Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627-1660 (review)

In the introduction to Writing the English Republic, Norbrook declares that his readers are at liberty, if they wish, to “tear the book in two and begin with chapter 5,” where his coverage of post-1649, Commonwealth literature begins. In view of the book’s length and copiously detailed argument, Miltonists might be tempted to commit a more serious travesty, and turn straight to his final chapter on Paradise Lost. It would be a pity to do so. Norbrook’s argument for the influence of Lucan’s Pharsalia on Milton’s epic is important, but it is not the most profound, nor in my view the most convincing, contribution this book has to offer. Read in its entirety, Writing the English Republic accomplishes two much more difficult tasks. Better than any single volume published to date, it enriches our understanding of the political and historical context of mid-seventeenth century literary production. And it traces the continuity of a certain political and imaginative stance, which Milton shared and helped to develop, that may broadly be defined as “republican.”

Norbrook’s aim is to demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, English republicanism did not simply “spring from nowhere, only to disappear from sight within a few years” (5). He begins his analysis of republican literature and politics in the 1620s, with Thomas May’s translation of Lucan’s epic on the Roman Civil Wars. His second chapter then traces republican fault-lines running through the 1630s, when court culture apparently flourished during the years of Charles I’s personal rule. If May was now content to celebrate Charles as the English Augustus, there were others, John Saltmarsh and John Russell, for example, who kept alive a tradition of oppositional, martial poetics. On the courtly side, Edmund Waller and John Denham forged a new poetics of elegance, but their verse harmonies were “hard-won,” deliberately constructed in the face of rival poetic and political energies. When civil war broke out in the 1640s, it was a Royalist poet, Abraham Cowley, who drew on Lucan’s model to portray the conflict. Norbrook judges Cowley’s Civil Wars a failure because it is “too much out of sympathy with the values of Lucan and his admirers to make that model work,” (86) and he contrasts Cowley’s “ideologically rigid” epic with the energetic openness of George Wither’s Campo-Musae.

Chapter 3 introduces Norbrook’s first indisputably republican hero, Henry Marten. Marten designed the Great Seal for the Republic in 1649, which is engraved with the words, “In the First Year of Freedom, by God’s Blessing Restored.” “Restored” is used here in its republican sense, inferring a return to ancient traditions of liberty rather than (as “Restoration” has come to be understood subsequently) the return of monarchic rule. This chapter also raises a key question for Milton scholars: when did his thought become recognizably republican? Many have taken 1649 to be the critical turning point, but Norbrook argues that Milton’s earlier prose works on religious issues contain the same basic principles later developed later in the political tracts. “If Milton targets the clergy in the first instance, it is because they offer a tyranny worse than anything known in classical times, one over ‘inward persuasion’” (114). The “ideological rigidity” characteristic of some republican thinking also emerges clearly in Milton’s divorce tracts, where a husband’s prized inner liberty depends, in part, on his wife’s willingness to “provide dialogue and to listen to a monologue” (118). Norbrook steers a balanced course through Milton’s prose tracts, alerting us, for example, to the fact that even the idealistic Areopagitica “nowhere calls for universal freedom” (119). But Norbrook is particularly attuned to the radicalism of Milton’s ideas; he highlights Areopagitica’s connections with the Hartlib circle, and its aims to set up a system of non-courtly patronage (122), and he emphasizes Milton’s support, in the divorce tracts, of radical religious groups that extended greater degrees of participation to...