The Story Of Charles Cotterell

By Author: Porter Black
Total Articles: 54
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Sir Charles Cotterell is one of the low-to-mid-ranking courtiers largely overlooked in most modern accounts of the period; he 'remains a strangely shadowy figure'. He is best known for his connections with Katherine Philips, rather than for any intrinsic importance of his own literary achievements. In Cartier Replica Watches the context of the contemporary resonance of the romance genre, however, the link with Philips is instructive. For in the extensive correspondence between the pair in the early 1660s, Philips gives Cotterell, her mentor, the pseudonym of 'Poliarchus' to complement her own 'Orinda' names derived from John Barclay's allegorical Helidoran romance Argents.

In doing so, while on one level she initiates a light-hearted, erudite literary game, she also indicates the intimate associations in this era between lived experience and romance literature. As is now generally accepted, for the contemporary lettered classes the division between imaginative writings such as Argents and 'real' life was often far from clearly demarcated. Both in terms ...
... of their language and the values they embodied, seventeenth-century romances could be hugely influential, shaping and re-shaping the contours of self-identity. Encoded into their readers' DNA, they 'could become the dominant way in which an individual understood him or herself. In her letters of the early 1650s, Dorothy Osborne records how she 'craves them for what they can tell her about herself and the world'. Precisely because of their importance they could be marshalled by defeated, particularly exiled, royalists to induce a compensatory state of melodramatic fictional crisis, to fashion a usefully diverting façade but only a façade of relevance, as a substitute for lost political potency, though, as has been discussed, that political potency could nevertheless be encoded within Replica Breitling the plasticity and oscillating imperatives of the genre. The intertwining of life and text exemplified in these ways by Cotterell, Philips and Osborne characterises a literary landscape in which Cassandra has its own implications, both for its author and its intended readership, extending far beyond the confines of the printed page.

Cotterell's close ties with the gifted Philips also underline that he was 'cultivated and cosmopolitan'. In addition to providing moral and practical support to Philips in her meteoric literary rise, he was a patron of the painter William Dobson at the displaced royal court in Oxford. Indeed, a triple painting of Dobson, Cotterell and (probably) Sir Balthasar Gerbier from this period, most likely invoking Veronese's The Choice of Hercules, indicates that he was something of an artistic trend-setter. Translation, however, was undoubtedly his metier. At Oxford, where he was knighted in 1645 at the age of twenty-nine, he collaborated with William Aylesbury in translating from the Italian, at Charles Fs request, Davila's monumental Storia delle Guerre Civile. The first five books of this translation were published five years before Cassandra, in 1647, with The Continuation and Conclusion of Davila's History of the Civil Warres following a year later. Like Cassandra, this translation was well received: for Pepys, it was 'a most excellent history as ever I read', and Roger L' Estrange, in the preface to its second edition of 1678, found it 'still much sought for'.