SYRITHE PUGH, Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality: Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism.

Abstract

THE Cavalier Poets are a subject long overdue for revived scholarly interest. This welcome study from Syrithe Pugh focuses on Robert Herrick (1591–1674) and Richard Fanshawe (1608–66), providing invaluable close readings of their poetry. In her introduction, Pugh sets up a comparative reading that promises to elicit significant nuances of difference in the two poet’s engagement with royalist polemic in their verse, in each case made evident through their respective uses of classical allusion. Pugh argues that Herrick’s work upholds the idea of Charles I as a divinely appointed and unquestionable monarch, whereas Fanshawe voices the concerns of a moderate group within the Royalist camp that, whilst upholding the rights of the monarchy, sought to encourage the king to listen to and engage with the concerns of his subjects. Pugh’s study is structured in two parts, with each serving as a case study on each poet. The first section comprises three chapters that focus on Herrick’s repeated allusions to Ovid’s life and works. Pugh prioritizes Ovid as the key classical influence on Herrick’s writing, suggesting that Herrick found in the exiled classical writer a model for his own life, poetic style, and political ideals. Pugh articulates innumerable examples of clear allusion to Ovid in Herrick’s work, and convincingly shows how together these allusions function as part of a complex authorial agenda that seeks to attain far more than a simple association with the classical past. Rather, Herrick makes Ovid a part of the present, finding in his poetry not only a model for a life of otium in withdrawal and retirement (the latter being the long-advocated reading of Herrick’s verse), but also attention to cyclic, metamorphic, forces which hold the promise of continuation and survival in exile until the natural order of court and society is restored again. Pugh emphasizes Herrick’s repeated sense of a greater poetical schema, a transcendental ‘symposium’ of great poets which stretch back to the classical writers with whom he engages in his own work: this schema cannot be touched by contemporary political events, and Herrick’s own place within it is ensured. Thus, Pugh argues, whilst Herrick’s verse cannot escape an engagement with the political realities of his own age, he simultaneously seeks to cut across time and space in his poetry by participating in a forum of living and dead ‘Greats’.