Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (review)

Reviews 331 Tale, both tales dominated by powerful, irascible and violent males. The chapter dealing with Petrarch and his influence, sub-titled 'Humanism, Tyranny, and the Petrarchan Academy', puts the relationship between the Clerk's Tale and the Merchant's Tale on a new level of understanding and breathes n e w life into Kittredge's old notion of a 'marriage-group': 'where Chaucer envisages dialogue between spouses, Petrarch imagines the domination of male over female, subjugation rather than conjugality' (p. 298). Within its broad understanding of European history, the book is always remarkable for its ability to change our understanding of familiar passages in the Canterbury Tales. Whereas for the Lombard city despots the countryside was reduced to the significance of invisible source of supply, in the masterpiece of thefirstgreat London writer, it is the rity which is unexpectedly absent. The cook is the only pilgrim to speak of 'oure citee'; the countryside continually leaves its mark on the city. Chaucer's text begins on the south bank of the Thames and ends somewhere in the Kentish countryside near Canterbury; it is only in Boccaccio's text that the journey begins and ends in Florence. Peter Goodall Macquarie University White, R.S, Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; cloth; pp. xx, 285; R.R.P. A U S $90.00. In the great trial scene of The Tragedy of King Lear (1623), the ' cries: 'let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?' (3.6.3335 ). It's a key question for Lear, of course, a central dilemma in Renaissance social and moral philosophy and, as White's fine 332 Reviews monograph reveals, a key question also in a range of what we now choose to call Renaissance 'literature'. The 'nature' upon which Lear and his play so obsessively brood is in fact two natures, or two radically opposed understandings of the term. The first belongs to what Perdita in The Winter's Tale calls 'great creating nature' (4.4.87), nature that is an allegory for a benign and divinely ordained universe, the world before the Fall. The second nature i s that Hobbesian one espoused by Edmund, Regan, Goneril and Cornwall in Lear, what in Chapter Nine of Leviathan (1651) Hobb calls the 'generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death'. Natural Law, then, is the human understanding of the benign principles underlying the f i r s t kind of nature, which a l l reasonable creatures ought to be able to deduce, and by which they should rule their lives and their communities, giving rise to principles of universal equity and justice, and, in our time, declarations of human rights, as well as dedications of human beings to higher purposes than their own, such as acting in concert to save the planet. Conversely, the kind of nature Hobbes and Edmund espouse can only lead to bristling statutes, legislating humans from destroying each other. White sees Hobbes as initiating a phase in Anglo-American culture when this idea of nature would prevail and when prior assumptions of 'natural law' f e l l away, bringing to a close a long era when the principle of natural law had been active. Late in the book he hints at a further book which he clearly hopes another scholar will write, tracing the resurgence in the Civil War period of natural law thinking, in the great communitarian writers of the 1640s and 1650s: John Lilburne, William Walwyn and especially Gerrard Winstanley with his 'great creator reason'. White's own contribution is a necessary prologue to such a study. His focus here i s more on the period before 1640: resolutely Reviews 333 canonical and unashamedly devoted to the history of ideas. H e defines his idea—the concept of natural law—develops its genealogy, from the pre-Socratic philosophers through Plato and Aquinas into the English Renaissance, through to Hooker and Bacon. H e then applies this 'background' to a range of canonical English texts: from Utopia through the Arcadia, The...