Edmund Campion:Memory and Transcription (review)

Abstract

Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription. By Gerard Kilroy. (Burlington, Vermont:Ashgate Publishing Co. 2005. Pp.xii, 262. $89.95,£45.00.) Over past decade Edmund Campion has assumed quasi-iconic status in Elizabethan studies. Executed for treason in December of 1581, Campion has benefited from cross-confessional interest in martyrs and martyrologies. Literary critics excavate his writings as they recover long-lost voice of English Catholics. More important for Campion's international renown is his alleged association with William Shakespeare, an association that remains nothing more than fanciful conjecture despite repeated unsubstantiated insistence. One suspects that despite contemporary concern for coded language and historical criticism, confessional issues often lay not far beneath surface. An Hilaire Bellocesque autumnal pastoral, nostalgic for by-gone days and melancholic for what might have been, permeates many of these works. Kilroy's monograph must be seen in this context: it may have evolved out of his reading Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of Altars (New Haven, 1992), Philip Caraman's edition of John Gerard's The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (London, 1951), and Richard Wilson's Shakespeare and Jesuits (Times Literary Supplement [December 19, 1997], 11-13), but Campion that emerges is traditional, martyred saint out of Robert Hugh Benson's Come Rack, Come Rope (London, 1912). How many literary critics and historians, perhaps deterred by difficult Latin, passed over Campion's so-called Virgilian epic? But language may have been what attracted author. Kilroy has not only transcribed for first time Sancta salutiferi nascentia semina verbi [The Birth of Sacred seeds of Salvation-bringing Word], but also has provided an English translation. This important theological poem, composed between 1566 and 1570, illuminates Campion's state of mind as he pondered next step: should he remain in Established Church and proceed to orders, or return to Roman Church. He juxtaposes permanence of Roman Church with transitoriness of Roman Empire in his apologia for papal primacy: the sure barque of Peter, never to sink, sailed bravely forward despite tyrant; sure it always was, unbroken by tempests or force of arms, and never to perish by wiles of devils (p. 193). Campion dedicated poem to Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague.This was not first time that Campion had presented something to him: you have shown to me personally, above all others, such a token of your splendour and glory in accepting my rough and loquacious little works of literature (p. 177). …