Andrew Marvell’s life has always proved a rather enigmatic subject for biography. While laudable attempts to interpret that life and to fill in the gaps that accrue from the paucity of documentary evidence have been made by such scholars as Pierre Legois (Andre Marvell: Poete, Puritain, Patriote, 1621–1678 [London, 1928]; revised although compressed, 1965) and more recently by Nicholas Murray (World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell [London, 1999]), there has been a need for a full-scale, evidence-based biography—one that both contextualizes Marvell in his historical moment and offers a comprehensive overview of the poet as well as the politician. Any attempt to do so can only be enhanced by Nicholas von Maltzahn’s indispensible chronology of Marvell’s life records (An Andrew Marvell Chronology [Basingstoke, 2005]), one of many resources used by Nigel Smith in his recent biography.

The strengths of Smith’s substantial volume reside in meticulous research and in the masterful situating of Marvell in his historical and political contexts. The author’s aim to present “an uncovering of the covering up of Marvell’s life” (11) is largely achieved, and there are some new insights. Of particular interest is the detailed account of the poet’s father in his role as a preacher, with useful reference to and citations from manuscripts of his sermons. In regard to Marvell himself, we are treated to a comprehensive overview of his education (probably at Hull Grammar and certainly at Cambridge University) carefully examined in light of seventeenth-century pedagogical methodology. Particularly impressive is the section (45–63) surveying the cultural impact of Marvell’s travels abroad and the potential influence of Roman painting, sculpture, houses, and gardens on the maturing poet. And Smith’s view of Marvell’s move from civil servant to MP as part of his career development (154) is convincingly made and well illustrated.

For the most part, the author interprets existing evidence well, but not without some detriment to the book’s overall readability. At times the narrative descends into somewhat routine itemization of, for example, Marvell’s role as witness to the signing of deeds (42–43) or his translations of Latin dispatches (136–41). The rather ponderous chapters 6 and 7, respectively entitled “Civil Service” and “Cavalier Revenge,” make heavy reading and tend to list rather than to interpret. While Smith is not afraid to offer some interesting suggestions of his own (e.g., about Marvell as a possible spy), some of his speculations fail to convince, for example, that Marvell wrote “The Character of Holland” “in order to impress Milton, or Bradshaw (possibly at Milton’s suggestion)” (106–7) or that because of “Miltonic echoes” “it would seem that the two men had recently met” (107), and we are left wondering about the relevance of the author’s imagining “the uses Marvell might have made of the Bodleian” (185). More dangerous perhaps is Smith’s exaggerated emphasis on Samuel Parker’s attacks (252ff.) and his naive acceptance as fact of the possibility that Marvell may have been a eunuch, an acceptance articulated in the biography’s final page (343) via a misleading overstatement that this “identity [is] confirmed in one of his Latin poems.”

On the whole, this biography is rather unbalanced in a number of ways. Discussion of historical context, excellent though it is at times, occurs at the expense of any real attempt to interpret Marvell the poet. While Smith’s historicist readings (e.g., of Marvell’s funeral elegy on Cromwell [149–53]) are useful, they gloss over the poetry itself. The omnipresent fixation on history means that key Marvellian poems such as “The Garden” (and its Latin companion piece Hortus) barely get a mention. And where there is an attempt to interpret, this is presented in terms that hardly advance comprehension of the poetry. Thus, “Upon Appleton House” is described as “his masterpiece” (94), his funeral elegy on Cromwell is “a masterpiece of its kind” (149), and “Clarendon’s Housewarming” is “a delightful and amusing poem, and one that certainly delivers a punch” (201). The absence of a mature critical voice here is unfortunate.

Even more serious perhaps is the extremely cursory way in which Marvell’s Latin poetry is passed over. At one point Smith remarks of Marvell’s Latin poem on James Mitchell that “it is largely overlooked because it is in Latin” (297), but this precise criticism can be applied to the methodology of the book under review. Despite the author’s stated aim “to make Marvell known to the widest possible readership, in the light of the most recent editions and scholarly work” (ix), his failure to take the Latin poems seriously or to engage with recent criticism on such (see, e.g., Estelle Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry: From Text to Context [Brussels, 2003]) results in only a partial reading of the poet and his work. The brief treatment of Ad Regem Carolum Parodia underplays Marvell’s inventiveness in the genre of Parodia. Discussion of “On a Drop of Dew” makes only passing reference to its illuminating Latin companion piece Ros in the vague statement “a similar effect is achieved in the Latin companion poem” (67); discussion of “Eyes and Tears” notes the existence of Marvell’s Latin version of stanza 8 but fails to take account of its generic debt to Marino’s Magdalene poems; the section on Marvell’s English epigram on Blood’s attempt to steal the crown (240–41) ignores his parallel Latin poem Bludius et Corona. Countless other examples could be cited. And there are some misreadings, for example, that the imagery of Bellipotens Virgo “harks back to ‘An Horatian Ode’” (119). Surely there is a huge disparity between the “restless Cromwell” of that poem and the later old man in the Latin, the depiction of whom looks back in fact to Homer’s Nestor or Virgil’s Evander.

In short, if a poem happens to be written in Latin or if it is a vernacular poem that is in any way apolitical, it receives minimal treatment in this book, which devotes its energies to the political rather than the poetic. Smith rightly remarks that Marvell’s poetry is “both brilliant and difficult” (3). There are glimpses of brilliance in his own command of historical facts, but because of its cursory treatment of Marvell’s poetry (and of the poetic) this is a biography not without difficulties of its own.