Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (review)

Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660. By Alison Shell. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 309. $59.95.)

Alison Shell's judicious and ground-breaking book will be especially welcome to anyone interested in English Catholicism in early modern times. The seventy pages of notes reveal how thoroughly she has sifted the previous works in this field. In the introduction Dr. Shell calls our attention to the problem of anti-Catholicism not only in the England of 1558-1660, but in our own time as well. Catholic imaginative writing from her period is virtually inaccessible nowadays except in facsimile, even though that writing was highly influential then among Protestants as well as Catholics. Coding and censorship are with us still, she notes, with early modern Catholic poets being marginalized in the canon and regarded as having a "foreign" inspiration even when they, like Crashaw, wrote their poetry while still conforming to Anglicanism. There are no camp-followers in her nation's universities for a Catholic analysis of English history, nor are Catholics included among those victimized in the early modern era, being thought to have brought their troubles on themselves by choosing an outlawed religion. While admitting she is not a Catholic, she complains of a taboo against writing openly as a Catholic, a taboo which causes historians like Duffy and Scarisbrick not to acknowledge their Catholicism in their works.

Dr. Shell thinks that literary critics, by failing to take anti-Catholicism into consideration, have wrongly ascribed a universality to the nightmare world of Italianate tragedy, such as Webster's White Devil and Duchess of Malfi, and Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy and Women Beware Women. Critics speak of a fated, damned world in Jacobean drama when, as she fully demonstrates, Middleton and his contemporaries used the same array of apocalyptic imagery to attack Catholicism in their minor works as in their major plays. For them, Catholicism was an idol beautiful on the outside, monstrous on the inside, and so their plots consisted in the unveiling of secret horrors. By ignoring the religious bias of these plays, critics perform "the illiberal act of perpetuating it" (p. 56).

The author also examines the genre of tears-poetry inaugurated in 1595 by the publication of Robert Southwell's Saint Peters Complaint, a work which gave sacred verse a new direction in England. Unfortunately, Southwell's collected poems have long been out of print, though his poetry was once so valued it was published in twenty-four mainstream editions and two secret Catholic editions before 1640. Dismissed nowadays as a minor lyric poet, the martyr Southwell was admired then for his long tearful laments, in which a figure from the Gospels (Peter, John, or Mary Magdalen) mourned Christ's Passion and called the people to repentance. In a famous preface, Southwell summoned England's poets to cease celebrating carnal love and sing of divine love instead. There followed a sudden upsurge in the publication of Protestant religious poetry. The first substantial edition of du Bartas came in 1595, and Spenser's Four Hymns followed, in 1596. Shell gives textual proof that Southwell had many literary heirs in England, including Thomas Lodge, Giles Fletcher, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Nashe, Gervase Markham, W. Broxup, Nicholas Breton, Samuel Rowland, G. Ellis, John Ford, and John Davies. However, his chief poetic heirs were George Herbert, William Alabaster, and Richard Crashaw. Dr. Shell explores the Southwellian tears-poetry the latter two composed, a generation apart, during their conversions. When Donne is praised for his dry-eyed spirituality and Crashaw dismissed for his tears-poetry, she thinks that critics are privileging a modern Protestant spirituality, since "critical discourse on seventeenth-century religious poetry is still highly prone to denominationalist judgements" (p. 103).

In another chapter Dr. Shell investigates loyalist Catholic writers of the Elizabethan and Stuart courts. In the former, she examines Henry Constable, who wrote...