Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual. Volume 33, 2019. General Editors: William A. Oram, Andrew Escobedo, and Susannah Brietz Monta. The University of Chicago Press Journals. ISSN: 0195-9468.
The latest volume of Spenser Studies is an impressive publication, densely rich and pleasingly varied. It is also the last to be edited by Andrew Escobedo, who is here thanked by his co-editors, William A. Oram and Susannah Brietz Monta, for his work on the past nine volumes. The most recent few of these have been enthusiastically received in The Spenser Review, and vol. 33 is another cause for celebration. Eight articles are followed by a trio of essays on Spenser and John Ruskin, rounded off with a coda of ‘gleanings’. And while journals do not primarily anticipate linear readings, this one works well as a whole. The Victorian perspective reflects back on a main section which offers multiple ways of thinking about antiquation and periodisation, and I hope to suggest some further resonances between articles in what follows.
Richard Z. Lee’s article on ‘Wary Boldness: Courtesy and Critical Aesthetics in The Faerie Queene’ is the first, and explores the ‘uniquely self-divided’ (1) virtue of courtesy in Book Six. For Lee, courtesy threatens to dissolve the oppositions between culture and its Other, or virtue and false self-promotion. So unstable is courtesy in this account that it cannot be invoked as a virtue without producing its apparent opposite. Nor can it be avoided: even as courtesy is associated with ethically empty sprezzatura, it is also the name for that which makes virtue possible. Lee uses this mechanics, by which courtesy’s ethical content is always equalled by its negative displacement, to review past readings of Book Six as either too directly political or not quite political enough, since the dialectic between contemplation and (political) action is at the heart of the problem of Book Six’s governing virtue. And so to the second stage of the argument: that it is critical awareness, rather than a directly political programme, which Book Six fosters. Adorno is Lee’s critic of choice here, particularly in Aesthetic Theory (1970), and the conclusion is ambitiously cast as the basis for a reconciliation between (New) historical criticism which emphasises a text’s political status, and criticism which aestheticises form. Adorno’s theorisation of the artwork’s ‘double character’ allows an emphasis on ‘critical agency’ as a gloss for courtesy’s ‘wary boldness’: not directly political, but at one further remove, ‘protopolitical’ (Kaufman, cited on 24), making a politics possible.
Judith H. Anderson’s piece, ‘Mythic Still Movement and Parodic Myth in Spenser and Shakespeare’, is another which looks to the end of Spenser’s career for refined figurations of his thought. In view here is the pun ‘still movement’ in the Mutabilitie Cantos, the publication of which in 1609 Anderson sees as having had underappreciated influence. The essay connects stillness/movement with myth/parody, and traces from Venus and Adonis through Spenser into The Winter’s Tale. It expands the term ‘parody’ into something referential and creative; its ‘movement’, connected to the movement of narrative, is opposed to the stillness of myth proper and its non-temporal symbolism. Paul Ricoeur is used here to broker the cooperation between myth and parody on the theoretical level, but what is most striking is the perspective we are given on the interaction of Shakespeare and Spenser over the roughly twenty years from the publications of the 1590 Faerie Queene, to which Venus and Adonis has been read as a response, to the death of Mamillius at the end of The Winter’s Tale. Their authorial interchange is a case of still movement, where a cyclical process of creative parody enables the mythic quality of these works.
The reader next encounters Anupam Basu and Joseph Loewenstein’s essay ‘Spenser’s Spell: Archaism and Historical Stylometrics’, in method the most distinctive of the set. This article has a couple of components. It presents the results of an algorithmic enquiry into Spenser’s position relative to the orthography of the period, and it opens a broader discussion of archaism as a phenomenon and the potential for digital tools to change how we think about it. Furthermore, it comments on editions of Spenser, noting the history of the editorial practice of original spelling and offering some concluding thoughts on best editorial practice in future. On the technical side, several graphs help to reveal the pattern of orthographic trends across the timeframe of the EEBO-TCP corpus, 1473–1700. Basu and Loewenstein’s algorithm has taken a representative chunk of text from each quarter-century of that period, and identified several two-or-three-character long ‘n-grams’ for each word; then, those features which account for the most change across print history – like the trailing ‘e’, or the frequency and positioning of ‘i’s and ‘y’s – are isolated and represented collectively as ‘principal components’. Because of the complexity of principal component analysis (PCA) it is hard always to interpret the results in their correct depth of significance, but there are some valuable observations here. The authors stress that Early Modern orthography is ‘nodal’, moving not from chaos to order but from coherence to coherence, only some of which would be instinctively recognised by modern eyes. As for Spenser, the most useful graphs rather impressively illustrate how far each of the Shepheardes Calender, 1590 Faerie Queene and 1596 Faerie Queene conform to the spelling practices of the day: to a large extent, it appears. The Shepheardes Calender deviates the most, it is suggested, while there seems to be some sign of the 1596 Faerie Queene printers revising spelling to bring it more into step with changing norms.
As I suspect is often the case for such investigations, this article reveals nothing so much as what it cannot answer, and the authors are explicit about wanting to apply similar techniques in future to analyse Spenser’s lexical choices and examine the possibility that he engineers a select group of words to create the effect of archaism. The approach makes the reader question their assumptions: did we think that Spenser’s archaism existed in wholesale orthographic distinctiveness to begin with? Is that the assumption made by his original spelling editors? As with the digital ‘toggled edition’ speculated in Basu and Loewenstein’s conclusion, this unsettling effect comes as a primary benefit.
Maria Devlin McNair’s ‘The Faerie Queene as an Aristotelian Inquiry into Ethics’ returns to the question of how the Faerie Queene operates ethically. McNair’s focus on Aristotelian ‘judgement’ as key here indeed bears much comparison to Lee’s ‘critical agency’: both terms aim to show how the poem is seriously but indirectly ethically engaged, relying on giving the reader the tools for moral development rather than prescribing rules. Instead of Adorno, this article turns to philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Christine Korsgaard to ethically rehabilitate an eclecticism from which no clear moral program can be derived, as adequately functioning ‘exempla’. It is in interpreting this Renaissance term as ‘case study’ rather than ‘example to be imitated’ that McNair seeks to respond to critics sceptical of the Faerie Queene’s ability to educate at all.
In a pleasing geometry the next article, ‘Spenser, Chaucer, and the Renaissance Squire’s Tale’ by Jeff Espie, in turn recalls Anderson’s on myth and parody (also referencing her earlier work on Spenser and Chaucer). It returns us to questions of influence and rewriting, arguing that Spenser learns from Chaucer a ‘revisionary aesthetic’ as much to do with self-rewriting as it is with rewriting Chaucer. Espie first addresses Jonathan Goldberg’s version of intertextuality in Endlesse Work, showing bibliographically that Spenser was most likely to have read the ‘Squire’s Tale’ not with the voice-effacing preface Goldberg analyses, but with an alternative preface where the squire conversely seizes narrative control. The history of this chunk of Chaucer is treated with great nuance, and this alternative, revisionary squire models a reassessment of book four, canto two, where Spenser ‘through infusion sweete / Of thine owne spirit’ adapts The Squire’s Tale. Spenser’s imitation of his historical interlocutors is here as much to do with method as surface, and this conclusion is a useful rejoinder to Basu and Loewenstein’s speculation about exactly how Spenser’s engagement with the authors he reads manifests. Nor is this temporality of influence simply unidirectional: by the time Spenser mentions his debt to ‘Dan Chaucer’ in book four, he has already surpassed him with his self-revisions of the 1590 Faerie Queene.
The subsequent articles take us away from The Faerie Queene: after the five reviewed above, we have work on the Spenser-Harvey letters, the Shepheardes Calender, and the Theatre for Worldlings. ‘Time, Reading, and the Material Text: Revising Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’ is a really useful article by Jessica C. Beckman which focuses on the print history of the Calender after its rights were sold to John Harrison II in 1580. Beckman looks at the changes to mise-en-page, examining how the gradual suppression of certain visual features unbalances the poem’s ‘complex temporality’ (161) towards a more straightforwardly serial text. Study of the dissipation of this effect, however, allows an examination of the reader’s original ‘kinetic engagement’ (165) with the poem and its modification over time. Spatial features both push against and ultimately strengthen a sense of sequential time which, in this account, this new pastoral calendar seeks to authorise.
Both Beckman’s article and Taylor Clement’s, ‘The Persistence of Vision: Continuous Narrative and Spenser’s Illustrated Poetry’, use illustrations to great effect; both are interested in how word and image intersect on the printed page. Clement’s article invites us to look at the woodcuts from A Theatre for Worldlings closely, and we get several full-page illustrations for the purpose. The art-historical term ‘continuous narrative’ is borrowed to show us how these images work as ‘a spatially arranged map of scenes where action and drastic changes occur within one frame’ (189): we note the combination of ‘linear’ and ‘omnipresent’ temporalities, where the proximity of an action and its telos has a suitably apocalyptic tone. Moving to the Shepheardes Calender, Clement both reveals the influence of the Theatre on Spenser’s career and brings out the later poem’s particular temporal mechanisms. The woodcuts of the Calender do not juxtapose before and after but contain multiple plot-points in the same complex image. Clement and Beckman’s readings of the Calender’s temporality are consequently in fruitful dialogue here: where Beckman envisages the vindication of linear time out from its curated struggle with visual effects, Clement describes a ‘recursive reading experience’ (209) whereby the Calender is instead a ‘new kind of vision poem’ (211). And yet these views do not quite read like the opposites they appear.
In ‘Collaborative Spenser? Reading the “Spenser-Harvey Letters”’, Elisabeth Chaghafi rounds off the main section by recasting ‘The Spenser-Harvey Letters’ as Familiar Letters (1581), a collaborative literary work engaged in developing an intertextual, fictional relationship. Arguing that Letters is ‘ultimately ill-suited for biographical reading’ (227), Chaghafi rigorously insists on the distinction between ‘G.H’ and Harvey, ‘Immerito’ and Spenser. She releases the reader from the obligation to consider the work as real letters with biographical import, and thereby opens the way for a reading of Letters as a ‘gloss’ (230) or ‘supplement’ (232) to the Shepheardes Calender, which was republished in 1581 as Beckman has already found significant. ‘Immerito’ is found as the key elaboration of the Calender in the Letters, a figure suggested to be quite different from ‘Edmund Spenser, the author of the 1590s’ (238), reaffirming the consensus among several of these essays that the Calender is the culmination of several early-career themes. Here the poem takes on some of the collaborative sheen of the Letters, its parenthood ‘shared by several fathers’ (238).
The next three papers all derive from a panel on Spenser and Ruskin at RSA 2018, and are presented here as ‘Three Papers on Ruskin’s Nineteenth Century and the Renaissance Spenser’. This introduction is apt, since periodisation is a constant concern in these fruitfully intercommunicative articles. Ruskin and Spenser, I have been easily convinced, shed particularly interesting light on each other, not least because Ruskin appears to have combined his hatred for the Renaissance with a deep love of Spenser, by whom he was evidently deeply influenced. We learn much about how the Victorians positioned Spenser, both as a gothic writer and as one strangely out of time, and we learn what Spenser allows them to think. In one such figuration, for example, Katherine Eggert tells us that ‘Ruskin’s peculiar taste in Spenserian women is a taste The Faerie Queene has made possible’ (284) in a move which illuminates his cultural project as a whole. Conversely, however, reading Spenser through Ruskin is here a rich activity. Often historicised so thoroughly as a Renaissance author, it is suggestive to read Ruskin’s attempts at identifying a gothic, medieval-but-better Spenser, even if Christopher Warley, in particular, offers a defence of the Renaissance as precisely that ‘mixed life in the world’ which Ruskin names gothic (276). As William N. West comments in ‘Spenser, Ruskin, and the Victorian Culture of Medieval England’, ‘we may want to consider again how what we find in Spenser has been prepared for us in other moments’ (264), and it seems Ruskin has prepared him for us most of all.
Central to all three articles is Ruskin’s three-volume work The Stones of Venice (1851–53), where West shows The Faerie Queene was de-periodised as a ‘magic lantern by which in the 1890s an imaginary chivalric England of the 1590s could be projected backward so that it came before the Renaissance Italy of the 1490s, remaining innocent of its excesses’ (249). While West supports his argument by tracing depictions of St George through nineteenth-century editions of Spenser, Warley in ‘The Pleasure of Hating the Renaissance’ turns to Auerbach and Rancière to suggest that part of Spenser’s Renaissance-ness lies in his ability to link together disparate principles and historical periods, and not just his membership of a historical moment. It is then left for Eggert in ‘Ruskin’s Taste in Spenserian Women: Not Looking at the Renaissance’ to show in parallel that Spenser doesn’t force the reader to look: at Duessa ‘hidd in water, that I could not see’ (I.ii.41), at women, at the Renaissance itself.
From the aesthetics of not seeing, this volume concludes with two ‘Gleanings’, shorter articles which take cues from single moments or words and bring them into focus as sharply as possible. The value of this sort of approach to Spenser is evident in both. In ‘“Whence had she all this wealth?”: Dryden’s note on The Faerie Queene V.vii.24 and the Gifts of Literal Reading’, Joe Moshenska uses the ‘delightful perversity’ (306) of Dryden’s question to reflect on literality and materiality in the poem, arguing for the value of persistent attention to surface. Contra Ruskin, an excess of objects is here surprising and lovely, a gift to the reader as Britomart’s dubious ‘wealth’ is a gift to the priests of Isis. Finally Samuel V. Lemley, in ‘Glossing Spenser’s Griesly’, neatly charts the word ‘griesly’ from A Theatre for Worldlings through to The Faerie Queene, as a ‘lexical signpost’ (319) for extremes of mortality, carrying intriguing temporal connotations which return to the resonances of several of the previous essays.
Conor Wilcox-Mahon
University of Cambridge
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