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Spenser Studies

Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual. Volume 34, 2020.  Editors: Editors Susannah Brietz Monta, William A. Oram, and Ayesha Ramachandran. The University of Chicago Press Journals.

 

 

Bergvall, Åke. “To ‘maister the Circumstance’:  Mulcaster’s Positions and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1-24.

 

This essay argues that the prominent Elizabethan pedagogue Richard Mulcaster exerted a considerable influence on the narrative strategies of his pupil Edmund Spenser, especially as seen in Book I of The Faerie Queene. Where recent scholars such as Jeff Dolven and Andrew Wallace have maintained that Spenser was critical of many of the humanist practices they deem prevalent in the Elizabethan classroom, this study shows that such critique of humanism was already a basic part of the reformed curriculum at Merchant Taylors’ School, where Spenser received his early training under Mulcaster. The essay first provides a reading of Mulcaster’s main pedagogical text, Positions (1581), and then applies its key concepts to a reading of Book I of Spenser’s poem with a double emphasis on the hero of the poem, Redcrosse, and on the reader’s interaction with the text. The most important of these concepts is the seemingly innocuous term “circumstance.” Aside from being a key concept within forensic oratory, to “maister the circumstance” is for Mulcaster a shorthand for a cautious approach to the classical text studied in his classroom. The same strategy, this essay argues, is implemented in the poem. The reader must pay attention to the circumstances, with their rhetorical, pedagogical, and theological connotations, triggered in large part by the apparent inability of Redcrosse, the putative hero of the book, to do so. Additionally, as a subcategory of the rhetorical connotations, there is also the need to assess the use of names in the poem.

 

Borris, Kenneth. “Open Secrets: The Verbal-Visual Satire of the Anjou Match in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 25-75.

 

In 1579 Queen Elizabeth appeared about to marry the Roman Catholic duc d’Anjou, the French king’s brother and heir apparent. Recalling the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1572 in Paris, many English Protestants feared this match, and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) satirizes it to stoke resistance. Although the twelve eclogues are illustrated, previous accounts of this satire address only its verbal aspects and focus on “Februarye,” “Aprill,” and “November.” But the picture for “Maye” presents the spurious triumph of a mock-royal couple juxtaposed with a fable of disastrous carelessness while heraldically relating them to the English monarchy. This eclogue climaxes the anti-Anjou satire both visually and verbally and pointedly interacts with the picture and poem for “Aprill” wherein Elizabeth triumphs as England’s virgin queen. As these two eclogues constitute a mutually definitive pair, so consideration of each should be informed by its counterpart. To fulfill the felt responsibilities of his poetic vocation amid acute political and religious challenges, yet elude reprisals, Spenser artfully exploited illustrated poetry’s greater potential for indirect expression, as in emblematics. Yet his intervention was still hazardous as well as potentially rewarding.

 

Danson Brown, Richard. “Why at all Complain?: ‘Bad’ Poetry and Denatured Form in Spenser’s Daphnaïda.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 77-110.

 

How should we read Daphnaïda—as Spenser’s worst poem or as covert advocacy on Spenser’s part for Arthur Gorges? In the light of such divergent recent approaches, this essay considers the poem through its formal choices and the ways in which such framing devices ironize and complicate its protagonist. It begins by rereading the monotonous quality of Alcyon’s long lament, suggesting that Spenser uses devices that critically align Alcyon with poets of the previous age in the choice of a particular line shape. It then explores the ways in which this characterization draws on aspects of contemporary drama in the presentation of him as an affectively problematic figure—in this reading, metrical allusion to the drama contributes to the ironic characterization of the poem’s protagonist. The connection between Daphnaïda and contemporary poetry is enhanced by a detailed account of the way Alcyon’s complaint rewrites and “denatures” the famous contemporary sonnet “Like to a Hermite poore in place obscure” before turning to the poem’s complex bibliographical relationship with the Complaints volume. Finally, analysis of the stanza reveals it as denatured rhyme royal, designed to frustrate the eloquent tonalities of the original form.


Helfer, Rebeca. “Spenser’s Golden Age Memories: Recollecting The Ruines of Time in Prothalamion.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 111-141.

 

This essay explores how Spenser’s late poem Prothalamion both reconstructs and deconstructs Golden Age myths of poetry and politics, through allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti as well as through the intertextual presence of Spenser’s early complaint The Ruines of Time. Although Golden Age memories of a time before a fall into time connect these two poems, Spenser nevertheless reveals Prothalamion to be a retrospective fiction constructed from The Ruines of Time, an intertextuality reflective of Spenser’s career-long poetics of ruin and recollection. As I argue, Spenser’s poetics relate to the art of memory, as dramatized by its origin story: the tale of the poet Simonides, who discovers locational memory by recollecting a ruined edifice. By remembering Prothalamion from The Ruines of Time, Spenser both recollects and reforms the memorial ruins of his own past and poetry, while challenging the myth of the Golden Age associated with Queen Elizabeth and his presumed role as England’s new Virgil.

 

Anderson, Judith H. “Pleasurable Reading: Donne’s ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning’.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 147-155

 

The best-known of Donne’s poems of “Valediction” is a lyric whose analogies of gold and a compass have long been considered touchstones for the so-called metaphysical style. Reading the poem, I have realigned these analogies with the Renaissance practice of making the invisible visible through analogy. In particular, the compass results from a poetic process that is simultaneously intellectual, material, and affective. Its polyphony is amazingly attuned to the multiple pressures and possibilities of Donne’s culture.

 

Kuin, Roger. “Mechanical Toys: Sir Philip Sidney and the Lyric.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 157-166.

 

In a tone both playful and serious, this essay explores Sidney’s use of the term “toy” to describe the purpose, artfulness, and aesthetic force of his lyric poems through an extended discussion of the singing match between Lalus and Dorus in the First Eclogues and the double sestina of Strephon and Klaius. A careful consideration of the technical virtuosity of Sidney’s verse and its possible provenance leads to an argument for the lyric’s distinctive modes of evoking virtue and excellence.

 

Silberman, Lauren. “Growing Up in Epic: Transformations of the Doloneia.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 167-175.

 

Iterations of the epic topos of the night raid (Doloneia) deriving from book 10 of the Iliad intersect with the motif of puberty in significant ways. For an Elizabethan author interested in the formation of sexual identity, this intersection triggers a range of literary transformations and modes of literary self-consciousness that can inform any given reference to sexual awakening. Erotic desire as a theme is not an intrinsic aspect of the epic topos but a variation introduced to it by Virgil in order to differentiate the emotional bonds of personal loyalty from the claims of duty the individual owes a collective entity. Subsequent epic poets Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser shape a tradition as each reworks elements of the Virgilian paradigm to explore the formation of gender and social identity in relation to structures of political power and cultural heritage.

 

Stump, Donald. “Elizabeth and Her Favorites: Britomart, Florimell, and Oram’s Concept of Fragmented Historical Persons.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 177-184.

 

Attempts to identify figures in The Faerie Queene with men and women in Elizabeth’s court have proved problematic. In his work on Timias and Belphoebe as figures for Ralegh and the queen, William Oram provides a model in which Spenser explores psychological, moral, or political issues that interested him by fragmenting historical persons into more than one character. This article explores such fragmentation of Elizabeth into Britomart, Florimell, and her evil twin, the Snowy Florimell, extending Oram’s work on Timias to include Leicester, Hatton, and Essex. In the tournaments of Satyrane and Marinell, Spenser’s allegory explores the dangers of arousing and frustrating erotic desire, arguing that Elizabeth’s use of courtly and Petrarchan love as a way to enjoy intimacy without sex led to betrayal and danger to the state.

 

Brink, Jean R. “Spenser’s Audiences.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 185-194.

 

William Oram’s study of the dedicatory sonnets appended to the Faerie Queene gave scholars insight into the audiences Spenser sought. In our subsequent work to understand those audiences, one major problem remains: we still lack full bibliographic studies of the more than twenty surviving manuscripts of Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, analyses that would establish dates, scribes, provenance, and contexts for each manuscript. A critical bibliography of the Views manuscripts would tell us much about Spenser’s audiences both after his lifetime and perhaps during his final years as well.

 

Grogan, Jane. “Colin Clout (again).” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 195-204.

 

This essay begins by asking what exactly it means to “know” Colin Clout in his several and striking appearances in Spenser’s poems. It goes on to consider the help in answering this question that a modern reader of Spenser might glean from writers and theorists of autofiction today. It points out three areas in which an understanding of autofictional techniques and values helps to shed light on the complex literary persona and praxis of Spenser’s Colin Clout—worldliness, voice, and performance—and sets out some exploratory arguments in relation to each of these.

 

Ramachandran, Ayesha. “Spenser’s Petrarch.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 205-214.

 

This essay calls for a fresh look at Spenser’s relationship to Petrarch—one that moves past a reliance on commonplace notions of “Petrarchism” to consider what exactly the English poet may have learned from his Italian predecessor. It thus explores what it might mean to identify Spenser as “post-Petrarchan”: to love and rival Vergil, to engage in intense literary self-reflection and autobiographical self-presentation, to reach for an international, multilingual audience engaged in cross-cultural and transhistorical dialogue, and to transform the lyric from a relatively minor literary genre to one that sought epic amplitude.

 

Grogan, Tess. “Speculative Bill.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 215-225.

 

This essay discusses some difficulties of teaching Renaissance engagements with race, class, and gender in diverse twenty-first-century classrooms and looks to contemporary romance—science fiction and fantasy—for examples of humane and reparative pedagogy. Ursula K. Le Guin’s feminist revisioning of her Earthsea trilogy in the late story “Dragonfly” both models the humility required to make change and stages a teaching practice that welcomes the disruptive and uncomfortable questions posed by a university’s first female student.

 

 

Lucas, Scott. “‘The Presiding Genius of Spenser Studies’: William Oram in Scholarship and the Scholarly Community.” Spenser Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 2020, pp. 227-233.

 

This article considers the influence of William Oram’s generous and welcoming qualities as a scholar both on his critical writings and on his key role in creating the intellectually stimulating and tight-knit international community of Spenser scholars that arose in the late twentieth century and that has continued thereafter. Oram’s decision as general editor of the important collection The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser not to require rigorous uniformity from its contributors in their editorial efforts allowed readers to experience a beneficially varied and wide-ranging set of approaches to Spenser’s shorter works. His welcoming spirit, in turn, led him to craft introductions for the collection carefully designed to be useful to experienced scholars and to those new to Spenser’s poems alike. Oram’s generosity and welcoming nature were also key to the creation of the intellectually invigorating and long-lasting community of Spenserians that arose in the wake of the establishment in 1976 of the Spenser sessions at the International Congress of Medieval Studies. Oram’s untiring work as an organizer of, participant in, and keen respondent to numerous Spenser sessions there and at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in particular has helped to encourage over four decades of remarkably thoughtful, passionate, and groundbreaking work on Spenser and all his writings.

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