Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660.

David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xiii + 509 pp. $64.95 (cl), $24.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-63275-7 (d), 0-521-78569-3 (pbk).

In this important new book, David Norbrook sets out to redress the erasure of republican culture from a royalized English history. This lucidly-argued and meticulously-documented study traces the complex evolution of a republican language from the 1620s through the 1660s, framed by Thomas May's 1627 translation of Lucan's Pharsalia and Milton's Paradise Lost. Against historians who see republicanism as arising from rather than leading to regicide, and then rapidly disappearing, Norbrook argues that "the republican culture of the 1650s was at once excitingly new and as familiar as a dog-eared school-book" (14): the study of the classics provided situations in which republican political practice was actively imagined, and the Renaissance revival of rhetoric took on political implications.

Norbrook recognizes that the history of English republicanism is discontinuous and uneven and that even defining republicanism--beyond a simple characterization of a state without a king or hereditary succession--is difficult. Generous in acknowledging other scholarly points of view, Norbrook nonetheless forcefully posits a particular reading of history and literary history. In his analysis, shared republican concerns include a critique of customary hierarchies, participation in an expanded public sphere, a focus on civic virtue and responsibility, a commitment to liberty for the people (however defined), and perhaps most important, the development of a poetics of the sublime.

Calling for a revision and expansion of literary history, Norbrook refuses to separate rhetoric and poetry, public and private. He juxtaposes canonical literary writers--John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden--with a host of (now) lesser known figures, including Edmund Wallet, Payne Fisher, Henry Marten, Thomas May, Marchamont Nedham, and George Wither. A narrow model of the literary, Norbrook suggests, has obscured the origins of a republican culture; by exploring literary texts in the context of social rhetoric, he aims to show how a republican politics produced a republican poetics.

This republican poetics is densely documented throughout Writing the English Republic, which is structured largely chronologically, but also groups together works by a single author (e.g., Marvell) or on a certain theme (e.g., "protectoral Augustanism and its critics"). The book begins with Lucan's Pharsalia as an iconoclastic, anti-imperial, and anti-Augustan text whose presence is felt in the reactive court poetry of the 1 630s and in the writings of new English Lucans--Abraham Cowley, George Wither, and Thomas May--upon the outbreak of civil war. Subsequent chapters turn to politics and literary culture in the mid-1640s (Milton's Areopagitica alongside George Wither's more radical democratization of the sublime) and in the post-war period (defenses of the Commonwealth by Milton and others and Andrew Marvell's poetry).

Later chapters of Writing the English Republic explore how the increasing prestige of Oliver Cromwell brought new tensions to a republican poetics, as poets such as Payne Fisher and George Wither strove to praise a single figure in service of the state. With the establishment of the Protectorate, Norbrook traces both the attempted republicanizing of Cromwell and protectoral Augustanism (evinced by Fisher and especially Waller), part of what he sees as a trend back to monarchy that culminated in Cromwell's royal funeral.

In his tenth and final chapter, Norbrook reads Milton's Paradise Lost as a republican work directly engaged with the politics of the late 165 Os, at which time its composition was likely begun. Accordingly, Norbrook contends that Satan's appropriation of republican language and his colonizing journey to earth implicitly critique an ambitious, imperial, and monarchical Oliver Cromwell. Evincing the iconoclasm, anti-Augustanism, and sublime concordia discors of Lucan's Pharsalia, Milton's epic, in Norbrook's analysis, both reflects upon contemporary politics and culminates the mid-century republican reassessment of classical literary culture.

With its massive detail drawn from both printed and manuscript sources, Writing the English Republic should convince any remaining skeptics that republicanism indeed had an early and important presence in seventeenth-century England. For literary scholars, another major contribution is Norbrook's rediscovery and analysis of writers influential in their own time but largely forgotten today. Equally important are the contextualizations and new readings of canonical literary authors, especially Marvell and Milton, as iconoclastic figures who challenge the courtly beautiful in their production of new modes of the sublime.

Yet in redressing the neglect of classical republicanism, Norbrook himself sometimes tends to neglect other discourses, most significantly, the religious fervor at the heart of much seventeenth-century conflict. Hence, although his argument is in many ways directed against revisionist historiography, Norbrook accepts the downplaying of religion and the recent depiction of Cromwell as a social conservative and of the Protectorate as having moved back to monarchy in all but name. Such a stance underlies Norbrook's reading of Milton's covert repudiation of an ambitious and monarchical Cromwell in his late prose and in Paradise Lost. But more attention to the complexities of the Protectorate and to the intense religious piety that Milton both shared with and praised in Cromwell might well complicate the issue of Milton's repudiation.

Magisterial, wide-ranging, and often brilliant, Writing the English Republic boldly rewrites the history of seventeenth-century English culture. The book's audaciousness matches that of its subjects, the seventeenth-century republicans whom David Norbrook so vividly and compellingly brings to life. The book should be of considerable interest and value to all scholars of the early modern period.