Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton by Elizabeth Jane Bellamy , Patrick Cheney , Michael Schoenfeldt Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity by Susannah B. Mintz The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature by J. Douglas Canfield (review)

Abstract

774 Reviews So, upon his return to Scotland, King James helped to subsidize the construction of a paper mill on Tycho's island. Given the presence of hunting dogs on Prospero's island, a reminder of the two British mastiffs James left as gifts for Tycho, is it possible that Prospero is not merely perusing books, but producing them too? Hence the necessity of log-carrying? This conjecture is intended in the spirit of, and as a compliment to, Sokol's fine book, which invites and enables future research on the topic of Shakespeare's knowledge of early modern science and how this knowledge 'affected him as a writer' (p. 16). University of Massachusetts?Boston Scott Maisano Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton. Ed. by Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. xii + 2i6pp. ?45. ISBN 0-333-98398-x. Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity. By Susannah B. Mintz. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 259 pp. ?38. ISBN 0-87413-822-1. The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature. By J. Douglas Canfield. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 252 pp. ?38. 0-87413-834-5. One of Milton's most overtly Spenserian moments is in Paradise Lost, 11. 648-73, where his description of Sin recalls the serpentine Errour of The Faerie Queene, 1. 1, and that of shapeless Death the 'Vnbodied, vnsoul'd, vnheard, vnseene' figureof vii. 7. 46. In their introduction to Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt make the wider claim that death 'is an indispensable backdrop for any attempt to articulate the relationship between Spenser and Milton' (p. 2). However, while Milton's epic narrates the events that 'Brought death into the world' (1. 3), and an impressive list of deaths in The Faerie Queene is provided by Andrew Hadfield in this volume (p. 28), death proves elusive or ambivalent in both poems. In Spenser's epic, death is frequently deferred or transcended: The Faerie Queene is populatedby persons such as the 'dead-liuing' Maleger (11. 11. 44), an animate corpse who will not die, and Adonis, 'subiect to mortalitie' but 'eterne in mutabilitie' (111.6. 47). Perhaps it is in the nature of allegory to produce such freaks: as Gordon Teskey writes, 'The very liveliness of the allegorical figures,their frenetic,jerky,galvanic life, makes us think of dead bodies through which an electric current is passed' (p. 66). The death of a character such as Cymocles is therefore a fixing of value, a kind of self-realization, rather than a loss. It may be this sense of the allegorical figure as galvanized corpse rather than feeling subject that underlies the harsh response of Guyon to Tantalus in the Cave of Mammon, as highlighted by Theresa M. Krier (p. 60): 'Ensample be of mind intemperate' (11.7. 60). Andrew Hadfield argues that in contrast to such problematic dissolutions, the death that informs The Faerie Queene most significantly is the future death of Queen Elizabeth, and the possibility of succession crisis and civil war. Milton's Death is rendered elusive by his physiognomy?or lack of it, as a 'shape [. . .] that shape had none' (11. 667). He, or it, is also deeply ambivalent, 'to the faithful [. . .] the gate of life' (xn. 571). Two essays here show how these qualities are manifested in syntax. Linda Gregerson points out that in the opening lines ofthe poem Death 'is unveiled in the context of its proper subordination' (p. 105), as the object of 'taste', itselfthe property of 'fruit' and, in turn, of 'disobedience'. David Lee MLR, 100.3, 2005 775 Miller acutely shows how both poets represent death as unrepresentable by means of situating it in the interstices of their poems, the caesurae and line-breaks. On the whole, this is a very focused collection ofessays, with contributors repeatedly returning to questions such as what it means to kill an allegory, and how Milton's work both manifests and moves beyond a melancholia stimulated by Protestant deritualization of death. Rachel Trubowitz stresses the political implications of Adam's mortal terror: its private, subjective nature...