Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate

Abstract

This book shows that the Protectorate's instabilities helped to generate lively and innovative poetry. Protectorate verse explores the fault-lines of a culture which ceaselessly contested the authority of its own institutions, including the office of Protector itself. This study reads poems by Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, John Dryden, and a number of writers who will be less familiar, in a cross-section of institutional contexts, including an embassy to Sweden, Oxford University, parliamentary crises, and a state funeral. It finds that their poetry often proves difficult to align with established ideas of the political and cultural contests of the age, because it becomes entangled with cultural institutions which were transforming rapidly. The readings of this book challenge previous representations of Protectorate culture as a phase of conservative backsliding, or pragmatic compromise, under a quasi-monarchical order. Protectorate verse emerges as nuanced and vital writing, which looks beyond the personality of Oliver Cromwell to the tensions that are shaping his power. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectectorate argues that it is precisely through being contingent and compromised that these poems achieve their vitality, and become so revealing.

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