Restoration literature has so often been treated by the academy as the redheaded stepchild of the long eighteenth century that Gillian Wright's new study focusing on English and Irish poetry from 1660 to 1700 is especially welcome and timely. It is also welcome for another reason. Wright redirects our attention from the London-centric drama and satires of the period to other places in which literature was produced and disseminated, notably Dublin and the coterie of writers that flourished there around Katherine Philips in the early 1660s, and to the still-undervalued influence Spenser had on Restoration writers. Scholars of drama know the formidable influence Jonson and Shakespeare (and, to a less visible degree, Fletcher) had on Etherege, Dryden, Shadwell, and Congreve as well as the rich vein of explicit classical influence on the imitations, translations, and adaptations written during the late seventeenth century. Wright shows quite convincingly that Spenser belongs in this elect company of classical and Renaissance writers, despite the widespread perception by his Restoration readers, versed as they were in neoclassical principles, that both his language and idiosyncratic stanza form were archaic. The 1679 edition of Spenser is pivotal to Wright's argument. She demonstrates Dryden's abiding engagement with his Elizabethan precursor through a nuanced analysis of the annotations in his copy of Spenser's Works in Cambridge's Wren Library. For Wright, Dryden is a “most careful and tenacious reader” (57) of Spenser's canon, and while some of his critical responses can be “traced back to self-vindication, self-interest or self-promotion” (64), his reading of The Faerie Queene “represents the most acute, sensitive, and—in its own way—generous account of Spenser's poetry produced in the seventeenth century” (65). While Wright documents several other Restoration writers’ debts to the 1679 edition, among them Oldham, Behn, and Howard, her analysis of Dryden's reception of Spenser stands out as one of the high points of this impressive book.
The second chapter of The Restoration Transposed is more diffuse, in large part because Wright offers a survey of literature produced in or about Ireland, often though not exclusively by Irish writers, a category with its own ambiguity, as she readily acknowledges. Parts of this somewhat amorphous survey of forty years of Irish creativity are nevertheless excellent. Dublin proves a “place of lively coterie composition and textual exchange” (81) for Katherine Philips during her sojourn there in 1662–63, when her play Pompey was performed at the Smock Alley theater and she entered fully into the circle of writers associated with the earls of Orrery and Roscommon. Equally valuable is Wright's comparison of the two earls as patrons, writers of commendatory poems, translators, literary theorists, and as spokesmen for the Protestant minority in Ireland.
In her third chapter, Wright explores the vast and complex terrain of “plants and trees” (143) in the Restoration, moving deftly from literary texts by both royalist and republican poets who use the rural landscapes in their works as political allegories to Evelyn's Sylva, an influential and classically learned primer for gardeners, published under the imprimatur of the newly established Royal Society, and Cowley's disillusioned poems and essays, written in the 1660s, praising country retirement and solitude. Milton's Paradise Lost fits neatly into this discussion, with Wright underscoring the “active, thoughtful and loving stewardship” (178) Adam—and especially Eve—have with the plants in their garden Paradise. The intense association of trees and plants with women leads to an adroit comparison of protofeminist and misogynist uses of trees in Behn's and Rochester's poems set in parks. Wright's penetrating analysis of Behn's translation of the last book of Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum (or Six Books of Plants) into English in the 1680s makes the case for the “bravura literary achievement” (202) of Cowley's final work considered in its own right and for the feminist and biographical significance of Behn's personal appropriation of the material in her loose “Cowleyan” imitation of Cowley. Both the translator and the translated benefit from this close scrutiny.
The coda to Wright's book retroactively argues the overlap of her three discrete chapters, exploring connections between and among them and situating her study as a complement to more familiar accounts of Restoration literature that emphasize the period's sexual license and its urban and English settings. Her justification after the fact of her project is altogether unnecessary: this is compelling and engaging scholarship of the first order that one hopes receives the wider audience it so richly deserves.
