George Herbert: A Literary Life (review)

Cristina Malcolmson's George Herbert: A Literary Life – not to be confused with her previous Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (1999) – is a timely and welcome updating of Herbert's biography. It is one in a series of Literary Lives that "follow the outline of the writers' working lives, . . . aiming to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing" (p. i). For that reason, perhaps, it begins with George Herbert's first writings, rather than dwelling on his childhood and family. It also features a substantial and useful "Chronology of Herbert's Life," with relevant contextual events given on facing pages.

This book is timely because in the almost three decades since the publication of Amy M. Charles's Life of George Herbert (1977), significant new information and viewpoints have come to the fore. While Malcolmson admits that exactly why Herbert became first University of Cambridge Orator and then the parson of Bemerton may always remain a mystery, she proposes in this book to counter the long-standing view of Herbert as retreating from the world, and show him instead as "publicly engaged, active within an important social circle, and [to the end of his life] directly concerned with the future of world Protestantism" (p. ix).

Malcolmson keeps this goal in mind as she relates Herbert's writings to their contexts, literary and historical. Her first chapter examines the Sidney-Herbert coterie (which she also dealt with in Heart-Work), showing why and how his family and religious ties influenced George's "formation as a poet" (p. 2). Thus Herbert's "answer" poems involve relationships, as she shows, to verse by Sidney, Sidney's nephew and "cultural heir" (p. 8) William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke), Benjamin Rudyerd, and Shakespeare, among others. William Herbert, the central figure of this coterie and one of George Herbert's patrons, was also the "leading spokesperson" for the Protestant cause in the England of his time (p. 22).

Herbert's writings while at the University of Cambridge (1612-23), Malcolmson claims, "signaled his dedication to international Protestantism, as well as his interest in high office in church or state" (p. 21). She reads his Latin poems in defense of English church ritual, Musae Responsoriae (which she dates 1620-21), as "an ambitious effort by . . . Herbert to become a spokesperson for King James and the established church" (p. 30). In keeping with the king's views to this date, he presented Puritanism in these poems not as a theological issue, but one of obedience to authority. Further, Malcolmson suggests that Herbert's Latin pacifist writings may have reflected not only a personal antipathy to war but also a "politic deference" to the views of King James (p. 39), "perhaps an opportunity to play Virgil to James's Augustus" (p. 51). At the same time these writings, and the poems to the Queen of Bohemia (recently proven to be by Herbert) show the poet's continuing commitment to international Protestantism (p. 37). However, Malcolmson can find no evidence that Herbert actually received patronage from James.

Malcolmson singles out 1624 and 1627 as important dates for Herbert and his writings. In the first of these years Herbert cut off his chances of secular employment by seeking permission to be ordained deacon immediately. His reason, Malcolmson suggests, is that he wanted to avoid voting against James in Parliament, as his political relationship to the Earl of Pembroke would have required (p. 56). She goes on to claim that the poetry of The Temple reflects "issues significant to Herbert" during that year: "the problems of Arminianism and Puritanism, the importance and difficulties of a Protestant empire, and his own pursuit of patronage and employment" (pp. 56-57). Here as in Heart-Work Malcolmson notes signs of the Protestant work ethic, or doctrine of vocation, in "The Church-porch." In her view, throughout "The Church" itself Herbert "comments on contemporary controversies about theology and liturgy" (p. 60), emphasizing the Calvinist view that salvation...