In this collection of essays first presented at the Millennium Spenser Conference in Doneraile, County Cork (1999), J.B. Lethbridge has assembled contributors with diverse interests in the writings of Edmund Spenser. In a lengthy introduction, Lethbridge aruges that, despite a diaspora produced by what he calls the "infection" of theory since the 1980s, a few scholars like the ones included have continued to produce substantive research. Indeed, the gathered essays mostly omit theoretical jargon, and, in the view of the editor, they participate in a return to a pre-theory era - a "golden age" in Spenser studies whose peak Lethbridge identifies with the publication of James Nohrnberg's Analogy of "The Faerie Queene" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Lethbridge allows that some useful study has derived from what he terms the first "return to history" in new historicism, but he yearns to recuperate an older standard of historical scholarship as a way to advance Spenser studies beyond iterative applications of ideologies.
Whatever their reaction to the framing argument, readers are likely to find the collected essays - and the tensions among them - of interest. For instance, while John Moore emphasizes a Protestantism of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar, with the shepherd/poet a pastor who leads readers past the worldly limits of pastoral to transcendence. Thomas Herron eschews Calvinist readings of Muiopotmos and advances instead a politico-historical allegory of the "fly" Clarion, read as a "political pretender" like the Anglo-Irish that Spenser condemns in A View of the Present State of Ireland. Herron specifies that Clarion's folly mocks the "failed" policies of Sir John Perrot, Lord Deputy of Ireland (1584-88) following Lord Grey's recall. Although this narrow reading is sure to elicit debate, Herron profitably directs attention to recent studies of Irish history that illumine the political and social stratigraphy of Elizabethan Ireland.
Among several essays on The Faerie Queene, Andrew King's usefully considers Spenser's employment of a "medieval structure" rooted in Middle English verse romances and collections of narratives such as The Canterbury Tales, where discrete narratives are connected by overlapping situations, recurring characters, and formatting intended to divide and connect episodes. For King, these sources deserve attention more than those usually associated with The Faerie Queen but less comprehensively represented therein. Interest in Spenser's adaptations of sources informs Syrithe Pugh's reading of Guyon in book 2 as "perverting" acceptable pleasures through his refusal to admit them. Extending prior work on Spenser's uses of Ovid, Pugh reads Guyon as deeply flawed by a too-ready acceptance of Stoicism's animosity toward the passions as disturbances of the soul that lead one to be "out of control." In an interesting variation, Pugh's Palmer ironically compels Guyon to extirpate Christian compassion and love along with truly dangerous emotions at the Bower of Bliss.
In reexamining the Timias-Belphoebe relationship in book 4, Graham Atkin sidesteps familiar Raleigh-Elizabeth parallels and focuses instead on Spenser's symbols of friendship and their function in freeing individuals from isolation and loneliness. Focusing on books 3 and 4, James Nohrnberg presents an insightful, diffuse essay that concentrates broadly on boundary crossings as these recur in Spenser's poetry. Nohrnberg emphasizes "crossings" between allegorized fiction and the historical experience of Elizabeth in her "marital politics" and nascent imperialism; between English colonizers and the colonized Irish; between Kilcolman and Spenser's experiences at court; between fictive structures of entry and exclusion; between epithalamia and representations of the victims of sexual perversion; between the two versions of the ending of book 3; and between the scope of the epic in its original and diminished forms.
Nohrnberg also considers the Mutabilitie Cantos, a focus of two other contributors. E.A.F. Porges Watson describes these cantos as a "coda" contrived to complete the work, to develop structural echoes harking back to book 1, and to generate a "context and final retrospective coherence" wherein the Faerie world becomes "mutually inclusive" with Spenser's quotidian one. In his analysis of the cantos, Lethbridge claims to find "external and internal" evidence that Spenser had completed more than survives of The Faerie Queene prior to the unpublished work's destruction, with Spenser's last-ditch reworking of the lost portions in added cantos dating from the poet's "last weeks." Lethbridge advances what he calls a "theory," admitting that the evidence he presents does not constitute "proof" but nonethless asserting that even the possibility usefully invites an alternative way of reading the cantos and interpreting them in relation to the preceding books.
Two essays offer enticing prospects, but, as each writer admits, they are exploratory rather than conclusive. Catherine Addison offers a formalist analysis of the Spenserian stanza (defined by frequency of rhymed parts of speech, enjambed lines, and grammatical inversions, contrasted with Romantic users of same stanza) and she concludes that Spenser uses the stanza more flexibly than do the Romantics by moving events along or eliciting retrospective pauses. Richard Danson Brown examines the influence - or lack thereof - of Spenser's poetry on modern poets and concentrates on the exception of the Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice, arguing that his lyric parables of the late 1950s and 1960s echo complex tones and multivalent symbols in The Faerie Queen.
Students and scholars interested in Spenser will find the contributors' essays valuable, especially the studies by Herron, King, Pugh, and Nohrnberg. Lethbridge's own contributions, particularly his sometimes strident attacks upon theory and its applications, are likely to be controversial rather than widely held, especially given the recent tendencies of even many theoretical critics, including Terry Eagleton, to draw back from ideologies that preclude reading literature. Moreover, the "theory" that Lethbridge apparently relegates to the "Iron Age" of criticism seems pervasive in the collection's essays, including his own, if less prominently displayed. Perhaps the grand narrative of critical degradation and recuperation Lethbridge constructs may be enlarged to allow for continuous and refinements of theoretical and ideological models rather than just "new and renewed" ones.
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