Abstract: John Crowne’s 1682 play City Politiques is arguably the most specific and topical political play of the Exclusion Crisis. This Tory play, however, was not just a celebration of the fall of the Whig party, as some have argued. Instead, Crowne was actively intervening in a still-ongoing matter: the King’s quo warranto proceedings against the City of London to revoke their charter. Keeping the charter controversy at its center, City Politiques engages and stages broader questions about citizens’ rights to contribute to political discourse. By depicting the misunderstanding and abuse of a city charter, and repeatedly invoking the language of charters and liberties, Crowne attempts to limit both the political participation and literary production of non-elite classes during a period that witnessed a shift towards a more representative government.
Abstract: This article reconsiders John Ogilby’s 1660 translation of the Iliad by examining its relationships to the first English Homer, George Chapman’s, and one of the most famous, Alexander Pope’s. While not suggesting that Ogilby’s Iliad is a lost masterpiece, I argue that the work’s reputation has suffered because it fell on the wrong side of a generational divide. Measured against Chapman’s prolixity, Ogilby’s Iliad marks a notable advance in representing Homer’s “rapidity” in English translation. Meanwhile, Pope’s borrowings from Ogilby have not been fully appreciated by modern critics, though (this article shows) some earlier commentators made detailed studies of those debts. Pope, this article contends, was actually one of Ogilby’s closest readers.
Some Current Publications Rose Botaish ART & VISUAL CULTURE See (van Hensbergen), JOHN DRYDEN (Zou) APHRA BEHN Bowditch, Claire and Elaine Hobby. "Aphra Behn's Adaptations: Paper and Stage Sources for The Rover (1677) and Sir Patient Fancy (1678)." Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 1, 2022, pp. 131–150. Bowditch and Hobby explore the concept of literary borrowing in Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677) and Sir Patient Fancy (1678) to illustrate the many methods Behn used to draw on the work of others, which they argue may be representative of Restoration dramatists' connection to paper stage sources. First, Bowditch and Hobby delve into The Rover and the content it uses from Thomas Killigrew's Thomaso. They observe that the relationship between the plays extends beyond the characters and plot points Behn takes from Killigrew. In fact, Behn returns to sources Killigrew himself drew on, like Boccace's Tales and The Novella, though Killigrew was never accused of stealing as Behn was. Along with Behn's use of these additional sources, Bowditch and Hobby also demonstrate that the playwright's decision to change the cavaliers' army to the French, move the location to Naples, center the play on the courtesan, and draw on the carnivalesque classify The Rover as a "radical remaking" (139). Next, Bowditch and Hobby examine Sir Patient Fancy and ascertain that Behn likely utilized James Wright's "La Mallad," a translation of Molière's Le Malade imaginaire, in addition to a range of earlier English plays, like Brome's The Damoiselle and Shirley's The Constant Maid; or, Love will finde out the Way to structure the play. With Sir Patient Fancy, they observe that Behn's borrowing is more conservative (in terms of rank and gender) [End Page 115] than what she did when writing The Rover. Bowditch and Hobby conclude that the variety of adaptive strategies at work in the two plays suggest potential for future research both on Behn and in early modern women's studies and could help reveal Restoration playwrights' "dramaturgic or sociopolitical'' priorities based on their plays' relationships to paper source materials. See also DRAMA & PERFORMANCE, GENDER & SEXUALITY, WOMEN WRITERS Britland, Karen. "'A Poor Gentlewoman That Cannot Take Mercenary Courses for Her Bread': Aphra Behn's Sister and the Influence of Colonialism in Late Seventeenth-Century London." The Seventeenth Century, vol. 38, no. 1, 2023, pp. 131–153. In this article, Britland investigates the impact of colonial expansion in the life of Frances Wright, an Englishwoman who Britland understands to be Aphra Behn's sister. Britland focuses on the effects of colonialism on ordinary English people, like Wright, who began to consider their own social position in terms of others' loss of liberty. Using instances like Wright's attempt to prevent her family's financial ruin by benefiting off the sale of enslaved North African sailors, Britland highlights how Wright "represented the value of her own life through its relationship with the debased value of other people's lives," which she argues was common for non-elite English people who came into contact with the maritime world (133). After presenting evidence to prove that Wright is Behn's sister, Britland also connects Wright's petition and self-perception to the influence of marine travel and colonialism on Behn's writing, including Behn's nuanced understanding of Old and New World institutions of slavery in plays like Oroonoko and Abdelazer. See also SLAVERY James, Cora. "'A Very Equal Well- Proportion'd Pair': Creative Collaboration in the Careers of Restoration Actress, Mrs Norris, and Playwright, Aphra Behn." Women's Writing, vol. 30, no. 3, 2023, pp. 189-205. With the goal of highlighting the contributions of supporting actresses, comedy, and strategic casting in Restoration theater, this article explores the biographical details of the seventeenth-century actress listed as Mrs Norris, who often played comic supporting characters in Aphra Behn's plays. James focuses on the coauthorial relationship between Norris and Behn in the characters Norris played in The Revenge (1680) and The Second Part of the Rover (1681). Despite the sympathy Behn had for many of her female characters, James acknowledges that Behn's plays rely on the audiences' contempt for the...
"He Best Can Turne, Enforce, and Soften Things":Of the Danger and "To the Queen" as Waller's Earliest Poems Richard Hillye I "First draw the sea," enjoins Waller's Instructions to a Painter (1666).1 But he himself had frequently heeded this command with earlier expressions of his maritime muse. "Waller was challenged poetically to represent seascapes," Jack G. Gilbert observes: "He works up gorgeous tableaus […] of struggles in a small boat against a storm, of broadsides, of fires, of explosions. Some of his most inventive images and witty rhetorical devices are inspired by the sea."2 Accordingly, Alexander Ward Allison can generate an entire overview of Waller's diction from just "the manner in which he has described the ocean."3 At least as dated by subject-matter, the first of Waller's "seascapes" preceded Instructions by some four decades: Of the Danger His Majesty [Being Prince] Escaped in the Road at Saint Andrews (1645). Here, he extracts the maximum possible significance from an event that occurred during the autumn of 1623, under circumstances recorded by Elijah Fenton: "Prince Charles having spent about six months at Madrid in solliciting a marriage with the Infanta of Spain, was at length disgusted with the affected delays which he met with in that Court, and resolv'd on returning to England."4 The ships designated to bring this frustrated suitor home caused a greater risk by avoiding a lesser, as Charles Carlton explains: The decision of their admiral, the Earl of Rutland, to anchor outside the harbour beyond the range of Spanish cannon nearly cost Charles [End Page 27] his life. As he was being rowed out to the flagship, the Prince, anchored three miles offshore, a sudden storm threatened to blow his pinnace out to sea, where he might have been lost in the dark had not Sir Sackville Trevor, captain of the Defiance, sent out a line buoyed with casks each with a lantern on top to catch his boat. Charles spent the night on the Defiance before transferring to the flagship, where on 13 September he entertained his Spanish escort. Four days later the English fleet set sail for home.5 But though Of the Danger takes for its point of departure a near-disaster that occurred when Charles left Madrid having entirely failed in his mission, it cleverly re-contextualizes this crisis as one threatening the otherwise smooth-running course of a true love between him and Henrietta Maria, thus transforming her status from that of a mere second choice of princess in a renewed round of marriage negotiations, this time involving France rather than Spain. A close reading of the poem reveals it as not only a plausible product of the mid-1620s but also one whose artistry, everywhere apparent, sometimes involves negotiating the challenges of writing about sensitive topics without the benefit of hindsight. If Waller revised or even first wrote Of the Danger about a decade after its declared occasion (as some literary critics maintain, for various reasons), then its versification would still qualify as an early example of the kind that Dryden adopted and brought to a higher level of overall achievement—end-stopped heroic couplets with frequently antithetical phrasing.6 Only if Waller wrote the poem during the mid-1620s, however, does it anticipate Dryden's greater level of accomplishment in another way—as an ingenious and sophisticated panegyric. Of the Danger loses much of its rhetorical flair and point if Waller wrote or revised it during the mid-1630s, unless one adopts the extreme view that he thereby displayed an even more remarkable kind of skill by producing at a later date a poem so uncanny in its resemblance to the superb panegyric he neglected to begin or complete when the opportunity first and most aptly presented itself. Albeit in a fashion that might seem mealy-mouthed, G. Thorn Drury thus makes an important point about Of the Danger when he discerns "nothing in the verses inconsistent with their having been written, as Fenton supposes, in 1623, or at any rate in the beginning of 1624."7 If not actually a poem dating from the mid-1620s, it carries conviction as...
From John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Undersanding to the Novels of Daniel Defoe:Enquiries into the Mind as Permeable Spirit Orla Smyth The idea that there is an affiliation between the philosophical writing of John Locke and the novels of Daniel Defoe has long been a commonplace in eighteenth-century studies, and to this day critics continue to explore the modes of that relationship. Earlier criticism, guided broadly by the principle that "philosophy is one thing and literature is another," as Ian Watt put it, felt most comfortable positing loose analogies between philosophical empiricism and realist fictions, or identifying themes in Defoe's fiction that echoed theses advanced by Locke.1 More recently, scholars have been canvassing the archives of early empiricism (an archive in which Locke enjoys a prominent but not solitary place) and refiguring the interface between fictional forms and the philosophy and science that secured its dominance during Locke's lifetime. In these studies, the "one thing" of philosophy is no longer the version that circulates in standard histories of ideas, and the protocols of literary criticism no longer impose constraints inherited from nineteenth-century theories of Literature isolating it from conceptual or natural-scientific inquiry. As Helen Thompson shows, eighteenth-century empiricist scientists and novelists shared a joint interest in the qualities of matter and the imperceptible processes subtending the sensible world as it presented itself to perception: just as Boyle pursued his inquiries into insensible bodies, so too novelists (including Defoe in The Plague Year) used the space of fiction to speculate on the invisible but causal operations of corpuscles that underlay modifications of matter. Thompson formulates a cogent critique of traditional accounts of fictional realism whose assumptions about empiricism's attachment to [End Page 85] "directly apprehended sensum" foster a faulty description of the work and modes of fictional representation: early modern empiricists, she points out—whether scientists, philosophers or writers of prose fiction—never conceived the discrete particulars of perception as isomorphic with the real essences of things.2 Jonathan Kramnick returns to the debates on agency and causality elicited by the emergence of modern science and similarly frames those debates as animating inquiry in a broad discursive field encompassing philosophy and fictional forms. Kramnick parses Locke's fraught negotiation of these problems in the Essay, but also the work of poets and novelists as they too confront and respond to the challenge of construing agency in the world of the new philosophy.3 These and other recent contributions to the literary history of the eighteenth century return to the annals of scientific and philosophical empiricism, explore them anew, and situate contemporary fictional forms—drawing on their own modes of representation—as participating in that sphere of inquiry rather than merely reflecting or transmitting its findings.4 In this essay, I too return to the archives of English empiricism and specifically to Locke's Essay, and I make a case for reevaluating the nexus between that philosophical work and the fictional writing of Daniel Defoe in his major novels. However, I take this inquiry in a different direction. Whereas recent studies build on the widely held premise that the impetus of Locke's work was—albeit surreptitiously—materialist, I advance a case for understanding the Essay as propounding an empiricism of substance dualism. We know that an array of heterodox thinkers, both French and English, seized on Locke's Essay and drew upon it in support of their materialist theses. Yet, after some initial leeriness, Locke's work was greeted by a groundswell of enthusiasm from a broad section of the reading public chiefly characterized by hostility to freethinkers.5 Today's revisionist literary-historical scholarship, I argue, needs to factor in this other Locke, the Locke whose findings were not deemed a threat to the period's sacrosanct religious tenet on the two distinct realms of spirit and matter. Although I concur with Thompson's premise concerning the status of empiricist percepts of the material world as effects of imperceptible corpuscles, I would contend that she ventures beyond corpuscularianism's explanatory ambit when she proposes that its inferences can be extended to the realm of the mind. Her contention that for...
"Wedded to Strange Singularities":Margaret Cavendish's Natural Philosophy on Marriage Jennifer Birkett In 1667, the natural philosopher, John Evelyn, penned a description of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, in his diary. The Duchess, he wrote, had an "extravagant humor & dresse, which was very singular."1 One year earlier, Margaret Cavendish had written herself into the narrative of her science-fictional romance, The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World,2 as the Duchess of Newcastle, a woman whose soul comes to the blazing world to write for the Empress and ends up becoming her dear friend.3 Like Evelyn, the Empress remarks on the Duchess' delight "in being singular both in accoutrements, behaviour and discourse" (149). In response, the Duchess admits that while her appearance "was extravagant, and beyond what was usual and ordinary," the reason was because "I endeavour…to be as singular as I can" (149). Notably, both Evelyn and the Empress's observations connect Margaret Cavendish's "extravagant" fashion with her "very singular" personality.4 In his book The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge suggests that singularity was occasionally used as a pejorative during the seventeenth century, equating to self-aggrandizement and a stubborn refusal to follow the status quo.5 This sentiment rings clear in The Blazing World when the Empress cautions the Duchess that "the world would say your singularities are vanities" and counsels her about virtue (150). In an earlier work, The World's Olio (1655), Cavendish had curtly suggested that only "the fantastical fool is wedded to strange singularities."6 And yet, we presume from the Duchess's unabashed endeavor for singularity some years later, that Margaret Cavendish would have been pleased to be called singular. [End Page 61] But what precisely did Margaret Cavendish mean when she wrote about singularity, and how has modern criticism shaped our understanding of this singular woman's bold endeavors? In reading The Blazing World through the lens of Cavendish's natural philosophy and alongside her personal biography (which seeps into the fictional prose through the characters of the Empress and Emperor as well as the Duchess and Duke),7 this article argues that singularity, for Cavendish, was not merely a glorification of extravagant singleness but one which thrived amidst unity and connection. On the whole, criticism regarding Margaret Cavendish's singularity has remained primarily focused on The Blazing World, but the phrases singular, single, and singularity also abound in Cavendish's poems, letters, dramas, and scientific observations. In other words, The Blazing World is just one part of a larger corpus in which Cavendish repeatedly reflects on the philosophical concept of singularity through meditations on natural philosophy and her own biography.8 Looking collectively at the Duchess of Newcastle's writings, we find that she uses singular/singularity most often as extravagance and peculiarity,9 inducing fame,10 or being the intention of one's focus.11 The term single, on the other hand, most often refers to one part of a larger unit, or unmarried status.12 Occasionally, however, she uses single, singular, and singularity interchangeably, all meaning particular and unaffiliating with another.13 In The Blazing World, for example, she uses single to mean "particular," as she does for singular in Philosophical Letters (1664), and for singularities in Wits Cabal (1662).14 This overlapping of meaning continues in her drama Love's Adventures (1662), where Lord Singularity is both singular in his renown, but also singular in his desire to remain separate from his wife. The Oxford English Dictionary provides a similarly fluid spectrum of definitions for the terms singular and singularity. One definition refers to singular as a quantity, a solitary representation of one; another looks to singularity as unity of purpose and heart.15 The terms are also associated with fame, implying that to be singular is to be "separate through pre-eminence, extraordinary."16 But notably, for both singular and singularity, the Oxford English Dictionary's primary definition refers to them as "related to singleness and unity."17 Traditionally, early criticism regarding Margaret Cavendish's endeavors for singularity tended toward the camp of singleness rather than the camp of unity or interconnectedness. Many feminist critics, including Brigitte...
Abraham Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum and the "J. O." conundrum Kathleen Taylor and Gillian Wright In 1689, the bookseller Charles Harper published The Third Part of the Works of Mr Abraham Cowley, being his Six Books of Plants. Described on its title page as "Never before Printed in English," Six Books was the first – and is still, to date, the only – complete English translation of Cowley's late neo-Latin masterpiece, the Sex Libri Plantarum, to reach print. Closely following the publication of the Second Part of Cowley's works in 1681, as well as a partial translation of Book VI of the Plantarum a year earlier, the arrival of Six Books would have contributed to Cowley's high posthumous reputation, which was reaching its peak in the 1680s.1 Six Books is also described on its title page as "Now made English by several Hands." Collaborative translation was fashionable in the 1680s; the landmark Ovid's Epistles (1680), co-produced by John Dryden and Jacob Tonson, had been reissued in 1681, 1683 and 1688, and helped to inspire "several Hands" translations of works such as Cornelius Nepos's The Lives of Illustrious Men (1684) and Suetonius's The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (1688), as well as two further Dryden-Tonson ventures, Virgil's Eclogues (1685) and Plutarch's Lives (1683-88). While the "several Hands" format had, by 1689, extended to genres other than translation (e.g., songs, miscellaneous poetry), Six Books is an early, and rare, example of its application to a modern literary work. Six Books of Plants has received relatively little attention within recent literary scholarship, and much about the circumstances of its production in 1689 remains unclear.2 In this article, we reassess one of the work's many puzzles: the identity of "J. O.," who [End Page 3] translated Books I and II. We set the scene for this reassessment by, initially, sketching out the contents, origins, and early publication history of Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum, a work which, despite generating a recent and impressive array of scholarship from neo-Latin scholars, is still largely unfamiliar to early modern English literary specialists. We subsequently explore what qualities a translator of Plantarum Books I and II is likely to have possessed, before evaluating the claims of several contemporary candidates to be the J. O. of Six Books. Before Six Books: Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum In 1662, Abraham Cowley published Plantarum libri duo, the first two books of one of the most unusual poems ever written.3 The complete work, Sex Libri Plantarum, was published posthumously in 1668.4 Neither an herbal nor a botanical textbook, Plantarum is a dazzlingly allusive six-book masterpiece about plants. Penned in virtuosic Latin, it is "a witty, surprising and often beautiful version of the language of Virgil, Horace and Ovid," as Victoria Moul describes it.5As well as including plant lore, medicine, and what would now be called pharmacology, it ranges from classical mythology to politics and recent history (Book VI includes revised material from Cowley's unfinished epic about the English civil war). The six books form three distinct pairs, of which Books III and IV are the most tightly linked, being two halves of a single long narrative about plants that flower in winter and spring (Book III) and summer and autumn (Book IV). All six are steeped in their author's deep knowledge of Latin literature. As Nahum Tate, who wrote the preface to the 1689 Six Books, explained: The two first Books treat of Herbs, in a Style resembling the Elegies of Ovid and Tibullus, in the sweetness and freedom of the Verse; but excelling them in the strength of the Fancy, and vigour of the Sence. The third and fourth discourse of Flowers in all the variety of Catullus and Horace's Numbers; for the last of which Authors he had a peculiar Reverence, and imitated him, not only in the stately and numerous pace of his Odes and Epodes, but in the familiar easiness of his Epistles and Speeches. The two last speak of Trees, in the way of Virgil's Georgicks: Of these the sixth Book...
Some Current Publications Garth Libhart APHRA BEHN Birchwood, Matthew. "'Puritan Mahumetans': Reading Anglo—Muslim Contexts in Aphra Behn's Abdelazer and The False Count." Women's Writing, vol. 27, no. 3, August 2020, pp. 294–309. Birchwood examines Behn's representation of cross-cultural encounters in two plays, Abdelazer (1676) and The False Count (1681), contextualizing his analysis within a discussion of the period's turbulent political atmosphere. Both plays feature a Spanish setting, specifically the "contact zone between the Iberian peninsula and the Maghreb" (294). In Birchwood's view, the plays' attention to the region's "rich history of Christian—Muslim relations" is "directly relevant to domestic political questions of the period" (294). Birchwood begins with an analysis of Abdelazer, "Behn's only full-blooded tragedy," a tale in which a Moroccan prince, now a royal slave, takes revenge on the Spanish royalty who forced his father out of power (295). Birchwood compares several moments from Abdelazer to related scenes in the Elizabethan revenge tragedy Lust's Dominion (performed ca. 1600), which served as a major source for the plot of Behn's play. While the plots between the two plays are broadly similar, Birchwood shows how Behn's version emphasizes the noble status of the titular character and inverts contemporary xenophobic stereotypes about Muslims as instigators of unregulated, vicious passions. Similarly, Birchwood argues that in The False Count, Behn unmasks the hypocrisy of the play's Christian characters. This is most evident in a scene where a "Grand Signior" commands a ship of "Turks." Throughout his analysis, Birchwood shows how both plays "raise provocative questions of succession, conversion, captivity, and allegiance" that resonate [End Page 133] powerfully with the political climate of the English Restoration (294). Britland, Karen. "Aphra Behn's First Marriage?" The Seventeenth Century, vol. 36, no. 1, 2021, pp. 33–53. Britland highlights three documents that may contribute to the understanding of Behn's life and social background. The first is an entry in the church register of St. Botolph Aldgate from 1657 which records the engagement of a "John Halse gentleman and Aphara Johnson" (33). According to Britland, there is a strong indication from archival evidence that the "Aphara Johnson" in the record was the daughter of Bartholomew and Elizabeth Johnson—later known as Aphra Behn. While the entry in the St. Botolph register falls short of proving that a marriage occurred, as it is only a publication of banns, Britland suggests that the wedding itself may have taken place elsewhere, and thus be recorded in another parish record. Britland explains that a connection between the young "Aphara Johnson" and the socially elevated Halse family would explain how Behn came to travel to the Americas: the Halses "had strong colonial connections, with members scattered about the Caribbean as merchants and plantation owners," though little is known about the specific identity or role of the "John Halse" in question (41). Next, Britland considers a set of instructions given to a Dutch spy who travelled to London in the mid-1660s to conduct work involving William Scott. The instructions tell the spy to visit "Scott's Shee correspondent," which Britland interprets as a reference to Behn (41). Finally, Britland turns to Behn's time in Flanders as a spy, suggesting that she borrowed money from John Butler in Antwerp to fund her journey home to England after failing to receive reimbursement from her governmental employers (Butler's will records the debt). Britland concludes by considering how Behn's connections to the networks illuminated by these documents might relate to the development of her literary ambition. Gill, Catie. "The Bible and Its Exegesis in Aphra Behn's An Essay on Translated Prose' (1688)." Women's Writing, vol. 27, no. 3, August 2020, pp. 310–324. Gill argues that Behn's preface to Bernard de Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes—published as "An Essay on Translated Prose" (1688)—reveals significant information not only about Behn's engagement with the Bible, but also with scientific theories such as heliocentrism. The Copernican solar model is an important influence on Fontenelle's Entretiens, and Behn's prefatory "Essay" praises the theory directly. For instance, Behn argues that Biblical...
Abstract:During the English Restoration, the writing of letters took on new significance, and the formal tradition of letter writing contributed significantly to the experimentation that played out within the genres of narrative prose fiction. While epistolarity is built on the absence of speakers, merely evoking their spectral presence during the moment of reading, materiality nevertheless finds its way into these indirect forms of communication. In fact, corporeality and the physicality of objects included in letters could be said to make up for the absent body of the speaker. This article discusses how Restoration epistolarity employs such forms of materiality, arguing that readers and writers, both within the diegetic realm and in actual reality, decoded ostentatious moments of materiality as acts that lent letters an element of veracity and reliability that this generic form was not usually able to claim at this particular historical moment. Texts studied include Robert Beaumont's Loves Missives to Virtue (1660) and Margaret Cavendish's Sociable Letters (1664).
Mary Pix (c. 1666–1709) published eight plays between 1696 and 1709, together with a novel, The Inhumane Cardinal, the verse-novelette Violenta, and two poetic works. Five additional plays have been attributed to Pix. Thirteen of Pix's seventeen works included dedications, which she used to derive additional profits and enhance her prestige as an author. The practice of writing dedications was widespread in seventeenth-century England, a state of affairs unsurprising given the precarious situation of professional writers, amongst whom Pix was no exception. This article focuses on Pix's dedication of The Inhumane Cardinal (1696) to Princess Anne, analyzing its use of a strategy common in such writings, the divinization of the dedicatee. I contend that Pix took advantage of the popularity she had earned through her first two plays, Ibrahim and The Spanish Wives (both staged in 1696 and printed that year with dedications to members of the gentry), to request Anne's permission to offer the princess her novel. In the epistle, Pix adapted conventions which had been developed predominantly in playtexts to legitimize her work of fiction, and Anne herself and the virtues that she exemplifies validate The Inhumane Cardinal as suitable reading, while bringing renown to the writer. Moreover, Pix's panegyric intersects with the political climate by insisting upon Anne's worthiness as the rightful successor to the throne. Therefore, I argue, paratexts should not be disregarded when studying novels, nor, indeed, plays, given that professional writers like Pix involved themselves in various genres throughout their careers.
Reviewed by: Before Crusoe: Defoe, Voice, and the Ministry by Penny Pritchard Patricia Rodrigues Patricia Rodrigues. Penny Pritchard, Before Crusoe: Defoe, Voice, and the Ministry. New York: Routledge, 2019. 177 pp. ISBN 9780367664381. Penny Pritchard's compelling picture of Daniel Defoe's complex authorial personae and the rhetorical strategies common in his earlier works will be of relevance not only to eighteenth-century scholars, but all those who are interested in literary history and Defoe's pivotal place in it. Through close examination of Defoe's nonconformity in his works before 1719, prior to the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Pritchard argues that Defoe forges an innovative form of moral authority through an array of voices reflecting these earlier works' religious perspective. Her vast knowledge of primary and secondary literature on Defoe's extensive oeuvre, its genre, and thematic diversity may justify Pritchard's choice of a conservative canon. Her refusal to engage in "the vexed question of attribution" (53) supports her adherence to Defoe's canon established by Furbank and Owens to avoid including works subject to such debate. Pritchard's analysis of Defoe's early writings provides insight into how his first fiction experiments during the Restoration matured in the early eighteenth century, particularly from a religious perspective. Pritchard explores Defoe's Protestant frame which she considers a "non-specific" Protestantism, drawing on biographical information on Defoe's education, and how his authorial personae in later fiction reflect these religious features. The chapter organization allows for a seamless flow that depicts the evolution of Defoe's authorial personae. The limited chronological range of Defoe's corpus Pritchard analyses is nonetheless extensive, and thus attention devoted to each text is necessarily limited in depth. A more detailed analysis of some of the presumably more significant works is offered to overcome such constraint, but one wonders about the criterion for choosing those particular texts. The introduction briefly discusses each chapter and lays the groundwork for Pritchard's arguments. Pritchard contends that one must consider Defoe's early authorial personae, and how they "reflect their inception within a burgeoning printing culture sensitive to the tastes of a diverse reading public" (1) to fully understand the beginnings of the early English novel and recognize the importance of Robinson Crusoe's role in its genesis. While these early works point to dissenting authorial personae, Pritchard claims that the virtual dismissal of the subject of nonconformity from his writings after 1719 cannot be coincidental, a claim she repeatedly makes throughout her book. The first chapter, "The Nonconformist Catch-22," encapsulates the paradoxes within the culture of English dissent. It addresses the "Happy Unions and Bitter Divisions in Popular Religious Writing," compares Defoe's writings to other non-conformists', and highlights his lack of empathy for his dissenting contemporaries. Pritchard argues that the extent to which Defoe is immersed in an intellectual, ambiguous dissident environment [End Page 181] justifies her investigation of his response to London nonconformity. Her comprehensive knowledge of English Protestant dissent can be rather overwhelming for those who are not extensively acquainted, as she is, with its "myriad of sects" (23). The biblical allusion (Mark 5:9) of the second chapter's title, '"Our name is Legion," unveils how Defoe's authorial personae echoes his address to the British House of Commons, "Legion's Memorial" (May 14, 1701), advocating the right to petition. The chapter highlights the notions of "author" and "authorship," and the voices Defoe uses in different genres. Pritchard argues that there has not yet been enough critical exploration on Defoe's Protestant roots in the variety of voices he invents, focusing on Defoe's religious convictions and moral concerns to persuasively establish just how important a role this plays in his fashioning of different voices. The third chapter, "'You must go Home, and ask my Father': Providence, Empiricism, and Print Culture," discusses the great Storm of 1701, borrowing Defoe's line from his account of the phenomenon. Pritchard contends that in both The Storm and An Essay Upon Projects, Defoe plays the authorial role of a religious and moral mentor. She adds that his early literary works were "sermons in purpose if not in form" (74), which she justifies by...
