ABSTRACT
Encapsulated here in the quotation from Lauro Martines is the myth I continue to wrestle with-that most “canonical” writers from the early modern period were “profoundly conservative in their politics,” by which Martines means, specifically, monarchical in terms of constitutional theory and elitist in terms of class. In the case of Donne, this legend was given its strong form at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1899 Edmund Gosse delivered his own assessment of Donne as a preacher, which locked him into a class attitude:
He belonged to an age in which the aristocratic element exercised a domination which was apparently unquestioned. Although of middle-class birth, the temperament, manners, and society of Donne were of the most distinguished order. The religious power of democracy had been discovered…. The Rebellion, and still more the success of the Rebellion, driving men and women of incongruous classes close to one another in the instinct of self-protection against the results of a common catastrophe, beganthe democratization of the pulpit. But of Donne we must think as untouched by a least warning of such a political upheaval. He belonged, through and through, to the old order; was, indeed, in some ways, its most magnificent and minatory clerical embodiment…. This
unity of purpose, this exaltation of a sovereign individuality, made to command in any sphere, gave to the sermons of Donne their extraordinary vital power; and if this particular charm has evaporated…it is that the elements in ourselves are lacking, that we no longer breathe the aristocratic Jacobean atmosphere.1
