The Problem of a Courtly Literature

This chapter analyses the seventeenth-century shift from aristocratic forms of literary evaluation to the book market as a key source of prestige—from a courtly to a commercial model of literary judgment and value. Setting the literature of the Caroline court within larger debates about the monarchy’s authority over an increasingly powerful commercial sector, it argues that English courtly culture crystalized in response to the challenges to royal authority posed by market growth and autonomy. It thus returns to a Marxist interpretation of the causes of the English Revolution, while using recent research on the book market, print censorship, and coterie literary circulation to draw new connections between socioeconomic change and literary history.

English Literature Abroad

Beginning in the seventeenth century, English literary authors began to be printed and read in translation in European vernaculars. This chapter traces the relationship between capitalist England’s emergence as an international commercial and colonial power and the circulation of English literature on the Continent. Taking the career of John Milton as a case study, it argues that the English Revolution marked a turning point in England’s political and economic influence, and as a direct result, in the reception of its literature. By the end of the seventeenth century, England’s capitalist development enabled vernacular writers such as Milton, Shakespeare, and Bacon to enter the European literary canon.

Fatal Adulteries: Sexual Politics in the English Revolution

This article argues for a reconsideration of the origins of Restoration sexual politics through a detailed examination of the effusive sexual polemic of the English Revolution (1642–1660). During the early 1640s, unprecedented political upheaval and a novel public culture of participatory print combined to transform explicit sexual libel from a muted element of prewar English political culture into one of its preeminent features. In the process, political leaders at the highest levels of government—including Queen Henrietta Maria, Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I—were confronted with extensive and graphic debates about their sexual histories in widely disseminated print polemic for the first time in English history. By the early 1650s, monarchical sexuality was a routine topic of scurrilous political commentary. Charles II was thus well acquainted with this novel polemical milieu by the time he assumed the throne in 1660, and his adoption of the “Merry Monarch” persona early in his reign represented a strategic attempt to turn mid-century sexual politics to his advantage, despite unprecedented levels of contemporary criticism. Restoration sexual culture was therefore largely the product of civil war polemical debate rather than the singular invention of a naturally libertine young king.