Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual. Volume 33, 2019. Editors: William A. Oram, Andrew Escobedo, and Susannah Brietz Monta. The University of Chicago Press Journals.
Lee, Richard Z. “Wary Boldness: Courtesy and Critical Aesthetics in The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 1-34.
In Book VI of The Faerie Queene, Spenser figures courtesy as a uniquely self-divided virtue. Alternating between benign and malign manifestations with such ease and rapidity that these seeming opposites become indistinguishable from one another, Spenser’s courtesy is a means of utopian progress and dystopian catastrophe at one and the same time. Embodied as much by the Blatant Beast as the courteous knight who seeks to contain it, the virtue functions less as an instrument of ideological motivation than as an index of the way that historical crisis obscures the difference between culture and its barbarous Other. Book VI ultimately thematizes and trains readers not in a politics per se, but in the critical agency that Spenser describes as “wary boldness,” a proto-political faculty governed by the tension between aesthetic experience and social praxis. The essay concludes by arguing for the value of Adornian theory in thinking through this tension, as it exists in The Faerie Queene, early modern literature, and contemporary critical practice.
Anderson, Judith H. “Mythic Still Movement and Parodic Myth in Spenser and Shakespeare.’”Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 35-61.
This essay argues for the essential importance of myth and parody to Renaissance writing and connects them with still movement, a punning paradox that both Spenser and Shakespeare engage. Still movement simultaneously opposes motion to stillness and conjoins them. Parody heightens the play of still movement, and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis offers an exemplary instance of it that parodies Spenser’s many refractions of the same myth in his epic. Shakespeare’s epyllion also serves as a transition to a historicized treatment of parody that is inclusive enough to pertain to both Spenser and Shakespeare. Properly understood, the parodic still movement of myth broadens and deepens the Spenser-Shakespeare connection and significantly affects a reading of sacred, or biblical, myth at the end of King Lear and the myths operative at the end of The Winter’s Tale, which are variously biblical and classical and bear on the troubling death of Mamillius.
Basu, Anupam, and Joseph Loewenstein. “Spenser’s Spell: Archaism and Historical Stylometrics.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 63-102.
In the present essay, on Spenser’s orthography, we address the question of whether the orthography of Spenser’s texts, in early modern editions, is salient and therefore worth preserving in modern editions. Even when we face the bibliographic fact that Spenser’s texts seem not to have been regarded as so valuably idiosyncratic that early modern printers preserved them from adjustment, we may still seek to know whether the first editions of Spenser’s works are demonstrably and articulably idiosyncratic, whether orthographically, lexically, inflectionally, or syntactically. This essay formulates a method for statistically probing Spenser’s orthographic profile against what we demonstrate to be the variant, but coherent background of early printed English. We build a model of early modern orthographic change based on letter n-grams extracted from the 60,000 texts in the EEBO-TCP corpus. The n-grams yield some 30,000 features; we concentrate on a subset of the 200 most variant features, reducing the dimensionality of the data by means of principal component analysis (PCA). Situating Spenser’s texts against contemporary and near-contemporary texts, we demonstrate that, in general, Spenser’s corpus is not orthographically distinctive and propose that the impression of the linguistic distinctiveness of Spenser’s poetry is concentrated elsewhere. We conclude both with proposals for new tests that might enable us to isolate that distinctiveness and with a brief assessment of appropriate editorial responses to our investigations.
McNair, Maria Devlin. “The Faerie Queene as an Aristotelian Inquiry into Ethics.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 103-132.
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene constitutes an Aristotelian inquiry into ethics because of its continual demand for judgment. For Aristotle, there is no single rule for what constitutes good action; similarly, in The Faerie Queene, there is no single rule for interpreting the poem’s allegories. The agent or reader must evaluate the unique circumstances of each case before she can act or interpret correctly. In The Faerie Queene, this is partly because the significance of individual characters, motifs, and actions changes radically from episode to episode. Spenser’s wide range of literary and philosophical sources likewise means that the poem has no single interpretive key. The variation and diversity of The Faerie Queene offer, not rules to follow or examples to imitate, but rather, case studies to analyze, whose narrative particularity both demands and develops judgment. I analyze key episodes from Books I, II, and V, and show that if we attempted to derive general ethical or interpretive rules from these episodes, these rules would lead us to misread other parts of the poem. To interpret the poem adequately, we must develop and apply an informed judgment to each individual case—the same process required of an Aristotelian ethical agent.
Espie, Jeff. “Spenser, Chaucer, and the Renaissance Squire’s Tale.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 133-160.
This essay develops existing scholarship about Spenser’s reconstruction of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale in Book IV of The Faerie Queene. I suggest, first, a new reason why Renaissance literary historians should study Spenser’s imitation of Chaucer in conjunction with the printed editions that transmitted his poetry to a Tudor audience: they present a prologue for The Squire’s Tale that differs radically from modern texts. The prologue, never before discussed in a Spenserian context, identifies the Squire as a paradoxical combination of deference and assertiveness, framing his tale as the product of an active, metafictional revision; Spenser adapts this posture and poetics as his own. I propose, second, a new reason why Spenserians might consider The Squire’s Tale alongside Anelida and Arcite and The Knight’s Tale: the poems collectively articulate a pattern of Chaucerian self-revision that Spenser appropriates to claim his place in a variously national and international tradition. Mediated by his Renaissance editions, following his own feet, Chaucer provides Spenser with poems to rewrite but also with a guide to accomplish his rewriting; Chaucer is the target of Spenser’s revision as well as the model for how to do it.
Beckman, Jessica C. “Time, Reading, and the Material Text: Revising Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 161-185.
Studies of The Shepheardes Calender almost exclusively focus on its first edition, printed by Hugh Singleton in 1579. Yet in 1580, Singleton sold his publication rights to John Harrison II, who controlled its printing for the next twenty years. This essay traces how a series of printers enlisted by Harrison in the late sixteenth century made subtle changes to The Shepheardes Calender that de-emphasize its emblems and glosses. It argues that these changes reshape the central kineticism of the Calender that relies on the interplay between its eclogues and paratexts to vary how readers move through the work. By articulating how Spenser’s text connects serial reading with the passage of linear time, this essay calls new attention to the role played by mise-en-page in amplifying the Calender’s complex temporality.
Clement, Taylor. “The Persistence of Vision: Continuous Narrative and Spenser’s Illustrated Poetry.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 187-224.
This article examines word-image relationships within A Theatre for Worldlings (1569) and The Shepheardes Calender (1579). Both printed texts contain illustrations with continuous narrative in which the implied three-dimensional space in the picture plane expresses temporality on a continuum that reaches back to the horizon. Spenser’s translations of Marot and Du Bellay in A Theatre reconnect the pictured scenes as a series of events, but the continuous narrative in A Theatre changes readers’ perceptions of narrative time and complicates deixis within the lyric poems. In the Calender, a different word-image relationship occurs. Spenser’s poetry, when paired with continuous-narrative designs, emphasizes the power of storytelling by illustrating imaginary or fable worlds on the landscape. Scholars often focus on how Spenser’s early translations influence his later poetry, but this essay argues that, in particular, the continuous narrative illustration techniques in A Theatre inform the ways in which visual images and narrative time operate in the Calender.
Chaghafi, Elisabeth. “Collaborative Spenser? Reading the ‘Spenser-Harvey Letters.’” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 225-242.
The so-called “Spenser-Harvey letters” (1580) are generally studied only for the biographical and bibliographical information they contain, though they are an unreliable source for both. This article proposes that instead of being treated as a corrupted version of Spenser’s personal correspondence with Harvey that found its way into print, the letters should be read as a collaboratively authored literary work that aims to give its readers a glimpse of the fictionalized (or fictional) collaborative relationship between two authors called “G.H.” and “Immerito.” The pseudonym “Immerito” in particular is highlighted in the book, suggesting that one of its goals was to supplement The Shepheardes Calender (which was due to be reprinted for the first time) and generate further interest in its author.
West, William N. “Spenser, Ruskin, and the Victorian Culture of Medieval England.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 245-266.
Victorian scholars of the Renaissance took the backward gaze of Spenser’s Faerie Queene at an imaginary chivalric England as a magic lantern by which the England of the 1590s could be projected back in time so that it preceded the Renaissance Italy of the 1490s, keeping the Elizabethan era innocent of the excesses of the Renaissance. For critics of the 1890s (including Ruskin as reframed by William Morris), Spenser offered a periodization that went backward. To some extent our current questions of periodization continue to stumble on this revisionist (maybe insufficiently revisionist) account of the relation of medieval and Renaissance.
Warley, Christopher. “The Pleasure of Hating the Renaissance.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 267-280.
This essay reads Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice through the lens of Erich Auerbach and Jacques Rancière to argue that the nineteenth-century term “Renaissance” names a link, never secure, between art, history, and collectivity—which is to say, a continual rebirth of historical life. Reading Ruskin makes clear that since the nineteenth century Renaissance has never meant, despite the efforts of many from a variety of political positions to make it mean, an abstract concept of beauty manifesting itself as the informing spirit of works of art. It has never meant a majestic subject standing athwart from history and imposing his masculine will upon yielding, feminine materials. It has never meant a Eurocentric imposition of universal values upon the peripheral world. Instead, a Renaissance by definition violates epistemes by insisting upon a link between disparate times, places, and peoples. Thus the term that demarcates the cinquecento as a unique historical moment also is the term that demarcates a nineteenth-century aesthetic.
Eggert, Katherine. “Ruskin’s Taste in Spenserian Women: Not Looking at the Renaissance.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 281-298.
John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–53) is suffused with Spenser’s Faerie Queene. This essay proposes that Ruskin’s view of Spenser’s allegorical women repeats and intensifies an aesthetic experience that The Faerie Queene models: the view of a woman in which one looks at her but does not see. Since The Stones of Venice aligns active feminine sexuality with the Renaissance itself, Ruskin thus, by means of Spenser, offers a periodized aesthetics in which the medieval allows us not to see the Renaissance, no matter how much it comes into our view.
Moshenska, Joe. “‘Whence had she all this wealth?’: Dryden’s Note on The Faerie Queene V. vii. 24 and the Gifts of Literal Reading.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 301-313.
This article discusses an annotation that John Dryden made in one of his copies of Spenser’s poems. In it, Dryden expressed surprise at the sudden emergence of the gifts that Britomart gives to the priests of Isis in Book V of The Faerie Queene. This annotation is used to explore the tendency of objects suddenly to emerge in Spenser’s poem, with varying degrees of explanation for their origins. This tendency is part of what grants the literal surface of the narrative its perennial capacity to surprise and delight.
Lemley, Samuel V. “Glossing Spenser’s Griesly.” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, vol. 33, no.1, 2019, pp. 315-321.
Scholars often gloss Spenser’s adjective griesly with conventional synonyms: frightful, horrible, ghastly. While Spenser’s griesly is no doubt semantically linked with these words, it does more than merely denote the frightening and bizarre. This gleaning suggests that glossing Spenser’s griesly in these terms precludes a reading of its connotative range. When read across and through Spenser’s corpus, griesly conveys three linked thematic associations: the passage of time, liminality, and senescence/mutability.
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Link / ReplyBoth the subject of Spenser's revision and the example of how to do it is Chaucer.
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