The Restoration Transposed: Poetry, Place and History, 1660–1700 by Gillian Wright (review)

Gillian Wright's The Restoration Transposed offers a timely response to two important questions in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literary studies. Why do we remain predisposed to conceive the Restoration as a period whose poetry is characterized predominantly by the works of male, London-centric writers, their "cliquey and competitive" personalities, and their preoccupations with "money, sex, eating and drinking, [and] the pleasures and dangers of contemporary London" (1)? And what might "Restoration poetry" look like if we turned our attention instead to poets and poems which engaged ideas well beyond this "urban, libertine and sceptical" matrix (3)?

To correct these stereotypes, Wright proposes what she terms a transposition in the historiography of late seventeenth-century poetry. Here, "transposition" signifies both a nuanced reappraisal of familiar poets, and a renewed focus on poetic practices and themes which have been underexplored or altogether neglected in Restoration literary history. Wright therefore argues that a "transposed Restoration" points us toward "texts that speak to more profound long-term shifts within literary historiography: the consolidation of the canon; the spread of English-language literature and publishing outside London; the rise of women writers; [and] the changing status of poets and poetry" (243). For specialists in early modern and eighteenth-century poetry, this approach will be doubtless be very familiar, as her study builds upon the groundwork laid by other recent reassessments of Restoration poetry (including Wright's excellent first monograph on the production and circulation of seventeenth-century women's poetry).¹ Yet what distinguishes The Restoration Transposed is its expansive perspective on the period, as the texts that take center stage are far more heterogeneous—and often far less familiar—in form and function than those that previous studies have considered.

The book advances its "transpositional" ethos through three lengthy, self-contained chapters, each of which comprises various case studies tied together by a narrative thread. Chapter 1 models Wright's general approach by tracing the complex legacy of Edmund Spenser on Restoration poetry and literary criticism. Through careful close readings, she examines how poets like William Davenant, John Evelyn, Roger Boyle, and Thomas Rymer turned time and again to their Elizabethan predecessor to shape their own poetic practices, and to confront the anxieties of the Restoration age. While these poets recognized Spenser as one of England's greatest writers, their own responses to his work—which is somewhat overrepresented by The Faerie Queene in this chapter—ranged from sustained admiration and adaptation of his works (Evelyn), to salutary quotations and allusions (Boyle), to qualified praise of the poet's verse style in an effort to defend the qualities of English literature against continental influences (Davenant, Rymer). Equally important to Wright's account is Jonathan Edwin's 1679 folio edition of Spenser, which profoundly shaped both the poet's late seventeenth-century reception—Dryden's meticulously annotated copy of Spenser's Works, she observes, made him arguably "the Restoration's most careful and tenacious reader of Spenser" (57)—and English printers' marketing of "canonical" authors (with Jacob Tonson drawing particular influence from Edwin's ornate decoration and biographical commentary). By attending to these various responses, Wright makes the convincing case that Spenser, more than any pre-Restoration poet besides Ben Jonson, posed the greatest intellectual challenge to the construction of an "English literature" of any offered in the wake of the Civil Wars. In turn, she usefully reminds us that the concept of canonicity, so often misunderstood to connote cultural immutability, was instead the product of continuous critical debate, creative adaptation, and clever advertisement.

The next two chapters seek to extend what Wright calls the "literary geography" of the Restoration beyond the realm of urban London. In Chapter 2, she turns to Restoration Ireland as an essential yet understudied site of poetic production in the period. Beginning her historical survey with Katherine Philips' visit to Dublin in 1662–63, Wright convincingly argues that Philips' literary activity in Ireland heralded...