The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England (review)

Abstract

Reviews 217 and its scripts" (20). If we are to be skeptical about constructions of subjectivity in biographical writing, we should be equally skeptical about constructions of periodicity in historical writing. In practice, it is very difficult to escape the point-of-view paradigm adopted by culture-critique: when Cheney speaks of a "theoretical perspective" he implies norms proper to treatise rather than dialogue; Anderson offers first the open palm when she declines to adjudicate, then the dogmatic fist when she declares that the selection of essays is "representative" and that "their emphatic presence in the volume asserts our own belief" that interrogation must precede biography (x). The selection is not particularly broad. Cheney observes that "If Judson's life of Spenser seems dated and inadequate today, it is in large measure because the academy and its privileged terms have changed: feminist, postcolonialist, queer perspectives on culture all call into question some of the terms in both Spenser and Judson that a white, Protestant, male academy considered secure" (176). One point of view precludes another: we neuter privileged terms by placing them in scare-quotes and exclude opposing positions on the grounds of generational or demographic prejudice. This may assert a perspective , but it is not an argument. Spenser's sometimes willingness to dramatize multiple and contrary sides of politically delicate questions renders his intentions difficult to read. This collection persuades me to regard this less as cultural contradiction than as a humane if imperfect response to wrenching anxieties and complex aspirations. If we are left with a view of the trees rather than the forest, such is the nature of sylva as opposed to biography. The publisher has been generous with illustrations, though the book lacks an index and is marred by an embarrassing error in a running head. David Hill Radcliffe Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England. Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 12. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 228 pp. $49.95; ISBN 0-521-48155-4. ... he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him selfe to bee a true Poem, that is, a composition, and patterne of the best and honourablest things ... —John Milton, An Apology for Smectymnuus Chaucer is the earliest poet in the history of English literature whose life has conventionally been appended to, and used to explicate, his writings. Yet he conceived of himself not as an author, but following 218 Biography 21.2 (Spring 1998) medieval custom, as a "compilator" (Pref., A Treatise on the Astrolabe); he represented his works as "mere translaciouns and enditynges" (Parson's Tale, 1085). Furthermore, and following from this, Chaucer did not describe any connection between his self and his poetry. Any statement in his writings describing the relation between writer and text is assigned to a fictional narrator, and the texts are further distanced even from this representation of a writer by frequent qualifications of the type "Disblameth me, if any word be lame, For as myn auctour seyde, so sey I" (Troilus and Criseyde, Book II, 17f). Chaucer's portrayal of his role as a writer is very distant from Milton's representation of the writer himself as a "Poem," a "composition," a "patterne." In chapters discussing Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, Pask traces the history of the construction of a place for the "life of the poet," exploring the cultural and conceptual distance separating Chaucer from Milton. Pask's history makes clear that the position of these five writers within the canon of English literature took shape through the process of the scripting of their Lives. Each had to be granted a certain cultural authority in order for his Life to be thought worth writing, and his enhanced authority, following from the inscription of his Life, determined for him a place in the canon. The cultural authority of the author as represented through his life-narrative echoed and then eventually replaced that of the saint portrayed in medieval hagiography. "The 'life of the poet' in England," Pask writes, "only emerged after the retooling and eventual disintegration of the dominant life-narrative up...