Richard Danson Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. xiii + 311pp. ISBN 9780719087325. £80 hardback.
Richard Danson Brown’s last major contribution to the study of Spenser was editing, along with J. B. Lethbridge, A Concordance to the Rhymes of The Faerie Queene (2013), a massive, list- and table-making compendium of what happens at the ends of the poem’s lines. That book comes with two separate explanatory essays, one by each of the editors. It is my experience that Lethbridge’s has sounded louder in the ears of Spenserians, because it is so contrarian, emphasizing as it does the formulaic character of the poem (‘as much as two thirds of the poem may take the form of almost prefabricated poetic expressions’[24], in Brown’s paraphrase), and the risk therefore of over-interpreting linguistic phenomena that were meant to disappear. Brown’s own essay takes a different approach, and in many ways his new book, The Art of The Faerie Queene, continues its work, helping readers to make interpretive sense of what the Concordance lays out. The Art is organized in a pleasing crescendo, working upwards chapter by chapter from words, to lines, to rhyme groups, to stanzas, cantos, and finally the whole poem. At all levels, it proceeds not by deductions from the allegory, but by induction from linguistic patterns, and Brown’s ambition is to refresh our reading by close attention to considerations of style.
Beginning, then, with words. Among the debates Brown takes up is that ‘between those who argue that Spenser’s vocabulary is ornamental and those who view it as semantic’ (23). Stylistic criticism tends to emphasise the former, to describe the aesthetic effects of diction on a large scale, rather than to search out the particular warrant of particular words. Here as elsewhere, Brown sees a false choice. His concordance work has made him a student of formulas and repetitions, but he is interested in the ways that Spenser manages poetic intensity across large-scale patterns. ‘Concordances are invaluable for seeing frequency and variety of usage’, he writes, ‘but such data is only meaningful inasmuch as it tallies with Eleanor Cook’s dictum that choice of lexis is understood “in relation, never in isolation”’ (37). Discussions of archaism and orthography tease out ways that the poems lexis can come to feel ‘bland’, and how it is ‘sharpened’ (25) in particular cases. The chapter ends with an exemplary reading of the egalitarian giant in Book V, showing how words and phrases shared between the giant and Arthegal are redeemed from the commonplace by the different inflections they take in two very different arguments.
Next, to lines, and the question that opens the second chapter, ‘To what extent was Spenser stylistically conservative?’ (48). Brown’s answer is, not very, and for two reasons: first, Spenser’s metrical practice in The Faerie Queene is less regular than is usually assumed, and second, the irregularities are more expressive, in a manner usually associated with Sidney and Shakespeare. His interlocutors on the first point are Paul Alpers, who insists, in his The Poetry of The Faerie Queene (1967), on the independence of the poem’s lines, and scholars like Susanne Woods (and myself) who treat Spenser’s rhythms as, in Woods’ terminology, ‘aesthetic’ rather than ‘mimetic’.[1] The case against Alpers is strong, and Brown has many examples of syntactic interdependence within the stanza. As for the pentameter, he has a keen ear for manipulation of the caesura, and calls particular attention to displacements of the usual four-and-six-syllable division of the line that unsettle the poem’s potential monotony. Some of his scansions strike me as too ready to relax the iambic movement on which the total poem so strenuously insists. There remains a vital contrast to be drawn between how Sidney’s line responds to turns of argument and fluctuations of affect, and Spenser’s commitment (in The Faerie Queene particularly) to architectural, ceremonial, not to say cosmic order. But Brown’s counterproposals are a stimulating challenge to a critical position that risks taking the poem’s rhythms for granted, and they are always in the service of local interpretive possibilities.
Brown makes a similar argument, to similar ends, about the use of rhyme in his third chapter, urging a ‘turning back from formal decoration into symbolic content’ (105). He allows that the necessities of the rhyme scheme often seem to dictate defaults to familiar formulae (or ‘formal decoration’), but insists again how ‘the colourless and the colourful are endlessly aligned and recombined in poetic structures which it is well not to take for granted’ (113). He explores various ways in which ornamental scheme is quickened into interpretable trope, including intricate cross-linkage among stanzas. There are some wonderful pages on ‘retrogressive motion’ (131), how rhyme carries memory backward in the poem as well as directing expectations forward, leaping across syntactic and formal boundaries, a characteristically ‘non-linear device’ (138). There are pages, too, on the debt to Chaucer, especially instances of rime riche attested in the Concordance. This chapter leads naturally into one on the stanza, which begins with a valuable survey of the possibilities afforded Spenser by the sixaine, ottava rima, and rhyme royale. Comparisons with Ariosto and Chaucer especially allow Brown to demonstrate how the Spenserian stanza ‘moves away from the more unambiguous allocations of syntax typical of the sixaine and ottava rima, while updating the double couplet structure of rhyme royale’ (178).
The final two chapters scale up again, to the level of the canto and of the whole poem, respectively. Brown emphasises the importance of the canto as a narrative unit, but as throughout, he approaches narrative by way of linguistic pattern. He does not express much confidence in numerological accounts of the ‘chancy and interrogative character of Spenser’s canto form’ (214). What holds cantos together, internally and in relation to one another, is the words they use. In this sense, these final chapters circle back to the first two, as Brown gives an exemplary account of the word ‘hew’ and how its rhymes ramify through Book III, from the description of Belphoebe to the Garden of Adonis. He nods to David Lee Miller’s work on ‘narrative substitution’, suggesting that there is a parallel process that ‘takes place lexically, as hew moves from a marker of appearance into one of form’ (226). He goes on:
Substitution depends on a principle of flexible analogy, whereby Spenser expects his readers to recognise mutations between related narratives and mythological allusions. That same principle is at work in the repeated words I have been following, and again tells against the view that Spenser’s diction is inexpressive. (227)
The final chapter explores the forms of order achieved by narrative motifs and devices, ‘larger, more amorphous patterns’ (271), and though there are some fine readings, the argument loses some of its force for want of the clear formalizations that structure its predecessors. Might a more explicit technical vocabulary, of the sort that characterizes contemporary structuralist narratology, help bridge the distance traveled from the specificity lexis, rhyme, and stanza? (It would involve, perhaps, a transition from the concordance’s forms of list and table to those of diagram.) The book leaves that question open.
But not before it has achieved a good deal. The Art of The Faerie Queene might be said to wrestle with two problems, one general, one special to its poem. The general one is the difficulty of thinking interpretively or exegetically about style. Style and meaning can be understood as aspects of a text in Wittgenstein’s sense, two ways of seeing that exclude or prevent one another, the way seeing the duck prevents you from seeing the rabbit. To pay attention to extensive patterns, to networks of similarity, is to sacrifice focus upon intensive occasions and figurative singularities, and vice versa. The problem can be felt in Brown’s strategic reluctance to engage with an allegorical program of reading. Nonetheless, his Art is a book-long master class in how not to let this dilemma get the better of you, how to turn the particular instances of large lexical and sonic patterns to account, to think network and node together.
The second problem is not unique to The Faerie Queene, but there is no other poem where it is as important, as constitutive: and that is the problem of formula, of the blandness and staleness that threaten its characteristic gestures. Most poems are concerned to draw the boundary between poetry and prose exactly at their own limits, to keep the mundane languors and official dickering outside, and to make everything inside tense with significance. The Faerie Queene relaxes its defences, and the border disintegrates into the interior, into the perpetual risk of mistaking a pearl of great price for gravel on the path, or vice versa. It is Spenser’s peculiar bravery to bring this question, the question of when to pay attention and when not to bother, inside his poem. Brown’s work with Lethbridge on the Concordance has meant that he can never unhear the desultory iambic shuffle of the stanza going through its courteous motions. But he has remained alert to those moments – and they are so many; and from reading to reading, are they ever the same moments twice? – when mere half-hearted ceremony quickens into revelation. That effect is a distinctive art of The Faerie Queene, to which his book is now our best guide.
Jeff Dolven
[1] Susanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1984), p. 15.
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The general one is the difficulty of thinking interpretively or exegetically about style.
Link / ReplyDiscussions of archaism and orthography tease out ways that the poems lexis can come to feel ‘bland’, and how it is ‘sharpened’ (25) in particular cases.
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