Politically well versed

These two volumes have a shared enterprise: to demonstrate that there is an indirect mode of political allusion common to many of the major canonical poetic works between the late-16th and 18th centuries, works often perceived as removed from the realm of politics, and "usually read for their aesthetic achievement and generalised wisdom". In over 500 pages, Howard Erskine-Hill offers to take on board the revisionist history that has so profoundly affected our understanding of early-modern politics, and to show how it might influence the literary interpretation of some of the touchstones of the period. This is an important and overdue project.

The earlier volume, Poetry and the Realm of Politics, leans towards poetic representation of constitutional theory and falls into three parts. First, Erskine-Hill considers Shakespeare's meditation on the issue of indefeasible hereditary succession and the nature of political right in the history plays. This is predominantly - and ingeniously - focused on issues raised by the abdication and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Second, he looks at later republican poetry, namely Thomas May's translation of Lucan, Ben Jonson's Catiline and Milton's sonnets. This section is concerned with images of government rather than with political practice or republican aesthetics. Third, Erskine-Hill looks at the Restoration writing of Milton and Dryden, juxtaposing Paradise Lost with the translation of the Aeneid and Samson Agonistes with Don Sebastian. As in Steven Zwicker's recent work, Erskine-Hill sees close parallels between Milton and Dryden, particularly in their responses to the political revolutions of 1660 and 1688.

The second volume, Poetry of Opposition and Revolution, is predominantly concerned with varieties of Jacobitism: though it also ponders on the curious and repeated motifs of horses and card-games. Erskine-Hill considers Dryden's later dramas and his 1693 poem to William Congreve, once again identifying a Miltonic strain. The discreet and indirect modes in which Dryden incorporated political allusion become the pattern for the 18th century. The second and third sections look at Jacobite sentiment in the poetry of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. Erskine-Hill clearly feels these to be among the most contentious passages of the two volumes, and, notably in his interpretation of The Vanity of Human Wishes, he digs deep into contextual complicities to make his case: but he does seem justified by recent historiography of the period. Erskine-Hill is relying on the notion of "emotional Jacobitism", based neither in constitutional theory nor in unrealistic nostalgia, but firmly grounded in the political possibilities of the day. The final part turns to Jacobinism, and looks at the politics of Wordsworth's Prelude in its successive revisions. Erskine-Hill rebuts the Whiggish attempts of new historicist critics to measure Wordsworth with the yardstick of Jacobinism, naming his shortcomings or looking for the date of his defection from the cause: instead he sees a deepening revelation into history, in which Wordsworth, by successive drafts, reinterpreted his earlier experiences and enthusiasm for the French revolutionary violence, reading back into his earlier compositions without undergoing or presenting a political rupture. His engagement with politics and hopes for future change continue, while the idealistic premises of these hopes are rebuffed: Erskine-Hill sees this as evidence of integrity, if not a form of radicalism.

Wordsworth in this seems to be giving us history itself. Erskine-Hill believes that poetry, as opposed to prose argument, can do this: that it is more sensitive to the complexities of political experience, through its subtle and complex modes of allusion. What Erskine-Hill offers us, then, is a perspective over the longue duree, but as a series of fragments, literary moments situated in their history.

It is certainly timely that literary critics modernise themselves with respect to history. But the terrain of early-modern revisionist history is hardly undisputed, and perhaps the exchange might work in both directions.

The fragmentary approach that necessarily follows from revisionist perceptions of local politics renders invisible political gestures which rely on an attenuated tradition of dissonant opinion. In keeping with his revisionist sources, Erskine-Hill considers republicanism less a tradition than a freak of nature. Milton's "public" sonnets are the only republican poetry from "the period of England's experiment with republicanism"; and this because of their virt rather than their principles. While the attention to May's Lucan is welcome, its relation to Paradise Lost is left unexplored, though the Virgilian dimensions of the republican epic are heavily underscored. Paradise Lost is presented as a poem of defeat, and Milton a "metaphysical royalist". Politically active republican writing, the practical pursuit of objectives through addresses to the public sphere, seems to disappear, or at least be rendered unaesthetic or nonpoetic. Something similar can be seen happening with "emotional Jacobitism", which can look like a set of gestures without a political content. The fact it was a movement based more on sentiment than on constitutional theory raises very large issues of the origins and significance of political belief. Everyone, including Milton, is a monarchist, the model of kingship is universal; and so monarchism cancels itself out on all sides of the equation, and has little significance. This is not to say that Erskine-Hill should have written another book: only that there is an untold story within these volumes, which, at certain points in history, stands at an even further remove from the old Whig orthodoxy.

Erskine-Hill's account of poetry and politics is not a trajectory mapped off against a few case-studies, but a developed and sustained argument about the nature of political reference in literature that is attuned to recent developments in historiography. This he achieves with grace. These books will serve to introduce undergraduates to some of the complexities of reading literature politically; and offer literary historians a strong reading of early-modern political allusion.

Joad Raymond is lecturer in English, University of Aberdeen.