Jennifer C. Vaught, Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser. Berlin: De Gruyter, Medieval Institute Publications, 2019. xi + 227pp. ISBN 9781501517938. £79.00 hardback.
‘He that of such a height hath built his mind’, begins Samuel Daniel’s epistle ‘To the Countess of Cumberland’, where ‘neither fear nor hope can shake the frame’, shall achieve a ‘settled peace’.[i] Hardened by Stoic discipline, the mind acquires the almost-permanency of a monumental building. Unlike a material castle standing in sixteenth-century England, the metaphorical dwelling of Daniel’s proposal is impervious to ruin and overthrow. The besieged castle as metaphor occupies a central place in Jennifer C. Vaught’s Architectural Rhetoric in Shakespeare and Spenser. This well-researched and useful book traces, across the works of two Elizabethan contemporaries, numerous figurations of bodies – fantasising, diseased, collective, defiantly temperate – as buildings. It reflects Vaught’s longstanding interest not just in connections between Spenser and Shakespeare, but also in the early modern body and the metaphors employed to describe it. Her previous edited collection, whose focus it refines, is entitled Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England (2010). The present study begins with the image of the ‘castle in the air’, before examining architectural metaphors for the body’s struggle against intemperance. Vaught then moves onto the metaphor of the ruin, and of figurations of the passions as built environments, before returning elegantly in the last chapter to ‘the architectural place of mind’.
Spenserians might initially be most interested in Chapters One, Three and Four, which concentrate on episodes in The Faerie Queene: the image of the mind-body as a castle vulnerable to conjured deceptions; the enslaved or coerced body depicted both in and as a prison; the diseased or ailing body as a dilapidated or ruined building. Yet the thrust of this study is comparative, and one of its main strengths is the regularity of its suggestive readings of Shakespeare and Spenser not against but alongside each other. Shakespeare’s second ‘Henriad’ emerges as particularly close to The Faerie Queene in its exploration of links between the kingly body and the body politic, and the vulnerability of either to the disfiguring influence of intemperance. In general Vaught expands an established argument that these two poets could depict the body as a building with such facility because of intuitive associations, dominant in Renaissance culture and residual from the medieval age, between bodies and buildings – intuitions solidified and deepened, in their turn, by such literary manifestations. She claims, in particular, to ‘break new ground by focusing on the permeable body as a besieged castle’ (2). The castle provided a natural image for a closed-off or heroically temperate body, as Daniel’s epistle indicates; it also, Vaught shows, figured the body as vulnerable to its own passions and those of others.
Considered in relation to recent scholarship, however, the most refreshing aspect of Vaught’s argument is that the early modern body it portrays is not exclusively ‘permeable’, leaky or vulnerably open. In the past few decades, critical studies of the passionate medieval and Renaissance body have drawn incontestable conclusions about its permeability to the vaporous environment, and the fluid relations of somatic and mental faculties in Galenic and Aristotelian theory. Yet the leaky and unruly passionate body familiar from accounts by Jonathan Sawday and Gail Kern Paster is depicted so forcefully and memorably that it sometimes hardens into a commonplace. The range of bodies examined by Vaught also includes the defensively inward, compassed being described in Michael Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (2000). When Vaught does address the intemperate body, then, she usefully directs attention to metaphors not only of fluid excess and imbalance, but also of buildings threatened by quasi-exterior, besieging powers. This architectural focus reflects a recent orientation in Spenser criticism towards buildings in The Faerie Queene and other works. Critics since C.S. Lewis have studied at length the ‘allegorical centres’ of Spenser’s epic, but the central focus is rarely on the buildings themselves. Christopher Burlinson’s materialist study, Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser (2006) establishes a way of reading the poem’s structures against their own allegorical grain, as built spaces of superfluous materiality. Vaught is content to consider Spenserian and Shakespearean castles as metaphors. In order to fortify her argument with theoretical heft, however, she gestures to the ongoing enquiry into the material world of early modernity, citing (among others) Stacy Alaimo’s claim that the realm of stuff and objects is not an ‘external place’ but contains ‘the substance of ourselves and others’ (6). Ecocriticism and cognitive studies (in particular some recent considerations of the medieval arts of memory in cognitive terms) are also acknowledged in the attractively wide-ranging introduction, as theoretical approaches which insist on the close integration of minds with bodies, and of persons with their environments. In early modernity cognition was embodied, material culture possessed agency and served as a receptacle for memory, and there was constant interaction with built and natural environments. Thus, Vaught implies, Shakespeare and Spenser could not but figure the body architecturally.
Vaught relates the two poets’ architectural metaphors to analogues in the English allegorical tradition, in particular the fifteenth-century morality play The Castle of Perseverance. From a Spenserian perspective, the relatively low profile of Tasso and Ariosto in her study is perhaps surprising. The magical castles of the Furioso and the besieged city of Gerusalemme Liberata have just as telling an influence on The Faerie Queene’s images of enigmatic or defensive buildings. Yet tracing Shakespeare and Spenser’s architectural metaphors back to a common tradition, which also includes Langland’s Piers Plowman, reveals the enduring presence of various traditional meanings of the castle. Chapter One, for example, examines Spenser’s frequent figuring of deceptions or delusions as architectural spaces (many of them in Book I of The Faerie Queene, such as Archimago’s cottage or Orgoglio’s castle), locating them in a medieval tradition of depicting the imagination’s dubious fantasies as insubstantial castles in the air. In Chapter Six, Vaught argues neatly that the unhappy spaces of King Lear reflect the use of the castle in earlier English allegories such as The Harrowing of Hell to signify not only the sins of pride and ignorance, but also hell itself.
Positioning texts like The Castle of Perseverance as common analogues also allows Vaught to make imaginative and stimulating comparisons between Shakespeare the dramatic poet and Spenser the epic allegorist. Chapter Two reads the second ‘Henriad’ through the prism of Alma’s castle, the House of Temperance. Falstaff is to Hal as Malaeger is to the castle – a ‘riotous, intemperate identity’ (51) – and the part of himself which he must resist and ultimately destroy. The comparison is too broad to support an argument for specific allusion, intentional or otherwise; yet rather than drawing intertextual lines between Spenser and Shakespeare, Vaught demonstrates the operation of allegorical thinking, and its spatial and architectural expression, in Shakespeare’s plays. Critics have long since stopped declaring absolute boundaries between Shakespeare’s supposedly realist drama and the allegorical mode in which many of his predecessors and some contemporaries worked. It is nevertheless provocative to consider Falstaff as we would a figure in The Faerie Queene: a projection of Hal’s own nature who appears to have his own life, who both tempts and assaults Hal with the offer of sack. Shakespeare and Spenser emerge in Vaught’s account not quite as the Attractive Opposites of Julian Lethbridge’s provocative recent study; in this complementary picture, they are similarly interested in how minds imagine themselves architecturally and subdivide themselves into allegorical parts, the castle of reason besieged by the forces of intemperate passion. Chapter Two demonstrates the specific relevance of body-as-building metaphors for the discourse of monarchical power of which Shakespeare and Spenser provide sustained examination and critique. A line of royal succession represents itself as a ‘house’, an eternal body politic into which temporal bodies step in orderly fashion, and which supposedly possesses the solidity and permanence of material castles, with none of their tendency to ruin. In actual fact, as the King discovers in Richard II, his power is as impermanent as both his body and the ‘ancient castle’ with its permeable, ‘rude ribs’ where he is besieged (40). It’s strange, therefore, that Vaught refers throughout to the texts she considers as ‘hybrids’ of drama and allegory: as her own readings show, the two modes possess an inherent tendency to overlap with one another. Sixteenth-century drama tended towards allegorical thinking; allegory meanwhile, at least in Spenser’s synthetic epic, is inherently dramatic.
The majority of this book is devoted to close, careful readings of its primary texts. This is refreshing in itself, as so much work on both early modern bodies and buildings tends to neglect textual details in favour of (often virtuosic) marshalling theory. Though Vaught’s opening theoretical gestures fade somewhat across her study, this provides space for the texts themselves. Architectural thinking is highlighted in figures of speech as well as visual metaphors. In Macbeth, for example, Vaught shows that ‘figuration can be a powerful thing’ (130). Duncan opens himself to deception, she observes sharply, by endowing his social relations with the reliable solidity of architectural structures: ‘he was a gentleman on whom I built / An absolute trust’, he says of the Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth, by contrast, understands that fulfilment of his ambitions depends on convincing imaginative projections, castles in the air; he also, of course, falls prey to the error of excessive faith in his own fantasies, so vivid to his feverish mind that they acquire seemingly material form. Volumnia, too, in Vaught’s account, believes in her son with such certainty that he becomes monumental to her, exceeding Rome’s politicians ‘as far as doth the Capital exceed / The meanest house’ (97). Coriolanus, unable to separate Rome from his own person, is doomed to ‘besiege the very fortress that stands for himself’ (98). These readings valuably uncover the intuitive architectural metaphors by which early modern writers understand and depict the various sins stemming from pride. To be proud is to fail to distinguish a body from a building, to assume that a castle in the air has solid foundations.
Alongside these deft readings, specific uses of literary and textual history also reflect Vaught’s facility with detail: Pope’s suggested emendation, in his edition of Hamlet, of ‘sea of troubles’ to ‘siege of troubles’, is justified by the frequency of the image of the besieged castle; Hal’s repetition of the phrase ‘every man’ in conversation with Poins suggests the allegorical context of the Everyman plays (49). Vaught’s readings of The Faerie Queene are mostly just as precise: Britomart’s journey through the House of Busirane, well-trodden ground for Spenser critics, resembles the challenge of a memory house disfigured by graffiti; Spenser’s description of Redcrosse ‘in amaze’ at Archimago’s cottage is a sly pun reflecting the frequency of the ‘infernal maze’ as a spatial metaphor for a mind confused by ‘wicked forces’ (134-5). Chapter Five’s novel reading of rumour, slander and ill speech in both The Faerie Queene and Anthony and Cleopatra ‘as an environmental hazard’ (114), expressed with metaphors of noxious fumes, is very persuasive, and makes unobtrusive but skilful use of the ecocritical framework acknowledged earlier. Only a few readings of The Faerie Queene seem unconvincing, or at least unbalanced. Vaught interprets the Giant of the Scales in Book V, as ‘an allusion to [the] radical political group the Levellers’ (110); the Giant’s balanced scales certainly symbolise an erroneous (for Spenser) interpretation of justice as equality, but it isn’t until the mid-seventeenth century that the term connotes political agitation, and specifically the group that became famous at the Putney Debates. Of Merlin’s prophecy to Britomart in Book III, that her Virgin descendant will ‘Stretch her white rod ouer the Belgicke shore / And the great Castle smite’, Vaught comments that the castle ‘refers to Philip II… the King of Castile’ (63). This is certainly plausible, but the ‘Belgicke’ context, which Spenser depicts towards the end of Book V, also suggests Antwerp Castle (‘Het Steen’, remodelled in 1520 by Charles V) as a more specific allusion. More puzzling is the notion that, along with Alma’s castle, the House of Care (whose black smoke Vaught nicely integrates into her analysis of uncivil speech as noxious gas) would have ‘reminded Spenser of Kilcolman Castle’ (104). If we do choose to look for traces of sixteenth-century Ireland in the House of Care, the obvious link is not so much to Plantation castles as to the hovels and smithies of the Gaelic Irish, as argued respectively by Burlinson and Thomas Herron.
Extrapolating from Northumberland’s ‘worm-eaten hold of ragged stone’ in 2 Henry IV, Vaught refers to ‘the disrepair of aristocratic houses in the sixteenth century’ (26). Recent architectural histories of early modern England have, it’s true, questioned the thesis of ‘Great Rebuilding’ proposed by W.G. Hoskins and modified by Colin Platt. Yet it remains worth emphasising that a great number of aristocratic houses were either constructed or adapted in the sixteenth century. More could have been made, then, of significant developments during Shakespeare’s and Spenser’s lifetimes in the speculative and practical arts of architecture and surveying. In sixteenth-century England it was increasingly common for geometric and perspectival innovations, traced to fifteenth-century Italian city-states, to achieve material expression, for example in public architecture and commercial cartography. Furthermore, towards the end of the century certain houses appear, such as Lulworth and Montacute, which self-consciously allude to the castle as a fanciful, chivalric type. Additional contexts like these by no means invalidate Vaught’s reading of Spenser’s castles in relation to The Castle of Perseverance, but do suggest that the line between them is not a straightforward one.
Similarly, Vaught’s general approach to Spenserian allegory is thoroughly accurate, but on occasion could be complemented by alternative conceptions. Asserting a ‘crumbling belief’ in Spenser’s time in the ‘epistemological link between “Real Presence” and actual matter’ (11), Vaught argues that allegory appealed as a way to restore the connection:
Renaissance writers, readers and audiences returned nostalgically to castles in the air found in medieval architectural allegories to restore this disappearing, analogic way of conceptualizing their situation within the cosmos (11).
The Foucauldian narrative echoed here of a shift, around 1600, away from thinking of the body as part of and open to the world, does not preclude ‘analogic’ thinking or make it disappear; it merely means that analogies between the body and the world (which proliferated throughout the seventeenth century) become comparisons of separate things rather than relations of parts to wholes. More significantly, the quoted sentence above is an incomplete description of Spenserian allegory. Vaught demonstrates convincingly that Spenser and Shakespeare’s architectural metaphors reflect an intuitive sense of the body as a building, and of the environment as possessing influence and agency. But allegory for Spenser is more than just a mode of intuitive analogies which aim to teach through clarifying; it is also a veiled, enigmatic way of speaking associated with esoteric readings of Homer, fifteenth-century neo-Platonism and the revival of emblems and hieroglyphics. The Faerie Queene underlines widespread and organic connections between bodies and buildings, certainly, but it is also interested in using buildings to represent ideas or processes which are rather unlike buildings. This inhibits Vaught’s analysis in Chapter Five, which analyses architectural allegories for body’s passions. To depict the temperate body resisting temptations as a besieged castle is intuitive; to depict the vices themselves, such as Ate, as confined spaces, plays more of a distorting game, where an idea characterised by excess and venomous fluidity is expressed through an architectural image of boundedness and enclosure. On the whole, however, this thoughtful book provides an excellent contribution to work on the fascinating subject of architectural allegory.
Archie Cornish
University of Oxford
[i] Samuel Daniel, ‘To the Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland’, in Certaine Epistles (1603), ed. by John Morris, Selections from the Poetical Works of Samuel Daniel (Bath: Charles Clark, 1855), 28-32, 28.
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