Andrew Marvell and the "Painter Satires": A Computational Approach to Their Authorship
John F. Burrows · The Modern Language Review · 2005
An increasing respect, since its discovery in 1945, for the manuscript now known as Bodleian Library, MS Eng.poet.d. 49, has helped to alter scholarly opinion about the main group of 'painter satires' associated with Andrew Marvell.To say this is not to accept the authority of the manuscript as incontestable but only to recognize that scholars now feel able to approach the matter in a way that was simply not open when H. M. Margoliouth was working on the first edition of The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell (I927).'The main objects of the present article are to reappraise the authorship of these poems and, in doing so, to test the authority of the manuscript.Margoliouth's own scholarly judgement was his most substantial ground for linking some of the poems and setting others apart.Contemporary and subsequent ascriptions of particular poems, differing widely in weight, were available to him.But the formation of authorial sets (usually assigned to Marvell) seems to have gone on without much regard for scholarly evidence.It certainly began so, in 1667, when the Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Advices were gathered in a printed volume and published as Denham's.2Margoliouth is a taciturn editor.But, so far as he enunciates it, his case rests on four considerations.He rejects the possibility that the five main rejoinders to Waller's Instructions could be the work of a single hand.He is convinced that, by virtue of its style and treatment, its close knowledge of the House of Commons, and its unchallenged association with Marvell, the Last Instructions stands apart from the rest.He holds that, for poems written close in time and covering similar ground, the Fourth and Fifth Advices differ so much in style and treatment from the Last Instructions that they cannot reasonably be regarded as the work of the same poet.And he sees the Fourth Advice rather than the Last Instructions as a 'natural sequel' (I, 349) to the Third Advice.The outcome is that, of the five poems, he prints only the Last Instructions, to which (seemingly on slighter evidence?) he adds the Further Advice.I wish to acknowledge