Jack Lynch. The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xi + 224 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-81907-7.
Reviewed by Daniel Woolf (Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta)
Published on H-Albion (May, 2004)
For a very long time now successive cultures have defined themselves either in comparison with or in contrast to earlier eras. Since Petrarch first singled out a dark medium aevum separating his own time from classical antiquity, value judgements have often attached to these views. The Elizabethan age is no exception, though most scholarship has focused on its own attitude to the immediate and remote past, for instance in Arthur B. Ferguson's book published a quarter-century ago, Clio Unbound (1979).
How the Elizabethan age came itself to be identified as a distinctive era in the development of culture, language, and literature is, of course, a very different question, and one that merits extended treatment, since it relates to other issues such as the formation of the modern "canon" and to shifts in the reputations of major authors such as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Jack Lynch's interesting and generally persuasive new study (which might have been subtitled Jonson and Johnson) explores several aspects of the perception of Elizabethan culture by authors of the mid- to late-eighteenth century, among whom Samuel Johnson features most prominently as an arbiter of taste, especially in the area of language. "The sixteenth century's insecurity about its Latinity and cultural identity was eased only by appeals to Cicero and his contemporaries," Lynch comments. "The eighteenth century's insecurities about its language and national identity were likewise eased by Shakespeare and his" (p. 119).
The eighteenth century did not have the Burckhardtian "Renaissance" as a concept or even a convenient tag. This did not prevent its authors from locating a kind of golden age of literature (art did not as yet feature prominently) as well as of political achievement in the sixteenth century, following a medieval era seen as disorderly and often threatening. Thomas Gray referred to the "long years of havock" of the later Middle Ages including the Wars of the Roses, and the re-establishment under Henry VII and VIII of a stable polity. This would survive the uncertainty and religious vicissitudes of the mid-Tudor years to climax in the glorious reign of Spenser's virgin queen and little England's triumph over Spanish imperial designs while venturing overseas to start up an empire of its own. Shakespeare himself played a significant part in the transplantation of the Tudor idea of the Yorkist-Lancastrian conflicts to a later age: the popularity of his history plays virtually handed Georgian readers a neatly shrink-wrapped national textbook, a tidy and unified vision of the process which brought Tudor order out of civil chaos and Ricardian monstrosity. (Despite the scepticism of authors like Horace Walpole--who built on the doubts expressed by the Jacobean George Buc--the conventional image of Richard III as Machiavellian archfiend endured largely intact.)
The Tudor age had similarly delivered England out of Romish Babylon, and the popularity of Foxe's Book of Martyrs during the eighteenth century (only mentioned in passing here) continued to do for the longer span of history what Shakespeare had done for the fifteenth century--it supported, in later reprints, the very same protestant-nationalist historical identity that it had largely created in the first place through its original editions. More specifically, the reign of Elizabeth had firmly established not just Protestantism but the via media prized by a conservative such as Dr. Johnson. An especially good section of Lynch's book deals with the relationship between Johnson and the principal theorist of late-Elizabethan official protestantism, Richard Hooker, whose name figures over two thousand times in Johnson's Dictionary, putting him among a "top ten" that includes much better-known figures like Shakespeare, Pope, and Dryden.
Johnson was a conservative in other respects, too, advocating the editing of older works, including Elizabethan, with original orthography intact, running against the current of late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century editions which often silently brought spellings up to date. The proliferation of old-spelling texts of major and minor authors in the second half of the eighteenth century helped promote the sense of period, while, at the same time, encouraging the tendency to view the English language itself historically. Lynch tends to overstate the originality of this development, given the much earlier work of Elizabethan antiquaries such as John Stow (who edited Chaucer along with Thomas Speght and William Thynne) and Richard Verstegan, not to mention William Somner in the early Stuart period. In part, this is a consequence of underestimating earlier interest in Anglo-Saxon which Lynch suggests was "never really popular" (p. 106). Perhaps not popular in the sense of "widely pursued by hundreds," but pursued it certainly was, and the highly political attention of major figures like Archbishop Parker in the early years of Elizabeth's reign indicates that pre-eighteenth-century interest in language was clearly not "merely antiquarian," nor was the sixteenth century's position on the Middle Ages as monochromatically Latinate and anti-medieval as is often conveyed here. Lynch mentions Parker only once, and not in this context; neither Stow nor Verstegan features, nor a later Augustan figure like the nonjuring bishop-turned-linguist George Hickes. Two secondary works that would have assisted Lynch in this connection are David Douglas's English Scholars, 1660-1730 (1951), which covers the period just before the age of Johnson, and the above-mentioned Clio Unbound, some of the best chapters of which concern the sense of language. In general, Lynch's command of the historiographical literature of the sixteenth century is rather shaky. There is no reference to the work of J. G. A. Pocock, a major authority whose work straddles the entire period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, nor to the recent works of Philip Hicks and Colin Kidd. Herbert Butterfield's Man on his Past (1955), which is cited, is a solid enough book but fifty years old--it is scarcely the latest word on the subject and less reliable than the even older work of Douglas. Sometimes, too, the author's grasp of the actual history slips, producing eyebrow-raising statements about the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. For example, Edward VI is referred to as having had a "regency" rather than a protectorate; and Queen Anne's accession is described as following "a half century of civil war" (p. 72), which would come as a surprise to the vast majority who had lived quite peaceably since 1660.
It is unreasonable to expect a book about the eighteenth century's perception of the past to master every detail of that past which was being perceived. If I have a more significant criticism of this study, it is that it provides a series of tunnels between the eighteenth and the sixteenth centuries, rather than a panoramic vision. The tunnels do usefully cross each other at various points, but they are mainly constructed between significant eighteenth-century men of letters such as Thomas Warton, Thomas Gray, and especially Johnson himself (who dominates the volume) and similarly prominent sixteenth-century cultural icons. A wider scan would add depth and complexity to this picture. It is evident from non-literary genres such as historical writing--Lynch uses the document editor Thomas Rymer and the narrative historian Rapin Thoyras as well as, periodically, David Hume--that the eighteenth century did indeed have a distinctive sense of the Elizabethan and one that ran beyond literature and language, which certainly supports the main argument of this worthwhile volume. What is needed now is a fuller range of instances of this consciousness across a number of areas (architecture springs to mind), drawn from a wider selection of genres and authors. Perhaps Dr. Lynch will consider a sequel devoted to other aspects of the eighteenth century's sense of the past.
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Citation:
Daniel Woolf. Review of Lynch, Jack, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9333
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