What’s the Problem with the Dutch? Andrew Marvell, the Trade Wars, Toleration, and the Dutch Republic

You could be excused for thinking that rather than an Englishman, Andrew Marvell might better have been born a Dutchman in the republic’s golden age – an era of religious toleration and commercial ascendance, of fiscal accountability and civic transparency, and of particular brilliance in the painterly arts of landscape and portraiture. There are moments in his career when Marvell seems in thrall to Dutch naval prowess, a strong advocate of confederacy with the States General against the universal monarchy threatened by the French crown, and admiring too of a religious toleration that characterized Dutch society. But that is not the whole story for his ‘The Character of Holland’ is filled with denial and excoriation, and the contradictions within Marvell’s attitude towards England’s mercantile rival and religious confederate call out for resolution. This paper explores the ways in which those inconsistencies and contradictions arise from Marvell’s apprehensions of sameness and otherness: that the proximity and distance of Britain and the States General is also the story of Marvell’s own sense of contradictory selfhood

Introduction

Over the past several decades there has been a transformation in our appreciation of the political cultures, the chronologies and the revolutions of the late seventeenth century. We have learned to read its subtleties of confessional identity and paradoxes of tender conscience, and to read anew the full range of Restoration sexualities, gender relations and sociabilities. As importantly, we have enlarged our sense of authorship in this age: its often collaborative character, the role of literary coteries in fashioning discourse and circulating texts and the workings and institutions of the commercial press. We now apprehend the Restoration theatre not simply as a repertoire of heroic plays, witty comedies and tragedies of pathos, but as an emblem of the culture's obsession with roles, performances and the constitution of the self. Naturally, indeed preternaturally, in the sexual mythologies and performance arts of the Restoration, in its literature and theatre, John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, plays a starring role. Rather more surprisingly, he now seems important even to our understanding of Restoration religion and ideology: to the ways in which libertinism is bound to the history of toleration and to the manner in which courtly verse at once reifies and critiques the conduct of Restoration politics (see Harris, Chapter 9). For his contemporaries and near-contemporaries, there was no question of Rochester's importance to Restoration culture. From the manuscript circulation of his verse to the posthumous publication of Poems on Several Occasions (1680) through much of the eighteenth century, Rochester's works – authentic and otherwise – were often copied, widely read and steady sellers. And he was hardly to be contained between the boards of quartos and folios; he migrated into fictions – into romances, anecdotes and the theatre, even into European letters. He permeated print culture at every level, though Johnson's biography of Rochester in Lives of the Poets (1779–81) seems to have been a turning point, a key sign of diminution and disapproval.</p

Introduction

March 2021 marked the quatercentenary of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell’s birth. This wide-ranging introduction to the volume reflects on the transformations in Marvell studies over the last several decades. It traces the arc of critical energy and investment in Marvell from modernism to the historical turn, focusing in to explore where literary history has been in recent years and where it might be going as scholars continue to map the pleasures and challenges of reading and re-reading Andrew Marvell