Catholicism, Controversy, And The English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660

This page intentionally left blank Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558±1660 The Catholic contribution to English literary culture has been widely neglected and often misunderstood. Drawing on extensive original research, this book sets out to rehabilitate a wide range of Catholic imaginative writing, while exposing the role of anti-Catholicism as an imaginative stimulus to mainstream writers in Tudor and Stuart England. It discusses canonical ®gures such as Sidney, Spenser, Webster and Middleton, those whose presence in the canon has been more ®tful, such as Robert Southwell and Richard Crashaw, and many who have escaped the attention of literary critics. Among the themes to emerge are the anti-Catholic imagery of revenge-tragedy and the de®nitive contribution made by Southwell and Crashaw to the post-Reformation revival of religious verse in England. Alison Shell offers a fascinating exploration of the rhetorical stratagems by which Catholics sought to demonstrate simultaneous loyalties to the monarch and to their religion, and of the stimulus given to the Catholic literary imagination by the persecution and exile which so many of these writers suffered. Alison Shell is Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham. She has held a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at University College London, a visiting fellowship at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and was formerly Rare Books Curator at the British Architectural Library of the Royal Institute of British Architects. She is co-editor of The Book Trade and its Customers (1997), and has published essays on Edmund Campion, Aphra Behn, conversion in early modern England, anti-Catholicism and the early modern English book trade. CATHOLICISM, CONTROVERSY AND THE ENGLISH LITERARY IMAGINATION, 1558 ± 1660 ALISON SHELL           The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Alison Shell 2004 First published in printed format 1999 ISBN 0-511-03863-1 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-58090-0 hardback Contents Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Note on the text vi ix xi Introduction part i 1 1 catholics and the canon The livid ¯ash: decadence, anti-Catholic revenge tragedy and the dehistoricised critic 2 Catholic poetics and the Protestant canon part ii 23 56 loyalism and exclusion 3 Catholic loyalism: I. Elizabethan writers 107 4 Catholic loyalism: II. Stuart writers 141 5 169 The subject of exile: I 6 The subject of exile: II 194 Conclusion 224 Notes List of works frequently cited Index 228 300 303 v Acknowledgements This book is all about how early modern Catholic l