Fairy in 'The Faerie Queene': Renaissance Elf-Fashioning and Elizabethan Myth-Making by Matthew Woodcock (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2005 763 Andy Orchard's sample edition of Wulfstan, which combines user-friendliness (in itself a radical departure from the practice of many editors of Old English) with a recognition of the 'practical and theoretical difficulty' (p. 314) of editing Wulfstan's work, accepting its characteristic variance and offeringa workable editorial solution to the problems raised by ongoing textual modification. The more traditional virtues of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, however, are well re? presented in this Festschrift: first-hand research, well-informed close argument, and meticulous editorial technique. It is thematically unified (unlike many Festschriften), the editing is scrupulous throughout, and an index is provided. Its high quality is a credit to its editors and its dedicatee. University of Southampton Bella Millett Fairy in 'The Faerie Queene': Renaissance Elf-Fashioning and Elizabethan MythMaking . By Matthew Woodcock. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2004. ix+162 pp. ?35; $59.95. ISBN 0-7546-3639-6. The Faerie Queene remains a kind of fantasy text. As Matthew Woodcock observes in a disconcerted footnote, McNeir and Provost's Edmund Spenser: An Annotated Bibliography ig3j-igy2,2nd edn (Pittsburgh, NJ: Duquesne University Press, 1975) comes with a 'rather Tolkeinesque [. . .] fold-out chart' as an illustrative map of fairyland. The McNeir-Provost chart is piece of fashionable paraphernalia: it looks like a prog-rock album cover (a movement in its heyday in 1975) where the House of Holiness nestles in the midst of tapering, needle-sharp mountain tops. Though Woodcock's title suggests a residual Tolkeinesque agenda, his concerns are more ambitious: Fairy in 'The Faerie Queene' attempts to relocate the study of Spenser's fairy in the light of changing ideas about the past and ways of reading The Faerie Queene itself. As its subtitle indicates, Woodcock's book faces in two directions at once. Though it is the firstsustained treatment ofthe fairymaterial since the late 1930s, itpositions the study of fairy in relation to more recent critical fashions. This is the book's central dilemma: does it face back to previous generations of Spenser scholarship (which energetically debated the provenance of fairyland) or does it draw on more recent criticism (which largely ignores the issue, but which is more attentive to disjunctions in Spenser's text)? Woodcock negotiates a way out of this by challenging the conclusions of earlier scholars like Rathborne and Greenlaw. Firstly,he enriches and complicates the context of the fairy lore available to Spenser by introducing recent work on early modern witchcraft, which provides a model for reading fairies. As witchcraft has become 'a site of textual controversy' (p. 11), so the study of fairy should be attentive 'to the context and form ofthe texts in which fairies are represented'. In the case of Arthur's narrative of his encounter with the Fairy Queen, Woodcock considers Spenser's reading of Chaucer's 'Sir Thopas', suggesting that he 'may well have taken up and treated Chaucer's parodic story of fairy as a consciously polysemic narrative' (p. 93), which in turn contributes to the Queen's 'potentially problematic presence' (p. 94) in Spenser's poem. Secondly, Woodcock suggests that The Faerie Queene's fairies are invariably more complex figures than their folkloric antecedents: 'Spenser shows no concern with establishing the fairies [.. .] as adistinct and rigidly defined ontological category' (p. 81). Fairies and fairyland should never be read literally; rather,they are deliberately am? biguous and provocative poetic signs which demand the reader's active engagement in the interpretation and?frequently?deconstruction of Spenser's poem: 'By deconstructing several of the characters that are frequently referred to as being fairy 764 Reviews knights Spenser forces his readers to continually question what they are reading, to remain alert for suggestions that the likes of Guyon, Satyrane, Marinell, or Calidore might be more than they at firstappear' (p. 87). 'Deconstructing' is a characteristic touch: on the one hand, Woodcock ascribes agency to Spenser as the writer of the poem; on the other, the word seems to betoken theoretical ambitions which the study does not completely fulfil. A deeper concern is Woodcock's overall conceptualization of The Faerie Queene. He relies throughout on the 'Letter to Raleigh', yet only seldom does its problematic status emerge. Though...