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The Discontented Cavalier: The Work of Sir John Suckling in Its Social, Religious, Political, and Literary Contexts.

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The Discontented Cavalier: The Work of Sir John Suckling in Its Social, Religious, Political, and Literary Contexts by Robert Wilcher. U. of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 445. $79.50.

It has been thirty years since the only full-length study of the whole range of Suckling's life and works appeared, Charles L. Squier's Sir John Suckling (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978). Since Squier's work, and the further assimilation of the 1971 Oxford standard edition of Suckling, edited by Thomas Clayton and L. A. Beaurline, the large shift in literary studies away from the New Criticism's focus on style and close reading has transformed the scene for studies of Suckling and his age. Following in the wake of work by such literary and historical scholars as Martin Butler, Kevin Sharpe, R. Malcolm Smuts, Timothy Raylor, and Thomas Corns, and the ground-breaking work on manuscript production and circulation by Arthur Marotti, Harold Love, H. R. Woudhuysen, Margaret Ezell, Mary Hobbs, and others, Robert Wilcher envisions The Discontented Cavalier as answering the need for "a more sustained application to Suckling's complete oeuvre of the interdisciplinary approaches and contextualizing strategies [that] have effected a radical change in our understanding of the literary dimension of society and culture during the reign of Charles I" (19). In this enterprise, he hopes to extract Suckling "from the lists of 'Cavaliers,' 'Sons of Ben,' 'Caroline court poets' and 'mannerists' in which his individuality as a writer has been submerged" (18).

At the outset, Wilcher distances himself from the "synchronic and monolithic model of culture favored by new historicists" (20) as well as from the old-fashioned sorting of earlier seventeenth-century poets into broad groups of "Metaphysicals" and "Cavaliers" or followers...

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