The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500–1700 by Liam Semler

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500–1700 by Liam Semler Rocío G. Sumillera Rocío G. Sumillera. Liam Semler, The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500–1700. London: Routledge, 2019. 338 pp. ISBN 9780367664961. Early modern scholars interested in the grotesque, in the broadest sense of the word, are in luck with Liam Semler's collection of one hundred and twenty extracts from a highly varied range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources which either mention the term or allude to the concept in some way. Those teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses on early modern literatures and art history will find this work very useful, not only due to the information it offers specifically on England, as the volume's title suggests, but more generally because the volume also provides an overview of how the concept has been understood at a European level. This is so partly because some of the selected primary sources are in fact early modern translations into English of Italian, French, and Spanish works by, among others, Castiglione, Lomazzo, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Cervantes, and partly because some of the extracts are taken from dictionaries of modern languages (French, Italian) into English. Overall, the volume serves as a complement to existing canonical monographs on the grotesque—including Clayborough's The Grotesque in English Literature, Barasch's The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings, Farnham's Shakespearean Grotesque, Rhodes's Elizabethan Grotesque, Harpham's On the Grotesque, and McElroy's Fiction of the Modern Grotesque—as well as to more recent scholarship on the subject, such as Chao's Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque and Connelly's The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture. Semler's collection of primary sources is a neatly structured conceptual map of sorts (to use Semler's words, a "terminological and aesthetic ecosystem" and "a philological map") which illustrates in context the meanings and understandings of the grotesque and of a range of its conceptual relatives, including not only predictable terms such as imagination, fantasy, and dream, but also more unexpected ones, such as morisco and arabesque. His one hundred and twenty "Items," as Semler calls them, are usually one or two paragraph-long fragments taken from, among others, book catalogues and inventories, biographies, travelogues, plays, dictionaries, letters, and essays and treatises on [End Page 173] varied subjects. Forty-three of these date from the sixteenth century, and the remaining seventy-seven from the seventeenth. To give an idea of the diversity of the sources, which Semler arranges chronologically, Item 1 is a six-line fragment taken from a text dated January 6, 1517, and included in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII; the final Item, number 120, is an eighteen-line paragraph from the anonymous English translation of Parrhasiana, written by the Genevan theologian Jean le Clerc (1657–1736), and published in French in 1699, and a year later in English. Item 1 describes the architecture and floral arrangements of the royal pageant's garden at Greenwich Palace, and Semler notes its relevance in being the first text where the term "antics," a relative of grotesque, is used with regard to architecture and in connection with a theatrical context. Item 120, by contrast, is from le Clerc's long essay on diverse topics that opens with the chapter "Of Poets and Poetry," where the admiration for poetic accomplishments in works in verse is compared to an admiration for "Grotesque Figures upon Marble" for "the fineness of the Sculpture" (252). Semler in fact notes that most of his sources tend to deal with either theatricality, bodily behavior (gesture, movement, posture), and artistic categories (drama, dance, and other forms of entertainment and performance), or with the visual arts, and in this sense they involve not just architecture and sculpture, but also textiles, plates, and decorative objects in general. The twenty figures included in the volume (from book covers, tapestries, and various objects, to details of paintings and architectural motifs) illustrate this multiplicity. Every Item is followed by Semler's insightful annotations, which range from single-paragraph commentaries to more detailed and in-depth explanations running to several pages. These "Notes...