Literature and the Arts: Interdisciplinary Essays in Memory of James Anderson Winn

Any festschrift must ideally meet two basic criteria. On the one hand, the volume should celebrate the scholarly achievement of its honoree. Usually this is not too difficult to manage since beneficiaries have typically built up a body of distinguished work and transmitted their knowledge to the bright, productive students and colleagues who make up the majority of the contributors. One of the pleasures of the genre is to see the transmission and circulation of knowledge proceeding so efficiently. On the other hand, the festschrift should have a unity of its own independent of its honoree, should revisit some important issue or problem central to a given period in an arresting way. This is often easier said than done since the sheer number of contributors acts against coherence.The ten essays that make up Literature and the Arts: Interdisciplinary Essays in Memory of James Anderson Winn amply fulfill the first criterion. They celebrate the versatility and authority of an eminent scholar in the best possible way, by returning to the subject matter and concerns he explored in his own lifetime. The scope of the collection signals Winn’s unusual breadth of interests: Queen Anne, John Dryden, patronage, country houses, family networks, period styles, and the relationship between the arts, all staples of Winn’s scholarship, feature in this volume. One essay, Cedric Reverand II’s energetic and informative “Domenico Scarlatti: ‘Jesting with Art,’” ventures into the area of musicology, where Winn, a flautist as well as a historian of music, enjoyed a particular authority.What of the second requirement? How far does this volume refresh and extend our understanding of literature and art in the Restoration and the eighteenth century? The answer to this query does not come instantly but slowly moves into focus as the book progresses. By the end of the volume, however, I think that the reader will have begun to see the relationship between literature and the arts during this period in significantly different ways.Three of the opening four chapters focus on Dryden. Steven Zwicker’s “Laughter from on High: Dryden and the Arts of Contempt in Restoration England” closes in on his steady but sure mastery of this highly necessary skill in the age of the late Stuarts. As Zwicker contends, he exercised this lofty manner through his talent, not as a birthright, and many of his opponents (particularly John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester) were quick to remind him of this via print or the bludgeon. Zwicker will have none of the old chestnut that satire, so often the preferred medium for the arts of contempt, had anything to do with reforming its targets. Satire in this period was more often an act of aggression in a tension-ridden cultural and political milieu where aggression was the common currency.Readers will do well to bear this in mind when they read Paul Hammond’s essay “The Arts of Memory in Absalom and Achitophel: Dryden’s Response to Milton and Marvell.” Hammond takes Dryden’s appointment as historiographer royal in 1670 as his starting point. Dryden’s proficiency in the arts of contempt features prominently in the course of the essay, but Hammond argues that he is at war with a political discourse as much as he is with its advocates. He magisterially drives home the evidence for Dryden’s fear that the liberty of John Milton and Andrew Marvell could mutate into the license of an unruly nation.That said, it might have been as well if Hammond had read Zwicker’s comment on Dryden’s memory beforehand: “Dryden had a very long memory, and he seems never to have forgotten an injury” (20). As historiographer royal, Dryden had reason to rejoice in the divinity that hedged a king, but his polemical battles against Milton and Marvell were not campaigns from the War in Heaven but interventions in a constitutional crisis. When Hammond steps back from this crisis to offer a Dryden who shared W. B. Yeats’s fears about the imminent arrival of anarchy stoked by rabble-rousers bent on undoing the work of centuries, we wonder whether he has reimagined both authors as mouthpieces for order itself, in the way earlier generations recruited Shakespeare.The arts of contempt reappear at a critical juncture in Andrew R. Walkling’s “Peacocks and Rainbows: Visual Spectacle and Allegorical Performance in Albion and Albanius.” However, Walkling has much other ground to cover as well, necessitating my extended discussion. On 18 March 1684, Christopher Gunman, the captain of the royal yacht Mary, docked at Calais. Gunman had faced court-martial two years before and owed his reprieve to the Duke of York. At Calais, he “observed a complex phenomenon consisting of multiple ice haloes [sic] and including a pair of ‘parhelia’ (colloquially called ‘sun dogs’) bright spots or halos that appear on either side of the sun” (67).In an atmosphere of turbulent politics, the wondrous spectacle of the sun dogs could not remain with the scientists or be deposited with the theologians. This natural wonder had propagandist potential for the Stuarts, who, as Walkling neatly puts it, habitually “exploited the performative value of the miraculous as a buttress to monarchical authority” (66). Gunman helped this process along by forwarding his two ink-and-watercolor renditions of the sea dogs to the United Company. (Walkling speculates—a little tenuously in my view—that he may also have passed along a third document, undiscovered until the nineteenth century.) The company was at that time preparing for the 1685 premiere of Dryden’s spectacular opera Albion and Albanius, “an extravagant royalist opera,” calling for “a number of lavish theatrical machines” (68) that would serve the greater glory of King Charles. Gunman’s notes and drawings became the stimulus of a dazzling art.The construction of these machines called for unusual skill but also extraordinary expense. They consequently necessitated the help of a celebrity sponsor. The leadership and prestige of the actor-impresario Thomas Betterton helped the opera reach the stage, although not without “a steep increase in ticket prices” (68). Yet this did not prove to be a propitious time for mounting such a blatant and costly display of royal splendor. The Stuarts were, as ever, politically vulnerable. Charles died before the production opened, and the looming return of his natural son the Duke of Monmouth, eager to press his claims to the throne, cast a shadow over the proceedings. The play enjoyed only six public performances before it closed, and less than half the outlay for its production was recovered. Now it found itself the object of a very different kind of attention, and the author, the play, and its backers had to run the gauntlet of the arts of ridicule. One opponent wrote in a biting epitaph for the production: “All in vain! The gaudy Project miss’d, / And whilst the Furies sung the Audience hiss’d” (82).Walkling handles the passage of the sea dogs from celestial phenomena through spectacular propaganda to audience derision very adroitly, and I regret the necessity of reducing his narration to the dimensions necessary in a review. His discussion underscores how the arts in this period rarely enjoyed the benefit of a contemplative, calm response. Instead, a swarm of what we may term “communities of interest” fell on new works and reported on what they saw in a manner often calculated to inflame the emotions. The arts of contempt and the phenomenon of celebrity—two leading features of the age—were hardly conducive to an atmosphere of sweetness and light. But the appetite for sweetness and light was perhaps not large, and it would take time to foster it.Amanda Eubanks Winkler’s “Staging Davenant; or, Macbeth, the Musical” describes her participation in a production of William Davenant’s Macbeth mounted, through the aegis of the Restoration Shakespeare Project and the Humanities Research Council, at the Folger Theater, Washington, DC, in 2018 (see Payne; and Smith-Bernstein). This essay confronts one of the most challenging problems for historians of performance. If the communities of interest for a play from the past include its audiences and performers in the present, how far does their presence modify our sense of that play? Winkler calls on the assistance of Gertrude Stein and Rebecca Schneider when she starts to grapple with these issues, specifically on Stein’s notion of “syncopated time.” Syncopated time, as Schneider relays it, is a space where “then and now punctuate each other” (34). The core issue—how our position in the present affects our understanding of the past—is a philosophical one that has exercised any number of philosophical inquirers from R. G. Collingwood to Hans-Georg Gadamer.But the interests of Winkler and her associates were not primarily philosophical. For them, syncopated time quickly became a practical problem of theatrical performance once the director, Robert Richmond, pulled up at “a gap between [his] expectations of the way the witches should sound and the way they actually sounded in Restoration Shakespeare” (34). This triggered a series of theatrical and exegetical opportunities as actors, spectators, technicians, and administrators from the scholarly community all weighed in on the difficulties they met in Macbeth. When the play opened in the theater, discussion and controversy did not miraculously cease. How could it when its audiences included newspaper columnists insisting that to change a comma of Shakespeare was sacrilege and representatives of professional organizations accountable for funding an effort to launch a Shakespeare adaptation for the Restoration? Some readers might argue that the members of Winkler’s team went too far in their readiness to take so many clashing views into account. But surely this brought them nearer to the conditions faced by Restoration and eighteenth-century dramatists and performers, for whom any number of hostile witnesses lay ready to pounce on their work and promote or disparage their labors.Paula Backscheider’s essay “Queen Anne’s Other Women” reopens the question of the relationship between sea power and theatrical spectacle. Backscheider observes: “Queen Anne was an inveterate playgoer and the monarch of a nation that viewed itself as a sea power” (131). These known facts lie behind three of the less visible developments Backscheider highlights. First, under Anne, the armed forces—not just the navy—were more numerous and better funded than ever before. They needed to be. Anne had inherited the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13), which made the fame and fortune of John Churchill. The American theatre of war (1702–13) became known as Queen Anne’s War. Second, this expanded military grew to be a more regular presence onstage as well as in daily life. The plays of Charles Shadwell and George Farquhar made military personnel familiar figures to theatregoers. Finally, as Backscheider points out: “[T]he evolution of England’s military infrastructure … involved a remarkable range of labor from women of all ranks” (131). Soon, many of these women found themselves confronted with the ugly consequences of militarization. Backscheider somberly comments: “Throughout the long eighteenth century, disabled or demobilized soldiers and sailors begged and even danced for money in the streets. Chelsea Hospital for elderly soldiers and Greenwich Hospital for seamen opened in 1692, and the number of released military men on the streets of both areas grew” (146). Such grisly sights make it difficult not to see Queen Anne’s expansionism as the act of a royal Mother Courage, ready to fling her subjects against an ever-expanding list of enemies.Two rewarding essays take us away from war and its consequences. One of the figures under discussion is familiar enough, while the other emerges from the shadows through the efforts of a tenacious and expert researcher. The title of Peter Sabor’s essay, “Responding to Emma in 1816: Reviewers, Readers, and ‘Opinions,’” may strike some readers as visiting well-trodden ground. But, in this case, those readers would be wrong since Sabor’s careful and, above all else, systematic account of the fortunes of Emma brings into clear relief the problems the novel posed for different groups of readers.Sabor observes that, even though “there was no shortage of readers of Emma ready to scrutinize and voice their views on the novel, no consensus among them emerged” (194). For some, the novel lacked the sweep and incident of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, while others felt the lack of the winning charm of Pride and Prejudice. Divergence was at the maximum when audiences discussed Emma herself. As Sabor bluntly states: “The heroine was either a remarkable new creation or else unbearable” (194).Sabor’s essay makes the important decision not to take Austen’s readers one by one but to carve out representative testimonies from each of the communities that heralded the novel’s arrival. It should prompt reception theorists to proceed more systematically when they examine the communities of interest that converge whenever a work of art comes to public attention. (To take just one telling example: the diarist’s Emma was not the publishers’ Emma.)Ellen Harris’s fine essay “Anne Donnellan: Friend of the Arts” makes its claim at the outset. Ann Donnellan “was never in the position to become a patroness of the arts,” but “astute financial management” enabled her to maximize “her interests and activities in the performing, literary, and visual arts” (151–52). She even helped Samuel Richardson in his bid to fashion in the creation of Sir Charles Grandison a gentler, less contemptuous style of masculinity. Their joint concern with “character” would be not a parlor game but a contribution to the effort to reform the nation’s manners.How did Donnellan do this? First, she had made a lifelong habit of keeping busy. Her activities are too exhaustive to cover completely, but she exchanged letters with Elizabeth Montagu, a leading contributor to the study of character in literature whose observations on this topic Donnellan might have had in mind when she exchanged correspondence with Richardson. Gifts from friends allowed her to acquire a collection of paintings. She even featured in her own right in William Hogarth’s portrait Wesley Family (with Anne Donnellan) (1731). She encouraged the poet Mary Barber, who records how she charmed Alexander Pope with her singing and Edward Young with her amiability.As Harris shows, Donnellan knew firsthand how brutal the old patriarchal dispensation could be. Her older brother and sister had, after their father’s death, tried to cheat her out of her legacies. In a reminder that the arts of contempt were not a completely masculine preserve, her sister, in a scene worthy of Northanger Abbey, asked her: “‘What signifies your not having a house, can’t you take a lodging?’” (153). Harris’s essay introduces us to a very significant figure in the formation of a potentially gentler culture where women could play a powerful, if often invisible, part.This task is important, for The of an is one of the many up to their and from focus with its Edward his expert of and critical to and as a to the of in the of culture in this As a a that of his and not to make his essay a on but a of how to serve as a for the of a culture while to an As a in the at the the unusual for the study of This brought him into with Sir William to the United and who had an with the is best known now as an in the of the he had no lack of skill and in the arts of contempt and he most against the of and had, for in a in the arts of contempt as well as a of the that had and that may well have encouraged to for to controversy when he his second figure is his years at years that his in the Alexander Pope that more than he could in the of he as Essays to the of This may be but the sheer of his concerns in the task of culture into the of and professional life. wrote a in and of his His versatility did much in and the culture of and familiar from The In his own way, he in the task of knowledge in what Samuel saw as most the of son John that the family in the developments of the in the John in the of culture did not out he helped in the of the of and the in and He was the of and of In the of all he wrote letters to his about his in not just a for the of the cultural past but a from which to the culture of the present and the and Christopher and out the collection in a way. takes as her starting the relationship between the Elizabeth and the eighteenth-century poet Christopher between and during the in an had until In that the culture of aggression and contempt in Literature and the Arts went to the of war by “a series of with whose she saw as “a way to to the and of the and the of in the manner of a or eighteenth-century she to see an to the of that confronted the of she to a in which does not in or but in its and of and will be familiar to readers of this But it work to at as a community of went about how to read In this she had to in her own the problems of syncopated time and to in and his over into a completely different medium through of her own her own as that of a volume worthy of James Winn’s She has done this and professional who should the book with all are students of reception and students of performance. But is an even that will by The arrival of has been a reminder of how far we a culture of and Literature and the Arts us into that in an earlier time and the effort to reform