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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | The Purple Island and Anatomy in Early Seventeenth-Century Literature, Philosophy, and Theology
ISBN# 9780838640180
Reviewed by: William E. Engel
Seventeeth-Century News |
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James Joyce, obviously familiar with the scope and tenor of Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island, included but later struck an extended allusion to it in the manuscript version of Ulysses. Overall the poem has not fared well among modern critics. For example in his anthology of Later Renaissance Nondramatic Verse and Prose, Herschel Baker, perhaps as a benevolent gesture, included twenty-two stanzas of "the notorious Purple Island," but with the caveat that Fletcher "exhaustively and implausibly expounds human physiology with a blend of Spenserian pastorlism and relentless allegory." Frank S. Kastor's conclusion that it is "an unmistakeable disaster" gives some indication if why it has been considered a post-Spenserian curiousity worth knowing about but perhaps not worth reading.
It was just such universal opprobrium that made me eager to read it as a graduate student spurred on, no doubt, by what Poe called "the imp of the perverse." With only a gut-feeling to go on, I was convinced there had to be more to the poem than I was seeing but simply had not yet acquired the critical acumen to find it. At last though, Fletcher has been vindicated in full by Peter Mitchell, who has published the best critical account of the poem to date. Indeed, he has written what may well be the last book ever needed on The Purple Island.
While this is said with admiration for Mitchell's laudable achievement, it is equally true this study is a tour de france of scholarly indulgence - a trait shared with Fletcher's poem. The critical apparatus alone attests to the unbound quest for thoroughness, with its 25-page bibliography, 61-page index, and 146 pages of notes. This book goes well beyond what seventeeth-century scholars have come to expect from a monograph, especially given its fulsome repetition and extensive summung up of each stage of the argument before moving on to the next point: "This chapter began by stating that the question of the purpose and the intentional and reflective directions of The Purple Island, that emerge from an analysis of the work's design, may be inquired into by situating the work in the contexts of the readers' expectations and reception" (173). By the same token, when Mitchell takes issue with a critic, typically he states that argument in exacting detail and then outlines his objections before taking each in turn: "The problmem with Healy's argument, however, is fourfold. Firstly..." (264).
In his conscientious attention to the subtleties of scholarly debates Mitchell implicitly self-selected his intended audience, consisting exclusively of advanced graduate students and dedicated seventeenth-century scholars. He has written a book that makes a leisurely, albeit rigorous, case: "The conceptual metaphors of anatomy and the analogies of the microcosm coalesce in the allegorical threshold figure and the figurative design of The Purple Island, providing what is not only a coherent understanding of anatomy, but also a consistent, figuratively complex issue, emblem, or speaking picture of anatomy, which explores the shared entailments and significant metaphorical connotations of islands, bodies, and buildings to an extent that is unprecedented in anatomy textbooks in its systematicity, coherence, and persistence" (472).
How, one might ask, can a book on Fletcher's Purple Island be sustained for 478 pages of involved argumentation? This study shows Mitchell to be a meticulous and responsible scholar, as well as a subtle reader not only of seventeenth-century poetry and prose, but also of the main early modern anatomical texts and their illustrations (most notably Vasalius, Estienne, Corti, Harvey, and Pare). He is equally adroit when teasing out cruces debated by historians of science and medicine (Pagel and Nicholson), scholars concerned with the nature of metaphorical language (Lakoff and Johnson), literary critics (Quilligan and Belsey), as well as early modernists focusing on notions of the body (Laqueur and Sawday) as of gender (Traub and Butler).
Without losing sight of the fact that The Purple Island is his ultimate point of focus, Mitchell presents some conclusions that have far reaching ramifications for early modern studies in general and anatomical figuration in particular. For example, early on he observes that the poem "does not merely draw figurative ideas from anatomy and the tradition of microcosmic speculation, but allegorically transforms them into the geographical and social features of the Isle of Man" (87). This allows him later to make claims for the poem regarding "how the body as microchristus and as a microcosm of the terrestrial globe or geocosm contributes to a system of antecendently existing associated commonplaces on the threshold figure" (117). By uncovering the providential plan which Thirsil (the poet-shephard speaking from within the text) narrates, Mitchell makes a compelling and convincing case that the characteristic feature of the innovation of the Isle of Man figure "is the way in which the ingenuity and effort it expends in trying to store up and preserve correspondences and analogies, and the entrenchment of its reaction to 'what e're is in the continent' P.I. 1.53.3), especially Roman Catholicism, help to concretize and give succinct yet infinitely expandable expression to the quasi-Paracelsian and alchemical notion of natural philosophy as individual revelation, and to the emergent ideologies of English (or British) Protestant individualism and nationalism, which ironically introduced a language which would in the history of the discourse of science, religion and nationhood help to bring about a collapse of what the implied author of The Purple Island endeavored to preserve" (441). In the whole of Fletcher's poem then, Mitchell argues, "The analogy between Man and an island becomes a metaphor in which the correspondence is extended to provide a justifying context for recent anatomical discoveries" (473).
By way of linking the poem suggestively to teh vanitas tradition (125-30), showing the extent to which the margin notes are more discursively expansive than the consise clarifying, nomenclatural, or indexical marginalia typical of the day (246), and indicating how The Purple Island figruality relates to Harveian anatomy especially as regards the systematic circulation of blood (351), Mitchell clarifies how the poem "develops a highly sophisticated soteriological epistemology and hermeneutics of the 'scientific' and poetic concepts of ingenuity and eloquence, which Fletcher's relgious prose shows us is modeled on the operation of the Holy Spirit in ecclesia, which is in turn modeled on the operation of the soul through the heart and brain in the human body" (478).
As the subtitle indicates, this is a book about anatomy in early modern literature, philosophy, and theology. It succeeds in delivering what is promised by situating The Purple Island in its social, political, scientific, and historical contexts. Mitchell is to be commended for showing contemporary readers how the whole of creation, as it was reckoned in seventeenth-century England, came to be subsumed in Fletcher's Isle of Man.
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