Preface to Style: Essays on Renaissance and Restoration Literature and Culture in Memory of Harriett Hawkins
The first words of Harriett Hawkins’ first book are a quotation from John Dryden:
The purity of phrase, the clearness of conception and expression, the boldness maintained to majesty, the significancy and sound of words, not strained into bombast, but justly elevated; in short, those very words and thoughts, which cannot be changed, but for the worse, must of necessity escape our transient view upon the theatre; and yet without all these a play may take. For if either the story move us, or the actor help the lameness of it with his performance, or now and then a glittering beam of wit or passion strike through the obscurity of the poem, any of these are sufficient to effect a present liking, but not to fix a lasting admiration; for nothing but truth can long continue; and time is the surest judge of truth.
For Dryden, as for Hawkins, “truth” is something that emerges from an ongoing dialectic. In two of her major works, Likenesses of Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama and The Devil’s Party: Critical Counter-Interpretations of Shakespearian Drama, Hawkins argues that “truth” is no less the sole property of bald, humorless, and limpid sermonizing as it is the property of ornate, witty, and obtuse poetry or prose. A “glittering beam of wit of passion” is often all it takes to transform obscurity into clarity, but “lasting admiration” is something that cannot be purchased cheaply by “purity of phrase” or “boldness maintained to majesty.” Perhaps Hawkins used Dryden’s words from “An Essay on Dramatic Poesy” to set the tone for her book, and by extension the remainder of her career, to illustrate how true style is in the service of, and is in turn served by, a verdict of lasting worth. This is the difference between “style” and its lesser cousin, “fashion.” Both are cultural constructions, both can be vessels for “truth,” but, as both Dryden and Hawkins make clear, they have significantly different relationships to time. The essays in this volume are all written in honor of Hawkins as evidence of her own lasting worth and continuing influence on Renaissance and Restoration studies. But they also address Dryden’s challenge for modern readers to cast a cold eye back on the past, to evaluate how elements of literary style from the age of Dryden and his predecessors have held up to our standards for “lasting admiration” and even “truth.”
Style is as difficult to define as it is ubiquitous in our presentations of Renaissance and Restoration art and culture. It is virtually impossible to conceive of the Renaissance without thinking almost immediately of style — it is perhaps the most self-consciously ornamental and rigorously individualistic period in British cultural history. The very word “Renaissance,” meaning of course “rebirth,” brings to mind baroque elaboration, rhetorical polish, symbolic power sewn into the flowering aristocratic clothing, Senecan bombast, Elizabethan lyricism, and Machiavellian panache. Likewise, the Restoration is defined as much by its sense of style as by its historical bookends. Representative government and Calvinist theology both survived the fall of Cromwell and the return of Charles II, but the manners, methods, materials, and motives of the court still seem to us nearly as radically and refreshingly different to the years immediately preceding it as they seemed to the citizens of London at the time.
Yet “style” remains elusive, something that tends to slip away from precise measurement and definition. It remains linked to personal taste, something that forms both the life of literary enjoyment and the death of more-or-less objective literary history. As a result, style has become something we often speak of in the classroom or with one another, often with great enthusiasm and affection, but also something we seldom write about anymore (apart from discussions of “stylistics,” a narrow branch of rhetorical analysis). Recent advances in historicist criticism, however, have made it easier for us to see how all virtually all aspects of literature intersect at some level with virtually all aspects of the history of culture. Style, often relegated to the ironically “unfashionable” bin of the disgraced New Criticism, should be no different. We are therefore in a unique position now to re-define “style” as much more than simply an author’s patented quirks or the casual taste of the town.
Style, as these essays collectively demonstrate, can be seen as a fertile juncture of culture, politics, technique, fashion, history, science, theology, and genre. After all, it takes more than one ingredient to cook a style. Fashion alone is meaningless without an economics of scale to accompany it; technique is meaningless without a context of canonical works against which it can be measured; rhetoric is meaningless without an ethics or a theology for its persuasive power to endorse. Style is inherently interdisciplinary, heteroglossic, and of course, it is inherently interesting. Style is where history meets cultural context meets personality meets reader response. It is both the beginning and end of inspiration and appeal: it is what artists seek to imitate and build upon in other artists, and what readers remember long after they have grown fuzzy on the content and details of an argument.
Literary history has assigned each conventional literary period, and cultural movement within each period, with its characteristic style: the elegiac tone of Anglo Saxon epic poetry, the elegant artificiality of pastorals, the erotic brooding of gothic novels, etc. Yet style seems to break down into smaller and smaller units the closer we look at the individual works. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic brooding seems considerably more sublime and picturesque than the violent occultism of Matthew Lewis, which is different still from the passionate longing of Emily Brontë’s and the tone of archetypal heroic questing in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (and of course individual chapters, even sentences, of Moby Dick show dramatically different styles and techniques). Different styles on the small scale often work together to create the kinds of cultural generalizations we often make on the larger scale: Christopher Marlowe’s sweeping passages of wild ambition and Robert Herrick’s precise attention to small objects of delicate beauty, for example, both share stylistic traits of seventeenth-century Humanism.
The essays in this volume are marked by their awareness that style is a consideration of scale, not of kind. Close examination of individual texts and individual authors alternates with broader considerations of culture, politics, and history. Taken together, the essays point to the Renaissance and Restoration as two periods that find unity in underlying assumptions about the value of highly individual expression and the high stakes of aesthetic debate for transcending matters of transient fashion and tradition-bound genres.
The essays fall into three parts. The first section, “The Style of Scholarship and the Scholarship of Style: a Tribute to Harriett Hawkins,” begins with two essays that demonstrate how Renaissance style as a subject of literary criticism can parallel, and perhaps even influence, the stylishness and appeal of the criticism itself. Harriett Hawkins’ life and career are a case in point. The first essay is by Arthur Kinney, professor at the University of Massachusetts and director of the Renaissance Center there that holds the repository of Hawkins’ publications and papers. Professor Kinney summarizes Hawkins’ major works and assesses their influence on the field of Renaissance studies, pointing out how Hawkins herself plays into the dichotomy she sometimes used in her work on Shakespeare criticism, how “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” According to Kinney, Harriett was the kind to follow the style of the fox while clinging to the style of the hedgehog for a central thesis that is found throughout her major work: hedgehogs have it all wrong. Robert Markley shows exactly how this works in one particular respect: in “Harriett Hawkins and the Criticism of the 1970s: Interpretation, Theory, and Iconoclasm,” Markley details how Hawkins’ unusual and prescient stance on the healthy ethical pluralism of Restoration comedy was a radical departure in a critical atmosphere that emphasized narrowly moralistic readings.
The section concludes with two short pieces by Hawkins herself. Since Kinney and Markley account for the contribution of her major scholarship, it seemed appropriate to provide representative samples of Hawkins’ legendary prowess at undergraduate teaching. These essays were written for an Oxford journal she cared a great deal about in the final years of her life, The English Review, a publication aimed at English sixth-formers considering university study in English at Oxford and elsewhere. The selections each deal in various ways with the dialectical style of specific passages from Spenser and Milton. They illustrate in microcosm what both Kinney and Markley claim for her more extended works: Hawkins constantly has an eye for dialectics and debate, for the ways in which the author’s meaning and the reader’s pleasure is found in the play of opposing forces, sometimes found in words of the same sentence. These exercises in practical criticism more than hold their own in a volume such as this, surrounded by highly advanced scholarship, but they work equally well on the level of an informed general readership. Hawkins always knew, as Dryden did, that “the clearness of conception and expression, the boldness maintained to majesty, the significancy and sound of words, not strained into bombast, but justly elevated” is all that effective literary criticism has ever really needed, then as now.
The second part of the volume is entitled “Single Authors and Singular Styles,” a section devoted to studies of the development and lasting influence of the individuality and subjectivity so characteristic of Renaissance and Restoration poetics. Whereas value was often placed on traditional, familiar genres and subjects in Renaissance writing, the bar was correspondingly raised on the heightened expectations for unique treatments and fresh perspectives (much like yet another jazz musician taking a solo on yet another chorus of “Stardust”). The authors in this section therefore look for ways in which the fingerprint of an author’s imagery, language, rhetoric, and frames of reference matter greatly to their canonization, continued relevance, and what they can tell us about Renaissance and Restoration aesthetics.
Sometimes even the best critics make value judgments on style that go further than questions of individual taste and personal preference, blinding them to all that an unusual literary technique can make possible. T.S. Eliot once dismissed the poetry of Henry Vaughan on the basis of his “vague, adolescent, fitful and retrogressive” portrayals of emotion. John Carey, in his essay “Henry Vaughan’s Poetry: Pointful Vagueness and the Merging of Contraries,” begins with this passage from Eliot to claim that Vaughan has never received the proper recognition he deserves. Viewed from the right perspective and with an open imagination, Vaughan’s peculiarities of linguistics and imagery clarify rather obfuscate his verse. His unusual word choices over-ride usual oppositions, so that contraries like night & light, heat & cold, stasis & agitation, etc., are reconciled.
Artful rhetoric, Carey argues, can help create an aura of mysticism. Something similar happens in Shakespeare’s works, but as the result of a slightly different spin on Vaughan’s same style of select omissions and indirect language. In her essay “Shakespeare and Magical Grammar,” Linda Woodbridge claims that many of Shakespeare’s plays preserve elements of magical beliefs carried over from an earlier age. Since cultural beliefs sometimes encode themselves in the very grammar of language, a choice of literary style in later generations becomes in part a choice of cultural reference. Shakespeare preserves the traditional superstition that danger arises from drawing attention to someone or something by naming him/her/it. This is seen especially in the use of pronouns rather than nouns which name directly, the use of passive verbs to evade naming who performed the action, the use of euphemisms to avoid naming the action itself, the use of epithets or praise-names rather than proper names, synonyms, and other substitutive devices.
Maurice Charney, also, claims that Shakespeare sometimes communicates most effectively through what he does not say. In “Shakespeare’s Eloquence,” a version of the Shakespeare Birthday speech given at the Merchantile Library, Charney illustrates the idea that Shakespeare’s eloquence may not be just in the words he wrote, but also in the intensely dramatic scenes or parts of scenes that rely on nonverbal eloquence. At times Shakespeare’s style is most effective when the language he uses is not particularly impressive in itself. One of Shakespeare’s most magical lines, for example, is Lear’s simple “Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.” Actions, too, often speak louder than words. Charney argues for a definition of “eloquence” that is inclusive of the entire range of rhetorical and literary techniques that make Shakespeare’s most effective scenes truly “dramatic.”
Richard Levin locates Shakespeare’s eloquence very differently in “Hamlet’s Dramatic Soliloquies,” using the examples of Hamlet’s seven great speeches to define the “dramatic” in two senses: each soliloquy is an integral part of the surrounding dramatic action and is therefore inseparable from it, and each one contains within itself a small dramatic action. The style of the soliloquies also serves the structure and characterization of the play by marking the ends of episodes and suggesting character motivation (among other things).
The investigation into how an author’s individual style serves, and is served by, the structure and development of genre is continued by Martine Watson Brownley in “Denzil Holles and the Stylistic Development of the Early English Memoir.” Brownley demonstrates how Holles’s “Discourse” exhibits all of the primary literary qualities of the seventeenth-century English memoir, but how by virtue of its distinctive language it reflects the conflicted relationship to historical discourse that rapidly destabilized the memoir over the relatively brief course of its development. In Holles’s hands, therefore, the early English memoir negotiates its uneasy relationship to historical discourse into stylistic possibilities that helped make possible the emerging English novel.
Allen Michie draws upon Harriett Hawkins’ innovative interdisciplinary theory in her final book, Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture, and Chaos Theory, to outline a new aesthetic for the poetry of John Donne that emphasizes very different kinds of instability, emerging properties, and perhaps even “magic.” In “’New philosophy calls all in doubt’: Chaos Theory and the Fractal Poetics of John Donne,” Michie claims that many characteristics of Donne’s style and imagery give his poetry much in common with the natural and mathematical systems described so well by recent chaos theory: it is dynamic, nonlinear, complex, adaptive, and turbulent. The basic elements of chaos theory and fractal geometry are summarized and explained for the benefit of non-specialists, including sensitive dependence on initial conditions, strange attractors, self-similarity across scale, and phase transitions. Each one applies in ways to Donne’s poetry and prose to the extent that chaos theory can pull together many otherwise disconnected strands of Donne’s art and thought.
The third part of the book, “Style and Culture,” includes essays which address the cross-pollinating influence of Renaissance style on fashion, politics, and aesthetics. Michael Neill writes in “As loose and free as nature”: Etherege, Dryden and the ‘perfection of art’” that two otherwise very different works, Dryden’s “Essay of Dramatic Poesy” and Etherege’s comedy “The Man of Mode,” are both structured as elaborate but mockingly inconclusive debates on the relationship between art and nature. Each debate is illustrated with numerous exemplars of art and artifice, and the pettiness of differences is highlighted by a style of parallelism that juxtaposes the debates to actual civil warfare. While not making claims that Etherege was directly influenced by Dryden’s “Essay,” this essay argues that the symmetry between the two works, despite the generic difference that separates them, reveals structures of thought and feeling in Restoration culture.
M. J. Gómez Lara, in “Discourses on Health and Leisure and Modern Constructions of Holidays at the Restoration Spas,” also pinpoints how Restoration culture intersects with aesthetic fashion in the form of social metaphors and ironic dialectics. He uses theories of cultural geography and anthropology to examine the life of spas in the late seventeenth century, demonstrating how their depictions in pamphlets and poems satirize, challenge, or maintain discriminatory social categories. The literary renderings of this cultural landscape feed back into Restoration society by privileging a stylish, fashionable environment suitable for the enactment of larger social conflicts.
Paulina Kewes discusses the serious social conflicts of English colonialism in Ireland and the treatment of British Jews in her essay “The Jews, the Irish, and the Puritans: Thomas Legge’s The Destruction of Jerusalem and the Uses of Jewish History.” The subtle political parallels in Legge’s overlooked play pull out double identifications from the audience, creating sympathies with both Roman and Jewish characters that call us to question our own ethical standards. Legge’s style of characterization and plotting holds up to scrutiny the entire process of making, transmitting, and representing history.
Such processes are ongoing, nor is colonialism only a thing of the past. Just as Legge’s narrative style posed challenges to the authority of colonial rule during the Renaissance, so does Renaissance literature still maintain a political dimension today. Terence Hawkes uses a collection of Shakespeare’s verse selected by Prince Charles titled The Prince’s Choice to examine how Shakespeare is conscripted into service by a modern monarchical establishment keenly conscious of its own need for cultural support. Characters claiming the title of “Prince of Wales” in the early modern “Great Britain” project form the central concern of Shakespeare’s history plays, just as in our time the present day responds in kind and uses Shakespeare’s cultural cachet as fuel for an authoritative royal style.
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Biographical Note
Harriett Bloker Hawkins was born in Memphis, Tennessee on April 29, 1934, and grew up on the banks of the Mississippi river in Caruthersville, Missouri. She relished escape at the local cinema, where the now-classic films she saw there made a permanent impact on her imagination, scholarly open-mindedness to popular culture, and her personal sense of style. Most who knew her believed they had met a movie star who had been too busy with grander things to get around to being in any movies.
Hawkins attended Tulane University, and even as a secretary and part-time undergraduate there, she attended the lectures of Richard Fogle and was invited to join his select after-hours circle of faculty and graduate students. She thought her physical education classes a waste of her time and tuition, skipped them all, and dared the university not to give her a degree. She graduated with the prizes for Shakespeare studies, dramatic literature, and overall excellence in the department of English.
She then attended Washington University on a National Defense fellowship and graduated with a Ph.D. in 1964, winning the prize for best graduate student just as she had as for best undergraduate. She then spent two years teaching at Swarthmore College before joining the full-time faculty at Vassar College in 1966. She won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library, and her first book, Likenesses of Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama appeared under the Clarendon imprint from Oxford University Press in 1972.
A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975 came close upon her full professorship at Vassar. Poetic Freedom and Poetic Truth followed that same year, winning the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy and being listed as one of the “Books of the Year” in the London Observer. Research and consultations for her doctoral thesis had taken her several times to Oxford, and by now she had become a familiar and welcomed fixture at Linacre College, where friends who remember her there say she played a key role in setting the intellectual and social tone for Oxford’s newest college. Her marriage to Eric Buckley, Printer to the University at Oxford University Press, took her away from Vassar in 1979, and by 1982 she was appointed Senior Research Fellow at Linacre.
Hawkins was happy and productive in Oxford. She supervised graduate students, lectured to undergraduates, served as faculty and speaker for various summer programs, was Visiting Professor at Emory for a semester in 1987, and enjoyed being on vacation in exotic places from Egypt to Antarctica as much as she enjoyed being at home in Headington with Eric and (as she put it in the flyleaf to Classics and Trash) her “tyrannical tortoise-shell cat.”
Three turns at reviewing the year’s Shakespeare scholarship for the Shakespeare Survey resulted in The Devil’s Party: Critical Counter-Interpretations of Shakespearean Drama. The first two essays in this volume review the impact of Hawkins’ first three books on the field of Renaissance and Restoration studies, so there is no need to go into detail here. A word should be said for Hawkins’ later works, however. The following years saw Hawkins expanding her range of interest, making greater use of her considerable teaching experience to write for general audiences. She allowed herself to speak more freely about the undeniable links she had always seen between literature, popular culture, and science (all written prior to, or at the early stages of, the rise of interdisciplinary studies).
Measure for Measure: A Critical Introduction was written in 1987 for the Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare series. In 1992 she joined the editorial board of The English Review, a journal aimed at English secondary school students to inform and inspire them about literary study. Hawkins helped to revive the lagging publication, bringing to it a new energy and an all-star list of contributors who had difficulty saying “no” to her requests, especially when they were reinforced with her own example (see the reprinted essays in this volume). Several years’ worth of popular guest lectures blended into Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres, which appeared in 1990 and is in many ways Hawkins’ most creative and nearly autobiographical work. She poured into it her wealth of literary reference, along with her committed feminism and all her affection for the popular culture that shaped her own aesthetics from the most recent West End musicals to those childhood experiences at the Caruthersville cinema that never left her.
Her final book, Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory was her greatest stretch. She immersed herself in an entirely new field of study, the nonlinear dynamics of chaotic and complex systems. Anchored by a characteristically witty parallel between Paradise Lost and Jurassic Park, Hawkins wrote of both chaos theory and a range of “high” and popular literature with clarity and catching enthusiasm. Of all her honors and accolades, she was perhaps most proud of her invitation to speak to the Oxford University Physics department on the relationship between chaos theory and the arts.
Hawkins was a legendary teacher. Ready with a quote from her formidable memory to match any occasion, she was able to reach many generations of students of all age groups and social backgrounds. Her scholarship on Shakespeare was impeccable, but in the classroom the dramatic arts were just that to her — always dramatic, and always an art.
Hawkins died from complications of cancer surgery on September 18, 1995. Her close friend John Bamborough, the first Principal of Linacre College who did so much for her career from its earliest stages, paid her his last service with a eulogy at her funeral in Oxford. His conclusion is a fitting introduction for the essays on the chosen theme for this volume:
One always felt better for meeting Harriett; she was a source of colour in one’s existence. . . . While the rest of us muster round for the daily battle of life in our drab khaki battledress, Harriett came on parade in full-dress uniform, with a scarlet tunic, and a plume in her helmet. . . . She was fond of an Arabic saying, which she quotes more than once in her writing: ‘What need you of the black tents of the tribe, you who have the crimson pavilion of my heart?’ That is where her memorial will be: in the pavilions of our hearts.
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Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank the entire staff of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts for their assistance with the compilation of the bibliography, which is drawn from the repository of Hawkins’ works and papers which the Center maintains and which readers of this book are invited to visit. Hawkins would be pleased to know that her life’s work is preserved in such beautiful and professional surroundings, kept side-by-side with the collected works and papers of her own mentor and friend, Dame Helen Gardner. The director of the center, Arthur Kinney, offered early advice, encouragement, and even guest lodgings that directly led to the organization and publication of this volume.
John Carey offered his time and expertise beyond the substantial contribution of his own scholarship. Sophie Goldsworthy, Chief Editor of Humanities at Oxford University Press, offered valuable suggestions, and Sarah Poynting of the English Review offered essential assistance with permissions for reprinting Hawkins’ two essays. The editors also wish to thank Colette Ryder-Hall for her able and prompt assistance with the manuscript, and Alistair Buckley for his enthusiasm and help with long-distance communications. Financial support for editorial work and research was liberally provided by the Provost’s office and English department of Iowa State University.
It is a great tribute to Hawkins that she maintained an astonishing assembly of loyal friends and colleagues. Many of them who work in Renaissance and/or Restoration studies were contacted about this volume, and all of them gave offers of support and encouragement even if they were reluctantly unable to contribute essays at the time on our particular theme. The editors wish to thank Jonathan Bate, Catherine Belsey, Julia Briggs, Sue Coker Brothers, Christopher Butler, Cecile Williamson Carey, Beth Darlington, Robert DeMaria, Katherine Duncan-Jones, Christopher Grose, Werner Habicht, Cicely Havely, the late Christopher Hill, Emrys Jones, James F. Jones, Roger Lonsdale, Anthony Nuttal, Helen Powers, Harry Rusche, Ron Schuchard, Kathleen Scott, Evert Sprinchorn, Joseph Summers, Michael Wutz, and especially Bonnie Wheeler. For those whom we have failed to contact who would have liked to make a contribution in Hawkins’ memory, we apologize for the inadvertent omission, and we thank each of you for generous thoughts.
Our earliest, most enthusiastic, and generous supporter has been Juliana Michie, who joins the editors in feeling that this book is a fitting eulogy to her sister in the native language of scholarship that she spoke in so eloquently herself.
