Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627 1660 (review)

248 Reviews Norbrook, David, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Po 1627 1660, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999; cloth; pp. xiii, 509; 16 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$115.00; ISBN 0521632757. Parergon is published from Australia where, in November 1999, a pain referendum held under Western democratic processes concluded that the nation would prefer to remain a monarchy owing allegiance to the Queen of England than change to the republican model on offer. Alongside this minor ripple of history it is interesting to place the events when England itself experienced the painful and tempestuous changes in the midseventeenth century from absolute monarchy to republic and back to qualified monarchy. David Norbrook's book, mischievously launched on the date commemorating the 350th anniversary of an actual and symbolic beheading of a monarch, Charles I, traces in painstaking detail the literary responses and manifestations of these tumults. At first glance, i t is tempting to classify the approach as N e w Historicist, but this is very misleading, since the book's models lie rather in the works of historians w h o have literary interests, such as Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson. Norbrook has three main themes, which reveal his o w n overall perspective. Whereas traditional history sees the English Commonwealth as an 'interregnum', an aberrant blip on the time-chart of steady progress, he argues that contemporary witnesses saw the revolution and the republic as a 'restoration' of national rights, a 'fundamental continuity' (p. 14); the so-called Restoration of 1660 was a backsliding into reactionary government effected by a small clique and an effective propaganda machine which has successfully hoodwinked historians ever since. The second theme is that works of imaginative literature are 'speech acts', dynamic responses to the specific exigencies of events as they unfold, which reveal a spectrum of political opinion from the times. A third preoccupation is the way in which the reception of the republican Lucan's works provides a litmus test of the various shades of opinion expressed by writers like Milton, Marvell, Cowley, Fisher, May, and the neglected Wither. (Indeed, the 'restoration' given to Wither by Norbrook seems to fulfil this courageous writer's conviction that history would vindicate his political and poetic consistency.) Admittedly, each of the three emphases m a y not strike all readers as equally effective. The emphasis on Lucan's Pharsalia, 'the republicans 249 favourite epic' (p. 439), often represented by untranslated Latin quotations, is probably a little too doggedly pursued for the liking of even the most diligent scholar let alone student of the period. The argument that this work was significant in galvanising republican sentiment, evidenced in T o m May's Continuation and elsewhere, is solidly made, but in an already hefty book the evidence could have been more succinctly presented, in order to focus attention on issues less erudite but more engaging to the modern mind. The question is raised as to h o w m u c h scholarship should be compromised to reach the broad readership that Norbrook's book deserves to reach. Secondly, one cannot entirely ignore the nagging suspicion that the deployment of speech-acts m a y not entirely satisfy the linguists w h o created the term, and m a y be a genuflection to the obligation these days to rest one's argument on a contemporary theory. The connection between speech-act theory and the politically charged, Marxist term, ideology, is not explored. But these reservations aside, the idea of the English republic as the true 'restoration' is presented in a compelling and even thrilling way, when Norbrook focuses on the unfolding events, sometimes on an almost dayby -day basis, and on inspiring statements from optimistic true believers, as in the ubiquitous Areopagitica and overlooked poetic footsoldiers of the period. Norbrook never lets us forget that these m e n believed in 'the people's war' and in the cause they were pursuing, and they did not have the dubious advantage of hindsight to inject into their writing self-irony or a lurking fear of failure. 'For m a n y religious radicals . . . "the Good Old Cause was (chiefly) Liberty of...