Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea and the Construction of Cavalier Authorship

This essay examines representations of Sir John Suckling in polemical texts of the 1640s as a context for reinterpreting the publication of his works by Humphrey Moseley in the collection Fragmenta Aurea (1646). Parliamentarian propaganda had condemned Suckling on moral, political, and artistic grounds, transforming him into a Cavalier caricature. Through Moseley’s paratextual materials and Suckling’s own literary works, Fragmenta Aurea responds to these attacks and presents a fragmentary figure of Suckling that calls into question the caricaturizing process of the anti-Royalist polemics. In the process, the volume makes Suckling into the foundation for the very concept of Cavalier authorship.