Increase and Multiply: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England (review)

This interesting book is premised on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptualization of population, and of the ways a population might be numbered, governed, and reproduced. Early Modern political authorities and writers viewed reproduction not as merely biological but also as cultural, and they sought to counter the threat of ungoverned biological reproduction by an appropriate cultural reproduction. Glimp studies how these preoccupations emerge in canonical literary texts of Sidney, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Glimp's project has its origin or methodological justification in Michel Foucault's insights into the variety of activities that could be considered as 'government' in Early Modern Europe. Glimp ranges over a wide number of 'relatively autonomous domains of governmental activity' (p. 68). This distinguishes his study of 'population' from the many recent studies of a more unitary nationhood or monarchic power.

The master-text for Glimp's book is A Discourse of the Commonweal, published in 1581, but probably written in 1549 by Sir Thomas Smith. Smith's dialogue form gives voice to a variety of ways of conceptualising population and its government that recur in Glimp's literary texts: the household analogy; the necessity to fashion worthy members of the commonwealth, and their obligation in turn to labour in their vocations; the humanist emphasis on an educational process that performs this shaping and that authorises the role of counsellor in state affairs; a concurrent anxiety about the risk of producing a surplus of learned people. (For this last point, Glimp also draws on Richard Mulcaster.)

Glimp is intellectually agile in interrogating his literary texts for the ways in which they respond to these concerns, often in their metaphors of generation or reproduction. His book is compellingly organised and lucidly written. He observes how Sidney's Defence of Poetry echoes Mulcaster's anxieties in its description of an England overrun by poetasters, and assuages them by attempting to segregate his right poets from their inferiors. More broadly, Glimp argues that while the Defence asserts the ability of poetry to generate noble men; Arcadia demonstrates the difficulties of this project. The Defence defends pleasure, but recognises its possible disruptiveness, which is manifested in Arcadia. Glimp also analyses in Arcadia a contradiction between two Protestant values, a militaristic masculinity that defended Protestantism and a domestic economy that propagated it. Finally, Glimp acutely traces in Sidney's attitude to the publication of his own writings a sense of the dangers of poetic generation, and a disavowal of parentage, at odds with his avowed aim of generating virtue. Most of these fissures in Sidney have been discussed before, but Glimp has new things to say, and he brings them together clear-mindedly and illuminatingly under his conceptual rubric of population.

The chapter on Shakespeare has suggestive discussions of Love's Labour's Lost and the Henriad, though its treatment of Henry VIII is rather strained. Glimp reframes the comic form of Love's Labour's Lost by discussing how Navarre aims to exercise virtue and win immortality through a learning conceived in contradistinction to paternity; he writes originally on the play's unsympathetic concluding model of domesticity. The brilliant discussion of the Henriad is perhaps the best thing in the book. Glimp's approach gives new vitality to the old discussion of Henry IV and Falstaff as rival fathers of Hal. He compares the situation of Henry V in France to the situation of the English in Ireland (drawing on Spenser's View of the State of Ireland): in both cases the English are outnumbered, but are transformed by imitative fashioning into noble conquerors. Again, Henry's concluding marriage project fails to unite the domestic and heroic realms. In all this discussion, Glimp offers new ways into another familiar topic, the role of the people in Shakespeare's histories. He also relates Shakespeare's representations of Falstaff and the people to the anti-theatrical charge that the theatre was a site of...