reviving ‘the cavalier poets’: coterie verse and the form of the poetic anthology

Reviving ‘the Cavalier Poets’: Coterie Verse andthe Form of the Poetic Anthology

Nicholas McDowell*University of Exeter

Abstract

In this essay I introduce the impressive literary circle which formed under the patronage of theyoung gentleman and poet Thomas Stanley in the Inns of Court in the mid-1640s, in the after-math of royalist defeat in the first civil war, and suggest that a reconstruction of the activities ofthis coterie can help us to define a new social context for Cavalier poetry. I contend that the cul-ture of poetic experimentation and competitiveness in the Stanley circle was a material conditionfor the exceptional lyric productivity and publishing activity in the late 1640s of several of thosewho have become known to posterity as the ‘Cavalier Poets’, especially Robert Herrick, RichardLovelace, Alexander Brome, and James Shirley. Recognition of the intimately connected lyricoutput of the Stanley coterie, which is focused on translation and imitation of classical, neo-Latin,and continental lyric, might help us to revive the study of ‘Cavalier’ poetry by identifying it withthe efforts of Stanley and his friends to expand English lyric capability at a time when the futureof English letters looked to them to be under threat. This insight into coterie poetics might alsoencourage us to rethink how we put together an anthology of early modern verse.

In a recent monograph which focuses on the early lyric and occasional poems of AndrewMarvell, I explore the efforts of writers and intellectuals of various political allegiance toreestablish structures of cultural activity and patronage in the aftermath of the first civilwar of 1642–46 and the dissolution of the Stuart court (McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance).In the early chapters I seek to reconstruct the activities of a little-discussed literary coteriewhich formed in London in 1646–1647, after the end of the first civil war, under thepatronage of the wealthy young gentleman, budding poet and royalist Thomas Stanley(1625–1678). In the monograph I am concerned to place the early Marvell in the contextof this coterie and its literary tastes and political affiliations. In this essay I introduce theOrder of the Black Riband, as Stanley’s circle apparently called itself, and suggest why areconstruction of the activities of this coterie can help us to define a new social contextfor Cavalier poetry. The early modern literary circle was ‘one of the essential materialconditions for the production of literature in an era in which patronage relations werecrucial and in which manuscripts were frequently circulated among coteries of sympa-thetic readers’ (Summers and Pebworth, 1). I will contend that the culture of poeticexperimentation and competiveness in the Stanley circle was a material condition for theexceptional lyric productivity and publishing activity in the late 1640s of several of thosewho have become known to posterity as the ‘Cavalier Poets’, including Alexander Brome(1620–66), Robert Herrick (1591–1674), Richard Lovelace (1618–57), Edward Sher-burne (c. 1616–1702), and James Shirley (1596–1666). ‘The Cavalier Poets’ was once aconvenient label for stand-alone anthologies of mid-17th-century royalist verse (Skelton,Maclean), and it remains the shorthand in large, period-wide anthologies for those poetsof the 1630s and 1640s who are seen as the central figures of the Caroline and royalistlyric tradition: Herrick, Lovelace, Sir John Suckling (1609–42), and Thomas Carew

Literature Compass 7/10 (2010): 946–953, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00752.x

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(1594–1640). The problem with the term, as Peter Davidson has pointed out, is that it‘identifies a school by allegiance and period, rather than by a distinguishing literary fea-ture’, and indeed there can often seem little to connect Suckling and Carew, who wereboth dead by 1642, with the poets active in the later 1640s other than a vaguely libertineattitude towards wine and women. As Davidson contends, ‘the category ‘‘Cavalier’’ andthe kinds of attention which the poets of the mid-century have achieved’ have been‘governed by ways of perceiving the period formed by historical fiction’, especially theromanticized 19th-century novels of Sir Walter Scott, ‘rather than by the examination ofthe surviving literature’ (Davidson, p. xl). In conclusion I will speculate on how recogni-tion of the intimately connected lyric output of the Stanley coterie, which is focused ontranslation and imitation of classical, neo-Latin, and continental lyric, might help us torevive the study of ‘Cavalier’ poetry by identifying it with the efforts of Stanley and hisfriends to expand English lyric capability through the encounter with classical and Euro-pean traditions at a time when, in the immediate aftermath of civil war and Parliamentaryvictory, the future of English letters looked to them to be under threat. This insight intocoterie poetics might also encourage us to rethink how we put together an anthology ofearly modern verse.

Having returned to England from a 4-year European tour in 1646, after the fall ofOxford, Thomas Stanley sought to preserve pre-war traditions of literary community andaristocratic literary patronage in post-war London. Among those who met under hispatronage in the Inns of Court were Stanley’s cousins Richard Lovelace and EdwardSherburne, the former professional playwrights James Shirley and Richard Brome(c.1590–1652), the teenage poet John Hall of Durham (1627–56) and the lawyer Alexan-der Brome, both at Gray’s Inn. Stanley’s uncle William Hammond (c. 1614–54), an out-standing classical scholar and decent if little-read poet, seems to have lived with Stanleyin the Middle Temple. Robert Herrick also associated with the circle after he wasdeprived of his living in Devon and returned to London in 1647, judging by referencesmade by Herrick’s friend Sherburne in correspondence with Anthony Wood and by Her-rick’s poem to Hall in Hesperides (1648), ‘To his worthy friend M. John Hall, Student ofGray’s Inn’. Herrick’s poem hints at the conviviality and drinking that was involved inmeetings of the coterie in the Inns of Court:

Tell me young man, or did the Muses bringThee lesse to taste, than to drink up their spring;That none hereafter sho’d be thought, or beA Poet, a Poet-like but Thee.What was thy Birth, thy starre that makes thee knowne,At twice ten yeares, a prime and publike one? (Moorman, 292)

Herrick seems to have lived off the charity of a number of patrons in London between1647 and 1660, but the only name we can be certain of is Mildmay Fane (Cain). Thereis no mention of Stanley in Hesperides, but the friendship with Sherburne, the poem toHall and Herrick’s appearance beside Stanley, Lovelace, Shirley, Richard Brome, andAlexander Brome in the commendatory poems for the 1647 folio of the plays of Beau-mont and Fletcher, edited by Shirley, suggest that Herrick had some association withStanley (McDowell, ‘Herrick’). Other prominent royalist writers such as John Denham,John Berkenhead, and Charles Cotton the younger had personal and literary links withStanley and his circle, if probably not patronage relations.

In a long poem written after the Restoration but never published, ‘A Register ofFriends’, Stanley recalled with great affection the social and literary activities of the core

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of the circle: Sherburne, a Catholic who had fought for the King the Middle Templeand whose rooms were adjacent to Stanley’s; Lovelace, a renowned courtier who hadreturned to England in 1647 from fighting in Holland and France (and so, like Stanleyand Marvell (1621–78), been absent during most of the fighting in the first civil war);Shirley, another Catholic who had lost his living both on the professional stage and atcourt, where he had been one of the Queen’s poets, and the precocious Hall, whomStanley first met in Durham when Hall was 14 and Stanley 16, and who was rememberedby Stanley as the ‘early blossom of the wandering north’.1 As with the ‘scribal communi-ties’ of early Stuart England described by Harold Love, Stanley’s literary circle was com-prised of kinsmen and friends who gathered in an enclosed social environment to listento and read each other’s poetry and to share manuscript materials. The Inns of Courtwere traditionally places where, in Love’s words, ‘alliances between groups of the risingyoung could be formed which might persist throughout an entire lifetime or professionalcareer.’ Writing and ‘its controlled circulation’ performed a central role in creating such‘new communities within the community’ (Love, 218–19; see also 224–9). IndeedStanley seems to have been consciously seeking to preserve this form of private literaryculture in a time of war and perceived hostility to poetry in the public world. As he putsit in his eulogy on Shirley in ‘A Register of Friends’:

Then oft, withdrawne from the dull ears of those,Who licens’t nothing but rebellious Prose,Me with those pleasures thy kind Muse supply’dWhich to it selfe the sullen Age deny’d. (Crump, 358)

Stanley only explicitly politicized the activities of his coterie in retrospect (and even thenhe kept his views in manuscript). However, the background of his friends and the senti-ments they express in their own poetry and in commendatory poems indicate that thecoterie tended to conceive of itself from its inception in political as well as poetic terms –although politics was not the deciding factor of membership, as John Hall was writing Par-liamentarian newsbooks in 1648 and would go on to become one of the three leadingpropagandists of the Commonwealth regime, alongside Milton and Marchamont Nedham(McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, chap. 2). Most of the members of Stanley’s coterie had,however, lost their position at court or source of financial support as a consequence of thecivil war. Lovelace, for example, was notoriously poverty-stricken by the late 1640s, duein part, it seems, to having assisted financially the royalist cause: according to AnthonyWood, ‘after the murther of K. CH. I’, Lovelace, having ‘consumed all his Estate’ in theroyalist cause, ‘became very poor in body and purse, was the object of charity, went inragged Cloaths (whereas when he was in his glory he wore Cloths of gold and silver) andmostly lodged in obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of Beggars’ (Wood, ii.146–7). In Wood’s account, the handsome Lovelace, once the flower of Cavalierism andgolden adornment of the Caroline court, becomes a personification of the tragic declineand disintegration in the 1640s and 1650s of a once glorious Stuart culture.

So on his return to London in 1646–7 Stanley quickly gathered around him some ofthe most talented writers of the day: some were established poets and playwrights in needof support; others were, like Stanley himself, younger men embarking on a literary careerin difficult times. Stanley apparently encouraged his literary friends and clients to displaytheir grief at the King’s defeat by wearing a black armband. We know about the Orderof the Black Riband from cryptic poems on the topic by Shirley and John Hall, and froma 1647 letter written by Hall which discusses Stanley’s ‘design Armilla Nigra’. Shirley’s‘On a black Ribband’ was published in his 1646 Poems:

948 Reviving ‘the Cavalier Poets’


This mourning bracelet is to me aboveAll Ribbands, which the Robinhoods of loveAre trickt withal, who but present at CourtWhich are the Race-nags for the Ladies sport.

Give me that sable Ornament, that mayVye honour with the Nova Scotia:Or Crimson Bath; and still reserv’d to th’KingMy reverence, who is the soul, and springOf English Honour, for the Garters sake,I should not mourn, although the blue were black,And ‘tis within his brest, when Charles will pleaseTo create one of black, to outshine these,For what bold Antiquaries will deny,Of Colours, Sable the first Heraldry?

All Orders have their growth, and this, when sent,To me, had something that was glorious meant,From one, whose blood writes noble, but his mindAnd souls extraction leave that stream behind:And this who knowes in calmer time may thrive,And grow into a Name, if Arts survive?

Til when, to this black Arme-let, it shall beMy Honour, to be call’d a Votary. (Shirley, Poems, 52–3)

The black riband instead signifies an ‘Order’ of greater glory and honour than even thoseof the Bath and the Garter, although Charles I, if he so wished, might ‘create one ofblack, to outshine these’ – perhaps a suggestion that Charles himself might eventuallybecome the patron of the Black Riband. The Order of the Black Riband to which thepoet has been inducted in Shirley’s verses, however, is founded by one ‘whose bloodwrites noble’ (my emphasis); moreover, the poet associates the possible future fame of theBlack Riband with the revival of the arts in ‘calmer time’: Shirley’s poem apparentlycelebrates, if obscurely, his incorporation into the literary circle under Stanley’s patronagein London between the first and second civil wars.

In his 1647 Poems Hall includes a Latin poem, ‘Armilla Nigra’, in which, like Shirley,he compares favourably the Order of the Black Riband with the Order of the Garter andpraises the armband as a symbol of potentially glorious future enterprises by members ofthe Order. He then turns to a particularly brilliant poet whom he addresses as Sol juvenemand who is eulogized as the crowning glory of the Order (l. 15). The opacity of Shirley’spoem and Hall’s use of Latin suggests that Stanley wished to keep the order secret – aswith Shirley’s poem, Hall’s ‘Armilla Nigra’ does not mention Stanley. However, Hall’scommendatory poem for Stanley’s 1647 Poems and Translations, which was also includedin Hall’s Poems, does link Stanley directly to the Black Riband and the Order with poeticcomposition. In praising the innocence of Stanley’s love lyrics, Hall reworks lines from‘Armilla Nigra’: ‘Nay, vestals might as well such sonnets hear, ⁄As keep their vows andthy Black Ribband wear’.2 The clinching evidence comes in a letter dated 20 April 1647,to the intelligencer and educational reformer Samuel Hartlib, in which Hall refers toStanley’s lack of interest in becoming involved in a proposed ‘Academy of Ingenuitys forHumane Learning’ in London because Stanley himself ‘hath a design Armilla nigra andforsooth will not be a q€iwaspi1 [renegade]’.3

Despite the mourning for a lost culture signified by the badge of the black riband,Stanley similarly responded to royalist defeat by seeking to maintain and develop forms ofcultural activity in the post-war, post-courtly world. As we have seen, Stanley proudly



remembered his circle as having maintained pre-war traditions of literary sociability andpoetic collaboration in a ‘sullen Age’ and ‘barbarous Times’ (Crump, 357). Stanley him-self produced an impressively wide range of imitations and translations of classical andcontinental verse. Moreover, this activity was not bounded by the scribal community ormanuscript circulation: much of Stanley’s work appeared in print. Stanley’s Poems andTranslations was printed in 1647 ‘for the Author and his Friends’, who gathered in theprefatory poems; the expanded 1651 edition included the first complete English transla-tion of the anacreontics, the Greek poems on love, drinking and mortality then ascribedto Anacreon, and a rendering of the majority of the Basia sequence by the Dutch neo-Latin poet Johannes Secundus (1511–1536), much admired by Ben Jonson. Stanley’s1651 Poems and Translations includes translations of an impressive array of continentalpoets – Marino and Guarini among the Italians, Lope De Vega and Montalvan amongthe Spanish, Saint Amant and Theophile De Viau among the French. Stanley workedwith Sherburne, who had been taught by the famous classicist Thomas Farnaby, on trans-lations of Seneca; in 1648 appeared Sherburne’s Medea, with a commendatory poem byStanley, and Answer to Lucilius his Quaere: why good men suffer misfortunes seeing there is adivine providence, dedicated to the imprisoned Charles I. Stanley was probably best knownin the Restoration and 18th century for his four-volume History of Philosophy, publishedbetween 1655 and 1662, and his 1663 edition of Aeschylus, with the Greek text of eachplay, Latin translation, and detailed textual and explanatory notes. The foundations forthese monumental works of scholarship were laid in the late 1640s, when Stanley and hisfriends undertook in the Inns of Court what has been described as a ‘systematic pro-gramme of study and translation’ (Revard, ‘Thomas Stanley’, 159).

Stanley’s publication of his translations of poets such as Secundus and the continentalwriters was a demonstration of the potential for poetry and literary studies to revive andeven develop in England in the aftermath of war. At the same time members of Stanley’scircle were publishing their own vernacular verse: in the 5 years from Stanley’s return toEngland, Shirley’s Poems appeared in 1646, with a commendatory poem from Stanley at itshead; Hall’s Poems were published at the beginning of 1647, including ‘Armilla Nigra’ andthree poems addressed to Stanley; Lovelace’s Lucasta was registered for publication in Feb-ruary 1648 but did not appear until May or June 1649; Herrick’s Hesperides was publishedin 1648, and Sherburne’s Poems and Translations appeared in 1651. This collection of lyricverse that appeared from poets associated with the Black Riband in a 5-year period wouldhold its own with any in the English language from any era. As we have seen, the Stanleycoterie was working on a range of imitations and translations of classical, neo-Latin, andcontinental amatory verse in this period, with Stanley himself concentrating on the anacr-eontics and Secundus’s Basia sequence. In his commendatory poem to the 1647 volume,Hall drew attention to Stanley’s reinvigoration of ancient traditions of love poetry:

Thee, noble soul! Whose early flights are farSublimer than old eagles’ soarings are,Who light’st love’s dying torch with purer fire,And breath’st new life into the Teian lyre [.] (Saintsbury, ii. 198, ll. 15–18)

Anacreon and Horace are two of the presiding classical spirits in Hesperides, in whichfestivity, drinking, and sexual indulgence provide an escape from the harsh public worldof war, but also a distraction from the certainty of mortality, as in ‘Anacreontike’:

Born I was to be old,And for to die here.



After that, in the mouldLong for to lye here.

But before that day comes,Shall I be Bousing;

For I know, in the TombsThere’s no Carousing. (Moorman, 195)

Or as Stanley starkly puts it in the final line of his version of Anacreontea 36: ‘There’s nodrinking in the grave’ (Crump, 91). Hesperides is full of carpe diem poems, most famously‘To Virgins, to make much of Time’ and ‘Corinna’s going a Maying’. The opening poemof Shirley’s 1646 Poems, ‘Cupids Call’, urges country swains to bring Cupid’s ‘wantonharvest home’ and use their ‘amorous sickles’ to reap maidenheads that ‘dangle on theirstalks, ⁄ Full blown’. The invocations in Lovelace’s Lucasta of drinking, friendship, andunabashed sexuality are indebted to Anacreon, moderated by the more restrained Horace:one of Lovelace’s best-known poems, ‘The Grass-hopper. To My Noble Friend MrCharles Cotton. Ode’ blends anacreontic 43 with Horace, Ode 1. 9. In his (much morefaithful) version of Anacreontea 43, Stanley retained Lovelace’s title of ‘The Grasse-hop-per’, perhaps, as Stella Revard speculates, ‘paying tribute to his cousin’s earlier adapta-tion’. Sherburne, Alexander Brome, and Charles Cotton the younger (1630–1687), sonof the addressee of Lovelace’s ‘The Grass-hopper’ and on the fringes of the Black Riband,all composed anacreontics in the late 1640s and 1650s.4

Similarities between several of the poems in Hesperides and Stanley’s versions of Anacr-eon suggest one poet influenced the other or that they collaborated. Compare forinstance Stanley’s anacreontic 40, ‘The Bee’, ll. 7–8 (‘A wing’d Snake hath bittenme, ⁄Called by Countrymen a Bee’), with Herrick, ‘The wounded Cupid’, ll. 8–9 (‘Awinged Snake has bitten me ⁄Which Country people call a Bee’). The resemblance iscomparable to many instances of poetic collaboration, competition, and exchangebetween Stanley and Sherburne. Sherburne included, uncredited, Stanley’s version ofAnacreontea 28 in his own Poems and Translations. Stanley translated a lyric by GiovanniBattista Marino (1569–1625), ‘On a Violet in her Breast’; Sherburne translated the samepiece as ‘Violets in Thaumantia’s Bosome’, making notes in a copy of Marino presentedto him by Stanley. But while in Stanley’s version the drooping violet ‘Doth smilinglyerected grow, ⁄Transplanted to those hills of snow’, in Sherburne’s the flowers suffer thesame fate as the lover: ‘What boots it to have escap’d winter’s breath, ⁄To find, like me,by flames a sudden death?’ (Crump, 92, 243; Moorman, 50; Sherburne, 22) The two lyr-ics are companion pieces that respond to one another. Sherburne’s annotated copy ofMarino, Della Lira Del Cavalier Marino (Venice, 1638), a presentation copy from Stanley,is in the British Library (BL 1063. a. 22). The likelihood of shared literary interest, col-laboration, and even competition between the poets in the Black Riband is heightened ifwe focus on a single neo-Latin love lyric: between 1646 and 1651 Stanley, Herrick,Sherburne, and Shirley all published imitations of Secundus’s Basium 6, in which thespeaker begs his mistress for multiple kisses in exchange for his one. As Revard hasconvincingly argued, the ‘existence of different versions of the same poem by Secundussuggests that the poets of the circle were serving as audience and respondents to oneanother. Perhaps some kind of poetic competition within the circle sparked the composi-tion.’5 Whereas in pre-war England a literary circle such as Stanley’s would have circu-lated their work only in manuscript, in the post-war world Stanley and his friendssignificantly viewed print as a way of preserving their work and communicating with adispersed cultural community. By the end of the first civil war in 1646, attitudes towardsthe relationship of lyric poetry to the print medium had changed. Instead of being



‘a potential embarrassment to royalist writers’ because of its association with the profes-sional who wrote for a living, the printed book became ‘a safe haven for their work anda sign of political resistance to the authority of those who had defeated the king’s forces’(Marrotti, 259).

What might a recovery of the literary activities and interests of the Stanley circle meanfor the way we approach the ‘Cavalier Poets’? If we are to call the Stanley circle ‘Cava-lier’, then we should perhaps think more in terms of the title of Marino’s volume, DellaLira Del Cavalier Marino, than Walter Scott’s novels and identify English ‘Cavalier poetry’very precisely with the imitation of neo-Latin and continental lyric forms. This wouldallow us to escape the restrictions imposed upon us by the current use of ‘Cavalier’ as astatic marker of political allegiance – one which excludes poets as significant as Marvelland as interesting as John Hall because they wrote for Commonwealth and Protecotrate –and instead to identify ‘Cavalier’ in terms of a distinguishing literary feature of the workof a number of writers who were known to each other in this period and were consciousof their common involvement in a literary enterprise (see McDowell, ‘Marvell Amongthe Cavaliers’). More specifically, we might also have to reconsider some arguments fordating poems by Herrick: while Herrick undoubtedly wrote the great majority of thepoems in Hesperides before 1640, perhaps, in the light of the culture of classical imitationin the Stanley circle, not as many as has recently been argued (Creaser). Finally, it mightbe more poetically revealing and historically accurate to compile an anthology of ‘Cava-lier’ verse that made Stanley’s Order of the Black Riband its centrepiece, despite the factthat the group seems only to have come together between the end of 1646 and the regi-cide at the beginning of 1649. By placing the poems of the group beside each other –Stanley’s ‘On a Violet in her Breast’ and Sherburne’s ‘Violets in Thaumantia’s Bosome’;Stanley’s ‘The Bee’ and Herrick’s ‘The wounded Cupid’; Stanley’s ‘The Grasse-hopper’and Lovelace’s ‘The Grass-hopper’ – we could see how the culture of imitation and com-petition operated in the coterie, and how classical, neo-Latin and continental lyric versewas imported into English culture by ‘Cavaliers’ who have for too long been misleadinglystereotyped as the exemplars of a very English type of aristocratic and unserious ease.

Short Biography

Nicholas McDowell is Associate Professor of English at the University of Exeter, wherehe has worked since 2001. Previously he was a Research Fellow of Fitzwilliam College,Cambridge (1998–2000), and he has held visiting positions at the Institute for AdvancedStudy, Princeton (2009), and the Centre for Research into the Arts, Social Sciences andHumanities, Cambridge (2011). He works in the fields of literary, cultural, and intellec-tual history, c. 1580–1740. He is the author of The English Radical Imagination: Culture,Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford University Press, 2003) and Poetry and Alle-giance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford University Press,2008); and the editor, with Nigel Smith, of The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2009), and, with, N. H. Keeble, of The Oxford Complete Works of John Mil-ton. Volume VI: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Tracts (Oxford University Press, 2011).He is one of the Associate Editors of the Blackwell Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Lit-erature, 3 vols. (2011). In 2007 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize by the Lever-hulme Trust: the Prizes are awarded to ‘outstanding scholars (normally under the age of36) who have made a substantial and recognized contribution to their particular field ofstudy, recognized at an international level, and whose future contributions are held to beof correspondingly high promise’.



Notes

* Correspondence: Department of English, University of Exeter, Queen’s Building, Queen’s Drive, Exeter EX44QH, UK. Email: [email protected]

1 ‘A Register of Friends’ was composed sometime between 1675 and Stanley’s death in 1978. See Crump, p. lviiii,356.2 ‘To his Honoured Noble Friend, Thomas Stanley, Esq., on his Poems’, in Saintsbury, ii. 198, ll. 21–2; compare‘Armilla Nigra’, in Saintsbury, ii. 206, ll. 12–14.3 John Hall to Samuel Hartlib, 20 April 1647, in Hartlib Papers on CD-ROM, 60 ⁄ 14 ⁄ 32A–33B.4 Sherburne, Poems and Translations, 107, 186; Brome, Songs, 26–7, 67–9; Cotton, Poems, 88, 217; Revard, ‘Tho-mas Stanley’, 161. On Cotton the Younger and the Black Riband, see McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 29. For acommentary on Anacreon in ‘Cavalier’ verse, see Scodel, 218–36.5 Revard, ‘Thomas Stanley’, 168. See also Revard, ‘Translation and imitation’. Shirley’s version appeared first, inhis Ovidian narrative Narcissus, 18, followed by Herrick’s ‘Kissing Usurie’; Stanley’s first appeared in his 1651 Poemsand Translations, 124, and Sherburne’s ‘Love’s Arithmetick’ was included in his Poems and Translations, 100.

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University Press, 1998.Hartlib Papers on CD-ROM: A Complete Text and Image Database of the Papers of Samuel Hartlib (c.1600–1662). Ann

Arbor and Godstone: UMI, 1995.Love, Harold. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.Maclean, Hugh (ed.). Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets. New York: W. W. Norton, 1974.Marrotti, Arthur F. Print, Manuscript, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.McDowell, Nicholas. Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2008.——. ‘Herrick and the Order of the Black Riband: Literary Community in Civil War London and the Publication

of Hesperides (1648).’ Community and Conviviality in Herrick and His Contemporaries. Ed. Tom Cain, and RuthConnolly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming a.

——. ‘Marvell Among the Cavaliers.’ The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution. Ed. Laura LungerKnoppers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming b.

Moorman, F. W. (ed.). Poetical Works of Robert Herrick. London: Oxford University Press, 1921; rpr. 1936.Revard, Stella. ‘Translation and Imitation of Johannes Secundus’s Basia During the Era of the Civil War and Pro-

tectorate in England.’ Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Abulensis: Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Neo-LatinStudies. Temp, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000. 553–61.

——. ‘Thomas Stanley and ‘‘A Register of Friends’’.’ Literary Circles and Cultural Communities. Eds. C. Summers,and T. Pebworth. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000. 148–72.

Saintsbury, Charles (ed.). Minor Poets of the Caroline Period. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905–21.

Scodel, Joshua. Excess and the Mean in Early Modern Literature. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,2002.

Sherburne, Edward. Poems and Translations Amorous, Lusory, Morall, Divine. London, 1651.Shirley, James. Narcissus. 1646.Skelton, Robin. The Cavalier Poets. London: Longmans, 1960.Stanley, Thomas. Poems and Translations. 1647.——. Poems and Translations. 1651.Summers, Claude J., and Ted-Larry Pebworth (ed.). Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England.

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reviving ‘the cavalier poets’: coterie verse and the form of the poetic anthology

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