Spenser's Poetry Research Articles

Spenserian MomentsGordonTeskey Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2019. 552 pp. ISBN 13: 9780674988446. $47.00 (cloth).

Spenserian MomentsGordonTeskey Cambridge, <scp>MA</scp>: Harvard <scp>UP</scp>, 2019. 552 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9780674988446. $47.00 (cloth).

The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature by Barbara Fuchs (review)

fuchs, barbara. The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. 186 pp.More than a generation has passed since Walter Cohen's Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (1985) began inspiring us to challenge the truisms of Anglo-Spanish literary history by viewing national canons commonly regarded as ''rival'' in relationship rather than primarily in isolation. The subsequent accumulation of monographs, journal articles, edited volumes, institutes, conference panels, and dissertations suggests that ''Anglo-Hispanists'' now comprise a growing subfield within early modern studies. Among those who have energized this ''Spanish Connection,'' Barbara Fuchs has been the most prolific and visible, and so the arrival of her work on the occlusion of Spain in English literary history, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, has been eagerly awaited.Fuchs's introduction immediately brings the project into material focus. To my mind, the point that the English drew inspiration from Spanish literature-''even at the times of greatest rivalry between the two nations'' (1)-could not be made more effectively than with the accompanying reproduction of the Spanish reading list of Gabriel Harvey, the Cambridge-educated Latinist, Hispanophile, and improver of the English language, who has been most often remembered as a promoter of Edmund Spenser's poetry. As Fuchs observes, the titles Harvey jotted down on the flyleaf of his personal copy of Antonio de Corro's The Spanish Grammar (1590)-including Lazarillo de Tormes, Juan Huarte de San Juan's Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, Jorge Montemayor's Diana, the Petrarchan poetry of Juan Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega, as well as ''other legends of chivalry and errant knights''-''would still belong on a master's exam in Spanish Golden Age literature'' (3).Harvey's interest in Spanish language and letters should not seem especially surprising. If England and Spain were often at odds in the early modern period, they also shared a long history of dynastic alliance, commercial exchange, and cultural connection. However, largely due to the ensuing institutionalization of literary study around our modern vernaculars, the transnational nature of the Anglo-Spanish literary relationship has often gone unrecognized. By demonstrating that ''the often vociferous rhetorical denunciation of Spain in the period and beyond did not impede literary traffic'' (4), Fuchs sets out to offer a corrective to modes of analysis emphasizing native traditions at the expense of broader patterns of interchange.The book's first chapter, ''Forcible Translation,'' observes how humanist notions of copia, imitatio, and translatio could take on a martial tenor during the highly nationalistic Elizabethan years, so that its second, ''Knights and Merchants,'' can demonstrate how these processes worked, especially in relation to the drama, during the more openly Hispanophilic reign of James I. English literature's extensive debt to Cervantes comes early to the stage via Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), which one contemporary observed as ''a sort of Quixot [sic] on the Stage'' (39). Long a staple of Renaissance drama surveys, the play's allusiveness to Don Quixote has often seemed apparent to readers acquainted with Cervantes's masterwork. And yet, generations of English scholars have downplayed the possibility of a Spanish connection by insisting that Beaumont's play had been an independent development ''satirizing the same chivalric romances'' (43). As Fuchs rightly observes, even if there were no Cervantine intertextual presence within The Knight of the Burning Pestle-and I wholeheartedly believe that she is right to insist that there is-the romances the play satirizes themselves demonstrate Spanish influence. And yet, Fuchs argues, patterns of critical denial have indicated an attempt ''to contain Spanish influence in an effort to promote a national English canon that seems to depend on a refusal of influence, or its transmutation into a triumphant appropriation'' (42). …

The pain of Reformation: Spenser, vulnerability, and the ethics of masculinity

The Pain of Reformation argues that Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene represents an extended meditation on emerging notions of physical, social, and affective vulnerability in Renaissance England. Histories of violence, trauma, and injury have dominated literary studies, often obscuring vulnerability, or an openness to sensation, affect, and aesthetics that includes a wide range of pleasures and pains. This book approaches early modern sensations through the rubric of the vulnerable body, explores the emergence of notions of shared vulnerability, and illuminates a larger constellation of masculinity and ethics in post-Reformation England. Spenser's era grappled with England's precarious political position in a world tense with religious strife and fundamentally transformed by the doctrinal and cultural sea changes of the Reformation, which had serious implications for how masculinity, affect, and corporeality would be experienced and represented. Intimations of vulnerability often collided with the tropes of heroic poetry, producing a combination of defensiveness, anxiety, and shame. It has been easy to identify predictably violent formations of early modern masculinity but more difficult to see Renaissance literature as an exploration of vulnerability. The underside of representations of violence in Spenser's poetry was a contemplation of the precarious lives of subjects in post-Reformation England. Spenser's adoption of the allegory of Venus disarming Mars, understood in Renaissance Europe as an allegory of peace, indicates that The Faerie Queene is a heroic poem that militates against forms of violence and war that threatened to engulf Europe and devastate an England eager to militarize in response to perceived threats from within and without. In pursuing an analysis, disarmament, and redefinition of masculinity in response to a sense of shared vulnerability, Spenser's poem reveals itself to be a vital archive of the way gender, violence, pleasure, and pain were understood.

Telling Stories: Southey and Romantic Narrative

In Francis Jeffrey's piece on Thalaba Destroyer for Edinburgh Review (October. 1802), he infamously designated Southey as belonging to sect of poets, that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years. The practices of this sect show, in Jeffrey's words, that they are dissenters from established systems in poetry and criticism (Madden 68). is not difficult to convert Jeffrey's via media put-down into spirited, anti-Establishment praise for Southeyan non-conformism, even if one should think of 1790s Southey as being with Coleridge what Daniel E. White calls kind of dissenter from Dissent (White 155). But implications of dissent aesthetically, what it implies for handling of genre and conduct of narrative, deserve attention, too, during current revival of Southey's fortunes. Hostile critics are often most involuntarily perceptive. Leavis notes that is certainly a sense in which Shelley's poetry is peculiarly emotional, and when we try to define this sense we find ourselves invoking an absence of something (Leavis 194), scarcely aware that in doing so he has offered a key to explaining poetry's elusive, haunting power. Southey's own gibe at The Rime of She Ancyent Marinere as Dutch attempt at German sublimity turns out, as Seamus Perry has argued, to be a mean-spirited and unintentionally illuminating expression of tension ... between diversitarian attention to minute particulars and unifying ambitions of gathering consciousness (Perry 290) typical of Coleridge's self-divided, doubling genius. Jeffrey himself takes us close to centre of Southey's peculiar but real distinction as a poet of narrative and romance when he writes of poet and his tribe: is nothing that appears to them so meritorious as perpetual exaggeration of thought ... all their characters must be in agonies and ecstasies, from their entrance to their exit. He goes on to generalize that It is delightful, now and then, to meet with a rugged mountain, or a roaring stream; but where there is no sunny slope, nor shaded plain, to relieve them--where all is beetling cliff and yawning abyss, and landscape presents nothing on every side but prodigies and terrors--the head is apt to grow giddy, and heart to languish for repose and security of a less elevated region (Madden 75). Jeffrey aligns Southey's narrative landscapes with scenes from Hamlet and Gothic novel, thus exposing fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in reviewer's philosophy and involuntarily demonstrating Southey's narrative commerce with realities in which fantastical has its reasons that reason cannot know. Jeffrey contrives, too, to bring out controlled, driving relentlessness of verse. Thalaba obeys, as Herbert Tucker has shown, the operation of a plot that has been looped all along in gyres of self-fulfilling prophecy (Tucker 88), a plot obedient to moral spelled out at start of Book 11: O fool to think thy human hand Could check chariot-wheels of Destiny! To dream of weakness in all-knowing Mind That his decrees should change! To hope that united Powers Of Earth, and Air, and Hell, Might blot one letter from Book of Fate ... (Thalaba, book 11, lines 1-7) Thalaba Destroyer--of evil--is pure will and pure passivity; he has become his avenging function. And yet steely white light of his progress through poem continually plays against variety of seeming accidents. Spenser is a forerunner here. But Spenser's poetry of encounter--the Red-Crosse Knight's encounter with Despair, for example--dallies, dwells, delves, and deepens. Despair finds a language for promptings in Knight himself. What seems like an external enemy turns out to be a powerful inward impulse. Allegory finds its spiritual and psychological voice and entwines itself with existential reality. …

Spenser and Jokes: The 2008 Kathleen Williams Lecture

WE ARE AWARE THAT Spenser was associated with many books and made use of a wide range of reading materials throughout his life.* 1 Yet, as is often the case, scholars have been extremely keen to explore his reading of European, especially Italian, literature; classical culture; history; medicine and science; the law, and so on, but not his use of more popular forms of writing and culture, even though it has long been established that popular culture was consumed by every social rank in the sixteenth century, a situation that disappeared within two hundred years. It is impossible to analyze early modern print culture without thinking about popular culture, the central point of Peter Burke's seminal book on popular culture in early modern Europe, which established a whole field of enquiry. Popular culture, argued Burke, was everyone's culture, shared by high and low life, rich and poor, literate and illiterate. Yet, the way that The Faerie Queene is usually read, one would struggle to realize this.2Spenser has indeed been radically severed from any traces of popular culture and his reputation outside the academic world is not inspiring, a fact that determines the ways in which the poem is read and often, I suspect, makes his admirers all the more bloody-minded in hauling him back into the ivory tower and keeping him there as the poet's poet, caviar before the general. Even other poets sometimes think he is a lost cause: the Irish poet, Tom Paulin, for example, referred to The Faerie Queene, with one eye on Spenser's reputation as yet another English butcher in Ireland, as Spenser's mercifully unfinished epic.3A recent brave but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to cross this division served to highlight the problems of Spenser's uncomfortable cultural location. A fledgling theater group, Cilgwyn Theater Company, staged a version of sections of The Faerie Queene at Sadler's Wells Lillian Bayless Theatre, 11-29 December 2007. The performance, dogged it has to be said by a great deal of bad luck, was not a critical or commercial success. Reviewers were, as anticipated, rather savage. The performance was billed as an eco-friendly performance and attracted some early publicity, which, sadly backfired. Lyn Gardner, writing in The Guardian opened her review by describing the play as One of the more bonkers Christmas offerings, and not in a good way.4 Complaining that the play was largely characterized by actors leaping about and mumbling, the reviewer in The Times concluded his review with the acid comment: Nor was the much-hyped use of recycled materials for the design anything special, though hopes briefly rise at the arrival from above of a vengeful goddess in the form of a gigantic potato masher. The serious point I want to make stems from the opening comment made by the same reviewer, one which was echoed elsewhere in the-mercifully-limited press coverage the poor play received: Edmund Spenser's interminable romantic epic is the famously unread tome of English literature, and the Cilgwyn Theater Company's production of a small chunk of it doesn't whet the appetite for more.3 Spenser's work is seen as, at best, worthy and humorless, esoteric and at odds with enjoyment, however good it might be for those hapless few who read it. If there was one assumption that was shared by the reviewer and the theater company it was an excessive reverence for the substance of Spenser's poem, which remained, I think, largely un-reread. It continued to be part of the strata of intellectual (unfunny) culture, and was cut off from the lively, vulgar (funny) arena of popular culture.What this episode reveals is that there is a huge gap in our understanding of the intellectual culture in which Spenser developed his work, because, in fact, Spenser's poetry developed out of a culture that bridged the divide between the high and the low. Moreover, the poet often tells us that he is making use of works of popular culture.6 A specific case in point is that of early modern jest books, of which several survive dating from the early sixteenth century that were reprinted and developed throughout that period. …

Hills of Contemplation and Signifying Circles: Spenser and Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie

SOME DECADES AGO, in a study that over the years has provoked both admiration and objection, Robert Ellrodt argued that Spenser probably read Ficino's Sopra VAmove in the 1588 edition of a translation by the French Neoplatonic poet Guy Le Fevre de la Boderie, first published in 1578 as Discours de I'honneste amour sur le Banquet de Platon. ' For Ellrodt, one of the benefits to be had from sorting out which Renaissance Platonists (I would add semi-Platonists or quasi-Platonists) lie behind Spenser's poetry is the help that such work might provide in determining the degree to which Spenser felt a tension between Christianity and Platonism and to what extent they merged in his mind, logically or not. Certainly Le Fevre, one of the most syncretic poets of the Renaissance, if one of the most obsessed and self-repetitive, felt no such tension. In the 1578 edition of Discours, for example, his dedicatory letter to de (sister of Henri III) reports that Ficino thought Plato had prophesied the coming of Christ, bringer of Sapience and Love.2 After all, MARIE is an anagram of AIMER, and there are clear parallels between Plato's love and the kisses in Solomon's Song of Songs-no wonder that Marguerite de Valois is an anagram of Gise le Verite d'Amour (lies [dwells?] the truth of Love). The flattery is overdone, Spenser might have thought, but flattering queens is what poets do, even if part of this French poet's name, anagrammatized at the end of the epistle, is L'Un Guide Orfee. Orpheus did not flatter queens, after all, although that omission might seem a mistake if we remember his death at the hands of angry women.In this essay I will suggest that there were political as well as literary reasons for English poets to have known Le Fevre, at least by name, and that his poetry, particularly his long cosmological poem La Galliade (1578), is worth remembering, even worth reading, by those who study Spenser. After describing the poem I will take as an example of Spenserian moments that gain further resonance when set next to this French poem the scene (Lx) in which St. George is guided by the hermit Contemplation up a hill, one that the narrator compares to Sinai, Olivet, and Parnassus and from which, with a further ascent, the knight can see the New Jerusalem.3 James E. Phillips cites this passage from The Faerie Queene at the start of his helpful essay on Spenser's religious syncretism.4 To give this hill and a not dissimilar one in La Galliade a fuller context, I will also offer a small mountain range of ones that Spenser and his contemporaries might have known.Le Fevre was himself as syncretic a poet as Spenser was likely to find, a devout and meticulously orthodox Catholic with a liking for divine circles, ecstatic ascents, anagrams, and number symbolism whose mind for all its theological orthodoxy hovered somewhere between Platonism and Renaissance occultism. His range of languages was impressive. In Paris he published translations ofjeronimo Munoz on the supernova of 1572 (1574), of Francesco Giorgio on L'Hatmonie du monde (1579), of Ficino's Trois livres de la vie (Three Books on Life, 1582), and, in Antwerp, of a tract on baptism by Severus, patriarch of Alexandria (in fact of Antioch). Near Eastern languages fascinated him, as did Italian Neoplatonism and the cosmic circles that were for him even more alive with the sound of music than they were for his French contemporaries.My focus here is on La Galliade, but Le Fevre wrote other books worth remembering. L'Encyclie des Secrets de l'Eternite (1571) merges biblical poetry and divine kisses with macro- and micro-cosmography, celebrations ofDavid with Orphic odes. The picture of Le Fevre that prefaces it, giving his age as thirty, is encircled by Greek words praying-in an anagram of his full name-May Holy David bud forth as One Orphically, while below the image a Hebrew poem claims that, like a merged soul, spirit, and body, this poet merges three in one: Virgil, Orpheus, the upstanding Greek (with a pun on Or-Pe in Hebrew, light of the mouth), and David, the leader and singer (Fig. …

Edmund Spenser, Lucretian Neoplatonist: Cosmology in the Fowre Hymnes

J N THE DEDICATION to the Fowre Hymnes, Spenser offers one of the few explicit «autobiographical narratives to be found among his printed poems:Having in the greener times of my youth composed these former two Hymnes in the praise of Love and Beautie, and finding that the same too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which being too vehemently caried with that kind of affection, do rather sucke out poyson to their strong passion, then hony to their honest delight, I was moved by the one of you two most excellent Ladies, to call in the same.1This story, with its tale of attempted retraction, has presented Spenser scholars with a puzzle: are the Hymnes a hybrid work comprised of two youthful Petrarchan poems and two later religious corrections to the poet's giovenile errore? Why did Spenser feel moved to publish a hymnic palinode in 1596, the same year he published the six-book Faerie Que ene? Perhaps more importantly, does the mystery of chronology and autobiography help illuminate the subject of the Hymnes themselves? The propositions of Robert Ellrodt, in his 1960 study, have done little to settle these questions of motive and content. Despite claiming that the poems could not have been composed before 1595 through a discussion of the Neoplatonism of Spenser's poetry, Ellrodt only threw into sharper relief Spenser's story of retraction and the possibility that it may be a fiction.2 Why did the poet insist on this fiction? And what ex«actly was Spenser recanting in his own work?'Long considered the apotheosis of sixteenth-century English Neoplatonism, particularly in the form of Petrarchan poetry, the Hymnes are perhaps the least studied poems of the Spenserian corpus. While there is critic«al consensus about their importance, we have yet to grasp firmly their relationship to the poet's other works or to the sociopolitical matrix into which Spenser has so successfully been reinserted in the last twenty years of scholarship. In fact, the determined absence of topical detail in the Hymnes, as well as their sheen of formal symmetry, have made them somewhat impenetrable to critical approaches based on historicist methods and political interests; the handful of essays on the poems treat either their philosophical sources or their formal structure.4 Thus, we might note that the Hymnes have seemed paradoxically both too easy and too difficult to Yet Spenser's palinodie frame for the Fowre Hymnes in the dedication's story of origin provides us with a powerful key to understanding the poems. Indeed, it is worth noting that not only the dedication, but also An Hymne of Heavenly Love, contain palinodie gestures, as though Spenser meant to thematize the movement of action and retraction, turn and counterturn within the work as a whole. The palinode or recantation was of course a much-used lyric trope in the Renaissance.3 Its classical source is Stesichorus's ode recantation of the Helen, famously imitated and discussed by Socrates in the Phaedrus (243a), while its best known Renaissance imitator might be Petrarch, whose Rime sparse is framed as a palinode, an Augustinian recantation of juvenile erotic experience.6 This turn away from either erotic nugae or errori to grand devotional themes, whether in Socrates' repudiation of erotic furor or in Petrarch's turn towards the Vergine bella, was simultaneously a sign of humility and ambition, a double-edged gesture that suggested genuine conversion as well as ironic self-consciousness. …

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's New Arcadia

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's <i>New Arcadia</i>

Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies, Vol. II by Peter M. Daly , Daniel Russell , Michael Bath (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 277 Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies, Vol. 11. Ed. by Peter M. Daly, Daniel Russell, and Michael Bath. New York: AMS Press. 2001. xii + 478pp. $112.50. ISSN 0885-968X. For long the major journal of emblem studies in English, Emblematica has reconfigured itself this year as a single, substantial annual volume. This allows, with the inaugural instalment, the welcome flexibility to publish monographs as well as the more usual articles and reviews. Dorigen Caldwell's extremely detailed and exhaustive study of the development of ltalian impreseand their attendant theorization from within the sixteenth-century academies supplies a gap in emblematic research. Al? though precisely focused on a specific form and provenance, Caldwell carefully lays out the background and history of the impresa as cousin-german to the more popular emblem, and her book will interest specialists and generalists alike. The remainder of the volume offers a remarkably varied set of approaches to emblem studies, and shows exactly why this area of literary-pictorial investigation has gained such ground in the past few decades. A discussion of medieval French proverb manuscripts and work on Alciati's correspondence, together with a valuable bibliography of Spanish emblem sources and secondary material, are the shorter or more technical offeringsalongside several major interpretative articles. Emblematic pictorialism in mainstream literature is one of the liveliest areas of discussion in wordand -image scholarship: relations between poets and fineart, portraiture, the artisanal crafts such as embroidery, interior decoration, architecture, and jewellery, and em? blem and imprese culture have yielded important insights into the compositional and structural techniques of Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare (to name only the best and the brightest?the list could go on). Judith Dundas engages in an apparently bygone undertaking in comparing Spenser's poetry to specific emblems?bygone because practised once upon a time rather less effectivelyin such as Green's Shakespeare and the Emblem-Writers (1870), where emblematic titbits in the plays were dutifully but not very illuminatingly linked to known emblems. Much more interesting is Dundas's concern with what amounts to ekphrasis, word-pictures not needing illustrations but functioning none the less like the word-image alliance of the standard emblem, and, like visual artefacts, carrying with them the difficultburden of potential idolatry. It should be almost impossible by now, in the wake of work by Bender, Skretkowicz, Duncan-Jones, and Gent, to think about works like Arcadia or The Faerie Queene without recognition of the influence of emblem and imprese theory and practice, and Dundas adds to our sense of Spenser's awareness of this material across the whole range of his work. Inter-emblematic relations is another area of study which has broadened our think? ing about scholarly networks and the dissemination of printed material in the early modern period. Gabor Tiiskes discusses the relations between Sambucus, the Hungarian humanist and emblematist, and GeffreyWhitney, who borrowed heavily from his Emblemata (1564) forA Choice ofEmblemes (1586). The article considers human? ist concepts of imitation through the strategic borrowings by emblem-writers in the retouching of existing plates and the wholesale importation of the emblems of one writer into the collection of another. One might argue that the emblem tradition in the sixteenth century deals almost exclusively in the already known, in loci communes, and that this familiarity is its primary didactic and aesthetic feature. Emblems, as Dundas also notes, serve the understanding, not the imagination, and even a topic as remote from the literary experience of emblems as the compositional and publishing history of a book like Whitney's can remind us of the way in which the emblem was a form of intellectual currency, specie in a precise didactic economy within which a writer like Spenser could operate. In the same vein as Tiiskes, Michael Bath documents the borrowings from Alciati 278 Reviews by Edward Topsell in The Historie ofFoure-Footed Beastes (1607) and The Historie of Serpents (1608), showing the early modern naturalist's use of literaryevidence, a prac? tice which would gradually be banished by post-Baconians like Ray, Willughby, and Merrett in the later seventeenth century. The volume's most unusual contribution is by James Tanis discussing the American...

Enabling engagements: Edmund Spenser and the poetics of patronage

Enabling Engagements contributes to current critical debates regarding early modern subjectivity and early modern cultural capital. In stressing the boldness of Edmund Spenser's poetics of patronage, Judith Owens shows that Elizabethans could and did exercise agency within a wide range of institutions. By consistently challenging assumptions of courtly hegemony in early modern society, Owens suggests a new appraisal of the processes of cultural commodification. Enabling Engagements challenges conventional assessments of Spenser as court-centred and of patronal relations in the early modern period as asymmetrical and prescriptive. Owens demonstrates that Spenser exercised a vigorous sense of agency within the close quarters of patronage and courtly culture, fashioning his laureate's role and envisioning nationhood in resistance to the centre. She shows that his independence from court-centred values and tropes informed his poetics from the start of his publishing career, not just as a result of increasing disillusionment with the court. Owens develops detailed readings of Spenser's poetry and his paratextual material in The Shepheardes Calender, the 1590 Faerie Queene, and Complaints, providing contexts that are both broader and more varied than those usually accorded Spenser's poetry. She extends the horizons of The Faerie Queene in particular to include not only court and sovereign but also London, the material conditions of early modern publishing, and Ireland. Bringing together concerns usually approached individually, she shows us a Spenser who is neither the careerist of much recent criticism nor the Elizabethan propagandist of long-standing custom.

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

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-

Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition. Spenser, John N. King

<i>Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition</i>. Spenser, John N. King

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual VIII. Edited by PATRICK CULLEN and THOMAS P. ROCHE, JR. Pp. xii+366. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1990. $45. Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition. By JOHN N. KING. Pp. xiv+272. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. $39.50. H. L. SPENCER H. L. SPENCER Exeter CollegeOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XLIV, Issue 173, February 1993, Pages 96–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLIV.173.96 Published: 01 February 1993

:Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition

In this extended treatment of Edmund Spenser's place in the Reformation literary tradition, John King presents the poet as a rival of classical and Italianate literary predecessors by placing his work within a distinctively English context. Rather than follow those contemporaries who rejected the unpretentious devices of mid-Tudor satire and allegory, Spenser, it is shown, infuses them with sophisticated standards of the Continental Renaissance. King's study begins with the consideration of Spenser's debut as an innovator who, paradoxically, emulates Chaucerian precedent for pastoral satire. By revising critical opinions that identify an iconoclastic movement in The Faerie Queene, he demonstrates the constructive aspect of the Reformation attack against idolatry that underlies the pervasive inversion and mutation of iconic tableaux in the poem. This study culminates in a detailed reading of Book I of The Faerie Queene that addresses Spenser's reformation, within the all-inclusive frame of allegorical romantic epic, of deficient and worldly forms of romance, pastoral, and tragedy into a set of purged and elevated Christian counterparts.

:Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition

:<i>Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition</i>

Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition

Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition

Spenser's poetry and the Reformation tradition

Spenser's poetry and the Reformation tradition

"The Faerie Queene" on Exhibit: Celebrating Four Centuries of Edmund Spenser's Poetry

"The Faerie Queene" on Exhibit: Celebrating Four Centuries of Edmund Spenser's Poetry

Spenser's Late Pastorals

Spenser, as everyone interested in him knows, began his career as writer of pastoral. But he also returned to pastoral at the end of his career, and we have not made this fact sufficiently intelligible. This essay begins by interpreting the pastoral cantos of Book VI as pastorals, and then draws out the implications of this analysis for The Faerie Queene as epic narration and for Spenser's poetry in the 1590s. In particular, I will argue that unlike The Shepheardes Calender, which was conceived as prologue to heroic poetry, Spenser's late pastorals are alternatives to it. Treating the pastoral cantos as pastoral means paying attention to the old shepherd Melibee and the poet-shepherd Colin Clout. By giving each of these figures his own domain, by involving the hero in significant encounter with each, and by making these two encounters central to separate cantos of the poem, Spenser indicates that they have equivalent claims on the reader's attention. Critical commentary, however, has not followed the poem's lead. On the one hand, Colin Clout has been viewed as authoritative presence in the poem. Kathleen Williams called him picture of the poet at his task of seeing meaningful order, ultimate concord, and making it actual and influential in harmonious sound.' This is the note sounded again and again by Spenser's interpreters-by Harry Berger, for example, for whom Colin on Acidale exemplifies the poet's secret discipline, or by Northrop Frye, for whom he is the Prospero of Spenser's epic.2 Melibee, on the other hand, is treated as always simple and sometimes even contemptible case. Berger fluttered the dovecotes many years ago by saying that his praise of the simple life is simply an excuse for laziness.3 Other critics, less openly disparaging, still view Melibee as utterly different from Colin Clout. Humphrey Tonkin says that he inhabits dream world, whereas Mount Acidale presents world of perfect order, visible only to the poet and the seer.4 Even if Acidale too proves to be in some sense a dream world, the shepherd-poet at its center remains privileged presence. I think we cannot understand these cantos without first recognizing that the poem establishes balance between Melibee and Colin

Spenser's Moral Allegory by Sean Kane (review)

250Rocky Mountain Review significance. His appreciative discussion of Langland's use of the alliterative long line is particularly inspiring. Anyone interested in poetic techniques would be captivated by his explanation of how in Langland "alliteration can have a substantive phonetic existence independent of the metrical accents of a line" (79) and how an interplay between the two patterns can result. Two general comparisons of the works of Langland and Chaucer follow, both written in 1980, and both more interesting for the issues they raise than for any development of those issues. The remainder of the book, though, does develop arguments on textual issues and problems facing editors ofmedieval literary texts. It is here that his overriding assumption that "criticism, like what it criticizes, can be good or bad" (ix) emerges most clearly, and it is here that his work becomes most controversial. The article titled "Conjectural Emendation" gives Kane's justification for the editorial approach he and E. Talbot Donaldson took in their edition ofPiers Plowman . This article is appropriately anthologized with his criticism ofthe ManlyRickert edition of Chaucer, since that edition represents the principles behind a more conservative approach to editing. Many may feel that Kane's conjectural emendations may result in distorting conflations of disparate texts. Whether or not the reader agrees with Kane's perspective, in these essays his arguments are clearly set forth in a way that allows them to be discussed intelligently. Furthermore, in his final essay in the series Kane states that "the worst feature of the situation respecting the texts of Middle English literature is exemplified in some ofthe most important, which we use most often and cherish most, namely that the editions which present them are not open, an 'open edition' being one where the editor makes available all the evidence needed to check his conclusions and decisions" (229). Whether or not a reader agrees with Kane's emendations, Kane supplies the apparatus needed to check his readings and, though perhaps with some effort, reconstructs specific manuscript readings. Kane's work involves clear organization and consistency. As fashionable young professionals are turning from pesto and chocolate decadence to homemade meat and potatoes for a more various and balanced diet, so medievalists may be turning from post-structuralist approaches to literature to recognize some of the value in historical and textual approaches. LINDA MARIE ZAERR Boise State University SEAN KANE. Spenser's Moral Allegory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. 237 p. John Milton's homage to Spenser as a philosopher and teacher is sometimes quoted for its hyperbole—"Spenser . . . [is] a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas ." Sean Kane's study, Spenser's Moral Allegory, shows us that Spenser is, indeed, a great moral philosopher by positing him firmly in the thinking ofsuch Book Reviews251 writers as Augustine, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hooker, Renaissance writers ofsermons, Cicero, Ovid, Plutarch, Ficino, Piccolomini, Tasso, Bryskett, Hurault, Ralegh, and Harvey. And the list can be much extended. With careful attention to fresh detail, Kane also presents Spenser's own translating genius as an allegorist and poet-philosopher of polarities and hierarchies, whose medieval progenitors receive new strength from his Medieval-Renaissance perspective and whose psychomachia looks forward timelessly to the epistemological and psychological subtleties of the twentieth century. Not only is the scholar satisfied in these tracings, but a careful reader ofSpenser also becomes excited with the interwoven antiquity and contemporaneity of Spenserian thought. The theme of the Faerie Queene, Kane points out, is enclosed in "The Cantos ofMutabilitie." Mutability ("time, change, randomness, variety"), seen as fatal decay, confronts seeming mutability, which is cyclic and eternal (84). However, as Kane warns, Spenser does not "think these matters through easily"; the poem is a "record of the struggle involved in placing a myth of human power beside a myth of sacred order" (x). Before discussing each of the books of Spenser's epic separately, Kane shows that Spenser's poetry accommodates two world views at a time when Christian humanism, involving a myth of power, needed to be recorded "both as paradigm and in precise and varying moral circumstance ." Kane believes Spenser anticipates "what we now acknowledge as the ecological design of life" (7). In this, Kane...