Lady State's First Two Sittings: Marvell's Satiric Canon

Twenty years ago, I strongly supported the case made by George de Forest Lord for Andrew Marvell's authorship of the two Restoration satires, the Second and Third Advices to a Painter, to which Marvell's Last Instructions to a Painter was obviously a sequel. ¹ These poems were written in parodic response to Edmund Waller's Instructions to a Painter, for the Drawing of the Posture and Progress of His Majesties Forces at Sea, which appeared in the spring of 1666 as a progovernment eulogistic account of the first phase of the Second Dutch War, and especially of the conduct of James, duke of York, as admiral. Manuscript copies of the Second and Third Advices appeared on the streets respectively in December 1666 and January 1667, when Samuel Pepys recorded their existence in his Diary. In the first printed editions of 1667, they were attributed to Sir John Denham, who, for several good reasons, including his temporary madness at the time, could not have been responsible for them. The question of who actually wrote them has never been definitively resolved.

Lord's original argument was based primarily on internal evidence: the Second, Third, and Last "painter" poems showed a marked similarity of attitude to the major figures in the Restoration government. ² In his edition of Marvell's poems, which included the Advices, Lord was further impressed by the provenance and testimony of what is now known as the "Popple" manuscript, which came from the family of Marvell's beloved nephew, William Popple, and is now in the Bodleian library. Lord's arguments about the value of this manuscript in establishing the Marvell canon, however, were somewhat discredited by his overdependence on certain cross marks in the manuscript which he interpreted as attributing or denying particular poems to Marvell; ³ and my own arguments in support of his position focused the question of attribution on the unusually intelligent deployment of pictorialist conventions in the Advices, which linked them with the Last Instructions rather than with later "painter" poems. Since then, Marvell critics have tiptoed around this issue. But, with a new edition of Marvell's poetry by Nigel Smith pending from Longman, with a modern edition of his prose in progress at Yale University Press, and a revised version of my 1978 book--Marvell and the Civic Crown--in print, along with an appendix publishing for the first time these Advices as they appear in the Popple manuscript, the time seems ripe, if not overdue, for providing a less timid answer than those currently available to the question raised by Lord. ⁴ Did Marvell write the first two satirical "painter" poems, as well as the Last Instructions? He evidently did.

Since 1978, I have only become more confident that the external evidence demands their inclusion in Marvell's canon, especially since nobody has been able to produce a plausible rival candidate for their authorship. I now offer a more detailed account of the Popple manuscript and its claims to authority; but, in addition, there is new internal evidence that Marvell wrote them, since they contain unmistakable echoes of his earlier poems. As distinct from similarities between them and the Last Instructions, which could perhaps have been the product of a shared satirical program, the echoes (specific rhymes and locutions) from Marvell's earlier unpublished poems provide proof that the same mind and ear produced them. For those who are wary of proof by echo, I can only hope that the initially skeptical will become convinced by the number and force of these cross-references, as it were, to Marvell's earlier work. In addition, I shall show that Marvell not only recalled himself in these satires, but in important instances deliberately parodied his poems to and about Oliver Cromwell, in order to show how the heroic days of the Protectorate had been replaced by the mock...