Anthony Miller. Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture.

Anthony Miller. Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture. (Early Modern Literature in History.) Houndmills, England and New York: Palgrave, 2001. vii + 7 b/w pls. + 223 pp. $62. ISBN: 0-333-94822-X.

Michelle O'Callaghan. The "Shepheards Nation": Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612-1625. (Oxford English Monographs.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. viii + 272 pp. append, bibl. index. $65. ISBN: 0-19-818638-X.

Both of these books make not inconsiderable contributions to the study of "early modern" English literature in its historical context, though they differ markedly in methodology. Anthony Miller adopts a roughly linear approach: marks down a subject, the Roman triumph, and hunts up successive "appropriations" of this "ancient martial model" from the days of "humanist transmission" and its recuperation by scholars like Volturio and Biondo to those of post-Armada Britain, Marlowe, Spenser, and thence onwards by stages ("The Stuart Peace," "Shakespeare and Stuart Drama," "Civil War and Commonwealth") to Marvell, "An Horatian Ode," The First Anniversary, and the Milton of "Cromwell, our cheifof men," Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained.

He begins, naturally, in Rome itself, with its historians and poets (Virgil, Horace, Lucan), fashioning a template: the parade of spoils and captives (including, ideally, the nearest-and-dearest of the defeated general); the loser himself (customarily sacrificed en route at the Tullianum); the triumphator, mounted or borne in a chariot drawn by white horses, royally-appointed even in republican times, face sometimes cinnabarred like Jupiter, but accompanied always by an attendant tasked to repeat an admonitory "Hominem te memento"; the victorious troops, saturnalian in expectation of their share of the booty; the admiring populace, etc. He outlines the decorums governing such events, the metamorphoses resulting from the shift from Empire to Republic, Ovid's erotic subversions, Constantine's final non nobis Christianization. He is (inestimable advantage) a decent Latinist, though he does give a new twist to the phrase "off to a T" when, illustrating how "Volturio's hyperboles communicate the spell that the triumph exercised over Renaissance humanism," he boasts, as his rendering of "phialas calicesque," "saucer 3s and cups." "For such the steady Romans shook the world!" He can seem sometimes incuriously incurious of resonance. Sonnet 74 of Barnabe Barnes' Divine Centurie (1595) envisages, "When thy fowre sweete Evangelistes ride by / (Like corporalles) proclayming victorye," the final triumph of Christ and his Saints. So, as he says, "even 'sweete Evangelistes' have warrior rank." But as Nyms and Bardolphs!

Perhaps readers are expected to know all about OED. Corporal, sb.2 Mil. 2, and "the foure Corporals of the field?" "These 4," explains William Garrard's Arte of Warre (1591), "be under the Sergeant Major generall, to appoint, set order, and make battaile and battailes, and to guide every particular person therein ... whose authoritie likewise is such, as if any resist, they shall by the Provost Martiall bee punished as Rebells, of what calling or degree soever they bee"--whether (in church-militant terms) popes or humble "persoun[s] of a toun." Gospel-truth out-trumps the authority of ecclesiarchy and tradition; which would have reinforced Miller's point about a Protestant "newe musicke" and the canceling of "papal primacy."

But his book is short as his brief is long. There is no room to wallow in close reading. It will suffice to observe that Redcrosse "appropriates for England the [Hapsburg] eagle" (FQ 1.xi.34) without noticing overtones of Icarian flight; that, on the day of actual triumph, St. George rises, not eagle- or "Eyass hauke"-like, but (true to his name) with "the mounting lark"; that Spenser, beginning the canto, has promised to "let downe" the "haughtie string" of epic and resort to strains more appropriately georgic. All of this, again, would have corroborated arguments about Reformation restraint and given, besides, more insight into the real complexities of Spenserian allegory.

Miller, revealing as his triumphal tens may be, can leave the reader feeling a mite shortchanged, especially when major works are at issue. Yet even when styptic he is stimulating and very rarely, in point of fact, wrong. (He does slightly lose the plot in Antony and Cleopatra, 4.3, which does not celebrate "Antony's victory in his first sea battle." The idea of Shakespeare's Antony winning anything "at sea" is ludicrous.) What most recommends this book, perhaps, is not any new light it sheds upon "canonical" texts so much as the interesting range of less well-known material it touches upon: plays like Fletcher's Bonduca or Nabbes' Hannibal and Scipio, "the vigorous tradition of pamphlet triumphs" mentioned in the sleeve-note, the plethora of occasional poems in English and a (relatively untapped resource) Latin. "To trace these English appropriations and transformations of triumph," claims the introduction, "is to study a chapter in the history of relations between England and Rome," classical and Catholic. And so it proves. The book does (as the advertisement for eexternal varnish has it) "what it says on the tin," with economy and vitality.

Michelle O'Callaghan goes a different way to work, concentrating on a more limited period (from 1614 and the publication of William Browne's The Shepheards Pipe to the early 1620s) and plotting more tentatively the intertexturings of a "Spenserian community" of writers centering on Browne himself, George Wither, and Christopher Brooke, who populated, in pastoral guise, each other's poetry and contributed pieces to each other's publications. Their Spenser was no longer laureate of Gloriana and the Virgilian or "Augustan" epic-center but (bitten by his own Blatant Beast) rather a poet of complaint, Ovidian exile, and Colin Clouts come home againe: the voice of a "shepherdes nation" cast, as Andrew Hadfield has argued, "in the role of guardians of a tradition of English public poetry ... able to stand outside and by-pass the constraints of a purely courtly culture," and so transform "patronage relationships into a humanist dialogue," not of clients, but equals. Wither, indeed, with his almost-invention of subscription publication, wranglings over patents, generic innovations, was to exploit his newsworthiness as a "prison poet" to "reconceptualize" relations between poet, printer/stationer, and public in ways which O'Callaghan examines in detail.

"Publication no longer functions as a mechanism for patronage and instead operates in the service of the author and through him the commonwealth": a commonwealth, she insists, whose "ties are those of friendship" and thus "humanist" and virtuously Protestant rather than grossly Grub-street.

Jacobean Spenserianism, then, is not the twitching of an Elizabethan corpse but the beginning of something flesh and vital, conducing to "new languages of citizenship and publicness" and "a complex 'country' ideology" constitutionally averse from any "mystification of kingship" and the "regicentricities" of epic or Jonsonian, "Horatian," classicism--although (as O'Callaghan hastens to admit) its very complexity precludes the drawing of impermeable party lines. Her chosen poets share Inns-of-Court and tavern "club" roots, parliamentarian sympathies, and an anti-Spanish "political neo-Spenserianism." Otherwise ... "Hardnes she loves," writes Brooke of Virtue in "A Funerall Poem" for Sir Arthur Chichester: "soft spirits she disdaynes; / And holds that conquest noblest, got with paynes"; which gives the dead hero disconcerting affinities with the villain of his Ghost of Richard III who similarly inveighs against "weak piping time[s] of peace." Browne, in Britannia's Pastorals, is more apt to "feminize," rejecting "patrilineal narratives of the land that invest cultural meaning and identity in dynasty for prodigal narratives that explore the alterity of exile and open alternative narrative possibilities." Wither is Wither: anxious always to add "salt upon salt" and (would it could be said of critics) "write so plainly that the Meanest Wit / Might from [his] Musings reap some benefit."

Both he and Browne, we are told, share (how often?) "an irregular seven-syllable line that reinforces the vernacular informality of the verse." When, however, Browne in the seventh eclogue of The Shepheards Pipe engages with (Wither's speciality) "the market for libellous satire" and the scandalous Somerset/Howard marriage, not only does he not use heptasyllables; he also contrives that the first exchanges of Palinode (literally "backwards song") and Hobbinoll should, actually, re-verse each other, diagrammatizing divergence and playing wittily (and not at all informally) upon the meaning of "recant"--which Hobbinoll, besotted bridegroom that he is, won't, at least not in any commonly derived sense. But O'Callaghan is not much interested in versification.

She is, though, in Browne's antiquarianism and "chorographical" kinship with Drayton. "Seascape and landscape loosened from regnal histories" promote more local loyalties, "sovereignty resides in the land and rivers," and another blow is struck against Jacobean "regicentricity!" Now and then, seeking political rather than poetic point, she prizes phrases from immediate context: uses, for example, "Drake's fatal shipwreck" (which he never suffered; Browne's actual words are "fearful wrack") to canvas an "Elizabethan view of empire ... suppressed by the Jacobean peace"; and this when Browne himself seems simply intent on elaborating one of his characteristic comparisons and sighing a lost lover's Golden Hind around the globe double-quick without chance of landfall, let alone risk of running--as Drake did--aground (Britannia's Pastorals, 3.1.510-17). Nevertheless, her gist is generally convincing. The book is well-researched. She has primary sources at her fingertips, contemporary critics (Norbrook prominent among them) and theoreticians like Bakhtin and Habermas. Her style is somewhat more cant-bitten than Miller's. She "interpellates" (whatever that may mean exactly) a good deal--usually readerships of various descriptions--and suffers conjunctivitis over "however," "moreover" and "in fact," to the neglect of some necessary full-stops and capitals. And even Miller (described as "elegant" on his sleeve-note) is not above riding roughshod over grammar into quotation. (He also, incidentally, consistently mistakes "sigs." for "sig.")

This, of course, is nitpicking. Both Miller, with his triumphal object-glass, and O'Callaghan, with her "Spenserian" endoscope, supply telling insights into the literary, political, and religious anatomy of the first half of the seventeenth century. Bird's eye and worm's eye are variously illuminating. Both books are valuable.

TIMOTHY LANGLEY

University College of London