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Beskrivelse
Henry Neville (16201694), writesDavid Womersley in his Introduction, was an experienced political actor whounited a practitioners sense of possibility with literary flair andimagination as he struggled to achieve headway for his republican commitmentsin the deceptive waters of late Stuart monarchy.
Educated at Oxford, Neville made anextended visit to Italy in 164344, where he formed long-standing connectionsin Florence and studied the institutions of republican Venice. In 1649 heentered the House of Commons with the support of Algernon Sidney (who was hissecond cousin). Over the next few years, Neville wrote pamphlets against theusurpation of the army and the threat of Cromwellian dictatorship, and as theRestoration approached, he was a leading member of James Harringtons RotaClub.
In late 1667 or early 1668, after hehad returned to England from a second trip to Italy, Neville wrote the first ofthe two works on which his reputation now rests. The Isle of Pines(1668) is at initial glance a slight, even salacious, shipwreck fantasy inwhich a fictional Elizabethan castaway, George Pines, and four femaleco-survivors populate a luxuriant tropical island with a thriving communitythat eventually numbers almost two thousand. Like Harrington before him,Neville plays with the island trope and flirts with political implication,although it is unclear quite how serious and profound these implications areintended to be.
Neville pursues similar republicanthemes more fully and directly in his major work of 1680, PlatoRedivivus. Often read as a moderate adaptation of Harringtonianprinciples to the realities of a monarchical system that was now againentrenched, the treatise is notable for its insistence on kingship as a trustfrom the people, on the duty of kings to relegate their own interests beneaththose of their subjects, and on constitutional sanctions such as annualparliaments as necessary checks on royal power. Mixed monarchy and limitedmonarchy are emphatic terms throughout the work. However, Nevilles critiqueof late Stuart monarchy relies more on the kind of cosmopolitan republicanismto which he had been exposed in his Italian travels than it does on morefamiliar home-grown concepts such as ancient constitutionalism.
The only scholarly edition of HenryNevilles most important writings, the Liberty Fund edition is constructed on asolid textual foundation, offering for the first time a thorough annotation ofboth texts.
David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at theUniversity of Oxford. He has published widely on English literature from theearly sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. He is the editor of JonathanSwifts Gullivers Travels (2012) for Cambridge University Press.