Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. xvii + 367, hb. £37.95, ISBN: 0691090289.In polemical writings, one's own side is always moderate, while the other side is characterized as irresponsible extremists: Dryden's strongly partisan Absalom and Achitophel, for example, pretends to espouse a via media, targeted 'to please the more Moderate sort'. In this wide-ranging, erudite study, Joshua Scodel shows how the classical ideal of the mean is reinterpreted and appropriated in different contexts by writers ranging from Spenser to Aphra Behn. Later chapters, the most interesting in the book, illustrate how other writers of the period, working in the traditions of love poetry and the Anacreontic/Horatian drinking song, reject 'dull moderation' altogether.Though Scodel seems to have read everything remotely connected with his topic, the main strengths of this impressive study lie not in its exhaustiveness but in sensitive detailed commentary on individual texts. A chapter on Donne, largely devoted to close readings of Satire 3 and a verse epistle to Sir Henry Wooton, examines the ways in which Donne adapts the tradition of the via media to argue the case for freedom of enquiry, the unfettered conscience. Milton, as one would expect, emerges as champion of moderation, in perceptive commentaries on L'Allegro and Il Peneroso, Paradise Lost, and the sonnets 'Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son' and 'Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench' - the latter two perhaps the least Bacchanalian drinking songs ever written.Two chapters on the 'symposiastic lyric' celebrating the pleasures of wine and companionship are attentive to the manner in which Jonson, Herrick, Lovelace, Rochester, and such relatively obscure poets as Alexander Brome and Charles Cotton responded to changing historical circumstances. Canary wine for the elite, educated in their tastes, is contrasted with strong beer for the rude multitude (Herrick's 'The Hock-Cart' is one of the few poems to celebrate both), and drinking in moderation to summon the Muse is contrasted with hard drinking to promote oblivion among the defeated royalists in the 1650s, hoping, as in Lovelace's 'The Vintage to the Dungeon', to 'Triumph in your Bonds and Paines,/ And daunce to th'Musick of your Chaines'. Rochester, from this perspective, represents a cul de sac, someone who 'with patrician arrogance . . . expresses his right to fulfil all his desires' (p. 251), celebrating licentious excess - a view of the poet which denies him any complexity and ignores the fact that he is a satirist, concerned with ethical and political questions, as well as a lyric poet. …