The Distribution of Political Agency in Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island

Abstract

PHINEAS FLETCHER'S ALLEGORICAL ATLAS of the human body, The Purple Island; or, The Isle of Man (1633), models both the geophysical composition and the social character of a fictional Pacific Island on the skeletal structure and anatomical systems of the human body. In canto 2, the author discusses the exigent role of small tributaries, glossed as capillaries, "which give to this Isle his fruitfulness and being" (2.10). 1 Like many writers of the Stuart era, Fletcher is using the design of the human body to analyze and interrogate the body politic, the mystical fiction upon which the power of absolutist monarchs throughout Europe was derived and the set of theoretical correspondences adopted residually by the similarly inclined early Stuarts. 2 Rivers in early modern literary productions often function as a marker of a brand of nationalism which reflexively comments on the health of the English state. William Browne's influential revival of Spenserian pastoral, Britannia's Pastorals (1613), stresses the connection between the course of rivers and human affairs: "as waters have their course, and in their place / Succeeding streams well out; so is man's race" (81). Properly circulating rivers throughout Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612) also signify a properly functioning polity. By contrast, the corrupt court in John Webster's Duchess of Malfi (c. 1613) is described as a "standing pool" which stifles the free circulation of bounty due to the corruption and favoritism of "flatt'ring panderers" and "caterpillars [that] feed on them" (1.1.51-54).

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