Milton's Poetry of Independence: Five Studies.

George H. McLoone. Milton's Poetry of Independence: Five Studies.

Lewisburg, PA and Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press. London: Associated University Presses, 1999. 160 pp. $32.50. ISBN: 0-8357-5403-1.

Esther Gilman Richey. The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance.

Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. x + 252 pp. $37.50. ISBN: 0-8262-1166-6.

Elizabeth Mazzola. The Pathology of the English Renaissance: Sacred Remains and Holy Ghosts.

Leiden: Brill, 1998. viii + 157 pp. $64.00. ISBN: 90-04-11195-6.

Debora Shuger in The Renaissance Bible (1994) decries the "disciplinary segregation" that has kept apart studies of culture and religion in Renaissance England: "books on the English Reformation do not usually engage questions of gender, sexuality, class, power, and selfhood; conversely, studies of Tudor and Stuart culture rarely consider sermons, sacraments, bishops or prayer books" (2). All three of the books under review here make worthwhile connections across this division of questions and sources, resisting the intellectual apartheid that has produced a translatio northward of Burkhardt's secularizing Renaissance.

Relying primarily on the prose tracts and comparing Milton to the well-known Independent clergyman Henry Burton, McLoone begins with a quite persuasive, if of course not entirely original, argument that Puritan independency, implying the primacy of inward illumination and individual responsibility for a right relationship with God, was the common factor running through the complex evolution of Milton's ecclesiology. He then devotes a chapter to each of five poems. The book's most subtle and thorough analysis, on "Lycidas," comes first. Invoking the Pauline concept of the mystical body of the church as an important resonance for the body of Edward King, McLoone traces the speaker's movement from an aestheticized pastoralism carrying with it "disciplinary impediments relatable to an unreformed egoism and its contractual, mythographic defenses" (41) toward a more prophetic orientation, a "more productive conciousness of his own membership in the communion of saints" (33). In this way McLoone arrives at a genuinely new insight into the poems remarkable unity, demonstrating that the two features cited in the headnote Milton added in the 1645 edition -- his bewailing a drowned friend and, "by occasion," foretelling "the ruin of our corrupted Clergy then in their height" -- are two sides of the same coin.

The author proceeds to an enlightening reading of the poignant twenty-third sonnet, which, over two decades after "Lycidas," displays a remarkably similar retreat into "structural impediments to a full, transcendent membership in the communion of saints" (47) in response to loss. After these excellent chapters, McLoone's engagements with the two epics were somewhat disappointing. For Paradise Lost he does make an interesting comparison between the unfallen adoration of Book IV and the "crisis of devout affection" in Book IX, but after this he merely glances cursorially at "reformist allusions" (65) in the closing books, declining to produce the kind of shrewd close-readings with which he illuminated the lyrics. Paradise Regained is considered in terms of its imagery of reformed sacramentalism, persuasively I found with respect to baptism, but less so on the Eucharistic aspects of the poem's banquet scenes. McLoone's terms of analysis are more uniformly efficacious in the closing chapter, where they help him to explain the disconcerting tendency of Samson Agonistes to support diametrically opposed readings of Samson as an inspired proto-Christian and a vengeful pagan monster. Extensive comparisons with the "epic domain of reformed Christians" (108) inhabited by Adam and the Son reveal how deeply Samson's tragic world is riven between visions of a liberating internal worship and an unreformed and fatally limiting cultic mythography.

Esther Richey's wide-ranging The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance nicely complements Milton's Poetry of Independence. Its chapter on Milton supports McLoone's depiction of a poet perennially negotiating the conflict between establishmentarian authority and Puritan independency. Indeed, it traces Milton's radical meditations on the conflict back in time to Comus and, perhaps more surprisingly, to the 1629 Nativity Ode, poems that Richey finds to be largely about "the dynamic relationship between the individual and the church" (139-40). As illuminating as the chapter is on its own, it become even more valuable as a step in the book's implicit historical narrative, which in effect locates Milton's independency within a wider and evolving cultural context. Organized chronologically, Richey's chapters outline the debate on the church-individual relationship that permeated English Renaissance culture and continued to escalate between the writing of Spenser's Faerie Queene and Vaughan's Silex Scint illans, the subjects of her opening and closing chapters.

The writers Richey covers have not often cohabited within the covers of a single book. One reason for this lies in Barbara Lewalksi's influential distinction between the period's writers of prophetic poetry influenced by the Book of Revelation and meditative lyricists influenced primarily by the Book of Psalms. Richey rejects this distinction. As she persuasively demonstrates, both groups and many others besides, radicals as well as conformists, "literary" authors and controversialists, depended heavily upon the same "bride" and "temple" imagery drawn from St. John of Patmos.

Chapter 1 describes the Elizabethan "conformist" (37) perspective dramatized in Spenser's Legend of Holinesse, in which the visible church represented by Redcrosse and the invisible church of the elect embodied in Una are united, if rather tenuously. In subsequent chapters we watch this relationship as it unravels. Thomas Brightman, author of popular commentaries on Revelation, and Lancelot Andrewes are offered as representatives of the two opposing views that soon came to dominate prophetic discourse in the seventeenth century: the former espousing ongoing reformation and taken up by radicals like Milton and women prophets, the latter "pacifistic, lyrical, and interior rather than militant, apocalyptic, and politically charged" (46). Richey shows that concentration on the woman in the Apocalypse in itself empowered visionary women such as Aemilia Lanyer, who used the image to counter Pauline subjugation, following the lead of Cornelius Agrippa's espousal of the nobility of women, although I don't find that Richey adequately articulates how she views Agrippa's "influence." Egalitarian implications were found in the Apocalypse by Lady Eleanor Davies, who worked simultaneously as a militant feminist and reformer, passionately proclaiming that the church must see "that its own status as the bride of Christ is contingent upon its recognition that the female gender contains the ultimate prophetic truth" (176). Similarly, during the Interregnum such middle-class prophets as Mary Cary, Anna Trapnel, and Margaret Fell, whom Richey bundles together into a single chapter, found in the Apocalypse support for their prophetic authority.

Richey portrays the male meditative poets not really as opposed to these voices, but laboring in more difficult ideological cross-currents. When Donne broached the question of the "true church" in Holy Sonnet 18, he rejected the exclusionary tendencies of contemporary prophetic discourse, a position that he only gradually approached in his more establishmentarian sermons. In The Temple Herbert achieved a similarly inclusive stance in the face of exclusionary attitudes of both Laudians and Puritans. Finally, Henry Vaughan, when he turned from secular to religious poetry after the Civil War, created a prophetic voice of the most militant pacifism.

Both McLoone and Richey have given us narratives of continuity, of the continuous use of images across a career and across an era, even if Richey's story divides the continued use of apocalyptic imagery into opposed streams of empowering radicalism and defensive inclusionism. The Pathology of the English Renaissance is also concerned with the continuing use of images and ideas. Elizabeth Mazolla, however, focuses on "disowned symbols" (4), Catholic inheritances which were emptied of their original sacred meanings by Reform, but which continued a shadowy existence in a Protestant world "coated with symbolic residue" (7). The first of the book's two sections, entitled "Broken Idols," takes up Spenser and Milton. For Mazzola the Legend of Temperance is the key Elizabethan text expressing the "widening gap between secular and sacred life" (11). In two provocative chapters she considers how the technology of printing and Renaissance debates over biblical apocrypha enabled Spenser's poetics of remembering and forg etting, and how Purgatory, although rejected by Protestantism, continued to serve as an imaginative liminal zone shaping the Faerie Queene's romance cosmology. She next looks at Milton's Eve, portraying Paradise Lost as an apocryphal text and its heroine as "the idol Milton smashes" (72), a figure of complex ambiguity reflecting Renaissance and authorial tensions between history and theology, past and present, Christian and Hebraic thought.

The Tragedy of Mariam and Hamlet are the subject of the book's second section, entitled "Lost Causes." Both plays evince "anxieties surrounding patriarchal bodies (what constitutes them, what dissolves them)" (85) that are also at play in the Reformation polemic over the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, a polemic that, because it concerned the repetition of an event from long in the past, was intimately tied to the Renaissance revolution in historiography. "Adapting many newly-developed historiographical techniques" (93), the Catholic Elizabeth Cary transformed anxiety over the absence of the patriarchal body -- the rumored death of Miriam's husband, Herod -- into a profound questionning of the relation of past to present, allowing her readers to "perceive firsthand the kinds of meanings history makes possible" (88). Hamlet's response to the troubling presence of the absent father is to stage another problematic presence-in-absence: the Mousetrap play-within-the-play, which "utilizes many of the onto logical discrepancies and historical confusions which first arise in the sixteenth century" (111).

The three books will engage somewhat different, if overlapping audiences. Milton's Poetry of Independence will primarily interest Milton scholars, who will encounter new perspectives on several poems and yet one more example of the poet's career-long thematic variations. The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance will reward an unusually wide circle of readers, including those interested in the authors covered, in apocalypticism, and in questions of "gender, sexuality, class, power, and selfhood." The Pathology of the English Renaissance is by far the most difficult of the three. It is plagued by far too many instances of insufficiently developed argument and unnecessary obscurity, but it is also graced by a wealth of sometimes dazzling revelations, and it will be valuable reading for anyone concerned with the torturous processes of cultural memory.