“Common Passions”: Hobbes and Suckling

Abstract

Though Suckling apparently committed suicide soon after he fled into exile to escape the arraignment suffered by his friend and coconspirator Davenant on the discovery of the Army Plot (not in 1642, as sometimes reported), C. V. Wedgwood speculates that “Had he lived to the Restoration he would have been in his element,” expressing the widespread and plausible perception that his work anticipated or influenced the literature of a period beginning more than a decade after his death.¹ If he had been contemporary with Rochester (who as Dorimant quoted him), then affinities between his thinking and Hobbes’s would partly reflect the influence of ideas widely circulating as he wrote, except that I have already downplayed the significance of that diffusion, because of the adulteration and dilution accompanying it.² Alternatively, if the character and composition of the Great Tew circle that flourished during Suckling’s own time could be reconstructed with certainty, this might establish him in a setting where he had opportunities to become acquainted with Hobbes’s thought, as expressed in person rather than encountered through any less reliable process of transmission.