ESC: English Studies in Canada

B U R L E S Q U E I N M A R V E L L ’S T H E R E H E A R S A L T R A N S P R O S ’ D HEATHER CAMPBELL York University .Lhirty years after its original publication, Jonathan Swift described The Rehearsal Transpros’d as satire of that lasting quality which results “when any great genius thinks it worth his while to expose a foolish piece; so we still read Marvell’s answer to Parker with pleasure, though the book it answers be sunk long ago.” 1 Modern critics, however, have tended to disagree over the quality of Marvell’s lengthy and complex prose-satire. Pierre Legouis, for example, criticizes its “desultoriness and wayward course,” 2 whereas Raymond Anselment finds it to be an “interestingly conceived and executed achievement in satiric unity.” 3Paradoxically, both views are justified. The apparent looseness of structure which disturbs Legouis is, in fact, a feature of the burlesque mode which Marvell establishes from the beginning as his satiric method, and which he maintains consistently throughout the first part, and modifies in the second part to accommodate a marked alteration in tone and position. The use of Buckingham’s burlesque drama, The Rehearsal, as his framework lends to Marvell’s prose work a unity of satiric method which has been severely under­ estimated. The use of the burlesque permitted Marvell to negotiate the potentially difficult course which lay between the need to silence Parker and his own feelings about Charles’s controversial Declaration of Indulgence. The theory of religious toleration had been written into the Declaration of Breda, but it was not well received by the English people, who variously associated it with the domination of the army and the preaching of fanatics, and feared it as an opening through which Catholicism might return and flourish. Toleration progressively decreased during the decade following the Restoration, with the expulsion of the nonconformist clergy in 1662, the Conventicle Act in 1664, and the Five Mile Act in 1665. Marvell, who was himself in favour of a de­ gree of toleration, seems to have been unhappy about this process. In April of 1669/70 he wrote to his nephew William Popple of “the terrible Bill against Conventicles” as “the Quintessence of arbitrary Malice.”4On the other hand, he may have felt at this time some of the fears of growing Catholic tendencies at Court which he later expressed so forcibly in The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government. Later in the same year, he wrote to Popple of his En g l ish Studies in C anada, vi, 3, Fall 1980 growing unease: “For indeed never had poor nation so many complicated, mortal, incurable Diseases. You know the Dutchess of York is dead. All gave her for a Papist. I think it will be my lot to go on an honest fair employment into Ireland. Some have smelt the Court of Rome at that distance. There I hope I shall be out of the Smell of our.” 5 In the light of these anxieties, his attitude to Charles’s Declaration of Indulgence to Tender Consciences, pro­ claimed on 15 March 1672, must have been ambivalent. Although possibly in sympathy with the theory of such indulgence, he could not have endorsed Charles’s high-handed overriding of the law, and he may have suspected the King’s motives. The Declaration was patently associated with the war with Holland (declared three days later) and hence with the secret Treaty of Dover, in which Charles had pledged allegiance to France in the event of such a war. France was a Catholic country, and alliance with her King was to be feared. Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, published in 1671, advocates an extreme policy of religious persecution and presses strongly for the absolute power of the monarch in ecclesiastical as well as civil matters. He argues that liberty of conscience is dangerous if allowed to affect the layman’s practice of religion, and that it is the duty of the monarch to impose strict limitations on that practice in order to preserve peace in the realm. His argument...