Archipelagic English : literature, history, and politics, 1603-1707

614 Pages·2008·7.004 MB·English

by  John Kerrigan

ARCHIPELAGIC ENGLISH:
LITERATURE, HISTORY,
AND POLITICS 1603 – 1707
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ARCHIPELAGIC
ENGLISH:
LITERATURE,
HISTORY, AND
POLITICS
1603 – 1707
JOHN KERRIGAN

1
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Preface
Historians increasingly recognize that early modern England, Scotland,
Ireland, and Wales were in different degrees and for a variety of reasons,
but sometimes to crucial effect, interactive entities. During the period
1603–1707, the islands of the North-West Atlantic constituted, culturally
as well as politically, a linked and divided archipelago. This term, as used
by the historians, and redeployed in my title, does three related things: it
designates a geopolitical unit or zone, stretching from the Channel Islands
totheShetlands,fromtheWashtoGalwayBay,withtiestoNorthAmerica
and down to the Caribbean; it does so neutrally (avoiding the assumptions
loaded into ‘the British Isles’); and it implies a devolved, interconnected
account of what went on around the islands. The contention of this book
isthatanarchipelagicapproachnotjusttoseventeenth-century historybut
to the anglophone literature of the period can yield valuable insights.
ArchipelagicEnglishismoreextensivelyhistoricalthanmyearlierwork.In
thisitfollowsatrendinliterarystudies,yetitowesmoretomainstreamhis-
toriographythantothetheoreticallyandanthropologicallydrivenmethods
oflastcentury’s‘newhistoricism’.Itmaybethatthehistoricizingtendency
in literary scholarship has started to become restrictive, but it has opened
up issues that cannot be probed in other ways and equipped us more fully

to make judgements about the value of texts. This is all that Archipelagic
English seeks to achieve. It does not offer itself as the best way of thinking
about seventeenth-century literature, nor as providing a full toolbox for
reading, say, Cymbeline or Colonel Jack—works whose peculiarities require
amixofapproaches.Theaimistoaddtoourunderstandingofsuchworks
by recovering the circumstances of their composition and reception.
The book also contributes to the geopolitical turn in literary studies. If
it does not talk much about cartography—probably a relief, given how
fashionable that topic has become—it does, in some sense, remap the
English- and Scots-speaking cultures of seventeenth-century Britain and
viii preface
Ireland. This shift to the geographical owes something to the general loss
ofbeliefthathistory hasaprovidential orprogressivedirection. Archipelagic
English does hazard a few generalizations about the overall course of
events,anditunpicks someknots ofconnection andconflict, suchaswere
generated by the long, involved relationship between English, Scottish,
and Dutch Protestantism, which throw up repeated crises that had literary
as well as military-political aspects. But the geocultural cast of this book
has reinforced the impulse—understandable in any case, given the relative
noveltyofmysubject—toproceedinanessayisticmanner.Ihaveselected
texts or clusters of texts, often related thematically, and sought to probe
them in context, rather than attempt to construct overarching historical
narratives, which areso often contradicted by local variation.
Historians frequently adopt adeep-litter approach tothe page,piling up
footnotes into running bibliographies. At times, especially when entering
areas new to me, I have been grateful for this, but the effect can be
cumbersome, and, in an age of electronic searches, it is less and less
necessary. In the introduction, I do list further reading in notes as a
wayofcondensing essential, preliminaryinformation. Elsewhere,debtsare
signalled, but scholars not mentioned should not assume that their work
has gone unread. For similar reasons, the bibliography lists only Primary
Sources; secondary works should be readily locatable given the division of
topics by chapter. To assist the reader, all the sources cited in a chapter are
giveninfull detail onfirstmention. Becauseof thebook’s historical tenor,
ithasseemedrighttouseoldspelling.Ihavemadeafewsilentcorrections,
and lightly regularized titles. Ligatures have been removed from ‘ae’ and
‘oe’,andsuchformsas‘&’and‘ye’expandedwhereappropriate.Whenthe
background is Scottish, members of the royal family are likely to be called

StewartsnotStuarts.WhetheramonarchisreferredtoasJamesVIorJames
VIandI,orWillemvanOranjeorWilliamofOrangeorWilliamIIandIII,
dependsoncontext,whichisoftendebatable.Becauselocationisaleading
concern, place as well as date of publication is specified whenever possible
for pre-1800 texts. The Bible is quoted from the Authorized Version.
I am grateful to the British Academy for awarding me a Research
Readership (1998–2000) which allowed work on this book to begin,
and to St John’s College, Cambridge and to the Cambridge English
Faculty for additional support. Chapters were tried out as lectures, confer-
ence and seminar papers at the following universities: Aberdeen, Bangor,
Cambridge, Exeter, Hull, Liverpool, London, Oxford, Queen’s (Belfast),
preface ix
Sussex, Swansea, Trinity College Dublin, Ulster (Derry), University Col-
legeDublin,York;Bologna,Copenhagen,Fribourg(Switzerland),Leiden;
Chicago,Columbia,Harvard,McGill,Princeton,Toronto,andWisconsin-
Madison. Peter Burke, Andrew Carpenter, Jo Eastwood, Alan Fletcher,
Germaine Greer, Rod Lyall, Caroline Macafee, James McGuire, Femke
Molekamp, Eile´an N´ı Chuilleana´in, Ma´ire N´ı Mhaonaigh, Jane Moody,
Jacinta Prunty, Colm O´ Baoill, Rory Rapple, John Ross, Jonathan Scott,
Jenny Wormald, and Andrew Zurcher made fruitful suggestions or pro-
vided information, as did others mentioned in the notes. Chapters were
kindly read by Toby Barnard, Michael Brown, Philip Connell, Robert
Cummings,EamonDuffy,DavidFinnegan,DavidHayton,ClareJackson,
Michael and Peter Kerrigan, John MacCafferty, Scott Mandelbrote, Susan
Manning, David Loewenstein, John Pitcher, Deana Rankin, Nigel Smith,
PaulStevens,andtheeditorsofcollectionsmentionedbelow.Evenwarmer
thanks must go to Andrew McNeillie and John Morrill for commenting
on an early, full draft, to Colin Burrow and Willy Maley for doing that
and more, and to Helen Small, who read material repeatedly as well as
acutely, and who was supportive through a period whose challenges for
meincluded chairing the Cambridge English Faculty.
MyfirstthoughtsonthistopicwereairedintheLondonReviewofBooks,
5 June 1997, under the editor’s cross-bred title ‘Birth of a Na´ison’, and a
progress report appeared as ‘Ulster and the New British Histories: Milton
to Mitchelbourne’, in Edna Longley, Eamonn Hughes, and Des O’Rawe
(eds.), Ireland (Ulster) Scotland: Concepts, Contexts, Comparisons (Belfast: Clo´
Ollscoil na Banr´ıona/Queen’s University Belfast, 2003). Slightly different
versions of chapters have been published as follows: 3 in Glenn Burgess,
Rowland Wymer, and Jason Lawrence (eds.), The Accession of James I:

Historical and Cultural Consequences (London: Palgrave, 2006), 4 in my On
Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 8 in David Baker and Willy Maley (eds.), British Identities
and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 10 in Liam McIlvaney and Ray Ryan (eds.), Ireland and Scotland:
Culture and Society, 1700–2000 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), and 11 in
Simon Mealor and Philip Schwyzer (eds.), Archipelagic Identities: Literature
andIdentityintheAtlanticArchipelago,1550–1800(Aldershot:Ashgate, 2004).
Liverpool—Cambridge—Co. Mayo