The Cultural Logic of Late Feudalism: Placing Spenser in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Our English wrote Joseph Warton in 1756, I think be disposed in four different classes and degrees. In the first class, I would place our only and pathetic poets, Shakespeare and Milton.' For us, reading from the vantage the late twentieth century's culture wars, Warton's Trinitarian disposing may seem rather conventional. It is interesting to consider, however, that Warton was perhaps the first critic to represent the canon in this manner. Indeed, the mid-eighteenth century witnessed what we might call the making of the English literary canon in its modern form. Shakespeare's complicated status in the eighteenth century has been richly documented. And Milton's connection to the emergent cult of the sublime is well-known. Much less has been written, however, about what was once called the of the 1750s and 60s. The revival is certainly notable: relatively ignored during the early years of the eighteenth century, Spenser's poetry enjoyed increasing prominence in mid-century literary culture.2 From 1715 to its reprinting in 1751, John Hughes's Works of Spenser remained the sole modern edition. In the next ten years, three new editions appeared, accompanied by two critical commentaries, Thomas Warton's Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (1754, 1762) and Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762). Mid-eighteenth-century Spenseriana was once considered an example of preromantic weariness.3 Cut off from their culture, lonely, and on a from Spenser's readers, according to this argument, looked to the poet's enchanted fairyland for the last redoubt of the imagination prior to the tyranny of reason.4 I would like, in this essay, to historicize this flight from history. The revival of interest in Spenser's poetry and the elevation of his name to the Trinity of high cultural authors has much to tell us about the cultural politics of the eighteenth century. When Joseph Warton separated out Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton from the rest of English literary history, he meant to demonstrate how older works sustained a kind of untrans-