Abstract
In a wittily unjust passage of ‘Tom May’s Death’, Marvell lampoons the practice of Romanizing English politics and history. Consigned in Elysium to the company of ‘novice statesmen’, May will pursue his deluded and ignorant comparisons:
Tell them of Liberty, the Stories fine,
Until you all grow Consuls in your wine…
Transferring old Rome hither in your talk,
As Bethlem’s House did to Loretto walk.
Foul Architect that hadst not Eye to see
How ill the measures of these States agree.1
Marvell himself was not however immune to the temptation of drawing a ‘Romane cast similitude’. His ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland’ (1650, probably the year of ‘Tom May’s Death’) and his First Anniversary of the Government under O.C. (1655) assume that the ‘measures’ of England and Rome do ‘agree’ — enough at least to legitimize Horace’s odes and Claudian’s anniversary panegyrics as generic models, and the literary triumph as a reward for military and political prowess. In a letter of 1654, Marvell drew an elaborate Roman and triumphal similitude in order to compliment Milton’s Defensio Secunda:
it seems to me a Trajans columne in whose winding ascent we see imboss’d the severall Monuments of your learned victoryes. And Salmatius and Morus make up as great a Triumph as That of Decebalus, whom too for ought I know you shall have forced as Trajan the other, to make themselves away out of a just Desperation.2
‘that insulting vanity’
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Notes
‘Tom May’s Death’, ll. 44–5, 49–52, in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M. Margoliouth, 3rd edn, rev. Pierre Legouis and E.E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), vol. I, p. 95.
Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, in The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. F. Allen Patterson, 18 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–8), vol. VIII, pp. 158, 222. Milton’s sonnet to Sir Henry Vane (1652) also praises him as a Roman Senator. On Milton’s republicanism and Romanitas, see Edward B. Benjamin, ‘Milton and Tacitus’, Milton Studies, 4 (1972), 125–30.
Paradise Regain’d, iii. 194–5, in Works, ed. Patterson, vol. II, part ii. Cf. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 352.
‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, ll.1–4, in Poems and Letters, ed. Margoliouth, vol. I, pp. 91–4. See Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972), p. 167;
David Norbrook, ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” and the Politics of Genre’, in Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 147–69; cf. the opening of Du Bartas, The Battail of Yvry, trans. Joshua Silvester in Du Bartas His Divine Weekes, and Workes (1633), p. 551.
Cf. Poems and Letters, ed. Margoliouth, vol. II, pp. 295–6; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 277–8.
Important discussions of the poem’s Romanitas in general, and its relation to Lucan in particular, are: A.J.N. Wilson, ‘Andrew Marvell, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland: the Thread of the Poem and its Use of Classical Allusion’, Critical Quarterly, 11 (1969), 325–41;
David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 243–71, especially pp. 261–3.
Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: Our Chief of Men (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), pp. 93–4, 139, 141, 152–3, 387–90; Lucan, i. 125–6, 146–50.
Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Triumphal Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 78–81.
Cf. Derek Hirst, ‘“That sober liberty”: Marvell’s Cromwell in 1654’, in The Golden and the Brazen World: Papers in Literature and History, 1650–1800, ed. John M. Wallace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), esp. pp. 21–6, 32–41.
Cf. Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 87–9.
Milton’s uses of triumph are studied with reference to Restoration spectacle by Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), ch. 4.
See also Stevie Davies, Images of Kingship in Paradise Lost: Milton’s Politics and Christian Liberty (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), pp. 110–26.
The History of Britain, in Works, ed. Patterson, vol. X, p. 57. On Milton, war, and triumphal celebration, see James A. Freeman, Milton and the Martial Muse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 216–23;
J.P. Rumrich, Matter of Glory (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987).
Cf. Ruth Nevo, The Dial of Virtue: a Study of Poems on Affairs of State in the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 88–92.
For versions of Christ the triumphator in Roman humanist writings, see Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 241–3.
David Armitage, ‘John Milton: Poet against Empire’, in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 206–25.
J. Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) argues for a conflicted relation between the poem and English empire-building.
For Satan’s return as a Stuart court masque, see John G. Demaray, Milton’s Theatrical Epic: the Invention and Design of ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 31–9, 71–2.
See also Stevie Davies, ‘Triumph and Anti-triumph: Milton’s Satan and the Roman Emperors in Paradise Lost’, Etudes Anglaises, 34 (1981), 385–98. Satan’s return recalls in particular the masquing language for the return of Queen Henrietta Maria in the Oxford Epibateria.
For a cognate discussion of Paradise Regain’d, emphasizing the Son’s classical virtues of magnanimity and Stoic heroism, see Richard Strier, ‘Milton against Humility’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 258–86.
Gerald J. Schiffhorst, ‘Patience and the Humbly Exalted Heroism of Milton’s Messiah: Typological and Iconographic Background’, Milton Studies, 16 (1982), 97–113.
Stella P. Revard, ‘Milton and Classical Rome: the Political Context of Paradise Regained’, in Rome in the Renaissance: the City and the Myth, ed. P.A. Ramsey (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), pp. 409–19;
Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 313–19.
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© 2001 Anthony Miller
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Miller, A. (2001). Marvell and Milton. In: Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230628557_9
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