Critical Survey

Whereas questions of race, class and gender may be uppermost in the minds of many late twentieth-century scholars and critics, in the early modern period tradition and belief were the predominant preoccupations, in practical terms, custom and Christianity were inextricably intertwined within the changing culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An awareness of these past concerns motivates each of the seven articles in this issue, articles which re-examine literary and historical texts, not as past mirrors in which we might speculate upon our own particular preoccupations, but as sources of a more anthropological and spiritual history.

During the last twenty years it has become conventional to read The Tempest in relation to the exploration and colonisation of the New World. The paucity of literal references to America in the play means that this ‘colonial’ reading, however suggestive, is as much an allegorisation of the text as the older idea that Prospero represented Shakespeare himself. A number of critics have expressed strong reservations about this approach and two important, recent articles have pointed out that the insistence on a New World context has ignored equally important European contexts which inform the play. A reading which emphasises questions of power, legitimacy, conquest, colonisation, and slavery need look no further than the Mediterranean world in which the play is literally set, or indeed no further than the British Isles themselves. The importance of Ireland to any ‘colonial’ reading has already been amply demonstrated. What I wish to do is to read The Tempest in the light of myths about the origin of Britain, an approach which takes the play’s questions about legitimate rulership beyond a narrowly conceived version of ‘colonialism’. As Claire McEachern has written, ‘Colonialism is of acknowledged importance to English nationhood in this moment, but to the list of colonial territories that are conventionally supposed to animate English identity – the New World, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales – we must add Britain itself’.

John Rolfe’s letter detailing his internal struggles concerning his relationship with his future wife Pocahontas brings into play many of the issues which are central to Reformed ideas – conscience, judgement, salvation and desire. The struggle between flesh and faith, desire and salvation which Rolfe presents fits our understanding of Calvinist thought to the extent that Peter Hulme has called the letter a ‘classic Puritan document’. Rolfe’s denial of ‘the unbridled desire of carnall affection’ seems archetypal in its renunciation of the flesh, but there also is another form of desire at work in the letter. Where Rolfe denies that his yearning is carnal he celebrates his longing to convert the native. This is very different, but a recognition of the link between the two desires – for the flesh and for the spirit – is necessary if we are to truly understand the Reformed theology which travelled across the Atlantic in the early seventeenth century.

Generations of scholars and critics have gnawed at two juicy interpretative bones: why is Faustus damned, and when exactly does his fate become irrevocable? Using a rather tacky analogy, which is just about defensible on the grounds that death and what lies after death are now both taboo, and bare bodies are everywhere, I shall argue that, just as a stripper delays gratification, so, teasingly, the play flaunts a number of possible reasons why Faustus might be damned, yet never allows the audience the satisfaction of certainty, and that it is helped in this by having a self-dramatising hero.

In the early 1580s religious propaganda was used extensively and ferociously to inform (or misinform) that sector of the English public that had access to such works about events involving a number of Catholic priests and sympathisers and their opponents. This period saw a major episode of crisis over counter-Reformation Catholicism, exemplified by the mission to England headed by Edmund Campion, and the consequent arrest, torture, trial and execution of Campion and his associates. Numerous texts were produced from a variety of perspectives to intervene in the representation of these men, their motives, the treatment they received, and the danger they may or may not have posed to Protestant England. The propagandist texts with which I am concerned range across the various possible positions on these and other Catholic priests.

Recusant confessional texts were discursively produced by and productive of secret spaces – the confessional itself and the torture chamber. They were sites of private, intimate probing that enabled disclosures of truth, which, to the English recusant community of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had a particular resonance. The confessional was a site of Catholic reconciliation, but to the state it was a signifier of Catholic treason. The state used the torture of recusants, particularly priests, to reveal the truth, but here the ‘truth’, ostensibly a list of people, places and actions that can be discovered in the body of the victim, was opposed to the recusant’s ‘truth’ as internal belief. But despite these opposing concepts of the location and nature of truth, the discourses of its revelation are similar. Torture binds together the perpetrator and victim through the secrets the participants strive to reveal or conceal. In the confessional too, the confessor and the confessant are bound together by what is hidden.

For those early modernists who come to the millenarian culture of mid seventeenth-century England via Bernard Capp’s seminal The Fifth Monarchy Men, it may be some surprise to discover that, of all the non-aristocratic women writing in England at this time, it was actually those associated with the millenarian Fifth Monarchist movement who received most contemporary attention. Anna Trapnel and Mary Cary are among the most prolific writers of the late 1640s and 1650s, who (according to all short title catalogues) have some thirteen extensive printed works to their names, a figure virtually unmatched by any writer of the same sex, or from the same non-aristocratic social background in the period. Despite being a less-famed figure than Anna Trapnel, Mary Cary’s exegetical works were widely read and accordingly went into numerous editions. In 1649, the anonymous author of The Account Audited claims to have seen the title page of the first edition of Cary’s The Resurrection of the Witnesses (1648) ‘posted up’ at a bookseller’s in London. When the author acquires the treatise, it is read with ‘much greediness and expectation’, only for disappointment to follow due to the work’s historical inaccuracies. These aside, the fact that the author felt it worthwhile to offer the account as a response to Cary’s pamphlet, attests to Cary’s growing – if largely unacknowledged – popularity at the end of the 1640s.

Mary Ward’s initial view of her vocation as a nun challenges the seventeenth- century English reformed church’s view of women’s role but is firmly within the patriarchal boundaries of the seventeenthcentury Catholic church. In 1620 she writes of her early position as part of a retrospective attempt to explain her later activities: ‘I saw not how a religious woman could do more [good] than to herself alone. To teach children seemed then too much a distraction … nor was it of that perfection and importance as therefore to hinder that quiet and continual communication with God which strict enclosure afforded’ (1620, Letter to Mgr. Albergati). However, by 1620 her view had changed and Ward’s later work for female educational emancipation and her attempt to establish self-government and freedom from enclosure for the institute of Jesuitesses which she sought to establish, have led to her being labelled the first known English feminist by Warnicke. This striking shift is due to visionary experiences which convince her that ‘women may be perfect as well as men’ (TGW, 58). Her resulting challenge to the discourses of patriarchy meets with disapproval from most representatives of the establishment of the Catholic church. Even her abbess dryly informs her that it is, ‘no longer the time “when young maidens should have visions.”’ Her subtext seems to be: ‘And especially not ones like these!’

Dandolo’s Bones She’s his Miranda A Middle-aged Poet Faced with ‘Titian’s Three Ages of Man’ CHRISTOPHER SOUTHGATE

Mysteries JOHN GREENING

Death Notices in Palestrina BARRY COLE

To Accompany a Gift of Culpeper’s Herbal (1653) SCOTT KELLY

Drama and Politics in the English Civil War Susan Wiseman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ISBN 0-521-47221-0 hardback £40.00

The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Sources and Documents Edited by Kate Aughterson (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) ISBN 0-415-18554-8 hardback £90.00

Coming of Age in Shakespeare Margorie Garber (New York & London: Routledge, 1997) ISBN 0-415-91908-8 paperback £10.99

Notes on contributors