Literature Compass 3/3 (2006): 444–452, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00339.

Literary History’s Alternate Groove:

The Expectations of Periodization and
Seventeenth-Century Literary Culture
Margaret Ezell*
Texas A&M University

Abstract
This piece investigates the possibilities of periodization and its labels for the mid-
and later seventeenth century, historical decades which have always posed certain
problems for those in search of literary period names. The Interregnum as a historical
period has very clear boundaries, but supposedly little literary merit. The standard
literary histories of the seventeenth century emphasized continuity with earlier
Stuart court literary culture and suggested to us that literature, too, was defeated by
a Puritan aesthetic, the “Cavalier winter.” The Restoration is typically represented
as a clean break with the Interregnum. This “rupture” model creates the expectation
that literary culture comes back in from the cold and the countryside; it also
privileges certain forms of literature associated with the new court culture. This has
hindered the perception of such diverse contemporary writers as John Milton, John
Bunyan, and Aphra Behn as emerging from the same period. While the war years
and the Interregnum have been recently become the focus of literary study of
alternative radical voices – women’s religious discourse, radical political discourse,
and the creation of the genres of journalism – this essay looks at yet another
Interregnum literary culture, of the reading habits of the middle class, or artisan
consumer.“Literature” is a commercial commodity as well as a cultural one. Leaving
aside periodization as a means to assist in evaluating artistic merit, this essay instead
uses it to define a discreet slice of time to explore in terms of what was being written
and what was being printed and sold, in other words to provide a time frame for a
descriptive overview of literary production and consumption.

My title requires some explanation in both the technical and the literal
senses. Although most recent debate has focused on the perils of
periodization, I wish to play a little with the possibilities that the practice
might offer. Michael Leslie, in his editorial statement inaugurating the
seventeenth century section of Literature Compass points the way when he
observed, “Periodization always has something of the parlour-game about
it, a very enjoyable game not least because it enables us to ask and propose
answers to some fascinating questions.” What interests me is “expectations”
which, of course, influence what one sees, consciously or not, and how
expectations which are derived from the concept of a historical moment
© Blackwell Publishing 2006
 Literary History’s Alternate Groove . 445

affect the ways in which an individual author or a literary phenomenon is

studied. While much time and thought has gone in to reassessing the periods
typically assigned to different moments in British and American literary
history, for example the vexed terms “early modern” and “postmodern,”
the mid- and later seventeenth century has always posed certain problems
for those in search of period names.
To start with an explanation of my title: long ago and far away when
people listened to vinyl records, it was possible to have what were called
“alternate grooves,” which meant that in addition to the songs on the record
you paid for, you had the possibility, depending on where the record player’s
needle dropped, of having completely unexpected “hidden in plain sight”
songs which had been inserted by the artists, between the lines as it were.
I learned about it from a friend who had purchased Monty Python’s Matching
Tie and Handkerchief (1974) album and only discovered by accident a year
later that, significantly for this piece, it would play for you if you were lucky,
the “The Background to History,” where explanations of medieval open
field farming system by Prof. Tofts of the University of Manchester were
sung in the style of Bob Marley.1
In terms of the literary aspect, in a provocative and useful special edition
of Modern Language Quarterly published in 2001, Marshall Brown observed,
“Periods are entities we love to hate. Yet we cannot do without them”
(309). In the 2005 response to this edition, Micah Mattix, in my view,
somewhat oversimplifies the nature of Brown’s observations and the
contributors’ pieces by reducing them to “Brown claims [that periods] clarify
the literary accomplishment of an individual author. They help to make the
difference – the measure by which literary works are evaluated – apparent”
(685), but this is a useful starting point for my thoughts in that it highlights
the sometimes forgotten connection between periodization and aesthetic
evaluation, between the historical moment and theories of transcendent
literary value.
My own situation is that I work on a period which has a very clear
historical boundaries and a label but supposedly little literary merit. Unlike
announcing at a cocktail party that one is a Romanticist, or a Postmodernist,
the declaration of one’s chosen moment in history as the Interregnum, the
period in the 1650s in England under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, is usually
met by polite silence or perhaps well-meant pity. Quite often one’s audience
is unaware that the Interregnum indeed was a period in literary history. If
the Interregnum was a record, it would most likely be perceived as having
no grooves or perhaps just a dull drone, since the theatres were closed in
1642, not to reopen until 1660, the Puritan “roundhead” army was infamous
for its destruction of decorative and representational art, and Interregnum
law notable for its attempt to control self-expression.
This perception of the political regime’s hostility to artistic culture in
general may underlie the expectations shaping standard literary histories both
ancient and modern, I will give a brief survey of the existing treatments
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446 . Literary History’s Alternate Groove

before turning to what I hope might prove an alternate groove. The Interregnum

was traditionally treated as being a continuation of earlier seventeenth-
century literary culture, albeit under siege. Recently, an alternative
perspective on the period, one highlighting the significance of it for those
interested in radical discourse and the impact of print culture has emerged,
but I would also like to think about how we know what we know about
the period, as a discreet historical moment which invites us to rethink
narrative literary histories in general.
Texts from the 1640s and 50s were generally classified as being the final
flourishes of Elizabethan and Jacobean literary culture established at the
beginning of the century, most famously, metaphysical and cavalier. The
later part of the century, 1660 onwards, while given its own period name,
the Restoration, has typically been grafted on to the 18th century, even
before the invention of the notion of the charmingly very long eighteenth
century now believed to stretch from 1660 to about 1830. So, one problem
raised by the existing patterns of periodization is whether the Interregnum
even exists as a “period” in literary history worth separate scrutiny.
For expedience sake, I will be using only the broadest examples to illustrate
the ways in which this period has been dealt with in traditional literary
histories. The original Oxford History of English Literature grouped it with
the “earlier 17th century” which covered the period 1600–1660. The words
“Interregnum” or “Commonwealth” do not appear in the index or Table
of Contents. The author of that volume, Douglas Bush, interestingly, chose
deliberately to deny the expectations of his readers that it would be organized
around individual writers: “Doubtless many readers would prefer to have
chapters grouped around men rather than around types of writing and modes
of thought” (v), he noted in his introduction. Instead, the organization
stresses continuity using descriptive genealogy tracing successors – successors
of Spenser, of Jonson and Donne – and genre as it is defined in terms
of “thought” – religious thought, travel narratives, biography and history
writing, science, and scientific thought – concluding, almost inevitably with
“Milton.” Interestingly, he managed it in such a way that one might well
never realize a civil war or commonwealth period had impinged on
literary life.
Studies which shaped and followed Bush’s model emphasized the
continuity with earlier Stuart court literary culture and suggested to us that
literature, too, was defeated by a Puritan aesthetic. Writers viewed as
characteristic of those aristocratic modes such as Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling,
Shirley, the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, Katherine Phillips, and their
royalist contemporaries, pardon the Texanism, hunkered down to endure
the Cavalier winter as best they could until it was made glorious summer
again by the return of Charles II. The expectation generated by this model
is that the cavalier notion of courtly literary culture survived in exile and in
retreat, circulating in rural grumblings and manuscript texts – we expect to
find it defeated, dejected, and in despair. And certainly there is ample textual
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 Literary History’s Alternate Groove . 447

evidence for the “cavalier winter” – one need only think of Lovelace’s
poems and those of Katherine Philips, Roger L’Estrange, Lady Hester Pulter,
and what Peter Davidson has argued are the strategies of silence and indirect
comment found in the translations by Fanshawe and Denham from the
period.2
In contrast, the next volume in the Oxford series, 1660 –1700, done by
James Sutherland, stresses rupture, a clean break, historical discontinuity. This
account begins with the premise that “for the literary historian the year 1660
marks a clearer break with the past than he is usually able to find. The reigns
of Charles II, James II, and William and Mary form a well-defined period”
(1). Because of the insistence of the court as the generative force behind
literary life, the culture of the court is again the key to the study of the
period’s literature, although for Sutherland,“there are too many disquieting
features in the public life of the time not to suggest that among certain
sections of the community the moral thermometer was standing at an abnormally
low level. In the smaller England of 1660 the Court exerted a greater
influence for good or evil than it could ever do in the next century” (13).
This “rupture” model, of course, assists in the coherence of the “long
eighteenth century,” which has the Interregnum acting as buffer, holding
back the early modern period from entering into the modern. It seems so
clear – what could be more discontinuous from the milieu of Cromwell
and his dowdy wife than the court of Charles II and his rampaging
mistresses? This model, of course, as many have noted, makes dealing with
figures such as Milton awkward, given that Paradise Lost was produced and
read during the Restoration: as Jack Lynch has said succinctly,“to judge by
the most visible institutional mechanisms of literary periodization – the
anthology, the history of literature, and the survey course – John Milton
has come unstuck in time” (397). Lynch’s argument is that certain writers
such as Milton and Shakespeare were, in the course of the eighteenth
century, deliberately disassociated from their particular historical moment
as they were being universalized as transcendent literary figures. This
argument is a convincing and thought-provoking, but it does still leave adrift
other types of seventeenth-century authors, such as John Bunyan, who is
rarely presented as being an author contemporary with Aphra Behn and the
Earl of Rochester.
The rupture model creates the expectation that literary culture comes
back in from the cold and the countryside; it also privileges certain forms
of literature associated with the new court and its interests. In Sutherland’s
view, “since the drama was the dominant literary form all through the period,
it was almost certainly the most important single factor in establishing a
compact and conscious literary world in London” (26). Finally, what emerges
from this model is a sense of the coherence of the Restoration and its
function as the launching point for the genres and audiences that would
develop in the early eighteenth century. “For one reason or another,
therefore, the literary world of the Restoration period was more closely
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448 . Literary History’s Alternate Groove

organized than it had ever been before,” Sutherland observes, “patronage,

publishers, coffee-houses, and by 1700, literary periodicals all played their
part” (27). The implication is that literary circulation was being influenced
and encouraged in ways that the previous regime clearly, by its laws
controlling publishing, public meeting places, and recreations, supposedly
discouraged (27). The expectations for the Restoration, correct or not, are
based in part on the supposed absence or erasure of literary culture during
the Interregnum.
I would suggest that this model which concentrates on the drama, the
court, and London is still the dominant one shaping literary studies of the
Restoration, although critics of the early novel such as Paul Hunter have
caused serious challenges to this model of a uniform literary culture centered
on the court in the latter part of the 17th century. The B side of the record,
as it were, includes both the civil war years and 1650s, and has likewise
benefited from more recent specialized literary histories focused on the
English Civil War period, such as those by Nigel Smith, Thomas Corns,
N. H. Keeble, and Sharon Achinstein, as well as new anthologies by
Davidson and Joad Raymond making new authors and types of texts more
visible. This new attention to pamphlet controversies, on religious polemics
and discourses of prophecy, and on the public voices of women has led a
counter argument to demonstrate that there existed a different kind of literary
culture, what Smith argued so powerfully, that literature was alive and well
in the service of revolutionary expression, one that, in particular, opened
spaces for women and artisan writers and orators: “never before in English
history had written and printed literature played such a predominant role
in public affairs, and never before had it been felt by contemporaries to be
of such importance” (1). Focusing pamphlet literature and the newsbooks,
Smith cites critics such as Joad Raymond who have brought to our attention
again the importance of journalism and literary forms and to what the
historian Peter Thomas called “an information revolution” (qtd. in Smith
365).The historian Phyllis Mack turned our attention in Visionary Women:
Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth Century England to the astonishing number of
women in a range of social classes who participated in public discourses
through writing and preaching, whether prophetic discourse, pious
exhortation, or personal life writings. Texts of this nature, such as those by
Anna Trapnel, Eleanor Douglas, and Margaret Fell, have been fruitfully
explored in recent years by critics such as Elaine Hobby, Ester Cope, Hilary
Hinds, Mihoko Suzuki, Elizabeth Clarke, and Katherine Gillespie.
In this interpretive model, the war years and the Interregnum by extension
have been retrieved again for literary study as the fertile ground for alternative
voices: women’s religious discourse, radical political discourse, and the
creation of the genres of journalism. Surely this is sufficient! However, the
groove I would like to try and hit for the rest of this reflection on the state
of the field exists between the tracks cut by the traditionalists versus the
radicals, the so-called “third side.”
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 Literary History’s Alternate Groove . 449

My feeling that an alternative groove exists during the Interregnum period

comes out of my own surprise on reading social historians discussing the rise of
consumer culture of the “middling sort.” The Interregnum was fairly recently
and notoriously described by the eminent social historian John Brewer as a
period which resulted in the beginning of the eighteenth century being a
“cultural void” or vacuum in England: “The civil war, Commonwealth, and
Protectorate effectively destroyed a court culture in which the monarch stood at
the centre of a complex system of cultural signs and artistic practice intended
to represent his or her monopoly of power,” summarizes Brewer (342–3).
The Interregnum regime’s hostility to court and church as the sites of cultural
production, it is implied, essentially created a period in which literature
and art were silenced and were without a public audience, a view that
corresponds well with the traditional Cavalier winter model of literary
history.
As we have seen, clearly there existed spaces in which radical voices found
a format and an audience. But what of the middling sort, the majority of
Englishmen and women living during the 1650s, who were neither exiled
or impoverished cavaliers nor radical prophets and pamphleteers? Is there
an alternative way to think about their literary history? “Literature” is, of
course, a commercial commodity as well as a cultural one. If one leaves aside
the use of periodization to assist in evaluating artistic merit, and instead uses
it to define a discreet slice of time to explore in terms of what was being
written and what was being printed and sold, in other words to provide
a time frame for a descriptive overview of literary production and
consumption, a rather different sense of the period and its possibilities as a
field for literary history begins to emerge.
One of the advantages of electronic databases is the simple opportunity
to run searches and get numbers. Although no one would want to claim
statistical perfection based on ESTC or EEBO, often the patterns of the
preliminary findings when one combines multiple electronic sources for
searches composed multiple frames of reference are quite unexpected.3
Would we expect, for example, given the traditional understanding of literary
culture that in the twelve-year period from 1646–58 readers could purchase
at least 49 titles featuring the word “romance” in their titles? Would we
expect that the 1650s were indeed the period in which volumes of poetry
by most of the “defeated” cavalier poets – Lovelace, Herrick,Waller, Shirley,
Suckling – were published? Would we expect that the decade of the 1650s
was an excellent time for the publication of women poets working in a
variety of genres, including Anne Bradstreet, Anna Weamys, Margaret
Cavendish, An Collins, and “Eliza,” in addition to the numerous Quaker
and other radical women who originally published their prophecies in verse?
One of the more interesting features of these electronic resources is the
ability to track the output of a single publisher or printer. Running the name
of Humphrey Moseley suggests that for him at least, literature in a variety
of genres was still a viable consumer commodity during the war years as
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450 . Literary History’s Alternate Groove

well as throughout the Interregnum. Because of Moseley’s choices as a

publisher, readers during the late 1640s and the 1650s could read the first
complete folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, dramas by John
Webster, George Chapman, Philip Massinger, and Thomas Middleton, Sir
Walter Ralegh’s essays, a manual of devotion by Lancelot Andrews, along
with Biathanatos and the paradoxes by John Donne. Moseley also offered
readers the collected verse of Thomas Carew, William Cartwright, and Sir
John Davies, as well as the posthumous works of Sir John Suckling, and
Francis Quarles. Among living writers active during the late 1640s and
1650s, Moseley published Abraham Cowley, John Denham, Sir Richard
Fanshawe, William D’Avenant, Henry Lawes, James Howell, Richard Crashaw,
Henry Vaughan, Thomas Stanley, and James Shirley. Through Moseley,
English readers were exposed to continental romances in translations of
French, Italian, and Spanish works, including those by Gaultier La Calprenede,
Pierre Corneille, Madeleine de Scudery, Giovanni Biondi, and Francisco
Quintana. He also made available translations of Juvenal’s satires in 1646,
Seneca’s Medea in 1648, and selections from Virgil about the destruction
of Troy and the story of Dido and Aeneas, in 1656 and 1658. Because of
the range and volume of his literary publishing in this decade, one could
argue that it was Moseley who shaped the literary sensibilities of the reading and
writing population that would come of age during the Restoration.
It is also notable that the authors who dominated Moseley’s list were for
the most part associated with the Royalist cause, including Quarles, Howell,
Cowley, Crashaw, Suckling,Waller, Davenant, and Fanshawe. Milton stands
out as a notable political exception. Who was buying these texts? Presumably
not the prophetic writers such as Anna Trapnel or Arise Evans, nor the
members of the diggers and levelers, although one does recall that John
Bunyan lamented the time he wasted as a young man reading frivolous
romances and ribald stories.
Perhaps it was the same audience at which the very popular and frequently
reprinted texts with titles such as The Academy of Compliments, The Academy
of Eloquence, and the new Dictionaries were being marketed. The 1650s also
marked the appearance of an interesting genre of what I call literary guides,
frequently reprinted volumes such as The Academy of Complements,Thomas
Blount’s The Academy of Eloquence, Cockeram’s English Dictionary: or an
Interpreter of Hard English Words, Blount’s Glossographia: Or a Dictionary
Interpreting all Such Hard Words, Alexander Ross’s The Muses Interpreter, and
the enticingly entitled The Academy of Pleasure. Here I will be differing with
Adam Smyth’s recent study, which focuses on the Academy of Compliments
as a repository of lyrics aimed at what he calls an audience of “young male
gallants,” which it had evolved into by the 1670 and 80s: in the 1650s in
their earliest incarnations, in my perception, they were instead being
marketed for groups identified on the title pages and prefaces as “Ladyes,
Gentlewomen, Schollers, and Strangers.”

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 Literary History’s Alternate Groove . 451

One of the conventions of these types of volumes is that they are designed
to assist their readers in attaining at least the semblance of literary
sophistication. When one looks at the long titles of the “Academy” texts,
there is a pattern that in addition to poetry, dialogues, and model letters,
such texts routinely also include, for example as one sees in The Academy of
Pleasure, “A Dictionary of all the hard English Words expounded. With a
Poetical Dictionary.” The title page and its facing frontispiece of the 1650
edition of The Academy of Complements offers an elaborate engraving of groups
of women and men interacting on what can literally be described as a “social
stage” and its blurb runs:
The Academy of Complements; Wherein Ladies, Gentlewomen, Schollers, and
Strangers, may accommodate their Courtly practice with gentile Ceremonies,
Complementall amorous high expressions, and Formes of speaking or writing
of Letters most in fashion. A Work perused, exactly perfected, every where
corrected and inlarged, and inriched by the Author, with Additions of many
witty Poems, and pleasant Songs. With an addition of a new Schoole of Love,
and a Present of excellent Similitudes, Comparisons, Fancies, and Devices. The
Last Edition, with two Tables; the one expounding the most hard English words,
the other involving the most delightfull Fictions of the Heathen Poets.
This inclusion of a dictionary of “hard” English words as well as a dictionary
of classical mythology suggests a readership which was not raised in an elite
literary culture, but which has interest in acquiring at least its vocabulary.
Ministers and laws might discourage the publication of “merry books,” or
the display of interest in such matters, but clearly from the publishing patterns
of these types of texts throughout the 1650s, there was nevertheless a steady
market for literary entertainment aimed at those readers, male and female,
who were above functionally literate but were not “learned,” and who had
disposable income. They were probably Puritan and Parliamentarian in their
religious and political allegiances, but they still looked to these guidebooks
of aristocratic behavior for their notions of social and literary improvement
and entertainment.
It is outside the scope of this reflection on periodization and the
seventeenth century to explore several other aspects of literary life revealed
by simple searches, for example, the printers other than Moseley who were
printing verse and drama in the 1650s. Perhaps the other huge unexplored
area to be considered is what is revealed by such electronic searches about
publishing practices outside of London during this period, and the possibility
that indeed, while London may have been the center of literary culture, it
did not monopolize it in the way we have expected. Speaking personally,
my expectations about the literary culture of the Interregnum have been
rudely shaken by having the tools to investigate simply the commercial
products available for readers during the period. Will this significantly rock
the aesthetic standards by which this period is judged? I doubt it – but in
the same way I can no longer think about medieval open field plowing

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452 . Literary History’s Alternate Groove

without hearing reggae, I can no longer think of the Interregnum as a blank

spot, a cultural vacuum or a culture hostile to artistic yearnings.

Notes
* Correspondence address: Texas A&M University, Department of English (MS 4227), College
Station,TX 77843, USA.
1 The Monty Python Matching Tie & Handkerchief, Arista records (1974). The track concludes with

a rendition by the supposed Professor of Medieval Studies at Cambridge, Prof. Hegermann, of

the section of the 1313 Hungerford village rolls concerning the necessity of consent of the lord
for the lending of oxen, sung to what sounds like the chorus of the Beatles’“Hey Jude.”
2 Davidson liii; this anthology is likewise noteworthy in the ways in which its contents illustrate

the diversity of the responses to the civil war, including Davidson’s discussion of “other voices”
during the period, ranging from radical writers in popular genres to the importance of Latin as a
“literary first language,” linking England’s elite writers with those on the continent (lviii–lxiv).
3 See, for example, George Justice’s article (2003).

Works Cited
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Commodity, 1660 – 1800.” The Consumption of Culture 1600 – 1800: Image, Object, Text. Eds.
Ann Bermingham and John Brewer. London: Routledge, 1995. 342–3.
Brown, Marshall. “Periods and Resistances.” MLQ 62.4 (2001): 309–16.
Bush, Douglas. English Literature of the Earlier Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1945.
Davidson, Peter, ed. Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625–1660.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Justice, George. “The ESTC and Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies.” Literature Compass 1
(2003): Eighteenth Century section. Blackwell Publishing. October 2003. <http://www.
Literature-compass.com/viewpoint.asp?section=5&ref=315>.
Leslie, Michael. “17th Century Editorial.” Literature Compass 1 (2004): Seventeenth Century
section. Blackwell Publishing. October 2003. <http://www.Literature-compass.com/
viewpoint.asp?section=3&ref=33>.
Lynch, Jack. “Betwixt Two Ages Cast: Milton, Johnson, and the English Renaissance.” Journal of
the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000): 397–413.
Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth Century England. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1992.
Mattix, Micah. “Periodization and Difference.” NLH 35 (2005): 685–97.
Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven:Yale UP, 1994.
Smyth, Adam. Profit and Delight: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640 –1682. Detroit:Wayne State
UP, 2004.
Sutherland, James. English Literature of the Later Seventeenth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1969.

© Blackwell Publishing 2006 Literature Compass 3/3 (2006): 444–452, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00339.x