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Victoria Coldham-Fussell, Comic Spenser: Faith, Folly, and The Faerie Queene
by Chris Barrett

Victoria Coldham-Fussell, Comic Spenser: Faith, Folly, and The Faerie Queene. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 256 pp. ISBN 978-1-5261-3111-9. £80.00.

 

If you have ever taught The Faerie Queene, you know the conversation can get real silly, real fast. Students are first struck by the incongruity of it all (‘Wait—there’s a lamb with the knight, too?’), and then by the preposterousness of allegory as read by those not yet inured to its workings; then comes the ebullient creativity required in trying to communicate it to others, including the excellent question of why it has not yet been adapted as a high-end drama to fill the Game of Thrones gap on HBO. There is something unbridled about the way the poem kindles humour and comic delight in its readers, something indomitable about its refusal to be entirely sober in the way Great Epic Poems or Works of Moral Instruction are imagined to be. That surprises students, and honestly, it surprises regular re-readers like myself, each time I revisit the poem; I somehow forget, over and again, how brilliantly jokes, satire, irony, wordplay, slyness and so many other vehicles of humour sparkle—sometimes like snowflakes and sometimes like broken glass—in the folds of verse.

Victoria Coldham-Fussell’s Comic Spenser: Faith, folly, and The Faerie Queene, part of the Manchester Spenser series, takes up the importance of humour to Spenser’s poem, attending to several ways comedy sits at the heart of FQ’s moral project, and indeed of allegory itself. Rather than an eruption or episodic departure from a tonal norm, humour in Comic Spenser’s analysis subtends the logic of the poem as a whole, structuring its strategies of representation and its engagements with genre, analogues and intertexts.

Comic Spenser specifically treats The Faerie Queene, though the introduction notes that other Spenser works evince their own instances of humour; even so, the volume focuses on FQ, where treatment of its humour has been, according to Coldham-Fussell, typically sidelined or considered in the service of other matters (4-5), though certainly there are exceptions to this asserted pattern. Books 1, 3 and 4 dominate Comic Spenser’s introduction and five chapters, with the Mutability Cantos making an appearance in the epilogue; while I would have loved to see more of Books 2, 5 and 6 in the discussion, their absence is less a deficiency and more a sign of how engaging Coldham-Fussell’s analysis is.

Being engaging while talking about humour is, in and of itself, no easy task. Funny things famously become infamously unfunny when scrutinised, and humour presents as a loose baggy monster of a subject, elusive in definition and difficult to theorise. Coldham-Fussell admirably imposes a workable frame on what exactly the “comic” in Comic Spenser might be understood to signal. Concisely synthesising a history of Western humour studies and the work of modern comic theory historians, Coldham-Fussell outlines three comic categories—consistently if differently operative across historical periods—to structure the exploration of the poem. Engaging with all the usual big names in humour studies (Bakhtin, Freud, Erasmus, et al.) as well as newer and more diverse voices, Coldham-Fussell reviews the comedic schools of ‘superiority theory’, ‘incongruity theory’ (now dominant) and ‘relief theory’, in order to propose three qualities that obtain among these schools and govern the practice of humour in FQ: reduction, ambiguity, and play. The innovative elaboration of these qualities of reduction, ambiguity, and play makes them capacious enough to hold much of the markers of comedy in Spenser’s poem, whether it be wordplay and innuendo, allegorical irony, character deflation, or so on.

Spenser’s humour, Coldham-Fussell argues, comprises a blend of these three qualities (16), and in advancing the didactic project of the poem, turns this combination into something both humane and recuperative. Reading FQ and its analogues (including Italian romance, Chaucer’s Troilus & Cressida and more) with nuance, and tending to humour’s shades and varied purposes, Comic Spenser manages to walk the tightrope of empowering the poem to do work resonant for modern readers, while also situating the poem in its historical context (even going into detail about things like the St. George Day procession and tiltyard etiquette, as at 183-84). This process is an intricate one, and often illuminating, demonstrating amply how critically engaging with humour—its sources, contexts and subtleties—might address some of the poem’s most vexing surface material. Indeed, Comic Spenser is full of considerations of challengingly uncomfortable episodes in which centring humour as a structure and not a symptom makes possible an interpretive account that both acknowledges the problematic surface of the narrative and suggests to a 21st-century reader an ethically viable reading. Coldham-Fussell’s fairly persuasive analysis allows the study of humour to do several important things for the poem. In chapter one, for example, it situates FQ’s blurring of romance and epic in the context of a ‘comic Renaissance’ in which ‘The influence of medieval traditions of humour, which emphasise human fallibility’ exist in tension with ‘the “neoclassical” desire to uphold heroic possibility’, generating a self-consciousness that manifests in citation and subversion of antecedent genres (79). This self-consciousness leads to a redefinition, or perhaps even collapse, of heroism in a work with a vexed relationship to the legibility of its characters, as chapter two argues: the amusement at Red Crosse’s burlesque and/or grotesque (mis)adventures shows how ‘the path to Christian heroism is not glorious but humiliating’ (81). Chapter three seeks to recuperate sexuality, by considering the comedic traditions and associations around its representation in the poem, from an embarrassing and low side effect of mortality, to an instructive and healthy component of life, and indeed, ‘a touchstone for thinking about the very condition of embodiment’ (123). Relatedly, chapter four’s account of the poem’s more misogynistic strains leans into the possibility that Spenser ‘satirises the ideal of chastity that serves to venerate women even as it polarises the majority of them as either lascivious or frigid’ (164).

This might seem at first like an effort to apologise for the poem’s vexations, or to make Spenser out to be a more forward-thinking writer than one might otherwise expect, given, say, the glee with which a stripped Duessa gets described in a giddily perverse blazon. But Coldham-Fussell’s account of humour’s centrality to the poem makes these explorations of comedy in FQ more a study of reading and indeed literary criticism. Coldham-Fussell relies on an interested and interesting reading of humour as doing moral work by teaching humility, a willingness to acknowledge one’s own limitations of imagination, perception and ability. ‘Fun always has a point in The Faerie Queene (195), Coldham-Fussell notes, and the book’s main point is that an openness to humour produces both ethical instruction and interpretive possibility. If humour plays in the fissures of expectation, perspective and one’s assessment of self and others, then attending to humour makes us better able to appreciate the numerous operations of the poem, while training us to acknowledge that daily life, as Oscar Wilde’s Lord Darlington once observed, ‘is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it’.

Even so, Comic Spenser does take humour’s importance seriously, insisting over and again that the cultural bias against the comic needs to be dismantled: ‘humour is not at odds with seriousness; moreover, sobriety is not the same as spiritual vigilance’ (90). This is widely true in the world, and specifically true with regard to Spenser’s poem, in the reading of which ‘greater responsiveness to Spenser’s sense of humour opens up the iconoclastic appeal of episodes… without unduly narrowing our reading of the poem’s politics’ (171). Coldham-Fussell’s approach is to highlight the advantages of this responsiveness, not at the expense of other readings, but alongside them. In a way, the theory of this book is as ecumenical as its account of humour, celebrating reading for the humour of the poem not as a ‘blanket strategy’ (173) for understanding every line, but as a valuable component of a critical engagement that begins with the knowledge that there are many ways of looking at a character, an event, a symbol. As such, this humour-centric approach to the poem thrives on New Historicist, feminist and other methodological accesses. Humility is the key word for the salutary workings of humour in Coldham-Fussell’s treatment of the poem, but I might describe the scholarly practice of the book—a practice that very much reflects the book’s central argument—using a different word, if one related to humility: generosity. Humility involves acknowledging that there are many ways of knowing, but intellectual generosity celebrates this, and Coldham-Fussell’s readings of comedy in FQ repeatedly point to the ways a humour-centred critique exists in company with a host of others, to the ways a focus on the comic illuminates or participates with other lines of thought. Comic Spenser is short on didacticism and long on the viability (even companionability) of many interpretive readings, a quality that mimics the big-tentedness I like to associate with Spenser studies as a whole.

For all that openness, Comic Spenser is still a meticulous book, one made of specific and precise, sometimes discretely modular, readings of allusions (to intricate myths as received over centuries, e.g.), of cultural figures (consider the goddess Fame at 175, e.g.), of intertexts (Chaucer’s ‘Sir Thopas’ is especially revealing), and of contemporary social, religious and philosophical discussions. At times, it can feel a little like wading into the weeds in dissecting what exactly is potentially, even salvifically, funny about a facet of the poem, but no one ever said humour was uncomplicated.

 

There are additional virtues to Comic Spenser, among them its inclusion of many observations that are true of Spenser’s poem and of day-to-day living. ‘Literary play is vital to Spenser’s moral project because good reading strategies are good life strategies’ (18) is one such note I plan to repeat for my students, with hopes that they write it on their hearts with yron pen. And the epilogue does an excellent job in unfolding explicitly what is hinted at throughout much of the book: ‘Allegory is fundamental to Spenser’s comic achievement’ (193). Because ‘allegory intensifies the game-like nature of fiction, and holds an innate appeal for the poet inclined to reflect upon the tasks of writing and reading’ and because allegory ‘discourages complacent and humourless reading practices’, it trains readers ‘to resist the temptation to become dogged or fixed’ (197). The fact that this will ‘frustrate as well as reward our efforts’ only helps to develop the poetics/ethics of humility Coldham-Fussell articulates for Spenser’s comedy: the well-known account of the poem as ‘a self-negating surface via which the Protestant poet disavows the seductive illusions of fiction’ might profitably give way to a model that ‘replace[s] the idea of negation and anxiety with something more playful and willful – self-deflating, perhaps, but not self-negating. Our task is to see that it is not in our power wholly to discard the narrative terms, and so to attain the humility that their inadequacy is intended to invoke’ (197). In other words, the joke is on us, and that’s the key to our fashioning in virtuous and gentle discipline. Earlier in Comic Spenser, Coldham-Fussell suggests that ‘The tension between allegory’s moral utility and its interpretative openness is generally regarded as a source of Protestant anxiety, but for Spenser it is precisely the “gap” between sententious conclusions and conflicting interpretative possibilities that is morally productive’ (54). We should all be so lucky as to live in such gaps.

 

Chris Barrett

Louisiana State University

Comments

  • New Home Building Supply 3 months, 2 weeks ago

    The innovative elaboration of these qualities of reduction, ambiguity, and play makes them capacious enough to hold much of the markers of comedy in Spenser’s poem, whether it be wordplay and innuendo, allegorical irony, character deflation, or so on.

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Chris Barrett, "Victoria Coldham-Fussell, Comic Spenser: Faith, Folly, and The Faerie Queene," Spenser Review (Fall 2020). Accessed March 28th, 2024.
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