Renaissance Forum: Volume 6, Number 1, Winter 2002: Ceri Sullivan

Joshua Scodel. 2002. Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 367 pp. ISBN 0-691-09028-9. Ł37.95.

The current fashionable vice among rhetoricians is to hunt the trope. Panting and snorting, we surge over one literary terrain after another in pursuit of any trace of anacoenosis, say, or hypophora. The excitement climaxes in a sudden recognition that a small, shy conceit – one which has shown itself so rarely in this poem or that genre – is in fact a huge, muscly, ferocious, shark-toothed paradigm, that explains everything everywhere. Brave little hunters!
When I picked up Joshua Scodel's book, I thought it was an invitation to yet another meet. In fact, it proved to be a model of original thinking, wide scholarship, and careful reading, which allows him to make careful discriminations between the different positionings of the concept of the mean. In other words, he acknowledges the rhetorical opportunities enabled by casting oneself as at the centre or in the extremes of a discourse, without showing a bloodlust which would morph all political and aesthetic features into potential – and thus homogeneous – prey. The book is more than the sum of its parts precisely because it does not claim that there is such a sum. Its structure, a series of essays around detailed readings of a few texts from a genre, each introduced by an analysis of the general strategies offered by the mean/excess binary in the individual situation, is not used in a procrustean way.
The basic premise is that early modern thinkers mediate their responses to political change by a particular engagement with ancient prudential, ethical, and Stoic discussions of moderation. Classical writers celebrated 'the golden mean', looking to its definition in the Nicomachean Ethics as a virtue springing from habits that balance between excess and deficiency in the passions and actions. In De officiis, Cicero gave social standing to that man who exhibited this proper measure; he was the true patrician Roman. By the sixteenth century, English authors characterized the Stoicism of Seneca's De beneficiis as a call for the regulation rather than removal of the passions. Scodel picks out two dialectical opportunities inherent in this agreement: it was decorous to revalue the excess when dealing with what were seen to be inherently exceptional issues, and the imprecision of the concept of the mean allowed the position of centrality to be claimed by all parties.
Scodel argues by contrasts. The two chapters on individual authors are primarily interested in religious belief, and are set into perspective by an introductory chapter on how the much vaunted via media of the Anglican settlement retained its moderate image, even when the tenor of its doctrine and liturgy moved from Calvinist to Arminian. This allowed those outside the established church either to claim a similar political and dogmatic moderation, or to proclaim their own devotional zeal as vehement opponents to lukewarm institutions. Looking at 'Satire 3', Scodel argues that Donne seeks freedom through a sceptical search for an individual position on opposing faiths (saving himself from destructive extremes). Less compelling is Scodel's second reading, of the verse epistle to Wotton as a rejection of the urban middle state, which leaves Donne in a continual process of balancing court, country, and city, friendship against work, or public engagement against retirement. The second chapter on an individual, Bacon, considers that The Advancement of Learning maintains the necessity of acting in social and political situations with moderation, but demands that the individual thinks outside conventional epistemological and religious bounds. Bacon's empiricist scientific and social programmes position themselves against what Scodel terms the extremes of Aristotelian rationalism. Scodel daringly characterizes Bacon in terms akin to a self-help manual: moderate behaviour, like scientific experiment, is a local strategy to get on with things, rather than an ambitious desire to discover the whole truth. Only in a zealous desire to act with energy in pursuing the benefits of these programmes does Bacon employ the trope of excess. The final chapter, on Paradise Lost, locates moral value in self-respecting moderation. Adam and Eve start with a marriage of legitimate pleasure founded on a correct sense of self-worth, but fall into opposite deviations: an idolization of the other that immobilizes the self's moral judgement, and a self-regard that ignores a proper moral hierarchy. Milton celebrates a private sphere of erotic intensity self-governed by ethical considerations over the indulgences of a licentious court. Scodel views Eden in terms of Ciceronian republicanism, and sees the poem as a forerunner to neo-classical works that take an Arminian line on self-restraint. I found this account of the Fall satisfying and from an angle that was new to me.
At the centre of the book, Scodel deals with three main genres that profit from the mean/excess binary largely in terms of rank: georgic poetry, symposiastic lyrics, and erotic verse. Georgic epics can value the honest hard work and limited ambition of the farmer; they can also exalt the extreme means – colonial exploits, war, heroic commerce – by which national greatness is achieved. The Faerie Queene, Poly-Olbion, Sylvester's Divine Weeks and Works of... du Bartas, and 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' show the labourer on the land (from farmer to poet) sometimes co-operating with it, sometimes subduing and tempering its extreme elements (from storms to rebellion). Later georgics (Scodel looks particularly at John Davies of Hereford's Microcosmos, Denham's 'Cooper's Hill', Waller's 'To the King, Upon his Majesty's Happy Return' and 'On St. James's Park', and Cowley's 'On the Queen's Repairing Somerset House' and De plantis) envisage foreign conquest, plantation, and trade as means to power and plenty. Their heroes are correspondingly apotheosized from labourers to royal planters.
Scodel reads drinking poetry also in political terms. The ability to use wine in a moderate and convivial fashion for inspiration is the topic of Jonson's anacreontics. Yet poems by his admirers, Waller and Habington, see drinking to excess as an heroic attempt to ignore political defeat and assert elite excess over utilitarian sobriety; Herrick turns from defiance to inspirational – though solitary – drinking. With Rochester and Lovelace, the poetry of drinking is more an expression of aristocratic self-consciousness, in feverish indulgence, than a political gesture; after them, it sinks to an ignoble survival technique. Similar contrasts are found in the period's handling of erotic poetry, which starts with the idealizing hyperbole of Petrarchan passion and frustration, and ends with the contrast between the private sphere of companionate marriage and the degraded public sphere of base self-interest. The church's insistence on proper hierarchy in marriage, to restrain the demands of the weak female half, was partnered by warnings against the social costs of amibitious or ill-matched love in Daniel and Lyly; for Lodge, social ascent by marriage may be justified. By contrast, in Sidneian romance and Caroline court drama, heroic passion is the preserve of the aristocrat, and distinguished from a baser engagement with corrupt socio-political manoeuvring. By the mid-seventeenth century, works such as Davenant's Gondibert, Dryden's Conquest of Granada and All for Love, and Behn's Love-Letters between a Noble-man and his Sister focus on challenges to the latter element. The virtuous aristocrat's erotic extremes are contrasted with the prudential pursuit of interest, often presented as a fair-minded balancing of the claims of different economic or social groups. The three writers reveal the sordid reality behind such claims to moderation.
In addition to the respect engendered by Scodel's scholarship, this book has three pleasurable qualities less common in academic writing: clear style, flexible argument, and a teasing relation to the reader. Its luminous, precise, and elegant prose style puts the works it analyzes first. The comparisions he draws are intriguing: cattle farming is in the same frame with republican ritual, ale or wine drinking with the beauty of holiness. The third characteristic, evident throughout, is summed up in the concluding jeu d'esprit, on the Romantic association of imaginative excess and genius, and the similar links between grand narratives and radical thinking. Bourgeois moderation may acquire power from its consensual mode – but it needs the exciting public image and indeed the ideas of the extreme if it is to effect change. A moment here, while we reflect on Labour's electoral strategy and the third way...

CERI SULLIVAN
UNIVERSITY OF WALES, BANGOR