The Return of the King An Anthology of English Poems .

222 Pages·2000·0.75 MB·English

by  MacLean Gerald

The Argument The Return of the King: An Anthology of English Poems
Commemorating the Restoration of Charles II edited by Gerald MacLean Dept
of English Wayne State University Detroit
The Argument
Table of Contents
1. Preface to the E-text edition
2. Acknowledgements
3. Introduction: Rationale, Scope, Organization, and Dating
4. Editorial Principles, Sigla, and Textual Abbreviations
5. The Poems: A Short-Title Calendar --a list of the poems to be included
arranged into chronological groups: this list effectively serves to indicate
the groups into which the poems have been organized and the order in
which they will be issued
6. The Poems: An Annotated Checklist based on Wing’s Short Title
Catalogue -- a full-title list of the poems to be included arranged
alphabetically by author or title and providing bibliographical description
7. Works Cited including Abbreviations
The Argument
Preface to the E-text Edition: June 1999
Having begun this project while engaging in doctoral research more than twenty
years ago at the University of Virginia, I am specially delighted that it should be
appearing from the E-text Center at Alderman Library. It was amongst the
Faulkner archives in Alderman that David Nordloh, of Indiana University, put
me through my earliest editorial paces, teaching me more about editorial
principles and practices than I could absorb at the time and certainly more than I
can recall now. Any and all obvious errors of editorial conception or execution
in this project are entirely my responsibility; anything I might have got right
probably owes itself to David’s training. And it was in Charlottesville that Ian
Jack, visiting from Pembroke College, Cambridge, took valuable time away
from his own work on the texts of Browning to encourage me in planning an
anthology of Restoration panegyrics. With the arrival of the microchip, the years
since then have witnessed a transformation in the methods, theories, and means
of editorial work and the reproduction of texts on a scale surely even greater than
that heralded by the arrival of moveable type. That this project, begun in
discussions at lunch overlooking the Lawn and in the rare books reading room at
Alderman, should finally emerge into the light of day in electronic form from the
E-Text Center seems, to me, peculiarly appropriate. My thanks to Jerry McGann
for suggesting it, and to David Seaman for listening.
Even as I prepare the first sets of poems for electronic publication there are, the
London news agencies would have us believe, millions of people for whom
anticipating whether the current Prince of Wales will ever become Charles III is
a matter of the utmost urgency. At the most general level, questions that were
being asked back in 1659 and 1660 are once again on the agenda: should there
be a monarchy? if so how, and over what or whom, does it rule? will Charles be
suited for the job? what sort of king might he become? How will the poet
laureate address the occasion? Beyond this very general level, of course, the
issues at stake are very different, but not utterly or entirely. If supporters of
monarchy living within the British Isles in 1660 were, and those living there now
are, sufficient in number and political authority to put another king on the throne
and keep him there, what can have happened to republicanism?
For those of us disappointed by the eventual outcome of what, in 1967, 1968,
and 1969, seemed like a "revolution" in progress, the question of how
and 1969, seemed like a "revolution" in progress, the question of how
revolutions come to fail has often taken the form of asking how it can be that an
assembly of representations--what in the 1990s has come to be called "culture"--
can interfere with, and sometimes even direct, the course of economic and
political history. How do cultural formations, such as pictures, songs, plays, new
jargons, forms of dress and public behaviour achieve political agency, entering
and transforming the ways life is lived, power acquired and displayed, wealth
accumulated and distributed? What might the poetry, published back in 1660 to
celebrate the Restoration of the Stuart dynasty to the thrones constituting Great
Britain, tell us about how poetry does, sometimes, make things happen?
In preparing the Introduction to this electronic edition, I have supplied only
references to my own previous publications in support of the general claims
being advanced. This is not simply the result of vanity but rather, I trust, a
convenient way of indicating where more may be found concerning the drift of
my argument or the historical and textual issues at hand, as well as particular
citations to the primary and scholarly works on which I have relied. Since these
essays have appeared over a twenty year period, certain discrepancies have
arisen, but the references to scholarship in the field still prove useful and
reliable. To the same ends I have prepared a list of Works Cited listing the
scholarly resources that I have relied on while editing and annotating these
poems: this will be updated from time to time while the groups of poems are
being issued.
While I plan to issue annotated sets of the poems listed in the Calendar as
quickly as possible, delays are certain to occur. Meanwhile I hope that anyone
interested in this project will contact me with suggestions or comments. I will be
happy to consider requests for provisional copies of any of the listed poems.
From June 1999 through August 2000 I am off-line from my e-mail address at
Wayne State, but can be reached at: 12 Southcombe St, Chagford, Devon, TQ13
8AY, England.
The Argument
Acknowledgements
Since starting work on this project in 1979, I have incurred more debts than I
care to recall to scholars and friends who have supplied and checked facts of all
sorts. I have attempted to acknowledge specific debts in the notes to individual
poems.
First, my special thanks to Jo Dulan and Mary Gillis who helped keyboard many
of the texts, often from xeroxed copies that were frustrating to read.
At one time or another, I know that the following have all helped with
information, confirmed suspicions, or generously supported this project in some
other intellectual, professional, or material way: Jack Armistead, Iain Boal,
Martin Bernal, John Bidwell, George Bornstein, Leo Braudy, John Brewer,
Carol Briggs, the late Irvin Ehrenpreis, David Evans, A. J. Flavell, Howard
Erskine-Hill, David Greetham, George Guffey, Bridget Hill, Christopher Hill,
Speed Hill, Elaine Hobby, Ian Jack, N. H. Keeble, Robert Kellogg, Arthur
Kinney, Laura Knoppers, Del Kolve, David Loewenstein, Nancy Klein Maguire,
Arthur Marotti, the late Jeremy Maule, Michael McKeon, David Norbrook, Max
Novak, Jason McElligott, Jerry McGann, John J. Morrison, Annabel Patterson,
Lois Potter, Joad Raymond, Alan Roper, Kevin Sharpe, Nigel Smith, Susan
Staves, Sara Jayne Steen, Ernie Sullivan, Len Tennenhouse, David Underdown,
Andrew Walkling, James Winn, and Steve Zwicker. I can only hope the end
product lives up to their expectations. My thanks also to the innumerable friends
who have listened to me talking about 1660 and the poetry written that year
regardless of their interest: they know who they are. I would also like to thank
the numerous reviewers--sometimes known, sometimes anonymous--who have
supported and refereed my grant applications and the various articles that I have
written about this project.
Over the many years of working on it, librarians at a large number of institutions
have been of incalculable helpfulness. My special thanks to Dr. Nicholas
Bennett of Lincoln Cathedral Library; L. Brotherton of the Manchester Central
Library; Dr. Christine Ferdinand, Librarian of Magdalen College, Oxford; John
Field of Westminster School; B. E. Fowler, Clerk of Horsmonden Parish
Council; Janet McMullin, Assistant Librarian of Christ Church College, Oxford;
Roger Norris of Durham Cathedral Library; Joanna Parker, Librarian of
Worcester College, Oxford; Dr. Michael Powell of Chetham’s Library,
Manchester; Paul Quarrie of Eton College Library; D. W. Riley of the John
Rylands Library, Manchester; Alan Tadiello, Librarian of Balliol College,
Oxford; P. W. Thomas of Exeter Cathedral Library; the late Paul Yeats-Edwards
of Winchester College Library; Elizabeth Watson and Paul Escreet of Glasgow
University Library. I have marvelled at their prompt, courteous and informative
replies to my various enquiries. Without the generosity of John Morrison and
others engaged in revising the Wing STC, this project might have been
abandoned long ago.
More generally, to all the librarians and members of staff who, since 1979, have
worked at the Alderman Library at UVA, the Kresge and Purdey Libraries at
Wayne State, the University of Michigan Library in Ann Arbor, the Detroit
Public Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Cambridge
University Library, the Exeter University Library, Lambeth Palace Library, the
John Rylands Library in Manchester, the National Library of Scotland, the
Houghton Library at Harvard, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
UCLA, the Huntington Library, St. John’s College Library, Cambridge, and the
Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, my gratitude for courtesies
remembered.
Funds and other forms of institutional support have, at various stages, been
generously provided by a number of bodies. Between 1979 and 1981, the
Department of English at UVA first provided funds for me to collect
photocopies of nearly every piece of verse in the Thomason Tracts, that was then
becoming available on microfilm. The Purchasing Office at Alderman Library
promptly bought copies of every new book that I recommeded. During those
years, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, kindly supplied me with up to date
reel guides to their publications of Early English Texts; I will never forget the
exceptional generosity of the anonymous gift from someone at University
Microfilms of a hard-bound photocopy of George Fortescue’s Catalogue to the
Thomason Tracts since I still use it regularly. In 1982, the Advisory Research
Board of Queen’s University at Kingston supplied funds for my first research
trip to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library; the Ahmanson Foundation
at UCLA supported my return there on several occasions. In 1983, the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded early research
trips to the British Library and the Bodleian Library. In 1989, a research grant
from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled me to take a
semester’s leave from teaching to work in the Clark and Huntington Libararies.
Since 1983, numerous grants and research fellowships awarded by the Dean of
Liberal Arts and the Humanities Research Center of Wayne State University
have enabled me to conduct research in numerous locations.
To all, my thanks.
The Argument
Editorial Notes and Sources
Introduction
Rationale
The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 marked a period in world history by
reintroducing monarchy to a nation that was determining global events through
its artistic, scientific, and intellectual achievements as much as by its growing
imperial ambitions. It also brought to an end the first great anti-monarchist
revolution in modern European history. On no previous occasion had the
commercial press been both so necessary and so directly instrumental in
bringing a new government into being.[1] This anthology seeks to bring together
for the first time all the English language poems that appeared during 1660
anticipating Charles’s return up to, but excluding, his coronation in April 1661,
in order to map the cultural links between poetry and political life by
demonstrating the range and scope of what was evidently an immense
ideological need for a poetic legitimation of the new regime.[2]
Why did the English Revoution fail? While it would clearly be overstating the
case to suggest that poetry in any direct way brought about the end of the
English Revolution, or that it caused the reintroduction of monarchy,
nevertheless the events of these crucial months would doubtless have taken
different form had there been no commercial press producing and distributing
the numerous poetic celebrations gathered here which, with few exceptions, aim
to persuade their readers to agree with the poet that Charles’s return was both
good and needful. There was evidently a powerful perception that these things
needed saying, in print, and in poetic form; a need that cannot simply be
explained as the need of individual poets to publicize a display of their personal
loyalty.[3]
When they were first published over three hundred years ago, the poems
collected here helped to re-define the meanings of royalty to a people who had
been without a monarch for nearly two decades, but also to the new king who
was brought in to reign. What did it mean to be Charles Stuart, king of England,
Scotland, and Ireland in 1660? What did the people expect of the man who came
to rule over them? What were the burning issues of the day that only the arrival
of a king could promise to solve? The most general aim of this edition is to
indicate ways that poetry provided an authoritative public medium by which the
sometimes private interests, hopes, and expectations of those helping to engineer
and celebrate Charles’s return could find expression. Except to poke fun at other
poets or to demonize members of the Rump, these poems are never directly
critical or satirical in contrast to the traditional view that Restoration poetry was
satirical. Many of these poems, however, are highly didactic and openly advise
the king to adopt any number of domestic and international policies in order to
boost trade, settle disputes, establish peace and prosperity. What these poems
reflect is the incredible diversity of problems that Charles was expected to solve,
and of the equally diverse and often contradictory sets of opinions about how he
was to go about the enormous task expected of him. Often poets advised the king
of the dangers still to be faced from those opposing his return. Calls for the king
to seek out and enact revenge upon the regicides and all other "traitors" still
loyal to the good old cause were often more blood-thirsty than Charles’s
eventual policies, but serve as a crucial counterpoint to the constantly reiterated
reports of spontaneous and unanimous celebration and praise. Even royalist
panegyrists could not always maintain the illusion that Charles’s return was as
universally desired as was so often being proclaimed in various forms of printed
text. Once these poems become available and understood not just as examples of
poems from the oeuvres of particular poets--Cowley, Waller, Davenant, or
Dryden, for instance--but as a public discourse that operates beyond the private
talents and interests of the specific poet, then their historical importance and
cultural agency can come into clearer focus. In this sense, of constituting a
poetic discourse, these works establish a horizon of expectations within which
Charles was called upon to perform the role of king, and by which that
performance might be judged.[4]
Although they were written over three hundred years ago, these poems still help
to define for us the very meaning and place of royalty in English culture. When
Charles II arrived in England, the people who found that they had suddenly
become his subjects had lived through the experience of regicide and
revolutionary military governments. Among the documents that flooded from the
presses in 1660, poems celebrating the king’s return were not alone in
encouraging readers to think about the many and likely benefits that would
follow from bringing the king back. In the light of such expectations, the tasks
confronting the new king, despite all the carefully orchestrated welcome, might
well have seemed truly daunting. He found himself expected to rule a people