The making of a Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell is a more likely enterprise in 2010 than it would have seemed in the late 1980s when Cambridge Companions to individual authors began to appear. Most obviously, the state of Marvell studies has been transformed by new editions of Marvell’s poetry and of his polemical writings; we have a more informed appreciation of Restoration politics and religion and of how to track Marvell’s presence in those fields; and we have a more finely grained understanding of writing culture, of manuscript and of print. That culture was formed not only of individuals who might have thought of themselves as authors but also of communities that had, in some sense, authorial function – patronage circles, coteries of wit, of partisan affiliation, of spiritual affinity, of gender or perhaps of sexual identity. And in that emerging complication of authorship lies a more fundamental distinction of this moment. The very category of author as subject of study was in the 1980s in some dispute; it had of course been challenged by Foucault’s deconstruction of authorship, but now new historicists and cultural materialists were dispersing authorial agency into a broader circulation of social and cultural energy, while discourse analysis of various kinds further complicated the notion of authorship. More broadly too, historians had replaced the old ‘history of great men’ with a new social history of otherness and dissonance. But from that direction, paradoxically, came an impulse to recover authorship.

Here is the problem: the texts studied by historians of political thought are almost invariably systematic and discursive; they are rarely poems or plays or novels, and who could blame historians for such a choice. The careful unfolding of political thought is rarely the business of playwrights, poets or novelists, and who could blame them for failures of analytic rigour or argumentative transparency as they make their specialized, interested, often polemical, at times uncertain, ironic, and rarely even-handed interventions into political systems – that is of course not their job. There seems then a gap difficult to bridge between interests and texts – on the one side, historians who are anxious to get on with their business and go to places where they can work efficiently and without the distractions of figuration, uncertainty or irony; and on the other, students of literature who feel an obligation to explicate the political ideas that so often erupt in their texts with a sense of their genealogy, force and currency, their status and character in the masterpieces of political thought, but for whom those masterpieces are rarely objects of devotion. The recognition of this gap is no great insight into disciplinary divides, but our own moment of heightened interdisciplinarity and an awareness of the early-modern implication of politics in aesthetics suggest the importance of probing such divides and of considering the ways in which reading literature enhances our understanding of politics.