1

Ingo Berensmeyer

THE ART OF OBLIVION

Politics of Remembering and Forgetting in Restoration England

This article enquires into the cultural uses of memory and forgetting in

seventeenth-century England, focussing on strategic acts of recall and oblivion

accompanying the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. In a reading of

three representative texts from the 1660s – Samuel Tuke’s The Adventures of Five

Hours, John Dryden’s Astraea Redux, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost –, it

examines the relationship between officially sanctioned fictions of state and

dissenting literary-political counter-fictions. The analysis of calculated acts of

oblivion, memory, and countermemory is intended to contribute to a more

complex picture of the social, political, and literary interconnections after 1660.

In this light, the Restoration appears not as a monolithic reaction against the so-

called Interregnum, but as a series of cultural reorientations characterized by the

urgency of finding acceptable representations of history and memory amidst

competing rhetorics of cultural and religious identity.

Keywords cultural memory; forgetting; countermemory; Restoration literature and

politics; cultural identity; religion; Tuke, Samuel; Dryden, John; Milton, John

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has

deformed us, or been deformed by us.

Samuel Beckett

2

Deforming the past has not been invented by the New Historicists, nor by their High

Textualist or Old Historicist detractors. Philosophers of history, from Hayden White to

Michel de Certeau, have taught us that the past does not, in the strict sense of the verb,

‘exist’. Forever receding, it can only be made accessible by means of approximations.

Performative, even constructive acts of remembrance relate to things past from the

perspective of things present. In turn, the present is inextricably bound up with the past in

a recursive loop: yesterday forms or, as Beckett has it, deforms us even as yesterday is

being (de)formed by ourselves. Recent studies of cultural memory (Bal et al., 1999; Erll

and Nünning, 2004 and 2005) have pointed to the various and varied forms that these

mutual formations and deformations can assume. They have also emphasised the

formative role of contingent value judgements in historic and contemporary acts of recall.

If time, according to Beckett (1965: 11), is a ‘double-headed monster of damnation and

salvation’, cultural processes of memorialization are stretched out across ‘floating gaps’

(Vansina, 1985: 23–24) between two poles: modelling and remodelling, constructing and

destroying, remembering and forgetting, institutionalizing and erasing versions of the

past – or certain parts of the past. In such a dual perspective on cultural memory, any act

of recall can be seen to involve a concomitant (be it conscious or unconscious) process of

forgetting.

In recent years, the concept of cultural or ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs, 1950)

has been developed into a productive interdisciplinary tool for unlocking connections

between history and media, including literary texts. Yet whereas much has been written

about cultural memory in recent years, in-depth treatments of cultural forgetting, or at

least of the formative role of forgetting within cultural memory, have been few and far

3

between.1 Thus the present micro-study of the politics of remembering and forgetting in

Restoration England is also intended as a contribution to a better understanding of

‘oblivial culture’ in a more general sense, and of the dialectic of embedding and

disembedding that characterizes the relation between texts and historical contexts. It

focusses on forgetting as a strategic element in memorial/oblivial culture, in particular on

the strategic forgetting of recent events in the period between 1650 and 1670.

Accordingly, I concentrate on intersubjective rather than subjective varieties of memory

and on what Aleida Assmann calls ‘functional memory’ rather than storage memory.

Functional memory, according to Assmann (1999: 130–39), comes in three distinct

varieties: legitimation (e.g. supporting a political status quo), delegitimation or

subversion of a status quo, and finally distinction (providing symbolic expressions of

collective identity). All three varieties can be observed, often in complex interaction, in

the long seventeenth century, especially in the two decades around 1660. In the political

turmoil of Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration, selective memory is a cultural as

well as individual imperative. The choice of what to forget and what to remember can

mark political and/or religious allegiances, and can thus become a matter of life and

death. Increasing cultural complexity and social heterogeneity lead to a heightened

awareness of the normative and formative functions of collective memory. Political,

religious, and cultural processes of memory and countermemory are also a central, if

neglected, element of seventeenth-century English literature, since the struggle between

different memorial and countermemorial myths also involves a struggle over

interpretations of historical events and texts, and ultimately over the interpretation of

history itself. In a country shaken and divided by civil war, acts of recall and oblivion

4

become paramount strategies not only in national and international politics but also in

literary texts that practice and multiply as well as reflect these strategies.

Concentrating on Samuel Tuke’s The Adventures of Five Hours, Dryden’s

Astraea Redux, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, I am going to examine the interplay between

officially sanctioned ‘fictions of state’ (Love, 1993: 164) and dissenting literary-political

counter-fictions. I shall try to demonstrate that Paradise Lost is not only a text of puritan

dissent but also, like other texts from this period, an example of literary countermemory –

a concept that can be defined as the systematic exploitation of an enemy’s most trusted

sources against their grain (see Funkenstein, 1992). I suggest that Astraea Redux and

Paradise Lost can be read as competing acts of cultural memory and countermemory in

the Restoration period: foundational, supportive and legitimizing on the one hand,

counter-presential, critical and delegitimizing on the other. Their rivalry is the more

fascinating because they make use of virtually the same materials to construct and deliver

their arguments: Virgilian epic and Biblical narrative, the major sources of early modern

literary culture.

Like many other epochal moments of historical transformation, the restoration of

the Stuart monarchy in 1660 entails a number of strategic acts of remembrance and

forgetting. On the twenty-third of May, Samuel Pepys accompanies Charles II and his

royal entourage from Scheveningen to Dover. In his diary, he registers the ease with

which the flagship of the Commonwealth, the Naseby – its name commemorating a

decisive victory of parliamentary forces over royalist troops in 1645 – is renamed and

repainted as the Royal Charles. ‘After dinner, the King and Duke […] altered the name of

some of the Shipps, viz. the Nazeby into Charles – the Richard, James; the Speaker, Mary

5

– The Dunbar (which was not in company with us) the Henery – Winsby, Happy returne

– Wakefield, Richmond – Lamport, the Henretta – Cheriton, the Speedwell – Bradford,

the Successe’ (Pepys, 1970, 1: 154). In such specific acts of remembering and forgetting,

as well as in its habits and conventions of referring, or avoiding to refer, to particular

events and persons, Restoration England offers ample opportunities for a case study of

early modern memorial cultures – a paradigmatic example of the ways in which historical

events, cultural processes and literary productions interact, reframe and indeed

reconfigure one another.

Already in the republican and Cromwellian 1650s, forgetting, though not

necessarily forgiving ‘the late troubles’ and ‘the differences that caused them’ (Cowley,

1656: sig. [a]4) had been a necessary condition for engagement in constructing a new

kind of state. After the Civil War, forgetting the past became, in the words of Andrew

Shifflett (2003: 101), ‘a positive value, the theme for a new intellectual ethos.’ It was also

a practical necessity, because there was no possibility to claim legal damages for injuries

incurred. The erasure of royal monuments after the execution of Charles I in 1649 was

accompanied by complex acts of rewriting which in their turn had to be ‘forgotten’ and

replaced after the Restoration. The euphemism ‘Interregnum’, a term still used by

historians without questioning its problematic nature, itself speaks volumes about these

reconstructive and recuperative efforts. Former royalist Abraham Cowley had realized as

much in 1656 at the latest when, in the preface to his Poems of that year, he wrote of the

obligation to ‘submit to the conditions of the Conqueror’: ‘we must lay down our Pens as

well as Arms, we must march out of our Cause it self, and dismantle that […] of all the

Works and Fortifications of Wit and Reason by which we defended it’ (Cowley, 1656:

6

sig. [a]4). After the Restoration, Cowley must have been more than a little embarrassed

by these lines but was, in turn, graciously pardoned for his premature submission to

Cromwell. In a second act of palimpsestic erasure, he deleted these lines from a new

edition of his Poems that appeared in 1667. But he had gone even further than merely

submitting to the new regime in 1656, pleading for memory to be silent:

The truth is, neither We, nor They ought by the Representation of Places and

Images to make a kind of Artificial Memory of those things wherein we are all

bound to desire, like Themistocles, the Art of Oblivion. The enmities of Fellow-

Citizens should be, like that of Lovers, the Redintegration of their Amity. The

Names of Party, and Titles of Division, which are sometimes in effect the whole

quarrell, should be extinguished and forbidden in peace under the notion of Acts of

Hostility.

(Cowley, 1656: sigs. [a]4–[a]4v)

It is not without irony that Cowley’s nominalist ‘Art of Oblivion’, intended for

Cromwell, was to become official government policy after the restoration of the

monarchy in 1660. In the Declaration of Breda, which was later converted into legal

practice in the Act of Oblivion, Charles II offered his subjects ‘a free and general pardon’

on the occasion of his return (Kenyon, 1986: 339–44). In this text, the word ‘restoration’

resonates with what Cowley, in his Poems of 1656, had celebrated as ‘Oblivions silent

stroke’, which was to ‘deface / Of foregone Ills the very trace’ (sig. 3B1v). Now such

defacement signalled the complete erasure from national memory of England’s

republican decade. At the close of this document, the year 1660 is referred to as ‘the

7

twelfth year of our reign’, thus closing the dynastic gap between father and son in a silent

stroke of the pen. ‘Henceforward’, Charles proclaims, ‘all notes of discord, separation,

and difference of parties [are to] be utterly abolished among all our subjects, whom we

invite and conjure to a perfect union among themselves […]’ (Kenyon, 1986: 331–32).

The return to the idealized past is here presented as a step forward into a more

peaceful and tolerant future, a step made possible by a deliberate act of oblivion,

presented in terms of curative treatment: ‘that those wounds which have so many years

together been kept bleeding may be bound up’ (Kenyon, 1986: 332). Healing wounds by

overcoming, or at least camouflaging, differences of opinion was the strategy of the hour.

This is clearly reflected in officially sanctioned publications as well as theatrical

productions of the early sixties, which followed the ideological fault line with various

degrees of skill and subtlety. In their provocative shallowness, many Restoration

comedies provided a form of decidedly anti-puritan entertainment that was perfectly

suited to the official mainstream of early Restoration England.

In 1662, for instance, Samuel Tuke (knighted in 1664) adapted a Spanish play,

Los Empeños de seis horas (now assumed to be by Antonio Coello), reportedly at the

behest of Charles II himself. The Adventures of Five Hours – one hour having apparently

been lost in adaptation – had its Court premiere in December of 1662 and its first public

performance in January of 1663. The play became a favourite of Pepys, who praised it

above Othello.2 In hindsight at least, the choice of plot by Charles II himself appears as a

shrewd move at the play’s historic moment (cf. Womersley, 2000: 2). The ‘Prologue at

Court’ dutifully stages the poet’s inspiration by the King in provocatively religious

language as ‘Light’ emitted ‘by a Ray from th’upper Sphere’, to which the poet responds

8

by ‘Zeal’ – an unmistakable witty secularization and displacement of the puritan mindset

(Tuke, 2000: 4). It represents the act of writing as an act of obedience and an attempt at

mind-reading simultaneously:

So should Obsequious Subjects catch the Minds

Of Princes, as your Sea-men do the Winds.

If this Attempt then shews more Zeal, than Light,

’T may teach you to Obey, though not to Write.

(Tuke, 2000: 4)

According to the contemporary dramatic and poetic theory of Sir William Davenant,

teaching to obey is the most important purpose of literary productions (see Jacob and

Raylor, 1991). Davenant was directly responsible for the production of The Adventures of

Five Hours, which was to be one of his greatest successes (Visser, 1975: 57). Tuke’s

play, regularly re-performed and reprinted during the 1660s and 1670s (Visser, 1975: 59),

provided a form of entertainment that was perfectly suited to the official taste of early

Restoration England.

Pepys’s comparison of The Adventures to Othello is appropriate because both

plays are about the dangerous passion of jealousy, even though they deal with it in

strikingly different ways. The Adventures is set in Spain, in ‘the City of Sevil’ (Tuke,

2000: 3). Its cultural context, the Spanish Wars of Religion in the Netherlands, in the

words of the play’s modern editor (Womersley, 2000: 2), ‘provides the largely neutral

backdrop to a series of romantic escapades’. This loss of importance of religiously

motivated warfare can be read as a calculated comment on the play’s historic moment in

9

England, which, as we have seen, is all about forgetting the cruelties of the Civil War and

the ‘Names […] of Division’ (Cowley, 1656: sig. [a]4v). It paves the way for the

predominant qualities of early Restoration drama not only in scenic conventions and in its

Spanish setting (see Visser, 1975: 57, 118–19) but also in its ‘provocative shallowness’

(Womersley, 2000: 2). The way in which The Adventures deals with the dangerous

passions of jealousy and exaggerated honour is perfectly aligned to the play’s function of

teaching the civic virtues of obedience. As Davenant had argued in his ‘exercise in

practical Hobbism’ (Jacob and Raylor, 1991: 205), the Proposition for Advancement of

Moralitie (1653), theatrical techniques could and ought to be used to engender positive or

negative passions in the audience: appetite or aversion for those objects that the sovereign

esteemed to be good or bad. Potentially dangerous and destructive passions – like the

‘fears and jealousies’ so often adduced by Parliament to justify its actions during the

Civil War – could thus be overcome by replacing them with passions that were

‘politically correct’ (Jacob and Raylor, 1991: 225).

The opportune sacralization of kingship in the ‘Prologue’, and the metaphors of

light and blindness, are intensified when, in a moment that harks back to the Jacobean

and earlier Caroline court masque, the King is addressed in person and directly

implicated in the presentation and its paratextual situation:

Ha! he is there himself. Pardon my sight,

My Eyes were dazled with Excess of Light;

Even so the Sun, who all things else displays,

Is hid from us i’ th’ Glory of his Rays;

Will you vouchsafe your Presence? You, that were given

10

To be our Atlas, and support our Heaven?

Will You (Dread Sir) Your Pretious Moments lose

To Grace the first Endeavours of our Muse,

This with Your Character most aptly suits

Even Heaven it self is pleas’d with the first Fruits.

(Tuke, 2000: 4)

Tuke’s prologue is not much more than a virtuoso setpiece of royalist self-ingratiation,

but it does set the scene for the ‘innocent’ carelessness, duplicity, wit, and ironic mixture

of genres so characteristic of Restoration aesthetics in general as well as of its court life

and the ‘Character’ of Charles II himself, who even in Dryden’s most celebratory poems

is almost consistently viewed as an actor performing kingship (see Gordon, 2002). ‘Sun’,

‘Glory’, ‘Atlas’, ‘Heaven’, ‘Muse’, ‘first Fruits’: Neoplatonism, Greek mythology, and

the book of Genesis are fused into a quasi-‘perfect union’ (Kenyon, 1986: 332) of

mutually communicating, if doctrinally and syntactically incoherent, metaphors.

The play’s rather too familiar love-plot is driven by a concern for elevated moral

sentiments. Two pairs of young lovers, Porcia and Octavio and Camilla and Antonio, see

their marriage plans thwarted by the girls’ brothers, Carlos and Henrique. The brothers’

objections are exposed as ill-founded in the course of the play, based as they are on a

series of misunderstandings and false information. Parallel to the high plot, the play

includes a bit of low comedy centered on Octavio’s servant Diego, who at the end is

forced to marry Porcia’s waiting-woman Flora. More to the point, the play is concerned

with circumventing a potentially tragic outcome of its plot by almost any means. Don

11

Henrique is depicted as a stern and hot-blooded Spaniard with a strict and severe code of

honour: ‘The Blemish once received, no Wash is good / For stains of Honor, but

th’Offenders blood’, he exclaims already in the first scene of Act I, with Don Carlos

reminding him that he is ‘too severe a Judge of point of Honor’ (Tuke, 2000: 4). The play

then argues for the necessity of avoiding premature judgements; it urges the control and

moderation of the passions of excessive honour and jealousy while seeking for a way of

preventing future ‘Love-disasters’ (5). While the entertainment it provides is markedly,

deliberately light and conventionally comic, its cultural and political purpose of speaking

out against radicalism and vengefulness is everywhere evident. Later revisions adapted

the play’s language to the fashionable, highly stylized speech patterns of heroic drama to

make it even more palatable to Restoration court culture and its public representation in

the city. With typical royalist nonchalance, the play develops into a plea for graceful and

gracious acts of oblivion.

On a more overtly political level, the play involves an exhortation to cool the

passions of religion and ambition, which are interpreted as stimuli for civil unrest and

rebellion. Discussing the rebellion in the Netherlands, the Spaniards’ servants in Tuke’s

play demonstrate a strikingly ‘modern’ understanding of international politics as

motivated by the mercantilist forces of trade and finance.

Geraldo. Pr’ythee, Friend, can these Dutch Borraccios Fight?

Ernesto. They can do even as well, for they can Pay Those that can fight.

Sylvio: But where, I pr’ythee, do they get their Money?

Ern. Oh, Friend, they have a Thriving Mystery;

They Cheat their Neighbouring Princes of their Trade,

12

And then they Buy their Subjects for their Soldiers. (9)

In the same discussion, Tuke carefully mobilizes existing anti-Dutch sentiments in his

English audience in order to downplay English religious differences as a motivation for

internecine conflict:

Ger. What a Gods name could come into the Heads

Of this People, to make them Rebell?

Ern. Why Religion, that came into their Heads

A Gods name.

Ger. But what a Devil made the Noble-men

Rebel?

Ern. Why that which made the Devil himself Rebel,

Ambition. (9)

This exchange revolves upon a denigration of religious experience as an obtrusive

and external force – ironically tagged ‘in God’s name’ to suggest a superior position of

judgement, the position of sovereign wisdom. It suggests a politicisation of Biblical

narrative and the Hobbesian reduction of such narrative to an illustrative physiological

discourse on seditious passions (‘Ambition’), which in turn involves a denial of the

relevance of religion for secular politics. All this is a familiar royalist strategy of anti-

puritan polemic, a strategy that Milton at this time was busy turning on its head (or feet,

depending on your angle of vision) in writing Paradise Lost, where he invoked Satanic

ambition as a sarcastic analogue to Stuart governmentality (see Davies, 1983: 3–8; Quint,

13

1993: 269). Tuke’s play winds up its plot by appeals to the virtue of honourable

moderation, setting ‘Reason’ (2000: 39) against erroneous and agitating passion:

[Carlos.] Good Cozin, I conjure you to restrain

Your Passion for a while, there does lie hid

Some Mystery in this, which once unfolded,

May possibly produce the means of making

That Reconcilable, which now seems Desp’rate. (37)

In these words spoken to Don Henrique, Carlos, whose name of course echoes that of

Charles II, rehearses the very terms of the restored King’s declaration of two years ago

(‘conjure to a perfect union’) that professed the intention of healing and settling the

country’s differences (Kenyon, 1986: 331–32). ‘Sweetly propos’d, Sir, an

Accommodation?’ asks Henrique, indirectly confirming the ‘sweetness’ of the Caroline

compromise that promises to ‘adjust this Competition’ (Tuke, 2000: 38) between the rival

impulses of honour, love, and revenge. The epilogue, spoken by the servant Diego,

explicitly confirms the parallel to the declaration of Breda. The style of the play, Diego

says, ‘is as easie as a Proclamation, / As if the play were Pen’d for th’whole Nation’

(41). This statement also asserts the public, hortatory and rhetorical nature of Tuke’s

play: it is addressed – even though this is proclaimed in a cagey ‘as if’ – to no particular

faction in the recent conflict as well as to the higher and lower orders alike, thus

conforming to Davenant’s educative ideals of teaching obedience to the common people

by means of stage entertainments. Strikingly, it employs the very young concept of

nationality to signify the common bond that transcends social and political differences.

14

The Adventures suggests a careful and moderate balancing of differences: ‘how

Nicely he does Honor weigh! / Justice her self holds not the Scales more Even’ (39). It

recommends forgiveness and the abstaining from bloodshed as a virtuous expedient to

solving social problems. Yet it also warns against the dangers of over-hasty reconciliation

and forgetting of these differences in the general rejoicing. The passionate Don Henrique,

who may stand for the puritan anti-royalist in this play, can still be a danger to the

achieved compromise of ‘union’ (Charles II) and ‘Redintegration of […] Amity’

(Cowley):

Carl. But let’s take heed, Antonio, lest whilst we

Are Joying in our mutual Happiness,

Don Henrique’s scarcely yet compos’d Distemper

Revive not, and Disorder us afresh:

I like not his Grim Posture; you know well

After a Tempest, though the Wind be laid,

There often does remain for a good while

A dangerous Agitation of the Waves;

He must not yet be trusted with himself.

(Tuke, 2000: 40)

Don Henrique realizes that he ‘must consent, […] or worse will follow’ because ‘Our

Strength, and Wisdom must submit to Fate. / Stript of my Love, I will put off my Hate’

(40). He thus accepts the Cowleyan solution of necessary and wholesome forgetting.

Tragedy is averted, and the end is peaceful reconciliation, again expressed by an image of

15

storm becalmed: ‘Thus end the Rare Adventures of Five Hours; / As sometimes

Boisterous Storms in Gentle Shours’ (41) – a topical echo of many panegyric verses upon

the return of Charles II, including Dryden’s Astraea Redux.

The ‘Epilogue at Court’ firmly places the play in the contemporary constitutional

setting of a restored sacral kingship, only semi-ironically referring to parliament in

feudalistic terms as the king’s ‘Vassals’, and rounds it off with a circular confirmation of

the royal will – without which the play would never have been written. It also, in

‘passing’ its audience like a law that is passed by parliament, aligns legislative, political,

and aesthetic practices of the Restoration in a relation of analogy:

W’have pass’d the Lords, and Commons; and are come

At length, Dread Sir, to hear Your Final Doom.

’Tis true, Your Vassals, Sir, may Vote the Laws,

Their Sanction comes from Your Divine Applause.

This Shining Circle then will all sit Mute,

Till one pronounce from you, Le Roy le Veut. (41)

Memory and forgetting, especially forgetting the puritan ‘Interregnum’, are

central to one of John Dryden’s most famous poems, Astraea Redux, which celebrates the

King’s return to England. Written a mere month after the King’s triumphal arrival in

London in May of 1660, Astraea Redux uses the King’s crossing from Scheveningen to

Dover as its narrative frame: taming the waves as a symbolic manifestation of the return

to order and justice. For the twenty-eight-year-old Dryden, who, only a year before, had

published an elegy on the death of Cromwell and had walked in Cromwell’s funeral

16

procession alongside Milton and Marvell, this change of allegiance must have been a

crucial biographical moment upon which he decided not to comment. Astraea Redux can

thus also be seen to constitute a personal act of oblivion for Dryden. It is a poem of

exorcism and forgetting as well as panegyric and celebration, a text that forcefully asserts

poetic authority over cultural memory, blending classical (mostly Virgilian) allegory with

rather daring allusions to Christian revelation. Mining both of these traditions as rich

resources for political metaphor, subtle puns, and copious imagery, Dryden offers a

provocative transformation of religious experience and reading habits into poetic source

material and political propaganda alike. Charles is compared to Jove and Aeneas with the

same elegant and cheeky verve as he is compared to Adam, Moses, David, and Christ.

Like Christ, Charles is said to be of ‘Heavn’ly Parentage and earthly too’

(Dryden, 1956: 29, l. 257); like that of Christ, the birth of Charles in 1630 had been

accompanied by the appearance of a star at midday.3 Yet while lesser panegyrists had

been content with interpreting this observation as a portent of ‘future Glories’ (Cowley,

cit. in Swedenberg, 1956: 232), Dryden draws an explicit parallel to the Star of

Bethlehem: Charles’s star is said to reappear in 1660, ‘Guiding our eyes to find and

worship you’ (Dryden, 1956: 30, l. 291). This Christmas reference is in line with

Dryden’s strategy of integrating the restoration of the monarchy firmly into English folk

customs. To revive old customs that the puritans had despised as superstitious was a

familiar royalist strategy.4 When Charles, entering London, ‘renew[s] the expiring Pomp

of May!’ (l. 285), he is as much a pagan prince of May as he is as a reborn Christ entering

Jerusalem.

17

Dryden repeatedly invokes the concept of the fortunate fall and other religious

tropes, like the traditional metaphorics of light against darkness and of physical blindness

against spiritual insight: ‘struck with rayes of prosp’rous fortune blind / We light alone in

dark afflictions find’ (Dryden, 1956: 24, ll. 95–96). We tend to identify this trope with

Milton but it also occurs in many royalist texts, as seen above in Tuke’s Adventures. By

using the puritans’ very own weapons, Astraea Redux thus denies puritan claims to a

special authority of interpreting contemporary political events in religious terms.

The specious frivolity of Dryden’s analogies and figures for Charles II was

probably intended as a well-calculated attempt at overcoming puritan restraint – a

strategy to which the references to springtime fertility, promising dynastic potency, are

perfectly attuned. Blending pagan and Christian allusions, the poem is busy wresting

religious semantics away from puritan culture and reinserting it into a royalist world-

picture at once festive and physical, neo-Elizabethan, neo-pagan, and deist.5 Heaven is

invoked many times throughout the poem (l. 13, 38, 40, 59, 73, 137, 145, 147, 196, 238,

and 318); other words with Christian connotations are ‘Pilgrimage’ (l. 54), ‘Miracles’ (l.

14, 241) ‘Fate’ (l. 13, 51, 321), ‘Destiny’ (l. 63), ‘blessings’ (l. 137, 141), ‘Martyrs’ (l.

186), ‘indulgence’ (l. 240), ‘th’Almighty’ (l. 262), ‘Vowes’ (l. 319), and verbs like

‘sinn’d’ (l. 207), ‘worship’ (l. 291) and ‘bless’d’ (l. 240). Particularly noteworthy are the

recurring references to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination: ‘Providence’ occurs twice

in connection with political events (l. 151, 238); a variant is ‘Heav’ns prefixed hour’ (l.

147). Without ostensible irony, the power of prayer in bringing back the king is invoked:

Yet as he knew his blessings worth, took care

That we should know it by repeated pray’r;

18

Which storm’d the skies and ravish’d Charles from thence

As Heav’n itself is took by violence. (ll. 141–44)

Dryden consistenly inverts the language of puritanism and the old regime. ‘Jealousies’ (l.

213), a keyword of Civil War parliamentarianism, springs up innocently in a simile

likening the English people to ‘early Lovers whose unpractis’d hearts / Were long the

May-game of malicious arts’ (ll. 211–12). The lovers’ ‘Jealousies’ are then found to have

been ‘vain’ (l. 213), which leads to reconciliation and increase of love. Dryden obviously

pursues a similar strategy of oblivion as Cowley had proposed in his Poems of 1656:

figuring citizens (in Dryden’s case: subjects) as lovers whose conflicts lead to a

‘Redintegration of their Amitie’. In the preceding couplet, Dryden alludes to the puritan

discourse of religious reformation and political reform, inverting it to describe the return

to monarchy as the outcome of a process of suffering, expiation, and regret (‘vertuous

shame’, l. 206): ‘But since reform’d by what we did amiss, / We by our suff’rings learn to

prize our bliss’ (ll. 209–10, my italics). Less subtly, his anti-puritan affect denounces the

intentions of the republicans as mercenary, intemperant and blasphemous (especially l.

186 on their drinking ‘to excess on Martyrs tombs’): ‘Religions name against it self was

made; / The shadow serv’d the substance to invade’ (ll. 191–92). Forthright theological

argument is carefully evaded in these lines, but the distinction between appearance and

reality (shadow and substance) insinuates that genuine religion is on the side of the

royalists and the established Church.

19

Furthermore, Dryden fuses storm imagery with a pseudo-historical glance at the

Ciceronian and Hobbesian state of nature, presenting the English republican decade in

terms of a return to the uncivilized past:

The Rabble now such Freedom did enjoy,

As Winds at Sea that use it to destroy:

Blind as the Cyclops, and as wild as he,

They own’d a lawless salvage Libertie,

Like that our painted Ancestours so priz’d

Ere Empires Arts their Breasts had Civiliz’d. (ll. 43–48)

In this act of anti-republican countermemory, one can virtually witness the poetic

invention of a British imperial and imperialist tradition. The poem’s royalist ideological

content is perfectly mirrored in its form, the ‘perfect union’ of subjects under a

patriarchal kingship and the hierarchical order of things poetically expressed in the well-

ordered and harmonious form of the couplet. In Dryden’s lines, civilization rhymes with

empire and London with Rome rather than Jerusalem.

In distinction to the royalist mainstream of the 1660s, Milton’s Paradise Lost,

first printed in 1667 but probably completed two years earlier, offers a dissenting

countermemory to the official politics of oblivion and an implicit repudiation of

Restoration cultural values – implicit because an explicit statement of purpose would

never have passed the state licenser. Only the second edition includes an indirect

statement, couched in aesthetic terms, in the prefatory note in which Milton defends his

20

use of blank verse as ‘ancient liberty recover’d’ from ‘the troublesome […] bondage of

Riming’ (Milton, 1957: 210).

Of course, Milton is not without his own idealization of a ‘natural’ order of

things, but these ideals are presented in terms of a procedural and forward-looking

‘reformation’ rather than a conservative and backward-looking restoration. ‘Reformation’

is a strategic key term in Milton that bears religious as well as civic and individual

connotations. It refers to a necessary human activity of reorientation in a world that has

radically opened up after the Fall. This process is not simply God-given or natural but

human, rational and political. In response to the royalist repression of the concept of

reformation, Paradise Lost does not simply consign irony, wit and compromise to hell

(cf. Zwicker, 1997: 192) – if it did so, it would be a much less fascinating text – but dares

to tell a far greater story of innocence, temptation, and fall, and even dares to reflect upon

the conditions of telling such a story in modernity. From its perspective, the failures and

shortcomings, but also the successes of the early Restoration period dwindle in

importance as merely contingent events that may be regrettable but have no connection to

human salvation. In other words, Milton’s epic looks backwards and forwards to a far

greater restoration than that of Charles II.

Whereas Astraea Redux uses Christian imagery (on a par with imagery derived

from non-Christian literary and folk traditions) to convey authority to a certain

interpretation of the events of 1660, this rhetorical structure is reversed in Paradise Lost

and Paradise Regained. In Milton’s epics of the fall and the temptation of Christ, the

political events of 1660 and their aftermath merely provide sarcastic sidekicks to

narratives whose cultural authority is, for Milton, self-evident. Milton does not need to

21

resort to superficial irony in order to place his political opponents in perspective. He

treats the Restoration and Charles II as if they were mere episodes, already past and

forgotten – and, one might add, not worth remembering either. By writing about the first

and last things, Milton makes the royalist panegyrics of the 1660s look insipid and

insignificant, exposing their exploitation of Biblical allusions as frivolous, excessive and

largely nonsensical. On a meta-poetic level, Paradise Lost is a critique of allegorical

thinking in images, a critique also of the ‘magical’ view of language so predominant in

many royalist publications. For Milton, the royalists resemble Satan in that they treat

their utterances as if they could bring about what they wish to ‘conjure’ (that crucial word

from the Declaration of Breda), illegitimately aspiring to the power of the divine Word,

whereas postlapsarian speech is in fact, according to Milton, subject to conjecture and

contingency. Meaning is a matter of individual or communal interpretation rather than

national proclamation. One of the themes of Paradise Lost is precisely the liberty and

responsibility of mankind in their actions and their speech acts, as the Father makes clear

in his speech in book III:

[…] Authors to themselves in all

Both what they judge and what they choose; for so

I form’d them free, and free they must remain,

Till they enthrall themselves[.]

(Milton, 1957: 261, 3.122–25)

This fundamental liberty to make one’s own choices includes the responsibility

for the reasonable and responsible choice of the right memory – necessary because since

22

the Fall, the homology between ‘true Liberty’ and ‘right Reason’ (Milton, 1957: 456,

12.83–84) has been lost. Of all people, it is the political loser, the radical Protestant

‘fall’n on evil days’ (346, 7.25) who recognizes and poetically shapes the potentials of

human self-reliance. The ending of Paradise Lost, which also marks a significant step of

beginning – namely, the beginning of human history –, observes Adam and Eve facing a

world that ‘was all before them’ (469, 12.646): a moment of spatial as well as temporal

openness that gives Milton’s epic a decidedly more ‘modern’ feel than other texts of this

period. Furthermore, his revisionary vision of the origins of humanity and history can be

seen to dovetail with an alternative political vision that, via Locke’s Treatises of

Government of 1689, was later to become the foundation of the Constitution of the

United States, constructed, as it were, on a countermemory to the British monarchy, an

act of recall that looked back to the short-lived English republic of almost one and a half

centuries ago.

Milton’s comparative modernity can also be gauged by the fact that, whereas

Dryden and others leave the classical homologies of the Virgilian epic intact, presenting a

prefabricated order as natural and eternal, if in need of reassertion, Milton presents the

search for order as an essentially open human process. Paradise Lost thus embodies a

type of cultural memory that, while certainly being partisan, does not sacrifice its

intellectual and spiritual integrity to merely tactical interests. Milton – at least the Milton

of Paradise Lost – does not mix metaphors according to party lines. The order of things

and of memory that this epic reflects and desires is far from prefabricated; it needs to be

constructed and is constantly contested – witness the increasingly doubtful and searching

23

speaker in Paradise Lost whose initially emphatic assurance gives way to increasing self-

consciousness, self-questioning and vulnerability in the final books (see Silver, 2001).

Dryden himself was among the first to realize the diagnostic and critical quality of

this text, if we may believe that the remark attributed to him on the first printing of

Paradise Lost is authentic: ‘that Poet has cutt us all out’ (Winn, 1987: 81). Even though

this phrase refers to card playing, the act of cutting also reminds one of the seventeenth-

century sense of rhetoric as a weapon, and of Dryden’s own later (1693) comparison of a

satirical text to a skilful hangman’s blade: ‘A witty Man is tickl’d while he is hurt in this

manner; and a Fool feels it not. […] Yet there is a vast difference betwixt the slovenly

Butchering of a Man, and the fineness of a stroak that separates the Head from the Body,

and leaves it standing in its place’ (1974: 71). We may conclude, therefore, that Dryden

felt the cut – he was, after all, no fool – but that he was tickled rather than hurt. He also

learned from it. When the crisis of the Stuart monarchy became much more severe in the

late 1670s and early eighties, Dryden remembered Paradise Lost and pursued much the

same strategy in Absalom and Achitophel as Milton had done in his epic. But this time

Dryden was to use a Biblical narrative explicitly for the sake of supporting the Stuart

regime, making a final attempt to resolve the contingencies of early modern politics by

means of calculated acts of oblivion: metaphorically, literally, and literarily ‘cutting out’

the enemy from cultural memory.

Yet whereas it is the privilege of rulers to forget history, the defeated are obliged

to remember and to reflect on the contingency of history. After all, things might have

turned out differently. The memory of the defeated is not used to legitimize the present,

but to construct the future: that moment of history which is to follow after the the present

24

distribution of power has been overcome. They construct what Jan Assmann (1992: 80)

calls a ‘counter-presential mytho-motorics’: remembrance is transformed into

expectation, a crucial characteristic of messianist and millenarian movements. On this

conceptual and historic foundation, it is possible to construct a distinction between

foundational and anti-foundational, between legitimizing and counter-presential texts

(and readings of texts) as two opposed and yet related cultural and political orientations

in early modernity. Assmann (1992: 71) describes these opposites as ‘cold’ vs. ‘hot’

memory: whereas the cold option wishes to close down on historical movement and

produce stasis, or order, the hot option is determined on producing change. For this

distinction, Milton and Dryden are certainly the most spectacular and well-known

examples. Milton transforms himself from a ‘cold’ foundational writer in support of

Cromwell into a ‘hot’ counter-presential writer in opposition to Charles II. Something

very similar happens to his younger opponent, Dryden, who is twenty years Milton’s

junior, when Catholicism finally loses its foothold in England with the arrival of William

of Orange in 1688, forcing the ‘cold’ Catholic into a ‘hot’ position of dissidence.

In the dialectic of formation and deformation of the past, traditions are built as

much upon forgetting as on remembering. In this light, the restoration of the monarchy in

England is not a monolithic reaction against the so-called Interregnum, but ‘a multiple

discursive reorientation’ that brings into play the very ‘terms by which a society must

revise the pressures of the immediate past’ (Kroll, 1991: 38–39). The Restoration is a

cultural moment, or rather a series of moments, characterized by the urgency of finding

acceptable versions of history amid competing political rhetorics and competing

foundational narratives: a paradigmatic situation in which legitimizing fictions of state

25

clash with countermemorial myths in a battle over cultural, political and religious

authority. In its diversity of opposing acts of oblivion and remembrance, literary

countermemory in Restoration England may serve as a useful reminder not only of the

general fluidity and the contested nature of cultural memory, but also of the critical

importance of gaps, loops and loopholes in shaping cultural constructions of the past.

Notes

1 Notable exceptions are Butzer and Günter, 2004; Behrens, 2005.

2 20 August 1666: ‘Up and to Deptford by water, reading Othello, Moore of Venice,

which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but having so lately read

The Adventures of five hours, it seems a mean thing’ (Pepys, 1972, 7: 255).

3 ‘It is observed, that at his Nativity at London, was seen a Star about Noon-time;

what it portended, good, or evil, we leave to the Judgment of the Astrologers’

(Phillips, 1660: 497). See Swedenberg (1956: 232) for further examples of

royalist eulogies that made use of the symbolic value of this meteorological

observation.

4 See William Cavendish’s Advice to Charles II, written in 1659, on the necessity of

reintroducing ‘Country recreations’: ‘all the old Hollydays, with Their mirth, &

rightes Sett upp agen […] May Games, Moris Dances, the Lord of the may, &

Lady of the May, the Foole & the Hoby Horse, muste not bee forgotten […].’

Cavendish expressly cites James I’s book of sports and invokes a nostalgic image

of Elizabethan ‘merry England’ for Machiavellian purposes: ‘These

Devertismentes will amuse the peoples thoughts And keepe them in harmless

26

actions, which will free your Majestie from Faction, & Rebellion’ (Cavendish,

1984: 64). The nostalgic revival of English folk customs is also evident in the

strategic publication of Robin Hood legends after the Restoration: Robin Hood

and his crew of souldiers (London 1661), Robin Hoods garland (London 1663).

5 Dryden’s reference to God as ‘Mans Architect’ (1956: 26, l. 165) can, I think, be

read as an indication of deism.

References

Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen

Gedächtnisses. München: C. H. Beck, 1999.

Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in

frühen Hochkulturen. München: C. H. Beck, 1992.

Bal, Mieke, Crewe, Jonathan and Spitzer, Leo, eds. Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in

the Present. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.

Beckett, Samuel. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder,

1965.

Behrens, Kai. Ästhetische Obliviologie. Zur Theoriegeschichte des Vergessens.

Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005.

Butzer, Günter and Günter, Manuela, eds. Kulturelles Vergessen: Medien – Rituale –

Orte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004.

Cavendish, William. Ideology and Politics on the Eve of the Restoration: Newcastle’s

Advice to Charles II. Ed. Thomas P. Slaughter. Philadelphia: American

Philosophical Society, 1984.

27

Cowley, Abraham. Poems. London: printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1656. Rpt. Menston:

Scolar Press, 1971.

Davies, Stevie. Images of Kingship in Paradise Lost. Milton’s Politics and Christian

Liberty. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983.

Dryden, John. Astraea Redux. 1660. Works, vol. 1, 1956. 22–31.

Dryden, John. ‘Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire.’ 1693. Works,

vol. 4, 1974. 3–90.

Dryden, John. The Works of John Dryden. Ed. H. T. Swedenberg et al. Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1956—.

Erll, Astrid and Nünning, Ansgar, eds. Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses:

Konstruktivität – Historizität – Kulturspezifität. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004.

Erll, Astrid and Nünning, Ansgar, eds. Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft.

Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005.

Funkenstein, Amos. ‘History, Counterhistory, and Narrative.’ Probing the Limits of

Representation. Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’. Ed. Saul Friedlander.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. 66–81.

Gordon, Scott Paul. ‘Endeavouring to Be the King: Dryden’s Astraea Redux and the

Issue of “Character.”’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 101.2 (2002):

201–21.

Halbwachs, Maurice. La mémoire collective. Paris: PUF, 1950.

Jacob, James R. and Raylor, Timothy. ‘Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and A

Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie by Sir William Davenant.’ The

Seventeenth Century 6 (1991): 205–50.

28

Kenyon, J. P. The Stuart Constitution 1603–1688. Documents and Commentary. 2nd ed.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 339–44.

Kroll, Richard. The Material Word. Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early

Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Love, Harold. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1993.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost.Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes.

New York: Odyssey Press, 1957. 173-469.

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews.

11 vols. London: Bell, 1970–1983.

Phillips, Edward. Chronicle of the Kings of England. London, 1660.

Quint, David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Shifflett, Andrew. ‘Kings, Poets, and the Power of Forgiveness, 1642–1660.’ English

Literary Renaissance 33.1 (2003): 88–110.

Silver, Victoria. Imperfect Sense. The Predicament of Milton’s Irony. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2001.

Swedenberg, H. T., ed. The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1956.

Tuke, Samuel. The Adventures of Five Hours. Restoration Drama. An Anthology. Ed.

David Womersley. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 1–41.

Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

29

Visser, Colin. ‘The Anatomy of the Early Restoration Stage: The Adventures of Five

Hours and John Dryden’s “Spanish Comedies.”’ Theatre Notebook 29 (1975):

56–69, 114–19.

Winn, James Anderson. John Dryden and His World. New Haven: Yale University Press,

1987.

Womersley, David, ed. Restoration Drama. An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

Zwicker, Stephen N. ‘Irony, Modernity, and Miscellany: Politics and Aesthetics in the

Stuart Restoration.’ Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain.

Essays Presented to Lois Green Schwoerer. Ed. Howard Nenner. Rochester:

University of Rochester Press, 1997. 181–95.

Ingo Berensmeyer is a Lecturer (Privatdozent) in English literary, cultural, and media

studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. His research interests are early modern,

eighteenth-century, and contemporary literature and culture as well as Irish studies. He

has recently completed a study of literary culture in seventeenth-century England entitled

Angles of Contingency. Address: FB 3 Anglistik, Universität Siegen, Adolf-Reichwein-

Straße, D-57068 Siegen, Germany. [email: berensmeyer@anglistik.uni-siegen.de].