Court culture and the origins of a royalist tradition in early Stuart England
Court culture and the origins of a royalist tradition in early Stuart England
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早期斯图亚特英格兰的宫廷文化和保皇主义传统的起源
DOI：
10.1016/0191-6599(89)90084-3
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发表时间：
1989
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
G. Walker
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
G. Walker
一年内出现两本关于某一特定主题的杰出质量的书籍是罕见的。更罕见的是，每个人都就自己选择的主题得出看似矛盾的结论，但仍然对史学做出了重要贡献。然而，这正是 R. 马尔科姆·斯穆茨 (R. Malcolm Smuts) 的《宫廷文化与保皇党传统的起源》和凯文·夏普 (Kevin Sharpe) 的《批评与赞美》的出版所造成的情况。两部作品与另一部作品相比都没有受到损害，这是对每部作品背后的智慧和学术的致敬。 对于斯穆茨来说，他选择的任务是识别和追踪艺术活动和赞助的发展，这些发展将导致个人统治期间查理一世宫廷的独特文化。在伊丽莎白时代的分散的“宫廷”环境中，对童贞女王伊丽莎/阿斯特莱亚的中心崇拜实际上更多的是贵族和城市艺术赞助的产物，而不是中央指导的产物，斯穆茨描述了精英文化逐渐集中在宫廷和迅速发展的大都市上。同样，随着“宫廷圈”的地理范围缩小，随着王室进程的决定和社会精英向首都迁移“季节”，艺术时尚变得更加精英化。贵族们华丽的服装和炫耀的奇特房屋让位于阿伦德尔伯爵所拥护的更为阴沉的古典风格，并在本·琼森的诗句和伊尼戈·琼斯的建筑中永垂不朽。在查理一世的统治下，这场运动在皇室的热情赞助下得到了巩固，贵族和宫廷开始将自己视为“一个因其智力卓越、精神修养和本能优雅而与众不同的阶层”。这种精英主义的必然结果，在凡·戴克的画布上描绘的冷漠、居高临下的显赫人物中可见一斑，它是与其他领域的隔离的一种措施。这种艺术“主要吸引一小群知识分子，他们中的大多数人一年中至少有一部分时间居住在伦敦”。宫廷最优秀的艺术和文学不再是统一国家的思想和态度的载体”。夏普在他的研究中试图批评的正是这种文化孤立的观念，特别是“法庭”和“国家”之间的两极分化的观念。自从佩雷斯·扎戈林（Perez Zagorin）和劳伦斯·斯通（Laurence Stone）的开创性著作以来，“国别划分”的概念一直主导着卡罗琳的史学。在这种模式中，查理一世的谄媚朝臣们忙于创作自己的艺术作品，向君主的初期“专制主义”致敬，以至于他们几乎没有注意到宫廷之外世界上反对浪潮的高涨，直到为时已晚。因此，英国内战在很大程度上是一场敌对文化的冲突：一种文化坚强、有社会意识、本质上是清教徒，另一种则阿谀奉承、过于世故、腐败和隐秘的天主教徒。夏普在强有力的介绍性章节中打破了这种错误的分歧，并在接下来的内容中继续证明，即使是最“有礼貌”的作家，如托马斯·卡鲁和威廉·达文南爵士，也远非不加批判的传统奉承者。事实上，典型的宫廷形式面具本身就被他们用来表达对王室政策和态度的批评，并提出替代的政治和文化策略。夏普的论证既充满活力，又具有相当大的修辞力量，这适合一位在早期斯图亚特史学的严酷世界中选择的作家，但尽管他对健康、敏感、非正统宫廷文化的论证很有说服力，但仍然很难接受斯图亚特花园里的一切都是可爱的。他不能
It is rare for two books of outstanding quality on a given subject to appear in a single year. It is rarer still for each to reach seemingly contradictory conclusions concerning their chosen topics, yet remain a vital contribution to historiography. Yet this is the situation created by the publication of R. Malcolm Smuts’ Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition and Kevin Sharpe’s Criticism and Compliment. And it is a tribute to the intellect and scholarship behind each that neither work suffers detraction by comparison with the other.For Smuts, his chosen task is to identify and trace the developments in artistic activity and patronage which would lead to the distinctive culture of the court of Charles I during the Personal Rule. From the diffuse ‘courtly’milieu of the Elizabethan period, in which the central cult of Eliza/Astraea the Virgin Queen, was in fact more the product of noble and urban artistic patronage than of central direction, Smuts describes a gradual concentration of elite culture upon the court and the rapidly burgeoning metropolis. Similarly, as the geographical range of the ‘court circle’contracted, as royal progresses deciined and the social elite migrated towards the Capital for ‘the season’, so artistic fashions became more elitist. The flamboyant clothes of the aristocracy and their ostentatious prodigy houses gave way to the more somber classical styles espoused by the Earl of Arundel and immortalised in the verse of Ben Jonson and the architecture of Inigo Jones. Under Charles I this movement was consolidated under enthusiastic royal patronage, and the aristocracy and court began to conceive of themselves as ‘a caste set apart by its intellectual distinction, spiritual refinement and instinctive elegance’. The corollary of this elitism, made visible in the aloof, condescending, grandees portrayed on canvas by Van Dyck, was a measure of isolation from the rest of the realm. Such art ‘appealed chiefly to small groups of intellectuals, most of whom resided for at least part of the year in London. The best art and literature ofthe court no longer served as a vehicle for ideas and attitudes that tended to unify the nation’. It is precisely this notion of cultural isolation, specifically the idea of a bi-polar divide between ‘court’and ‘country’, which Sharpe seeks to criticise in his study. Ever since the pioneering work of Perez Zagorin and Laurence Stone,’the concept of a ‘cour~ country divide’has dominated Caroline historiography. In this model the sycophantic courtiers of Charles I were so busy fashioning their own artistic tributes to the incipient ‘absolutism’of the monarch that they hardly noticed the rising tide of opposition in the world beyond the court until it was too late. Thus the English Civil War was in great part a clash ofinimical cultures: the one robust, socially-aware and fundamentally puritan, the other fawning, over-sophisticated, corrupt and crypto-catholic. In a powerful introductory chapter Sharpe explodes this false divide, and he goes on in what follows todemonstrate that even the most ‘courtly’of writers, such as Thomas Carew and Sir William Davenant, were far from the uncritical sycophants of tradition. Indeed that archtypal courtly form the masque was itself employed by them to voice criticism of royal policies and attitudes and to suggest alternative political and cultural strategies. Sharpe’s arguments are advanced with both vigour and considerable rhetorical strength, as befits an author schooied in the harsh world of early Stuart historiography, but for al1 the persuasiveness of his case for a healthy, responsive, heterodox court culture, it remains difficult to accept that everything in the Stuart garden was lovely. He cannot