HESTER LEES-JEFFRIES. England's Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture.

Abstract

This wonderful book—which might itself have been inspired by the classical mount of its title—presents a study of fountains in Elizabethan England: in both the literature of that period (in the main, the New Arcadia, the 1590 Faerie Queene, and Jonson's play, The Fountaine of Selfe-Love, better known as Cynthia's Revels) and in its material culture (fountains in Elizabeth's coronation pageant, in the Kenilworth entertainment of 1575, in country houses such as Theobalds or Nonsuch, and as represented on medals, hat-badges, tapestries, portraits and so forth). However, this book is infinitely more than a motif-study. Instead, it takes fountains as particularly dense signifiers that bring together a whole series of different operations—the relation of flux to stasis, of freeze to flow or solid to liquid, of reflection and circulation, of surface and depth, of nature and art—so as to present themselves as uniquely complex and multivalent ‘texts’. Lees-Jeffries makes a compelling case for seeing fountains not as they are largely seen today—as merely decorative, municipal and for the most part overlooked—but as elaborate, ingenious and highly designed structures, quasi-rhetorical in scope, that calculatedly make use of space, time, sculptural forms, visual allusion, literary reference, punctuation and narrative in order to guide the viewer/reader toward a deeper and more purposive understanding. As she puts it, ‘[f]ountains are not passive: they capture observers, drawing them into their surfaces, promising refreshment, and so involving those who gaze upon or into them in an active and sometimes demanding relationship’ (p. 9).