by Ian Mortimer
So whom should you read?
Endless anthologising over the years means that you probably already have the top ten names lodged in your mind: John Milton, John Dryden, Samuel Butler, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, John Wilmot earl of Rochester, Edmund Waller and John Oldham. Several of these – Traherne, Vaughan and Marvell – are considered ‘metaphysical poets’ in modern times but they themselves would not recognise any such classification; there is no metaphysical ‘school’ as such. Nor is Marvell accorded the sort of fame he enjoys in the modern world for poems such as ‘To his coy mistress’ and ‘The Definition of Love’. Most of his lyrical poems do not appear in print until his widow publishes his Miscellaneous Poems in 1681, three years after his death. Samuel Butler’s fame rests almost entirely on his Hudibras. Although he does publish other works in the same vein, nothing comes close to that initial success. Lord Rochester never publishes any of his poems in his own lifetime; they circulate in manuscript and scandalise or delight those who read them, but his life is more like a sparkler than a flame, throwing instants of light in all directions and extinguished all too soon. Cowley’s poetry is published before 1660, and the same is largely true of Vaughan and Waller – although Waller’s most famous lines, from ‘Of the last verses in the book’, appear in the fifth edition of his Poems, published a year before his death in 1687. In case you don’t know them, here they are:
The seas are quiet, when the winds give o’er,
So calm are we, when passions are no more:
For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost.
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness, which age descries.
The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made;
Stronger by weakness,wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home:
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.
Let me return to John Dryden, the most popular poet of the age. On 23 November 1658 he takes part in the funeral procession of Oliver Cromwell alongside John Milton and Andrew Marvell: all three poets are fervent supporters of the Commonwealth and write panegyrics to the Protector in life and death. You would have thought that meant all three are on very dangerous ground when Charles II takes power. But Dryden, the youngest of the three, assimilates himself to the restored monarchy almost overnight. He writes Astræa Redux (‘Justice brought back’) to welcome the return of the Stuart dynasty, dismissing the Commonwealth as a time of anarchy. And as soon as the king reopens the playhouses that were forbidden by the Puritans, Dryden starts writing plays. He clearly knows which side his bread is buttered: we will return to him as a playwright in due course. But although the stage gives him wealth and fame, he never turns his back on poetry and continues to produce original verse and translations as well as plays until he dies in 1700. At its worst, Dryden’s verse is overblown and tedious. At its best, however, it is witty and light. This is a song from the comedy Marriage à la Mode (1673):
Why should a foolish marriage vow,
Which long ago was made,
Oblige us to each other now,
When passion is decayed?
We loved, and we loved, as long as we could,
Till our love was loved out in us both;
But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:
’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.
If I have pleasures for a friend,
And further love in store,
What wrong has he, whose joys did end,
And who could give no more?
’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,
Or that I should bar him of another:
For all we can gain is to give ourselves pain,
When neither can hinder the other.
Most of Dryden’s published works are longer poems, however. In these he ranges from satire to religion and back, with a surprising integrity in both departments. If you dip into his work, including the poems he wrote to be incorporated in his many plays, you will come across a mass of trinkets of wit, and quite a few jewels. ‘Plots, true or false, are necessary things / to raise up commonwealths and ruin kings’ … ‘Love’s the noblest frailty of the mind’ … ‘Here lies my wife: here let her lie! / Now she’s at rest, and so am I’. And these striking lines from his play Aureng-Zebe:
When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit;
Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay:
Tomorrow’s falser than the former day;
Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possessed.
Strange cozenage! None would live past years again,
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And, from the dregs of life, think to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give.
I’m tired with waiting for this chymic gold,
Which fools us young, and beggars us when old.
Without doubt the most gifted writer to appear in print during these years is John Milton. Blind since 1652 and a committed republican, he begins Paradise Lost, his epic account of the fall of mankind from Heaven, in 1658, the year of Cromwell’s death and the deaths of his second wife, Katherine, and their infant daughter. As a polemicist on behalf of Cromwell’s government, justifying Cromwell’s actions in a number of prose works, Milton both objects to the Restoration on principle and knows it is a time of great danger for him. When the king returns he goes into hiding. His books and tracts are collected and burnt in London by the public hangman. While he himself is not listed amongst those excluded from the general pardon issued in August 1660, when he emerges from hiding he is arrested and locked in the Tower. He loses most of his money. Living in reduced circumstances and dependent on amanuenses to write down his poetry, which he dictates to them, Milton struggles to bring up his teenage daughters. In fact they turn against him bitterly. At the age of fifty-four he marries his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, who is thirty years younger than him. When his daughter Mary is told of her father’s marriage, she replies, ‘it is no news, to hear of his wedding, but, if I could hear of his death, that would be something’.69
Fear, prison, impoverishment, grief, family strife and blindness – Paradise Lost is not composed in the easiest of circumstances. Nonetheless, after nine years it is complete and ready for the press. Milton signs a book contract in April 1667 and receives £5 payment in return for the first edition of 1,300 copies. Ten thousand lines by which he hopes to ‘justify the ways of God to men’ do not perhaps strike the modern traveller as the most compelling subject, but the poem is nothing short of sensational. Reading it is like being on a literary rollercoaster, shooting through valleys of darkness and heavenly light in turn. With Satan as a lead character, and Adam and Eve being cast out of Paradise as the story’s pivotal moment, the speeches are as powerful as the Devil whispering in your ear. This is Satan, taking his first view of Hell, into which he has just been cast:
‘Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,’
Said then the lost archangel, ‘this the seat
That we must change for Heaven, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is sovereign can dispose and bid
What shall be right: farthest from him is best
Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields
Where joy forever dwells. Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new possessor: one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in i
tself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.
Yet amid the fire and brimstone, the smoke and Stygian gloom (which reflects Milton’s own permanent darkness), beautiful descriptions emerge, such as that of evening in Eden:
Now still came evening on, and twilight
grey Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied, for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, thee to their nests
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased: now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires: Hesperus that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the Moon
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.
Some of Milton’s contemporaries understand the greatness of the poem from the moment they read it. At the end of October 1667 the poet and architect Sir John Denham rushes into the House of Commons carrying a newly printed sheet of Paradise Lost, wet off the press, declaring it to be ‘part of the noblest poem that ever was wrote in any language or any age’.70 The public as a whole is slower to catch on. Only when the fourth edition appears in 1688 does the work take off. After that it becomes the national epic in English: the equivalent of the works of Homer, Virgil and Dante in their respective languages. By then, of course, Milton is dead – but thus he conforms to my rule about three-quarters of the verse sold being by dead poets.
Music
As you walk along a London street in one of the better neighbourhoods at dusk on a summer’s evening, all sorts of sounds will greet your ears. Horseshoes clacking on the cobbles, and iron-tyred wheels grinding against the stones. Masters calling to their servants, children being reproved by their mothers or governesses, window shutters being pulled closed with a slam. And high above it all, the plucked sounds of a lute and the low whistle of a recorder as a lady and a gentleman while away their evening playing a dance tune. A few doors down, there is singing, as a private recital is given in a gentleman’s house. From another building you can hear the strains of a quartet of lute, harpsichord, viol and violin on the first floor. In a yard behind a house in the next street there’s a girl singing a tune to herself, as she gathers in the washing from a line. A few blocks away, in a tavern, there is some raucous tune-wrestling as the drinkers join in with a soloist on the choruses of a well-known bawdy jig. From the open window of a smart house comes the delicate sound of an accomplished young lady playing the virginals in front of her proud parents and their dinner guests. Passing the parish church, you might hear the organ, cornets and choirboys practising a motet for the following morning. And if you walk along Seething Lane, maybe you will hear Samuel Pepys playing his lute and singing to himself in his chamber after an argument with his wife. There is music everywhere in the Restoration city – in every house, among men and women, rich and poor, young and old.
Listening to all this playing and singing, it is easy to forget that before the Restoration you would have heard few tunes. The Puritans forbade church music. Cathedral choirs were disbanded. Church organs were broken up. Groups of musicians who regularly played during services were rendered unemployed. The theatres, which had used music for interludes and amusements before, during and after the plays, were all closed down. The musicians and choir of the Chapel Royal were disbanded. Masques and lavish balls were no longer held, as they had been at Charles I’s court. In taverns and inns, censorious magistrates took action to prevent the playing of songs that did not conform to their own high standards of propriety. Music did not disappear entirely but people were not allowed to sing and dance freely, and very little music was performed in public. When the Restoration sees the theatres open again, the churches allowed to restore their old organs and the cathedrals permitted to have choirs, it is as if all the windows in Britain have suddenly been opened at once and music is heard ushering in a million trills and bright cadences into the sunlit morning of a new age.
Royal music cannot simply resume where it left off in the 1640s. Too many skills have been lost; too many traditions have dwindled into obscurity. But Charles II rises to the challenge of re-energising it. He appoints twenty-four violinists, following the example of Les vingt-quatre violons du Roi who serve Louis XIV of France.71 The old Master of the King’s Music, Nicholas Lanier, is reappointed to his position, and the king recruits new musicians from the Continent to serve under Lanier. As a result, there are as many foreigners playing music in England in the 1660s and 1670s as there are painters from the Low Countries working here. Unsurprisingly, the king reaches out first to the French, and establishes a permanent band called the King’s French Music. That group is disbanded in 1666 when Charles grows bored of them and decides he would like an Italian troupe instead. So Vicenzo Albrici and his brother Bartolomeo are brought over to run the King’s Italian Music that same year, supported by two female Italian singers, two Italian castrati, a tenor and a bass.72 When Nicholas Lanier dies in 1666, his successor as Master of the King’s Music is a Catalan-born, French-trained musician, Louis Grabu. All the foreign musicians who come to court also perform in private houses all around London. At one performance that Evelyn attends in 1679, all four musicians are from the Continent.73 The rejuvenation of royal music means the breaking down of national barriers, and England resuming its long-lost place in the wider musical world.
The most important facet of this development lies in the developing orchestra. In 1673 four French wind players arrive at court and before long they start playing alongside the king’s violinists. In the 1680s English trumpets are added to the mix. Nicholas Staggins, Master of the King’s Music in 1685, writes music for the coronation of James II that involves violins, violas, basses, trumpets and oboes. The modern orchestra grows out of just such ensembles. The patronage of the royal family means that England is part of this international development in the last two decades of the century – alongside courts in Italy, Germany and France.74
Don’t imagine for a moment that all these Continental influences damage English traditions. Now that the restrictions of the Commonwealth are lifted, the old songs and dances have a new lease of life too, both at the palace and in the country. Key to this is a guide to the dances, The Dancing Master, or Directions for Dancing Country Dances, by John Playford. First produced under Cromwell’s government, the book soars in popularity after the Restoration, going through many editions by 1700. By the time the tenth edition appears in 1698, many famous English tunes are represented, including ‘Cuckolds all a-row’, ‘Jamaica’ and ‘Lillibullero’, all with instructions as to how to dance to them. New songs are published too – some written by ‘serious’ composers and circulated in their song books; others by anonymous writers and plastered up on tavern walls (with directions that they should be sung to this or that tune); and still others sold as broadsides by street sellers who sing the very songs as they walk along. Then there are the professional songwriters like Thomas d’Urfey. Hundreds of his songs are published in this period, many of which will one day be collected in the six volumes of his Wit and Mirth: Pills to Purge Melancholy.
Another musical development in this period is the public concert. Musical performances are essentially private affairs in the 1660s. You may see a gentleman gather a few musicians together, and some of them may be paid professionals, but they will play only for an invited audience. Hence it is enormous
ly significant that on 30 December 1672 the violinist John Banister holds the first proper public concert in rooms adjacent to the George Tavern near the Temple, London. Admission is 1s per head. The scene is theatrical. Curtains are drawn back to reveal the performers on the stage. All the musicians are first-rate, playing music composed or selected by Banister and able to extemporise as necessary, to the delight of the audience. Banister continues to hold such events regularly until his death in 1679. By then a second series of public concerts is under way in Clerkenwell, managed by Thomas Britton: these are held weekly for the next thirty-six years. London musicians start to hold a public performance of a new composition in honour of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music, every year on the saint’s feast day (22 November). In the late 1690s this becomes a competition, with large prizes for the winning composer. By 1700 the public concert is a regular fixture on the London entertainment programme.75