It is astounding that the provocative polymath Richard Bentley prompted no serious study for 125 years. H. responds to this shortcoming with a book that analyses, contextualises and challenges Bentley's scholarly endeavours. Her research on the critic and his milieu for over fifteen years brings to bear a remarkable spectrum of English and continental books and manuscripts of the sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. The result is an original and racy intellectual history that offers many novel and interesting observations, particularly on points of detail: its primary underlying ambition, though rarely declared, is to depict Bentley as a natural product of both his forerunners and his generation – in short, one not entirely extraordinary. Yet this ambitious endeavour is hampered by the study's compactness: the main text scarcely exceeds 200 pages, a scale that simply cannot satisfy. There are regrettable omissions: his attempt to secure Isaac Vossius' library for Oxford (1689), his major contribution to Graevius' Callimachus (1697; some 400pp.), his emendations on Menander and Philemon (1713) and his Remarks (1710) on Anthony Collins' Discourse of Free-Thinking; although Bentley's myriad disputes with Trinity College, Cambridge, are mercifully ignored, further consideration of their influence on his editorial persona would bear considerable fruit.
The first chapter, ‘Before Bentley: Restoration Cambridge’, is the book's longest and perhaps most significant: it says little of Bentley himself but expertly surveys classical and ecclesiastical scholarship issuing from late-seventeenth century Cambridge, particularly Thomas Stanley, Thomas Gale and John Pearson. H. demonstrates that such figures tended both to construct broad-brush literary and philosophical narratives and to tackle outré texts. The second chapter, ‘London in the 1680s: Bentley Begins’, outlines how Bentley developed his own scholarly trajectory, influenced by Edward Stillingfleet and his celebrated library: H. shows how, at least in text-critical endeavours, Bentley looked beyond England to align himself with a continental tradition, particularly the emendax Dutch School.
‘Bentley in Oxford: the New and the Strange’ critiques Bentley's first publication, the sparkling Epistula ad Joannem Millium (1691). H. does more justice here to Bentley's scholarly flair than for his other, more profound works, elegantly demonstrating the profit that his hard toil with books, manuscript and printed, offered up for his disposal. Chapter 4, ‘Into the Drawing Room: the Public Intellectual’, tackles Bentley's inaugural Boyle Lectures (1692–3) and his Dissertation on the Epistles of ‘Phalaris’ (1697, 1699); between the two, his prolonged involvement with the Royal Library and Cambridge University Press is expertly handled. Yet, given the book's focus, it is unfortunate that Bentley's ground-breaking Dissertation enjoys a mere ten pages: such a brief compass deprives the reader of an account of, for example, Bentley's numismatic researches, his remarkable English style (set against his lively Latin) and the work's reception over the subsequent century – a potent indication of its revolutionary contentions.
The fifth (‘Rewriting Horace: the Force of Reason and the Force of Habit’) and sixth (‘The Measure of all Things: vi commodavi’) chapters treat two of Bentley's major editions of Latin poets. In both chapters considerable material is harvested from these works, even if not always cited in full. H. argues with conviction that Bentley's primary concern in his Horace (1711/12) was to impose verbal scholarship upon a textually conservative work that epitomised genteel society. In the case of Terence (1726), she focusses on his metrical Schediasma; but despite careful discussion of predecessors in this complex field, the account fails to prove that Bentley's advances were neither novel nor foundational. Without comparison of Bentley's conclusions with modern theories, essential to appraise his contribution, the account offers insufficient information to enlighten the uninitiated or to satisfy the expert; for Bentley-Luchs and the like, head to Questa. (Presumably the Press introduced the chapter's incorrect scansions and podic/metric divisions.)
Chapter 7, ‘Bentley's New Testament: the Return of the Repressed’, treats Bentley's ambitious but inchoate project to regenerate the textual state of the New Testament at the Council of Nicaea. H. gives detailed context for contemporary debates on the Trinity, drawing profitably on Bentley's manuscript notes on several theologically significant passages. Although H. regrets the tedium of theological discussion (pp. 187–8), closer inspection of the diverse responses that Bentley's Proposal elicited in print would provide significant critical context, not least since Bentley's praelection on the inauthenticity of the comma Johanneum (1 John 7) successfully secured the Chair of Divinity in 1717.
The final chapter, ‘Interlopers and Interpolators: Manilius and Paradise Lost’, sets the two final books of Bentley's life in parallel through their contention that interpolators' hands blight these texts' transmissions. Although this link is somewhat forced, and deprives both important works of many angles of approach, to compare late-Bentleian criticism in classical and English literature is rare and rewarding. Still, since interpolation has been an accepted feature of Manilius' transmission from Scaliger to the present day, it is misleading to deem it a Bentleian smokescreen ‘designed as a vehicle for displaying Bentley's critical skill’ (p. 217). Likewise, it is odd to ignore Elijah Fenton's pre-Bentleian edition of Paradise Lost (1725), which both posited a Miltonic amanuensis and ventured to correct (tacitly) the poem's punctuation and, occasionally, phraseology – to critics' outrage; it is odder still not to state that Bentley purposefully placed conjectures in the margin, not the text, ‘[s]o that every Reader has his free Choice, whether he will accept or reject what is here offer'd him’. Given Bentley's undeniable playfulness, it is also odd not to consider his possible disingenuity (as briefly aired on p. 2), Queen Caroline's alleged encouragement of the project, or his pointed coda, unifying [Addison's] critical temerity, the curious apologia ‘non injussa cecini’ and Homer's defiant Agamemnon (Il. 1.174–5).
Some of H.'s most interesting observations appear in the conclusion, even if its subtitle, ‘Dominating Antiquity’, misconstrues the Latin describing Bentley's Terence (antiquum obtinere). H. at last offers a refreshing synthesis of what was novel in Bentley's scholarship, elsewhere taken for granted or painstakingly challenged. For her, Bentley passionately wished to invade the ‘polite world’ of English (i.e. non-classical) letters, hoping that his methods ‘would make him appear a glamorous bad boy in the classical sphere’ (p. 193). That may be so, but scant proof is adduced for such hunches from which much of H.'s overarching argument depends. Did Bentley always – or ever – care for the coffee house?
H.'s analysis – replete with ‘surely’, ‘clearly’, ‘evidently’, etc. – proves to be surprisingly intentionalist and cynically suspicious: if Bentley does not mention a predecessor, he does so provocatively, or to fabricate his own novelty; if he supports a conjecture by parallel passages, he does so to bully the reader into acquiescent submission; if he talks of improbability, he really means impossibility; if he supplants a predecessor's emendation with his own, he does so pugnaciously; if he argues on the basis of ancient sources (literary and factual), he is unoriginal. Any loftier goals, such as the pursuit of truth and the establishment of fact, are given short shrift; were they not, stimulating questions could be posed about when and where Bentley subverts these enlightened ideological pursuits for rhetorical flair or personal profit.
Bentley is introduced (p. 1) as a ‘repellent’, ‘noisome’, ‘flamboyant but embarrassing’ figure who ‘evokes loathing’. Such hyperbolic rhetoric endures throughout the book, which remains little enamoured of its subject. The tone of H.'s argument regularly appears not only partisan in its iconoclasm (a put-up job from Mr Scaliger?) but, on occasion, mean-spirited and pedantic in its quest for a contrary account to the hard-won narrative of historians of scholarship. H.'s ‘Bentley’ (like so many others') suggests the arche of Swift's and Pope's slanders and the baffling audacity of his Paradise Lost; if so, this cannot but taint the telos.
The absence of footnotes is frustrating: for almost all supporting evidence, and all bibliographical citations, the endnotes require constant consultation; the text proper lacks sufficient detail to substantiate many of its more important claims, recording academic sources infinitely more rarely than is alleged of Bentley. Those seeking a complete bibliography must construct it by sifting through the endnotes. Nevertheless, beyond its Greek, the book contains very few typographical errors (e.g. Corpus Christi being ‘Benét’ College, and Joseph Wasse a ‘sociable queen's fellow’).
Bentley averred that ‘no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself’, unmoved by the inconsequential and the fraudulent (Boyle, Atterbury, Le Clerc, Middleton). Despite H.'s laborious and provocative study, Bentley's writings and his unique amalgam of critical methods and talents still require a full and fair analysis to reflect the scholarship of one who, night-gowned and wig in hand, once salvaged the Codex Alexandrinus from the flames ravaging Abingdon House, while Gentlemen pondered Robert Jenkins's ear.
