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The Scope of Spenser’s Strangeness
by Richard Danson Brown

Wilson-Okamura, David Scott. Spenser’s International Style. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. xiv + 235 pp. ISBN: 9781107038202. $85.50 cloth.

 

The title of this review comes from the final chapter of this book, which considers The Faerie Queene’s failure to conform to one of the primary specifications of epic, that it should be concerned with warfare:

The scope of Spenser’s strangeness – not only the absence of wars, but of the epic-set pieces that go along with wars – has rarely been addressed or even remarked.
(188)

This is a bold book about Spenser’s strangeness which addresses topics that, though well enough known, have tended to be less addressed and remarked in recent years.  Wilson-Okamura’s central argument is a simple one: Spenser is much more of an international poet than is usually recognized, particularly at the level of the forms, genres, and modes he deploys in The Faerie Queene, as well as the theories which underpin his poem.  Many of the stylistic aspects which seem to modern readers perverse or eccentric—whether this is his use of archaism, his elaborate stanza form, his “flowery” language and the apparently paradoxical lyricism of his very long poem—can, on this account, be more fully grasped by reading him in the contexts of continental Renaissance thinking.  This is a humanist Spenser with a renewed edge and purpose.  At the same time, as the sentence quoted above indicates, Wilson-Okamura keeps wanting to register and interrogate the oddness of Spenser’s writing.  One of the glories of this book is not simply the answers which it gives but the questions which it keeps recurring to, and which—by virtue of posing —it keeps alive in the minds of its readers: “Why stanzas for epics?” (Chapter 1); “why, if The Faerie Queene is trying to imitate the sound of classical epic, does it sound so …  unclassical?” (52-53); “do [Spenser and Tasso’s] epics succeed—not just as period pieces, but as poems?” (180-81).

As these quotations suggest, Wilson-Okamura’s methodology is dialogic and pedagogic to an extent which is unusual in scholarly monographs.  His Introduction on “the persistence of form” registers some of the difficulties of teaching Renaissance poetry, homing in on questions which more recent approaches have tended to overlook, or define as inappropriate: “what do we, as teachers of English literature, have to offer non-professionals who are serious about literature: not just reading literature, but writing it?” (3).  The implied answer is “not a lot,” and this anxiety contributes to Wilson-Okamura’s desire to demystify topics such as rhetoric and scansion.  Yet the book offers relatively little close reading.  Instead, as in his earlier study, Virgil in the Renaissance (2010), to which this functions as a supplement and development, Wilson-Okamura’s account of the styles of The Faerie Queene is rooted in

the consensus sapientum, the convergence of scholarly and critical opinion over a long period. […] It is not infallible, but the agreement of learned ears, when they are widely spaced in time and place, is probably more reliable than random soundings by one scholar.

(5)

Such a warning must give any formalist pause for thought. Wilson-Okamura proves himself on several occasions to be an accomplished close reader (see his reading of Amavia’s death, 144-46), so his skepticism about the “random soundings” of the individual scholar is a methodological challenge which merits serious consideration.  This reluctance to read closely is reminiscent of related warnings made by Gordon Teskey in a recent essay (not cited by Wilson-Okamura):

There is no poet for whom the techniques of close reading are more unsuitable if relied on exclusively, or more likely to mislead if mechanically applied. When we read The Faerie Queene we need a long memory and a distanced, somewhat relaxed view of its entanglements even more than we need the capacity for paying minute attention.[1]

In effect, “a distanced, somewhat relaxed view” is what Spenser’s International Style delivers to its readers, as the contexts of Spenser’s reading and the contexts in which he has been read are periodically illuminated by readings of individual passages. Though Wilson-Okamura’s method is remote from mechanistic close reading, it does provoke two related queries.  Though Spenser’s style is evoked in detail in the central chapters through the Renaissance consensus sapientum of what constituted an epic, the reader—particularly the student reader summoned in the Introduction—has to take the poetic value of The Faerie Queene largely on trust.  That “From the first, the New Poet was always doing something new” is assumed as given, not established through detailed readings (220).  This is the perhaps inevitable corollary of Wilson-Okamura’s method, and it does have the advantage that his account of the poem’s formal inventiveness is panoramic but not exhaustive.  The community of readers, however, doesn’t altogether replace the judgement of the individual scholar, and there are occasions when the book is guilty of the piety it diagnoses in critics who are chary of making sweeping evaluations: “we say ‘It’s all good’ and offer up the odorless incense of empty devotion” (13).

The second query concerns the community of “learned ears.”  At one level, Wilson-Okamura’s painstaking recovery of the formalism of humanist literary culture is one of the book’s singular virtues.  As in Virgil in the Renaissance, Wilson-Okamura excels in his knowledge and exposition of the commentarial tradition and humanist poetics.  Tasso is a key source, and the book is particularly convincing when discussing the middle style in the light of Tasso’s shifting theory and practice (Chapter 4).  Similar tributes could be paid to his use of Servius and Donatus, or the poignant case of Trissino’s almost universally reviled epic in blank verse, Italia liberate dai Goti (1548), which illustrates why Spenser may have been reluctant to continue his own experiments with unrhymed verse (34).  But it is in the selection of more recent voices that Wilson-Okamura’s decisions are sometimes more puzzling.  In discussing the absence of epic exhilaration from The Faerie Queene, he cites C. S. Lewis and Thomas Greene, who provide memorable characterizations of the poem’s tranquility and serenity (67).  As he explains, part of the reason for using Lewis and Greene is “Today critics are more polite and less critical” (68).  Indeed: today’s formalist inevitably relies on works from the middle part of the twentieth century which historicist scholars have probably not needed to consult; Wilson-Okamura also pays generous tribute to (amongst others) the pioneering and still useful work of Herbert D. Rix and Veré L. Rubel on rhetoric and diction (135-36).  However, the discussion of Spenser’s tranquility seems (to this reader at least) to cry out for reference to Paul Alpers’s The Poetry of The Faerie Queene, particularly since the extract from Greene describes the poem’s “circular” sentence structure (67).  Alpers does not of course trump Greene, but his careful, comparative study of Spenser’s syntax remains the standard work on The Faerie Queene’s rhetorical modes.

Spenser’s International Style takes its shape and impetus from Wilson-Okamura’s questioning style.  The first chapter provides a detailed account of the choice of stanzas for an epic poem.  It is particularly illuminating in its emphasis on the “arteficiall” quality which Renaissance poets were aiming for, and which in turn helps to explain the pan-European quantitative experiment, in which poets like Spenser attempted to distance their work from ordinary language and bring it closer to classical Greek and Latin (39). Subsequent chapters develop these arguments by interrogating Renaissance views of epic style, and advancing the view that The Faerie Queene is best understood as a poem written in the middle style, as “a hybrid of lyric and epic styles” (71).  Chapters 4 and 6 consider the poem’s content, as an epic which focuses on the relatively unclassical matter of love and which avoids warfare.

In each case, Wilson-Okamura’s arguments are provocative and worthy of the attention of all Spenserians.  However, the argument which I want to focus on in more detail is contained in Chapter 5, “Ornamentalism.”  Wilson-Okamura’s paradigm-shaking claim is that Renaissance thinkers viewed ornament as an end in itself.  Content should not, in this view, be decoded into theme; we have to instead resign “ourselves to the uselessness of ornament: the pursuit of ornament as an end in itself, for its own sake” (146).  The clinching example of this ornamental uselessness is the introduction of feminine rhyme into the 1596 installment of The Faerie Queene.  For Wilson-Okamura, readings which suggest that there is anything semantic or humourous about these rhymes are problematic; his quotations here are particularly telling. Consider VI.iii.10:

But faire Priscilla (so that Lady hight)
Would to no bed, nor take no kindely sleepe,
But by her wounded loue did watch all night,
And all the night for bitter anguish weepe,
And with all teares his wounds did wash and steepe.
So well she washt them, and so well she wacht him,
That of the deadly swound, in which full deepe
He drenched was, she at the length dispatcht him,
And droue away the stound, which mortally attacht him.

Wilson-Okamura’s comment is illustrative both of his own quirky style and of the valuable questions he keeps asking about Spenser’s style:

Should we sigh here, or giggle? We cannot tell. But for someone who knows the later history of English poetry, and whose responses to feminine rhyme have been conditioned by the likes of Auden and Byron, the giggle is hard to suppress. Not that the rhymes are never funny. But they are not all funny, and the unfunny ones are an irritation unless we can formulate […] a theory to account for them.
(164-65)

“Giggle” is certainly the mot juste for the reader who thinks of Don Juan or “Letter to Lord Byron,” but as is implied, such a response hardly works for Priscilla’s act of empathetic nursing.  Wilson-Okamura rightly identifies a fault line in taste and poetic enjoyment between modern readers and their Renaissance counterparts.  His theory of feminine rhymes is based on a detailed account of the practice of the Pléiade poets (who alternated masculine and feminine rhymes as a matter of routine; 171-72), and the ornamental prevalence of such rhymes in medieval Latin poetry (168-69).  Wilson-Okamura’s Spenser is a “cosmopolitan” reader with varied tastes, who he imagines reading more European poetry than English poetry in Munster (167, 221).  The theory of feminine rhyme which emerges from these contexts is a model of lucid simplicity: “Spenser, when he opened the floodgates of feminine rhyme, was not trying to make a statement, or even be sexy, he was trying to make a big, fat sound” (177).

My own suspicion (developed elsewhere) is that this theory is seductive but probably too simple both for the introduction of feminine rhymes in 1596 and—perhaps more tellingly—their virtual exclusion from the 1590 Faerie Queene.[2] The issue for debate is whether Wilson-Okamura’s brilliant exposition of the literary contexts of Spenser’s feminine rhymes fully justifies the conclusion that such ornaments are simply the bejeweled deckings of the poem and do not have further semantic or symbolic resonances.  Spenser’s International Style cumulatively suggests that teachers and scholars of Renaissance poetry have been colluding in a “Noble Lie” about the composition and interpretation of literary texts; in this account, writing poetry was much closer to baking a cake (the content of the cake first, then the frosting of form) than is usually admitted (150).  Yet the Priscilla stanza quoted above suggests that a semantic reading may still be appropriate.  To be sure, the Audenesque giggle is something the reader needs to try to stifle.  But the obsessive repetitions of the wacht him: dispatcht him: attacht him cluster suggest that something has been added to the poetic text which is more than simply extra sound; the rhymes (including the half rhyme on washt them in line 6) enact Priscilla’s medical and psychological attention to the wounded Aladine in ways which extend the reader’s sympathy.

In Orhan Pamuk’s brilliant novel about the politics of style amongst sixteenth-century miniaturists in Istanbul, My Name Is Red, the issue of the meaning of ornament is never far from the surface. In one chapter, a character says, “It’s not the content, but the form of thought which counts. It’s not what a miniaturist paints, but his style.”[3] The character is, of course, Satan, or rather a version of Satan through the mouthpiece of a storyteller in a coffee shop; the layerings of irony and perspective are part of what makes Pamuk’s novel such a skilful evocation of a culture which is almost overturned by the new styles of European Renaissance art, in which form and content are disturbingly mixed in the depiction of seemingly real people in seemingly concrete environments. The Faerie Queene is very different from the paintings of the Venetian Renaissance, yet in its extended representation of human experience and promiscuous amalgam of styles, it is analogous. I quote from Pamuk not to destabilize Wilson-Okamura’s provocative argument but to pay tribute to the subtlety of his analysis. Spenser’s International Style is an important book because it forces Spenserians to rethink commonly held assumptions about form and style. More broadly, it suggests that the European dimension to English Renaissance culture is still underestimated by scholars and needs further exploration.

 

Richard Danson Brown
The Open University

 



[1] Teskey, Gordon, “Thinking Moments in The Faerie Queene,” SSt 22, (2007): 103-24 (111).

[2] Brown, Richard Danson, ‘“Charmed with inchaunted rimes”: An Introduction to The Faerie Queene Rhymes Concordance,” in Richard Danson Brown and J. B. Lethbridge, A Concordance to the Rhymes of The Faerie Queene. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, 21-22, 47-57.

[3] Pamuk, Orhan, My Name is Red, trans. Erdağ M. Göknar. London: Faber and Faber, 2001, 467.

Comments

  • San Diego Fencing Co. 3 months, 2 weeks ago

    Renaissance culture is still underestimated by scholars and needs further exploration.

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43.3.53

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Richard Danson Brown, "The Scope of Spenser’s Strangeness," Spenser Review 43.3.53 (Winter 2014). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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