The Making of Restoration Poetry by Paul Hammond (review)

35 essay in the forthcoming Festschrift for Maximillian Novak (Defoe’s Footprints, University of Toronto Press). A larger problem of annotation in a number of these volumes should be laid at the general editors’ door. Although Mr. Blewett, known for his book on the illustrations of Robinson Crusoe, devotes a section of his Introduction to the frontispiece of A Continuation of Letters written by a Turkish Spy (1718), and Mr. Starr devotes a note to the frontispiece of History of Apparitions, Mr. Furbank, in his edition of Jure Divino, says nothing at all about the famous frontispiece image of Defoe or its inscription in the Introduction, nor in the annotation, though he annotates the title page. This omission is even more curious because Mr. Elmer, glossing ‘‘probitas laudatur et alget’’ (Juvenal, Satires, I.74) in A System of Magick (1727) appropriately calls it Defoe’s ‘‘personal motto’’ and calls attention to its appearance on the frontispiece of Jure Divino (‘‘laudatur et alget’’). This man of integrity is praised and starves. (Interestingly, two years later Nicholas Rowe used the same phrase as the motto for his published play The Royal Convert.) Mr. Elmer annotates the title-page poetry of A System of Magick but ignores the frontispiece, engraved by J[ohn] Van der Gucht. Mr. Starr discusses the publishers of a number of the books in his Introduction . Mr. Mullen has nothing to say about them, the frontispiece, or the title-page poetry (doubtless by Defoe) of Political History of the Devil. Mr. Sill says nothing of Bragg, Morphew, or Roberts, the publishers of the first editions of the works he edits. The general editors should have required of themselves and their colleagues consistent treatment of these significant features of Defoe’s writings in this important edition. Robert Folkenflik University of California, Irvine PAUL HAMMOND. The Making of Restoration Poetry. Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Pp. xxiii ⫹ 230. 12 illustrations. $80. Mr. Hammond invites us to travel back to the seventeenth century to watch the Restoration poetic canon emerging from a chaotic welter of elements. We see it formed not just by the decisions of writers, but also by those of copyists, printers, booksellers, and readers, as well as by the pressures of censorship and of party politics . In this evolution, anonymity and intertexuality play their parts. The Making of Restoration Poetry puts us in the Heraclitean flow from which the now beautifully bound works of Dryden, Marvell, and Rochester have come forth. Although booksellers like Herringman and Tonson were highly influential, with their lists almost defining a Restoration canon, Mr. Hammond wants us to pay attention to manuscripts circulating in coffee houses and collected into ‘‘microcanons .’’ Until 1679, state censorship of the press encouraged a wild proliferation of political and erotic poems in manuscript. These were affected by censorship as well, those who copied them acting as editors, second authors, and censors, overwriting the authors’ intentions to please their readers. Rochester’s lampoon on Charles II multiplied into a bewildering array of versions as copyists added and omitted lines, their creativity instigated by the work’s not enjoying the dignity of print. 36 Politics was a key element in the welter from which the canon eventually arose. Due to Whig ascendancy after 1688, an attempt was made to obliterate all memory of the earlier, radical Whiggism. Mr. Hammond demonstrates how the 1697 Poems on Affairs of State shaped a counter-canon of poets who had advanced the party’s cause. Marvell was elevated to ‘‘Whig hero’’ by the inclusion of sixteen of his antiroyalist satires, but his poems praising Cromwell were excluded for fear of harming ‘‘the opposition cause for which he had been such a prominent spokesman and pamphleteer .’’ Conversely, Dryden’s poem on Cromwell was included, along with more material meant to harm his reputation. During the Restoration, printed works and manuscripts often came to birth without acknowledged parentage. Anonymity, Mr. Hammond remarks, divided readers ‘‘according to their skill in attribution, a skill which was as much a matter of social standing as of literary acumen.’’ Dryden was unusually self-conscious about his use of anonymity: in Absalom and Achitophel, he excused himself for it on the...