“The thick and black clouds of Obloquie”: Modality and Point of View in Abiezer Coppe’s ‘A Remonstrance’

Abstract

This article discusses the interaction between modality, point of view and ideology in Abiezer Coppe's A Remonstrance (1651), a letter of protestation written in prison by one of the most infamous radical thinkers of England in the 1650's. Point of view is one the most fruitful topics of stylistic enquiry, in particular in its interaction with modality as carrier of ideological effects, but, as recent studies amply demonstrate, it is advisable to adopt a heuristic methodology integrating a code-driven approach with a use-driven model in order to account for a wider variety of expressive means for the realisation of modality. As this article tries to show, in Coppe's text this modal function is mainly performed by periodic sentences and digressions, which act as modalizing structures in the text and, together with the creation of weak implicatures, introduce a destabilizing element with clear ideological implications. The stylistic analysis of A Remonstrance shows how this apparently sincere protestation of innocence is in fact a layered, polysemous text that problematizes the idea itself of sincerity, uses a varied set of modalizing elements to convey an alternative point of view, and produces interstitial (even subversive) reading possibilities.