Richard Lovelace: royalist poetry in context, 1639 - 1649

Abstract

This is a literary-critical, contextual study of important poems by Richard Lovelace (1617–1657) printed in Lucasta (1649). It is based on an examination of all Lovelace’s poems and manuscript remains, and of contemporary poems, pamphlets and newsbooks. Those of Lovelace’s poems selected for detailed examination emerge as activist interventions in royalist political debates of the 1630s and 1640s. Their place in the vibrant literary and polemical culture on which Lovelace drew, and to which he contributed, is as central to the study as the interpretations of the poems themselves. Scholars have long interpreted Lovelace’s densely allusive poems as being disengaged from the royalist cause, or ‘neutralist’. I offer the first major reassessment of Lovelace’s biography since 1925. Significant new information on Lovelace’s life has come to light in manuscripts, contemporary literary and polemical texts and other printed sources, confirming Lovelace’s ongoing commitment to the royalist cause. The poems chosen for the case studies reveal the complexities of Lovelace’s engagement with royalism. While his loyalty to the cause is constant, he is not blind to its perceived failings. Lovelace often emerges in the classical role of the poet as a source of independent counsel to his king. He invites his readers to discern meaning by constructing and juxtaposing allusions to classical, continental European and English language texts. Lovelace’s contemporaries would have been very familiar both with these texts and with the meaning(s) they had accreted over time. Lovelace’s intertextuality and fields of allusion are discussed in detail. Lovelace’s early love lyrics, ‘TO LUCASTA, Going beyond the Seas’, ‘TO LUCASTA, Going to the Warres’, ‘TO AMARANTHA, That she would dishevell her haire’ and ‘TO ALTHEA, From Prison’ emerge as engaging with the royal discourses of honnête platonic love and chivalric honour to which they demonstrably belong. In doing so, these poems contest the courtly lyrics of William Habington. ‘TO ALTHEA’ also reveals Lovelace’s early interest in an activist construction of the discourse of retirement or otium of the kind developed by the Dutch philosopher Justus Lipsius and appropriated by George Withers and others in prison poetry of 1617. ‘TO LUCASTA. From Prison’ shows Lovelace entertaining Lipsian expressions of the concepts of ‘love’ and ‘force’ as instruments of state policy, as he engages with the debates which dominated the months leading to the outbreak of war, including that on the Nineteen Propositions. In ‘AMYNTOR from beyond the Sea to ALEXIS’ and ‘AMYNTOR’S GROVE’, Lovelace appropriates the allegorical identities of Chloris and Amyntor awarded to Charles I and Henrietta Maria in court literature, including in the songs of Henry Hughes. In doing so, he expresses his concern at the manner in which the king has allowed himself to be represented by parliamentarian propagandists as emasculated by his foreign, popish wife. I conclude with a new reading of ‘The Grasse-hopper’ in the context of royalist polemic of 1647–1648. The poem emerges as a strong statement of support for the king and the royalist cause, one which is shown to cultivate the activist, Lipsian construction of retirement shown to be prevalent in royalist polemic leading up to the recurrence of civil war in 1648.