A Subtle Circumcision in Andrew Marvell's The Rehearsal Transpros'd: The Second Part

Abstract

THAT a Hebraist argument informs part of The Rehearsal Transpros’d controversy of 1672–3 has found convincing exposition in the work of Jason Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt argues that Samuel Parker and Andrew Marvell relied heavily upon the work of John Selden and John Lightfoot respectively, and used the work of these scholars, ‘the two greatest Christian Hebraists of seventeenth-century England’ to arm themselves in dispute.1 As Rosenblatt convincingly demonstrates, both Parker and Marvell posture themselves as consciously engaging in a running Hebraic by-play. The point is sensitive enough that each presses the other to disclose his source of Talmudic knowledge. Much of this Hebraic debate centres on two key topics: first, the Zealots, where Parker’s knowledge, or unacknowledged source, may be the better; second, and of special relevance for present purposes, is the history of Jewish proselytes, or as Marvell puts it, of those ‘which you may in English interpret Turn-coats’.2 This Hebraic context lends peculiar significance to Marvell’s choice of words when, in The Second Part of The Rehearsal Transpros’d, he uses a whaling metaphor to taunt Parker’s disproportionate emphasis on a triviality: He falls severely upon the word Unhoopable, from which I it seems used in representing his Unlimited, &c. But whereas I only threw it out like empty Cask to amuze him, knowing that I had a Whale to deal with, and least he should overset me; he runs away with it as a very serious business, and so moyles himself with tumbling and tossing it, that he is in danger of melting his Sperma Ceti. (Marvell, Prose Works, I, 281)