The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (review)

With the publication of The Poems in Nigel Smith's Longman edition and The Prose Works in these two impressive Yale volumes under the general editorship of Annabel Patterson, the whole body of Marvell's writings has become available in well-prepared texts, helpfully introduced and comprehensively annotated for today's reader. The last prose collection had been in Alexander Grosart's Complete Works (1872-75), although latterly the two most important texts, The Rehearsal Transpros'd and its Second Part, could be enjoyed in D.I.B. Smith's critically edited and erudite Oxford edition. Unfortunately the general knowledge of the period and its culture (including Latin) on which Smith could count in 1971 no longer prevails: that, together with recent historical and bibliographical discoveries, amply justifies the re-editing of this pair of texts by Patterson and Martin Dzelzainis as Yale'svolume 1. Anthony Wood grouped The Rehearsal Transpros'd with John Eachard's Contempt of the Clergy and Samuel Butler's Hudibras as 'buffooning and drolling books' (Life and Times 2.240). Archdeacon Parker's authoritarianism is repeatedly mimicked in Marvell's arbitrary acts of writing and reading: 'I upon this occasion, begun, I know not how it came, at p. 127. And thence read on to the end of his Book. And from thence I turn'd to the beginning and continued to p. 127.' Marvell's assertion that Parker's Ecclesiastical Policy is actually a poetic drama is echoed in Mr. Smirke, also edited by Patterson, where 'Ingenious and Pregnant' clergy have been ordained 'to supply the Press continually with new Books of ridiculous and facetious argument.' Eventually Marvell presents Smirke - Parker's fellow high-flyer Francis Turner renamed after the parson in Etherege's Man of Mode - with A Short Historical Essay on the early Church. It employs the more serious tone of the remaining texts in volume 2: An Account of the Growth of Popery, edited by Nicholas von Maltzahn, and Remarks on a Late Disingenuous Discourse (viz the predestinarian Thomas Danson's De Causa Dei), edited by N.H. Keeble. An Account is particularly well edited - closely analysed and exhaustively researched, bibliographically and historically, in manuscript and printed sources. A wide-ranging introduction indicates exactly how Marvell assembled his text and describes its very interesting reception history.

The Editorial Protocols remark the absence of 'what might have been expected in a bibliographer's edition - the complex narrative of different states of the texts as produced by press corrections, and so on. Instead we concentrate on the broad differences between editions.' Their complicated printing histories are carefully investigated - although for descriptions of the pirated Rehearsal Transpros'd one must still consult Smith. The editors choose second-edition copy-texts, as more correct and modern-looking, except in the case of the single-edition Remarks. Not separating variant readings from the explanatory footnotes has the effect of mixing what is simply recorded with what readers actually want to know: a number in the text ('you say to⁷³³ me') prompts one to look - only to find '⁷³³to me 73] to to me 74.' Original spelling and punctuation are retained, and italics 'for all quotations and words that Marvell apparently wished to emphasize. The original italicization of proper names and places has, however, been dropped, on grounds that it distracts from the ideological intentions of italicization as a debating practice.' One can recall Yale's edition of Samuel Johnson taking a similarly dismissive view of capital letters. This protocol may have affected some editorial quotations: John Evelyn's 'Dr. Gunning Bish: of Elie ... Chiefly against an Anonymous Booke called Naked Truth, a famous & popular Treatise against the Corruption in the Cleargie, but not sound as to its quotations' loses all its italics except 'Naked Truth.' Likewise the next...