Notes on Recent Studies in English Literature of the Earlier Seventeenth Century

15 Notes on Recent Studies in English Literature of the Earlier Seventeenth Century What was "recent" in 1965 may seem antediluvian in 1993. 1 believe it was in 1964 that William Matchett asked me to do an essay on seventeenûxentury studiesfora bibliographical issue of Modern Language Quarterly. / took doe opportunity to write much more generally ?a? usual, and stuck to relatively safe Jonsonian principles: my bad examples are all generalized, and my praise is directed at individual works and persons. These days, when theory seems doe major literary concern, much of what I have to say may seem remote. But doe essay does suggest where literary studies and I were in the mid-1960s, and should have some historical interest. I also doink some ofmy cautions may still be relevant, most of my desiderata — and all my praise. If some recent works of seventeenth-century scholarship and criticism seem unsatisfying, the reasons are only incidentally related to the seventeenth century or to England or even to literature; they are more nearly related to the unsatisfactoriness of some of our commercial products. Whether in criticism or scholarship or in many other areas, dullness is likely to mark the work produced by people who are busily doing what they think they should to get ahead but who have no particular interests or convictions or knowledge. (A system that places pressure to publish on every college teacher is, of course, absurd.) Some other unsatisfactory works seem the result not of automatic responses to academic pressure but of mistaken convictions or perverse zeal. In literary matters there are almost as many ways of being wrong as of being right, but in their extreme 214Studies in 17th-century Literature forms we can recognize three characteristic aberrant patterns which we may call the solipsistic, the encyclopedic, and the hobbyhorse (or one-note) syndromes. Superficially, the encyclopedic and the solipsistic seem to be in precise opposition to each other. Faced with a literary text — a poem, perhaps — the solipsist says, "This means exactly what it means to me privately." Other sorts of knowledge, such as considerations of contemporary usage, the conventions of genres and forms, the author's intent, etc., are excluded on principle as well as through ignorance. It is easy to make fun of this sort of reading, once associated with some of the New Criticism, and it seems now to be in a decline. Certainly when Eliot's ideal of the "fused" impression of a cooking egg and of a reading of Spinoza was transferred from the poet to the critic, some very strange readings occurred. Yet such criticism often gave an impression of a mind reading; when the mind was an interesting one and not completely uninformed, the results were frequently exciting. At least the limitation of one mind served as a check on internal contradictions. When the encyclopedist reads a poem, however, he says, "This means all the things that any word or ¡mage in it may have meant in the history of man" — and there are no checks whatsoever, not even those of ordinary syntax or sense. The readings that result sometimes make one long for the comparative lucidity and simplicity of the old-fashioned solipsists. The encyclopedic approach is fashionable in some circles, and one can see why: it is easily taught, and by its very nature it is inexhaustible as a method. Everyone can learn how to write proliferating footnotes, and almost everyone can discover at least one more "analogy." Occasionally, the purpose of this kind of scholarship seems to be merely to prove that the scholar has read (or at least consulted) an extraordinary number of unusual or rare works in a large number of languages. Since Americans are learning an increasing number of languages outside the Indo-European group, the future of the encyclopedists seems limitless. The hobbyhorse (or one-note) affliction is the sort of thing that can happen to anyone: the same effect or pattern or meaning begins to appear everywhere one looks. Although in extreme forms the syndrome may be associated with ciphers, conspiracies about attributions, and other literary and political manifestations of derangement, the hobbyhorse is usually a fairly benign King Charles...