Among the most prominent names that literary archaeology into England's earliest women writers has brought forward is that of Katherine Philips (1631/2-64), whose engaging sobriquet, “The Matchless Orinda,” offers a quick glance into the drawing-rooms of a lost cultural moment. Her contemporaries took Philips very seriously indeed as a poet, a moral model, a pioneer, an inspiration and a nonpareil, the English Sappho, the Muse's darling and equal. Besides adding the claim “matchless” to the “Orinda” she chose for herself, John Oldham (1653-83), for example, includes Philips as one of five poetic worthies along with Chaucer, Milton, Cowley, and Denham.¹ Despite the range of honorifics from contemporary male and female commentary alike, traditional literary history has victimized Philips within what modern feminism identifies as “the politics of benign neglect.”²

This study seeks to repair some of the neglect of Philips's poetry through a pluralistic or multivalenced inquiry, one of the recognized kinds of feminist criticism. By comparing several of her lyrics with precise analogues from John Milton and John Donne—cherished favorites of the seventeenth-century literary canon—this study supplies some fresh means for historically and aesthetically contextualizing her work. It puts forward some epistemic and cultural grids of the transitional historical moment she self-consciously inhabited. The poetic territory to which Philips chiefly laid claim, woman's friendship, would seem to endorse a non- or even anti-political stance, but, as we shall see, her subject matter and the poetic discourses in which it is couched are themselves cultural and political signifiers.

My contrastive methodology highlights more chronological than gendered difference to discover surprisingly political dimensions to Philips's performance. Section I below contrasts two Philips's lyrics with two nearly contemporaneous sonnets on the same subjects by John Milton to argue that, poetically, Philips's work focuses the contestation of the sixteenth-century's characteristic resemblance and representationalism against the eighteenth-century's empowering of discourses along the lines that Michel Foucault traces in The Order of Things. Whatever its ultimate limitations, Foucaultian typology can productively ground the rediscovery of an author like Philips. Section II takes up the intertextualities of Philips's appropriation of John Donne's famous compass conceit from “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” in order to “explore the multiple paths that lead to the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts,” the task that Fredric Jameson assigns to the political unconscious within his 1981 study of that title. Together these sections attend to the widening frameworks of a text's social grounding that Jameson distinguishes as the text, the social order, and the ideology of form. They annotate Philips's literary texts within a narrowly defined political history of punctual events and chronically sequenced happenings, but also place them within less diachronic and time-bound social history more largely, taking into account the constitutive tension between social classes as well as the larger patterns of history as a succession of modes of production and social formations.³

Two of Philips's non-friendship poems precisely parallel two poems by John Milton to differentiate the historical positioning of these authors, their literary generations and cultural contexts. The analogues enact the social and biographical within the formal and aesthetic. The first poem celebrates a particular moment of Philips's biography, her twenty-sixth birthday in 1657/8, and as such it invites comparison with Milton's sonnet acknowledging the passing of his twenty-third year (1632).⁴ Philips manifests what Earl Miner describes as the Cowley effect, that is the distancing of the poet from his/her subject matter and situation, attended by a heightened consciousness of the reader.⁵ Her second-generation practice assumes a public and political mantle, as Milton's assumes an aesthetic or laureate mode. Keenly aware of inhabiting a world spinning and turning upside down, Philips, like so many other poets of the later seventeenth century, locates herself in the present moment and in immediate historical realities at the expense of transcendence and prophecy.

Milton's birthday sonnet, the seventh out of a lifetime total of twenty-three, confirms his commitment to poetry and piety and anticipates a life of lofty achievement. In form as in content, it aspires to the laureate mode, specifically to that fashioning of an official, ethically exemplary poetic self that Richard Helgerson attaches to seventeenth-century “self-crowned laureates”:⁶

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
          Stol'n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
          My hasting days fly on with full career,
          But my late spring no bud or blossom show'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
          That I to manhood am arriv'd so near,
          And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
          That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
          It shall be still in strictest measure ev'n
          To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me,and the will of Heav'n;
          All is, if I have grace to use it so,
          As ever in my great task-Master's eye.(7)

This sonnet assumes Virgilian, Ciceronian, and Christian endorsements of its rhetoric, ethical argument, and poetic aspiration, of its affirmation of divine will and heroic human patience. When it was first published in the collection of Milton's youthful English and Latin verse in 1645, it looked forward specifically to the imminent “brave new world” of Puritan, Republican political hopes in which Milton actively invested, but it enfolds any political assumptions within the laureate tradition's public/private univocality and within Milton's sense of the poet as vates (prophet) or spokesman for his culture and his God and of making the whole design of his life “a true poem” (Poems 694).

In the absence of any overt statements in her poetry or prose, we cannot know if Katherine Philips ever read this or indeed any of Milton's poems, but a similar poem, “On the I. of January, 1657,” likewise commemorates her twenty-sixth birthday in twelve lines of pentameter couplets. This brief, virtually unknown poem looks back upon the history that Milton's poem anticipated:

Th' Eternal Centre of my life and me,
Who when I was not, gave me room to be,
Hath since (my time preserving in his hands)
By moments numbred out the precious sand[s],
Till it is swell'd to six and twenty years,
Checquer'd by Providence with smiles and tears.
I have observ'd how vain all glories are,
The change of Empire, and the chance of War:
Seen Faction with its native venom burst,
And Treason struck, by what it self had nurs'd:
Seen useless Crimes, whose Owners but made way
For future Candidates to wear the Bay.(8)

Like Milton's, Philips's poem views her life sub specie aeternitatis, though it otherwise speaks motives and aspirations that differ markedly from Milton's presentation of a self heroicized within classical and biblical discourses. Its first half acknowledges the point in life she is just achieving with a grateful eye to divine cause and preservation. Its second half retrospects not theology but chronology. It reviews the historical categories that have defined life in England during Philips's adult years: Empire, War, Faction, Treason, and “useless crimes” more generally. “The change of Empire, and the chance of War” (my italics) gives a deft, linguistically balanced formulation to the Civil War, the beheading of a monarch, the Interregnum, the Stuart return—the extraordinary sequence of events that serves as background to her time and awareness. Her more political vision anticipates an era of poetry not for herself alone but for her society generally to displace the chaotic political negotiations she sees as slouching toward oblivion.

We cannot know if Philips was deliberately giving Milton's earlier construct a twist that could contain her differently based sense of life and literary performance, but the poetics and the self of her lyric reflect a distinctly later age. In form as in content, both make theological gestures, but where Milton is personal, Philips is political. Where Milton enfolds his sense of his own destiny in inherited imageries (theft, springtime) and in biblical parable (Matthew 25: 14-30), Philips looks to the later expressional norms of heroic couplet and abstract diction that were to dominate the literary reigns of Dryden and Pope. Like Milton's, Philips's poem concludes on a quietist note.

Philips is political not just by belonging to and being marked by a particular time, place, and self-consciousness, but also by engaging that world and rewriting the experience that power and history have written upon her, by interwriting personal, social, and natural experience.⁹ In a quite deliberate choice, political positioning is a matter of status, ambition, and authority for her. It is worth remembering that Philips begins her published volume of Poems with titles and subjects that insist upon her political self-presentation and right to comment, such titles as “Upon the double murther of K.Charles, in answer to a libellous rime made by V.[avasor] P.[owell]”; “On the numerous accesse of the English to waite upon the King in Holland”; “Arion on a Dolphin to his Majestie in his passadge into England”; “On the faire weather at the Coronacon”; “To the Queene on her arrivall at Portsmouth. May. 1662”; et cetera.¹⁰ Where Milton builds his poem and constructs his poetic self by enfolding his education, literary inheritance, and biblical grounding securely within a poetics of the heroicized personal, Philips gives politics full priority, even over the writing self. She aligns her life with history, not, as Milton does, with transcendence.

Besides these similar threshold affirmations of poetic commitments and destinies, Philips and Milton also shared a common friend and collaborator in Henry Lawes (1596-1662), perhaps the most notable of English lyric musicians in this most musical of ages.¹¹ Both Milton and Philips enjoyed personal as well as professional relationships with Lawes, Milton in spite of Lawes's pronounced Royalist allegiance. Throughout his long career, Lawes set to music poems by both Milton and Philips, and both sang his praises in poems, Milton in Sonnet 13, “To my freind Mr. Hen. Laws Feb. 9. 1645” [= 1646 n.s.]¹², and Philips in 40 lines of heroic couplets entitled “To the truly noble Mr Henry Lawes” (#15). These comparable poems extend the historical, epistemological, and literary differences glimpsed above.

Milton's tribute was first printed in Henry and William Lawes's Choice Psalmes put into Musick (1648) dedicated to the then imprisoned Charles I.

Harry, whose tuneful and well measur'd Song
          First taught our English Music how to span
          Words with just note and accent, not to scan
          With Midas' Ears, committing short and long,
Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng,
          With praise enough for Envy to look wan;
          To after age thou shalt be writ the man
          That with smooth air couldst humor best our tongue.
Thou honor'st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing
          To honor thee, the Priest of Phoebus' Choir
          That tun'st their happiest lines in Hymn, or Story.
Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher
          Than his Casella, whom he woo'd to sing,
          Met in the milder shades of Purgatory.

(Poems 144)

This sonnet, like the birthday one, is finely executed in the Miltonic appropriation of the Spenserian model, with a strong break between octave and sestet, insistent enjambment, tough content, and a surprisingly muted ending. Its diction and logic defy the simplistic sweetness of the genre as passed down from the Elizabethans, and its strong literary reference, here detailing both classical myth and Italian epic, exploits the reader's literary study, memory, and ingenuity. Milton's Lawes sonnet again claims laureate and vatic “authority.” Its personal/public univocality follows the practice of so many of Milton's sonnets in elevating an historic personnage as heroic exemplar of the loftiest principles of character, piety, or in this case art.

Katherine Philips's collaboration and association with Lawes date from at least the 1650s. He was the music teacher to several of her lifelong friends and set to music at least three of her other poems:¹³ “Set by Mr. H. Lawes / A Dialogue between Lucasia and Orinda” (Works 1.94-5); “On the death of my first and dearest childe, Hector Philipps, borne the 23^d of Aprill, and dy'd the 2^d of May 1655. set by Mr Lawes” (220), and “Friendship's Mysterys, to my dearest Lucasia. (set by Mr. H. Lawes.)” (90-1). The last of these was published in Lawes's Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues (1655), a volume Philips's biographer describes as a virtual commentary on Philips's pseudonymous “society.”¹⁴

Despite their differing sizes and formats, Philips's poem joins Milton's not just in claiming Lawes as “friend,” but in making him representational of the largest ideas. Neither author exploits the pun in their subject's name, but both celebrate measure, order, and govern in what are perhaps allied gestures. Calling Lawes “Great soule of nature,” Philips like Milton embeds her subject within the cosmos and the layered harmonies that impel it:

Nature, which is the vast creation's soule,
That steady curious agent in the whole,
The art of heav'n, the order of this frame,
Is onely number in another name:
For as some King, conqu'ring what was his own,
Hath choice of severall titles to his crown;
So harmony, on this score now, that then,
Yet still is all that takes and governs men.

(Works 1.87)

Like Milton, Philips views Lawes in relation to preceding and subsequent ages, though for her those ages are not marked as literary.

As with Philips's birthday poem, this one too relies heavily upon the abstract conceptual diction that was so much to dominate the Age of Reason, but her procedure realizes a metaphor even within such constraints. Thus after establishing the cosmic governance of harmony and number, she hinges a series of principles of character and person upon a musical diction:

Beauty is but Composure, and we find
Content is but the Concord of the mind,
Friendship the Unison of well-tun'd hearts,
Honour's the Chorus of the noblest parts,
And all the world on which we can reflect,
Musique to th'Eare, or to the Intellect.

My italics show how, in fact, each poetic line turns upon the same verbal hinge, the final two lines here balancing more largely upon the summational word that comes just at their juncture.

Such dictional exploitation functions much as imagery functions in the earlier poetics. What is now imaged is not some item of experiential reality but a category of discourse. That radical alteration in the base of the poetic—here for Philips as elsewhere for her contemporaries and heirs generally—embodies in a telling miniature the epistemological transformation that Foucault illuminates in The Order of Things between the resemblance that dominated the sixteenth century and the classification that came to prevail in the eighteenth. Gone is the profound kinship between language and the world and the shared epistemology of conjuncture, and in its place appear new systems of artificial, arbitrary, man-made signs translating apprehended realities into manipulated discourses.¹⁵

Several of Philips's tributes to Lawes reconstitute the earlier representationalism, most notably in taking up themes that other works of Milton attach either to Lawes himself or to the Platonic Idea or best earthly practice of music.

If then each man a little world must be,
How many worlds are coppy'd out in Thee?
Who art so richly formed, so compleat,
T'epitomize all that is good and great;
Whose stars this brave advantage did impart,
Thy nature's more harmonious then thy art.

These lines (15-20) cast as a rhetorical question the multilayered roles within which Milton coded Lawes's presentation of himself in A Mask, as simultaneously composer, music teacher, Orphean pastoral poet-singer, Thyrsis, Attendant Spirit, and generally—musician layering into Music itself—as mediator between the careful deity and needy, worthy humans. Since Philips's tribute is couched in the resolutely assertive sonorities of heroic couplets rather than the allegorical prophetic poetics of Milton's masque, such layerings are much curtailed in her verse. Indeed where Milton seeks to raise his materials and his audience's vision to the resonating heavens, Philips's concern is to bring down and contain vision and subject within the confidences of a familiar world shorn of numinousness.

In allied Milton works, ad Patrem offers a grateful tribute to his musical father and At a Solemn Music compounds voice and verse, that is singer and song, within a supralunary vision of the Music of the Spheres and the inability of fallen humans to hear it. Both these early Milton works may be invoked to footnote Philips's next lines:

Thou dost above the Poets praises live,
Who fetch from thee th'Eternity they give;
And as true reason triumphs over sence,
Yet is subjected to intelligence:
So Poets on the lower world look down,
But Lawes on them; his height is all his own.
For, like divinity it self, his Lyre
Rewards the wit it did at first inspire:
And thus by double right Poets allow
His and their Laurells should adorn his brow.

The conclusion here is very like Milton's neat turn in Sonnet 13: “Thou honorest Verse, and Verse must … honor thee.” Both authors box themselves into and out of self-referentiality. Both project tributary works, not themselves, as the agency of praise, but where Milton displaces the gesture from himself to Dante and Dante to Casella (Purgatorio 2.76-117), Philips projects hierarchies of mental faculties and the arts—Foucaultian discourses—situating herself on high though below the subject of her praise. Where Milton's gaze is prophetically upward, Philips shares with Lawes a downward glance at lesser mortals.

Although we might expect Milton to offer the public poem and Philips the personal one, the opposite proves to be the case in this pairing as in the former one. Her concluding ten lines give Philips's poem not just a public but a political turn, compounding the sort of expectations that the birthday poem conditioned us to expect with the cosmic compass of the present design:

Live then (Great soule of nature!) to asswage
The savage dullness of this sullen age;
Charm us to sence, for though experience faile,
And reason too, thy numbers will prevaile.
Then (like those Ancients) strike, and so command
All nature to obey thy generous hand:
None can resist, but such who needs will be
More stupid then a Stone, a Fish, a Tree.
Be it thy care our Age to new-create:
What built a world may sure repayre a state.

As before, where Milton insists upon his own inheritance of divine and human literary lines and inspiration—Phoebus and Dante—Philips is deeply conscious of inhabiting and retreating to a particular historical and political place. It is usual to assume female poets' remoteness from politics and power,¹⁶ but this, like the earlier Milton example, demonstrates not just an interest in such matters, but a vision that includes their relation to the writing self and private interests as well.

Philips's concluding lines contain two surprising literary gestures, and both encapsulate the adjustments in governing poetic between, on the one hand, Milton—the first half of the seventeenth century, and Renaissance poetry generally—and, on the other, the Restoration, Enlightenment epistemology, and its modern linguistic and desacramentalized legacy.¹⁷ The first of these represents an Orphean career and destiny. That ultimate poet, when fully empowered by the ancients and the Renaissance, overwhelms all resistance to his combination of poetry and music, wresting responsive order from animals, plants, and stones, even indeed from the god of the underworld himself. As Milton presents such power in Il Penseroso, in order to free his bride Eurydice, Orpheus so enchanted that deity that he “made Hell grant what Love did seek” (Poems, 108). In Philips's contrast of modernity's savage, sullen dullness with Orpheus' sensual and harmonious charms, we recall too Milton's epithet for Orpheus as the Muse's “enchanting son, / Whom Universal nature did lament” (Lycidas, 59-60). Even in its generalized phrasing, Philips's gesture toward such inherited narrative under the category of “those ancients” manifests her age's deliberate displacement of the myths its predecessors reveled in to a fault. She enacts Abraham Cowley's 1656 dismissal of some of his contemporaries' classical borrowings as “the Cold-meats of the Antients, new-heated, and sew set forth.”¹⁸

Philips's final ten lines begin by distinguishing between historical eras, its own recognized as “sullen,” but available for “new creation” under the harmonious leadership represented by Lawes. The second literary surprise and reward of this conclusion reinvokes the Harmony that at the poem's outset had built the world and nature and served as its soul and agent. Here Harmony's creativity is reaffirmed, but also reassigned within the foregrounded present to the lesser task of “repayr[ing] a state,” a phrase deftly balanced against “buil[ding] a World.”

That culminating, if anticlimactic, distinction between divinely ordained cosmos and humanly constructed political organization embodies in miniature the radical shift in apprehended power from the Reformation orthodoxy with which the seventeenth century began to the crudely natural, fragile stasis a Hobbesian, indeed a modern, world has to settle for. The earlier model—epitomized, for example, in Philip Sidney's rehearsal of Menenius Agrippa's speech on the “body politic” in Defense of Poesie or in Shakespeare's Coriolanus 1.1—projects a macro/microcosmic, organic, natural, mutually dependent, analogical society, universe, and epistemology underwritten by the further analogue of the Church as the visible body of Christ. The later model—epitomized in the refigured “body politic” of the famous frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan (1651)—occurs not as an organic “true” analogy but a static “occasional” metaphor. It presents a human construct, a controlled and controlling device through which political power manipulates its disciplined population into an instrument to achieve ideological purposes quite distinct from the instrument itself.¹⁹

Milton is often viewed as the late flowering of Renaissance literary performance because his practice so essentially assumes resemblance as the foundational principle and form of experience and knowing. But Philips inhabits the Cartesian alternative in which orders of thought, not orders of analogy, dominate. The later mode privileges analysis, scientific orders, and proof. It values discriminations of difference not identity; as a corollary, it values too the occasional finite likenesses it can discover, measure, and enumerate. Philips's development of Donne's compass conceit—discussed in Section II below—even more fully extends the Foucaultian typology to a point where signs displace resemblance and self-conscious awareness replaces the earlier divinely inspired language of things. Rather than the discovery of the anterior resonating truths of the older system, the new signs perform an arbitrary, fabricated, and now only certain or probable signifying function. They leave behind a cause/effect relation in favor of a sign/thing-signified one, and a random and circular divination in favor of progressive analyses and fabricated signs within systematized knowledge. What has been lost is both a guaranteed relationship between signs and their contents and the mediating bond of resemblance. In the new mode, a sign not only becomes “the representativity of the representation in so far as it is representable,” but it also inhabits “the interstices of ideas … in a perpetual state of decomposition and recomposition” (Foucault, Order 52, 59, 60-61, 63, 65, 67).

At the deepest level, the emerging epistemology thus reenacts the extraordinarily fluid contemporary politics. When the truthful figuration of the world moves out of language and into perception, language necessarily enters a period of transparency and neutrality.²⁰ Epistemologically and poetically—as politically and culturally—these signatures of seventeenth-century change mark Katherine Philips's literary practice, and this linguistic development—as we shall see in the next section—shows her world writing itself through Philips's poetry in a series of conventions of genre and mode that transcode social needs and social realities ranging well beyond the confining private interests that normatively bound occasional verses.

Fredric Jameson launches The Political Unconscious (1981) with the imperative “Always historicize!” an operation that distinguishes between the object and the subject, between the “objective” structures of a cultural text and the historical emergence of the audience's interpretive categories or codes (9). When Katherine Philips's “Friendship in Emblem, or the Seale, to my dearest Lucasia” (#29) borrows the famous metaphysical conceit of “stiff twin compasses” from John Donne's “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” the cross-generational intertextualities again produce new insight into Philips's less familiar texts and contexts, but to discover them we must allow the interpretive act to resurrect some sedimentary master codes. The categories of analysis for these contrasting texts largely leave behind the earlier politics of individual biography in favor of the politics of social class and ideological program. They discover Katherine Philips in the peculiar political position of writing to legitimize a ruling class under temporary contestation.

Philips's subject matters include political affirmations, topographical descriptions, elegies, social and familial tributes, and translations of both lyrics and plays from the French—all established genres of the time—but something more than half of her 116 poems—and the work for which she is best known by far—treat female friendship—that is the “sentimental friendship” that Janet Todd defines as “close, effusive tie[s], revelling in rapture and rhetoric.”²¹ Since we are relatively unfamiliar with the literary systems—and, of course, the gender systems—that underwrite her subject matter, these poems tend to sound very much alike to our ears. We forget that on first glance virtually all Petrarchan sonnets, invoking the same metaphors and themes, will sound very much alike too, for the authors' deepest intentions honor the conventions they embrace. Practitioners of specialized literary modes measure their originality by increments that the uninitiated may find minute.

A recent commentator generalizes that Philips's celebrations of love lack “the dramatic tension between flesh and spirit that imparts nervous urgency to Donne's amatory verse,”²² but a close look at the intertextualities of these two poems discovers a female poet not tamely reinscribing a male text, but embracing a female poetic that reaches beyond male discourse to an alternative French female literary tradition. Although her contemporaries understood this as shaping her practice—and despite the manifest political linkage—canonical literary inquiry has nearly always ignored the continental context that could make sense of the priorities of Philips's verse, just as vested academic specialties have drawn rigid barriers between Renaissance and eighteenth-century literatures, in effect assigning a great many English works between 1660 and 1700 to limbo.

The final stanzas of Donne's “Valediction Forbidding Mourning” draw out a justly famous metaphysical conceit likening a pair of lovers to the two feet of a compass, one centered and fixed soul, sometimes leaning after its oblique extension, sometimes drawing it erect. Their love with its compelling “inclination” and firmness achieves the perfection of circularity, ending with its own beginning. The compass image occurs as the final three of a total of nine quatrains.

If they [our souls] be two, they are two so
                    As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the fixt foot, makes no show
          To move, but doth, if the'other doe.
And though it in the center sit,
          Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
                    And growes erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
          Like th'other foot, obliquely runne.
Thy firmnes makes my circle just,
          And makes me end, where I begunne.(23)

Ever since Izaak Walton's Life of Donne, this image has been singled out for particular notice, and it is often said to encapsulate the unique compounding of imagery and themes that characterize not only Donne's poetry but seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry generally.²⁴ Although ostensibly addressed to the poet's beloved, in fact this work, like Petrarchan “love” poetry generally, targets a male audience similar to the author in education, wit, and gender conditioning. Such poetry makes “love” the vehicle for meditations upon self, art, and the largest of human and divine truths.

There seems little doubt that Philips was deliberately borrowing the image from an acclaimed master. Her reinscription implies an analogous female poetic and a woman's community to create and receive such works. Tellingly, her poem does directly address its declared interlocutor. In its largest reaches, Philips's borrowing from Donne enfolds a gendered poetic politics within the historical and epistemological changes already noted. Philips takes up the image in stanzas 6-14 of a sixteen-quatrain, tetrameter lyric:

6

The compasses that stand above
Express this great immortall love;
For friends, like them, can prove this true,
They are, and yet they are not, two.

7

And in their posture is express'd
Friendship's exalted interest:
Each follows where the other Leanes,
And what each does, this other meanes.

8

And as when one foot does stand fast,
And t'other circles seeks to cast,
The steddy part does regulate
And make the wandrer's motion streight:

9

So friends are onely Two in this,
T'reclaime each other when they misse:
For whoso're will grossely fall,
Can never be a friend at all.

10

And as that usefull Instrument
For even lines was ever meant;
So friendship from good-angells springs,
To teach the world heroique things.

11

As these are found out in design
To rule and measure every line;
So friendship governs actions best,
Prescribing Law to all the rest.

12

And as in nature nothing's set
So Just as lines and number mett;
So compasses for these being made,
Does friendship's harmony perswade.

13

And like to them, so friends may own
Extension, not division:
Their points, like bodys, separate;
But head, like soules, knows no such fate.

14

And as each part so well is knitt,
That their embraces ever fitt:
So friends are such by destiny,
And no Third can the place supply.

15

There needs no motto to the Seale:
But that we may the mine [mind?] reveale
To the dull ey, it was thought fit
That Friendship onely should be writt.

16

But as there is degrees of bliss,
So there's no friendship meant by this,
But such as will transmit to fame
Lucasia and Orinda's name.

(1.107-8)

In borrowing the figure of the compass, Philips recognizes a male society, its central figure Donne, the Platonizing of sexual love he/they so often articulated, and their characteristic superimposition of a metaphysical dimension upon a fully envisioned physical object and the processes appropriate to that object. But where Donne is engaged in an act of discovery, or what every schoolboy of his age would call an act of Invention, Philips performs an act of appropriation and interpretive reading. Where Donne fuses disparates together with striking originality, Philips breaks down, or de-fuses, the constituent parts of a borrowed conceit. Working within quite different literary conventions and epistemological assumptions, Philips at once reconstitutes a metaphysical conceit and de-intensifies its metaphysics into safe, stable assertion. Her form like her content glances as well at the emblem genre.

Philips invokes Donne's precedent as the initiating or ritual embodiment of her poetic “society.” Her sixth stanza likens friends to a compass in being both one and two. Her seventh highlights the compass's “posture,” where “leaning” coincides with grasping each other's “meaning” with which it rimes, a compound of “inclination” and perfect understanding. The eighth stanza recasts Donne's chief conceit of one male circling foot and the other fixed female one. Politically, where Donne posits female sympathetic immobility and male freedom, Philips makes the participants interdependent mirroring peers with equal freedom and equal control.²⁵ Stanza 9 combines the numerical from stanza 6 with the stabilizing from stanza 8 to separate friends only in the ability of one to “reclaim” the other from an error. Donne's metaphysics, thus, transmutes to Philips's ethics.

It transmutes too to physics, and the technological developments of stanza 10 reflect late century prospects. Philips considers the scientific and mathematical processes of her “usefull Instrument” within a contemporaneous Royal Society discourse emphasizing even lines, design, rule, and measure. She translates number or quantity into equivalence or qualitative extension when the points of the compass, though separate, in fact signify not division but harmony, order, and completeness. Besides articulating the radical epistemological change detailed above, such technological specificity enacts a secular and female-empowering by-product of Puritan meditative traditions that disciplined the mind to careful interpretive scrutiny of the “creatures” and the “occasions” of daily life.²⁶

Philips's final stanzas develop the abstract dimensions of her subject. They politicize friendship into the central governor of all actions and proffer it as a just and stable standard against the recognition—new and transforming to the century's thought—that “in Nature nothing's set,” a point that Donne elsewhere phrases as “the new Philosophy calls all in doubt” (“The First Anniversary,” 205). Moreover, her friendship “springs” from good Angels “To teach the world heroique things.” The friendship Philips celebrates in this and similar lyrics compounds mutual feeling and knowledge with full understanding, growth, freedom, aspiration, enlightenment, even heroism, nobility, and divinity.

Philips's “Friendship in Emblem” collects and illuminates a congeries of contemporary fact and discourse as a prism does light. At a basic level, it aligns with the emphatically “social” poetry of those contemporary Cavalier writers Alexander Pope described as “the Wits of either Charles's days, / The Mob of Gentlemen who wrote with Ease.”²⁷ Such poets enfold active courtly and military engagement within celebrations of each other and their networks of personal relations. They produce a poetry that mirrors the mannerism of contemporary art, since mannerism too emphasizes the author's sense of himself as an inheritor and a latecomer reconstituting his predecessors' achievements in a poetic characterized by polish, virtuosity, and a seemingly effortless savoir faire. Such poets “often decorat[e] the smaller concerns of life in a style forged to express the greater.”²⁸

Encoding contemporary attitudes toward originality and literary history, John Dryden rewrote Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and even Milton's very recent Paradise Lost, and Alexander Pope recast Donne's Satyres into what he considered ordered, comprehensible clarity and refined expression. In a similar tidying or reclamation operation, Philips's “Friendship in Emblem” unties the knots of Donne's excessive discordia concors even as she reenvisions his “usefull Instrument” in up-to-date scientific grids. The era of such recastings was also an era of translations, not just Dryden's Aeneid and Pope's Iliad, but dozens of lesser exercises, including Philips's own. Both kinds of transliteration reflect a sense of cultural displacement, loss, and alienation, and urgently reach for transitioning, for larger meanings, and for reconnections to disrupted cultural continuities.

More largely, Philips's poem does for her age what she said friendship did for the heart. It “(like Moses bush presum'd), / Warm'd and enlighten'd, not consum'd.” Where the classically learned Milton might have referred his views on friendship to the calm virtue of Cicero's De amicitia, Philips draws hers from a quite different and, of course, modern tradition. For both, friendship rests upon concords of goodness, wisdom, loyalty, and happiness. In the example of Milton's friendship for Lawes, social concord quickly gives a local habitation and a name to universal ordering principles of cosmic harmony. To understand Philips, we must draw upon other kinds of understanding. Milton was the most individualistic of men—the OED credits him with several of the earliest uses of the very word individual—but Philips was very much a social being, and came of age within a milieu formulating new structures of personal and social interaction. Her poetry draws strength from and popularizes a female version of the emerging conventions.

To understand Philips's insistence upon friendship, we must draw back briefly to a longer view of evidence. Virtually by definition, Calvinism generates what Max Weber describes as the “feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual.”²⁹ An imbalance toward individual autonomy will in time necessarily rebound in the direction of social reciprocity, and the seventeenth century acts out such a carom from the Reformation in multiplying new social quasi-institutions with at least skeletal organization—men's interest groups such as the Royal Society, for example, or semi-private gatherings at taverns, coffeehouses, and chocolate houses. Such social intensifications at convenient public sites signal the rise of a diverse gentry, with sufficient leisure for intellectual and social pursuits and ambitions and with new tastes, specializations, discourses. In the second half of the century, the Court itself was a coterie, defiantly defensive against Puritanism and anti-Catholicism, the more so from pre-Restoration confederacy on French soil. The very etymology of CABAL—precisely datable to a pamphlet of 1672—emblematizes the tendency.³⁰ Conventicle co-religionists translate exclusive associations based on common goals and strict loyalty even to the lower strata of society.

The seventeenth century empowered new ideals of personal friendship. For the young, the new boarding or “public” schools provided isolated environments and generational and academic disciplines that nurtured fellowships based on shared class, tastes, activities, and aspirations. They marked adolescence as an age chronologically prior to marriage during which the young could both define their identities and discover the “other.” They fostered friendships grounded in an anthropological “spiritual kinship” modeled on the family that assumed reciprocal obligations, defended its members against external threats, and severely sanctioned failures to follow its rules. Gradually, this sort of extra-familial, voluntary, optional, and flexible society, free of self-interested motives, spread to later age groups. Sometimes friendship in the period shares the same vocabulary with love, love being “carnal” friendship or “tender” friendship. It can refer not only to everyday social relations, but also to unusually exalted associations.³¹ The latter was of course rare, “once in three ages” according to Montaigne who coopts it for males on the grounds that women's souls are not “strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, and durable.” In deference to its specific recipient, Jeremy Taylor's 1657 A Discourse of the Nature and Offices of Friendship, in a Letter to the Most Ingenious and excellent M[rs]. K[atherine]. P[hilips]. partly qualifies this gender exclusion.³²

Among women, salons in private homes served overlapping purposes, being likewise exclusionary, predominantly single-sex, and with at least rudimentary form. Women's groups, however, organize not around subject matters but around personal styles. At the highest social levels, English female society imported French models of social deportment for defining and representing the self. Specifically, it borrowed the précieux discourse that more and more minimized objective content and disregarded data of work, family, practicality, and utility. As filtered socially downward, such cultural transformations were supported by a proliferation of prescriptive texts on proper social behaviors and collections of model conversations and letters.³³

Many events of Philips's life conspired to ground the “style” of her friendship discourse. During her years at Mrs. Salmon's school for girls at Hackney, Philips formed a particular friendship with a classmate Mary Aubrey, dubbed “Rosania” in Philips's poetic friendship circle, a cousin of the chronicler John Aubrey. After moving with her newly remarried mother to Wales, Philips cited Anne Owen as “Lucasia” in no fewer than 28 poems that interweave celebrations of their friendship with daily occasions.³⁴ Besides friendship poems to “Ardelia,” “Philoclea,” “Valeria,” and “Celemina,” Philips developed a number of (at least) epistolary friendships with such prominent male figures as Jeremy Taylor (“Palaemon”), Sir Edward De[e]ring (“Silvander”), and Sir Charles Cotterell (“Poliarchus”). Her husband as “Antenor” and herself as “the matchless Orinda” also inhabit this apparently imaginary rather than formal society of friendship.³⁵ Historically, such discourse reflects the French romances of Philips's reading, but to a modern feminist consciousness, it may also signal women claiming the power to name themselves in gestures at once mimetic and anti-patriarchal.³⁶

It is no accident that this social remodelling invokes French romance and précieux traditions. The proudest curricular claim of the new schools for gentlemen's daughters that the young Philips attended was instruction in modern languages with readings in up-to-date French romances.³⁷ The post-Restoration publication of Philips's Poems insists upon her linguistic skills by presenting French texts on verso pages and her translation on matching recto pages.

In the middle decades of seventeenth-century England, allegiance to French literature—to French anything—was a political stance favoring the Stuart family and cause. Before her exile, Queen Henrietta Maria had energetically imported French social practices and ideals onto English soil, including a vogue for her gallant, courtly version of Platonic love modelled on the society of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and its dominant text D'Urfé's L'Astrée (1607-27). English versions of the practice are necessarily complexly layered when a French queen, conscious of cultural privilege and opportunity, imports a foreign text itself giving a Renaissance updating to Platonic love and seeks to impose such discourse upon the everyday life and society of its self-consciously different time and place.³⁸ Further layerings necessarily qualify Philips's late and provincial appropriations of original French sources, Henrietta Maria's influences, and continuously imported new French texts.

French preciosity provides Philips with both a rationale for her society of Platonic friendship and with some features of her poetic. The social and literary précieux movement flourishing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France presupposed exclusive and superior language, imagery, and society. Erica Veevers summarizes the style as

a search for recondite and ingenious comparisons, which at the same time avoided archaic, pedantic, or vulgar expressions; and a dependence on antithesis, allegory, and abstraction, the aim of which was to communicate wittily with the group in ways which avoided obviousness and which often veiled the meaning from outsiders. At its best the style had distinction, at its worst it fell into affectations.³⁹

In Odette de Mourgues's provocative summation, précieux literature constitutes “an art not of production but of consumption.”⁴⁰ Formally, writers sought not originality, accuracy, or vigor of expression, but always to eschew low words, to reduce objects to one or more of their qualities, to take up only what could be contained within acknowledged and well-classified categories, to seek refuge in vagueness and the mechanical workings of formal logic, and in general to reduce the threatening complexity of reality and the contradictions of language to safe absolute assertions. They make considerable use of antitheses and hyperbole, but where antitheses normally provoke witty insight into the familiar, précieux antitheses proffer automatic associations of ideas and the reassuring operations of well-known mechanisms. Alexander Pope's praise of “Nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed” might well describe the style but for its characteristic prolixity.⁴¹

Early précieux literary productions featured elaborate imagery and clever conceits—not unlike what students of English literature will know as Elizabethan Petrarchanism, Euphuism, handbook collections of rhetorical tropes and figures, and even metaphysical conceits. But because such poetry does not create new metaphors and in fact tends to kill the metaphors it borrows, its normal evolution is toward the abstract expression that predominates in late seventeenth-century English practice. At a late stage, metaphors are no longer required for expression at all,⁴² and as we have seen, Philips often inhabits this stage, the Foucaultian era of linguistic transparency and neutrality noted at the end of Section I above.

To work our way through the formal features of this poetic is to array some characteristics of Philips's Friendship poetry. If the results strike a modern reader as hermetic, exclusionary, and overly circumstantial, it is precisely because they were designed to create these effects. When Philips appropriates Donne's compass image, she aims not to create a fresh metaphor, but to develop a stock comparison within a secure conventional pattern. From her removed vantage, she analyzes the likeness into parts and draws out all its logical consequences. Précieux hyperbole—and this category includes most of Philips's claims for her friendship with “Lucasia”—seeks to escape not just the complexity of reality, but even reality itself, and the interchangeability of their and her hyperbolic metaphors proves the gratuitousness of the device. What in Philips's “Friendship in Emblem” at first looks like a metaphysical gesture is merely an exercise in preciosity. We have here not a poetic of disquieting inquiry, not a teasing of reality, but an exercise that minimizes the importance of the feeling or idea it brings forward while deliberately removing it from the realm of actual experience.⁴³

Philips's poetry—and précieux poetry in general—should not be dismissed as decadent by-products of excessively decorated and complacent elites. In the examples we have considered, the preciosity of her Donne analogue balances against or even over-balances a heightened awareness of what we saw in the Milton examples, political negotiations and her own and poetry's participation in history. Although précieux poetry may appear escapist, in fact it seeks to “shelter the delicate flowers of civilization from the rough winds of tempestuous times.”⁴⁴ Précieux poets not only uphold the blessings of culture, they also mobilize in defense of peace, order, and high civilization and thrive by opposing political intrusions and historical chaos.

Such production records the complex nature of Katherine Philips's age, its undertow of relief and hope, its retreat to security and trust—fragile and doomed wishes in what had become a Hobbesian world. “Poliarchus's” introduction to Philips's collected works (1667) shows that from the outset “Orinda” was made representational of larger historical designs along these lines. Against the background of the plague and fire of 1666-67 and the preceding Civil War arise her “gentle and tender strains of Friendship”; they will, he hopes, “outlive all these dismal things to see the blessing of Peace, a conjuncture more suitable to their Nature, all compos'd of kindness; so that I hope Time it self shall have as little power against them, as these other storms have had” (Poems [1667] a2^r-v). In 1675 Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips (no relation), similarly judges her style as “suitable to the humour and Genius of these times.”⁴⁵

Against the chaos of the seventeenth-century's radical transformations of faith, knowing, social categories, and material culture, a world literally turned upside down, Katherine Philips bravely proffers what she has found to be true and worthy and transcendent, filtered through French conventions she saw as securing the English future. Her friendship expresses not so much an achieved state as the rather desperate hope that such an achievement might come to pass. For her, friendship can restore coherent virtue, order, and stability to the frenzied flux of the social and political worlds she inhabited.

For a young woman in the early 1660s such hopes might have held promise, but as additional decades marked the advance of the century, such hopes and such strengths seemed less and less realizable in the private and larger worlds. Thus Anne Killigrew (1660-85) speaks for the following generation in idealizing “True Friendship” as “a Rich Cordial” and “the sweet Refection of our toylsome State,” and Lady Winchilsea similarly echoes “Orinda” in 1713 in identifying friendship as

          the Support of Human-kind;
The safe Delight, the useful Bliss,
The next World's Happiness, and this.(46)

As Killigrew sees it, however, modern friendship mixes ill with good, passes dross for gold, and “for one Grain of Friendship that is found, / Falshood and Interest do the Mass compound.”⁴⁷ Elsewhere Killigrew—again by contrast with her deteriorated epoch—eulogizes Philips as a “Radiant Soul” and “Albions and her Sexes Grace,” as one to whose laurel all other laurels once bowed and whose name is now fixed high among the Stars (“Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another”).⁴⁸ Although we may set aside some of the extravagance of contemporary praise of “the matchless Orinda,” adjusted understandings of Philips's literary universe, her gendered and generational differentiation, make it possible, I believe, to credit the reverence and wisdom that contemporaries found essentialized in her and that inspired a later generation of female poets with grateful awe.

Notes

1. Earl Miner, The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 424.

2. Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28. In Earl Miner's exhaustive three-volume analyses of seventeenth-century poetry—to cite just one example—only some fourteen out of a total of 1200 pages so much as mention the names of women poets of the century, and only one poem on one page (The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971], 301) by one poet, Katherine Philips, is presented for anything like its own case, and that with carefully couched condescension (Cavalier 222, 300, 302, 304). Anne Killigrew's name, it is true, appears on five pages, but only because Dryden (clearly Miner's favorite author) happened to write a famous ode to her. Miner dismisses Killigrew's own poetry damningly with the label “at best a second Katherine Philips” (Restoration 520).

3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 20, 76, 98, 75.

4. Philips was born the year Milton's sonnet was written, 1632, and she had been dead three years when he published Paradise Lost (1667). Although Philips was born and died in London, where their paths might have crossed, she spent more than twenty of her thirty-three years in Wales and another in Ireland, where they could not. In the great chasm that divided the English population, Philips's sympathies were Royalist while Milton's were Republican in the extreme. If Philips accompanied her husband to Westminster when he sat with Parliament, she might have met Milton, but in any imaginable circumstances the two would have constituted a most unlikely conversational pairing.

5. Miner, The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 195; Restoration 4, 7.

6. Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), passim.

7. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), 76-7. Hereafter cited as Poems within the text.

8. The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda, ed. Patrick Thomas (Stump Cross, Essex: Stump Cross Books, 1990-93), 1.213, #94. Hereafter cited as Works within the text. Philips's original title reads Poems By the most deservedly Admired, Mrs. Katherine Philips, The matchless Orinda. To which is added Monsieur Corneille's Pompey and Horace, Tragedies. With several other Translations out of French (London, 1667). Hereafter cited as Poems. The heretofore most convenient version of her work is in volume I of Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. George Saintsbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905).

9. Lauro Martines, Society and History in English Renaissance Verse (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 1-4.

10. Philips, Works 1.69-75. See also Dorothy Merwin, “Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch,” English Literary History 57 (1990): 341.

11. Lawes well earned the subtitle of Willa M. Evans's biography, Henry Lawes: Musician and Friend of Poets (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1941), by providing settings for some 80 of the century's poets, some prominent, some obscure (239-40), and it is easy to see why poets praise his shift away from the polyphonic madrigal that foregrounded musical complexity and toward the new fashion of declamatory or recitative song that highlighted their own art.

12. John Milton: Poems: Reproduced in Facsimile from the Manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge: With a Transcript (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970), and similarly, Poems 1645: Lycidas 1638 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970).

13. Evans, Henry Lawes, 202, 205-6.

14. Philip W. Souers, The Matchless Orinda (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), 60; similarly Evans 202. “A Dialogue betwixt Lucasia & Rosania, Imitating that of Gentle Thirsis” (Works 197-8) seems also to glance at Lawes under the name of the role he played in Milton's A Mask of 1634 (Souers 57).

15. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 42-3.

16. For example, Merwin, “Women Becoming Poets,” 336, 342.

17. Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, Poetry and Dogma: The Transfiguration of Eucharistic Symbols in Seventeenth Century English Poetry (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1954), 18-19, 87, 181-2.

18. Abraham Cowley, “Preface to Poems,” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 2.89.

19. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 171-83.

20. Foucault, Order, 55.

21. Todd, Women's Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 3. See Harriette Andreadis, “The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: 15 (1989): 34-60.

22. Merwin, “Women Becoming Poets,” 343. Philips borrows from Donne on other “friendship” occasions as well. See, for example, “Friendship's Mysterys, to my dearest Lucasia” (#17); “To the excellent M^rs. A[nne]. O[wen]” (#25); “To My excellent Lucasia, on our friendship” (#36); “To my dearest Antenor on his parting” (#54); and “Friendship” (#57).

23. The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1967), 88.

24. Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson, intro. George Saintsbury (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 42.

25. Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing 1649-88 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 138.

26. U. Milo Kaufmann, The Pilgrim's Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), passim; Hilda L. Smith, Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 62-3.

27. Pope, Horace Imitation, Epistle 2.i.107-8; Miner, Cavalier, passim.

28. Helgerson, Self-Crowned, 201, 194-5.

29. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930), 104.

30. Germaine Greer et al., eds., Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), 257.

31. Maurice Aymard, “Friends and Neighbors,” in A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, vol. 3 of Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 489, 466-7, 450.

32. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montagine Done into English by John Florio (1603), vol. 1, intro. George Saintsbury, The Tudor Translations, ed. W. E. Henley (London: David Nutt, 1892), 197, 200; Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, D. D., ed. Charles P. Eden, volume I (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854), especially 94-5.

33. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Exclusive Conversations”: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), [Illegible Text] 47.

34. “Lucasia,” like other of her code names, seems to derive from the plays of William Cartwright, a favorite of Queen Henrietta Maria and Royalist sympathizers, an associate of Henry Lawes, and the subject of Katherine Philips's first published poem (Thomas 1.7, #51). Sir Charles Cotterell [“Poliarchus”] was Charles II's master of ceremonies and politically Philips's most famous associate.

35. Souers, Matchless, 39.

36. Miller, Subject to Change, 29, building on Iragaray.

37. Kenneth Charlton, “The Educational Background,” in The Age of Milton: Backgrounds to Seventeenth-Century Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Raymond B. Waddington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 109-12. Students of English literature will understand the basic features of the romance genre from Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Later French works extending the genre enjoyed wide popularity in England, and perhaps closest to Philips herself is her friend Cotterell's translation of de la Calprenède's Cassandre in 1652 (partial) and 1661 (complete) (Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984], 189-90, 264). Philips's non-dramatic translations include a 368-line version of one of Georges de Scudéry's pastorals, and the small volume of letters Philips left behind was also—it has been suggested—modelled on his sister Madeleine's epistolary romances (Alfred A. Upham, The French Influence in English Literature from the Accession of Elizabeth to the Restoration [New York: Octagon Books, 1965], 446-7).

38. Upham, French Influence, 327-31, 344-5, 363; Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 16.

39. Veevers, Images of Love, 15.

40. Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 131-2.

41. de Mourgues, Metaphysical, 123, 125-7; Pope, Essay on Criticism, 297-8; Georges Mongrédien, Les Précieux et les Précieuses (n.p.: Mercure de France, 1963), 19.

42. de Mourgues, Metaphysical, 139, 125; Mongrédien, Les Précieux, 10, 13-15.

43. de Mourgues, Metaphysical, 123, 127, 129.

44. de Mourgues, Metaphysical, 116-17.

45. Edward Philips, qtd. in K. Philips, Works, 1:24.

46. Winchilsea quoted in K. Philips, Works 1.33.

47. Killigrew, “The Discontent,” quoted in Ann Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 229.

48. See Greer, Kissing, 306.