BIOGRAPHY: Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War, By John Stubbs, Viking, 550pp. £25
THOUGH I WOULD like to give a wholehearted welcome to any book that integrates the poetry of 17th-century England into an account of the age, I find Reprobatesa curiously unsatisfactory work. The subject matter – the world of those who played important parts in the English civil wars, principally those we now call Cavaliers – is fascinating, and John Stubbs shows an enviable knowledge of the letters, poems, plays and diaries of the age. The trouble is that Stubbs has failed to resist the temptation to draw our attention to everything that happened to the characters he is concerned with, to explain their feelings by retelling the stories of their youth and families, and to refer to every extant document.
As a result, and also because Reprobatesis not organised chronologically, the reader becomes increasingly confused as the book's multiple details, flashbacks and non sequiturs tumble around him or her. Many of the accounts of persons, battles or poems in this book are successful by themselves (indeed, occasionally they are brilliantly evocative), but the lack of a consistent organising structure within the book means that the parts do not make a coherent whole – "Tis not a lip or eye we beauty call / But the joint force and full result of all."
The style is a further problem, for this is more a work of creative non-fiction than of history or biography. The reader is constantly being taken by the hand and told rather patronisingly to imagine the sounds, sights and smells of 17th-century England. “Leaving Hyde Park, expunge the cold bulk of Marble Arch. There is no imperial stone, no Victorian cast iron, no post-modern steel: there are no tinted panels of inscrutable glass . . . Only in recent times have the parklands behind you, formerly royal hunting grounds, been open to commoners. Here at Tyburn you might be edified by the spectacle of a hanging, perhaps twenty felons at one go, on the sturdy derrick . . .”
So we are exhorted to imagine ourselves passing through the streets of London to Chancery Lane, where we find Sir Matthew Carew sitting at his desk in melancholy mood, writing a letter. This might be an appropriate register for the script of a historical television documentary, but it does not work on the printed page.
Well-researched, well-written history contributes to all our lives: we are informed, delighted and challenged by what we read. This book, however brilliantly researched and full of insights it may be, is often patronising rather than challenging. It assumes we need to be jollied along with cliches and jocular phrases – “crack troops”, “an extremely lucky break for a young out-of-towner” – and chivvied along as by a witty tour guide. There are places in the book where one feels that serious engagement with the past has been deliberately pushed to one side in favour of less intellectually demanding sound bites. But this is clearly what’s intended. The publicity for the book describes the Cavaliers as “a parcel of rogues, fashionable, a bit brattish, promiscuous and also free-thinking”. What a thoroughly muddling list.
Reviewers have previously praised Stubbs for his "fizzing prose", but in Reprobatesthese pyrotechnics can lead to overuse of adverbs and a reliance on cliches – journalists write "twitchily", a book is "colossally unendable", catastrophes "come thick and fast". In places the informal, conversational tone leads to sloppy writing. Here is a sentence at random (from page 150, as it happens): "Tiresome, yet a part, as Charles knew from his English parliaments, of political life, and not to be dwelt on too gloomily since, for the most part, he and those close to him were well satisfied with their reception, even if they were fairly eager to be off." My red pencil itches and twitches (to coin a phrase) to be allowed into action.
Notwithstanding these reservations, the book contains a lot of interesting information on the daily lives of major players, such as King Charles I, and of the writers of the age: Ben Jonson, John Milton and others. Reprobatesis also refreshingly full of quotations from Cavalier poetry, which lighten and brighten the text.
By far the best aspect of this book is its consistent and imaginative use of verse to highlight some of the complexities of life at the time. It is also a pleasure to read Stubbs’s astute assessments of the effects of ballads, plays and masques during the period and to see the prominence he gives to the underrated poet Sir William Davenant.
The book sheds new light on what it meant to be a Cavalier and contains revealing analyses of the poetry of Jonson, Sir John Suckling, Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew and the Irish-born Sir John Denham.
The assumption is that we want to read about these men because they were “wits, womanizers and wanderers”. Much more important, however, is the fact that they were fine and original poets – and Stubbs’s book, despite its failings, helps us to see these poets of civil-war England in their social as well as their political and literary contexts.
Andrew Carpenter is emeritus professor of English at University College Dublin. He has edited The Poems of Maurice Craig, which will be published by Liberties Press later this year
