The Self in Early Modern Literature: For the Common Good (review)

The title of Terry G. Sherwood’s book consists of the unusual, to this reader’s ear, configuration of a noun phrase in the nominative, The Self in Early Modern Literature, joined by a colon to another noun phrase in the ablative: For the Common Good. The conjunction functions effectively if awkwardly to position Sherwood’s humanistic readings of the work of Spenser (The Faerie Queene), Shakespeare (1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V), Donne (poetry, letters, Pseudo-Martyr, Devotions, sermons), Jonson (Epigrams, poetry of compliment, Timber, The Forest, some plays), and Milton (particularly the prose pamphlets, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise Regained) in relation to the debate about early modern subjectivity. On the book’s title page, the significance of this debate as the inspiration of this study is underscored typographically: the size of the letters of The Self in Early Modern Literature overtakes that of For the Common Good by a factor of two.

It will come as no surprise to readers who know his earlier books (Fulfilling the Circle: A Study of John Donne’s Thought [1984], Herbert’s Prayerful Art [1989]) that Sherwood is on the side of humanism, finding in early modern writings, in contrast to the readings of cultural materialists and some New Historicists, evidence of a unified self in the characters and self-presentations of the writers whose work he discusses. The insight he brings to bear on this question is that “the intersection of Protestant vocation and Christian civic humanism” was “a stabilizing factor” (3) in the early modern experience of subjectivity: “Responsible contribution to common good stabilized and sustained the self ” (8).

Four of Sherwood’s five main chapters focus more or less concertedly on the authors’ own subjectivity. (One chapter, as well argued as the others but less persuasive, stands a little apart: chapter 2 on Shakespeare’s Henriad, where only the self of Prince Hal and not that of his creator is the object of analysis.) While for much of the chapter on Spenser, Sherwood is concerned with The Faerie Queene’s representation of the knights of Faerie Land, conceived in terms of “gendered relationships” (81) that reflect the reality of the court of Elizabeth and the readership of the poem, Sherwood turns at last to the poem’s change of direction, its unfinished condition, and the questions that arise about Spenser’s understanding of his poetical vocation.

Chapters on Donne, Jonson, and Milton are more thoroughly focused on the selfhood of the authors. Reading Donne against the grain of “[m]uch recent criticism,” Sherwood finds in all of his writing “contours of the self ” (166), a self that achieves stability at last in Donne’s identification with St. Paul in his priestly vocation. Jonson’s writing, addressing “poetry’s cultural value and the poet’s role in the commonwealth” (248), is preoccupied with what Sherwood calls “the truth of envy,” the condition of “the congenitally unfulfilled human self” (254). Sherwood tracks Jonson’s awareness of “how his own personal habits [are] disruptive of the common good” (258). The chapter on Milton explores Milton’s persistent concern with how best to use his “one talent” (sonnet, “When I consider,” line 3). Brief and incisive on the early poems, detailed on the prose writings, Sherwood brings his argument to impressive fruition in his discussion of Milton’s post-Restoration poetry, particularly the effect of his publishing Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained together “to reflect on each other” (306–07). A “postscript” discusses the Bacon family and the role of Anne Bacon in influencing her sons’ commitment to public service: a fitting coda for this book.

Work like this gratifies the desire, however traditional, of readers such as this reviewer to believe in the capacity of literary works to support a responsible civic enterprise. Sherwood’s style and method, respectful of his opposition, thoroughly...