John Donne (review)

This book, elegantly written and conceived, is part of the Critical Issues series published by the Palgrave Macmillan Press. Sugg sees his major goal as placing the reading of Donne's poetry and prose within the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, most particularly within a "triangular relationship" among "religion, the individual and society" (3). To this end, he accords the chapters of his book different pivotal issues: Self, Men and Women, Belief and Sin, New Philosophy, The New World, and Glorious Annihilation. He moves through these chapters in a generally chronological manner that parallels the development towards greater intertextuality: from the poems dealing with Donne's anti-Petrarchan tradition, then to his Elegies and Satires (chapters 2 and 3), and ultimately to a conjoint discussion of his poetry and prose works (chapters 4–7). The interrelationship between Donne's life and his writing has long fascinated readers and scholars: indeed such a concern greatly influences the Simpson and Potter twentieth-century edition of the Sermons, as particularly Simpson desired to illustrate the course of Donne's life by reference to his sermons and poetry. Her two essays first conceptualizing this approach were written at the beginning of the twentieth-century (Evelyn M. Spearing, "A Chronological Arrangement of Donne's Sermons," Modern Language Review 8 [1913]: 468–83; "Donne's Sermons, and their Relation to his Poetry," Modern Language Review 7 [1912]: 40–53). Sugg's twenty-first-century book appropriately widens this context, admirably developing concerns with intellectual history, and with the interdisci-plinary studies of literature and culture.

My major concern in this book is with its targeted audience — and hence with its scholarly and pedagogical goals. Neither in the volume nor on the press's website is there a statement regarding the goals of the Critical Issues series. I can therefore only surmise that the intended audience is the sophisticated secondary school student, or concomitantly, the curious university undergraduate. This is indeed to be welcomed. Therefore, Sugg takes pains to consistently paint an interesting, and intimate, portrait of Donne as student, man-about-town, husband, and preacher. Yet this also indicates a weakness, shared with another recent British study of Donne. In her TLS review of John Stubbs's book, Donne: The Reformed Soul, Katherine Duncan-Jones writes perceptively (and rather amusedly) of the "empathy" component of the British GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examination in history, which tends to set tasks like: "imagine that you are a servant in the City of London during the Great Fire" (22 September 2006, 3). Though Sugg generally uses this quality to great advantage, I would have preferred a more explicit awareness within the book of such a fictionalizing technique, indicating the clear distinction between Donne's literary, polemical, sermonic, and epistolatory texts, and a scholar's re-creation of Donne's personal musings and attitudes. Furthermore, Sugg tends to make conclusive summaries of scholarship that are often unwieldy: such is the case, for example, when he writes that "Bakhtin would see, in that [Donne's] metaphor of absorption and homogenisation [of knowledge], the centripetal habits of those who could only admit variety as a tamed and subordinate element in a totalising, essentially tyrannical and monolithic system" (129). This statement is at once too pedantic for a student not grounded in Bakhtin, as well as too categorical for a more knowledgeable scholar.

Sugg is at his best when he utilizes his concern with literature and culture to produce insights both into Donne the man (his shifting situations and allegiances in response to the complex political, religious, and societal challenges of early modern England) and into integrative discussions of Donne's works — they being, after all, the raison d'être for our interest. Particularly of note is chapter 5, "New Philosophy," in which Sugg draws on his own scholarly work — presented at length in his recent book Murder After Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (2007) — to look at "Donne's...