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Reviewed by:
  • Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations ed. by Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae
  • Hope Frew-Costa
Kewes, Paulina, and Andrew McRae, eds., Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 371 pp.

The essays collected in this volume offer an expansive, engaging, and significant resource. Across sixteen chapters these essays demonstrate that the establishment of a new regime (whether royal or otherwise) was consistently a complex and fraught endeavor; and asserting that the literature occasioned by a succession constitutes a rich field worthy of specific scrutiny. The editors introduce the volume with an intention to build on the highly influential scholarship of the late Kevin Sharpe. Selling the Tudor Monarchy (2009), Image Wars (2010), and Rebranding Rule (2013) together constitute a series that explored how Tudor and Stuart monarchs attempted to manage and transmit their image through authorized writing and visual iconography. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach the contributors to this volume continue in this spirit of inquiry: sermons, city pageants, university volumes of commemorative verse, panegyrics (and its prose progeny, the loyal address), political polemics, coinage, and even the ritual of the coronation itself are interrogated in order to consider how both monarchs and their subjects responded to these transfers of power. The result is a work that is far-reaching in its approach whilst highly specific in its scope.

Part I of Stuart Succession Literature (“Moments”) dedicates an essay to the succession of each of the Stuart monarchs. Each chapter considers a tension surrounding their coronation and offers insight into the image-making necessitated by an accession. Richard A. McCabe begins with a study of the unprecedented accession of James VI and I, identifying competing rhetorical strands in the panegyrics generated by the event. Those who wished to assure continuity between two reigns by presenting the novel King as Elizabeth’s “natural successor” (26) in their verse stood in opposition to those who saw James’s entry as opportunity for change in foreign policy and religious direction. Much like the Interregnum itself, Steven N. Zwicker’s entry offers a brief deviation from an established formulation in order to focus on Andrew Marvell and John Dryden’s poetic reactions to Richard Cromwell’s ascent to Lord Protectorate – reviewing the ways in which these poets [End Page 139] measured and couched their praise. The absence of a focused chapter on Oliver Cromwell’s ascension is understandable (if not regrettable) given the scholarly attention already paid to the topic and the volume’s focus on dynastic politics.

Helmer Helmers offers a fresh perspective on James II’s controversial succession by examining the influx of pro-Stuart material originating from the Netherlands, a trend made surprising given the prominent community of exiled Whig writers residing in Amsterdam. His chapter offers a fascinating insight into Anglo-Dutch relations in the later years of the Restoration, revealing the extent to which censorship could cross borders and succession literature could act “as a form of diplomacy”(97). Joseph Hone’s entry considers the innovations to the coronation ritual introduced at Queen Anne’s accession, finding that she was deliberately “portrayed as a constitutional Protestant monarch”(137), her coronation sermon purposefully down-playing her hereditary claim; a public relations strategy employed to acknowledge a cultural shift following a century of political tumult. Typically, succession scholarship has focused on Tudor and early Stuart coronation ceremonies – it is a strength of this volume that changes and continuities are tracked along a greater period of time. Alongside Alastair Bellany, Christopher Highley and John West’s excellent entries on Charles I, Charles II and William and Mary respectively, these essays explore how the poetics of loyalty could be utilized across partisan boundaries. Through both elegizing and eulogizing praise these panegyricists reveal the latent political anxieties occupying the popular conscious. By identifying where contemporaries attempted to paper over the cracks, these essays test “the rhetoric of succession against the reality” (19).

Part II (“Transformations”) is diachronic, “concentrating on genres, sites of cultural production, and recurring arguments about the foundations and limits of civil authority” (15); rather than specific monarchs, these essays trace both the continuities and cultural shifts that marked the era. Andrew McRae’s work...

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