Reinventing romance, or the surprising effects of sympathy.

Divers other passions there be, but they want names; whereof some nevertheless have been by most men observed. For example: from what passion proceedeth it, that men take pleasure to behold from the shore the danger of them that are at sea in a tempest, or in fight, or from a safe castle to behold two armies charge one another in the field? It is certainly in the whole sum joy. else men would never flock to such a spectacle. Nevertheless there is in it both joy and grief. For as there is novelty and remembrance of [ones] own security present, which is delight; so is there also pity, which is grief But the delight is so far predominant, that men usually are content in such a case to be spectators of the misery of their friends.

Hobbes, Elements of Law, 9.19

You know that Kings are in some sense called Gods, and so they may in some degree be able to look into mens hearts; and God hath given us a King who can look as far into mens hearts, as any Prince alive; and He hath great skill in Physiognomy too, you would wonder what Calculations He hath made from thence; and no doubt, if He be provoked by evil looks, to make further inquiry into mens hearts, and findes those corrupted with the passions of Envy and Uncharitableness, He will never choose those hearts to trust and rely upon. He hath given us a noble and princely example, by opening and stretching His arms to all who are worthy to be His subjects, worthy to be thought English men, by extending His heart, with a pious and grateful joy, to finde all His subjects at once in His arms, and himself in theirs.

Clarendon (1)

Writing in the aftermath of the English civil war, in his Certaine Conceptions, or Considerations... upon the Strange Change of Peoples, Dispositions and Actions in these latter times (1650), the Catholic royalist Sir Percy Herbert depicted his contemporaries in terms that would have been recognizable to Hobbes. He noted their restless seeking after power, observing that they "are more taken with hopes of honours to come, then absolutely satisfied with those that are present." He commented on their "roving and unsatisfied nature: which argues, that the very disposition of man cannot be happy with this world." (2) Like Hobbes, Herbert was particularly concerned with the passion of vainglory, that insatiable self-love which "nourish[es] our pride and torment[s] our thoughts, with inconvenient and violent ambitions, by ayming at that which in a manner nothing can arrive unto, but vain imaginations." (3) This pursuit of vainglory accounted for the present vices of ingratitude; disobedience to one's parents, maste rs, and sovereigns; and the widespread contempt for "the strongest bonds of trust." Herbert was so disturbed by this last violation that he devoted a whole section of his treatise to breach of contract, which he filled with counterexamples of virtuous pagans and Christians who kept their word even at cost of life. (4) Where Herbert differed from Hobbes, as these examples begin to suggest, was in the remedy he proposed for this desperate deterioration of social relationships. His readers should imitate those virtuous men who preferred friendship to "interest and commodity"; they should adopt an attitude of Christian Stoicism in the face of adversity; they should recall the lessons of "romance," including the moral of the faithful dolphin from Pliny: "that the bands of friendship ought not to be broken upon any condition, without impiety & dishonour." Ultimately, Herbert diagnosed the general malaise as a condition of impatience and urged a combination of patience and an active "subjecting [of one's] own will" to Christian authority. (5)

Herbert's Certaine Conceptions was part of an outpouring of royalist literature in the 1650s by writers who were attempting to make sense of the causes of the civil war. (6) Whether in actual exile on the continent or internal exile at home, supporters of Charles II undertook a period of soul searching and retrospection. In Herbert's Certaine Conceptions we see how romance could serve as a compensatory fiction for these defeated royalists -- the fiction of a world in which noble characters remain constant in their affections despite their romance trials and tribulations. This is certainly one important function of royalist prose romance in England in the 1650s. (7) But in Herbert's own voluminous romance, Princess Cloria (1653-61), as well as in Richard Brathwaite's Panthalia (1659), and William Sales' unfinished Theophania (1655), we find considerably more skepticism about the arcadian dimension of romance. (8) Instead, it becomes an analytical tool for reflecting on the causes of the war and the contemporar y crisis of political obligation. If Hobbes' solution to the problem of vainglory was to imagine a world of discrete individuals with no incentive to join together except the interest of self-preservation, or the fear of violent death, prose romance of the 1650s both records and responds to this Hobbesian solution by proposing a new affective basis for political obligation.

Like Hobbes, these authors depict a world of passion and interest, in which the aristocratic pursuit of honor is more often a cloak for factional self-interest and self-aggrandizement than an expression of true nobility. And, like Hobbes, they suggest that a frank recognition of the centrality of interest is the foundation of any secure government. Unlike Hobbes, however, the authors want to resist the complete demystification of the passions -- the reduction of the passions to varieties of self-interest. As their choice of genre suggests, they want to hold on to romance, in however revised a form. The narrator of Panthalia insists that interest needs to be supplemented by "affection," that the most powerful model of obligation is one in which the Hobbesian quid pro quo is recast as a theatrical one, and that the strategic manipulation of fear needs to be replaced by pity or clemency. (9) The narrator of Theophania goes further, suggesting that pity, sentimental identification, or what we would call aesthetic interest can form the basis of a new political settlement. (10)

The works of Herbert, Brathwaite, and Sales thus bear out Derek Hirst's contention that in the 1650s defeated royalists made culture itself the ground of their political contestation. At the same time, they complicate Hirst's dichotomy of royalist culture and republican statecraft. According to Hirst, while royalist poets and preachers contrived "through the cult of Charles the Martyr . . . to sacralize authority and to render statecraft mysterious," Milton and his fellow republicans "sought to demystify statecraft" by emphasizing the role of interest, "consultation, designs, [and] policies" in the realm of politics. It is in this context, Hirst argues, that we should interpret royalist literature of the 1650s. To deploy "poetry as political statement in itself" was by implication "to assert the philistinism of those in power, and thus "to conduct a fundamental exercise in delegitimation. Not only were the rulers of the new state acting improperly . . . ; the state itself was improperly constituted." (11) Whe reas Hirst pits the royalists' claim to culture against the republican demystification of statecraft, the royalist prose romances of Herbert, Brathwaite, and Sales show that these authors were more interested in assimilating arguments about craft and interest than in refuting them. Caroline aestheticism failed, they suggest, because it was not interested enough; the aesthetic interest of prose romance is the vehicle of this political insight.

Taken together, Herbert, Brathwaite, and Sales chart a trajectory from a politics of narrow self-interest -- which contemporaries identified with Hobbes -- to a politics of aesthetic interest. In response to Hobbes' critique of vainglory, they extend an invitation to imaginative identification. In doing so, as we will see, they anticipate the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality and the emerging discipline of aesthetics. Speaking of Hobbes' attack on rationalism, Leo Strauss once remarked that it was not "a matter of chance, that la volonte generale and aesthetics were launched at precisely the same time." (12) In fact, Hobbes was skeptical of this link between political philosophy and aesthetics; it was his royalist contemporaries who were attempting to reforge that link after the death of "the royal aesthete." (13) A close look at these romances can thus shed light not only on the royalist response to defeat and the distinctive literary culture of England in the 1650s, but also on the neglected role of aesthetic interest in modern treatments of the "passions and interests" in seventeenth-century politics. (14)

HERBERT'S "CLORIA" AND WISE COMPLIANCE

Herbert's Cloria is in some ways the most Hobbesian of the romances, and thus allows us to see the innovations of Theophania and Panthalia by contrast. First published as Cloria and Narcissus in two parts in 1653 and 54, by 1661 The Princess Cloria had grown to five parts, and some six hundred pages. With Gloria standing for Mary (daughter of Charles I) and Narcissus representing William II (prince of Orange and Mary's husband), it offers an elaborate allegory of the English civil war in the context of European politics. Like Panthalia and Theophania, it is a work of analysis and counsel: analysis of how the royalists should have conducted themselves during the civil war, and counsel regarding what they should do to bring about the restoration of Charles II.

Counsel is in fact an explicit theme of Cloria and is manifest in part as an extreme self-consciousness about genre. The romance opens with the figure of Euarchus (Charles I) debating about whether to wage war on the continent. As writers in the employ of the Caroline court had argued, Charles' pacifist inclinations dictated a political romance of love rather than valor, peaceableness or passivity rather than military action. In Cloria, however, the characters repeatedly contest this interpretation of the genre both in action and speech. While the future Charles II/Arethusius traipses around Europe in a depressed state -- sometimes voicing highminded sentiments about honor and at other times giving in to self-pity and depression -- his younger brother tries to find an occasion to display his martial valor. In a more contemplative mode, Gloria and her maid Roxana debate "whether active valour, or passive courage, were the greater vertue, in that Euarchus seemed to possess them both in a high kinde"; while Cres es (Clarendon) cleverly responds that patient suffering requires valor more than military action: without the diversions of war, the mind needs greater courage to resist the "horrid apprehension" of the "imagination." (15) This self-consciousness about genre is further heightened by the inclusion of comic episodes reminiscent of the parody of chivalric romance in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. On one such occasion, Cloria ends up sharing a bed with a country bumpkin who confesses his desire to do "some notable exploit" to avenge the king's death and vindicate the people's "liberties." (16) Whether this is a satire of the ineffectual royalist party or proof of the naivete of those who believed in a military solution to the royalists' dilemma, it renders a political crisis as a crisis of genre.

The question we are asked to consider is, Do recent events dictate a chivalric romance of martial valor or a romance of love and marriage? Should the protagonists actively seek to determine their fortunes or should they patiently suffer their trials and tribulations? The answer seems to be neither. In the course of the narrative -- sometimes within a single episode -- the language of military valor and patient suffering gives way to recommendations of wise compliance, strategic calculation, and the theatrical manipulation of the passions. Thus, when Charles II/Arethusius concedes that dissimulation is sometimes necessary, but insists idealistically that "fame is the life and being of a Prince, and that cannot be ruled and governed either by the appetites, or the power of others, but by those demonstrations, that must make us appear as we ought to be, Gods upon earth, never to be terrified, or disobeyed," his trusted servant Meliander brings Charles down to earth with his reply: "I must confess Sir . . . that these are most glorious attributes, fitt to adorn a Princes dignity; but how they can be well attained, without a politick comportment in difficulties, I know not." Similarly, just a page after he has recommended "majestick patience," Creses praises Euarchus' "outward" yielding to his opponents' demands: "So that in my opinion, Euarchus hath done like a wise and Politick Prince, in seeming not to contend, where he was not sure to prevail .... And besides, it is to be considered, that no Act he shall pass in this condition of constraint, can binde either himself or posterity by all Humane and Divine Laws, if his sword ever become more powerful." (17) Creses' casuistical "seeming not to contend" echoes Roxana's earlier advice to Cloria that she give her "seeming consent" to an unwanted proposal of marriage: "which promise cannot binde at all, not onely in respect of your former obligation to Narcissus, but also in regard you are a prisoner, and therefore not tied to any contract made in such a state." Cloria ac cepts the advice, "wherein she shewed, that her necessities had taught her a craft, that was not at all in her nature, for that she alwayes esteemed it dishonourable to dissemble." (18) For Creses, patience and promises are forms of politic dissimulation, and this is a lesson Cloria quickly learns as well.

Gloria's revision of the Caroline romance is also apparent in its treatment of marriage. The marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria had served as a charged political metaphor for the harmony and stability of Charles' reign. Cloria presents a very different world from that of the Caroline politics of love. (19) Here, in the first sixty pages, we encounter two apparently different stories of marriage contracts. The first concerns the story of Osiris (the younger brother of Louis XIII), who is barred from marriage with his lover Alciana for political reasons. The second concerns the marriage contract of Gloria and Narcissus: "Such contracts made as these, may be / Esteem'd a blessed Unity." (20) In both cases, however, the message seems to be that marriage (like Charles' arcadianism) no longer does its political work in a dependable way. Later, when Osiris (now in love with someone else) becomes king, he is rebuked by his counselors that "it was no time to be amourous, when Memphis was in apparent danger to b e lost." Creses provides the appropriate comment. Hearing that the king of Spain has a daughter whom Mazarin wants to marry to Louis XIV, he remarks to Gloria, "neither at all times doth contracted marriages, hinder jealousies procured by reason of National quarrels, and seldom make friendships of a confident nature, when subjection thereby are [sic] feared." (21) In a similar vein, Cloria distinguishes between her marriage contract with Narcissus and the necessity of warfare in support of her father. (22) The marriages in this text are either really based on love, or purely political, but not a symbol of the unity of the two. Marriage is no longer an emblem of peace and harmony; at most, it is one instrument among others in the politician's arsenal.

The text evinces a corresponding skepticism about the power of the passions to inspire political obligation. Although numerous characters articulate the view that it is better for a ruler to be loved than feared, and that affection is stronger than interest, the passions are on the whole a source of distemper. The people of Lydia (England) are described as having fallen "into so absolute a stupidity or want of courage . . . by reason of their frequent sensualities, that they are content to buy their own slavery at any rate," while Charles II/Arethusius is tossed about by his "exasperated and desperate passions." (23) Particularly striking in this context is the depiction of the future king as a kvetch, one who at the slightest provocation bursts into an aria of passionate complaint about his treatment at the hands of his subjects, fate, even divine providence. The other characters begin to grow tired of his whining, and urge patience, constancy or wise compliance." (24)

The shift from neostoic "constancy" to "wise compliance" is important for understanding the role of the passions in this text. (25) Ideally, the passions should be the object of moral supervision; practically speaking, however, they have their uses. They should not be simply repressed or even tempered but rather strategically solicited and deployed. Here Cloria comes closer to Cicero than to Hobbes. First, in contrast to the Hobbesian emphasis on the fear of violent death, the central passion in the newly demystified world of self-interest is, paradoxically, love. (26) Then, passion is not so much a primary motive or incentive for deliberating about self-interest, as part of a strategy of representation that follows from the calculation of self-interest. For example, the depiction of the restoration of Charles at the end of Cloria makes it clear that the outpouring of love on the part of his newly obedient subjects is inseparable from a strategic consideration of their interests. At his entry into England, Ch arles is

accompanied by the chiefest Magistrates, [who] met him many furlongs from their dwellings, to shew a loving duty to his person...; the Military Discipline being in the streets under curious Banners, both to guard and satisfie his content, when the keys of every gate in the interim were delivered into the possession of his own Officers, that dispersed the command among the Souldiers, as if their natural allegiance belonged onely to King Arethusius, as an appearing conqueror of all mens affection. (608)

It is hard to imagine a more qualified representation of the people's affection for their sovereign. "Loving duty" and "natural allegiance" bracket what is arguably the more important point: that Charles has regained control over the militia (an issue of contention in 1642, at the beginning of the civil war). Charles is only "an appearing conqueror" of his subjects' affections. Moreover, the subjunctive "as if" recalls us to an earlier description of Charles viewing these "gallant demonstrations of joy" with "a certain kinde of disdainful aspect, both in regard to his own former usage, as for their want of care in his Sisters [Cloria's] particular; notwithstanding he determined totally to dissemble his passions, either until he was better settled in his Kingdom, or they had procured from him a milder opinion." Although this Charles II is not a quick study, he has by the end of Gloria learned to dissemble his passions in a politic way. (27)

Ultimately, the lesson of Gloria is one of politic negotiation. The particular message to Charles II, whose father is depicted as partially responsible for the outbreak of civil war, is that the king should not rule absolutely, nor should he attempt to rule simply by love. Rather he should be constrained by the fundamental laws of the kingdom, and by a strategic consideration of the power politics of nation states on the continent. (28) The lesson of politic negotiation is also important for the subject/reader. Although, on the whole, the people in this text are represented as incapable of deliberating about their own interest, their follies are the object of the reader's deliberations.

The goal here seems to be to help the reader learn the difference between slavery to one's passions and rational subjection to one's sovereign.

This message is conveyed both thematically and formally. Thus, when Charles enters London he confronts a poem engraved on the city gate which instructs us that "Dark Rebellion's gone." The poem reads in part:

The Fates have trifled all this time ; they knew
No mortal spight could long contest you due:
It 'twas their craft to let your Subjects see,
All were but Slaves, and you have set them free.
                                      (613)

As the quatrain makes clear, the achievement of the romance is to recast contingency as fate. (29) The extended trifling, digressions, and set pieces of the romance plot are now described as a deliberate strategy. What appeared to be randomness was really design which, the narrator suggests, was as much a matter of providence as artifice. The imposition of a deus ex machina conclusion brings about an aesthetically satisfying, providentially ordained freedom -- to which the people and the reader willingly submit. But there is another message for the reader of the text. In attributing craft to the fates, the narrator of Cloria calls attention to the conventional romance ending of the narrative and provides a "theological" justification for feigning, construed not only as the duplicity inherent in representation but also as the strategic misrepresentation or wise compliance dictated by politics. In freeing the subjects from their slavery (or rather, helping them understand that their former "freedom" was really bondage), the narrative encourages not only rational deliberation but also a kind of craft on the part of the reader. In this respect, the reader is invited to imitate the author rather than Charles II.

In alternating between providential and naturalistic explanations of the plot, Herbert uncannily reproduces the narrative strategy of Heliodorus' Aithiopika, the most popular Greek romance of the early modern period. And in doing so, Herbert, like Heliodorus, foregrounds the author's artistry in reconciling these two explanations of events. (30) As John J. Winkler has observed of the Aithiopika, "the novel concludes with a new religious significance read into the romantic events, [but] this religious significance is not religiously meant." (31) In Winkler's account, Heliodorus is chiefly concerned with the way in which "the interplay" of romantic melodrama and providential explanation allows him to display an ironic self-consciousness about literary convention and genre. Gloria also alternates between a religious and secular rhetoric, and dramatizes a similar self-consciousness about genre. But in Gloria this literary self-consciousness also serves a political function. By inculcating an ironic detachment fro m the conventions of romance, it also encourages an awareness of the conventions of representation in politics. (32)

The Preface to Cloria comments at greater length on the discipline that romance can provide the unruly reader. The author tells us that the genre of romance both reflects the tumultuous times of civil war and proposes a solution to this crisis. It is a reflection since recent political events have been as incredible as a romance: "it cannot be denyed, but the Ground-work for a Romance was excellent; and the rather, since by no other way almost, could the multiplicity of strange Actions of the Times be exprest, that exceeded all belief, and went beyond every example in the doing." It offers a solution since it engages the reader's interest through the lure of aesthetic pleasure, and provides idealized images of virtue "to put persons in minde, what they ought to do." Like other early modern defenders of poetry, the author both subordinates pleasure to instruction and distinguishes between them in terms of the skill of the reader. To intelligent readers, indeed for "any, who have been indifferently versed in th e Affairs of Europe," Gloria presents an easily deciphered political allegory. To "the more vulgar sort, [it offers] a bare Romance of Love and Chivalry" which delights without instructing. (33)

It is chiefly the former, more skilled reader whom the author of the preface has in mind. Thus he goes on to discuss the fanciful portrayal in romance of scenes of probable reasoning, which serve in turn to educate the reader's judgment. As in so many Renaissance defenses of poetry, fancy is now described as conducing to equitable judgment. To the objection that romances "Invention and Fancies ... leads [sic] peoples thoughts into a dark Labyrinth of uncertainties," the writer replies that fidelity to historical truth precludes the "liberty for inward disputations, or supposed passions to be discovered." In a romance, by contrast, each character's deliberation "stirs up the appetite of the Reader" and provides a model worthy of imitation. Clorids "Discourses probable...may put people in minde of what they may say and do another time, with more advantage to themselves or employment; especially seeing it is impossible otherwise to express inward passions and hidden thoughts that of necessity accompany all Trans actions of consequence." This defense of invention sounds like Sidney's Apology for Poetry, but with an even greater emphasis on the representation of "inward passions and hidden thoughts." Just as important as the representation of virtue is the representation of the psychology and motivation of virtue. Just as crucial as "put[ting] us in minde of Vertues and their effects" is "continu[ing] them constantly in our thoughts and desires; whereby to render them habitual to our natures." This preoccupation with the representation and reproduction of inward passions will be even more pronounced in Panthalia and Theophania. (34)

In a remarkable turn towards the end of the preface, the writer connects the genre of romance to the question of political origins.

For Stories of former Ages are no other, then certain kinde of Romances to succeeding posterity; since they have no testimony for them but mens probable opinions; seeing the Historical part almost of all Countreys is subject to be questioned; neither is it any great matter as to our profit, whether they were exactly so or no, provided Bravery be cherished, and Baseness discountenanced to our Instruction; in that all things are but to teach people how to do well, and avoid the contrary; wherefore [it is] to be considered, that the Authour had a greater desire to discourse the causes of Accidents, then the truth of Actions.

Here the author conflates history and romance: we have no certain knowledge of the past, only of others' opinions. The origin of all governments is questionable, which in this period is as much to say founded on conquest (as writers as diverse as Marchamont Nedham and James I had argued). In this light, the notion of legitimate authority is a kind of fiction or romance told to "succeeding posterity. " The writer of the preface defends these legitimating fictions, as long as they teach the people "how to do well."

This conflation of history and romance then provides a defense of Cloria. Although in describing the author's "desire to discourse the causes of Accidents, then the truth of Actions," the writer of the preface associates both political authority and the contract of genre with the contingent realm of romance, he does not want to discredit either the literary contract or the notion of political authority. For if the non-Aristotelian notion of a caused accident is a good description of the anomalous world of romance, the language of supposition signals the goal of redeeming romance for Aristotelian poetics. In short, the writer of the preface wants to "legitimate" romance by virtue of the reader's participation in the construction of its verisimilitude. By extension, he also makes room for the subject's participation in the construction of political authority. (35) At the same time he reassures us that, unlike other more elaborate romances, Cloria does not depend on and will not elicit the paralogisms or "false conjectures, which in a Romance, is not proper." Instead, he assures us, the romance form of Cloria will "stir up the appetite of the Reader to a continuance," not only to continued reading but also to continued equitable reasoning and political allegiance. (36)

Nigel Smith has argued that, to the demise of Caroline arcadian romance, "Cloria provides reactions rather than answers, and its arguable insufficiency in this respect points to one reason why post-Arcadian romance faded away. Not only was it associated with royalism, and its fictionality drained by allegorical pressure, it had no answers within itself for the predicament in which many of its readers found themselves." (37) It's true that the conclusion imposes a providential sanction on the Restoration which the characters had sought in vain for the previous six hundred pages; but the real message of the work lies not in its conclusion but in the narrative as a whole, which offers a remarkably astute analysis of the power politics of the major European states -- a politics based on faction, interest, and the dispassionate evaluation of competing military forces. Despite the moralizing rhetoric of the prefatory letter to the reader, supposition and probable reasoning are freed from the constraints of virtue, while political interest is shown to be inseparable from a kind of crafty aesthetic interest, an interest in the uses of representation, including the representation of the passions.

BRATHWAITE'S "PANTHALIA" AND THE POLITICS OF PITY

Like Gloria, Richard Brathwaite's Panthalia: or the Royal Romance both allegorizes the events of the civil war and reflects on the politics of genre. This reflection takes the form of a meditation on the use and abuse of romance in domestic and foreign policy from the reign of Elizabeth through the restoration of Charles II. Specifically, Panthalia diagnoses the corruption of political passions -- the declension from the Machiavellian and Elizabethan dyad of fear and love to the debauchery and uxoriousness of the courts of James and Charles. Like Herbert, Brathwaite redescribes the dangerous passions of love and honor in terms of politic self-interest. And, like Herbert, he makes our interest in aesthetic craft a model for voluntary subjection to the sovereign. (38)

In the seventeenth century, the reign of Elizabeth was the object of nostalgic admiration for the way the queen managed her court and conducted her foreign policy. In both spheres she provided a striking contrast to the reigns of James and Charles. This is the function of Bellingeria (Elizabeth I) in Panthalia as well. In particular, Bellingeria is praised for her skill in manipulating the passions: "being no lesse formidable to her Enemies; then infinitely winning and affectionate to her own: as she might app eale to the whole progresse of her flourishing Government, if every any State were managed with more Forraigne featre and Domestick love." (39) Although Clarentio (Essex) is portrayed sympathetically as a figure out of chivalric romance, Bellingeria's treatment of him (and of "Mariana") is excused by being blamed on her servants and by being psychologized: "But Crowns and Nuptial Beds, as they admit no Competitors, so their enjoyment begets, many times, sundry causeless fears" which end in tragedy. (40) As her name suggests, Bellingeria embodies something of Essex's own martial spirit: while recognizing the political importance of her subjects' affections, she also knows how to distinguish affairs of the heart from affairs of state and is suitably martial in the latter (especially in comparison with her successor).

The respectful treatment accorded Elizabeth is nowhere in evidence when we come to Basilius (James). Here Brathwaite's characterization of James is in keeping with much commonwealth historiography, which presented James' decadence and profligacy as largely responsible for the outbreak of the civil war. (41) If the name of the misguided ruler of Sidney's Arcadia weren't enough to cue the reader's judgment, the narrator tells us that Basilius is taken up with "amorous parlies" rather than state affairs. In the degenerate court of James I, one kind of romance has replaced another: "Tilts and Turnaments... became Addresses of too virile a quality"; effeminate courtiers spend their time watching comic and pastoral romance; no one is capable of real employment in "State-service":

Carpet-Knights were not for Campe-Service: nor Court-Couches convertible to Field-Bedds. Schools and Academies of Love stored with choicest Lectures of pure and attractive Rhetorick, to make their dialect a more powerfull Sollicitor to Fancy, were erected: And Masters of Revells appointed and amply endowed; and these were imployed in contriving and inventing [a] variety of Comic and Pastorall delights: which were usually represented in their private Court Theaters, purposely erected for such Enterludes and Comicall Inventions. And good opportunity had Ismenia with her amorous Ladies to play the Platonick Courtiers: seeing Basilius made the Wild Forrest the Place of his solace and recreation. (39-40)

Furthermore, despite the king's poems celebrating the royal romance, Basilius is portrayed as indifferent "to Feminine Objects" owing to his "affection to the contrary Sex," while the Queen Ismenia is rumored to have favorites of her own. (42)

This enervation of romance affects the negotiations over Rosicles/prince Charles' marriage. For reasons of personal revenge, Silures/Buckingham, "the Catamite of our time," blocks the Spanish marriage negotiations. The pursuit of pleasure and of self-interest, that is, overcomes state-interest. (43) Increasingly in this climate, all professions of love begin to look like hypocrisy. There follows an elaborate allegory of Charles' courtship of Henrietta Maria, who needs to be convinced that Charles has not already been rejected by the Infanta and then that he is not inconstant. Commenting on how the hypertrophy of romance conventions mirrors the resentful scheming of figures such as Silures/Buckingham, Irina/Henrietta Maria remarks, "the whole world...presents but in a Land-skip, a continued counterfet Lovemask; wherein appears variety of Faces, but they are not native nor genuine" (86).

A different -- but equally ineffectual -- royal romance takes center stage at the court of Rosicles and Irma. Here Brathwaite draws on the numerous contemporary portraits of Charles as uxorious and Henrietta Maria as domineering:

[the] Prince became a Subject to his Queens Command: and she to the pursuit of her own pleasure. A conjugall love injoyned him to obey: and a native affection to Courtly delights begot in her an easie Soveraignty to Command.

This inversion of political and gender roles is then aggravated by the king's own confession of a prior contract to the Infanta: "his breach in so high an Interest [was] construed to be a dangerous Omen to his future Success." These breaches of political and affective decorum help to explain why the people "could not Find hearts to believe: where they could find none to love." (44) Genuine love or affection is represented by the narrator as a necessary ingredient to political success, the necessary disciplinary supplement to the law:

Loialty appeares ever an attentive hearer; whereas Sedition proves an indocile Scholar. Lectures of Morall discipline or legall obedience are of hard digestion to such fiery spirits. It is true; The Law is the safeguard; The Custody of all private Interests; Personall Honours, Lives, Liberties, and Estates are all in the keeping of the Law; without this, no Soveraignty; no Propriety; every man hath a like right to everything.

Yet this Law so necessarily conducing to the Conservation of all Estates is to be moulded after the Lesbian Rule: it is to be evenly squared....If the Prerogative of the King overwhelme the liberty of the People, it will be turned to Tyranny; If Liberty undermine the Prerogative, it will grow into Anarchy. An even hand is ever fittest to guide the helme of State. But it is affection that gives the best Calking to the Vessel. (45)

This extraordinary passage reads as an attempt to use the parliamentary rhetoric of fundamental law for royalist ends, to balance the people's liberty against the royal prerogative, and to advise the king about the necessary supplement of the affections. If law is the bulwark against a Hobbesian state of nature in which "every man hath a like right to everything," affection is the bulwark against "fiery spirits." It is as though Brathwaite wanted to extricate a Ciceronian pragmatism from the Neoplatonic rhetoric of love at the Caroline court. At the same time, the narrator cautions that, while it may be better to be loved than hated, it is not good to have to "beg acceptance from your subjects. The necessity of love risks putting the sovereign in a position of dependence; besides, affection alone cannot take the place of military force since the people will desert their sovereign when it is in their own interest to do so. (46)

Brathwaite's anatomy of romance -- his distinction between the admirable chivalric honor of an Essex and the romance debauchery and delusions of the Stuart court, along with his recommendation of a politic appeal to the affections -- is further complicated by the romance insert of "The Pleasant Passages of Panthalia, the Pretty Pedler." This is a miniature prose romance in the tradition of the Italian novella famously criticized by Roger Ascham in The Scholemaster (1570). Panthalia is in love with Acolasto, but Acolasro is a scoundrel who has run off to the wars because he has run out of credit in regular life: he has contracted debts just as he has clandestinely contracted to marry Panthalia. Brathwaite thus links the credit relations of the new market economy to the danger of deception in clandestine marriage; (47) yet, he also shows dissimulation is the motor of the romance plot and a necessary part of our aesthetic interest, Panthalia dresses up as a peddler in order to seek Acolasto in the camps and in t his disguise becomes the love object and Platonic "Idea" of one Aretina, whom she pretends to love and then disabuses regarding her apparent sex. This double-edged parody of Platonic love portrays courtly rhetoric as both removed from real life and the vehicle of self-interested deception. The insert then shifts from a parody of courtly romance to allegorical commentary on the causes of the English civil war. Panthalia describes how the king's subjects have grown weary of "Commodity [trade], Liberty and Tranquillity" and analyzes the reasons for Climenes/Cromwell's success. Here we find the negative version of Bellingeria's masterful rhetoric: Climenes "declared himself a singular Artizan in the successful pursuit of his own aspiring interest" and he did so in part by "insinuating himself into [others'] affections. " (48)

This dispassionate political analysis then finds fruition in Panthalia's resolution to leave Acolasto, both because of his inconstant affections and his probable "Conjugall tyranny." "I have suffered enough," she writes to him, "I meane not to be unpittiful to my self, as to enlarge sufferings with fresh feares or inconstant Fancies....Private Contracts being not accompanied with other Ceremoniall Observances and Conjugall Offices...may legally admit a dispensation." (49) Lacking the legal "consideration" of Acolasto's conjugal offices, Panthalia is justified in acting out of self-pity, breaking their contract, and joining the contemplative order of Delia. Although, after a series of twists and turns, Acolasto reconquers her love and they are married, separated, and reunited (Acolasto enjoys an "act of Oblivion" regarding his former transgressions), they do not live happily ever after. We are pointedly told that Acolasto becomes uxorious, patently as much of a problem as being unfaithful. Clearly Panthalia an d Acolasto -- like Charles and Henrietta Maria? -- have not found the proper balance between passion and interest.

In Panthalia as a whole, as in this romance insert, Brathwaite seems to be trying to make sense of the role of the passions in both the domestic and political sphere. Yet, while the story of Panthalia links the crisis of the affections to the new world of market relations, the larger narrative suggests that the crisis is more political than economic: the king's earlier broken marriage contract implies that his word cannot be taken on credit, and this doubt of the king's word in turn reinforces the subject's pursuit of self-interest. As in Cloria, although the analogy between the marriage contract and the contract of sovereignty is still in evidence, it functions more as a sign of crisis than of harmony and reconciliation. (Basilius' invocation of this rhetoric of harmony is portrayed as deluded at best, hypocritical at worst.) An equally disturbing cause of distrust is the king's failure to support his "faithfull servant," Sophronio/Strafford. Whether in the public or private sphere, vows and contracts need t o be "accompanied with other Ceremoniall Observances and Conjugall Offices." And in both spheres, interest needs to be balanced with passion, romance artifice with genuine affection. (50)

It is significant in this light that, in the remainder of the narrative, it is no longer the Ciceronian and Machiavellian dyad of fear and love but the aesthetic passions of pity and fear that play a prominent role. (51) In the early modern period, the history of these passions was intertwined with the reception of Aristotle's Poetics and with Stoicism; and in both cases, pity was associated with a kind of aesthetic pleasure. Although in the Poetics Aristotle famously argued that tragedy elicits and purges the emotions of pity and fear, in the De clementia Seneca asserted that pity and theatricality were mutually enforcing. Specifically, he contrasted pity, the potentially effeminizing emotional response to spectacles of sorrow, and clemency, a rational and helpful response to another's suffering: "Misericordia non causam, sed fortunam spectat; clementia rationi accedit" (pity regards the plight, not the cause of it; mercy is combined with reason). The merciful man "will bring relief to another's tears, but w ill not add his own." (52) For this reason Seneca argued that mercy or clemency was a kind of equitable judgment (2.7.3). But early modern readers would also have been familiar with counter-arguments, which recuperated the aesthetic response of pity as an ethical passion: Renaissance Italian commentators on the Poetics had taken issue with the view that pity should be purged, and Calvin had written a commentary on the De clementia in which he expressed a similar concern about Seneca's repudiation of pity. (53) These distinctions bear, as we shall see, on Brathwaite's analysis of Charles I's mistakes and his recommendations to the future Charles II. To be an object of pity, he tells us, is a problem; to stage a spectacle of pity -- to represent pity -- is a source of political power.

Incapable of setting the stage themselves and manipulating the passions of others, Brathwaite's Cromwell and the two Charles are passive before their subjects' gaze: Climenes is pathetically afraid of the people, while Rosicles and Charicles (Charles I and II) are objects of pity. Not surprisingly, the narrator describes the new state as "State-Theatre" and blames this spectacle on the subjects' desire for "innovation" as much as on their rulers' ineptness. As a result, Rosicles and Charicles find themselves playing the role not of chivalric knight so much as suffering damsel in distress. The narrator also repeatedly calls attention to the lost world of chivalric honor and true romance by referring to the "mushrump-gallantry" and the "Sprouts of adventitious Honour" who inhabit the present parliament. (54)

But, by the end of the text, this dangerous aestheticizing, even effeminizing, of sovereignty has been turned on its head. The Restoration occurs in the final pages of the text and is celebrated by a "dance of Sylvans" who enact an "antick" failed coronation of Climenes. (55) With this pastoral interlude Brathwaite simultaneously mocks Cromwell's affected humility and dramatizes the inescapably theatrical dimension of politics. But something has changed. While, up until this point, the question has been What kind of romance hero do you want to be? the final pages attempt to move beyond the romance world of contingency altogether. (56) Crucially, in conclusion Charicles reappropriates the passion of pity which he now extends to his subjects in the form of clemency. Charicles himself represents his clemency as a complicated theatrical performance. By feigning ignorance (or misrecognition) of his subjects' faithlessness, Charicles claims, he invites them to a kind of closet drama or "bosom-agnition of their own disloyalty." At the same time, he stages the public spectacle of his power: "To have it in ones power to punish, and not to inflict it, I have ever held it Princely," he pronounces, paraphrasing Seneca's De clementia. (57) In his treatment of Charicles, in short, Brathwaite illustrates both Seneca's critique of pity and his analysis of the power of clemency, while also associating clemency (as, in fact, Seneca does) with a politically shrewd theatrical staging of one's power.

The public display of clemency also allows Charicles to reestablish the force of the sovereign's word:

Rely on the reputation of his word [he tells his subjects], under whose Sovereignty you live, that you cannot be more dear to your selves then you shall be unto us, so popular Faction divide you not from us. Nor do we doubt it, for we see that cheerfulness in your faces, as it assures us, that nothing but Characters of loyalty can be writ in your hearts: From which assurance, we have signed your pardon with the Signet Manual of our pity.

Like divine providence, Charicles is now the dispenser rather than the object of pity, the author rather than the character. His subjects' -- rather than his own -- faithfulness may be open to doubt (there is a disturbing echo of Duncan's "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face" in Macbeth), but it is in Charicles' power to resolve the crisis of faithfulness through his own clemency and trust. (58) The metaphor of "characters of loyalty" written on the subjects' hearts is reminiscent of the scriptural image of conscience as the law written on the heart by God. But here the narrator implies that the king is the writer of loyal "characters," that this writing or character is itself the effect rather than the cause of his pity. As in the conclusion to Cloria, providential and naturalistic explanations of the plot converge to foreground not only the author's but also the royal protagonist's artistry. As though to address whatever discomfort we may feel faced with this exposure of the theatri cal dimension of politics, Charicles reiterates in conclusion that his resolve is "steered rather by Reason then Passion," that is, by the rational response of "Princely Clemency." Then, as a sign of his confidence in his own judgment, he invites his subjects to "unsheath [their swords] against us, when we act ought deviously, or contrary to the rule of Equity." (59) In his new relation to his subjects, Charicles provides us with a perfect example of controlling the potentially wayward passion of pity by the representation of pity, that is, by clemency. He provides, that is, a perfect image of the link between clemency, equity, and artistry.

SALES' "THEOPHANIA" AND SYMPATHY "BETWEEN MEN"

Like Cloria and Panthalia, Theophania depicts a Hobbesian world in which genuine passion -- not least the passion for glory -- is both a sign of true aristocratic virtue and a cause of civil war. Civil war in turn contributes to a crisis of the affections, an uncertainty about their role in court culture and politics. Depending on who is speaking, passion is either distinguished from the calculation of self-interest or conflated with it, as though Sales were trying to find a way to accommodate the old world of chivalric virtue to the new world of "politick maxims." (60) At the same time, like Brathwaite and Herbert, Sales resists the reduction of all behavior to interest. Repeatedly in the narrative, chivalric honor is portrayed as a principle of erotic identification -- the soldier is above all a man of feeling. Such identification, it is suggested, may in turn become the basis of a new political order of sensibility -- or perhaps a newly aestheticized order of sensibility that is less obviously political th an the old. The mimetic desire that contributed to civil war -- the desire for glory in the eyes of others -- may itself provide the basis of the Restoration. (61) (Theophania was written in 1645, and published in 1655, so the Restoration is merely hypothetical.)

In conspicuous imitation of Sidney's Arcadia, the narrative opens with the shipwreck of two young men, Demetrius (the prince of Orange) and Philocles (Prince Rupert, nephew of Charles I). They are rescued by Synesius (Robert Sidney, the second earl of Leicester) who has retired in wartime to his country estate (Penshurst). After a series of military skirmishes in the surrounding countryside, they are joined by Alexandro, the prince of Wales, and Cenodoxius, the third earl of Essex and erstwhile commander of the parliamentary forces. The remainder of the narrative is then taken up with Synesius' questioning of his visitors about the events of the war and their responses.

The genre of prose romance is well suited to representing the complicated political stance of the author. As Ian McLellan has convincingly argued, the romance is a vehicle for the political views of Robert Sidney, second earl of Leicester (1595-1677), who urged negotiation between the royalists and Essex. One of the chief burdens of the text is to justify the actions of Essex without offending the royalist party; equally or more important was the defense of Leicester himself against charges of inconstancy vis-a-vis the king. (62) The typical romance device of the inset narrative serves these purposes by allowing for the rhetorical redescription of the "same" events from different perspectives. For example, in a long inset narrative Cenodoxius/Essex justifies his rebellion in terms of the indignities he and his family have suffered at the hands of their monarchs. He then defends his actions by describing them in terms of the chivalric code of love and honor. In both cases, true passion is a sign of aristocrati c virtue and is conspicuously opposed to the conniving self-interest of the crown. In response, Leicester criticizes Essex by redescribing his actions in terms of factional self-interest. Yet Leicester also reprimands the Stuarts for indulging their passions and appeals to politic considerations of interest to urge reconciliation between Essex and the prince of Wales.

In his account of the slights to his family, Cenodoxius portrays his father, the second earl of Essex, as the constant lover and faithful servant of the inconstant Elizabeth, who did not hesitate to abandon him when he no longer served her purposes. Interest, not passion, was the driving force behind Elizabethan policy, as we see in the following depiction of her relationship with her subjects:

Wherefore knowing that a Prince who will be absolute, must either by an awful terror compel a strict obedience, or else with a show at least of clemencie and vertue gain the affections of the people; and being in her nature cruel and ambitious, she thought severity the most certain means to compass her designs: Nevertheless surpassing even all her sexe in the art of dissembling, she so vailed it over with a mask of affability, that though she were resolved to make her will a law, yet she appeared to the vulgar the most submiss of women, and was believed to have neither affections nor desires, but what tended only to the public good: Insomuch that her most violent proceedings were thought forced by a publike necessity ... and which was most admirable, her profound dissimulations real virtues, and an innate tenderness or affection of the people; by which she so won their hearts, who judge only by outward appearances. (63)

Elizabeth appears here as the Machiavellian prince who knows that it's better to be feared than loved, although ideally both are desirable. Affection is a theatrical effect, designed to win the people, who judge only by appearances, to "slavish obedience." Although there is some suggestion that the queen's feelings for Essex were genuine at one time, Cenodoxius makes it clear that considerations of self-preservation and expediency were always foremost in Elizabeth's mind. Essex, in contrast, lived according to a chivalric code of honor rather than the "politick maxims of the present Government." (64)

A similar opposition between passion and interest appears to govern the life of the third earl of Essex. Like his father, Cenodoxius presents himself as motivated by genuine passion -- "the resistless power of love" -- and as abused by his sovereigns. Thus he narrates in what must have been, for contemporaries, gripping detail the story of his courtship and clandestine marriage to the notorious Frances Howard, whom James then married to his favorite, Robert Carr. (65) He tells us how, when asked to explain his "pretences of Interest in that Lady," he "related at large the birth, growth, and maturation of our Love, our mutual Vows, our private Contracts, our formal marriage, and at last the fruition of those joys." (66) He describes the insult to his honor when King James arranged for the annulment of the marriage on the grounds it had not been consummated (Cenodoxius tells us the evidence included a faked test of chastity, in which Artemia/Frances Howard was impersonated by her virgin maid). This story of pas sion and deception is repeated in the reign of Charles, when Essex resolves "once more to become a courtier," again becomes "a slave to love," is again betrayed by his wife, and again insulted by the king, who refuses to punish the guilty parties. (67) Although not as cunning as Elizabeth in her treatment of the second earl of Essex, James and Charles are equally guilty of casting aspersions on the third earl's manhood and aristocratic honor. In doing so, they prime him for the tragedy of vainglory so astutely analyzed by Hobbes in Leviathan and Behemoth. (68)

According to Essex's own Hobbesian analysis, his passion is not only a sign of aristocratic virtue but also a cause of civil war, for it was on the basis of his many grievances that others could persuade him to take up arms against the king:

My Fathers blood, Agnesias [his mother's] languishing griefs, my violate marriage, and this late contempt, raised several passions, which like so many torrents overthrew all obstacles that withstood the rapacity of their course, where they met the greatest checks, raging with the greatest impetuosity, and though the sacred person of the King, with the holy Office of the Priesthood, seemed secure Ramparts against any violence, they swelled to such a prodigious height, that at last they overflowed them, and have now caused such a vast sea of confusion, in which my self have suffered a miserable shipwreck.

Nevertheless those two considerations of piety and allegiance had perhaps suppressed such unruly thoughts, if the malecontents of the times perceiving my distemper, had not taken that opportunity to enage me in their own (69)

Essex appropriates the proverbial romance tempest and shipwreck as metaphors for his own emotional confusion: his passions, he argues, are both inconstant and genuine -- inconstant because genuine -- and thus their own apology.

Yet, as in the case of Essex's analysis of Elizabeth affection for her people, what is passion from one perspective is interest from another. Listening to this narrative, Alexandro (Prince Charles) is suspicious Cenodoxius' "reformation" and of his offer to assist the royalist cause:

I had rather to enjoy a divided Empire with [Corastus/Fair fax], then be fully restored by the assistance of Cenodoxius; for his proceedings under specious pretences of reformation, and dissembled protestations to advance the interests of the Crown have been so injurious both to King and people, that by his wicked practices they are now almost irreconicileably [sic] engaged in one anothers ruine: Yet I must confess if he had avowed his cause, I should not have been so much offended with his actions, nor altogether so averse from such a reconciliation: For great men that are sensible of their own dishonour, are the fittest Ministers for Princes, and being cherished, the chief supports of the Crown. (70)

In this complicated analysis, Alexandro recasts Cenodoxius' passionate defense of his honor as a matter of factional self-interest but he also betrays some sympathy for the self-serving pursuit of "greatness." Although, he seems to suggest, love of one's sovereign (as of one's subjects) can be feigned, love of honor cannot. Thus, the very passion that led Essex to rebel is potentially just as dependable and calculable in its own way as self-interest. In fact, there is little or no difference between them, and this is a source of strength as well as danger for the sovereign who knows how to "cherish" his nobility.

In his own response to Cenodoxius' narrative, Synesius is less optimistic about the conversion of vainglory to the public interest. Like Hobbes commenting on the lethal rivalry inherent in chivalric culture, Synesius recasts Cenodoxius' motivating passions as injured "Vanity and Revenge:" "Cenodoxius, moved by the sense of his disgraces, finding the humors of men so congruent to his designs, through Vanity and Revenge, engaged us all in a miserable war, of which he was himself the first Author, so himself hath felt first the cruel effects thereof." (71) Mimetic desire has been rampant in the life of Cenodoxius: out of affection, the king procured Cenodoxius' wife (Artemia/Frances Howard) for his favorite (Robert Carr). As a result, Cenodoxius' honor was offended, and so he found others similarly offended with whom to join in battle. In both cases, the courtly bond is first and foremost a bond between men, an erotic bond which is also the occasion of rivalry and violence. The civil war is itself one of the "ho rrid effects of sympathy."

But mimetic desire is not the only problem. Synesius also invites Alexandro to recognize how the Stuarts' neglect of the public interest contributed to the present state of civil war:

the frequent bloody strife between our Kings and the Nobility ... were the necessary consequences of an ill composed government in the first institution, which neither sufficiently declaring in whom consisted that supream authority, which is necessary to the preservation of every Commonwealth, not yet fully determining the right of succession, left a liberty to subjects to enlarge their privileges by force, and to every one, as he had most power, the arbitrament of his own interest. (72)

Earlier monarchs' reluctance or inability to rule absolutely left a power vacuum in which powerful nobles acted according to their own factional selfinterest.73 Moreover, James and Charles were in turn "inconstant": lenient when it came to their courtiers' private interests and negligent in advancing the public interest. In both cases, this inconstancy was related to unregulated passion. Just as James was "too much byassed by his own affections," especially for Buckingham, so Charles was biased by his affection for Henrietta Maria. This dual misgovernment of passion and interest, Synesius concludes, set the stage for Essex's rebellion:

Thus, what one built, another presently destroyed, and those active spirits, who sought to prefer themselves, neglecting the interests of their Country, applyed themselves onely to those studies that might render them most gratefull to the present favorites .... That Country which is so unhappy to be governed by such depraved Counsels, must of necessity be a nursery of factions and discontents, which through those errors, and defects so abounded amongst us, that it was impossible they should be long contained within the bounds of duty. (74)

The remedy, Synesius argues, is a strong sovereign power, along with attention to "politick maximes" and to the "fundamental laws" which are designed to preserve the public interest. On the basis of England's interest in self-preservation and his own assessment of the unlikelihood of assistance from other European nation states, Synesius urges reconciliation with Cenodoxius and his followers. Cenodoxius has promised obedience and "a Prince who is deputed by Heaven, to exercise a kingly power upon Earth, ought in this to imitate the supreme Divinity, that though the people only through fear of punishment are obedient to his Laws, yet whilst they perform their duty, he refuseth them not his protection." (75) This advice echoes that of Tacitus, Jean Bodin, and in particular Leicester's friend, Hugo Grotius, whom he had come to know while serving as ambassador to France in the 1630s. (76) In his private papers, Leicester had meditated on the origin of government and the question of political obligation in explici tly Grotian terms: "I [believe] ... as Grotius sayeth, that men, not by the commandment of God, but of their own [mind] ... did gather themselves together into civile societyes from whence the civile power hath beginning, and is therefore called a humane ordinance." In other words, "Kings made not themselves by force, but were created in all nations by the people for the public good." The proper response to human weakness and fallibility was for men "to make Laws with consideration of humane infirmity, and for the benefit of the whole." And he concluded, "This is cleare enough in ye mindes of all men, unless it be of such as for their own interests flatter princes in the ruine of theyr country and of all honest men.

The romance as a whole, however, is not content with the politic solutions of either Alexandro or Synesius. To Alexandro's redescription of the unstable passions of love and honor in terms of calculable interest, and Synesius' proposal of a Hobbesian quid pro quo, Sales adds a number of powerful scenes of passion. In a series of erotically charged tableaux, he both dramatizes his sympathy for the older aristocratic values of love and honor, and suggests that these passions may become the basis of a new social order. Mimetic desire is still at work in these scenes, but it produces sympathy rather than rivalry. An erotically charged aesthetic interest substitutes for political interest as the characters respond to "spectacles of sorrow" with pity and compassion rather than "vanity and revenge." These sympathetic passions, which differ not only from Synesius' politic counsel but also from the rational clemency recommended by Seneca and Brathwaite, are particularly associated with those figures fighting on the si de of the king.

Essex's long, central narrative is framed by the adventures of Alexandro (Prince Charles) and Demetrius (William, the young prince of Orange), as they are narrated to Synesius (the earl of Leicester). Although Alexandro and Demetrius are drawn together by reports of each other's virtue, they do not meet on the battlefield but -- for all practical purposes -- in bed. Alexandro, who is suffering from battle wounds and even more from lovesickness presents "a spectacle of sorrow" to the Leicester household: even his servant faints for pity on Alexandro's bed. Alexandro tries to revive him and when the doctor Cassianus arrives to check on his royal patient, he is "not a little surprised to find them in such a posture." This ambiguous encounter sets the stage for the meeting of Demetrius and Alexandro a few pages later. Demetrius' eagerness to see Alexandro is referred to as a kind of "courtship." (78) When Alexandro comes to Demetrius' bedroom, Demetrius (who is himself recovering from his exposure at sea) faints at the sight:

But when he saw Alexandro, who presently went to embrace him, instead of returning that civility, all his senses were on a sudden seised with so strange a stupidity; that falling backwards upon his pillow, he fixed his eyes upon him with such a ghastly countenance, that they all thought he was at the same instant yielding up the ghost. Whereupon the Prince, turned about to [his servant] Lysander, cryed out, Is this sympathie, that produces such horrid effects! ...

But whilst he was speaking, Demetrius by degrees began to move his eyes; and raising his body, cryed out, Oh let me for ever gaze upon that glorious object! Some heavenly Deity in commiseration of the languishing Demetrius hath assumed that form, to restore him to perfect happiness. When Alexandro once more approaching towards him, before he could speak, he proceeded; Disdain not, divine creature, a sacrifice of that heart which hath been so long devoted to thy service: Thy presence hath infused into me a new soul, and I already feel such an overflowing joy, that one pleasing look will enable me not only to overcome this trivial sicknes, but to vanquish even death it self. (79)

And, with the rest of the household looking on, "they flew into each others arms with such a mutual concurrence of affection, that they seemed to breath their souls into each others bosoms. At which sight the standers by were moved with such a tenderness, that they could not refrain from tears." (80) In this scene, the identity of the princes is portrayed not in terms of chivalric combat but erotically charged sympathy. And this sympathy is in turn rendered as an aesthetic effect: the "spectacle" of Demetrius' sorrowful condition moves Alexandro, just as the spectacle of their own tearful recognition scene moves the bystanders. This is the sort of pity Seneca condemns in De clementia and that Brathwaite associates with effeminacy in Panthalia. In Theophania, by contrast, the aesthetic response of pity is tinged with admiration and wonder. (81)

A similarly erotically charged relationship between young men appears at the end of the narrative, along with a similar aestheticizing of passion. In the final romance insert, Cenodoxius, Alexandro and Demetrius hear the story of two royalist soldiers, Perrotus and Clorimanthes, whose friendship "was paragoned with the best examples of antient times," notwithstanding their love for the same woman, Monelia:

We consorted our selves together in all actions either of danger or recreation: our thoughts were so uniform, that whatsoever pleased the one, was the delight of the other, and even our loves, which it was impossible to separate, by the secret sympathy of our souls, were without jealousies or emulation, directed both to the same object. (82)

In Leviathan Hobbes had argued, "if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, (which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes their delectation only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other." (83) In contrast to Hobbes' linking of desire to a scarcity economy, this story dramatizes the perfect "regulation" of the passions, the perfect containment of the dangers of mimetic desire: one prince loves Monelia physically, the other worships her platonically, and their shared love makes them "more enamoured of each others vertue." (There is a precedent in Sidney's Arcadia where the shared love of Urania maintains friendship between rival shepherds Strephon and Claius.) (84) And, although the conclusion of the narrative illustrates once again the horrid effect of sympathy, it too manages to contain this effect -- again by aestheticizing it. When her physical lover dies in battle (the battle narrated at the opening of Theophania), Monelia appears to exhibit stoic constancy -- even impassivity. Yet, when her platonic lover approaches her in her chamber to console her, she stabs herself. The surviving prince describes this last act of her life as a "tragical scene," while praising her "heroick hand"; the narrator of Theophania tells us "this sad tragedie moved a wonderfull compassion in the hearers," and that Alexandro urged patience until the perpetrators of the prince's murder could be discovered. By deliberately contrasting Monelia's action to stoic constancy, the narrator suggests that while passion may be a motive for heroism, it is also a source of tragedy. But tragedy as an aesthetic rather than a political phenomenon may in turn generate compassion rather than "vanity and revenge" in the audience. The "spectacle" of tragedy ideally provokes pity and compassion rather than violent deeds. In this respect, the characters' responses are models for the reader's.

In focussing on scenes of pity and compassion, the narrator of Theophania self-consciously aestheticizes the political. Political interest is not the only bulwark against the dangerous passions of honor and vainglory Pity and compassion -- which appear in this text as effects of erotic and aesthetic interest -- may also serve as a countervailing force to the jealousy and emulation that have given rise to civil war. In this sense Theophania, like Cloria and Panthalia, is a kind of meta-romance: it self-consciously reflects on the uses of romance (including the longstanding association in romance of erotic and aesthetic interest) to create the kind of distanced engagement characteristic of sympathy rather than rivalry. If such engagement can be sustained, the Restoration may appear as one of the surprising effects of sympathy. (85)

This reading is supported by the prefatory note to the reader, where the stationer singles out Theophania's analysis of the passions as one of the primary achievements of the text:

You will find Man, and the Passions of Man (the great Engines of our Conversation) and (it may be) traverses of State, set down as in a Mapp or Chart before you.

[The author's] Designes are natural, correspondent, and effective; his Scenes probable, and suitable; his Loves high and generous (but without extravagancy;) his Passions essential, and real, and such as perfectly limn different souls, in their different agitations; his discourses and reflections solid and mature, and the resultance of all this, so generous and harmonious, that I rather choose to leave you to the consideration of the several beauties you will find in every part thereof, then [sic] corrupt your judgements by a previous information in the general.

This is about as near to a defense of aesthetic interest as we will find in these romances. The stationer makes no explicit claim for the power of Theophania to inculcate virtue, constancy, or political consent. The adjective "suitable" takes no direct object, unless it is the self-referential "suitable representation." The passions are "real" because perfect imitations. Above all, the stationer recommends "the several beauties" the reader will find in Theophania. These remarks capture something of the effect of this strange work. Theophania does not so much teach the emulous striving after virtue as sympathetic identification or male bonding. But, in doing so, it transmutes the politically dangerous passion of vainglory into aesthetic interest.

We can get a sense of Sales' achievement by recalling that, in Panthalia, the narrator criticized Basilius/James' court for its aestheticizing self-regard:

This graceful and long-continued habit of peace, as it enricht the State with plenty: so it begot in the Inhabitants an incommodious securitie. For those virile & masculine spirits, which formerly proclaimed the Heirs of Honour, were become now strangers to action & exploits of valor, being wholly unexercis'd to those Martial affairs, wherewith their first Assaies of Youth had been insured.

"The court had wars," the narrator goes on to remark, "but they were amourous Encounters: Foes, but they were Corrivals." (86) While Brathwaite condemned the "effeminacy," "amorous Encounters," "Masks, Treats, [and] Balls" of the Jacobean court as obstacles to martial valor, Sales suggests a self-conscious revival of Caroline aestheticism (in particular, the aesthetic response of pity and fear) as a way of channeling and defusing the passions of war. The pity experienced by both characters and readers will in this respect work very much like the "passion," in Hobbes' words quoted in one of the epigraphs to this essay, that causes men to "take pleasure to behold from the shore the danger of them that are at sea in a tempest, or in fight, or from a safe castle to behold two armies charge one another in the field." It is not by chance that this famous image from Lucretius takes the threat to self-preservation (including warfare) as the subject matter which is both preserved and cancelled when perceived as a spec tacle. Nor is it by chance that this passage from the opening of book 2 of De rerum natura has so often been appropriated as an allegory of art itself. The strongest evidence we have of the shaping power of aesthetic distance is the pleasure we take in viewing those things which we would flee if we encountered them directly. For Hobbes, as for some Renaissance commentators on Aristotle's Poetics, such distance could inculcate insensitivity to "the misery of one's friends." But, in light of Theophania, the passage from Lucretius suggests a different moral: aesthetic distance can make the subject matter of tragedy a source of fellow feeling "between men," not only in art but also in life.

Theophania thus provides a powerful response to Hobbes' argument that consent to the political contract and peaceful coexistence are predicated on the fear of violent death. Instead, Sales suggests, the peaceloving and thus -- in the context of aristocratic culture -- effeminized political subject is much more likely to be the effect of sentimental identification or aesthetic spectatorship. In this way, Theophania anticipates both the political settlement of the Restoration and the sentimental culture of the eighteenth century. As Carol Kay argued in her study of Hobbes' influence on eighteenth-century aesthetics, "the sentimental spectator may be the appropriate incarnation of the timid subject Hobbes was trying to create." According to Kay, "neither Hobbes nor Burke can be described as reducing [political] representation to [a] wholly affective function, but the potential for it in Hobbes's theory is greatly developed by Burke's emphasis on the admiring sentiments with which we regard the 'embodiments' of a uthority: 'These public affections, combined with manners, are required as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to the law.... To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely."' Theophania provides one of the missing links between Hobbesian fear and Burkean love. (87)

There are a number of important conclusions to be drawn from these royalist prose romances of the 1650s. First, clearsighted royalists such as Herbert, Brathwaite, and Sales used the genre of prose romance not only to criticize the "Platonick" obsessions of the Caroline court, but also to anatomize the contribution of passion and interest to the civil war. In doing so, they reshaped the genre of prose romance to reflect the perceived importance of strategic considerations of political interest in the aftermath of the civil war. Second, for all three authors, to varying degrees, the analysis of political interest was intertwined with questions of artistry and aesthetic interest. For Herbert, Brathwaite, and Sales, culture was the ground not only of "political contestation" but also of restoration; in the right hands, they suggested, artistic craft and aesthetic interest could contribute to the hoped for Restoration of Charles II.

Third, and finally, this defense of the role of aesthetic interest in facilitating political reconciliation invites a revision of Albert Hirschman's influential account of political arguments based on the passions and the interests in the early modern period. In response to Max Weber's question, "How did commercial banking and similar money-making pursuits become honorable at some point in the modern age after having stood condemned or despised as greed, love of lucre, and avarice for centuries?," Hirschman replied that an older aristocratic ethos was not simply replaced by a bourgeois one involving the defense of individual economic interest. Instead, the language of interest emerged first and foremost from a new conception of politics -- one based on an "objective" analysis of the passions and of the interest -- or reason -- of state. (88) This so-called objective analysis of the passions eventually allowed for the perception that one passion might be used to counteract the deleterious effects of another. T hus, by the mid seventeenth century; Hobbes had come to believe that the fear of violent death might serve to dampen the aristocratic passion for self-aggrandizement that was so dangerous to the stability of the commonwealth. Later theorists, according to Hirschman, built on this idea of the countervailing passion to argue that the desire for material gain would serve as the best counterweight to the aristocratic preoccupation with honor and glory. Accordingly, Hirschman traced the development of a positive view of the acquisitive passions and of self-interest not simply to Calvinism, as Weber had done, but to developments in early modern political theory. Hirschman's great contribution to the early modern history of passion and interest was thus to argue that the concept of interest was as much political as it was economic in this period.

This essay has argued that writers of prose romance in the 1650s were just as aware of the political uses of aesthetic interest -- including the reader's interest in the imitation or representation of the passions. This is not only because imitation sets off the process of rhetorical inference or probable reasoning which helps produce the illusion of verisimilitude and educates the reader's judgment. It is also because imitation allows for sympathetic identification that may itself be marshalled for political uses. Cloria, Panthalia, and, above all, Theophania stand at the intersection of these two insights (arguably Aristotelian and Platonic). At the same time that literary representation is conceived of as a mode of countervailing passion and thus of political interest, Restoration politics itself is aestheticized. The achievement of royalist romance in the 1650s is to refigure the public interest as a matter not only of Hobbesian calculation but also of aesthetic interest, affection, and sympathy. In this way, Herbert, Brathwaite, and Sales could be said to "redeem" or reinvent romance for the post-Cromwellian settlement. (89) In Clarendon's vision of the Restoration (quoted as an epigraph to this essay), the newly restored king will both "make Calculations" about the trustworthiness of his subjects' "hearts" and -- in an uncanny echo of the embrace of Alexandro and Demetrius in Theophania -- "finde all His subjects at once in His arms, and himself in theirs."

(1.) His Majesties Most Gracious Speech, Together with the Lord Chancellors, to the Two Houses of Parliament; On Thursday the 13 of September, 1660 (London, 1660), 11-12; quoted in Shifflett, 1998, 97.

(2.) Herbert, 1650, 78-79.

(3.) Ibid., 80, 250.

(4.) Ibid., 115-19 (bonds of trust); 148-59 (breach of contract).

(5.) Ibid., 148-59 (breach of contract); 162 (interest and commodity); 170 (romance); subjecting one's will (252).

(6.) Of course, royalists were not the only ones concerned to analyze the causes of the civil war in the 1650s. For a brief survey of commonwealth historiography, see Lois Potter's introduction to Osborne. Potter discusses the shared royalist and parliamentarian "concern to explain the downfall of the House of Stuart" by reference to James' prodigality, which in turn gave rise to Charles' forced loans (xxv, xxxiii). For Osborne, see also n65 below.

(7.) On the theme of consolation in royalist literature of the 1650s, see Hirst. His main point, with which I agree, is that royalist literature in this period was not so much withdrawn as polemical and politically engaged, and that "the components of the nation's literary culture became the subject of angry argument" (136).

(8.) Cloria and Theophania were published anonymously; Brathwaite used the pseudonym of Castalion Pomerano. Brathwaite was a poet who was known for his pastoral romances in verse and prose, as well for The English Gentleman (1630, 1641, 1652) and The English Gentlewoman (1631, 1641). The DNB tells us he "is said to have served on the royalist side in the civil war" (DNB, s.v. Brathwaite, Richard, 1142). Unlike Herbert and Brathwaite, Sales seems to be a

pseudonym. The authorship is contested, but at least one critic has speculated that Theophania was written by Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon. See Shearer, 74. The secondary literature on these romances is slight. On Gloria and Panthalia, see Patterson, chap. 4. See also Boyce; Smith, 233-50; McLellan; Salzman, 1985, chap. 11; and the introduction to Salzman, 1991. For the criticism of arcadianism, see in addition to Patterson, Salzman, Smith, and Potter, esp. chap. 3.

(9.) I discuss the difference between these two emotional responses below.

(10.) There are of course other reasons why prose romance of the 1650s looks the way it does, including intra-generic influences such as Sidney's Arcadia, Barclay's Argenis, French romance, and Heliodorus (whom I discuss below). McCoy discusses the influence of Sidney on critics of Charles I, as does Kay in his preface. But Sidney's reputation and work were also appropriated by royalists in the 1650s, including not only the authors of Cloria, Panthalia, and Theophania, but also, for example, Thomas Blount in his Academie of Eloquence (1654); see Hirst, 143-44. For the circulation of manuscripts of the Arcadia prior to the civil war, see Woudhuysen. On the Hobbesian and Machiavellian elements of Sidney's political analysis in the different versions of the Arcadia, see Evans' introduction to Sidney, 27-40. For a fuller analysis of the politics of Arcadia, see Worden. On Barclay, see Sandy.

(11.) Hirst, 147 (statecraft), 149 (delegitimation). It is in this context that Hirst takes issue with Annabel Patterson's influential account of royalist romance: "Might we not read the proliferation of romances in the 1650s not ... as testimony to the effectiveness of censorship but as political prescription, when in the minds of many, force rather than nobility and virtue appeared to dominate the body politic?" (148).

(12.) Strauss, 161, n.2.

(13.) The phrase is taken from Trevor-Roper, 93.

(14.) I am thinking in particular of Albert Hirschman's important argument. I return to Hirschman in the conclusion to this essay.

(15.) Herbert, 1661, Cloria and Roxana (202); Creses (203). Creses goes on: "All smart, grief, and discontents, is encreased by want of action and too much leasure for consideration; so, I must conclude, that it is a great deal easier for a person to dye fighting in the Field, though he should be cut assunder in a thousand pieces, then to endure a long and tedious captivity, which is Euarchus present condition" (203). In a later conversation, a chaplain urges the imprisoned Charles to display his "heroical virtues . . . by a majestick patience in your outward sufferings."

(16.) Ibid., 346.

(17.) Ibid., 392 (Arethusius), 204 (Creses).

(18.) Ibid., 73, 74. For further discussion of the legitimacy of politic dissimulation, see e.g. 390-91.

(19.) I take the phrase "politics of love" from Sharpe; see also Veevers.

(20.) Herbert, 1661, 59.

(21.) Ibid., 62 (Osiris), 507 (Creses).

(22.) Ibid., 334.

(23.) "Ibid., 140 (affection stronger than interest), 551-52 (people of Lydia); and 542 (desperate passions). On the distemper of the passions, see also, e.g. 13, 28, 106, 189, 499, 423.

(24.) Ibid., 500-01. For other recommendations of wise compliance, see 230, 373.

(25.) Patterson sees the recommendation of compliance as a contribution to the engagement controversy (195). On Neostoic constancy, see Braden; Shifflett, 1998; and Barbour. Braden comments on the way the stoic display of virtue may paradoxically manifest itself as theatricality. In contrast, wise compliance suggests that constancy can itself be feigned for political ends. Here constancy draws near to a kind of Tacitean or Machiavellian shrewdness. Lipsius' De constantia and Politica (both of which were translated into English in the seventeenth century) were important vehicles of these Tacitean and Machiavellian insights. For an astute analysis of the Tacitean dimension of early seventeenth-century prose romance, see Sandy.

(26.) See Cicero, 2.6.22-2.7.23: "But, of all motives, none is better adapted to secure influence and hold it fast than love; nothing is more foreign to that end than fear. For Ennius says admirably: 'Whom they fear they hate. And whom one hates, one hopes to see him dead.'" Alluding to the recent assassination of Julius Caesar, Cicero drew the obvious political moral: "fear is but a poor safeguard of lasting power; while affection [benevolentia], on the other hand, may be trusted to keep it safe for ever."

(27.) Herbert, 1661, 601.

(28.) Ibid., 82, and 191 if. on balancing royal prerogative and the subject's freedom. It is significant in this regard that the subtitle of the 1661 edition refers to the romance's "Political Notions, and singular Remarks of Modern Transactions," for transactions in this period meant negotiations, business dealings, agreements, or covenants.

(29.) Ibid., 445, where Charles II/Arethusius "hoped the instability of things, would of necessity at last bring him to his Rights." As Salzman, 1981, 243 points our, Charles II doesn't regain his throne by military virtue but by means of romance contingency. As I argue below, however, the narrator and other characters do not simply endorse Charles' passivity.

(30.) Winkler, 127. He observes, "Reflections such as these on the crazy-quilt of Life and whether a friendly designer or a brute force is behind it have the value of self-advertizements for the author, since the novelist will be most successful on his own terms if we regard his story as one of impossible odds and plausible resolutions, that is, an elegant mediation between the hopelessness of a world governed by malevolent or indifferent tyche and the confidence of a world mysteriously orchestrated by providence" (126). See also 152-54 on the providential conclusion of the plot. Heliodorus was well known in the early modern period. Even taking this into account, the similarities between the two texts ate remarkable. Winkler's entire discussion provides an uncanny analysis of the narrative strategies of Cloria. On the influence of Heliodorus in the early modern period, see Forcione, 49-87; Hughes; Doody, chap. 10 and 11.

(31.) Winkler, 152.

(32) There is another kind of alternation in Cloria that cannot be fully assimilated to the alternation between providence and nature. And that is the oscillation between recommendations of wise compliance and a kind of foucauldian discipline of the passions. We are led to understand that politics requires not only the subject's rational deliberation and craft but also the disciplining of the subject's affections. It is striking in this regard that, while Herbert recommends strategic thinking to the reader, he also claims the upper hand by suggesting that the reader has already been won over through the not entirely rational experience of aesthetic pleasure. This oscillation -- this uncertainty about whether aesthetic pleasure promotes or replaces deliberation -- is even more characteristic of the other two romances we will explore. The double message of the plot -- the instruction in wise compliance and the eliciting of the passions in order to discipline them -- is conveyed in explicit thematic terms in the conclusion to Cloria. Just as the people willingly submit to their sovereign, so, the narrator implies, the reader voluntarily submits to Cloria: "This now shall finish our Romance, that perhaps hath too long a season troubled the Readers patience; but as Fancies are creations of our own, and therefore for the most part please with some excess; so of the other side, I neither invite or compell any to the exercise." Here the narrator both does and doesn't take responsibility for the pleasure of the text. While admitting that a writer's fancy is by nature extravagant, the narrator also declares that no one is forcing us to read Cloria to the end: reading is a form of voluntary subjection to aesthetic pleasure, to the pleasure of our own fancy. Unlike the Hobbesian political contract, the contract of genre (in this case the genre of romance) is predicated on a specifically aesthetic interest, a consent, if not to the rules of the genre at least to the pleasure we take in reading. For a compelling discussion of the contract of genre, see Prendergast, esp. chaps. 2 and 3. Jameson also discusses genre as a kind of social contract (106).

(33.) Interestingly, the author of the preface expresses doubt concerning the aesthetic appeal of Cloria's digressions in a time of political upheaval. Ordinarily, "the many Descriptions of Countreys, Places, and Triumphs" would satisfy the human desire for variety. But in the present crisis the author wonders "Whether the hair-brain'dness of the present world, will give leasure enough to most, to dwell upon any thing at all, much less to practise Heroical Vertues with such a constant settledness as is necessary, being the chief intention of the Authour (as I conceive) in writing of this Romance." Here the author may be suggesting that the sheer length of the romance is well suited to "the hairbrain'dness of the present world": if romance doesn't speak to our passions, it will at least try our patience and so educate us to constancy and voluntary subjection.

(34.) Thus I strongly disagree with Smith who argues that Herbert's goal is "to make his reader experience a stoical expulsion of all emotions" (239).

(35.) Cloria thus does not conform to Potter's description of many post-regicide romances: "the typical romance plot, in which elaborately intertwining intrigues are resolved by quasimiraculous means, corresponds to a view of life which, of necessity, became that of many royalists after 1651" (109). Although "wise compliance" could be described as "a waiting policy" (109), these romances also educate the reader to the need to create the Restoration.

(36.) Patterson also comments on the way the preface provides "a suggestive account... of the interpretive act, poised as it is in this genre between esthetic and political experience," but she links the "esthetic" dimension of Cloria with the semantic "indeterminancy" that results from the author's refusal to provide a key to the political allegory (196-97). As should already be dear, although I agree with many of Patterson's points, I do not see the aesthetic or the "artfully difficult" (197) dimension of Cloria or other, contemporary romances as a consequence of political censorship.

(37.) Smith, 237.

(38.) Panthalia was composed when Richard Cromwell was still the head of government but published shortly after his abdication. The entry in the stationer's register shows it was first addressed to parliament and only afterwards fitted out with a postscript about the restoration of "Rosicles," and a frontispiece showing an image of Charles II. See Boyce, 478, n.3.

(39.) "For a less flattering account of Elizbeth's manipulations of romance conventions, seventeenth-century readers could turn to Theophania (discussed below) and to James Harrington's Oceana (1656). Smith discusses the relevant passages in Harrington (246-49).

(40.) Brathwaite, 23 (domestick love; my emphasis); 29 (causeless fears).

(41.) See note 6 above. As Potter, 1983, points out, one function of this demonizing of James was to allow Charles to retain his status as royal martyr.

(42.) Brathwaite, 39 (tilts), 43 (state service), 41 (Basilius), 37 (Ismenia); see also 42-43.

(43.) Ibid., 88. See 103 on the connection between degenerate pursuit of pleasure and equally debased pursuit of self-interest on the part of Rosicles' "senatours."

(44.) "Ibid., 98, 99, 101.

(45.) Ibid., 101-03; emphasis in the original.

(46.) Ibid., 112.

(47.) On this connection between the new market economy and the fear of clandestine marriage, see Hutson.

(48.) Brathwaite, commodity (176), affections (177-78).

(49.) Ibid., 180-81; see also 203 (conjugall tyranny), 205.

(50.) Ibid., 248 (Strafford), 181.

(51.) This is not noted in any of the secondary literature on Panthalia with which I am familiar. For a thorough history of the romance passion of pity in early modern romance and epic, see Burrow, who argues that after 1620 "many epic poems appear to abandon the civic concerns which had led Spenser to attempt to weld the opposing motives of love and honour into a single force, and turn to the internal regimen of the passions as the chief activity for the heroic mind" (147-48). See 237-38 on Cowley's positive association of pity with the royalist cause, and 274 on later seventeenth-century depictions of Charles II as a romance Aeneas, pitying his subjects (using clemency and mercy).

(52.) Seneca, 2.5.1. Seneca associates pity with effeminacy in this same passage: "And so it is most often seen in the poorest types of persons; there are old women and wretched females who are moved by the tears of the worst criminals, who, if they could, would break open their prison.

(53.) See the excellent discussion of clemency in Shifflett, 1998, especially 76-78, 95-100. Shifflett discusses the relevance of De clementia to discussions regarding the Act of Oblivion. See also Shifflett, 1997; and Barbour, 166. Eden argues for "the transmission of pity and fear into Christian poetic theory and practice indirectly through Christian ethics, rather than directly through the domination on Aristotle's authority of literary matters." But she stresses that this "points to an even more profound continuity in the Aristotelian tradition [of the similarities between poetic and legal fiction]. Even without the argument of the Poetics, fiction continues to share its peculiar psychology with the law and in particular with the relation between the Old and New Law" (156).

(54.) Brathwaite, 264 (State-Theatre), 251, 273-74. See Hobbes' comparison of individuals in the state of nature to mushrooms in On the Citizen, 1.8.

(55.) Brathwaite, 296.

(56.) Patterson's comment on Brathwaite's representation of the Caroline court may be relevant here: "As the English civil war could, from one perspective, be seen to have been caused by effeminacy, by the feminization of culture, so romance, in Brathwaite's opinion, was a form that history should not have taken" (201).

(57.) Brathwaite, 299. See Seneca, 1.5.7: "To save life is the peculiar privilege of exalted station"; 1.18.1: "No glory redounds to a ruler from cruel punishment -- for who doubts his ability to give it? -- but, on the other hand, the greatest glory is his if he hold his power in check."

(58.) Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.4.12-13. Brathwaite, 301.

(59.) Brathwaite, 302. There were numerous other sources, besides Seneca, for the association between mercy and equity. The common lawyer Christopher St. German's dialogue Doctor and Student (1531) was one influential early modern source. On the relation between pity and equity in the Aristotelian and Christian traditions, see Eden, 28, 100-02, 156, and passim.

(60.) Sales, 114. I quote from the 1655 edition. After the completion of this essay, a modernized edition of Theophania was published by Renee Pigeon.

(61.) I take the phrase "mimetic desire" from Girard, 1977, 143-68, and 1981. According to the structure of mimetic desire, passion is never spontaneous but always mediated by and imitative of other people's desires. See n. 68 below.

(62.) I have been unable to reach McLellan and so have decided not to quote his unpublished work without his permission. But I do want to acknowledge his argument, which has shaped my own understanding of the political context of Theophania. See also the excellent introduction by Pigeon, especially 37-45. Pigeon argues that " Theophanids author espouses a moderate royalist position, asserting via Synesius the need for negotiation between the royalists and the parliamentarian followers of Essex, Theophanids Cenodoxius" (37).

(63.) Sales, 105.

(64.) Sales, 104 (slavish obedience), 114 (politick maxims).

(65.) For a contemporary scathing treatment of Essex and his divorce, as well as of James I as "the chief cause of the civil war," see Osborne. A friend of Hobbes, he accepted employment under Parliament in the 1640s and early '50s (Osborne, xxviii; x-xii).

(66.) Sales, 152 (resistless power of love), and 165, my emphasis. If Cenodoxius echoes Shakespeare's Othello here (1.3.127ff.), he must do so to appear naive and manipulated.

(67.) Sales, 168.

(68.) In Behemoth, 112, Hobbes conjectured that Essex was driven to insurrection by his wounded pride or vainglory: "But I believe verily, that the unfortunateness of his marriages had so discountenanced his conversation with the ladies, that the court could not be his proper element, unless he had had some extraordinary favour there, to balance that calamity." Although elsewhere in Behemoth Hobbes wrote respectfully of the commander of the parliamentary armies, here he implied that it was not so much manly valor as the fear of being perceived nor to have it that caused Essex to risk violent death on the battlefield. Essex's military role was inescapably tied to his imagination of others' perception of him. In The Elements of Law and Leviathan Hobbes also analyzed the mimetic structure of the vainglory that leads to civil war. I discuss the relevant passages in Kahn.

(69.) Sales, 169-70; cf. 183 on the shipwreck of civil war.

(70.) Ibid., 187. There is some dispute whether Corastus stands for Fairfax (as McLellan believes) or Cromwell (as Shearer and Pigeon argue). On this point, see n. 85 below.

(71.) Ibid., 193.

(72.) Ibid., 191-92; see 37 on the horrid effects of sympathy.

(73.) See Pigeon, 42-43: "Cenodoxius's narrative locates the genesis of the war in the personal indignities suffered by the nobility and the affronts offered them by the monarchy; Synesius, in contrast, sees his country's problems as stemming from the failure of the constitution to clarify where that power should lie, thus allowing 'public affairs' to be 'swayed by the interests or inclinations of particular persons.' He finds the genesis of the war not in the personal failings of those involved, but in the nature of the institutions which permit corruption to flourish." Pigeon, following Howard Tomlinson, aligns these two positions with those of Clarendon, on the one hand, and Harrington on the other.

(74.) Sales, 193 (the syntax is faulty in the original).

(75.) Ibid., 190 (politick maximes), 196 (protection).

(76.) Leicester was in France from 1636 to 1642. Jonathan Scott discusses the influence of Tacitus, Bodin, and Grotius on Leicester, who frequently cites them in his private writings (45). McLellan refers to this passage in Scott. Grotius' Politick Maxims was published in London in 1654, a year before Theophania appeared in print.

(77.) Quoted in Scott, Algernon Sidney, 58. On the second Earl of Leicester's library, see Warkentin.

(78.) Sales, 32 (posture), 36 (courtship). None of the critical accounts I am fami1iar with mentions these extraordinary scenes.

(79.) Sales, 37.

(80.) Ibid., 38.

(81.) Along with the ekphrasis typical of Greek romance, Sidney is an important influence here. In his introduction to the Arcadia, Maurice Evans discusses Sidney's method of description which "keeps us at a distance from the action, so that tragedy is turned into spectacle and admiration aroused in place of pity and fear" (18). In addition, admiration and wonder were central to many Renaissance treatments of poetry.

(82.) Sales, 191, mispagination for 200.

(83.) Hobbes, 1994, chap. 13, p. 87.

(84.) Sales, 202. On Strephon and Clauis, see Sidney, 64.

(85.) See Pigeon, who notes that "the general viewpoint expressed in the text appears most appropriate to 1645. Charles I (Antiochus) still lives, as does the third earl of Essex (Cenodoxius)" (13). She goes on to quote Shearer: "there would have been no point to a large part of the book had not Essex still been living" (Pigeon, 14; Shearer, 73). The question remains why the text was published in 1655. Shearer argues that it was done to discredit the Commonwealth (73) but, since he identifies Corastus with Cromwell, he is then unable to explain why Cromwell appears in a sympathetic light. If, however, Corastus is Fairfax, as I believe, Theophania could both discredit the Commonwealth and represent sympathy rather than military virtue as the bond of obligation and key to the Restoration. Eagleton discusses the aestheticizing of politics in the early eighteenth century. Armstrong anticipates this argument, focussing on the sublimation of arguments about political obligation in the novel. Prose romance of the 16 50s anticipates both of these developments. For the later fortunes of sympathy, and its relation to theatricality in the eighteenth century, see Marshall, from whom I take the title of this essay.

(86.) Brathwaite, 42-43.

(87.) Carol Kay, 278, and 270, quoting Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 172.

(88.) Hirschman 9.

(89.) Brathwaite argues that princely clemency will "redeem the time" in Panthalia, 299, 302; the phrase echoes Hal's famous speech in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I. Potter comments on the desire on the part of royalists to turn the future Charles II into a kind of Prince Hal figure who could reconcile the worlds of court and tavern, king and kingdom (103-04).

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