Reading pseudonyms in seventeenth-century English
coterie literature.; Ezell,
Margaret J.M.
Essays in Literature 03-22-1994
The study of pseudonyms is one of the oldest
activities of literary historians. In its first stages,
"pseudepigrapha" was an important arena of scholarly endeavor because
of its goal of establishing the canon of the New Testament through the
correct identification and authentication of authors and texts. During
the Renaissance, the primary interest in this field, whether
theological or classical, was attribution and the unmasking of fraud,
involving, as Taylor and Mosher characterize it, critical methodologies
"standing between higher criticism and investigations in plagiarism and
forgery" (vii).
Such techniques of investigation lie behind such
seventeenth-century texts as Vincent Placcius's Theatrum Anonynorum et
Pseudonymoron (1674) and Adrien Baillet's Auteurs deguisez (1690),
whose contents consist of long lists revealing the "true" identities of
a wide variety of authors. In these early studies, as well as such
later ones as Halkett and Laing (the standard reference work) and Alice
Kahler Marshall, the goal is to establish literary ownership of a
particular work or to validate the credentials of the author by
discovering the identity masked by the pseudonym. The historical
questions raised by the use of pseudonyms in the period to be discussed
in this essay, English literature in the seventeenth century, would
thus appear to be quite simple: who was Urania? Was there really a
Poliarchus? Traditionally, pseudonyms are read as fiddles to be solved;
the theoretical issue to be resolved in this mode of reading is "who,"
not "why."
The politics of using pseudonyms, however, are more
complex than this one methodology of literary detection suggests, and
they are largely unexplored. This type of analysis of pseudonyms
implies that all pseudonyms are meant to be read in the same way,
regardless of historical context. A closer consideration of the
practices of coterie literary production during the seventeenth
century, however, both reveals and discredits the unstated assumption
found in these accounts that the nature of authorship and of writers'
relationships with their readers have remained unchanged throughout
history, regardless of the mode of literary production. The issues
raised about the relationship between author, audience, and subsequent
generations of critical readers are, in fact, so large and so varied
that this essay will focus only on late seventeenth-century English
coterie circles and pastoral pseudonyms in particular. By examining
this specific phenomenon and the ways in which we have conventionally
analyzed its presence in the literary environment of the seventeenth
century, I hope to provide suggestions for reconsidering the ways in
which we discuss authorship in early periods in general.
References
to pseudonyms in general literary histories of the seventeenth century
are grounded on two key assumptions which concern the nature of
authorship and the author's relationship with his or her readers. These
assumptions are that pseudonyms are a form of deliberate, intentional
disguise and that they function either to perpetrate fraud or to
protect the writer. In either use, the relationship between author and
reader is thus presumed to be antagonistic.
The early studies of
pseudonyms illustrate these premises not only in their methodologies
but also in the very format of their presentations. Baillet's title
Auteurs deguisez itself declares the relationship between Baillet and
the writers he studies. Implicit in the approach suggested in Baillet's
title and found in the volume is the belief that pseudonyms signal an
author's desire to distance him- or herself from the audience, with the
suggestion that the writer does so deliberately to deceive the reader,
either to disguise the identity of the author or the nature of the work.
"Deguiser"
also contains the notion of putting on a costume or fancy dress, a way
of reading of pseudonyms which the frontispiece of Vincent Placcius's
Theatrum Anonymorum represents. This engraving offers the image of a
library represented on a raised stage; a banner draped across a bench
in front declares Placcius's name and the name of the scene being
enacted, "Scriptores Anonymi & Pseudonymi Detecti." On stage,
Placcius, who is clearly the hero in this literary drama, is removing
the masks from two men, while overhead, a series of costume masks like
hunting tropics dangles from a string, some bearded to represent sages,
some more resembling masks of comedy. The motto to which the string is
attached supplies the ironic moral to the scene: "Suum Cuique," "To
Each His Own."
The literary historian in this dramatic scene
enacts the role of literary detective, to foil literary criminals or,
perhaps more good-humoredly, to unmask clever deceptions. The critical
reader unmasks the author to create an orderly sense of the real in
authorship, so that, indeed, each author does get credit for his or her
own work. In the process, the acts of the literary critic, not the text
or the author in question, take center stage. In this mode of reading,
the study of pseudonyms in many ways is the ideal vehicle for the
self-presentation and dramatization of literary historians and their
task, to uncover and validate an objective truth about the text.
Our
other sense of reading pseudonyms (this time from the author's point of
view rather than the literary historian's) is that they are protective
measures against hostile readers. We are, of course, conditioned to
read in this fashion by a host of celebrated nineteenth- and
twentieth-century examples: we think first, for example, of
inflammatory political texts that appear under the name of "A Patriot"
to avoid arrest or persecution. This reading is reinforced by the ways
in which post-1800 writers used them: we read seventeenth-century
pseudonyms while simultaneously being conscious of a host of celebrated
nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples. In particular, since most
of the familiar examples of literary pseudonyms which come to
mind--Orinda, George Eliot, Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell, George Sand,
Isak Dinesen--are those adopted by women, a gender-based explanation of
this phenomenon has been offered. This reading, to which I shall return
shortly in reference to particular seventeenth-century writers,
stresses the politics of social intimidation, where pseudonyms serve as
a protective device permitting women to venture into the competitive,
combative arena of authorship while shielded from social censure.
When
we read eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary historians'
accounts of Renaissance and Restoration pseudonyms, we find yet another
assumption about the practice of authorship embedded in the discussion.
In representing the literature of the 1650s through the 1690s,
commentators frequently make passing references to the prevalence of
what they variously call "poetic" names or "fanciful" titles which
authors bestowed upon each other. When discussing Katherine
Philips,
"the matchless Orinda," for example, or the still contested "Ephelia,"
critics also have read such names as signs of a frivolous dilettantism,
characteristic of lightweight literary ideals.
This particular
analysis of the politics of pseudonyms is most frequently found in
nineteenth-century accounts, although it is sometimes carried over into
more recent texts. For example, Louisa Costello, writing in 1844 about Philips,
observed that "the affected adoption of romantic names, as well as an
over-estimation of genius, particularly in females, was a fault of the
times"(257). Edmund Gosse likewise smiled indulgently at Philips
in 1883, noting about Anne Owen, Lucasia, that it was "absolutely
necessary that each member should be known by a fancy name" (232-33).
Alfred Upham characterizes Philips and her
circle in 1908 rather more sarcastically, noting that Philips,
"rejoicing in her assumed title of The Matchless Orinda," threw open
her doors to a "circle of second-rate brilliancy which gathered at
Cardigan to assume new and romantic names, to prate of ideal
friendship, and to dabble with their hostess in literature" (353).
We find a more supportive tone, but a similar interpretation of the
phenomenon, in this century. Louise Bernikow celebrates Katherine Philips as "the
first woman...to stand on her own," but laments Philips's
adoption of what Bernikow sees as "the accepted feminine lifestyle of
she-poets: a comfortable country house, a literary circle with herself
at the center, a set of pastoral names, old-fashioned and 'literary' in
that self-conscious sense--a precieuse"(22). Angeline Goreau describes Katherine Philips's
reaction to the pirated edition of her poems as typical of early women
writers' feeling that publication "symbolically violated feminine
modesty," even though, Goreau notes, Philips's
poems had "hardly anything shocking" in them and "the people that the
poems were addressed to were disguised under names like 'Lucasia' and
'Silvander'" (15). Speaking more generally about women writing in the
seventeenth century, Jacqueline Pearson notes that "various tactics
were open to women writers trying to cope with this kind of prejudice,"
one of which was the use of "fanciful pseudonyms which, even if they
did not conceal identity, seem to have mitigated the sense of guilt of
some women writers," citing in her footnote Philips,
Aphra Behn (Astraea), Ephelia, Ariadne, Anne Finch (Ardelia), and
Elizabeth Singer Rowe (Philomena) (7, 259). Finally, we find such names
referred to as a woman writer's "nom de guerre," literally a "war
name," and figuratively emphasizing again the supposed estrangement
between writer and reader (Courtney 43).
Alice Kahler Marshall's
compendium of women's pseudonyms offers one example among many texts
which explain the estrangement in terms of the historical evolution of
women's status in society. "Women writers who use pseudonyms nowadays
usually do so for the same reasons male writers do," she begins, but
historically, she continues, women used pseudonyms as protective
devices.
...until well into the 19th Century, a woman had a
special reason for wrapping herself in a nomme de plume: to escape the
stigma of being branded a "blue-stocking," "she-writer," "female
quill-driver," "half-man," "petticoat-author," "scribbling dame" or
other epithet for a woman who ventured into an overwhelmingly
patriarchal literary culture. (i)
In addition to acting as a
protective shield for a woman writer's reputation, women's pseudonyms,
Marshall asserts, signal an economic concern. Citing Gilbert and Gubar,
Marshall argues that women who adopted male or neutral pseudonyms did
so because "it was easier to find a publisher if you were a man;
equally important, your work might be taken seriously" (ii). Marshall
does note that relatively few women writing in the seventeenth century
used male names, an occurrence she finds surprising.
What such
accounts assume is that all authors--that is, all good authors--wish to
publish their works to the widest possible commercial audience and that
women writers were intimidated by their readers from doing so under
their own names. Because many of the examples of literary pseudonyms
from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries belonged to women,
a gender-based explanation carries a good deal of authority.
Pseudonyms, in this reading, thus reveal the dynamics of social
repression on the one hand and literary dilettantism on the other, with
the implication that the first condition created the socioliterary
environment resulting in the second.
Such readings, however,
derive authors' supposed intentions concerning readership for their
texts from a particular type of literary production--commercial
publication. Such interpretations of pseudonyms operate as if the
chosen mode of literary production for those seventeenth-century
writers--coterie manuscript circulation--were irrelevant. In short, the
majority of critical assumptions about all pseudonyms are based on
commercial print practices. Such generalizations, however, obscure the
particular nature of coterie literary production.
To begin with,
any consideration of the dynamics of coterie circles demands that we
discard the notion that the primary function of seventeenth-century
pseudonyms was to conceal the anthor's identity from the reader, or at
least to disguise the gender of the writer. Everyone in Katherine Philips's
circle, for example, knew who Orinda, Poliarchus, and Palaemon were,
even if later generations have not. It is also important to note that,
unlike later nineteenth-century pseudonyms such as George Eliot, names
such as Orinda, Ephelia, and Urania do not conceal the writer's sex.
The
second adjustment to our notion of authorship and audience which a
study of coterie circles suggests is of our image of isolated authors,
hiding behind pseudonyms to watch the response to their work while
safely concealed. So intent have we been to read as literary
detectives, bent on tracking down individuals to remove their masks,
that the literary circle that often was embodied in a supposedly
single-authored, printed collection of poems is overlooked. We know,
for example, that the Restoration poet "Marinda" was in fact Mary
Monck, because her father published the papers "found in her Scrittore
after her Death, written with her own Hand" (Marinda, Dedication). We
don't know, however, who Thirsis or Sylvia or "A Friend" were, whose
eleven poems written in response to Marinda's are indiscriminately
included in the volume.
We tend to assume, guided by patterns
established by later commercial conventions governed by modern
copyright laws, that the contents of a volume published under a
pseudonym during the seventeenth century, particularly when that
pseudonym provides the title, will be the "property" of one single
individual. We furthermore assume that the individual is still
primarily concerned with establishing ownership, since the mask of a
pseudonym still constitutes a distinct, coherent identity for the
author, unlike publishing anonymously. However, such assumptions do not
work in a coterie literary environment, where usually unsigned pieces
are circulated in manuscript, endlessly copied, "improved," and
corrected, often generating more verse in response.(1) Thus, in
Marinda's case, for example, the pseudonym has been misread to indicate
isolation and concealment, a view reinforced by her father's
determination to demonstrate that his daughter "died not only like a
Christian but a Roman lady," with no interest in worldly matters,
"little desiring the public should have any opportunity either of
applauding or condemning [her verses]" (Marinda, Dedication). As the
contents of the volume make clear, however, the actual literary
environment which created the contents was a coterie one, a literary
environment based on the exchange and circulation of texts for comment
and response.
This brings us to a consideration of the possible
functions of pseudonyms other than as a protective device. As far as I
have been able to establish at this point, this practice of assuming
names in literary circles appears to have firmly established itself as
a convention in England during the Commonwealth, to have continued in
the Restoration, and to have become itself a convention of commercial
literature by the early eighteenth century. The most well-known coterie
circles during the Renaissance do not appear to have adopted this
practice. For example, "the Sons of Ben" were members of a literary
fellowship, but I have been unable to detect that they assumed
different names when communicating with each other, either in verse
letters, or in prose. Donne wrote verse letters to his friends in which
he addressed them by their initials, but not as Strephon.(2)
Likewise,
the function of pastoral names in verse such as Jonson's is not exactly
the same as that found in the coterie circle of Philips
or Monck, or that of later Restoration writers' use of them. We
typically encounter a "generic" Celia or Strephon; the names typically
occur in a series or set of verses about Celia's eyes or Strephon's
fickleness. One could argue that Waller's series of poems invoking
Sacharissa or Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel to Stella also are
engaged in a different type of pseudonymical play, which does engage
real individuals and particular situations. The difference, however,
between the names in Sidney's sonnet sequence and in coterie practice
is that Stella was not expected to reply in kind, to be an interactive
participant in the literary enterprise. Her role was to be written
about, not to engage in an exchange of verse.
In the later
coterie use of such types of names, on the other hand, we have an
active, on-going exchange between two or more individuals constituting
a dynamic literary system rather than a static literary artifact. For
example, the epistolary exchange between Katherine
Philips
and Sir Charles Cotterell was published in 1705 as Letters from Orinda
to Poliarchus with the declared purpose of providing "an admirable
Pattern for the pleasing Correspondence of a virtuous Friendship...[and
to] instruct us how an intercourse of writing, between Persons of
different Sexes, ought to be managed, with Delight and Innocence"
(A4r). In this series of epistles, we have prose accounts of the
actions and emotions of the figures who populate Philips's
verses: we have Poliarchus, Sir Charles Cotterell, exchanging letters
with Orinda, Katherine Philips,
about Lucasia, Anne Owens, and then we see how these same names are
carried over for specific individuals in literary works. The names are
used both as direct forms of address in epistolary communications and
as literary motifs.
A brief scan of the titles included in Mary
Monck's Marinda gives the first indication of the interactive nature of
the pseudonyms used. At the beginning of the book, we have a series of
verses which begins with "A Tale, Sent by a Friend," which is followed
by an "Eclogue. In return to the foregoing Tale," which is in turn
continued by an "Answer to the Foregoing Eclogue." A later poem's title
likewise announces the path of its creation: "Upon an Impromptu of
Marinda's, in Answer to a Copy of Verses."
In terms of the
specific content of such verse, this playful interaction extends
through several pieces, shaping the ongoing narrative. For example,
when one reads the "Eclogue in return to the foregoing Tale," one finds
a small drama being played out in pastoral terms among the members of
the literary coterie. "Thirsis" opens with an account of the poet's
boredom with conventional pastoral:
So much is said and sung of
Plains, Of Fields, of Grove, of Nymphs and Swains, Of purling Streams,
and Myrtle Shades, Of listning Ecchoes and deaf Maids,
That vext
at hearing the same Tune, From Noon to Night, from Night to Noon,
Thirsis had long his Pipe laid by, Quite tir'd with rustick Harmony.
But when you to the woods repair, He thinks them worthy of his Care, He
thrusts into the list'ning Throng, Charm'd with the Musick of your
Song.... (Marinda 19-20)
Marinda's response to her friend's
challenge that began the series has resulted in a poem so delightful
that "Paleamon needs must wrong decide, / Had he adjudg'd for either
side." This in turns generates verses from Thirsis: "Inspir'd by you,
th'inchanted Swain, / Resolves to try a rural Strain":
His Pipes
refits, invokes the Nine, And on a shady Bank recline, He tells the
Crowd, that round him wait, That he'll Marinda Emulate. But all in
vain, his Oaten Reed Breaths the Old Sounds[;] he then with Speed
Snatches his Harp, which does alike Succeed. Th'impatient Shepherd full
of Ire, Rises, and breaks both Pipe and Lyre. (Marinda 20)
Thirsis
may have been unsuccessful in his attempt to write a fresh example of
pastoral in response to Marinda's, but he has created a graceful
commentary on her writing, while at the same time demonstrating the use
of pseudonyms not to disguise identity but to participate in a dynamic
literary process.
As we can see in examples from Katherine Philips's
and Mary Monck's circles, the use of these names is interactive and
ongoing, not a generic label assigned to a distant figure for a single
occasion. Also, the names cross freely back and forth over the
boundaries we traditionally use to delineate different types of
writing; some we label "literature," some "letters." Clearly, some
other mode of reading these names than as a protective disguise needs
to be devised.
Let us return to those seemingly unfair accusations of dilettantism
leveled at Philips
and her circle. Clearly the charge is not directed at the moral
behavior of the group (Jeremy Taylor, after all, was Palaemon); it was,
instead, directed at the type of authorship practiced and literature
produced. While some recent critics such as Patrick Thomas suggest that
the giving of names was an affectation held over from Philips's
girlhood at school (21), most commentators who do not like this
"dabbling" in literature attribute the "fanciful" names to Philips's attachment to French literary fashions.
As Douglas Bush, who sees Philips as a
disciple of William Cartwright, comments dismissively, Philips
absorbed just enough of the fashionable "Frenchified" Platonism to
transform "good friends like Mary Aubrey and Mrs. Owen into Rosania and
Lucasia, and enveloped Mr. Philips and other
men in similar celestial hues" (125-26).
Those
who see a more direct link between French and English literary
practices single out in particular the practices at the salon bleu of
Mme Rambouillet established in 1608, which included the romance writer
La Calprenede, whose work was translated by Philips's
close friend, Cotterell. This group of writers and intellectuals, often
referred to as "les precieuses," are routinely chastised for their
affected attempts at purifying the French language. As part of this
refinement of language and manners, they assumed new names.
This
selection of new and refined names was considered to be such a
characteristic practice of the movement that Moliere picks up on this
practice in Les Precieuses Ridicules where two pretentious young girls
from the country make a strange request.
Magdalen: Ah! pray Father, leave off those strange Names, and call us
by some other.
Gorgibus: How! Strange names! Are they not your Christian names?
Mad:
Lard! how vulgar you are.... Did ever any Body in a beautiful style
talk of Cathos or Magdalen? And must you not acknowledge, that either
of these Names would be enough to disgrace the finest Romance in the
World.
Cathos: Really, Uncle, an Ear that's a little delicate
suffers extremely at hearing these words pronounced; and the Name of
Polixena, which my Cousin has chosen, and that of Amintha which I give
myself, have an Agreeableness that you must acknowledge. (29)
In
this example of naming oneself, clearly the new name, the pseudonym,
acts not as a cloak or mask, but as a password to signal membership in
an exclusive and much desired group.
One early commentator, Eric Robertson, stating that Philips
"completely adopts the Rambouillet system of nomenclature," argues that
Philips,
like the targets of Moliere's play, is attempting to escape the
commonplace but succeeds only in being silly. He does not, however, see
the assumption of such pseudonyms as a defensive disguise against a
hostile reading public, but a barrier against a dissolute Restoration
court society in general, the formation of a separate group within a
larger society. The "fancy" names acted to distance the individuals
from less refined or cultured groups: "they fenced their personalities
round with these fantastic names, pretty much as they were fencing
their bodies round with those swelling hoops that robbed them of any
semblance to the commonplace appearance of Eve" (5). In Robertson's
reading of these pseudonyms, we still find them interpreted as a
protective disguise, with the author in an antagonistic relationship
with the general reader and the critic, but here we also have the
notion that they could function to protect the identity of a group
rather than only an individual.
There remains still another
possibility for the function of pseudonyms in this literary environment
which is raised by this consideration of the nature of the coterie as a
self-selecting society within a larger literary world. Granted that Philips was adopting a French literary fashion, the
precieuse movement may have provided more than a list of names for Philips
and her group. Les Precieuese are closely identified with the literary
world of the romance, in particular Honore D'Urfe's Astree, which one
critic notes has as a central tendency the practice of presenting
"contemporary people as characters in the story. Familiar situations
and incidents would meet the reader at every turn" (Upham 310-11).(3)
In the Rambouillet circle, therefore, not only did life provide text
for romance, but when members assumed romance names, fiction gave shape
to the life of the group. This use of pseudonyms in a literary circle
made permeable the seemingly solid line between the acts of fictional
characters and those of real people.
Apart from this important
French model, there is another English tradition worth considering in
this mode of reading pseudonyms. Let us briefly return to the metaphor
of the pseudonym as a "mask." Masks, of course, can be used to hide
identity or mislead the viewer, and this is how we have defined the
literary practice. Masks also, of course, are part of the costume of a
"masque." In Renaissance masques, where courtiers joined with
professionals to stage the spectacle, the function of the "mask" was
not to hide the identity of the performer; even though they appeared
"disguised" as the "Prince of Faery" or "Fame," the audience was
intensely aware of the individual's identity. Stephen Orgel's study of
the Jonsonian masque suggests that the form
attempted from the
beginning to breach the barrier between spectators and actors, so that
in effect the viewer became part of the spectacle. The end toward which
the masque moved was to destroy any sense of theatre and to include the
whole court in the mimesis--in a sense, what the spectator watched he
ultimately became. (6-7)
Like the romance, where real writers
assumed fictional names and fictional characters acted out the
accomplishments of real readers, the masque offers a literary
environment where there is a permeable barrier between audience and
performer, between reader and writer.
Significantly, in the
context of this discussion of coterie literary practices versus
commercial print ones, Orgel's argument about the nature of masques
stresses the different function of the mask for the amateur participant
and the professional performer. He notes that "a masquer's disguise is
a representation of the courtier beneath. He retains his personality
and hence his position in the social hierarchy. His audience affirms
his equality with them by consenting to join the dance" (117). Thus, in
Orgel's model, instead of a disguise or distancing device, the courtly
amateur's masked participation in this literary spectacle is a
statement of identity with and commitment to the audience, a model of
participation which I believe fits the characteristics of coterie
literary practices much better than those derived from commercial
publication.
In both these examples--the romance salon and the
courtly masque--the mask, the pseudonym, or the physical costume served
not to estrange performer from audience but to give coherence to a
specific social and literary environment. In each instance, the
assumption of another identity was not to disguise the true nature or
intent of the person, but to enhance and to announce the values and
characteristics upheld by the group.(4) Rather than a false nature or a
false assertion of authority such as Placcius was so concerned to
detect and to reveal, such pseudonyms announce and amplify identity in
the same fashion that stage symbolic costumes, like the white hat,
signal a moral and ethical position.
To return to the dynamics
of manuscript circulation in coterie circles, the use of the device of
a mask or pseudonym also permitted the happy interplay of the worlds of
fiction and reality. As in the masque, the coterie literary environment
encourages easy and continual open exchange between performer and
audience, in which the audience would join with the masquer to dance
and the coterie readers wrote their responses to the texts of others in
a continual literary flow. As demonstrated in Monck's circle, whose
dynamics are frozen in print, the pseudonym served as the occasion for
elaboration of identity, not only the suppression of it; the writer
existed both as reader and recipient of verses involving her, but also
the creation of an on-going fictional scenario involving several
"masqued" writers. These pseudonyms should be read not as creating
barriers between reader and author, but instead as breaking them down.
Finally, such examples as Monck and Philips
also suggest why a consideration of the politics of pseudonyms in
coterie literature could repay our attention when addressing gender as
a part of literary history. Although the reading of women's pseudonyms
as defensive mechanisms is grounded in a view of historical
progress--the changing status of women in society--this reading gives
no recognition to the historical nature of literary production. We have
too easily assumed that women writers in the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and nineteenth centuries wrote for the same type of readership and
faced similar responses from it. We have, in short, read pseudonyms as
though we believed that for women, the nature and practice of
authorship remained static, transhistorical, even while the mode of
literary production was changing profoundly.
Pseudepigrapha
began as the detection of literary fraud; to read Baillet, Placcius, or
Halkett and Laing is to enter a world in which reading pseudonyms is a
con game played between author and critic. In contrast, gender-based
theories of pseudonyms place the modern reader and the early woman
writer on the same side; here, we read the pseudonym sympathetically as
the emblem of the victimization of the author by hostile readers of her
own generation. There is, however, still a third mode of reading them
which involves a consideration of pseudonyms as forming part of the
dynamics of a coterie literary environment. Reading pseudonyms in the
context of the process of literary production not only would reduce the
tendency to recast an earlier historical literary phenomenon to conform
to nineteenth- and twentieth-century ones, but it could illuminate new
areas for study, including the changing nature of authorship in the
early modern period and the premises on which our own critical response
to the literature of that period are based.
NOTES
1 Very
little attention has been given to the mechanics of coterie literary
production in general except from a bibliographical point of view. For
discussions of participation in coterie circles by specific poets, see
for example Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet; Buxton; Love, "Scribal
Publication" and Love, "Scribal Texts"; Vieth; and Wilson.
2 See
Marotti's John Donne, Coterie Poet for an account of the members of
Donne's coterie; see also Marotti's "John Donne, Author" for an
analysis of the transformation of Donne's literary career from that of
a coterie poet to a "modern" author by subsequent generations of
literary critics.
3 See also Veevers and Adam for discussions of
the nature of the salon and the introduction of its ideals into the
English court.
4 For an interesting discussion of "the rhetoricized character of
courtly life," see Whigham.
WORKS CITED
Adam, Antoine. Grandeur and Illusion: French Literature and Society
1600-1715. Trans. Herbert Tint. New York: Basic Books, 1972.
Bernikow, Louise. The World Split Open: Women Poets 1552-1950. London:
Women's P, 1974.
Bush, Douglas. English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century.
New York: Oxford UP, 1945.
Buxton, John. "The Donne Fashion." Elizabethan Taste. Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities P, 1963. 317-82.
Costello, Louisa. Memoirs of Eminent Englishwomen. London, 1844.
Courtney, William Prideaux. The Secrets of Our National Literature.
London: Constable, 1908.
Goreau, Angeline. The Whole Duty of a Woman. London: Dial P, 1985.
Gosse, Edmund. Seventeenth Century Studies. London, 1897.
Halkett,
Samuel and John Laing. Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English
Literature. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1925-56.
Love, Harold.
"Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England." Transactions of
the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9 (1987): 130-54.
-----.
"Scribal Texts and Literary Communities: The Rochester Circle and
Osborn b. 105." Studies in Bibliography 17 (1989): 219-35.
Marotti, Arthur F. "John Donne, Author." Journal of Medieval and
Renaissance Studies 19 (1989): 69-82.
-----. John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison:: U of Wisconsin P, 1986.
Marshall, Alice Kahler. Pen Names of Women Writers. Camp Hill, PA:
n.p., 1985.
Moliere. Lee Precieuses Ridicules. London, 1732.
[Monck, Mary.] Marinda. Poems and Translations Upon Several Occasions.
London, 1716.
Orgel, Stephen. The Jonsonian Maque, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965.
Pearson, Jacqueline. The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women
Dramatists 1642-1737. London: St. Martin's P, 1988.
[Philips, Katherine,]
Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus. London, 1705.
Robertson, Eric. English Poetesses: A Series of Critical Biographies.
London, 1883.
Taylor, Archer and Frederic J. Mosher. The Bibliographical History of
Anonyma and Pseudonyma. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951.
Thomas, Patrick. Katherine Philips.
Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1988.
Upham,
Alfred Horatio. The French Influence in English Literature from the
Accession of Elizabeth to the Restoration. New York: Columbia UP, 1908.
Veevers, Erica. Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and
Court Entertainments. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Vieth, David. Attribution in Restoration Verse. New Haven: Yale UP,
1963.
Whigham,
Frank. "Interpretation at Court: Courtesy and the Performer-Audience
Dialectic." New Literary History 14 (1983): 623-39.
Wilson, John Harold. "Introduction." Court Satires of the Restoration.
Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1976. xi-xx.
Margaret
J.M. Ezell, Professor of English at Texas A&M University, has
authored several critical books, including The Patriarch's Wife (1987)
and Writing Women's Literary History (1992). She has published numerous
essays in a wide range of journals, including New Literary History and
ELH. Most recently she edited The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady
Chudleigh (1993), the first published volume in the new series "Women
Writers in English, 1350-1850" by Oxford University Press.
COPYRIGHT 1994 Western Illinois University