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I
ABRAHAM Cowley wrote that Katherine Philips "Turn'd upon Love himself his own Artillery"-and I am sure that he meant it.1 Presumably he was thinking of her love poems to women "friends"; but as he develops his metaphor, drawn from the tactics of seventeenth-century siege warfare, he strains eros of every kind to the breaking point and impresses on us the truth of Achsah Guibbory's contention that "the intimacies of the private world and the social orders of the public world are complexly intertwined in this period in ways that have yet to be fully understood."2 It is time to shift our perspective on Philips's "love" and "friendship" from the quiet domestic sphere, however interestingly that sphere is conceived; to a noisy public one. One way to do so is to consider Pompey (I663), her translation and transformation of Pierre Corneille's La Mort de Pompee (1644), and its immediate political and intellectual contexts. Here, too, Philips "Turn'd upon Love himself his own Artillery"-indeed Cowley may also have been thinking of Philips's once-famous play. Moreover, in this dramatic example the "love" in question is quite definitely political in character.
Pompey was the cause of any fame that Philips was able to enjoy in her short life. Thanks to a well-documented article by Catherine Cole Mambretti, we now know a good deal about its genesis and its claim to be the first "heroic" drama performed in English.4 Beyond this, however, the play has received little comment of value. While the fact that Pompey is a translation need no longer stand in the way-most critics and historians would agree with Stephen Greenblatt that "there is no translation that is not at the same time an interpretation"5-the play's unfamiliar mixture of historical allusiveness and moral and political casuistry may remain as a barrier. If they were to read the play at all, most moderns would echo what John Dryden's Neander says of Corneille's Cinna and La Mort de Pompee: "they are not so properly to be called plays, as long discourses of reason of State."' The cast list of Pompey includes Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Ptolemy, Pompey's blessed ghost (who, although he does not appear in Corneille's text, is given crucial prominence in one of Philips's original entr'actes), and Pompey's...