. For example, Algernon Sidney's Dis- courses concerning Government was published byjohn Darby Sr. in 1690; in the same year,John Phillips,John Milton's nephew, produced the Secret History of the Reigns ofK. Charles II and K James II; and, in 1694, Edward Phillips, his brother, published Milton's Letters of State and included the sonnets written to Edward Fairfax, Henry Vane, and Cromwell that had been excluded from all editions of his poems hitherto. And, of course, in 1689, there began the tradition of publishing collections of Poems on Af- fairs of State, in which Whig satires predominated, and Marvell's name, made famous by his prose pamphlets, was often presented as a lure to buyers. In these circumstances, there would be every incentive for Marvell's nephew to perform a similar service simultaneously for his uncle and the Williamite regime, by recovering poems unpublishable during the

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

402 Marvell's Satiric Canon

reigns of the last two Stuarts. Most important of these, from our perspec- tive, were the three "Cromwell" poems cancelled from the 1681 edition. But Popple might very well have been provoked, as well as encouraged, by the State Poems of 1689, which attributed the Last Instructions to Marvell, but repeated the evidently fallacious attribution of the Advices to Denham-that attribution which Thompson took special pains to chal- lenge, possibly on the basis of family oral tradition as well as on the testi- mony of the Popple manuscript itself.

II. INTERNAL EVIDENCE FOR ATTRIBUTION

By the time that Margoliouth prepared his reissue of Marvell's Poems and Letters in 1952, he knew of the existence of the Popple manuscript. He decided, however, not to include the Second and ThirdAdvices in this second edition, on two grounds. The first in importance, no doubt, though it receives briefer mention, was the fact that Oxford University Press would not allow him more than minor revision, and any new material had to be inserted on "spare pages," a fact that certainly prohibited the addition of more than 800 lines of poetry.21 Consequently, he had a disincentive to al- ter his original opinion against their inclusion, which was based primarily on thematic internal evidence and qualitative judgments. The Second and ThirdAdvices, which deal with the Second Dutch War primarily as a naval encounter, "would be more naturally assigned to some writer who took part in the naval actions," though he hazarded no nominations;22 and the Last Instructions was "more the work of a learned man."23 In Marvell and the Civic Crown, I began to challenge these opinions by showing that all three poems share a set of modestly learned references to the utpictura poesis tradition.

I would now reemphasize the fact that the LastInstructions begins with the assumption of a sequence of three, rather than five 'painter" poems: "After two sittings, now our Lady State / To end her picture does the third time waite" (lines 1-2). This would seem to point to a structure that Marvell himself wanted to recall in September 1667 (the date given for the Last In- structions in the Popple manuscript), as distinct from the connections forged in the volume entitled Directions to a Painter, which included the Second and Third along with a Fourth and Fifth advice to the painter, at- tributing all four to Denham. Influenced perhaps by this bundling, though undeceived by the Denham attribution, Margoliouth believed that a "gen- erally consistent level of style and intelligence" linked the Second and Third with the Fourth and Fifth, which Marvell certainly did not write, since they

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Annabel Patterson 403

overlap in subject matter with the LastInstructions. Margoliouth's creden- tials as an editor, especially as supported by the agreement of Legouis in his revised Oxford edition, seem to have outweighed the subjective and disputable nature of these judgments.

One could argue, for instance, that Marvell was quite capable of writ- ing descriptions of naval scenes (witness the last section of the FirstAnni- versary) without having participated in them, and that the author of the SecondAdvice clearly indicates that he is compiling reports brought in by others: "What others did let none omitted blame: / I shall record whos'ere brings in his Name" (lines 229-30). And, if one were looking for a specific source of information about these naval events, the name of Sir Jeremy Smith, whom Marvell knew personally and often mentioned in his letters, would be the first nomination.24 But, in addition, we should remember, Marvell sat from 25 October 1665 on the parliamentary committee to in- quire into the embezzlement of prize goods during the first phase of the naval war, and would therefore have had access to a good deal of informa- tion about what actually happened at the battle of Lowestoft.25

One could argue (and I did) that both the Second and Third Advices deal with issues Marvell was himself embroiled in-the debates over the parliamentary supply (funding) for the war, the various committees to ex- amine the "miscarriages" of the campaign, including the division of the fleet in 1666-and that are documented in his letters to Hull. One could add that Marvell carefully recalled these issues in his Account of the Growth ofPop- ery and Arbitrary Government: "It is well known, were it as well remembred, what the provocation was, and what the success of the war begun by the English in the year 1665 against Holland: what vast supplyes were furnished by the subject for defraying it, and yet after all no fleet set out, but the flower of all the royal navy burnt or taken in port to save charges."26

One could argue (and I do) that the first two Advices are much better poems than Margoliouth, and especially Legouis, were prepared to admit. Thompson called them "excellent," and there are more manuscript copies of them than of any other Marvell poem: forty-seven of the SecondAdvice and twenty-eight of the Third. Poetically, they show remarkable control over the pentameter couplet. Stylistically, they frequently anticipate Alexander Pope in the use of zeugma and ironic balance to mock-heroic effect. Describing General Monck's indignation at having to beat a retreat from de Ruyter, the author creates a witty catalogue of inadequate com- parisons which expand the social and political satire of the poem and end with a thrust at Charles I and Archbishop William Laud:

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

404 Marvell's Satiric Canon

Not vertuous Men unworthily abus'd, Not constant Lovers without cause refus'd, Not honest Merchant broke, not skillfull Play'r Hist of the Stage, not Sinner in despayre, Not loosing Rookes, not Favourites disgrac't, Not Rump by Oliver or Monk displac't. Not Kings deposed, not Prelats ere they dye Feele half the rage of Gen'ralls when they fly.

(p. 176)

In fact, Pope, who owned a copy of the 1705 edition of Poems onAffairs of State, and annotated this poem therein, almost certainly learned from it how to handle this witty structure. Witness his account of Belinda's dis- tress in The Rape of the Lock:

Then flashed the living Lightning from her Eyes, And Screams of Horror rend th'affrighted Skies. Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav'n are cast, When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breathe their last, Or when rich China vessels, fal'n from high, In glittring Dust and painted Fragments lie!

But, since we are now dealing with internal evidence, the fundamen- tal question must be asked: is there anything recognizably and unmistak- ably Marvellian in the Second and ThirdAdvices? There certainly is. I will begin with the strongest instance, already mentioned in Marvell and the Civic Crown. In the Second Advice, there is introduced another speaker besides the narrator-a technique that Marvell used in Upon Appleton House with the unsettling figure of Thestylis, and in the FirstAnniversary when putting Cromwell's military reputation before us by way of the re- luctant admiration expressed by the kings of Europe. Here the interpolated speaker is "one, concern'd most" who is appalled by the dangers of naval warfare, and wishes to put the blame on the legendary inventor of ship- ping, who also happened to be the inventor of viniculture:

Noah be damned, and all his Race accurst, That in Sea brine did pickle Timber first. What though he planted Vines! he Pines cut down, He taught us how to drink, and how to drown. Hefirst built ships, and in the wooden Wall

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Annabel Patterson 405

Saving but Eight ere since indangers all.

But damn'd and treble damn'd be Clarendine Our Seventh Edward and his House and Line.

(pp. 162-3, lines 131-42)27

This passage is the mirror image of one in the FirstAnniversary wherein Cromwell (who like Noah had three married children) is praised as the progenitor of a new dynasty but one honorably without personal dynastic ambition:

Thou, and thine House, like Noahs Eight did rest, Left by the Warrs Flood on the Mountains crest: And the large Vale lay subject to thy Will, Which thou but as an Husbandman wouldst Till: And only did for othersplant the Vine Of Liberty, not drunken with its Wine.

(1:115-6, lines 283-8)

The combination of the "Eight" saved and the invention of wine as a hu- man benefit locks the two passages together as heroic and mock-heroic adaptations of the same biblical tradition. Marvell also deployed it in Upon Appleton House, where the woods of the estate, he imagines, provide a resource "where the first Carpenter might best / Fit Timber for his Keel have Prest," deploying two more of the weight-bearing units ("first" and "Tim- ber") of the sailor's execration.28 But, in the SecondAdvice's transition from Noah to Clarendon and his "House," we perceive that the dynastic theme is not incidental, but central, to the satire's charge that by marrying his daughter Anne tojames, duke of York, Clarendon's ambitions encroached on the crown itself. This is also, of course, the theme of Clarindon 's House- Warming.

A similar principle operates in another echo between the FirstAnni- versary and the ThirdAdvice, whose governing conception is that Charles II, having withdrawn his brother from command of the fleet because it was too dangerous, made a fatal mistake in dividing that command in 1666 be- tween Prince Rupert and General Monck, duke of Albemarle. The Advice introduces this error in the following terms:

First paint me George and Rupert, ratlingfar Within one box, like the two Dice of War:

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

406 Marvell's Satiric Canon

And let the terrour of their linked Name Fly though the aire like chainshot, tearing Fame.

United Gen'ralls! sure the only spell Wherewith United Provinces to quell. Alas, ev'n they, though shell'd in treble Oake Will prove an addle Egge with double Yolke.

(pp. 172-3, lines 11-20)

In the FirstAnniversary, the kings of Europe complain as follows:

Theirs are not Ships, but rather Arks of War And beaked Promontories sail'd fromfar;

And those that have the Waters for their share, Can quickly leave us neither Earth nor Air. Yet if through these our Fears could find a pass, Through double Oak, and lin'd with treble Brass, That one Man still, although but nam 'd, alarms More than all Men, all Navies, and all Arms.

(1:118, lines 357-76)

The mock-heroic premise is simple; it takes two Restoration generals with their "linked Name" to attempt, against one small country, what "that one Man ... although but nam 'd" accomplished throughout Europe. The rep- etition of "War" and "far" as rhyme words is typical of Marvell's aural recall of himself; but the reiteration of "double" and "treble" would have to have been an intentional joke, as "double Oak" becomes a "double Yolke," pro- tected by something as flimsy as eggshell. As for the "addle egg," it will re- appear in Marvell's pamphlet, Mr. Smirke, or the Divine in Mode (1676): "To be set in the Pillory first, and be dawb'd with so many / Addle Eggs of the Animadverters own Cackle as he pelts him with."29

It is worth noting here that Marvell played the trick of parodying his own earlier heroic images in Clarindon's House-Warming, in which he has Clarendon "recollecting how the Harper Amphyon / Made Thebes dance aloft while he fidled and sung."30 This is a reductio ad absurdum of the long passage from the First Anniversary in which Cromwell, as "our Amphion," tunes the "ruling Instrument" so as to create the new structure of the Commonwealth (1: 110, lines 57-74). The contrast is between build- ing for the public by creating "Order and Consent," and building for one-

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Annabel Patterson 407

self by an elaborate system of bribery, extortion, and threats against one's enemies. In Cromwell's structure, "None to be sunk in the Foundation bends," whereas Clarendon "For foundation ... Bristol sunk in the Earth's bowel" (lines 77-8). And, whereas Cromwell's building is held together by the downward pressure of "the Roofs Protecting weight," Clarendon's is topped by a "Lanthorn" which "shows on the top by the Regal Gilt Ball, / Where you are to expect the Scepter and Crown" (lines 90-2); the first is the sign of a ruler who refuses the crown, the second that of the minister who aspires to it.

The next set of instances are rather more complicated, both in their genesis and their resonance. The second major target of the Second Ad- vice after Coventry is Anne Hyde, duchess of York, and her ludicrously expensive visit to the duke at Harwich before the battle of Lowestoft. Waller had compared her arrival to the birth of Venus. The satirist responds by an outdoing comparison:

But Painter now prepare, t'inrich thy Piece Pencill of Ermins, Oyle of Ambergris.31

One thrifty Ferry-boat ofMother-Pearl Sufficed of old the Cytherean Girle. Yet Navys are but Properties when here, A small Sea-mask, and built to court you, Dear. Three goddesses in one; Pallas for Art, Venus for sport, andJuno in your Heart.

Never did Roman Mark, within the Nile, So feast the faire Egiptian Crocodile.

(pp. 159-60, lines 51-70)

This passage recalls a scene from Marvell's The Gallery (appropriately enough for a "painter" poem, and appropriately, too, for a woman whose wedding portrait had been painted by Lely):

thou sit'st a float Like Venus in her pearly Boat. The Halcyons, calming all that's nigh Betwixt the Air and Water fly. Or if some rowling Wave appears, A Mass of Ambergris it bears.32

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

408 Marvell's Satiric Canon

Marvell's imagined portraits of Clora, remember, are "a Collection choicer far / Then or White-hall's, or Mantua's were," a couplet that indicates alert- ness to the history of Stuart portraiture (lines 47-8). But, the satire against Anne Hyde then proceeds to incorporate, with its allusion to Cleopatra, an echo of Upon Appleton House and its river:

No Serpent new nor Crocodile Remains behind our little Nile; Unless it self you will mistake, Among these Meads the only Snake.33

Perhaps Marvell here only remembered his previous rhyme; but perhaps he also invoked the aura of self-indulgence in which the poet-tutor basks, and from which he is rescued by the discipline of Maria Fairfax.

There remain three striking echoes of The Garden, for which we will need a more complicated hypothesis. The first occurs early in the Second Advice:

Next let the flaming London come in view Like Nero's Rome, burnt to rebuild it new. What lesser Sacrifice then this was meet To offer for the safety of the Fleet?

(p. 158, lines 13-6)

The structure of the second couplet inevitably invokes The Garden's rather different question: "After a place so pure and sweet, / What other Help could yet be meet?" (1:53, lines 59-60). In the Third Advice, the duchess of Albemarle meditates on the burning of the actual city of London:

See how Men all, like Ghosts, while London burns, Wander and each over his ashes mourns! Dear George, sad Fate, vain Mind that me did'st please To meet thine with far other Flames then these.

(lines 419-22)

Not only does this passage echo a line from the elegy for Cromwell (A Poem upon the Death of 0C.), where Marvell describes how "we, since thou art gone . . . / Wander like ghosts about thy loved tombe" (1:137, lines 299- 300); it also creates a peculiar relationship both with The Garden's famous couplet: "Yet it creates, transcending these, / Far other Worlds, and other

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Annabel Patterson 409

seas" (lines 45-6) andwith one from Upon theHilland GroveatBill-borow: "Much other Groves, say they, then these/And other Hills him once did please" (1:62, lines 65-6).

Still more disconcerting, though explicable, is the relationship between The Garden's image of the soul as a bird that

whets, and combs its silver Wings And, till prepar'd for longer flight, Waves in its Plumes the various Light34

and the ThirdAdvice's description of Monck's defeat by de Ruyter:

So an old Bustard, maim'd, yet loath to yeild, Duells the Fowler in Newmarket Field. But soon he found 'twas now in vain to fight And imps his Plumes the best he may for flight.35

(lines 91-4)

Not least because several of them involve combinations of more than one Marvell poem, these Marvellian moments in the Advices are a test of the echo theory of attribution. Harder to hear, less conscious probably than the parodic cross-references demonstrated above, they might be dismissed as peripheral to the argument, were it not for the evidence produced by Allan Pritchard that Marvell, in The Garden, echoed several of the lyrics of Katherine Philips, the niece ofJohn Oxenbridge, whose Poems were pub- lished in 1667, as well as poems of Abraham Cowley first published with his Essays in 1668.36 Pritchard used his discoveries to propose that The Garden was not, as usually assumed, contemporaneous with Upon Appleton House, but rather a product of 1668 or soon thereafter. I endorse both Pritchard's comment that "there is no more possibility of maintaining a state of innocence in chronology than in any other matter" and his healthy proposal that we should no longer assume that all of Marvell's most valu- able poetry preceded the Restoration, or indeed his commitment to poli- tics (p. 381). But if The Garden was not written until 1668, it follows that it echoes the Second and ThirdAdvices, not vice versa. This would make it entirely possible that when Marvell wrote the brilliant lines reversing our expectations of common myths-

Apollo hunted Daphne so, Only that she might Laurel grow,

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

410 Marvell's Satiric Canon

And Pan did after Syrinx speed, Not as a Nymph, but for a Reed

(lines 29-32)

-he was improving on the comic formula invented for the ThirdAdvice: "So Rupert the Sea-dragon did invade: / But to save George himself, and not the Maid" (p. 176a, lines 139-40).

Did he do so only because the Advices were still ringing in his compo- sitional memory? Or was this another kind of parody, whereby The Garden reflected upon the kind of writing that Marvell had recently been doing? Only Marvell, it seems fair to say, could conceivably have made those aural and ironic connections between a Restoration lyric that cel- ebrated a calculated immunity from the world-not, of course, without its own scintillating irony-and two recent Restoration satires that chronicled the consequences for the public of personal ambition, lust, and greed.

NOTES

lAnnabel M. Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 111-67.

2George de F. Lord, "Two New Poems by Marvell?" Bulletin of the New York Public Library 62 (1958): 551-70.

3See the reservations of Warren L. Chernaik, The Poet's Time: Politics and Religion in the Work ofAndrewMarvell (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 206-14.

4 Patterson, Marvell: The Writer in Public Life (London and New York: Longman, 2000).

5Marvell, The Works ofAndrewMarvellEsq. Poetical, Controversial, and Political, ed. Captain Edward Thompson, 3 vols. (London, 1776), 1:xxxviii.

6There are some satires included in the William Popple MS whose attribution to Marvell either remains debatable or has been definitively set aside. All this means is that the compiler of Popple had to struggle with the same confusing data of late attributions, chronology, and style as do we.

7See Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts (London: Mansell, 1993), 2:17-67, for descriptions of these and other manuscripts containing Marvell's writings.

8Beal, 2:22. 9H. M. Margoliouth, ed., Poems andLetters ofAndrewMarvell, rev. edn., ed. Pierre

Legouis, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:346. All references to Marvell's po- ems and letters are to this edition (hereafter Poems andLetters) unless otherwise speci- fied.

10As observed by Margoliouth in Poems and Letters, 1:240, 345. 11 Nigel Smith, in preparing his edition of these poems, found witnesses unknown

to Lord, some of which match Popple. The most important match, however, is the vol- ume entitled Directions to a Painter, which I have shown to be closer to Popple in its readings than to either of the first printings of the Advices. See Patterson, "The Second and ThirdAdvices-to-the Painter," PBSA 71,4 (1977): 473-86.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Annabel Patterson 411

"2Lord, PoemsonAffairsofState:AugustanSatirical Verse, 1660-1714, vol. 1 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1963).

13PoemsandLetters, 1:74, line 366. See Essay in Marvell, CompleteProse Works, ed. A. B. Grosart, 4 vols. (Fuller Worthies Library, 1872-75), 4:118: "These great bishops, though they only had the decisive voices, yet thought fit to bring along with them cer- tain men that were cunning at an argument"(italics added).

14Poems andLetters, 2:28. "Three witnesses give "Brusled," which makes no sense, and one "Bricolles." 16Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros'd and TheRehearsal Transpros'd. The Second

Part, ed. D. I. B. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 168. 17Most interestingly, the "Gough" manuscript in the Bodleian, a copy of the Direc-

tions volume with its own manuscript corrections, has "carry coal" crossed out and sub- stitutes "caracole," implying contact between "Gough" and the tradition represented by Popple.

18It should be emphasized that Lord's collation, on which these remarks are based, was far from complete. Smith's preliminary collation of many more manuscripts seems to point to a family of manuscripts related to Popple.

19 Compare also Marvell, The Statue at Charing Cross: "The Trojan Horse, tho' not of Brass but of wood, / Had within it an Army that burnt up the Town" (Poems and Let- ters, 1:200, lines 26-7).

20Beal only identified Thompson's hand in the Advice section of "Popple" on page 157, where he contested the attribution toJohn Denham (Beal, p. 22).

21 Poems and Letters, 1 :vii. 22 Margoliouth mentions Henry Savile, only to note that he did not go to sea until

1666, and would therefore not have been a witness to the battle of Lowestoft in June 1665.

23 Poems and Letters, 1:349. 24SeePoemsandLetters, 2:9,68-70,77,78,79,164,169,173,277,280,282,322,334,

and 335. 25Journal of the House of Commons, 8:629, 654. 26Marvell, Complete Prose Works, 4:264. 27 Smith informs me that the sailor's voice is attributed to "Killigrew" in one of the

Nottingham mss (Pw2 V5 (iii)). 28 Marvell, Upon Appleton House, lines 485-6. 29Marvell, Complete Works in Verse and Prose, 4 vols. (Privately printed, 1872-75),

4:34. 30 Marvell, Clarindon 's House-Warming, in Poems and Letters, 1:143, lines 17-8. 31 For a matching rhyme, see Marvell, The Character ofHolland: "And div'd as des-

perately for reach piece / Of Earth, as iPt had been of Ambergreece" (Poems and Let- ters, 1:100, lines 11-2).

32Marvell, The Gallery, inPoemsand Letters, 1:31, lines 33-8. 33 Marvell, Upon Appleton House, lines 629-32. 34 Marvell, The Garden, lines 53-5. 35 Compare also Second Advice, where the phrase "imps his Plumes" appears as a

metaphor for Clarendon as Daedalus (p. 171, line 356). 36 See Allan Pritchard, "Marvell's 'The Garden': A Restoration Poem?" SEL 23,3 (Sum-

mer 1983): 371-88.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 00:07:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions