This study revisits Marvell's “celebrated poetic ambivalence” (1) with a view to contextualizing it further in mid-seventeenth-century English thought. How are we to revive this now familiar subject or questions of Marvell's “amphibious” or “chameleon”-like character? Yoshinaka proposes his wide reading in likely contexts will center in the writings of the Great Tew circle, with which he associates Marvell's skepticism. This promise is not much fulfilled, such is his industry in canvassing still further possibilities. There is difficulty too in emphasizing Marvell's ambivalence while presuming in him an underlying consistency; this would require more concerted and careful argument than is met with here. Doubts arise on many points of detail and more generally over the synchronic construction of Marvell's thought as so coherent over time. This suggests some indifference, whether on Marvell's, or more likely on the critic's, part, to circumstance and its role in rhetoric, in determinations on genre, in choices of poetic form, and in habits of allusion.

A deeper question persists about ambivalence: whether the word describes contradictory views or emotions strongly experienced or at least strongly expressed, that is, with our being drawn powerfully if irreconcilably to opposite ends, or at least to their rhetorical expressions; or, as in common usage now, whether ambivalence connotes a retreat to something nearer indifference. The former might seem a real possibility in Marvell's case, in whom the equivocation may be heartfelt, or at least emphatically expressed; the latter is the cooler norm in Marvell studies, long ago established by T. S. Eliot, where the equivocation issues in a muting of affect, or even decent silence. Yoshinaka's chief contribution is to dress this Eliotic legacy in terms of skepticism, even to make of Marvell a doctrinaire skeptic (56ff., 65).

This skepticism Yoshinaka sees as directed especially against the providentialism prevalent in Marvell's day. Even where he can cite the familiar example of John Hales, however, this does not much bring Marvell into the world of Great Tew. Moreover, the piety to the Church of England for which the Great Tew circle became known may prove difficult to reconcile with Marvell's own career as a polemicist against High Church pretensions and other details from his biography. That career in prose Yoshinaka scants. Instead, he insists that “[i]n order to enhance and modify our understanding of Marvell's ambivalence, it is necessary to clarify the contemporary religio-political thoughts within which he seems to have kept his silent judgement” (2). The result is first a wide survey of seventeenth-century English providentialism, the question of “mechanism vs. the Cambridge Platonists and Descartes” or of “providence vs. atomism.” The author sets himself, and his readers, the challenge of becoming expert in a wide range of major theological, ecclesiological, and political issues, though we soon become less and less eager for his guidance. To achieve so much would demand a discipline of mind, a flair for languages, and a talent in explanation given to few.

The result is a lot of run-up for rather less Marvellian jump. For example, where Marvell's poems reflect how “[i]n the first half of the seventeenth century, there was almost always scepticism with regard to astral control, or fate, and recommendations to resist it” (50), Yoshinaka turns to Sir Thomas Browne, to Lovelace, to Cowley, and to Donald M. Friedman, but never to the poem where Marvell himself discusses the issue more directly and at length, the elegiac distichs on Maniban, “Grammatomantis.” Again on Pyrrhonism, Yoshinaka casts widely but only touches (61n) on Marvell's recommendation to his nephew on just this point—perhaps this passage appearing untranslated in Latin in the Margoliouth/Legouis edition causes difficulty, but it is worth making more of Marvell's advice: “[Y]ou should consult Cornelius Agrippa himself on the vanity of the sciences, and against the astrologers especially Pico della Mirandola” (letter dated 17 July 1676, in The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth and Pierre Legouis [Oxford, 1971]). But Marvell's letters barely feature here.

Yoshinaka's critical judgements can seem peremptory: after a doubtful characterization of “the Armininian position,” he suddenly claims, “In ‘Upon Appleton House,’ for example, Marvell does not display sufficiently profound insight to present the paradox of the felix culpa, but seems to share the miseries of the time of the Civil War with his patron Thomas Fairfax in an apostrophe to England ‘that dear and happy isle’ which was ‘ere while’ a ‘Paradise’” (9). “Sufficiently profound” for whom? This may be confused, but it also overlooks the challenge in Marvell trying to instruct the Lord General Fairfax, devout Presbyterian, in the “Arminian position.” Having taken us thus far, and conceding much to N. H. Keeble's view (earlier Willie Lamont's) that Marvell followed the Baxterian “middle way,” Yoshinaka decides that “[t]o delve into this complex and intricate issue and to classify Marvell's exact theological position is beyond the scope of this book” (11), though at Keeble's suggestion, its presumed French counterpart, the theology of Amyraldus, still catches his eye. To meet with such leaps is the more challenging when conveyed in an academese unwelcome in discussion of a poet of such verbal subtlety as Marvell.

The book belatedly turns to successive chapters reading “An Horatian Ode,” “Upon Appleton House,” “The Garden,” “To His Coy Mistress,” and “Bermudas.” In these, Yoshinaka makes the most headway in his reading of “Bermudas,” the wit of which has long been understood to express Marvell's reservations about providentialism. We may wonder whether the “orange bright” hanging in the Bermudas’ shades need “have reminded the contemporary reader [then or now] of the Orange dynasty of the Netherlands” (255ff.). But on the whole this chapter best reads text against context. John Hales, as a representative of Great Tew, was indeed in the vicinity when Marvell moved to the Oxenbridges at Eton, and Marvell does seem to have found in him relief from the sterner Calvinism and apocalyptic hopes with which he otherwise had to contend (267ff.). The less availing conclusion has more on Marvell's associations with members of the Great Tew circle, and any study of this interesting subject will now need to cite Yoshinaka's work.