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Criticism 43.3 (2001) 309-324



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Herrick, Hollar, and the Tradescants:
Piecing Together a Seventeenth-Century Triptych

Thomas Moisan

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WERE THERE NO OTHER affinities, coincidences of biography alone might justify a synoptic glance at the figures brought together in this paper, the seventeenth-century contemporaries Robert Herrick the poet, Wenceslaus Hollar the engraver, and the John Tradescants, father and son, gardeners and collectors of curiosities for the rich and royal. Herrick, Hollar, and the elder Tradescant all found, and lost, patronage in or close to the court of Charles I. Both Herrick and the elder Tradescant participated in the unhappy military expedition led by the Duke of Buckingham, to the Isle de Rhe, within a year of the Duke's assassination in 1628; Herrick refers to the Tradescants' curiosities in one of his poems ("Upon Madam Ursly, Epigr." 232.4.3) 1 and elsewhere pays homage to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, conspicuous collector of arts and artists and patron, for a while, of Hollar; 2 Hollar, in turn, made several engravings of the man from whom the elder Tradescant bought his celebrated house in Lambeth, did the illustrations for the catalogue to the collection prepared by the younger Tradescant and Elias Ashmole in 1656, is cited as "my kinde friend Mr Hollar" by the younger Tradescant in the dedicatory epistle to the catalogue ("To the Ingenuous READER," l. 22), 3 and later testified on behalf of Tradescant's widow when she sued, unsuccessfully, to block Ashmole's claim to the Tradescants' collection. As the intersecting careers inscribed in these vitae reveal, and reflecting the pressures and vagaries of the times, the productions of each of these figures in varying ways and to varying degrees of success negotiate the passage between the domains of private, royalist patronage, and coterie and public commodification, a passage reflected in what these productions represent and how they represent them.

Nor, though, are the affinities discernible among Herrick, Hollar, and the Tradescants confinable merely to an analogy in career trajectories. In what is to follow—and with due acknowledgment of the great differences in their [End Page 309] agendas and forms of articulation—I would suggest that Herrick, Hollar, and the Tradescants converge in several culturally symptomatic ways. We see that convergence in the sheer miscellaneousness with which their productions, for better or for worse, have been labeled, for encompassing a great variety of things, mainly small, in a manner that betrays no obvious order or unity; we see it in the interest each evinces in the material, in things and their textures; and we see it also in an ingenuous, perhaps one would call it a pre-Royal Society rationalist, elision of the empirical and the imaginative, wherein curiosity over natural phenomena and attention to taxonomy are inflected by an apprehension of the supernatural and mediated by a vocabulary and affirmation of the uncanny and mythic. Finally, in each we find moments of a shared syntax, moments when nature, representation, and art enact a dialectic wherein nature is represented metonymically and in "pieces," in fragments that displace what they supposedly represent and get aestheticized as objects of interest and pleasure, and are transfigured as, in short, art. That, in turn, might conform to what, in the seventeenth century, fulfilled a criterion of the artful, the "curious": "any thing that is strang," literally the bottom line of a directive from the elder Tradescant to a deputy delegated to gather exotic animal parts; 4 "faire, and unfamiliar," as Herrick at one point puts it in summing up his close inspection of Perenna's "Parts" ("To Perenna" 10. 1. 4), "faire," perhaps, hendyadically, because "unfamiliar," empirical observation elided here, as it is in Tradescant's directive, with the vocabulary of the fancy.

It is to Herrick's works then that one looks to find a literary articulation of this curious artfulness. And nowhere, it has generally been thought, does it appear more paradigmatically than in "The Argument of His Book," that exuberant fourteen-line poetic micropedia at the outset of Hesperides where Herrick introduces us to...

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