Joshua Scodel. Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature.

Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. viii + 367 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-691-09028-9.

Joshua Scodel has written an excellent book, ambitious in scope and masterful in its management of scholarly resources and interpretive techniques. It is organized around mediocritas, considered as an ethical norm, an aesthetic ideal, a strategic position in politics and religion, and a multivalent concept in the conflictual discourses of early modernity in England. Hewing to the mean between extremes necessarily involves familiarity with divergent possibilities, which Tudor and Stuart England supplied in abundance. Discriminating among several historically specific situations, Scodel shows how the virtuous mean, while recommended by venerable authorities and ratified by common sense, was usually subject to modification, sometimes to subversion, in a culture attached to the excess (whether generous, selfish, or self-destructive) associated with noble status and wealth.

At the risk of being misunderstood by some in the large audience that Excess and the Mean deserves, I wish to endorse with enthusiasm the old-fashioned way in which Scodel has construed and conducted his argument. While it displays no nostalgia or Tory sympathies, his book manifests an authentically conservative temperament, and offers a thoughtful response to poststructuralist and postmodern trends in early modern studies. Without methodological posturing, Scodel develops a nuanced account that reaches from the reign of Elizabeth (Sidney and Spenser are the earliest of the English writers he discusses) to the end of the seventeenth century. His approach to literary texts combines close reading with deft historical contextualizing and erudite attention to intertexts in ancient authors. The social history that is by turns the background and foreground of Scodel's literary analysis uses recent scholarship with tact and imagination.

The book brings a potentially unmanageable subject under control by ingenious choices, interpreting a wide array of texts under three rubrics. After chapters devoted to "revisions of the mean" by Donne and Bacon (19-76), part 2 is devoted to the rediscovered category of "georgic" poetry. Exploring Virgil's "complex legacy promoting both national moderation and aggrandizement" (13), Scodel examines both obvious and surprising instances, beginning with The Faerie Queene and Sylvester's Du Bartas, ending with Denham, Waller, and Cowley. Part 3 examines literature that treats "erotic excess" as expressive of noble virtue, seen first in aspiring courtiers and their noble paragons during Elizabeth's and James' reigns; then, in Caroline love poetry and the heroic plays and romances that refracted social turmoil later in the century, Scodel follows the development of "two opposed discourses," with the private satisfactions and sacrifices of passionate love "in dialectical interaction with a political and economic discourse centered upon 'interest'" (170). Part 4 is devoted to the "symposiastic lyric" of the seventeenth century: from Jonson to Herrick, imitators of Anacreon and Horace celebrated the civilized pleasures of friendship, wine, and poetic rapture, while the later Cavaliers and libertine poets of the Restoration made self-abandonment in drink and venery emblematic of their anti-Puritan politics. The book is rounded off by a chapter on Milton's "reimagining" of moderation in Paradise Lost (253-84). Scodel's argument is exquisitely segmented, with each text and contextual relationship accorded careful attention; cumulative effects are so well managed that the whole is much greater than a long catalogue of parts.

Given a book so cornucopian as this, to mention omissions would be a mean or deficient response; I will predict, instead, that its longterm value will be demonstrated by the supplementary work in dissertations, journal articles, and books that it encourages, such as the study of Shakespeare that Scodel may be reserving for himself (11). Specialists in the Tudor period can learn a great deal from Excess and the Mean, although its limited treatment of Elizabethan literature and society is not equal, in depth and freshness, to what is said about seventeenth-century developments. Scodel's stress upon classical antecedents imposes what I take to be an unintended consequence: latent possibilities and continuities within English traditions are sometimes neglected. One example will have to suffice: in the fine chapter on Paradise Lost, one welcomes an emphasis on Milton's transformation of the epic by "making the self-governance of the Edenic couple central to his poem" (256), but self-governance is no less central to The Faerie Queene, and many aspects of that endeavor are more elaborately anatomized by Spenser than by Milton. Excess and the Mean provides a fine framework for examining the transformation of the heroic poem by Milton's "original."

JON A. QUITSLUND The George Washington University