True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England by Frances E. Dolan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England by Frances E. Dolan Andrew Fleck Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2013) vii + 331 pp. A student once asked me about a phrase on a facsimile of the title page of the First Folio of Shakespeare. What did it mean to base the book on “True Originall Copies?” The phrase seemed paradoxical to his modern ears. In the exhilarating discussion that followed, we ranged across questions of originals and reproductions, truth, the complex contradictions of Shakespeare’s first editors’ claims about their friend’s perfection and revisions, post-structural issues of the primacy of the oral and the written, presence and absence. In True Relations, Frances Dolan explores another dense nexus: what did it mean for early modern English writers to produce “the truth,” and what did it mean for their early modern readers and for us, 400 years later, to search for the truth, rather than fiction in the archives? In six chapters, three devoted to specific incidents and three devoted to larger genres of truthful texts, Dolan explores some familiar ground as she explores the “crises of evidence” that these instances and types of “relations” offer to readers in the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. In this respect, the book often seems “meta,” as my student would say, as Dolan reflects meta-critically on her own scholarly practice and the methodology we have followed for the last thirty years in early modern studies. The book’s most important contribution, though this thread sometimes gets lost, is its reminder of Francis Bacon’s view that new knowledge must usually be synthesized with accepted truths. The power of texts’ conventions to shape readers’ behavior and understanding then and now is the touchstone of this book. Dolan reads three specific incidents that exposed crises of evidence. In the first, focusing on the Gunpowder Plot, she discusses the strange True and Perfect Relation, the Crown’s account of its proceedings against Henry Garnet. She argues that this elaborate relation, which reveals itself to be an idealized account of the proceedings—since Northampton’s speech offers what the Earl would have said if he had had more time—confronts and counters other “true” reports of the incident, revealing that the truth of the matter the author sought may have been a confessional rather than a disinterested one. Dolan argues that this confessional truth seeps into modern scholarship as well, coloring the biographical entries on key figures associated with the Plot. The second evidentiary crisis Dolan effectively treats has to do with familiar pamphlet accounts of early modern witchcraft, many of which reveal themselves to be similarly invested in confessional truth. She focuses here on relations of failure to prove witchcraft’s power. For instance, in the celebrated case of Anne Gunter, a young woman accused three other women of bewitching her. Closer scrutiny resulted in accusations that the victim had in fact vindictively accused family enemies of the crime and that she had learned to perform the symptoms [End Page 227] of being bewitched from her careful reading of previous accounts of witchcraft. Modern scholars’ accounts of this incident, Dolan claims, further perpetuate the conventions of stories of witchcraft. A scholar’s account of Anne Gunter ends up being “inevitably, as indebted to other stories and to inherited narrative conventions as were the Gunters themselves” (70). The final crisis Dolan treats in True Relations deals with the search for the true cause of the Great Fire of London. Parliament appointed a committee to investigate the 1666 fire, but Charles II prorogued Parliament before it could report its findings. As a result, popular opinion came to substitute rumor and prejudice for a true relation. The contested inscriptions on the monument erected a decade later point to the confessional “truth” of the fire’s cause. In the second half of the book, Dolan takes up “genres of evidence” and the difficulties modern scholars face in making use of them. Looking first at legal depositions, she acknowledges modern critics’ desire to find some sort of authentic voice of marginalized individuals...