1. James Loxley's new book arrives at a good time for Royalist poetry. Fanshawe, Cowley and Waller are in the process of being re-edited, and there is an upsurge of research interest in all things courtly. A historically informed analysis of Royalist poets and the creation of a royalist poetic is long overdue and this book follows the work of Lois Potter, Nigel Smith and Kevin Sharpe, although concentrating on a period not considered in detail by any critic recently (Smith has even suggested that during the war 'Royalist literature was condensed, flattened, stopped' [1994. Literature and Revolution in England 1640-1660. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 11]. Loxley is committed to one strand of Civil War culture: he contextualises and historicises the material he considers, but consciously does not attempt to offer a cross-sectional diagram or overview of the cultural history of the war years.

2. As the title indicates, Loxley considers the relationship between ideological position and cultural production during the war years. The book is largely concerned with the transition from the relative stability of the personal rule period to the strife of the 1640s. Much space is given over to discussion of the mutation of courtly tropes from instruments of faction into polemical weapons of war, as 'poetic forms were not simply marked by conflict but were themselves mobilised in the active pursuit of the King's cause' (79). The central function of the work is to trace the 'development and deployment of a politically instrumental, self-reflexive poetics from the early years of King Charles's personal rule into the aftermath of the regicide' (3). Loxley structures his book in a broadly chronological fashion, analysing and digressing at length along the way. Such a linear historical narrative has the advantage of illustrating the subtle changes that occurred during different periods of the war, although it can sometimes feel rather constrictive. For the main part, however, Loxley avoids the pitfalls of a schematic theory; this is due to his sharp critical eye and interest in illustrating the minutiae of the text.

3. The bulk of the book's first half is concerned with reassessing the role of the Caroline universities in creating a royalist cultural discourse that was malleable enough to be used in the King's service during the war. Loxley pays particular attention to the role of Oxford in the construction of a royalist poetics, concentrating at length on the influence of Brian Duppa on the panegyrical collections produced during the 1630s. Building on the work of Kevin Sharpe and Nicholas Tyacke, Loxley locates Charles and Laud's plans for Oxford as central to the personal rules reshaping of national identity and cultural expression. Lauds Oxford produced verse of 'poetic subjection [...] in service, "For the KING"' (37). Loxley maps the imposition of the kings authority on the University and traces how this was expressed poetically: both the structure and the cultural practices of Caroline Oxford 'revealed royal authority as their strongest determinant [...] the subjection of the universitys poetic activities to the authority of the King was itself a consequence of, and element in, the broader dynamic of the personal rule' (423). In the epideictic verse of the 1630s the germs of the cultural expressions and identities of the war years are to be found.

4. Loxley illustrates particularly well the transition from tropes furthering courtly factions to the polemical rhetoric of the civil war. The crucial figure in this literary shift is John Cleveland. The fractured physical state of Cleveland's texts has tended to obscure their deep and pervasive influence on Civil War verse practice. His 'elaborately dialectical poetics' created verse 'carved from the engagement of royal authority with its enemies' (96). Cleveland injected a new aggression and maliciousness into supine tropes, revivifying Royalist verse during the war. Positioning his readings against the weight of standard critical opinion, Loxley's Cavaliers are committed and warlike, combining lyric with satire to create verse that can be used as a weapon: 'The poet takes on military and regal power, ensuring that a public, polemical role is at the heart of his writing' (98). This goes for the majority of writers working during the war years; even those such as Sir Robert Stapleton, who attempted to 'reassert the importance of the classical exemplar for English satire', were working to polemic purpose (103). Loxley emphasises the role of the text as political and cultural engagement, as 'illocutionary' acts, to use Quentin Skinners phrase. In this he follows a well-trodden path in seventeenth-century scholarship of later years. Yet his method and practice seem to meld with his subject, as he traces the emergence and development of a self-consciously polemic and engaged writing practice.

5. The final chapter deals with poetic reactions to the royalist defeat and execution of the king, analysing how polemical writing practices coped with such a profound reconfiguration of the national hierarchy. Loxley analyses the development of royalist elegy, from more polemic manifestations during the first civil war (particularly the university verses mourning Sir Bevill Grenville) to the 'desperate circumstances of the second civil war and its aftermath' which meant that 'polemical requirements [were] even more insistently built into the commemoration of the dead' (193). The elegiac volume i/Lachrymae Musarum/i is relocated within its cultural moment, all but ignoring the more celebrated pieces by Dryden and Marvell to concentrate upon verse by Mildmay Fane, Sir Aston Cokain, Sir Arthur Gorges and Thomas Higgons. Loxley reads the volume as 'a rather public act of defiance' (199), but one which ends by 'mourning the death of active royalism [...] turning inward in response to an overwhelming defeat' (201). The chapter ends on a flourish, however, by considering royalist stoicism and the work of Lovelace, Mayne, Fane and Cotton, in order to trace continued resistance: 'For a committed poetics, defeat on other fronts only increases the significance of its own ability to embody and perpetuate the active prosecution of the Stuart cause' (215). Fane's work in particular highlights the increasing primacy of print in the new royalist poetics, something that had been an undercurrent since the early 1640s: 'it is precisely the volume as a single signifying unit which presents the opportunity for the exploration and maintenance of a poetics of activism [...] these works place themselves in the line with the militarised poetics of Cleveland and his comrades in Oxford and elsewhere. They continue to forge the soldiery, arms and armour of a civil war fought with the pen' (223-34).

6. There are a few stylistic irritations: Loxley too often resorts to hyperbolic epithets in a fashion that suggests (despite the opposite being the case) a loose and imprecise approach to his subject. Such over familiarity and slanginess can grate with the reader; however, at its best his written style is fluid and easy. His literary analyses are intelligent and practical, allowing for the ambiguities of text whilst gently pointing conclusively toward a coherent argument. Whilst a literary scholar, Loxley sees texts as registers of the political and historical circumstances of the period. The scope of the work is laudable and polemically important for the recovery of a neglected literary period. However this does tend to mean that the book is at times a little breathless, romping through when concentration on specifics might lead to greater clarity. Major poets such as Cowley and Denham are relegated to twoparagraph discussions. Whilst this gives space to more representative and relatively unknown writers, such treatment ignores the ambiguities inherent in their texts in favour of an overall thesis. These are small and defensible problems, and are far outweighed by the quality of Loxley's writing and the importance of his work.

JEROME DE GROOT
UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE