Chapter 12 examines on the polarity triggered by the fear of destruction, the imminence of disappearance and the face-to-face encounter with death (all resulting from abuse of power, exclusion or retribution): one either belongs to a country or is deeply attached to a person, this because political commitment and national duty prove incompatible with personal feelings (as is the case for Coriolanus), because the future of the country or the reality of the place where one dwells becomes derisory compared with deep love (as for Kent and Lear), because, conversely, one can be denied or even crushed, and the priority given to the country out of allegiance to the king (John of Gaunt) or out of an identification with a particular idea of it (Volumnia). This chapter pays particular attention to certain banished characters (Queen Isabel in Richard II, Lear, and Suffolk in King Henry VI, Part 2) who choose to focus on beloved beings and regard them as an emotional map onto which they can project a reterritorialisation no matter what their geographical situation, regardless of their exile. What appears as irreplaceable is not the homeland but these beloved beings who become the banished figures’ landmark, their home base, their entire cartography.

George Herbert’s mother Magdalen Danvers and his friends the Ferrars at Little Gidding recorded joyful psalm singing. The metrical compositions and translations they used were in English, but their sources were French. The English drew from French and Swiss practices, translations, and settings. Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze, central to the Genevan Psalter, offered not only inspiration but also possibilities for imitation and invention. Mary Sidney’s psalms, drawing from these translations and settings, are resonant with echoes of French-language psalms, and are themselves literary wonders in their own right. George Herbert’s lyrics quite self-consciously and even ostentatiously join with those of his important predecessor in the Sidney–Herbert–Devereux clan. He participates in an international consort of the “Sweet singers of our Israel,” where the individual singer joins a larger international chorus across time and space. Translation from Hebrew and Latin into vernacular languages is in fact a polylingual and intercultural enterprise.

The chapter’s aim is threefold. Firstly, by referring to Wallace’s review of Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress and the short story ‘Suicide as a Sort of Present’, it argues that Wallace’s interest in the solipsistic position of the Tractatus and its pathological dramatization in Markson’s novel unveils deep and existential concern. It emphasizes the close link between the reflective and ethical dimensions that, like Wittgenstein, Wallace experienced personally and interlaced in his narrative work. Secondly, the chapter argues that, according to Wallace’s reading of Wittgenstein, the ‘discovery’ that language is something public articulated in the Philosophical Investigations did not eliminate the risk of solipsism. On the contrary, Wallace understood it to eliminate the possibility of contact with the outside world and leave us trapped in language rather than in private thoughts. This idea of language as both a ‘cage’ and a boundary between subject and world can be clearly discerned in Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System. Thirdly, drawing from some passages of Infinite Jest, the chapter highlights the close connection in Wallace’s narrative work between solipsism as a metaphysical position and loneliness and alienation as existential drama.

Edward Herbert considered himself a member of a European community of plain speakers, a community that values a conversational style, itself the vehicle for an understanding of what a social community is meant to do and the philosophical ideals it is to sustain. Many members of Edward Herbert’s English and French coterie found in the rhetorical writings of the Belgian humanist Justus Lipsius welcome permission to depart from an overly wrought discourse in favor of a more gallantly honest style. A key work here was Lipsius’s Epistolica Institutio, published in 1591. Style was a means of signaling one’s identity to the world; but more than that, it fostered a way of being in the world. The ideal of fellowship is linked to a self-conceived cosmopolitan directness and truthfulness.

Published in the year of his wife Margaret’s death, Poetical Fragments (1681) was linked to the dissenting clergyman Richard Baxter’s ‘sorrows and sufferings’ as a bereaved husband, but also those of his wife stretching back to when she was a member of his flock in need of spiritual consolation, and finally those of the ‘near Friends in Sickness, and other deep Affliction’ of the title page. In both the Poetical Fragments and later Additions (1683), Baxter made a special plea for ‘passions’ as a key part of devotional identity: they were both the motive for spiritual song and an essential for spiritual life, without which ‘it will be hard to have any pleasant thoughts of Heaven’. This essay explores how ‘passions’ applied to the evolving devotional identity of Baxter himself and how Baxter used personal loss to present to his readers a new kind of practical divinity: consolation – of self as much as others – through a poetics of the ‘passions’.

This chapter explores the events of Edward Herbert’s ambassadorship, making use of primary documents rarely discussed or analyzed, reassessing the Ambassador’s integrity. This reassessment leads to new conclusions about Edward’s developing understanding of truth, conscience, and the unity of the general and personal good. Past accounts of his ambassadorship have stressed Edward’s rashness and failure as a diplomat. However, such accounts adopt historiographical approaches that tend to divorce the study of facts from philosophical and moral thought. This chapter shows, on the contrary, that Edward’s blindness or “mistakes” as a diplomat may well stem from his (perhaps excessive) faith in and commitment to a continuum between the individual conscience and the general good. The Wars of Religion taught him to distrust corrupt political and ecclesiastical bodies. Bent on a quest for peace, he placed his trust instead in truthful individuals (such as himself), thinking they might be more apt to bridge the divides created by religious strife. He provided James with useful, valid, and accurate information on European ambassadors’ visits and their implications, French views on Palatinate issues, reports of Spanish and French troop movements, Catholic influence at the French court, and the status of Protestants in France, acting in the sovereign’s stead and in the sovereign’s as well as what he considered the nation’s interest. Yet his faith in the universal individual’s conscience and actions (including his own) also led him to neglect the complexities of political representativeness, thus accounting for his diplomatic faux pas.