This tome in forty-three chapters might easily overwhelm Marvell's relatively slender Miscellaneous Poems (1681). Yet the twenty-first-century Marvell so thoroughly explored in this new volume extends beyond the folio. This version of the writer also transcends the early twentieth-century characterization of Marvell that Steven Matthews describes in the concluding essay: as a witty but less-than-great lyricist, based on T. S. Eliot's 1921 article in The Times Literary Supplement for the tercentenary of the writer's birth and on his review of Herbert J. C. Grierson's anthology of the Metaphysical poets. Although the scholars assembled here delineate Marvell's various roles differently, most accept the trajectory that Matthew C. Augustine offers, from early Royalist versifier through Cromwellian poet to oppositional satirist and prose controversialist. To cover the range of the career, the editors have divided the Handbook into four sections: the historicist research of “Marvell and His Times,” the critical analysis of “Readings,” the literary-historical insights of “Marvell and His Contemporaries,” and the studies in reception of “Marvell's Afterlife.”

The first chapter, “Marvell, Writer and Politician, 1621–1678,” has been eagerly awaited by Marvellians since Nicholas von Maltzahn unearthed new material on the writer's early life. He discovered in a bench book that Marvell's father, as the master of Hull's Charterhouse, an almshouse for the elderly, expelled one Leonard Storr “for his evill carriage and misdemeanors” (7). That Marvell was raised in a household of lightly supervised strangers and left in “the company of aged men and women” (7) raises questions about the causes of what Ann Hughes describes in a subsequent essay as his “almost undefinable sense of otherness, isolation, and of unresolved pain” (78). The agony was far from fully internalized. In a fascinating reinterpretation of the writer's seemingly disastrous embassy to Muscovy, Edward Holberton explains Marvell's outraged protests to the Tsar on his officers’ violation of protocol as “diplomacy in action,” signifying his “readiness to stick up for himself and his king” (103).

Opposite to the hostile self-assertion of Marvell's diplomatic mission is the bookish self-effacement of his lyric personas. Tracing the epigrams in “To His Coy Mistress” to the Greek Anthology, Nigel Smith sees this poem of “high civilization” as compressing literary history into a “heated moment,” thereby challenging cultivated readers to recover the borrowings to experience its maximum resonance (356, 354). As the laughter at the hyperbolic climax “absorbs embarrassment” (339), we might add that the deep allusiveness distracts readers and poet alike from the poem's rapacious opposite-sex coupling. Both disruptions provide an alternative source of pleasure to heterosexuality: withdrawal into the solitary sanctuary of the canon. Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker take a different tack from Smith in their stylish essay on the lyric verse's motifs: “the sexually undifferentiated youth . . . featureless dreamscapes, the fantasies of vegetal embrace” (388). They find the origins of this “continuous script” (404) not in the archive or in a source text but in a recurring fantasy of oneness just outside the author's conscious control.

Encompassing a diversity of perspective as well as methodology, the anthology is as interdisciplinary as its subject's own work, once it was no longer miscategorized as solely poetic or at all metaphysical. In one of several chapters demonstrating the political prose's emergence from the critical darkness, Martin Dzelzainis and Steph Coster share segments of the paper trail the Stationers’ Company left in trying to suppress Mr. Smirke. So scrupulously learned are these essays for specialists and graduate students that they seem pitched too high for all but the most advanced undergraduates, except for, possibly, Philip Connell's “Marvell and the Church,” with its generous appositives. Theory appears fleetingly but consequentially in the actor-network theory informing Emma Annette Wilson's study of educational circles and in the psychoanalysis inflecting parts of Leah S. Marcus's chapter on vitalism, Lynn Enterline's piece on grammar-school discipline, and Warren Chernaik's inquiry into wit and corruption. (For more distinctly theoretical arguments there is the 2019 special edition of Marvell Studies.) In the end, the contributors to this brilliant volume prove that Marvell is as lucky in the critics he has attracted in this century as he was unfortunate in the adversaries he acquired in his own.