Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete, ed. Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, and Gareth Griffith. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. xii + 252 pp. ISBN 978 1 5261 36916 (Hardback). 

This very welcome collection offers twelve essays both by young scholars and by senior figures who have shaped the field of Spenser’s medieval roots, specifically here in Chaucer. Studies that interrogate the continuities and transformations (rather than outright rejections) between the English middle ages and early modern period have grown in recent years – pre-eminently in the work of Helen Cooper, one of this volume’s contributors. A good thing, too, since the picture that emerges from such an approach is of the special regard within the English tradition of its medieval legacy: not something to be discarded, but rather to be reshaped and turned to new uses. 

The ‘Introduction’ by the editors, Stenner, Badcoe, and Griffith, emphasises that their authors do not adopt a simple sense of one-way influence – from Chaucer to an essentially receptive Spenser – despite the persuasions of chronology. Instead, and rather boldly, the editors and most contributors are interested in how the influence flows equally from Spenser to Chaucer – more easily understood when we consider how Chaucer’s works were put into print in this period and how that was part of an ongoing shaping of his corpus and the sense of his authorship and authority. The editors lead the discussion by arguing that Spenser’s response to Chaucer ‘is best understood as interventionary’ p. 3) – a concept that involves the awakening of Chaucer to a return-influence. In some of the ensuing essays, the strong sense in which Chaucer’s ashes are kindled into a blaze by Spenser almost risks (with subsequent regard for Chaucer as inflamed) a sense of anachronism; at least the essays tend to create a sense of conversation, however much this be artifice, between the two authors, rather than a one-way influence. 

Judith H. Anderson’s study of Troilus and Criseyde and Spenser’s Amoretti provides a sound opening essay in a book that augmentatively seeks to demonstrate, however much a construct, a dialogue between Chaucer and Spenser; this artificial sense of their contemporaneity, connected through their sympathetic imaginations, is a latent theme throughout this collection. Helen Barr’s chapter, on The Shepheardes Calender in dialogue with The House of Fame and Chaucer’s ‘La Compleynt’, deepens the plot by its focus on the unstable elements in Spenser’s work in its constructed relationship with Chaucer. Discrepancies, tensions, and contradictions exist between The Shepheardes Calender and The House of Fame in Barr’s reading. Yet, however recalcitrant these points of contact, they do indeed remain areas of putative dialogue and ‘simultaneity’.  

Helen Cooper’s contribution on the representation of sexuality in both poets is a deeply learned, elegantly written, and very persuasive piece. Cooper argues that the allegorical nature of The Faerie Queene allows Spenser to write of love in conjunction with the endorsement of virtue; for Chaucer, writing in a distinctly non-allegorical mode, that approach is not so accessible. Interestingly, then, Cooper’s essay avoids the construct of simultaneity and recognises a fundamental difference between the work of the two poets, rooted in different periods. Claire Eager’s engaging chapter on Edenic, seemingly paradisal worlds and their depiction in Spenser and Chaucer bears the powerful insight that for ‘Spenser … importing classical and Christian images of paradise to the landscape of English poetry seems to require a series of moves amounting to colonisation’ (p. 76). The use of the past, as seen throughout this collection on Chaucer and Spenser, can at times feel rapacious. Eager’s essay works well because of its subtle attentiveness to the intellectual independence, and yet putative collegiality, of Chaucer and Spenser. 

William Rhodes’ essay on ‘Chaucer in Ireland’ has something of Spenser’s Phantastes behind it. Of course there is no record of Chaucer as a person ever visiting Ireland; but surely his works lay on shelves or in chests in residences such as Kilcolman Castle, Spenser’s main residence in Co. Cork. His work exemplifies the theme shared throughout this collection, of ‘the poetic practice of remaking the past in the present’ (p. 112). Richard Danson Brown provides an interesting shift in his focus not so much on thematic or interpretative issues, but on formal ones: the handling of rhyme and stanza by Chaucer and Spenser. The technical details of the essay, aligned with insightful close reading, are what mark it out in the collection: 

Specific aspects of Chaucerian diction are recollected in rhyming positions, as if in the process of remembering Chaucer, Spenser flagrantly smuggles specific pieces of medieval lexis into the fabric of his verse. (p. 127) 

Gareth Griffith focuses on Chaucer and the Middle English romances in the MS-anthologies, such as the Auchinleck MS. He develops the illuminating point, perhaps not immediately evident, that for Spenser the act of writing a romance must have seemed very ‘Chaucerian’ (Griffith, p. 149). Megan L. Cook writes on the ‘cultivating’ of Chaucerian antiquity in The Shepheardes Calender. Her work exemplifies an admirable level of clarity of expression and argument. The potentially anachronistic sense in which Spenser shapes Chaucer’s works is made sensible through a focus on the 1598 and 1602 printings of Chaucer’s works. Cook writes: 

Like E.K.’s commentary, the explanatory materials found in the 1598 and 1602 edition of [Chaucer’s] Workes mark Chaucer as both familiar and strange, a recognisable figure and yet one also in need of scholarly explication. (p. 165) 

Towards the end of the collection, Elisabeth Chaghafi’s essay brings to the centre a figure hitherto peripheral: Thomas Speght. Speght brought forth the edition of Chaucer’s work in 1598, and he made some additions to the 1602 edition; these editorial enhancements represented a new level of annotation, introducing critical material and scholarly apparatus. Crucially, Speght’s editions reference Spenser, imagining a ‘friendship’ between the two across the centuries. So important seems Speght in the definition of Chaucerian authorial identity and his impact on Spenser, it would be justified to include him in the title of the current book under review. Indeed, his books seem to be the very incarnation of the two poets together. Brendan O’Connell’s focus on Chaucer’s ‘beast group’ and Spenser’s ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’ and other animal fables in his Complaints (1591) finds in, admittedly less studied texts, the powerful assertion that, in this text, Spenser ‘offers his most extensive and thoughtful engagement with his great vernacular literary forbearer, Chaucer’ (p. 190). 

Craig Berry’s chapter, comparing authority and poetic tradition in The Parliament of Fowls and The Mutabilitie Cantos, considers the challenges, anxiety, and possible eventual elation when an author has to recognise the importance of an existing textual authority and negotiate her/his relation to it. Harriet Archer’s essay, concluding the volume, focuses on this same issues of (taking the phrase from her piece’s title) ‘[n]ew matter framed upon the old’ (Archer, p. 224). She deliberately problematizes the sense of clear lines of literary descent and influence, preferring to lead us into ‘a hall of broken mirrors where origins are unreadable’ (Richard Chamberlain, Radical Spenser: Pastoral, Politics and the New Aestheticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, p. 50; quoted by Archer, p. 226).  

What emerges from this collaborative study of Spenser in relation a ‘collaborative’ medieval writer is not a retrograde conservatism on Spenser’s part, but rather a demonstration of the dynamics of Spenserian poetry. As Archer writes in the collection’s final essay, with the ‘seductive binary of the old and the new, Spenser hoodwinks his readers into taking untenable stances on either side… [I]n fact his work breaks down even attempts to reconcile the two’ (Archer, p. 242). 

Dr Andrew King

University College Cork, Ireland