Joe Moshenska and Leah Whittington
The Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting Program
Toronto, Canada
17 - 19 March, 2019
Spenser’s Afterlives I
Sponsor: International Spenser Society
Chair: Colleen Rosenfeld, Pomona College
Organizer: Colleen Rosenfeld, Pomona College
Panelists:
Jennifer Vaught, University of Louisiana Lafayette
‘Marvell’s Spenser’
Andrew Marvell was most likely reading Spenser’s Faerie Queene while living at Nun Appleton from 1650-52 and working as modern languages tutor to Sir Thomas Fairfax’s daughter, Maria. Marvell’s shorter and longer poems bear striking impressions of Spenser’s poetic feet as a result. As the speaker in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House (1651) adventures through the estate, the poet alludes to arboreal episodes such as the Wandering Wood, Bower of Bliss, and Garden of Adonis and architectural sites of the House of Holiness, Castle of Alma, and Castle of Busirane in Books I-III of The Faerie Queene. In “A Dialogue, Between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure” and Upon Appleton House Marvell echoes Guyon’s dialogue with Mammon in Book II. Throughout Upon Appleton House Marvell appropriates specific words and phrases, imagery, themes, and aspects of characters from numerous episodes in The Faerie Queene. Nevertheless, he preserves the integrity of other voices during intertextual dialogue by remaining sensitive to the context of the literary material he borrows. In Upon Appleton House Marvell exhibits an ethical model of appropriation based on the hybridity of his lyric voice with those of other writers as they mutually experience a world of vibrant matter.
Beatrice Bradley, University of Chicago
‘Spenser’s “Sweet Toyle”: The Residue of Erotic Labor in Early Modern Literature’
In Book II of The Faerie Queene, Acrasia appears dripping with sweat: “And yet through languour of her late sweet toyle, / Few drops, more cleare then Nectar, forth distild” (2.12.78.3-4). Spenser calls upon Tasso’s Armida (another sorceress who sweats), but he differs from his predecessor in his emphasis on the labor that produces the moisture. This paper tracks the reception of Spenser’s “sweet toyle” in early modern English literature, as the sweating erotic subject reappears in figures ranging from Shakespeare’s Venus to Milton’s Adam. Early modern authors reading Spenser seize upon the sweating yet more perfect being—individuals whose supernatural capacity would suggest no need for metabolic processes—as a means to explore the relationship between erotic labor and the Biblical emphasis on toil. Ultimately, the influence of these lines on the cultural imaginary of early modern England asks us to rethink contemporary categories surrounding waste and its production.
Brice Peterson, Pennsylvania State University
‘Spenser, Lanyer, and the English Literary Hymn’
When it comes to exploring early modern adaptations of Spenser’s innovation in genre and
poetic mode, we do not think immediately about the afterlife of Fowre Hymnes (1596). Scholars
have examined how writers such as Donne, Milton, Drayton, and Samuel Daniel (among others)
emulate Spenser’s figuration of pastoral, epic romance, the sonnet, and the epithalamion. Yet no
one has identified any early modern imitators of the Spenserian literary hymn. Indeed, the few
scholars who have investigated genre and Fowre Hymnes look back to Spenser’s predecessors
rather than forward to his successors. This essay, then, explores how Spenser’s hymns serve as a
generic model for his near contemporary, Aemilia Lanyer. In the title poem of Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum (1611), Lanyer rewrites the literary hymn as imagined by Spenser and, in so doing,
sets up herself as his hymnic successor. By paying attention to the generic afterlife of Fowre
Hymnes, we see a more complete picture of Spenser’s contribution to the development of genre
in early modern England that expands beyond his coevals’ more noticeable adaptions of
Shepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene, Amoretti, and Epithalamion.
Spenser’s Afterlives II
Sponsor: International Spenser Society
Chair: Colleen Rosenfeld, Pomona College
Organizer: Colleen Rosenfeld, Pomona College
Panelists:
Catherine Nicholson, Yale University
‘Lost Plots: Sebastian Evans and the End of The Faerie Queene’
“A Lost Poem by Edmund Spenser,” trumpets the headline to an 1880 article by Sebastian Evans. The title of the newly discovered poem? Two Cantos of Mutabilitie. It’s an odd claim, given that the Cantos appeared in every print version of The Faerie Queene since 1609, and the claims that followed from it were stranger still. According to Evans, recognizing the Mutabilitie Cantos for what they were—not a fragment but a freestanding work—revealed Spenser as the prophetic genius of modern physics. Scientists ignored his idiosyncratic essay, but it had a profound effect in the field of Spenser studies: unquestioned since 1609, the relation of the Mutabilitie Cantos to The Faerie Queene was suddenly, unavoidably in doubt. Now forgotten, the essay deserves a second look, for it both illuminates and helped to precipitate the ongoing debate over the structure of Spenser’s epic and the meaning of his life’s work.
Stephen Foley, Brown University
‘Found in Translation: Bathurst’s Latin Shepherdes Calender’
The format of Theodore Bathurst’s 1608 Latin Shepheardes Calender interleaves the Latin translation with the English text of 1597, inviting insights into prosody, hard words, dialect, naming, and polysemy. In the opening of “January,” for example, “a shepherd’s boy” is translated “upilio,” a hard word from Vergil’s attendance catalogue for Gallus’s funeral, “venit et uplio”/”the shepherd also came.” Colin Clout becomes Alexis, the servant loved in vain by Coydon. Hobbinol is Mopsus, who sings the praises of Daphnis with Menalcas. In “September,” Bathurst correctly translates the northernisms and extends the difficult wordplay by hearing a pun (“digging”/laborifer) in the name Diggon and giving him the unusual name (Lycormas), one of a pair of twins whose mother calls them by the wrong names as they are dying. How does Bathurst’s translation suggest the ways Spenser’s language was understood and misunderstood by his contemporaries?
Yulia Ryzhik, University of Toronto Scarborough
‘Spenserian Allegory in Japan’
This paper focuses on the reception of Spenser in Japan, particularly the ways in which the allegory of The Faerie Queene is interpreted in critical literature and rendered in translation. In the past fifty years Japan has become one of the most prolific producers of scholarship on Spenser outside of English-speaking countries. Using the recent literary translations of The Faerie Queene by Shohachi Fukuda, this paper attempts to tease out what details in key allegorical moments are considered most salient for the conveyance of signification. Works by Japanese scholars concerning Spenser’s allegory serve to supplement these findings. Although interest in Spenser in Japan is largely limited to academia, this paper also considers the more general understanding of allegory in Japanese literary and scholarly traditions and the potential afterlives of Western-style allegory such as Spenser’s in popular culture and contemporary media, including manga and anime.
A revised and expanded version of this paper has been published in The Spenser Review 49.2 (Spring-Summer 2019), together with a response by Professor Izumi Nemoto: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/49.2.2/
Spenser’s Ethics
Sponsor: International Spenser Society
Chair: Colleen Rosenfeld, Pomona College
Organizer: Colleen Rosenfeld, Pomona College
Panelists:
Abraham Stoll, University of San Diego
Narrative Ethics in The Faerie Queene
“Narrative ethics” brings together philosophy and narrative theory. Philosophers argue narrative provides more particularity and humanity than the categories of analytic philosophy. Literary theorists, correcting deconstruction’s elision of social considerations, theorize the ethical content of narratological elements. An ethics of narrative form can suggest how The Faerie Queene reworks Aristotelian virtue. When a virtue embodied in an individual knight extends across narrative to become a “Legend,” how does this change virtue? How can reading Spenser’s narrative techniques yield ethics? How does narratology intersect with allegory? Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue ties a fracturing of narrative unity to the undoing of Aristotelian conceptions of the virtues. Building on MacIntyre and Harry Berger’s readings of Archimago as a figure for discourse, this paper will consider the complexities of Spenserian story and discourse, showing how, as the quest of Book 1 slides into what can be called more novelistic modes, Holiness loses its wholeness.
Namratha Rao, St John’s College, University of Oxford
‘Fearful Symmetry in Spenser’s Muiopotmos’
This paper focuses on Spenser’s Muiopotmos (1591), an elusive poem that has bred diverse and mutually contradictory interpretations. Most tend to find the butterfly, Clarion, culpable to varying degrees, in order to make moral sense of the poem. By paying close attention to the poem’s formal detail—structure, rhetoric, aetiologies, imagery—I hope to challenge this critical consensus. I argue that the powerfully sustained symmetries between spider and butterfly create moral unease by evoking discordant classical representations of fate and divine will from such sources as Homer, Virgil and Ovid. The protagonists emerge as largely unwitting prisoners of genealogy and circumstance, although knowledge is unevenly distributed. The finely wrought symmetries that underlie Muiopotmos complicate the boundaries between destiny, agency and ethical expectation. Consequently, they impede interpretation of the poem as didactic parable while simultaneously revealing an ambivalence towards epic that raises questions about Spenser’s relation to that fraught genre.
Roundtable: Making Race in Spenser
Sponsor: English Literature
Chair: Kimberly Anne Coles, University of Maryland, College Park
Organizers: Susannah Monta, University of Notre Dame
Kimberly Anne Coles, University of Maryland, College Park
Discussants:
Urvashi Chakravarty, George Mason University
Eric Song, Swarthmore College
Anna Wainwright, University of New Hampshire
Tess Grogan, Yale University
David Brown, Binghamton University, SUNY
Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex
Discussion:
Early modern studies has been increasingly interested in the emergence of race as a category of identity, that could variously demarcate groups of people along lines of lineage, nationality, religion, and skin color. But in spite of the growing body of scholarship now devoted to early modern racial formation, relatively few scholars have explored Edmund Spenser’s treatment of race outside of his treatment of the Irish. Scholarship on A vewe of the present state of Ireland has played an important role in inaugurating Spenser as an early modern producer of race thinking. Yet with few exceptions, race has not been a central focus in studies of his pastoral poems, his Faerie Queene, and his lyric poetry. This roundtable on “Making Race in Spenser” offers a corrective, interrogating the works of Spenser that are underutilized, and discovering them as a diverse repository of early modern race thinking.
Italian Renaissance Epic
Sponsor: Italian Literature
Organizers: Andrea Moudarres, University of California, Los Angeles
Eleonora Stoppino, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Panelists:
Joshua Reid, East Tennessee State University
‘Spenserian Overlay and English Translation of the Italian Romance Epic’
“The fact is that all writers create their precursors” (Borges). In his Englished Romance Epic The Faerie Queene (1590/96), Edmund Spenser transmutes his generic precursors: Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516/1532) and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Spenser so effectively acculturates the Italian Romance Epic for his Elizabethan audience that The Faerie Queen becomes a form of intermediary translation, surrogate source text, or interpretive overlay for contemporary translators like Sir John Harington (1591) and Edward Fairfax (1600). These translators read Ariosto and Tasso through The Faerie Queene: characters, episodes, and individual translation choices bear a Spenserian inflection. Particular attention will be given to the Bowers of Alcina, Armida, and Acrasia, as they morph from Ariosto and Tasso through Spenser the literary grafter. Analyzed intertextually, these Bowers are sites of metalinguistic transformation—locus amoenus as locus translatus.
Error, Salvation, Virginity, and Genealogy in The Faerie Queene
Panelists:
Melanie Simoes Santos, University of Toronto
‘“That so vntimely breach”: Virginity and Prolepsis in The Faerie Queene’
Elizabeth I’s lack of an heir created much debate in 1590s England, as recent historical and literary research has shown. This paper will extend that conversation by exploring the relationship between the genealogical cantos of The Faerie Queene and the politics of succession in late-Elizabethan England. In these cantos, Spenser, who considered the uncertain succession a threat to both the continuity of the monarchy and his own longevity as a poet, stages monarchical genealogies as a series of ruptures and disruptions. Through attention to specific passages from The Faerie Queene, as well as contemporary manuscript sources relating to the succession debate, this paper will argue that Spenser imagines a version of future monarchical life in response to this political crisis. The argument of this paper thus has implications both for our understanding of the literary dimensions of political debate and the role of historical material in Spenser’s imaginative fiction.
Deseree Cipollone, McGill University
‘Redcrosse’s Dantean Journey: Error and Salvation in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene’
Debates about the merits of Dante’s poetics were ubiquitous during the 16th century in Italy. Yet, despite Spenser’s interest in Italian poetics and Dante’s prominence among Italian poets and literary critics, contemporary studies of Spenser’s Italian influences have generally disregarded Dante. I argue that Dante’s Commedia provided Spenser with a new model of epic heroism that emphasized a journey of self-discovery through a series of falls and resurrections and that Redcrosse’s journey in Book 1 of the Faerie Queene is a chivalric reimagining of Dante’s Commedia. To demonstrate how Redcrosse’s journey follows a Dantean structure, I compare the parallel journeys of Dante and Ulysses in Inferno 26 to that of Redcrosse and Fradubio in Canto 2. While both Dante and Redcrosse initially fall victim to the same deceptions as their counterparts, their eventual salvation creates a negative typology from which they can begin to understand their own identity.
Sarah Case, Harvard University
‘Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and the Genealogy of Succession in Late-Elizabethan England’
Elizabeth I’s lack of an heir created much debate in 1590s England, as recent historical and literary research has shown. This paper will extend that conversation by exploring the relationship between the genealogical cantos of The Faerie Queene and the politics of succession in late-Elizabethan England. In these cantos, Spenser, who considered the uncertain succession a threat to both the continuity of the monarchy and his own longevity as a poet, stages monarchical genealogies as a series of ruptures and disruptions. Through attention to specific passages from The Faerie Queene, as well as contemporary manuscript sources relating to the succession debate, this paper will argue that Spenser imagines a version of future monarchical life in response to this political crisis. The argument of this paper thus has implications both for our understanding of the literary dimensions of political debate and the role of historical material in Spenser’s imaginative fiction.
Individual papers:
Margo Kolenda-Mason, University of Michigan
“Shepherds, Poets, and Lovers: ‘Fruitlesse Worke’ in Edmund Spenser’s Poetry”
Critics of early modern pastoral have traditionally approached the issue of labor only insomuch as it is distanced, suppressed, or purely metaphorical. While recent scholarship has begun to express more interest toward labor within the pastoral, suggesting that labor is not erased but displaced onto the act of writing, such thinking has yet to grapple with the already ambivalent attitudes of the early moderns toward considering writing as work. My paper, then, offers a reading of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, alongside the Amoretti, which more directly confronts its status as a potential product of labor. The Amoretti, though, repeatedly figures writing as non-generative labor, or “fruitlesse worke.” I take fruitless labor as a paradigm that challenges our expectations toward productivity, poetry, and labor in order to explore the way that these tensions manifest in the Shepheardes Calender and reconsider what it meant to write, and to work, at this moment.
Leah Whittington, Harvard University
“Chaucer Increased: Textual Expansion in Spenser’s The Squire’s Tale Supplement”
Scholars have long known that Spenser read The Canterbury Tales in John Stowe’s 1561 The woorkes of Geffray Chaucer, but much remains to be explored about the poetic implications of this channel of reception. This paper argues that in continuing the unfinished Squire’s Tale in Book IV of The Faerie Queene, Spenser responds to Stowe’s representation of Chaucerian textuality as enriched, expandable, and self-renewing. By adding his own extension to the ever-expanding Chaucerian corpus, Spenser answers humanist anxiety about textual loss in the face of problematic transmission, historical change, and temporal decay, figuring transmission as a process of enhancement. As the foundational episode in the Legend of Friendship, the Squire’s Tale extension makes loss and mutability meaningful by representing the poet’s activity as a friendly process of perfecting, in which the operations of allegorical reading enable textual continuation.
Abigail Shinn, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘Spenser’s Popular Forms’
This paper will explore how a synthesis of elite and popular cultures is realised formally in the work of Edmund Spenser. Focusing primarily on the use of animal fable and the allusions to oral storytelling in Mother Hubberd’s Tale, I will also consider whether it is possible to excavate non-elite forms of storytelling in Spenser’s poetry more generally. Part of a project seeking to resituate our understanding of Spenser’s influences within a more hybridised cultural sphere than has hitherto been acknowledged, I will argue that Spenser’s literary eclecticism extends to the use of popular modes of fabular representation. This is not to ignore the importance of arguments about literary and artistic value in the period, but to emphasise Spenser’s playful experimentalism as he engages with different ways of creating and telling stories.
Hayley Cotter, University of Massachusetts Amherst
‘“Wreckt Uppon the Sands”: Maritime Law in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’
Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, dedicated to the virtue of Justice, seems a natural launching point when considering Spenser’s use of law. Like the traditional English itinerant justice, after a thorough training in jurisprudence from Astraea, Artegall sets off to adjudicate cases in Fairy Land. But one moment in the early stanzas shows Artegall rendering judgment in matters of maritime law, not the common law of England: when he meets the two brothers on the shore, he settles their disputes of alluvion and maritime salvage, matters that would have fallen under the purview of the English High Court of Admiralty, not the common law courts. My paper, hence, will situate the maritime law in Book V in the historical context of the late sixteenth-century disputes about admiralty jurisdiction and probe why Spenser chose these particular legal problems to exemplify his program for justice.
SAA 2019: Pleasure and Interpretation in Shakespeare and Spenser
Seminar Conveners: Joe Moshenska (Oxford University) and Leah Whittington (Harvard University)
17-20 April 2019
Seminar 01
Amy Cooper, United States Air Force Academy
“Textual Pleasure in As You Like It and The Faerie Queene”
This paper will juxtapose two moments from the ends of As You Like It and Book II of the Faerie Queene: Rosalind’s epilogue and Guyon’s restoration of Grylle to human form. Rosalind’s epilogue points to an underlying infinite regress which underpins the play of gender identity in As You Like It: acknowledging his own sexed body, the boy actor playing Rosalind wryly remarks, “if I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleas’d me” (18-19). Rosalind is a boy, playing a girl, playing a boy, playing a girl. There is a similar infinite regress that closes out Guyon’s dubious triumph over Acrasia (whose name means “sensual pleasure”): Grylle is a man, transformed into a beast by Acrasia, whom Guyon and his Palmer then restore to “manly appearance,” but who laments this transformation and insists he is a beast. In both cases, what appears to be depth turns out to be surface: both scenes resist the depth model of reading by trapping readers in a logical paradox—an infinite regress—that denies us the reality beyond the appearances which we insist is there and to which we desire access. Significantly, both moments appear in discussions of pleasure—Grylle’s predicament is the result of languishing in Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss and Rosalind’s gender play is acknowledged in an address which implores the audience to “like as much of this play as please you.” I argue that both texts point to a model of reading designed to frustrate suspicious readers—readers like Guyon and his anti-theatrical, puritan counterparts—readers, that is, who are suspicious of pleasure.
Hannah Crawforth, King’s College London
“Shakespeare, Spenser, and Difficulty”
Rita Felski has recently challenged the presumption latent within much contemporary critique that texts deliberately withhold meaning and resist the reader’s efforts to assimilate them with anything other than what she calls ‘ubiquitous criticality’. Why does literature need to be so difficult? Or rather, how should – or how can – literature be difficult? Shakespeare and Spenser have both been termed ‘difficult’ poets, but in very different ways; Shakespeare exploits what George Steiner might have described as ‘ontological’ difficulty (his texts ask us to question the very existence of literature itself), while Spenser’s difficulties have been seen as more ‘modal’ (his deliberate archaism) or ‘tactical’ (the prevalence of allegory in his work). Both writers have exercised generations of editors with their ‘contingent’ difficulties – aspects of their language, in particular, that need to be ‘looked up’. Yet critics and audiences alike return to the works of Shakespeare and Spenser at least in part because of their difficulty. This paper will ask what the value of difficulty is in thinking about these two poets, paying particular attention to the affective powers of difficulty in our reading or listening processes. Can Shakespearean or Spenserian difficulty be pleasurable to us as readers, writers and critics?
Clare Kinney, University of Virginia
“Selective Pleasure, Selective Interpretation: The Tempest 3.3.”
Abstract: Shakespearian drama at times strikingly complicates both the experience of pleasure and the pleasures of interpretation through its representation of the responses of on-stage characters to embedded, scripted performances or elaborately framed spectacles. Our responses to the metatheatrical event must enter into dialogue with that event’s mediation by the audience within the play. If, moreover, we are watching the Shakespearian text in performance, the negotiation of both pleasure and understanding will be further complicated by our response (critical, appreciative, enchanted, alienated) to a particular re-staging or reinvention of such an intricately inflected dramatic moment.This paper will focus upon The Tempest 3.3., a scene in which a magician-scriptwriter-director crafts a theatrical spectacle and an associated fiction of cosmic revenge which together variously beget pleasure, wonder, the awakening of guilty memory, horror and derangement in an on-stage audience. The characters’ parsing of their experience is perplexingly multifarious and indeed offers an incisive representation of the very experience of playgoing. Any audience member is likely to be selective in what she remembers or forgets, appreciates or resists (and these same acts of selection will inflect her interpretation of what she has seen and its entanglement with the pleasure she experiences.) Furthermore, this selective pleasure—or pain!—will itself have been shaped and mediated by the re-framings, refractions, erasures and reinterpretations that inform a particular iteration of the play in performance. This is perhaps even more true of cinematic versions of Shakespeare where the aggressive cutting of text, the camera’s appropriation or reframing of point of view, the selective language of montage and the translation of text into image collaborate to manage and “re-mediate” pleasure and interpretation. Looking closely at Derek Jarman’s reinvention of 3.3. in his 1979 film adaptation of The Tempest, I will argue that this director’s “selections” enter into a productive and illuminating dialogue with Shakespeare’s own provocative practice, even as they draw new attention to the processes of performative mastery and beguilement.
Ross Lerner, Occidental College
“The Pleasures of Punishment in Spenser and Shakespeare”
In her 2015 book The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski titles a section of her third chapter “Critique is not a Capital Crime (Only a Misdemeanor…).” In it, she argues that reading shouldn’t “always be a matter of guilt and innocence, crime and complicity,” proposing a vision of literary studies that is defined less by “suspicion” (of the text, of the reader herself, and of the society that produces both) than by “pleasure” and “appreciation.” “Suspicious reading,” Felski argues, needs to become aware of the fact that it too is “pleasure-driven.” Felski is partly making a joke with this section title, but it strikes me as somewhat suspicious that someone who opposes associating literary criticism with policing and legal trial, on the one hand, and social struggle, on the other, should still be committed to the determination of what crime Critique itself is guilty of: capital or misdemeanor. My paper will suggest that some literary determinations of guilt and innocence are more self-aware of how they are pleasure-driven than Felski’s account might suggest, and that such self-aware pleasure is itself a problem to be interpreted. I will study passages from book 5 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice where determinations of guilt and criminality—themselves acts of interpretation—produce kinds of pleasure that characters seem aware of and that the texts themselves seem suspicious of. “Suspicious reading” may not be the best name for the modes of critique that Felski is so wary of, but the term’s relevance is tantalizing when applied to moments of juridical interpretation, and the representations of pleasures they produce, in Spenser and Shakespeare. My essay will ask: What is the relationship between the pleasures of interpretation and the pleasures produced by determinations of guilt and criminality? How do Spenser and Shakespeare meditate on bad enjoyment in legal interpretation (the pleasures produced by the suffering of others) while still supplying us with tools to cultivate pleasure in our own interpretative work as readers?
Andrew Miller, Williams College
“Ticklish Reading: Cressida, Hellenore, and the Disruption of Pleasure”
As the centers of scenes of fraught voyeurism, Shakespeare’s Cressida and Spenser’s Hellenore occasion forms of textual extremity. Troilus’s deeply confounding speech on beholding what “is, and is not, Cressid” and Malbecco’s metamorphosis into Gealousy have both been read as exemplary distillations of the skeptical and allegorical commitments of their respective texts. But Cressida’s and Hellenore’s actions (and the in-text observation of those actions) have also served many schools of criticism as exemplary moments of disruption, as failures to conform to interpretive schemas of increasing complexity ranging, roughly, from characterological consistency to Western metaphysics to the Faerie Queene’s pedagogy. This paper proposes that many of these readings share a common investment in changes in authorial and readerly pleasure: how Shakespeare’s usual delights sour, and how Spenser’s moralism gives way to poetic indulgence. In both cases, this interpretive focus on verbal texture arises partly in
response to each character’s complex intertextual debt to genre and literary precedent. But this
reading for pleasure and displeasure is also cued by the way that both texts stage these
characters as canny interpreters of their own wooing––and then shroud them in forms of
voyeurism that mystify female pleasure.
Kevin Pask, Concordia University
Pastoral: Reading Pleasure
I propose to address pleasure and interpretation in the context of the Renaissance generic form most clearly aligned with pleasure: pastoral. In particular, I will look at two quite different forms of literary pleasure associated with pastoral: Touchstone as a pastoral parodist of love poetry and the idea of pastoral itself in As You Like It and Calidore’s response to (and interruption of) the pastoral scene of Colin Clout’s piping in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene. Because The Faerie Queene weds romance to an ethical system, its use of pastoral is more conventionally recognizable as literature when instruction trumps pleasure (Horatian utile over dulce), as it tends to do in the highly professionalized and institutionalized reproduction of literary culture in the last century. Even the title of Shakespeare’s play, on the other hand, suggests a different approach to the affordances of pastoral. My paper will examine these different versions of pastoral for Renaissance ideas of literary pleasure and some of their consequences for modern ideas of literary reading.
Robert L. Reid, Emory and Henry College
“The Harvest of Mysticism in English Renaissance Literature: Ascesis in Spenser and Shakespeare”
No abstract available.
Michael Schoenfeldt, University of Michigan
“The Uneasy Pleasures of Spenser and Shakespeare”
Abstract: Both Spenser and Shakespeare exhibit intense anxiety about the pleasures their works at once elicit and explore. Their pleasures are invariably hedged with moral and physical hazard. I wonder: Is an uneasy pleasure a pleasure at all? Or is it the only kind we have. I want to explore how these writers, amid a series of cultural imperatives that link pleasure with the devil and pain with salvation, manage to get to the place where, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, “the body is not bruised to pleasure soul.”
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, King’s College London
“Interpreting Sound: Feminine Endings, Pleasure, and Gender in Early Modern English Poetry”
This paper will investigate the history of “feminine rhyme”, both the term and the poetic feature, some elements of its usage in poems by Shakespeare and Spenser, and its interpretive challenges in the seventeenth century and the twenty-first. Since the fourteenth century, the term “feminine” has been used to describe words ending on an unstressed syllable. Modern critics and teachers are usually embarrassed by these terms: the latest edition of Blackwells’s The Poetry Handbook apologetically advises, “these sexist terms are easily replaced by stressed and unstressed hyperbeats”. Many writers choose instead to use the terms “weak” and “strong”, which are problematic in different ways. But before these terms are dismissed as outdated, their history can illuminate certain gendered aspects of early literary criticism and poetic usage. The use of feminine rhyme was debated from the moment when the term entered English usage, probably in Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry. It was freighted with associations both of pleasure (sweetness) and of interpretive difficulty (foreignness, need for regulation). By tracing the development of both the theory and the practice of feminine rhyme in English, I hope to provide a micro-history of the gender politics of this aspect of poetic form, connecting usage by Spenser and Shakespeare (written about by Maureen Quilligan, David Scott Wilson-Okamura and Ann Thompson, among others) to its as-yet uninterpreted use by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women poets.
Jennifer Vaught, University of Lousiana-Lafayette
“Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Jonson’s The Alchemist”
Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene serves as a pivotal intertext for Jonson’s The Alchemist. Though Patrick Cheney has examined how Marlowe’s Jew of Malta informs Jonson’s city comedy about worldly vanity and the desire for gold, few have explored in detail how Jonson draws extensively upon Spenser for his funniest play. Jonson’s character name Sir Epicure Mammon and the prostitute Dol Common masquerading as the Faery Queen are explicit allusions to Spenser. The coinciding of the first performance of The Alchemist in 1610 with the publication of the first folio of The Faerie Queene in 1609 might have contributed to such connections between Spenser’s epic and Jonson’s drama. Jonson’s marginalia in his copy of the 1617 Folio of The Faerie Queene provides considerable evidence that he was particularly intrigued by episodes involving Braggadocchio, Mammon, and Alma in Book II. All three figures shape various personae, themes, and features of language and setting for The Alchemist. Jonson creates Sir Epicure Mammon by blending facets of Spenser’s Braggadocchio and Mammon and Shakespeare’s Falstaff. This unholy trinity of hoarders and hedonists exhibits ties to the morality play figures the World and his cohorts Pleasure and Folly in The Castle of Perseverance. Jonson’s intertextual borrowing from multiple sources illustrates how he read and wrote dialogically. Jonson’s parody of The Faerie Queene is fiercely satirical not of Spenser’s allegory but of pleasure-seeking Londoners and Puritans who are greedy, self-delusional, and dulled by their misuse and misunderstanding of language. In contrast to Spenser’s mythical epic, The Alchemist is a social satire about thieves and gulls depicted in a gritty and realistic style.
Patricia Wareh, Union College
“Courteous Farewells in Spenser and Shakespeare”
This paper is a draft of the conclusion to my book project, Courteous Exchanges: Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s Gentle Dialogues with Readers and Audiences, in which I argue that Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s treatments of courtesy—a social practice that encouraged hypersensitivity to artful self-presentation— provided a vocabulary for them to comment on their own literary practices and to prompt readers and audiences to reflect on the constructed nature of both texts and aristocratic identity. The book as a whole explores the connections between Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Winter’s Tale. Focusing here on the conclusions to The Faerie Queene and The Tempest, I argue that such moments directly challenge readers and audiences, approaching them and calling on them to recognize how their own investment in poems and plays renders these works meaningful. The representations of rupture in particular—the escape of the Blatant Beast in Book Six of The Faerie Queene, and Prospero’s breaking of his staff—create spaces for readers and audiences to consider critically how their lives and environment relate to the texts’ fictionalized worlds. While Spenser’s narrator takes his readers to task, and Shakespeare’s Prospero entreats them, both texts encourage their addressees to explore the nexus of relationships among courtesy, performance, and aesthetic pleasure. These deflating moments thus prod readers and audiences to reflect on how their aesthetic judgment helps to form their social identity.
Michael West, Sacred Heart University
“When is the Pleasure of Interpretation?”
In asking “When is the pleasure of interpretation?” I mean this question in two senses. First, when we talk about “the pleasure of interpretation,” is this pleasure primarily understood to be a feature of one’s experience of a poem, text, or play? Or is this pleasure of interpretation primarily a feature of one’s later working through that poem, text, or play, whether through rereading, note-taking, or writing? Second: we know of recent theorizations of the pleasure of interpretation; but is there an early modern account of the pleasure of interpretation, or is this only a contemporary point of explicit interest? My paper will have two parts, corresponding to the two senses of my overriding question. First, I outline what I think are the two best recent theorists of the pleasure of interpretation, both of whom focus on the pleasure of interpretation as a feature of readerly experience, not as its product: Stephen Booth and Eve Sedgwick. Sedgwick is better known for her work in this area, but Booth offers (in my view) the most compelling account of why and how the pleasure of interpretation is best understood as a phenomenon of readerly experience. And as we will see, both critics are invested in an account of the pleasure of interpretation that focuses not on “successful” interpretation, but on its failure. The second part of this paper takes up the question of whether there is a specifically early modern account of the pleasure of interpretation. My argument is that while no unified account exists, glimmerings of such an account can be found by hunting around the tonal edges of Renaissance rhetorical and poetic theory: most clearly in Henry Peacham and George Puttenham.
Matthew Zarnowiecki, Touro College
“Social Song: an un-Spenserian Pleasure?”
Spenser is often seen as much less interested in the positive dimensions of social song and music in practice than Shakespeare (or Sidney). Not only is The Faerie Queene full of examples of the lascivious dangers of courtly singing, but also Spenser himself seems not to have written much poetry at all designed for participatory, multi-part or social singing. This essay takes up the question of whether deriving social, participatory pleasure in singing is an un-Spenserian pleasure, one that thwarts or perverts the Faerie Queene’s purpose of fashioning “a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” Specifically, I examine the madrigal settings of passages from the Faerie Queene by Richard Carlton (1601) and Orlando Gibbons (1612). If the chief pleasure of FQ, from the perspective of eudaimonic literary studies, lies in a gradual program of self-improvement achieved by the reader through aesthetic response and narrative work, then perhaps these multi-part song settings of small bits of text constitute willful misreadings of Spenser. If so, there may be a conflict between readerly responses involving pleasurable and social reproduction, adaptation, or appropriation on the one hand and guided self-improvement on the other. Might we call these Shakespearean and Spenserian responses, or even lyric and epic responses?
Seminar 02
Frederick Bengtsson, University of Kentucky
Pleasing lines and pleasing rhymes: finding interpretive pleasure in Spenser’s Amoretti
In the final couplet of the opening sonnet of his Amoretti, Spenser expresses the wish that the “[l]eaves, lines, and rymes” of his book “seeke her to please alone / Whom if ye please, I care for other none.” But what kind of pleasure, exactly, does Spenser wish to generate, and how does he anticipate it will be generated? In this paper, I want to take literally what is perhaps usually read figuratively, and explore reading and interpretation—rather than, say, gratitude or flattery—as sources of pleasure in the Amoretti, reading Spenser’s sonnets alongside those of Shakespeare and Sidney. As currently imagined, the paper bifurcates into an exploration of the relationship between reading/interpretation and pleasure as figured in these texts, and a consideration of the role of interpretive pleasure as a pedagogical tool in the teaching both of these texts and of literary interpretation as praxis (a bifurcation that will hopefully come together elegantly—much like a final couplet).
Brian Chalk, Manhattan College
“Sleepy Business”: Gendered Dreams in Spenser and Shakespeare
My paper begins with the observation that male characters in Spenser and Shakespeare frequently hold their female counterparts responsible for deeds and actions that take place in their dreams. In both The Faerie Queene and on Shakespeare’s stage, consequently, these women find themselves unwittingly inhabiting the nightmare landscapes of the men in their lives. Early modern dream manuals consistently insist that dreamers should hold themselves accountable for the feelings and desires to which their dreams give expression. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on Book One of The Faerie Queene and Cymbeline, my essay examines how characters such as Spenser’s Red Cross and Shakespeare’s Posthumus interpret their dream experiences in a manner that extends and projects this culpability onto Una and Imogen. Ultimately, in both works, the challenge of existing in someone else’s dream leads to tragic destabilizations of female identity.
Claire Eager, Colorado College
“Pleasure, Paradise, Destruction, Instruction: Reading Landscape in Spenser and Shakespeare
Warranted by Sidney’s alignment of pleasing poetry and pleasant landscape, my paper
will explore the close but often tense relationship between “pleasure” and “paradise” in Spenser and Shakespeare. In The Faerie Queene, descriptions of pleasurable landscapes are frequently invitations to read closely and suspiciously. (And to prepare for an act of destruction.) Yet the means by which Spenser’s readers are to study virtue—and the motivation for their continued reading—is found within the sensual pleasures of the text itself. Meanwhile, the locus amoenus in Shakespeare is usually metaphorical, standing in for a desired object (lover or landscape) that the speaker hopes to conquer or acquire. Both writers tend to include in their descriptions of such places references to paradise as evidence for just how extreme the pleasures they offer are—or seem to be. To invoke paradise in scenes of violence raises aesthetic and ethical questions for both the pleasures described and the poetry that describes them in such terms. I will argue against the impulse to read the destruction of paradise as the straightforward punishment of pleasure and against the reaction to such readings that scorns or denies the intimate connections our two writers draw between them.
Katherine Eggert, University of Colorado-Boulder
Respondent
Patrick Gray, Durham University
“What is Iago? Shakespeare and Spenser on Imagination and the Demonic”
What is the root cause of Iago’s relentless, thorough-going evil? Coleridge saw in his soliloquies “the motive-hunting of a motiveless Malignity.” Othello wonders aloud if his nemesis might be a devil. Reading Shakespeare by comparison to his slightly older contemporary, Edmund Spenser, as well as their shared inheritance of Tudor morality plays, I propose that Iago should be understood symbolically, as well as naturalistically. As F. R. Leavis suggests, Iago is “subordinate and merely ancillary”: “he represents something in Othello himself.” Much as Falstaff might be said to represent, in Pauline language, the “old man” or “flesh” of the protagonist, Prince Hal, or the Fool in King Lear can be understood as a symbol of Lear’s own repressed conscience, Iago can be seen as a personification of Othello’s own imagination. Iago’s characterization makes sense, by this light, as a reflection of contemporary anxieties about this suspect faculty of the mind. Iago stands in relation to Othello much as Archimago does to Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight: in the wake of Protestantism, imagination comes to fill the role that the devil once held in medieval and Tudor drama.
David Landreth, University of California-Berkeley
Amoret: fan fiction and interpolating pleasure
Anecdotally, it seems to me that a playful engagement with Spenser is more readily available to my students now than it was when I began teaching FQ a dozen years ago. My own developing confidence in presenting the poem as matter for enjoyment is surely a factor here. But I think there are external factors in contemporary culture at work too: the growing sophistication and prestige of contemporary serial forms, such as TV and webcomics; the growing sophistication of media theory addressing and constellating those open-ended forms; the thriving symbiotic relations among appreciation, interpretation, and textual production that fan communities forge through interacting with these forms.
Fan engagement likes to seize upon the possibilities of romance—generically, as the multiplicities of what-if in which the open-ended serial form is “inescapably” entangled (to adapt Patricia Parker), and especially erotically, in the “shipping” of an erotic relation not yet portrayed, or the “slash” encounter of an erotic relation the text does not seem prepared ever to portray. In “Into Other Arms: Amoret’s Evasion” (1991), Dorothy Stephens recognized and charted the shadow of a Britomart-slash-Amoret plot in FQ Book 4, a recognition that by now seems straightforwardly to govern my students’ engagements with that otherwise-ungoverned book. The opening for that engagement is created by the devices of incompetence that hedge round the voice of FQ‘s narrator, which are at their most acute whenever the narrator attempts to focus on Amoret. Amoret scatters playful, teasing hints of an identity centered on pleasure through the medium of the narrator’s oblivious representations, which drape her decorously in a veil of fear. I call this mode of mediated, playful, plausibly-deniable self-assertion on the part of Amoret her discretion. Though this mode of being in the world is more like a Certauldian “tactic” than an Aquinian “virtue”, the relation of virtues to tactics is an open field in the second installment of FQ: whence my fan-fictive retitling of Book 4 as “The Legend of Amoret, or of Discretion”.
Writing soon after Stephens, Alan Sinfield considered in similar terms “How to read The Merchant of Venice without being heterosexist”—how, that is, to resist the hetero-normative shape of closure enforced with such overdetermined rigor by that play. Sinfield recommends giving interpretive priority to “the adventurous middle part of a text, as against the tidy conclusion,” and many critics since then have enjoyed doing so. But I do think it’s worth contrasting the generic, formal, and professional constraints that seem to enjoin “tidiness” and conclusiveness upon Shakespeare’s playful middles to the enjoyably open-ended oscillations, evasions, revisions, and plain continuity errors of Spenser’s texts, rather than only writing Shakespearean conclusions off as obeisance to ideology. Even the most punitively determinate of Shakespeare’s plots, Measure for Measure, enfolds in its conclusion a hard kernel of incorrigibility—Barnardine—and the hint of self-determined discretion in the unaccountable silence of Isabella. But the character who finally realizes the formal pleasures of The Faerie Queene’s mediated engagement within the two hours’ traffic of Shakespeare’s stage is Cleopatra.
Alice Leonard, University of Warwick
“Spenser’s Vale of Error and the Pleasure of Poetry”
Francis Bacon opens his Essayes (1625) with a wonderful image of truth: ‘no pleasure is comparable, to the standing, upon the vantage ground of Truth: (A hill not to be commanded, and where the Ayre is alwaies cleare and serene;) And to see the Errours, and Wandrings, and Mists, and Tempests, in the vale below’. Bacon’s vantage point is as a supreme philosopher-king, disinterestedly surveying error. Thirty-five years earlier in The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser had chosen not to take the vantage ground above the ‘Wandrings’, ‘Mists’ and ‘Tempests’, but instead to enter the wood of Errour (Canto 1). There Redcross encounters error’s horrible embodiment. In this paper I want to investigate what happens to pleasure once inside the wood. Is it only, as Bacon claims, a state produced when in possession of truth, or is pleasure delivered by poetry even when it is not driven by truth? Spenser describes his epic poem as ‘cloudily enwrapped in Allegorical devises’, shrugging off Bacon’s serene clarity and sounding very much like the misty place of error. Despite being a ‘scene of instruction’, Spenser’s faerie land seems to make a little room for the pleasure of poetry.
Cassie Miura, University of Washington-Tacoma
“The Pleasures of Reading: Spenser and Lucretius”
Although interest in the early modern transmission of Epicurean physics and philosophy, especially through Lucretius’s De rerum natura, has grown exponentially over the past decade, Spenser’s engagement with this Latin epic has been strongly contested in ways that Neoplatonic or Ovidian influences have not. Focusing on Spenser’s translation of Lucretius’s invocation of Venus in Book IV of The Faerie Queen as well as selections from the Garden of Adonis and the Mutabilitie Cantos, this paper explores how De rerum natura informs not only Spenser’s representation of pleasure, but also his conception of the pleasures of reading and writing epic poetry. For Lucretius, poetry and philosophy both aim to bring about ethical pleasure and the ultimate end of tranquility. Despite their differences, I argue that examining Spenser’s engagement with Lucretius provides one way to re-center pleasure in the larger conversation over early modern reading practices and reception of classical texts, a discourse that has been historically characterized in darker terms from the “anxiety of influence” to the “crisis of exemplarity.”
Catherine Nicholson, Yale University
“The Faerie Queene and the Matter With Reading”
“I am now in the country, and reading Spencer’s fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter with me?” The complaint of an anonymous correspondent to The Spectator in July, 1712, sounds with endearing frankness a note of consternation that resonates throughout The Faerie Queene‘s reception history. From the poem’s first known reader, Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey, who returned an early draft with a plea that the poet write something—anything—else instead, to the novelist Virginia Woolf, who advised would-be connoisseurs of Spenser’s verse that “the first essential is, of course, not to read The Faerie Queene,” those who seek in its pages the delight and discipline promised by the author in his dedicatory epistle to the 1590 first edition have frequently themselves struggling in the grip of less benign readerly reactions: boredom, bafflement, irritation, outrage, obsession, intoxication, or sheer exhaustion. Such confused, passionate, intemperate, and even wrongheaded responses to the poem have typically served only as a counterpoint to a more engaged and rigorous tradition of critical reading, but they ought not to be dismissed out of hand, or cited only to be rebuked and rehabilitated. On the contrary, the perceptions and misperceptions, likes and dislikes of Spenser’s readers—good and bad alike—serve as a useful index of the poem’s own ambivalence toward reading, which it treats as both a spiritual discipline and a sensual indulgence, a life’s work and a potentially deadly waste of time. They are also a sensitive barometer of larger cultural and institutional transformations. Indeed, tracking the vexed reception history of The Faerie Queene turns out to be an excellent way of charting the history of reading itself: precisely because Spenser’s poem has so often frustrated the desires and expectations of those who have tried to read it, it catalyzes the mixed feelings and contradictory ambitions that have attended the act of reading from the era of commonplacing to the advent of the digital age.
William A. Oram, Smith College
“Cleopatra’s Deaths: Pleasure and Freedom”
This essay develops out of a recent paper by Ayesha Ramachandran, which argues that “to understand ‘pleasure’ as related to the will, to judgement and to intentionality, is to see how the enjoyment of pleasure is profoundly related to the exercise of freedom and individual agency.” In Antony and Cleopatra, pleasure with its accompanying self-realization is fully realized only in death. Enobarbus comments about Cleopatra: “I do think there is mettle in death, which commits some loving act upon her, she has such a celerity in dying.” Enobarbus’ punning, bawdy and suggestive, makes death the characteristic mode of Cleopatra’s exercise of “freedom and individual agency.” This embrace of pleasure and death becomes central to the final acts of the play, in which Cleopatra turns away from “the world” with its dominant values reputation and power. Cleopatra’s death is characterized by an embrace of pleasure and freedom, and a rejection of the world. Shakespeare emphasizes her rejection of the world by making Cleopatra die twice, once when she faints after Antony’s death and again at the end of the fifth act. The essay examines these death scenes as they articulate the play’s concern with pleasure and the creation of a self.
Joseph M. Ortiz, University of Texas-El Paso
“Whose Pleasure?: Humanist Interpretation in Spenser and Shakespeare”
This paper explores the figuration of humanist reading in Spenser and Shakespeare. From Petrarch onward, the humanist representation of philology typically makes a polarizing distinction between sensuous pleasure and informed, textual intepretation. However, this distinction is muddled almost as soon at it becomes conventional, even by early humanist writers themselves. Spenser and Shakespeare in turn evoke the humanist opposition of pleasure and understanding, and their concomitant blurring of this opposition implicates the humanist model on its own terms. Moreover, for these two poets, ekphrasis becomes an especially powerful mode through which to suggest such a skeptical attitude toward humanist philology. First, as Krieger and others have pointed out, ekphrasis entails a translation of the material image into text (and vice versa), thus unsettling the terms by which humanist rhetoric stakes its opposition to pleasure. Second, and perhaps less noticeably, ekphrasis multiplies and renders ambiguous the position of the spectator, and thus of the reader. As I hope to show, hermeneutically charged ekphrastic moments in Book 3 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis confound the humanist model of interpretation precisely by dispersing the sources and objects of readerly pleasure.
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Pomona College
“On the Pleasure of a Renaissance”
This paper takes up the question of aesthetic pleasure in Spenser and Shakespeare through an unlikely philosophical resource: Picasso’s suite of paintings entitled, Las Meninas (After Velásquez). In 1957, Picasso isolated himself on the upper floor of his house with a single photograph of Velásquez’s masterpiece. Over five months, he produced fifty-eight studies of Las Meninas: this one is a detail of the handmaiden, that one is a detail of the Infanta; here, her face is in profile and there, a double profile; in one, the Infanta’s eyes are stacked atop one another and in yet another, the Infanta is the center of a vortex that threatens to consume the room by pulling all of its other inhabitants⎯dog, handmaiden, dwarf, candle⎯into the void of her body.
Picasso’s Las Meninas (After Velásquez) energizes my investigation because its experimental attention to the capacities of form offers an alternative to the more familiar models of knowledge production that have dominated early modern studies in recent decades and of which Michel Foucault’s reading of Velásquez’s Las Meninas in The Order of Things is paradigmatic. Focusing on the Infanta’s arresting glance as it fixes the viewer within a system of seeing and being seen, Foucault described how Las Meninas clears out a space for the absent monarchs whose reflections appear in a mirror on the back wall. Foucault’s reading has influenced a wide range of accounts of cultural and literary forms in the period, from the Elizabethan schoolroom to the Jacobean court masque, and has sustained the field’s dominant theory of aesthetic form as the representation of that power which organizes and makes possible all knowledge but which otherwise cannot be expressed. Whereas Foucault’s charismatic reading turned on the Infanta’s forward-facing gaze, Picasso crucially and repeatedly renders her face as a sharp double profile. Instead of looking in front of her and at the viewer, Picasso’s Infanta looks, impossibly, left and right simultaneously. Because her gaze no longer places the viewer in the singular locus of the absent monarchs, the Infanta’s new face eliminates the “essential void” that Foucault understood to underwrite all acts of representation. The Infanta’s new face permits us to perceive, instead, the dynamism of aesthetic form. The Infanta’s centrifugal gaze reveals the impossibility of Picasso’s pictorial space and vouchsafes the formal disarticulation of art from the world so as to offer something different from the world.
This paper will take up one of Picasso’s renderings as a visual way of thinking through a figure of speech that has been central to the critical legacies of both Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare: the pun. Velásquez’s Las Meninas features a dwarf with his left foot resting on the haunches of a dog and his right arm raised, forefinger lifted ever so slightly above the rest. Foucault described this dwarf as the bottom right half of an X that marks the spot of the Infanta’s gaze. In Picasso’s variation, the dwarf is a piano-player: his raised foot lifts to press a pedal and the fingers of his right hand bang away at the keys. When asked about this painting, Picasso described “the little boy with the piano” as “part of the reality of the subject”: “a parrot is also a green salad and a parrot. He who makes it only a parrot diminishes its reality.” Picasso concludes: “I see things otherwise.” In this essay, I will take up Picasso’s model of reality and the principle of aesthetic form that sustains it and ask, How might Picasso’s piano-player ask us to read the pun in Spenser and Shakespeare differently?
Kevin Windhauser, Columbia University
“Pleasure and Productivity in the Spenserian Library”
Is anyone having fun in Eumnestes’ Library? Spenser presents the library, visited by Guyon and Arthur in Book II of the Faerie Queene, as a space capable of provoking responses ranging from admiration to curiosity to nearly all-consuming desire, but seems remarkably ambivalent about clarifying which, if any, of these emotions anyone in the library actually holds. The library’s visitors, Guyon and Arthur, vacillate between a possibly-impressed perplexity at their surroundings (“wondr[ing] at his [Eumnestes] endless Exercise”) and an intense desire to read the library’s contents (“burning both with fervent Fire” at the sight of their titles). Its inhabitants, meanwhile, are framed with likewise ambiguous language; Eumnestes, for instance spends his day “tossing and turning” the books, two verbs that, when used in Renaissance texts to describe the experience of study, have decidedly mixed registers (Lyly, for instance, uses the terms to describe both pleasurable reading and enervating dedication to study).
This essay argues that Spenser’s ambivalent depiction of the relationship between pleasure and productivity in Eumnestes’ library represents the poet’s difficult attempt to theorize the proper function of an English institutional (that is to say, non-household) library, and to calculate the proper relationship between labor productivity and pleasurable reading that should take place there. As textual warehouses, libraries inevitably engaged with the Renaissance (by way of classical rhetorical theory) commonplace that texts should teach by delighting; in this sense, libraries should be largely storehouses of pleasurable material (and Guyon and Arthur’s reactions to the history texts they find seems to indicate this). Yet, as institutional spaces designed with an explicit rationale of supporting the state (something sixteenth-century library creators make very clear, framing their state-supporting libraries as an alternative to the monastic libraries of Catholic England), they are also sites that demand profitable labor. Examining Spenser’s attempt to reconcile these two impulses alongside Renaissance discourses of library-creating, I build on existing readings of Eumnestes’ Library (particularly Jennifer Summit’s argument in 2008’s Memory’s Library) by bringing to light Spenser’s engagement with, and contribution to, Renaissance ideas about what working, or playing, in a library should look like.
Paul Joseph Zajac, McDaniel College
“Content to please their feeble eyes”: Affect, Ambiguity, and Interpretation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene I”
This essay will turn to Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene to consider the challenges presented by interpreting affect and the challenging affects that interpretation can provoke. From the very first stanzas of canto one, Spenser confronts his audience with the difficulty of reading emotions. Within this uncertain emotional landscape, I focus on Spenser’s engagement with concepts of contentment, which have been overlooked or dismissed by literary critics. During the early modern period, contentment had a particularly complex and contradictory relationship with pleasure, as the experiences could be treated as aligned, identical, or in opposition with one another. Derived from the Latin contentus, which means both contained and satisfied, contentment primarily signified an affective state that holds the individual together—a defense against fickle fortune and unruly passions. Yet Book I repeatedly locates contentment in the act of interpretation, including moments of misinterpretation. By extending Book I’s affective ambiguity even to contentment and by encouraging readers to share in the emotional confusion of its characters, Spenser qualifies contentment as both a topic of and response to his poem. Ultimately, this essay will explore how these scenes of interpretation—with all of the hybrid emotions, mixed pleasures, and qualified contentment that they entail—reflect on the strategies of Spenserian allegory. How do we reconcile a Horatian goal of delighting in order to teach with the poem’s insistence that interpretation always courts conflicting responses and its awareness that affect is especially elusive?
54th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI
May 9–12, 2019
Spenser’s Amoretti and Faerie Queene
Presider: Sahar Ishtiaque Ullah, Columbia University
Lena M. Hull, University of North Florida
‘Reconciling the Spirit and the Body in Sonnets 76 and 77 of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti’
No abstract available.
Nickolas A. Haydock, Univ. de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez
‘“Oure Ancient and Learned” Chaucer: Sequels and Repetitions in Book IV of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’
No abstract available.
Jordan Ivie, Southern Methodist University
‘“A sonne be gotten, not begotten ”: Birth, Succession, and the Transformation of Motherhood in the 1596 Faerie Queene’
This paper nuances the current critical discussion of motherhood in The Faerie Queene, which largely confines itself to examinations of Spenser’s depiction of maternity as dangerous. Identifying a crucial shift between the 1590 poem’s definition of motherhood as physical procreation and the 1596 poem’s emphasis on child-rearing, I recognize a resignation to the necessity of non-biological succession in the heirless twilight of Elizabeth’s life. In 1590’s Books 1-3, motherhood is defined solely by the mother’s participation in physical procreation- mother figures like Acrasia, Belphoebe, and Cymoent are threatening precisely because they remove their son figures from the sexual marketplace and forestall potential fertility. Venus, on the other hand, protects Adonis, and the pair function as the superabundant fount of all life in the fertile Garden of Adonis. Motherhood’s primary concern is therefore physical generation.
In the 1596 books, however, the focus of maternity shifts, and motherhood becomes a flexibly defined, shared act of child-rearing. Venus’s motherhood is now communal as she shares the care of her foster-daughter Amoret with a group of women, and male figures like Melibae maternally nourish children. Spenser is also preoccupied with foster-children like the infant that Calepine delivers from the bear. This child is grafted into the childless Bruin’s family tree, emphasizing the privileged place of succession and child-rearing over physical conception.
The definition of successful motherhood therefore undergoes a drastic transformation between the poem’s two halves, from the begetting of children to the getting and raising of heirs. Queen Elizabeth’s impending childless death offers one motivation for this shift. This new maternity, one that elevates non-biological succession, implies an acceptance of a lineage that does not depend on procreation and offers hope for a people with no sovereign heir.
Spenser at Kalamazoo I: Eclogues, Elegies, and Emblems
Sponsor: Spenser at Kalamazoo
Organizer: Sean Henry, University of Victoria; Susannah B. Monta, University of Notre Dame; Brad Tuggle, University of Alabama
Presider: Rachel E. Hile, Purdue University–Fort Wayne
Opening Remarks: Donald Stump, St. Louis University
Jake Hertz, Boston University
‘Examining the Antique and the Aged in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender’
There is underlying tension between that which is young and that which is old throughout The Shepheardes Calender: Spenser’s archaisms frustrate his contemporary readers, the book’s rude gothic woodcuts and English blackletter jarringly deliver its humanist poetry, and the young Cuddie and the aged Thenot of the “Februarie” eclogue are framed as oppositional figures. Ultimately, however, the calendrical format of the eclogues subdues this tension. As with January and December of the calendar year, the antipodes of human age are, for Spenser, paradoxically the two furthest points from each other and the nearest—likewise, Spenser’s archaic neologisms are both “old” and “young.” By grafting both of these notions onto the human life-span through Colin Cloute’s eclogues, Spenser suggests a similar paradox in the experience of aging. Yet rather than using the conventional paradigm of the puer senex to express this paradoxical connection, Spenser develops an affinity between youth and old age throughout The Shepheardes Calender by emphasizing the calendrical cycles of our lives over the linear progression of our years. He celebrates the dialectic of aging over the classifications of age to provide a vision of senescence that is much less a portrait of decline than it is an accordance with the seasonal momentum of nature.
Jean Brink, Henry E. Huntington Library
‘From the Phoenix Nest to Astrophel : The Third Elegy’
No abstract available.
Tamara Goeglein, Franklin and Marshall College
‘Edmund Spenser and Emblems: New Occasions for New Stories’
No abstract available.
Spenser at Kalamazoo II: Reading Remains
Sponsor: Spenser at Kalamazoo
Organizer: Susannah B. Monta, University of Notre Dame; Brad Tuggle, University of Alabama; Jennifer Vaught, University of Louisiana–Lafayette
Presider: Denna Iammarino, Case Western Reserve University
James Cotton, University of Notre Dame
‘Destruction and Discovery in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’
No abstract available.
Thomas Fulton, Rutgers University
‘Reforming History: Spenser, Matthew Parker, and the Relics of the English Church’
No abstract available.
Elisabeth Chaghafi, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen
‘Anecdotal Spenser: Reading the Seventeenth-Century “Biographies”’
When – and if – we think of the brief lives of Spenser written during the seventeenth century, we tend to think of the many things their authors get wrong. What little factual information they contain is often inaccurate; some of them inexplicably date Spenser’s year of birth to 1510 (which would have made the New Poete rather auncient to begin with), some have him die a year early, while others manage entirely without dates. But above all, those miniature biographies disappoint us because they do not contain the sort of information we would be interested in: how / when / why / where Spenser wrote his works, whether he wrote the last six books of The Faerie Queene, or what he *really* thought of Gabriel Harvey. Instead, they seem oddly obsessed with retelling anecdotes that range from the highly implausible to the clearly impossible. And they all copy from each other, so many of those anecdotes are very similar.
This paper examines the lives of Spenser written by Fuller, Phillips, Aubrey and Winstanley and argues that it is wrong to dismiss those anecdotes as meaningless just because they are factually inaccurate. Similarly, it would be wrong to assume that the slight differences between the anecdotes are insignificant and only caused by faulty transmission. In fact, the anecdotes always serve a purpose, even if it is not to tell the reader about the facts of Spenser’s life. A comparison between the lives reveals that each of Spenser’s earliest biographers chose and modified his anecdotes carefully and used them at specific points to help him to join the dots and highlight what he considered to be Spenser’s defining characteristics. So while they cannot answer our questions, they can nevertheless tell us something about Spenser’s reception among readers too young to remember Elizabeth’s reign.
Spenser at Kalamazoo III: Roundtable on Teaching Spenser in Honor of William A. Oram
Sponsor: Spenser at Kalamazoo
Organizer: Sean Henry, University of Victoria; Jennifer Vaught, University of Louisiana–
Lafayette; David Scott Wilson-Okamura, East Carolina University
Presider: Susannah B. Monta, Univ. of Notre Dame
Spenserian Connections, Judith H. Anderson, Indiana University–Bloomington
“Poetry Raw and Realistic”: Composition Students Encounter Epithalamion, Margaret
Christian, Pennsylvania State University
Teaching Spenser under Stereotype Threat, Paul J. Hecht, Purdue University Northwest
The Student-Editor, from Spenser to EEBO-TCP, Joseph Loewenstein, Washington University in St. Louis
Teaching Spenser, David Lee Miller, University of South Carolina–Columbia
Feeling Spenser, Nathanial B. Smith, Central Michigan University
Reflections, William A. Oram, Smith College
No abstract available.
Individual papers:
Paul R. Rovang, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
‘From Malory to Spenser to C. S. Lewis: An Intertext in That Hideous Strength’
This paper examines a complex of intertextual relations between a medieval, a Renaissance, and a modern text. First, it traces how Spenser draws on two separate rescue narratives from (Caxton’s) Book XI of Malory’s Morte Darthur in his own development of Britomart’s rescue of Amoret in Book III of The Faerie Queene. Second, it demonstrates how Lewis not only draws upon Spenser, but reaches back into Spenser’s own source in Malory, to develop his paired narratives of the captivity and eventual reuniting of Jane and Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength. The importance of The Faerie Queene as an interpretive linchpin in this line of influence from medieval to modern is emphasized through comparison with Evelyn Waugh’s Fear in a Handful of Dust, another twentieth-century British novel that reinterprets the chivalric tradition for the modern world, yet apart from the mediating influence of The Faerie Queene and therefore with a strikingly contrasting resonance. In conclusion, Lewis not only draws upon Spenser but also reaches back into the poet’s source, creating a line of influence from medieval to modern via Spenser, refitting chivalric romance for twentieth-century readers.
Thomas Herron, East Carolina University
‘Spenser’s Kilcolman Castle in Virtual and Augmented Reality’
No abstract available.
The 2019 MLA Annual Convention
Hyatt Regency Chicago, Sheraton Grand Chicago, and Fairmont Chicago
3–6 January, 2019
Spenser and Architecture
Presider: David J. Baker, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Panelists:
Patricia Palmer, NUI Maynooth
‘Spenser’s “Noyous” Neighbors: Kilcolman and Gaelic Castle Culture’
Abstract not available.
Eric Klingelhofer, Mercer University
‘Spenser’s Castle: The Archaeology of Kilcolman’
Abstract not available.
Claire Eager, University of Virginia
‘Views from Kilcolman: Landscape and Narrative Architectures in The Faerie Queene’
Abstract not available.
Luke Pecoraro, George Washington’s Mount Vernon
‘“I Am a Stranger in Mine Owne Country”: The Spenser Influence on British Colonial Projects in the Seventeenth Century’
Abstract not available.
Individual papers:
Chris Barrett, Louisiana State University
‘Before Everything: Spenser, Catchwords, and the Obviousness of Sequence’
The opportunity to think “before Shakespeare” is also an opportunity to consider what exactly “before” means. This paper considers the nature of literary before-ness by way of a phenomenon that is, quite literally, always before: the printer’s catchword. This essay examines the catchword—the first word of a printed page of type, positioned by early modern compositors at the bottom of the preceding page to ensure the correct sequence and accurate folding of the printed sheets—as it appears in Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene. Assertively noticeable and yet oddly invisible, the catchword is often dismissed as an artifact of printing, rather than as a signifying (and thus significant) element of the page. This paper suggests that the before-ness of the catchword might help us develop a new interpretive practice—a poetics of the obvious—that itself rejects the imposition of the before-ness and after-ness so central to existing critical paradigms
49.3.22
Comments
Comment deleted 2 years, 4 months ago
Participants at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Toronto explored interesting aspects of Spenser's influence on early modern literature. Jennifer Vaught examined Andrew Marvell's poetic engagement with Spenser's Faerie Queene, demonstrating how Marvell's works echo and appropriate elements of Spenser's epic poem. Beatrice Bradley explored the 'sweet toyle' motif in Spenser's writings, tracing its reception in early modern literature and its significance in depicting the relationship between erotic labour and biblical themes of toil. I usually use https://samplius.com/free-essay-examples/overcoming-my-fear-of-public-speaking/ to make public speaking better and to get over the fear; Brice Peterson has examined the underexplored genre of Spenserian literary hymns and singled out Aemilia Lanyer as Spenser's significant successor in this regard. These insightful presentations shed light on the enduring impact of Spenser's works and the rich tapestry of intertextuality in early modern English literature.
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