Review of A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in 17th-Century England, edited by Adam Smyth. more

The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 20 (2005), 154-71. Book Reviews Adam Smyth, ed. A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004. 214pp. Cloth. $85.00. isbn 184384009x. This collection of twelve essays derives from a conference in July 2001 at the University of Reading entitled “Drink and Conviviality in Early Modern England.” The topics covered in the collection range from the representation of conviviality by such writers as Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and Thomas Killigrew to medical and scientific theories about wine and beer during the period. Other areas of interest explored in the essays are the relationships of gender and sexuality to conviviality, the connections between conviviality and politics in ballads and anacreontics, and the roles of national stereotyping in early modern drinking cultures. The contributors to the volume offer expertise in literature, history, humanities, fine arts, and sociology to their studies of conviviality in seventeenth-century England, and the results are often impressive. Broken into five general areas—Identity and Community, Politicized Drink, Drink and Gender, Improvement, and Excess—the variety of subjects covered in this relatively brief collection provide for engaging discussions of drink and conviviality. As noted in the collection’s title, the “pleasing sinne” of alcohol consumption produced ambivalent responses in seventeenth-century drinkers. Smyth begins his introduction to the volume with a fine discussion of such ambivalence in one of the period’s most famous drinkers, Samuel Pepys: Smyth records the dizzying array of drinks found in the Diary such as “ale, cider, beer, brandy, buttermilk, chocolate, gruel, elder spirits, julep, mead, metheglin, water, milk, coffee, orange juice, posset, tea, strong waters, whey, and many varieties of wine” (xiii). Overindulgence of the alcoholic beverages on this list induced, in Smyth’s words, the “familiar Pepysian swing between delight and guilty regret” (xiii). Pepys’s convivial pleasure attendant upon alcohol consumption is counterbalanced in the Diary by numerous resolutions to quit drinking, typically written in the grip of hangovers. Such ambivalence toward the excess of pleasure and the dearth of abstinence finds expression in the subjects of the other essays in the volume and indeed, might be seen as the key conceptual point linking the chapters in the collection. This commonality provides a strong argumentative “backbone” for A Pleasing Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England 155 Sinne that is much needed in discussions of the social and literary history of the period. Particularly in literary studies, the apparent sameness of the anacreontic literature of seventeenth-century England has led many critics to dismiss a vital thematic and conceptual element as derivative classicism. Stella Achilleos’s essay on the Anacreontea offers a nuanced reading of its influence upon such noted poets as Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick and underscores the sociopolitical implications of their anacreontics for clubs of educated, upper class males in later generations. Cedric C. Brown’s essay on the “Sons of Beer and Sons of Ben” explores similar territory by focusing on the construction of a community of drinkers organized around a poetic “father” figure. However, his discussion of Leonard Wheatcroft, a Derbyshire yeoman and poet who wrote as a “Son of Beer,” exposes the class incompatibility at the heart of the convivial debate between beer and wine. In fact, Brown’s exploration of the differing, polyvalent connotations of beer and wine can also be found in several other essays in the volume, particularly those by Marika Keblusek, Charles C. Ludington, Louise Hill Curth and Tanya M. Cassidy, and Charlotte McBride. Keblusek examines the political function of wine for Royalist exiles, finding it to have been a source of unification and nostalgia; Ludington looks to wine’s changing nationalist role during the Restoration, linking changes in consumption to England’s internal and external politics. Wine’s medicinal properties are the focus of the essay by Louise Hill Curth and Tanya M. Cassidy, which asserts that ambivalence about alcohol consumption impacted its prescriptive use by the medical establishment of the time. Wine was seen by doctors as an agent of both healing and harm, depending on the amount consumed. In the section entitled “Excess,” Charlotte McBride describes how national stereotyping came to bear upon English males, whose drinking served to delimit their gender and national identity in a negative fashion. McBride’s essay offers a bridge to later periods that would view drunkenness, especially during the nineteenth century, as a particularly “sinful” character type. While the contributors mostly avoid restating similar conclusions about the changing roles of wine, one finds an often repetitive quality to the insights offered about its cultural function of class demarcation. With the exception of Brown’s essay and Angela McShane Jones’s study of popular ballads, there is little use of primary texts by working-class writers whose relationship to beer and wine is also of signal interest during this and later periods. Similarly, although the section on gender provides intriguing analysis of women’s relationships to drinking cultures, it is limited to discussions of largely canonical dramatic texts. The level of engagement with theoretical analysis is also rather slight, and there is an unusually high amount of citation of sources that come from within the volume itself. A broader use of primary and secondary sources would have been useful in more strongly grounding the volume in the current critical discourse on conviviality. Particularly with primary texts, one wishes for more unusual speci- 156 The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 20 (2005) mens such as A Treatise of Fruit-Trees, Shewing the Manner of Grafting, Planting, Pruning, and Ordering of Them and Sylva, Or a Discourse of Forest-Trees used in Vittoria Di Palma’s essay on “the politics of fruit trees,” an intriguing analysis of the debate surrounding the cultivation, production, and consumption of cider in the mid-seventeenth century. Adam Smyth’s own essay on writing about drunkenness which closes the volume offers a compelling reading of primary texts which describe the state of drunkenness; as in his introduction, Smyth finds many examples of ambivalence about the sensation and experience of drunken pleasure, noting that texts which condemn conviviality “teeter on the edge of celebration and so illustrate the necessary and destabilizing proximity of censure to encomium” (210). Along with the many other fine chapters in A Pleasing Sinne, Smyth’s essay points the way for further critical forays into the alluring yet destructive world of conviviality in seventeenth-century England. Corey E. Andrews, Youngstown State University