More, Please

Just to prove that I am not underemployed, I clocked the fact that my review had been published and assumed that it was the last one submitted to that journal (although even that was quite a while ago), but did not have time to check until last night, after I had blogged it.

It was in fact the one before that, which at least makes sense of the very out-of-date byline that I have been given. Anyway, it is of Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660, by my friend Dr Alison Shell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

I must be turning into my own formative academic influences, several of whom, not that they would ever blog in the first place, would do things like that if they did. And you can never have too much Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene or Waugh, anyway.

Herewith, the review a form of which has finally made it into print:

This hugely important book demands to be ranked alongside the historical works of J J Scarisbrick and Eamon Duffy. Thanks to Dr Shell, the whole intelligentsia, defined as broadly as possible, now has no excuse for not knowing these things.

First, Shell sets out “to give a name to the nameless terror of Jacobean tragedy.” In Middleton and Webster, what we find are not only obvious, specific instances of anti-Catholicism, but also an all-pervasive and even unconscious anti-Catholicism. Shell sees many historically mistaken readings of these plays, even by Swinburne and Eliot, as deriving from French Romanticism and Decadence, “tinctured by the anticlericalism of the French Revolution.”

And she bemoans the lazy use of the term ‘Calvinist’ in relation to the Jacobean tragedians, as well as the agnostic or secular confusion of the depiction of Catholicism as corrupt or decayed with a depiction of “religion” generally in such terms.

Shell then turns her attention to poetry, in a magnificent essay on the exclusion from canonicity of Saint Robert Southwell SJ and Richard Crashaw, though also of William Alabaster. Saint Robert’s martyrdom in 1595 has not helped the cause of his recognition, since there has been much talk of “seventeenth-century lyric” and “seventeenth-century religious poetry” by critics searching for alternatives to “metaphysical poetry”. At best, he has been seen as important only as precursor of Donne and Herbert.

As to Crashaw: “When Spenser writes in Italian fashions, it enriches English culture and helps to make Spenser a major poet; when Crashaw does the same, he is called foreign.” Post-war art historians have problematised the connection between Catholicism and the Baroque; and recent literary criticism has come to see a Protestant Baroque in Milton. But the fact remains (although Shell does not mention it) that T S Eliot casts a very long shadow. His definition of metaphysical poetry clearly excluded a Baroque writer as foreign and un-English. And if that writer was a Baroque Catholic like Crashaw, then he remains foreign and un-English, quite axiomatically, to many people.

Yet in fact nothing could be more English than Crashaw’s expression of strongly Catholic sentiments in terms heavily influenced by the wider Latin culture of which England (like Scotland, Wales or Ireland) is properly an integral part. The Catholic Church recapitulated the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire, temporally as well as spiritually saving at least the second and third of these by so doing. She then likewise saved the cultures of those who had threatened to destroy the Graeco-Roman world, integrating them therewith and with each other.

Thus, She made Romans of such ostensibly unlikely types as Franks, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Burgundians, Goths, Normans, Lombards, and so forth. These were acknowledged as such by both their Latin-writing and their Greek-writing fellow-Romans; and they provided Fathers and Doctors of the Holy Roman Church to rank with any. Through and under Her, they participated fully in the wider Latin culture, and thus in that of Christendom as a whole.

Crashaw stood in precisely that tradition. As did the English seminaries and religious houses in exile, acting as conduits for the transmission of ideas (by no means only in Theology) from England to their host-countries and vice versa. Such communication was also effected by the London embassy chapels, by the French refugee priests and religious in the eighteenth century, and by the French and Italian missionary orders from the nineteenth century onwards.

To return to Shell, modern agnosticism and secularism have served to obscure and decracinate Crashaw yet further, by preferring Donne’s and Herbert’s questioning and wrestling to Crashaw’s religious ecstasy. One might add that, again, there was never anything un-English about Crashaw in this regard either: there were Julians of Norwich all over Mediaeval England; eighteenth-century London teemed with Blakes; and in between, all manner of persons went about during the Interregnum, much as they do today. Crashaw is to be commended for remaining within the bounds of orthodox Christianity, which he was only able to do as first a cryptic and then an overt Papist; this is a lesson to many of his compatriots (and others), now as then.

Shell then proceeds to explore the complex ways in which Catholics continued to express their loyalty to Elizabeth I, and then to the Protestant Stuarts. The similarities between the earthly and heavenly Queens were stressed, and works were even dedicated to both. Praises of Our Lady were thinly disguised as praises of Elizabeth. Some Catholics placed hope in Mary, Queen of Scots; but this was not universal, and she was actually disapproved of for plotting against Elizabeth, as Mary I was retrospectively for having been married to Philip II of Spain.

Texts intended for the Queen’s eyes drew parallels between the ageing and childless Elizabeth, and her namesake’s conception of John the Baptist. Shell writes that the Queen’s age “absolutely precludes a literal application of the passage, in favour of an allegorical. A real heir is not intended, but instead, Elizabeth is being urged towards incubation of the recovered Catholic faith.” But Catholicism does not admit of purely allegorical, any more than purely literal, readings of this kind; nor has it ever had any problem with post-Biblical miracles.

Most English Catholics were unaware, and would certainly have disapproved, of the Gunpowder Plot. But during the Stuart period, there was a shift in loyalist writing, reflecting the shift in wider political thought at the time: whereas Elizabeth had been addressed as personally beloved, the Stuart kings were held to command loyalty because they were absolute monarchs, at least in theory.

The hierarchies of Church and State came to be seen as an appositional “bulwark against the terrors of popular rule.” Shell sees in the tropes of this tradition the roots of Anglican expressions of loyalty to the Church of England in absentia during the Interregnum, and expresses her hope to revisit this so as to trace the intellectual line back to Elizabethan Catholic loyalism. One greatly looks forward to this revisitation.

Finally, Shell treats of exile as an imaginative stimulus. In particular, she points out that the elegies of the English Catholic exiles challenge the current, agnostic definition of elegy in terms of scepticism, by standing firmly in the older tradition of Horace, of elegy as lamentation and the sentiment of granted prayer. These are exhortatory, such that the former interrogates the reader as the voice of objective woe.

Shell also draws attention to the neglected ‘Jesuit drama’ of the English Catholic institutions on the Continent, by no means all of which, of course, were actually under Jesuit control. These tragicomedies optimistically balanced the elegiac call to dry England’s tears. With shades of what has since come to be called trench humour, the present state of the English Catholics is allegorically presented as pitiable, but “an ending of unspeakable happiness is reserved for them.”

Optimism also characterises the Catholic hymn written in exile, heavily emphasising the joys of heaven in marked contrast to the sorrows of earthly separation from one’s native land, which any Christian might be said to be enduring in this life, with careful qualification in Catholic terms. This is speratory verse, standing “in an antigeneric relation to elegy.” Much is made in celebration of the Catholic belief that all the senses may be stimulated as an aid to devotion, and heaven is portrayed (analogically, we must say) as such stimulation to the utmost extent.

The Madonna Vulnerata of the English College in Valladolid, very visibly desecrated during the English sacking of Cadiz in 1596, externalised the wounds of national heresy and personal exile, as well might an image of Our Lady, whose dowry England had been. Yet many of the lavish ceremonies associated with the Vulnerata were in fact performed on Elizabeth’s birthday.

And exile had its advantages, making it possible for Catholic writers to say exactly what they thought about what had become of Catholic England, both since Henry VIII and under Mediaeval interdicts. Plays were written and performed at the English colleges which simply could not have been performed on the English stage, or issued by a mainstream English publisher. How much, one wonders, did their clandestine circulation, and that of men who had seen them, contribute to England’s transformation into a pluralist society with an exceptionally strong anti-authoritarian streak more usually put down to Protestantism, but not characteristic of either Charles I or Cromwell?

More, please! There undoubtedly will be.

Indeed, there now is.