The Poems of Andrew Marvell by Nigel Smith , Andrew Marvell (review)

782 Reviews That a heterodox lower-class culture, ignorant of the intellectual heritage of the Renaissance, found its voice during the 1640s and 1650s was, of course, Christo? pher Hill's recurrent theme, and this view still constitutes the prevailing scholarly orthodoxy. Hill argued that this grass-roots movement did not suddenly appear from nowhere: it had been a feature of English life at least since Wyclif and the Lollards, and probably for longer. What brought it into view was the revolutionary fervour of the 1640s, coupled with the power of the press and the collapse of pre-publication censorship: artisans and cottagers, labourers and vagabonds, empowered by the light within rather than the authority of the elite literate culture to which they had no access, reached fortheir pens. This, however, is to take at their own value the polemically charged and stereotypical caricatures of such opponents as the Presbyterian Thomas Edwards. McDowell's starting point is that this is not biographically sustainable. University men in fact constituted the majority of what is now a pretty firmlyestablished canon of radical writers, highly educated and competent in the traditional rhetorical arts. Indeed, the majority even of Quakers were craftsmen, tradesmen, and yeomen, the 'middling sort' rather than the 'vulgar'. With fine and accurate scholarship, and sensitive and acute readings, McDowell explores the implications of these facts, demonstrating the range of intellectual re? sources and the literary artfulness of these writers. In successive chapters he explores the rhetoric of controversy that shaped constructions of identity in the pamphlet wars of the mid-century, the store set by learning in the Puritan tradition, the deployment of writing strategies in the humanist tradition of Erasmus, the recurrence of sceptical patterns of thought more familiar from Montaigne than from Walwyn, and a parodic strategy that depends more upon Lily's grammar and upon the kind of undergraduate festivities that gave rise to Milton's 'At a Vacation Exercise' than upon oral culture. McDowell handles his argument with engaging tact and scrupulous fairness. The result is a most impressive firstbook, showing beyond doubt that to speak of conflict between 'the high and the low [. . .] the learned and the unlearned' (p. 9) is to misrep? resent the complexity of mid-century radical culture. It also raises larger questions than it is able to pur sue about the cultural dynamics of the period: if these radicals were not of the people, yet spoke for the people, to whom did they speak? If, as Mc? Dowell's argument suggests, they anticipated a readership not unlike Milton's own fit audience though few,why did they adopt the hostile caricature of themselves as illiterates ? McDowell follows Thomas N. Corns in noting that, however sympathetically revolutionary he may have been, Milton took pains to avoid being associated with the illiterate characterizations of the radicals (pp. 47-48); nevertheless, in Paradise Regained, just like them, he explicitly rejects the classicism that, in the companion Samson Agonistes, again like them, he so wonderfully reinvigorates. This tension is yet to resolve. University of Stirling N. H. Keeble The Poems ofAndrew Marvell. Ed. by Nigel Smith. (Longman Annotated English Poets) London, New York, and Toronto: Pearson Longman. 2003. xxvi + 468 pp. ?50. ISBN 0-582-07770-2. Nigel Smith's Longman edition of Marvell is a cornucopia of learning, an extraordi? nary achievement for a single scholar, fully deserving the general editors' description as 'a unique resource for the student of Marvell's work and its age' (p. xi). One is tempted to apply Marvell's words in praise of Cromwell: 'So much one man can do, | That does both act and know' ('Horatian Ode', 11.75-76). The edition makes MLR, 100.3, 2??5 783 available to readers an impressive amount of new material, much of it the result of Smith's tireless researches. It is far superior to all previous editions of Marvell in several respects: its annotation of linguistic detail, the puns and verbal ambiguities so abundant in Marvell; its notes identifying possible sources and analogues, classical and biblical; its citation of parallel passages from the poet's contemporaries; and its consistent attempts to situate Marvell's writings in their historical...

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