ABSTRACT
In Neville’s preface to Plato Redivivus (1681), a fictional publisher describes how the manuscript arrived anonymously, and how he admonished his servant for accepting such a package in dangerous times. The servant, he says, answered “that the bearer did look like a gentleman, and had a very unsuitable garb for a trepan, and that he did believe he had seen him often at my shop, and that I knew him well” (i–ii). The defense is typical of Neville’s mordant humor, proposing that a criminal could be identified by his outfit and then turning the question back upon the questioner with a slight threat. While the metafictional preface soon becomes a convention of the novel, in Neville’s political dialogue it is only the first of many disrupted attempts to determine the truth. The narration is a composite; while the character of the English Gentleman may approximate the voice of Neville (Robbins, Commonwealthman 37), all three principal speakers, along with the cautious publisher, his lawyer, the servant, and even the “Courteous Reader,” perform the larger dialogue. Understanding is constructed through negotiation and interplay, rather than occupied in fixed, hierarchical positions that would almost certainly obscure or misvalue information: “I hate nothing more than to hear diſputes amongſt Gentlemen, and men of ſence, wherein the Speakers ſeem (like Sophisters in a College) to diſpute rather for Victory, than to diſcover and find out the Truth” (Plato Redivivus 13). Within the territory of Neville’s fictions, whether the danger-bordered colloquium of Plato Redivivus or the isolated cooperative of The Isle of Pines, no voice can be easily dismissed, no experience discounted out of hand. 1
