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Criticism 43.3 (2002) 249-270



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The Distribution of Political Agency in Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island

Mark Bayer


PHINEAS FLETCHER'S ALLEGORICAL ATLAS of the human body, The Purple Island; or, The Isle of Man (1633), models both the geophysical composition and the social character of a fictional Pacific Island on the skeletal structure and anatomical systems of the human body. In canto 2, the author discusses the exigent role of small tributaries, glossed as capillaries, "which give to this Isle his fruitfulness and being" (2.10). 1 Like many writers of the Stuart era, Fletcher is using the design of the human body to analyze and interrogate the body politic, the mystical fiction upon which the power of absolutist monarchs throughout Europe was derived and the set of theoretical correspondences adopted residually by the similarly inclined early Stuarts. 2 Rivers in early modern literary productions often function as a marker of a brand of nationalism which reflexively comments on the health of the English state. William Browne's influential revival of Spenserian pastoral, Britannia's Pastorals (1613), stresses the connection between the course of rivers and human affairs: "as waters have their course, and in their place / Succeeding streams well out; so is man's race" (81). Properly circulating rivers throughout Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612) also signify a properly functioning polity. By contrast, the corrupt court in John Webster's Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613) is described as a "standing pool" which stifles the free circulation of bounty due to the corruption and favoritism of "flatt'ring panderers" and "caterpillars [that] feed on them" (1.1.51-54).

What is intriguing in Fletcher's treatment of this trope, in his celebration of tributaries as what is perhaps the smallest organ of the human body, is the implicit claim that political agency resides in all aspects of the state and not exclusively in the head or monarch. Fletcher diverges from the centralized political theodicy offered by the Stuarts and redistributes political agency to the most minute parts of that body politic. Because this strategy is inimical to the prevalent Stuart ideology that sought to redefine the unity of wills between [End Page 249] ruler and subject (unitas in voluntatibus) as the governing and regulating will of one man (unitas una et regulatrix), I argue that Fletcher contributes to alternate traditions rooted in primitive notions of communal accord and social reciprocity embodied in the notion of pietas and richly adduced poetically throughout the pastoral tradition. The pastoral tradition, which reached its apogee under Elizabeth, itself becomes increasingly saturated with discussions of a unitary model of political will which, at this time, also provides the model for poetic patronage in a new political climate. As poets adjust to the absolutism of James's rule, the pastoral landscape becomes increasingly structured from above; it is overseen by a single ruling entity rather than a group of shepherds working in the harmonious pursuit of common interests, necessitating a generic renegotiation to reflect the disparate ruling ideologies in the shift from Tudor to Stuart. 3 The Purple Island, therefore, is at the confluence of major artistic and political fluctuations and can be seen as a forceful reaction against many of these micro- and macro-level changes.

Although literary scholars have perennially noticed the significance of the bodily metaphors operant throughout The Purple Island in relation to Stuart history and broader generic issues, 4 few have attempted to come to terms with the political concepts permeating this allegory. For these scholar-critics, the relevant theoretical and historical context lies in the personal and family history of the Fletchers and not in more comprehensive and longer-term political and social propensities. Frank Kastor goes so far as to propose that because the allegorical structure and anatomical images which punctuate Fletcher's poem are scientific, they are "therefore not literary." 5 Alternatively, David Norbrook documents the multiple ways in which English Spenserians used pastoral poetry as a vehicle to express their discontent with Jacobean and Caroline court practices and ecclesiastical innovations but does...

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