Abstract
Shakespeare’s sense of past and present speaks beyond his time and is a locus for the exploration of fictional and literary worlds. His historical fiction yokes together past and present, fiction and history, thereby conflating and distinguishing them. The power of Shakespeare’s language combines rhetoric and poetics, ethics and aesthetics, and moves the reader and audience. This is the business of the poet, whose memorable images move the reader to virtue, if Philip Sidney were to have his way in his Apology or Defence.1 Language, style, and rhetoric also matter for John Bunyan in his representation of a spiritual journey in this world. The quest or pilgrimage involves a more sustained religious setting than anything that Shakespeare composed. Shakespeare also represented his work though narrators and characters, so that his address to the reader or audience is indirect and refracted. Here, I wish to concentrate on Bunyan’s apparently direct appeal or apology that is aimed at the reader.
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Notes
Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or, The Defence of Poesy, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 102. The first and second editions appeared in 1965 and 1973 edited by Geoffrey Shepherd.
I dedicate this chapter to the memory of James Forrest, generous and kind colleague. The occasion for the writing of my original paper was for Tradition and Revolution: Politics, Literature, and Theology in John Bunyan’s England, The Inaugural Conference of the International John Bunyan Society Conference, September 29 to October 1, 1995, Edmonton and Banff, Alberta. Thanks to the organizers. My statements about the state of scholarship was probably more the case at the time of writing. For a collection that grew out of that conference, see Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community, ed. David Gay, James G. Randall, and Arlette Zinck (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2000). For recent works on Bunyan since the original writing of this piece, see, for instance, Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
Colin Morris, Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Richard L Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002);
Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004);
Beth Lynch, John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004);
Anne Dunan-Page, Grace Overwhelming: John Bunyan, the Pilgrim’s Progress and the Extremes of the Baptist Mind (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006);
N. H. Keeble, “John Bunyan’s Literary Life,” The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan, ed. Anne Dunan-Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 13–25.
The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble, The World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). All citations and quotations are from this edition. See also John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus— Tercentenary Essays, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). See Keeble 264, and U. Milo Kaufmann, “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1966), 3–60.
William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans with J. Tobin (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
On Plato and the church fathers and their influence in Elizabethan England, see Jonas Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
Thomas Sprat is quite conscious of the style of his book and what constitutes plain style versus that of an apology. See, for instance, “An Advertisement to the Reader,” The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge by Tho. Sprat. (London: T. R. for J. Martyn …, and J. Allestry …, 1667). See Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting,” Mind, new series, 14 (1905): 479–93.
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© 2012 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2012). Bunyan’s Apology for His Progress. In: Fictional and Historical Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012647_13
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