ESC: English Studies in Canada

Anthony Raspa, ed., John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). lxxxix, 427. $65.00. John Donne’s problematical Pseudo-Martyr was written late in the 16071610 period, which R.C. Bald considered the author’s “most disturbed and anxious years” (John Donne: A Life, 235). This period lay midway between two watershed events: Donne’s secret 1601 marriage to the teen-aged Ann Donne, thereby undoing high hopes of Court preferment, and his conclusive 1615 ordination in the Church of England. Whoever joins the attempt to understand the jigsaw puzzle relationships of Donne’s life and works need come to terms with this period. One piece of the puzzle least understood has been the stubbornly resistant Pseudo-Martyr (1609-10), a work generated by the controversy over the Oath of Allegiance to King James I. Modern Donne scholarship has had good reason to shun this major work of Donne. Not all Donne scholars enjoy Professor Anthony Raspa’s necessary grasp of Recusant thought, moral theology, and canon law. His welcome edition of Pseudo-Martyr contributes significantly toward our understanding of a difficult jigsaw puzzle. Pseudo-Martyr has been much abused as the ugly duckling of Donne’s prose works. In its support of the Oath of Allegiance, the work is clotted with references to texts, events, and authorities unfamiliar to modern students of Donne. A tightly reasoned argument has few “literary” graces, and the pages contain some of Donne’s more inhospitable syntax. Few modern readers have been willing to muster even faint praise while damning it as opaque, tedious, and punitively long. Professor Raspa persuades us that, by constructing the real frame of the issues, we can make our way handily enough through the text. Of course, saying that this early prose work may not be an ugly duckling does not make it a swan. The modern publication of this little discussed work of religious/political controversy is timely. Seismic pressures from the New Historicism increas­ ingly have forced a more energetic look at texts uninviting to modem “liter­ ary” tastes. The New Historicism’s refusal to separate the literary from the political or “cultural” is nowhere more relevant to the Donne canon than to Pseudo-Martyr, a work undertaken in defence of Stuart policy against Papal intrusion in English political affairs. Written with the full approval of James I (even at his invitation if we take the unreliable word of Isaac Walton), the work contributed significantly to a debate between Papal sup­ porters and those loyal to James I. To suggest its personal centrality in the troubled years of Holy Sonnets and Biathanatos, just before the Anniver­ saries, is to merge the personal, the political, and the theological; it is also to work against the compartmentalization by literary genera that creeps into assessments of Donne. 474 Like Bald before him, Raspa takes aim at the bugbear that Donne’s ambi­ tion for advancement was the primary motivation for defending the monar­ chy. Raspa argues plausibly that Donne used an appropriate public oppor­ tunity to settle personal questions about his own ecclesiastical loyalties. The result is a sophisticated public argument from canon law advancing Donne’s own clearly conceived political philosophy. The basic motivation may be per­ sonal, but the form is a tightly constructed and copiously annotated public statement significant in the history of ideas. The intended readership was conscience-stricken English Catholics commanded by the Pope to refuse the Oath of Allegiance. Donne sympathetically met them on the same grounds he had occupied earlier but now rejected. His closely knit argument assumes a common background in canon law, which he had first studied intensively at the Inns of Court (1591-94) and continually thereafter. His central claim is that the Pope enjoyed “spiritual,” but no “temporal!” authority over En­ glish subjects. To obey the Pope by refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance, thus embracing a specious martyrdom, was to violate a Christian’s true re­ sponsibility. The nub of the matter in Pseudo-Martyr is obedience to proper author­ ities, temporal and spiritual. The urgent local problem in England is the Papal claim on ultimate authority in both domains, counter...