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Judith H. Anderson review of Hadfield
by Judith H. Anderson

Hadfield, Andrew. Edmund Spenser: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xxi + 624 pp. ISBN: 978-0199591022. $45 cloth.

In the trinity that David Miller assembled to review Andrew Hadfield’s biography, I take myself to be the literary critic, although, like the other reviewers, I have published in all three areas—history and biography, as well as literary fiction. Although the emphasis of my review will fall primarily on the value of Hadfield’s Life for reading Spenser’s literary art, I want first to express my admiration for the effort that has gone into this book and for the wealth of information it affords. A Life may not provide much in the way of new facts, as roughly two hundred pages of notes and a hundred pages of secondary sources signal, but as these numbers also suggest, Hadfield’s comprehensiveness—his accumulation, organization, and interpretation—of his sources in a single volume is an impressive, important, and immensely useful accomplishment.

Aside from comprehensiveness, I found several of the recurrent themes and threads that Hadfield has woven into his account particularly valuable: for example, Spenser’s exposure to a range of religious views throughout his life, from the Family of Love to Roman Catholicism, and his desire to achieve independence, to which, in Hadfield’s judgment, his “rudeness” to (or disregard of) those from whom he might hope for support or employment was somewhat paradoxically related. Hadfield’s many explorations of networks—familial, institutional, geographical, official, patronal, occupational—are further notable. These are so numerous, extensive, and detailed that it is hard to remember that they have plausible, rather than proven, relevance to Spenser. Hadfield rightly and valuably seeks to update the social, political, and cultural context of the few “bare facts” we have about Spenser’s life in England and Ireland. He acknowledges that any such context must be his construct. Necessarily as well, this construct will figure in my review of his understanding of Spenser’s art and especially of The Faerie Queene, the major poem that undergirds and accounts for our continuing interest in Spenser. Previewing, I’ll suggest here that intellectual culture is slighted in the context Hadfield constructs, as is fiction in the textual readings—some nonetheless provocative—that he offers.

Hadfield’s introductory treatment of biographical methodology emphasizes the relation of Spenser’s writing to his life and argues that “they cannot irrevocably be prised apart,” presumably because Hadfield’s “Spenser writes more extensively than most about his life in his work, encouraging readers to think about his work in terms of his life” (12, 15). The reverse, the life in terms of the work, holds as well, even though the two “cannot be conflated” (15). Not surprisingly, then, the first chapter of A Life opens with Amoretti 60 and 74, the former indicating Spenser’s age and the latter identifying three Elizabeths in his life—his mother, his queen, and the woman who will become his second wife. Aside from Spenser’s identification of himself as a Londoner in the occasional Prothalamion and both Cambridge as his alma mater and Mulla as his own in the odic river-marriage of The Faerie Queene (IV.x.34, 41), these are the most open, direct references to the facts of Spenser’s life in his English poetry, and they seem generically apt to the sonnet and more specifically to the highly occasional, “timely” use Spenser makes of it, particularly as published in a volume including Epithalamion. Immediately after citing Amoretti 74, however, Hadfield remarks that we can be sure the information provided in it is true because in the 1596 Faerie QueeneSpenser similarly "describ[es] Elizabeth Boyle, his second wife, as a fourth Grace whose beauty has eclipsed that of Elizabeth Tudor (VI.x.28)” (17). Not only does this claim seem curiously backwards, moving from the less to the more personal form, epic to sonnet, but in a flash, the densely layered fiction of Mount Acidale collapses into simplicity and literalism. This collapse, moreover, effectually desituates pastoral lyric (or a sustained allusion to it) from its surrounding context of allegorical narrative. This is not the literalism Hadfield equates with source hunting when he tells us we mustn’t read allegory literally (37) but a referential literalism that misunderstands the way allegory functions as a narrative form and rushes to equate fiction with history. Wistfully, I reread Donald Cheney’s remarkable essay “Spenser’s Fortieth Birthday and Related Fictions,” and noticed again Cheney’s drawing of Spenser’s age into the larger, livelier contours of his fiction and illuminating life and art together. Once in A Life, Hadfield endnotes Cheney’s essay; I wish he had attended to its subtlety and complexity.

Despite this unfortunate beginning, Hadfield’s discussions of Spenser’s less complex political and religious poems are full of insight or interest: A Theatre for Worldlings in chapter 1, The Shepheardes Calender in chapters 2 and 3, the Complaints volume (especially Mother Hubberds Tale) in chapter 8. His treatment of the Calender includes a heightened sense of Spenserian comedy (one to be found elsewhere as well: 97–98), sustained attention to Spenser’s ambivalence regarding the Bishop of Rochester, figured as Roffyn, and to the fable of the oak and brier in the February Eclogue, whose “point is surely that the Reformation must not forget its roots in the past and that all Christians need to think through what is good and what is pernicious about the legacy of the pre-Reformation” (134). Predictably, the Calender’s Rosalind “is clearly” Spenser’s first wife, who is doubtless Machabyas Childe, even though at least ten contemporary Edmund Spensers could have been her husband (21, 128, 140–42, 145–46); furthermore, Spenser and Gabriel Harvey wrote E. K.’s notes, with help from Edward Kirk (123). In Complaints, the Visions at the end of the volume, which belong to the beginning of Spenser’s literary career, "circl[e] back to provide answers to the questions posed in the opening poem of the collection [The Ruines of Time], a pattern that is in keeping with Spenser’s interest in sequences, numbers, and repetition” (278). Complaints, moreover, “is central to Spenser’s poetic career and his and our understanding of him as a writer”—central for the biographer at least (283).

Before turning to The Faerie Queene, I want briefly to consider Hadfield’s treatment of Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes. Their Neoplatonism and their publication in 1596 make Hadfield uneasy, since they don’t accord with the trajectory of Spenser’s career as the biographer envisions it. They are “at odds,” in his view, with Spenser’s “more sophisticated work . . . published in the 1590s” (48). They also contrast with a more ironic use of Neoplatonic ideas in the late sixteenth century, as evident in Sidney’s sonnets or in Donne’s “Extasie,” which “is based on the joke” that the lovers need to consummate their love physically in order to realize its idealized purity (351–52). Aside from the fact that a joke is not the only, or the reigning, view of “The Extasie,” Donne’s poem seems less relevant to the Hymnes than Spenser’s own Neoplatonized vision on Mount Acidale, which was also published in 1596, or perhaps even the vision of creative love near the end of Colin Clouts Come Home Again, published in 1595. Although Hadfield notes that the Hymnes were published on expensive paper and more carefully printed in Spenser’s lifetime than any of his other works, he tries hard to neutralize their presence in Spenser’s canon, finally suggesting that they “would undoubtedly have pleased two aristocratic sisters of a puritan persuasion, especially one who was a widow” (356). Undoubtedly.

Something larger is at stake in Hadfield’s concern about the Hymnes. This is the importance he attributes to marriage in Spenser’s life and specifically to sex, as well as to marriage, in The Faerie Queene. Summarizing at the end of A Life, he concludes that “the key decision [Spenser] made . . . was to get married in 1579, and he placed a heavy emphasis on the significance of marriage, especially his own, ever afterwards” (403). That the second “he” in the preceding sentence is momentarily ambiguous illustrates the way a biographer’s life can wrap around his subject’s. Despite a lingering memory of C. S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love, I was frankly surprised by Hadfield’s assertion about the decisive importance of Spenser’s first marriage. In its textual context, this assertion implies that marrying Machabyas led Spenser to a life in Ireland. What likely accounts for the assertion, however, is Hadfield’s reading of the 1590 Faerie Queene.

On the basis of Harvey’s well-known description of Spenser’s romance epic in 1580 as “Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo,” Hadfield infers that the early sections of The Faerie Queene that Harvey saw came from Books II and III. To support his inference, he cites the authority of Josephine Waters Bennett (1960), whose assumptions and methods have long been questioned and mostly discounted. Hadfield next suggests that because Books II and III were written first, we should ask how Book I relates to them instead of taking Book I as the pattern or, as I would suppose on the basis of Spenser’s final, published version, as the foundation for the rest (254). Later he adds that Holiness is, after all, “a first stage only,” hardly “the apex of Christian virtue” (260). Surprisingly, he also wonders why, if Red Cross “is a figure of Holiness, . . . his downfall [is] related to sex” (257). The traditions of romance that speak to this question curiously go unnoticed here, as do those of the Bible that relate the sinful flesh to lust—in a modernized term, to desire. Instead, we learn that Red Cross and Una are “spectacularly ill-matched” because Red Cross is “‘pricking on the plaine’” and Una is “a chaste virgin” (258). Moreover, Una, who wears a wimple, is associated by it with the pre-Reformation church and more explicitly with a nun, such as Chaucer’s Prioress, who also wears a wimple. Never mind that Chaucer’s Wife of Bath wears one as well or that women of all ages often wore wimples when traveling on dusty medieval and early modern roads—a matter of practicality and not merely of modesty (258–59): cf. also the wimpled beldame within doors in Sir Gawain: castles could be chilly in winter. Evidence from the OED to which Hadfield unspecifically alludes confirms rather than challenges this broad use (and usage) of the word wimple and fails to support an exclusive or a “particular” churchly association. Yet the end toward which Hadfield stretches is actually more interesting, namely, that Red Cross is now to be seen as “an old-fashioned hero from a romance,” and Una as “a medieval religious figure,” although, I imagine, he really means a figure of medieval religion (259). This conclusion dovetails with Hadfield’s reading of the oak and brier in Spenser’s February eclogue, whose theme is the relation of the religious past to the present—a relation also present in Spenser’s archaic language. The trouble with Hadfield’s argument, aside from its inconsistency regarding the romance vehicle, is that, as it is presented, it would replace rather than merely complement the Knight’s traditional Christian quest for everyman’s salvation: Una figures religious truth as personal troth, not simply as institutionalized religion: the complex signification of medieval trouthe, still alive in the sixteenth century, is pertinent.

Hadfield endorses an alignment of the Bower of Bliss in Book II with Queen Elizabeth and her court and aligns its destruction with colonial violence. Yet he is more interested in Book III than in Book II because Britomart, its heroine, “in marrying Artegall” (at least according to Merlin’s prophesy) not only “ensures the success of the Reformation” but also “fulfils the Reformation ideal of marriage, like Spenser himself” (261). In doing so, “Britomart’s quest pointedly exposes the failings of the real queen” (261). There are no further surprises here, unless it is the progressive implication that Book III mainly concerns Elizabeth, or rather, her inadequacies. Hadfield especially focuses on the canceled ending of this Book, in which the narrator makes a visual comparison between the physical embrace of Scudamore and Amoret and the statue of a hermaphrodite. Witnessing this hermaphroditic reunion, Britomart half envies it, feels empassioned, and wishes to find “like happinesse” (III.xii.46). Here Hadfield finds Spenser representing “the sort of emotions that a queen should have” with respect to marriage and to “securing her nation’s future” (262). In this way, he adds, “Spenser brings us back full circle to the issues raised at the start of the Book I, showing that the future lay in thinking carefully and properly about sex” (262).

Perhaps this reading of the canceled ending was Burghley’s too, if lacking, in this Baron’s view, Hadfield’s enthusiasm for it. Hadfield subsequently speculates that Burghley saw in the hermaphrodite an allusion to his daughter’s disastrous marriage to the earl of Oxford and still later considers the reunion of Scudamore and Amoret “a Platonic ideal of equal married love,” confusingly this time not a Donnean joke reducing Neoplatonized idealism to sex (274, 328). What Hadfield omits from all these various readings, however, is the complicating alexandrine two lines before the image of the hermaphrodite. It refers to the embracing figure of Scudamore and Amoret as “two senceles stocks,” or blocks of wood (cf. Amoretti 48.8: “stupid stock”), not exactly a description to inspire queenly emulation. Like rivers, which can “one at last become” (xi.43) and unlike the more complex figures of Britomart and Artegall, Scudamore and Amoret merely fuse. Differences in figuration in The Faerie Queene are significant; they convey differences in meaning and in the way they ask us to read the various figures in the poem, whether these are agents or immobile statues. Hadfield’s readings disregard this literary kind of fact.

Of the three books added to The Faerie Queene in 1596, the fifth, on Justice, is the most openly political. Since sex and politics are Hadfield’s foci in updating the relation of Spenser’s life and art, it would be unfair not to attend to this important book. For Hadfield, the political arguments about Ireland in it tally exactly with the “determined, pitiless, and rigorous” thinking found in Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (342). Moreover, the View, although nominally a dialogue, is nonetheless “a straightforward logical argument” (342). Citing Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh (“a Poet thrusteth into the middest”), Hadfield appears to assume that the Letter describes something contrary to the distinction both Sidney and Bacon, not to mention assorted Italian sources, draw between poetry and history (343). Sidney and Bacon evaluate these two disciplines and two ways of knowing differently, but they agree that their perspectives, methods, and ends are not the same.

“[P]robably the allegorical core” of Book V is the court of Mercilla, “a body that is not fit to govern itself, let alone a nation” (332). Britomart’s part in this Book, which includes the Temple of Isis, barely registers on the interpretive screen. “[T]he crown itself” (fudge for the Queen?) sets loose the Blatant Beast and such a “failure of justice leads directly to the meaninglessness of courtesy in Book VI” (332). When the armored knights Arthur and Artegall enter Mercilla’s hall (V.ix.24), what seems to be praise of her justice is “bitterly ironic”: we are supposed to read incredulously the claim that Mercilla’s judgments are not touched by threats and bribery (171-2). The suitors (“courtiers” in Hadfield’s gloss [171]) are terrified by the sight of armor in this hall because they are incapable of grasping the reality of war. The warden who excludes guile from the court is an interpretive decoy, and the two halves of this canto—the episodes of Malengin and Mercilla—mirror likeness, not contrast. Praise of Mercilla’s justice is juxtaposed in the next stanza to the chilling image of Malfont, the poet with his tongue nailed to a post “at [before?] the Scriene [room divider]” beyond which, I note, is Mercilla’s chamber of presence (V.ix.25). The stanzaic juxtaposition lends considerable weight to Hadfield’s perceptions, but these are still too black and white. Utopian possibility is simply obliterated. Cynicism replaces Neoplatonism, or one extreme the other. Malfont, of course, is for Hadfield “a self-representation” of Edmund Spenser (172).

At the trial of Duessa/Mary, Artegall/Grey, the latter a commissioner for the trial, is likened in the text to Zeal, an indication, perhaps, that “on this issue at least, Spenser had some insider knowledge of public policy” (194). Elizabeth is reluctant to execute Mary, but “is forced to act by the logic of her councillor, Zele,” which must be similar to the “straightforward logical argument” of Spenser’s View (193). Arthur’s knightly role at the trial and the fact that Zeal’s nasty, culminating emphasis on moral failing (“Incontinence,” “foul Adulterie,” “lewd Impietie”) is what finally sways Arthur’s compassion are apparently irrelevant (ix.46, 48–49). Likewise unmentioned is the odd ending of canto ix, in which Mercilla pities Duessa and avoids judgment, only to be followed by the still odder beginning of canto x, in which we first hear the poet’s resounding praise of mercy, then a markedly ambiguous treatment of the relation of mercy to justice, then more praise of mercy, after which Duessa’s execution slips in as an afterthought. This whole conspicuous sequence has often been described as vacillating, uncertain, overdetermined, indeterminable, or even humane, rather than rigorously logical. Its verbal and conceptual ambiguity parallels that of the crucial legal maxim “Better a mischiefe then an Inconvenience” as it is employed conspicuously twice in the View, and it also bears on the growing conflict in this period between individual right and the greater good—hardly a small matter. The complexity of the Spenserian sequence expresses an apparent contradiction between justice and mercy that is fundamental to Spenser’s exploration of the concept of justice throughout Book V, yet this complexity does not speak to, or in, the treatment of this book by Hadfield’s Life. It is the very concept of justice that demands open attention to the events of contemporary history in the last five cantos of this book, not simply these events that demand attention to the concept of justice.

Surprisingly, Hadfield also remarks that the leveling Giant’s “claim [in Book V] that the universe should be based on more equitable principles has generally received short shrift from commentators,” as have Artegall’s opposed assertions (373–75). I honestly wonder where Hadfield has been. The answer, perhaps, is that here, as elsewhere, he has disregarded studies that emphasize complexity, ambiguity, and figural or verbal elements and has often done so despite A. C. Hamilton’s notes. This bias is again evident in his treatment of the Mutabilitie Cantos, where “the metaphysical conclusions of Nature are one thing, but what really mattered to most people were their immediate surroundings” (375).

Likely there is an unavoidable tension, conceivably a discrepancy, between biography and poetry. Once recognized, it calls for a subtler, more provisional touch than I have found in Hadfield’s Life. But I would emphasize at the end, as at the beginning, of this review, that however unreliable as an interpretation of The Faerie Queene, Hadfield’s biography remains an invaluable work for biographical reference. Working with contexts, networks, and such documentary evidence as does exist, Hadfield rejects a number of hoary assumptions about Spenser’s life, arguing, for example, that his family came not from Lancashire but from Northamptonshire; that he was not a poor schoolboy, that Spenser and Burghley were not consistently hostile, that Spenser was not an enthusiast for Irish genocide, and that he was not in dire financial straits when he died in London. Perhaps when Hadfield chose for the jacket of his book the familiar Kinnoull portrait of Spenser in a courtly ruff, only to tell us at the end, that the subject of this portrait could not have been Spenser, he meant to illustrate how skewed the received commonplaces about the poet’s life formerly have been (402). Or perhaps he meant the portrait to allude to the jacket of Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography (1996), on which successive frames of this same portrait fade from relatively distinct to indistinct (or vice versa) and within which the foreword begins by recognizing that in Spenser’s life, “we confront with unusual clarity the issues that the death of an [sic] author presents and the problematics of biography”; it continues, specifying that in the instance of Spenser, “the most basic problems include historical reference (both the few ‘facts’ and their many interpretations) and the relations of his voluminous writing (his fiction) to his sparsely documented life” (ix). Now, more than fifteen years and six hundred pages of Hadfield later, these relations remain very much in question.

 

Judith H. Anderson

Indiana University

42.2.12

Cite as:

Judith H. Anderson, "Judith H. Anderson review of Hadfield," Spenser Review 42.2.12 (Winter 2013). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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