‘Mr. Bayes in Mr. Bayes’

Abstract

Hobbes and Marvell have more affinities than one, not least in their turn for ecclesiastical satire. Both fashion to their own ends even as they excel at the art the seventeenth century termed ‘personation’—the satirical portrait of a subject that ridicules to the point of caricaturing its target. But until The Rehearsal Transpros’d undertook to personate the Anglican polemicist Samuel Parker, Hobbes’ words had yet to appear on the same page with Marvell’s. It is Parker who plays midwife to this unheralded event, which he does by his attacks on Hobbes and Hobbism, hoping to deflect attention from his own plagiarism of Leviathan’s model of absolute sovereignty. For Marvell’s personation of Parker as ‘Mr. Bayes the Second’—Buckingham’s figure of authorial absurdity in his popular play The Rehearsal—wickedly likens him to the Hobbes of Parker’s personation, making that caricature of Hobbes ‘Mr. Bayes the Third’.