Herrick's Cultural Materialism

Herrick's Cultural Materialism by Mary Thomas Crane Most students of the English Renaissance must by now be aware of the fallacy of "Tillyardism," the belief that an orderly and hierarchical world-picture was the universal basis of human thought in sixteenth-century England.1 This approach is, of course, considered fallacious partly because it attributes false consensus to a culture complicated by conflicting beliefs and goals, but also because it deals in "ideas" — essential human concerns thought to transcend social and political interest — rather than "ideology" — such ideas as they relate to and further the political interests of a dominant class or cultural hegemony.2 One effect of the rejection of "Tillyardism" has been a tendencyto ignore the texts and concepts previously associated with traditional history of ideas, resulting in a flattened view of ideology which in some cases comes to look like a narrowly political world picture.3 For although many critics accept, in theory, the broad Althusserian definition of ideology as the "lived relation to the real," too many, in practice, confine their working definition to the sphere of the overtly political.4 Interpretations of Robert Herrick's poetry have been strikingly limited by the divorce of ideology from the history of ideas. Important work by Raymond Williams, Leah Marcus, and Peter Stallybrass, among others, quite rightly saw in Herrick's seemingly innocent celebration of country festivals an example of poetry informed by Royalist ideology.5 By supporting such festivals, Herrick furthers the anti-Puritan project of the Book ofSports (issued by the King in 1618 to encourage festivals which the Puritans would suppress) and is complicit in the ruling class "attempt to re-form popular festivities as a means of social control."6 As Ann Baynes Coiro has noted, however, these critics' assumptions about Herrick's Royalist and Anglican politics lead them to "ignore" (or express "surprise" at) the potentially subversive elements in such poems as "The Hock-cart."7 Coiro argues that Hesperides is not the instrument of Royalist propaganda most critics have taken it to be, pointing instead to a "structure of social ambivalence" including anxiety about class affiliation and pointed critique of the Stuart monarchy. In this essay, I want to reconstruct what I think is a plausible intellectual and 22Mary Thomas Crane cultural context for that ambivalence, showing, in the process, how "ideas" or knowledge about the nature of physical matter necessarily complicated Herrick's relation to material culture and, as a result, his subject position within that culture. Herrick's ideas about the nature of the physical and social worlds were produced by a conflict between his early experience as a working goldsmith and the world-view of the privileged classes in which he was later instructed as a University student and which he maintained as a Royalist and Anglican minister. His poems evince that conflict in their obsession with transitions among the three states of matter — solid, liquid, and gas — and their depiction of those transitions as uncontrolled by the innate hierarchies that, according to high-cultural orthodoxy, informed and ruled all matter.8 The result of this is a world where classical and grotesque bodies, upper and lower classes, and man and nature are united by their participation in the same essentially grotesque material processes. These disgusting processes are covered over in various ways, and their covers are variously perceived as beautiful or dangerously deceptive. Hesperides itself seems, on one level, to offer up these surfaces to the readers' celebratory gaze, but, at the same time, to reveal the failure of that gaze as an ordering force by showing how containing surfaces are ruptured, dissolved, and rendered grotesque by the volatile matter contained within. I Critics have underestimated the influence of Herrick's early practical and social experiences on his poetry partly because of a gap in our formulation of the relationship between basic ideas about physical matter and contemporary social practice. This gap is the result of a disjunction between historians of ideas, who have focused almost exclusively on high-culture ideas, and new historicist and Marxist critics who have ignored such ideas in favor of political ideology and low-culture "practice." Traditional historians tell the story of...