Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne

This book is the first detailed study of the final Stuart succession crisis. It demonstrates for the first time the centrality of debates about royal succession to the literature and political culture of the early eighteenth century. Using previously neglected, misunderstood, and newly discovered material, it shows that arguments about Anne’s right to the throne were crucial to the construction of nascent party political identities. Literary texts were the principal vehicle through which contemporaries debated the new queen’s legitimacy. This book sheds fresh light on canonical authors such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison by setting their writing alongside the work of lesser known but nonetheless important figures such as John Tutchin, William Pittis, Nahum Tate, John Dennis, Henry Sacheverell, Charles Leslie, and other anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Through close historical readings, it shows how this new generation of poets, preachers, and pamphleteers transformed older models of succession writing by Milton, Dryden, and others, and imbued conventional genres such as panegyric and satire with their own distinctive poetics. By immersing the major authors in their milieu, and reconstructing the political and material contexts in which those authors wrote, this book demonstrates the vitality of debates about royal succession in early eighteenth-century culture.

War

Chapter 4 investigates how the War of the Spanish Succession was reconfigured as a War of the British Succession. During the early modern period, warfare provided a stimulus to imaginative writing. At the start of the eighteenth century, Britain’s new status as a military superpower profoundly affected literary culture. By examining a range of official, popular, and diplomatic responses of military victories, including poems by Joseph Addison, Nahum Tate, and Daniel Defoe, this chapter illuminates local partisan meanings in texts reacting to the war and succession crisis. Moving through popular news, court propaganda, panegyrics, and satires, it establishes how the war became a lens through which to view dynastic crisis.

Poets and the Politics of Patronage and Literary Criticism

Some of the most prominent and powerful literary and artistic patrons were also highly regarded poets themselves, including the Earls of Rochester, Dorset, Mulgrave, and Roscommon. Dryden and other dramatists such as Shadwell and Etherege enjoyed support and preferment from them, as did poets including Matthew Prior and Nahum Tate. The poets and their patrons were shaping an emerging discourse of literary criticism with essays on tragedy, translation, and on satire, attempting to situate contemporary English writing in the context of classical models and Shakespeare.

Poets: Laureates, Social, and Commercial

There were three poets laureate in the last decade of the century: John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, and Nahum Tate, all of whom had begun their careers writing for the stage. Poets active during this time included Anne Finch, who was circulating her verses in manuscript among friends and compiling manuscript collections, and Mary Astell, who created a manuscript volume of verse for Archbishop Sancroft. Prolific poets in print included Sir Richard Blackmore, Samuel Garth, and Matthew Prior, who all published in miscellany collections. Jonathan Swift began publishing occasional verse in periodicals including the Athenian Gazette

“Subject to Invent”: Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets into other Media

Adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays has been part of his legacy from the beginning, as works by artists such as Nahum Tate, Henry Purcell, and John Dryden can attest. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, too, have been put to many uses over the years. They have been set to music, they have been quoted by politicians, they have been used as wedding vows, and they have appeared on greeting cards. For many, they represent the ultimate statement on love. In the four hundred years since Shakespeare’s death, they have found their way into a variety of media, including music, drama, books, television, and film. Whereas the plays have long been acknowledged as a rich source of inspiration—both serious and parodic—by artists and auteurs, ranging in kind from novelist James Joyce to dramatist Tom Stoppard to comedian Ben Elton, the poems have received less scrutiny in this regard. However, they represent a gold mine of untold riches, especially in terms of biography, which has yet to be sufficiently tapped. In this paper I take a look at the various uses the sonnets have been put to, primarily in books, television, and film, and come to some conclusions regarding their success in remediation.