[Back from Hiatus] "Emblematic Identities in Late Jacobean Print" by Malcolm Jones

CITATION: Jones, Malcolm. "The Common Weales Canker Wormes, or the Locvsts Both of Chvrch, and States: Emblematic Identities in Late Jacobean Print." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 193-213. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How ought The Common Weales Canker Wormes be contextualized with the discovery of an additional impression?
• Answer: The  recently discovered impression may be dated to the mid-1620s, at which time the emblematic identities concentrate anti-Jesuitical fervor on Henry Garnet.
• Method: Jones first dates the impression to the mid-1620s through the analysis of references, clothing, and Anglo-Spanish relations; second, he identifies Garnetian mythology in the emblem of the Jesuit "G"; third, he relates the imagery of the ambassador "I" to Don Acuna, count of Gondomar, through surviving satire and a title-page (explicitly naming Gondomar) from which the ambassador was apparently drawn.
• Assumptions: Jones' essay responds to Alexander Globe's Peter Stent London Printseller, in which Globe identifies an impression of Canker Wormes from the 1670s with controversies relating to the Diggers, the Commonwealth, and controversies regarding L'Estrange.
• Sententiae: "Even Homer nods, however, and in this essay I shall produce evidence to suggest that when Globe catalogues it as 'A commonwealth satire, engraved anonymously c. 1650', he was misled by the title into thinking it belonged to the Commonwealth era ushered in by the execution of Charles I in 1649, and that the actual date of its original issue was c. 1625 (and thus must have been acquired by Stent, whose recorded activity begins only c. 1642, from some earlier publisher)." (193)

Overstanding

• Assessment: This is an extremely bold essay: it dramatically revises some rather elementary bibliographical work established by another scholar, and it asserts instead an unknown publisher, printer, etc. In place of Globe's concrete legal evidence, Jones makes his argument on the basis of allusion and caricature.
• Synthesis: Jones obliquely deals with visual satires licensed by L'Estrange, thus relating to Pierce's essay on Towzer. Jones elects not to pursue this connection as part of his revisionist essay, but he might resuscitate Globe's interpretation as a Restoration re-appropriation of Jacobean imagery. That is to say that Jones' argument does not entirely invalidate Globe's, and that Globe may be have correctly identified the reader response (relating to Diggers and the Commonwealth) to Canker Wormes in the Restoration.
• Application: Even if L'Estrange did not approve of the original impression of Canker Wormes, then it would be interesting to review L'Estrange's notes on and around the re-licensing of this image in light of Pierce's argument--that L'Estrange licensed illustrated caricature as a form of attack on the emergent Whig. Such an analysis would demonstrate that L'Estrange and the Tories were constructing a revisionist Tory history--even in the proto-history of parliamentary partisanship.