English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey by Allan Pritchard (review)

150 observation, supported by painstaking historical scholarship, is significant, marking as it does the development of a print-based literary marketplace. Without such a marketplace, the later reification of Shakespeare (and of Garrick) would not have been possible. Jean I. Marsden University of Connecticut ALLAN PRITCHARD. English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey. Toronto: Toronto, Buffalo, and London, 2005. Pp. 297. $60. Arguing that the early history of biographical writing in England has been generally neglected and further obscured by the subsequent achievement of Johnson and Boswell, Mr. Pritchard traces the emergence of forms of biography from earlier medieval and classical models. He promises to enlarge the territory, noting that biographies exist in many guises—the funeral sermon, the prefatory biography, the brief life, in ‘‘national and local histories, family genealogies and chronicles, journalism, and popular literature.’’ But his method is less revolutionary than the introduction might suggest. It offers a useful compendium of seventeenth-century biographical writing, carefully divided by type—with such chapter headings as ‘‘Lives of the Protestant Saints’’ and ‘‘Lives of Writers: Scientists and Antiquaries ’’—or by outstanding examples: ‘‘Izaak Walton’s Lives’’; ‘‘Brief Lives: Thomas Fuller and Anthony Wood’’; ‘‘Roger North: Lives of the Norths.’’ It documents step-by-step the movement from highly conventionalized treatments , exemplary lives, lives that fail to mention such matters as dates of birth or death or physical characteristics or profession , that in fact suppress the negative , the uninstructive, or the atypical, to those that increasingly reveal details of appearance, habit, personal or professional or educational history, such as Aubrey’s reporting that ‘‘Hobbes sings in bed, Sir Henry Lee is entertained by his reading women, and Suckling, the great gambler, practises cards in bed by himself.’’ Mr. Pritchard usefully spends time on some biographies that have received relatively little treatment but that anticipate the techniques of the eighteenth century, including Abraham Hill’s life of Isaac Barrow and his culminating example, Roger North’s lives of his three brothers, described as a theme with variations, a sequence best understood as a trilogy. Yet finally this study considers a somewhat limited number of categories , and its criteria, applied to a set number of texts, produce something closer to a graph than a new or vivid sense of the territory. While the ordering of the chapters is related to historical sequence , the study crisscrosses the field, asking and answering a set of questions: how much personal detail is there in this biography? How aware is the biographer of the principles of biography, of the distinction between biography and history ? Where does he fall on the spectrum between Aubrey the gossip and Walton the idealizer? or Dugdale the antiquarian ? How much and how accurate attention is given to dates and time? Both Mr. Pritchard’s carefully balanced style and his method of organization tend to blur the progress of his argument ; an impression made at one moment is likely to be overturned or modified in the next: ‘‘while Wood can be praised for his frankness and honesty and his relative freedom from conventional moralizing, he leaves no doubt 151 that much of his criticism of his subjects is prompted by his political and religious prejudices.’’ The scope of the volume necessarily limits the depth of the discussion of selected texts, and, although a vast landscape is to be surveyed in limited space, several examples recur: we are told twice of Johnson’s complaint that Sprat’s life of Cowley was ‘‘a funeral oration rather than a history ’’; and twice that Aubrey describes Barrow ‘‘as pale as the candle he studied by.’’ As these instances suggest, the mode of this study is often descriptive and anecdotal , yielding information about the content of these texts, but not probing beyond the initial parameters of the discussion . One would like to hear more— but does not—about a potentially promising idea: that these seventeenth-century biographies are the prelude to the novel. In the interesting and persuasive account of Roger North’s lives of his brothers, Mr. Pritchard writes that his ‘‘phrasing and sentence structure are often marked by a certain awkwardness or oddity, which no doubt helps account for his dissatisfaction with his...