Oxford promotes this book both as a radical new look at the literary and political climate in which Alexander Pope conceived then emended Windsor-Forest and as the fullest contextual account of that poem. The latter more accurately describes this absorbing and erudite study. Rogers's methods and conclusions are rarely radical in this “historical rather than historicist” (3) project overtly aligned with Earl Wasserman's “unfashionably Aristotelian and ‘Augustan’” (282) interpretation of Pope's symbolic unity in The Subtler Language. Rogers's more current critical interest, Pope's Jacobitism, extends rather than initiates arguments familiar from John Aden, Howard Erskine-Hill, and Douglas Brooks-Davies about Pope's probable ties to exiled Stuarts. Rogers argues that Stuart destiny in the poem fails to escape the past of “Jacobite martyrdom” (85) memorialized by Pope and that the poem's optimism is more fragile than the peace it celebrated. Pope's abiding hatred of intolerant foreign usurpers from William I to George I thus makes the poem's fractured history more meaningful. Rogers ably supplies the most systematic survey of the political, literary, and personal contexts out of which the poem's gossamer neogeorgic and anti-Hanoverian lines were spun, detailing how praise for a peace negotiated by Pope's Tory friends is poised against a pointedly unmentioned Duke of Marlborough and ascendant Whig ideology. Throughout, the information is excellent. The presentation of it, however, sometimes lags and often repeats topics just covered in his coeval, parallel study, Symbolic Design of Windsor-Forest (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004).

Destiny hovers, sometimes puzzlingly, between supplement and complement to Design. It is clear that Rogers's knowledge of the poem is exhaustive, perhaps too much so for some readers. Its argument, however, can be approached fruitfully from multiple angles independent of Design. Destiny expands Rogers's own notes to his Oxford edition of the poem, offers an early career parallel to Douglas Brooks-Davies's arguments about a Jacobite Dunciad, and pays homage to Wasserman's unifying concordia discors gloss: “It is indeed the aim of this book to bring more evidence to bear on both the historic and mythic aspects of the book, to demonstrate that Wasserman's claim can be even more strongly stated” (281).

Such a wealth of intellectual roots generates branches requiring some pruning to keep the complete argument perspicuous. Destiny delivers an attenuated, episodic explication in a somewhat ambling narrative style within which readers may lose sight of Windsor's forest for its many mythic trees. All of the topics are relevant and thoroughly researched, but often the main point of each section is delayed enough to deprive the argument of full force and momentum. For example, the warrant for detailing Pope's 1713 revisions is to present the poem as more fundamentally redirected during the run-up to Utrecht and the Tory peace plan than the Twickenham editors acknowledge; however, no helpful summary account of all such changes and their lasting significance synthesizes the elaborate evidentiary details about those years. Similarly, Rogers's striking aim to show Windsor-Forest as “much possessed by death” (311), thus marking the early end of Pope's optimism and start of his oppositional stance as vehement satirist, needs emphasis sooner. Even the gracious nod to Wasserman appears as afterthought, despite providing Rogers the “most searching account of the moral and political ideology” (281) and a “fuller basis for understanding the poem than any other schema” (282).

Rogers so persuasively details how thoroughly the poem absorbs the tumultuous period culminating in the 1715 Jacobite rising and why J. F. E. Stuart formed the only supportable successor to Anne for Catholics and cashiered Tory ministers alike that his more tentative alignment of Pope with Jacobitism is overly cautious. Once peace and plenty is made synonymous with a Stuart in 1713, Pope's poem indeed becomes an “intimation of Jacobite mortality” (5) but one best expressed by a true believer in that cause. As Rogers emphasizes, “Finally, if the reading … which this book offers has any validity, then Pope needed a Jacobite as much as he needed a peace negotiator” (20). Rogers's connection of the Jacobite dots in Pope's influential circle—Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Francis Atterbury, Thomas Southcote, and much of the Caryll family—dovetails well with comparable claims for Jacobitism in works immediately following Windsor-Forest, including the 1714 Rape of the Lock and its doubly deceptive Key and, as I have argued elsewhere, the Iliad translation.

Destiny primarily emphasizes political contexts, yet sections on heraldry, armorial customs, alchemy, and the orders of St. George and the Garter mix more formalist interests that blur its difference from Design. These topics also answer a more dubious introductory concern that Whitwell Elwin's Victorian bias against allegory and classical allusion in the little Queen Anne's man still prevails. Hence Rogers revisits the arcana of alchemical language and the courtly, ceremonial symbols by which Stuart rule was promulgated and legitimized in Royalist panegyric drawn from Renaissance ideology. The chapter on Windsor as Anne's favored place expatiates on these signs via the palace's art and architecture. The chapter on classical allusion expands Rogers's own Oxford edition of the poem. Echoes of Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, John Milton, and William Camden are joined with neatly turned summaries of the roles of John Denham, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and John Evelyn as influences, and all those later voices are appropriately framed by the more commanding role of Virgil as exemplar of the Forest's key organizing georgic metaphor: “identifying the health of the landscape with the health of the state” (246).

Overall, Rogers's highly detailed exploration targets advanced students and scholars. Its length and depth will require further careful framing by professors aiming to use it to introduce those new to the Age of Anne to the complex world of this poem. All, however, can learn from Rogers how thoroughly polarized politics may grow over responsibility for war, peace, and succession; how opposition in such climates is often voiced in symbols; and how literature may offer cultural continuity and solace during such times yet also require our careful analysis whenever strong, competing interests represent historical change as cultural crisis.