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Nathaniel Hawthorne explores nonnormative kinship structures in The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne successfully defends her right to custody of her daughter, Pearl, when the Salem magistrates threaten to place her for adoption. In this landmark novel of 1850, Hawthorne rejects the adoption plot as practiced by the domestic novelists he famously excoriated. His portrait of an adulterous mother in control of her motherhood stands in striking contrast to a body of fiction in which mothers tearfully relinquish their children to others. Through the trope of adoption—in this case averted—Hawthorne examines historical as well as contemporary configurations of family and explores the strength of bonds of blood and care necessary to form a stable society.

This chapter reexamines the controversy over readmission of the Jews in light of both the idea that England was Israel and the challenge of radical religion. The tense relation between Jewish messianism, Christian millenarianism, and conservative Protestantism appears in the controversy surrounding the Whitehall Conference Cromwell called in 1655. Controversy centered on the question of Jewish conversion, and disagreement about what Paul meant when he said ‘all Israel’ would be saved. The chapter analyzes writings by Menasseh ben Israel, Henry Jessey, John Dury, Arise Evans, Roger Williams, and Prynne. Presbyterians opposed readmission, believing religious radicalism had already contaminated England with ‘Judaism.’ Support for the Jews came from religious radicals (especially Quakers), who did not identify Israel with the nation. Margaret Fell wrote pamphlets to the Jews, hoping to convert them, yet others like George Fox and Dury expressed sharply anti–Jewish attitudes, showing the limits of toleration.

In seventeenth‐century England, masques inhabited two media, their dramatic occasions consistently delivered into a public culture of reading. This chapter details masques' material circulation in print culture: print and scribal reproduction, provenance, annotations, rights and reprints, marketing as sheet music. While bibliographic attention is crucial, it offers a starting point rather than a terminus for exploring masques' (or any texts') position in their culture. The chapter explores ways that scriptors address readers in the prefaces and margins, drawing examples from masques of Jonson, Campion, Daniel, Chapman, Shirley, William Browne, Thomas Jordan, Middleton/Rowley, and Heywood. It analyzes the hermeneutics of reading in two seventeenth‐century accounts: legal documents surrounding the prosecution of William Prynne, and an essay on the book trade by Newcastle bookseller William London, testing Habermas's theories of the public sphere against these early modern accounts.

This chapter examines how writers used history as a means to develop arguments either for or against the use of certain religious rituals. It begins with a brief discussion of the use of ancient Christian and Hebrew history as a source of reference, and argues that disputes about how this history was to be interpreted and understood were, in reality, discussions of authority and thus of politics. The major sections of the chapter deal with debates on two controversial elements introduced into the Church of England by Charles I and his loyal bishops: bowing at the name of Jesus, and the use of altars. Some writers maintained that altars were illegal because they were not used in the ancient church and were subsequently prohibited by English law, while others replied that altars were a key feature of the history of all Christian churches, and should therefore be maintained. These debates sharpened the terms of political disagreement over religion.

This chapter continues the examination of reactions to government policy in the reign of Charles I. It focuses on the sufferings and triumphs of the polemicist William Prynne, and pays particular attention to the political theatre enacted through his body and his image. This is a story of mutilation and martyrdom, victimhood and vindication, which mobilised large sectors of public opinion between 1634 and 1641. One of its high points was the public ritual burning of the frames from which Prynne's portraits had already been removed. Prynne's evolution from moral critic to public enemy, from godly polemicist to hammer of the Laudian regime, parallels the rising tensions and changing fortunes of the years from 1633 to 1641.

This chapter examines Ezra Pound's and J. H. Prynne's use of Chinese poetry to understand the problem of motivation—and the incentive structures that govern modern life. It considers how difficult poetry illuminates the difficulty of motivating social change. Here, Prynne's work, “Jie ban mi Shi Hu,” exemplifies a problem for readers of his work, and for literary and social theory: How and why should we read texts that make extravagant, even impossible demands? The question asks us to justify the value of particular texts and the values of the world that receive them. To put this point a different way, when we ask for reasons to accept a poem's invitation to do work, we should also ask what kind of world would have to exist to make the invitation seem reasonable, and whether we would want to live in that world. Similar questions are relevant to debates about utopianism.

In the adventures of the Lieutenant Nun Doña Catalina de Erauso, who cross-dressed her way out of a Spanish convent and into the New World, what we read, what we find, is a version of ourselves. When, acting as a “second” for a friend whose honor has been insulted, Catalina de Erauso kills her brother unknowingly and inadvertently, it seems possible to see her as a version of Willam Shakespeare's Viola in Twelfth Night, stepping into the shoes—and the clothing—of the brother she believes is dead. In England, the Puritan pamphleteer William Prynne was one of many who inveighed against cross-dressing on the stage as a transgression sure to produce immoral desire. The book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety describes the literary and cultural phenomenon known as a “category crisis” and a related manifestation called the “transvestite effect.” A study of female transvestism in early modern Europe by Dutch scholars Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van der Pol records the stage popularity of plays about “the Spaniard Catalina de Erauso and the Englishwoman Mary Frith.”

The proposal ramified in the previous chapter, namely that the forms of poems can act upon the conditions that they contain, is further explored and exemplified with particular reference to the speed of rhythmic and metrical movement. This is in turn shown to be inversely related to the dictional burden of a poem’s words. The chapter begins by returning to the example of Ezra Pound, and a recent reading of the late Thrones Cantos, a reading which canvases but finally rejects rejects analogies between the numbers of accountancy and those of its poetic metrics. Works by J. H. Prynne, Adrian Stokes, and Geoffrey Hill are then employed to promulgate a conception of poetic rhythm figuring the poet’s technique with regard to language as analogous to a central banker’s means for stabilizing the value of a currency.

This chapter uses the poetry and the poetic theorizing of two contemporary poets who are usually taken to represent opposed poetic movements, Don Paterson and J. H. Prynne, in order to discuss the perennial question of the relation between sound and sense in lyric poetry. Paterson's and Prynne's very different arguments concerning this relation—the former stressing the close bond, the latter preferring to focus on the history of words and their appearance on the page—are outlined and a critique of each is offered, and both are tested against examples of poems by the two poets. The result of this exercise is to show that neither poet's work confirms their theoretical arguments. In conclusion, a different account of the notion of appropriate sound is proposed.

This chapter considers the seventeenth-century debates over the readmission of Jews, when the English shifted from telling stories about Jewish houses to contemplating the accommodated Jew in earnest. During this period the link between Jews and materiality acquired new urgency in England, as the participants in Oliver Cromwell's Whitehall Conference pondered making a place, literally, for Jews on the island. This chapter examines both the appearance in England of a climate amenable to readmission and the resistance to such possibility, focusing on Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel's campaign for readmission through both polemical writings and his own prominent residence on the Strand, as well as Protestant polemicist William Prynne's collection of evidence favoring keeping Jews out of England. The chapter concludes by analyzing John Milton's position on readmission which he expressed in his 1671 play Samson Agonistes, with particular emphasis on his use of architectural figures to address issues of tolerance, Christianity, and Judaism. Instead of the house, however, Milton's preferred metaphor is Solomon's Temple.

In 1973, Donald Davie attributed the famous difficulty of Prynne’s poetry to its etymological ‘logic’. More recently, Prynne himself proposed that we read poetry with ‘mental ears’, listening for latent etymological connections. This chapter considers how etymology can be used to read Prynne’s poems, focusing specifically on morphological patterns such as the splitting of words across line endings and the repetition of roots or affixes. Such patterns are consistent across Prynne’s large and varied oeuvre; detailed readings are given here of The White Stones (1969), Unanswering Rational Shore (2001), and Kazoo Dreamboats (2011). These readings find that Prynne’s poetic language communicates on the boundary between meaningfulness and meaninglessness, where every word disrupts and is disrupted by its history.

Pearls That Were is an anomaly in Prynne’s oeuvre; it whole-heartedly adopts a Romantic lyric diction that is only used in a fragmentary way elsewhere in his poetry. Such a characteristic diction—a ‘lightness ready-made’, as Prynne once wrote—raises questions of inheritance, and there are many echoes of the Romantic poets in the collection. This chapter considers the different ways in which sustained and fragmentary lyricism (in both poetry and criticism) can avoid the manoeuvre that Clifford Siskin termed the ‘lyric turn’, which exploits a ‘lightness ready-made’. Instead, Prynne reclaims this diction by giving it back its historical weight.

What does it mean to say that Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon’s poetry accords a special value to obsoleteness, against the backdrop of the etymological fallacy? Obsoleteness demonstrates that language is always in contention, thus destabilising both the poet’s seeming control of language and their critics’ seeming penetration of it. But the speculation, difficulty, and pedantry that is the result does not abstract this poetry beyond use: rather, its appreciation of obsoleteness constitutes a new commitment to the uses of language poetic form leaves behind, turning etymological virtuosity into poetic virtue. By way of Derrida and a recent book on Auden by Andrew W. Hass, this study is brought full circle: coming to terms with obsoleteness is understood as a coming to terms with synchrony, which gave the etymological fallacy the momentum Auden, Prynne, and Muldoon carry through into poems that show us how language is both always beyond them and constantly being reclaimed.

Pastoral is a complex genre, with classical and renaissance inheritances that offer both the romantic simplicity of rural retreat and its opposite: urban encroachment, political engagement, broken-hearted discontent. This chapter concerns the updated pastoral poetics of Michael Haslam (1947-), poet, machine-worker, resident of Hebden Bridge and semi-detached member of the Cambridge school which flourished under the influence of J. H. Prynne from the 1960s. It seeks to understand Haslam’s engagement with the practical and political elements of pastoral, as well as its literary and folkloric aspects – thinking about noise, repetition and reflection as poetic strategy and generic stance. It argues, though consideration of lyric verse from Continual Song (1986) to Scaplings (2017), that pastoral – the poetics of nature and experience paradoxically dependent on a highly theorised and formalised literary construct – is not just the only lyric mode capable of negotiating between intuition and education, but that it provides for Haslam a compelling model for compositional practice. This chapter will represent the first sustained scholarly investigation of Haslam’s writing.

This chapter is about the night song, or nocturne, and the extent to which it has provided J. H. Prynne with a formal correlative for his nocturnal habits. It did so at a crucial moment in the poet’s career – the 1960s – just as he was composing the lyrics that would eventually find a home in The White Stones (1969). Those years witnessed significant strides in space exploration – particularly for the Soviet Union and for the United States – just as they did for political causes of one kind and another, including the Civil Rights movement. Prynne was attentive to such movements, with the result that the nocturne became in his hands a vehicle for thinking about the sorts of macro-historical developments that others (Ezra Pound, Charles Olson) had once explored in the epic form. The chapter is about the politics of cosmology, then, but it is also about the longer history of nocturne-writing. As well as touching on poets central to the evolving genre, the chapter looks to other media such as visual art and music (James McNeill Whistler’s paintings, Fryderyk Chopin’s piano writing) in order to assess the kinds of analogy that might help to thicken a description of the nocturne genre.