Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions commemorates the Spenser Millennium Conference held in 1999 in Doneraille, Ireland. The essays are fewer (eleven) and longer (six are thirty-four pages or more) than in most conference-volumes, approaching Spenser in various ways: thematic, formal, biographical, historical, reception-historical. The introduction by J.B. Lethbridge presents a reasoned polemic against "theory" and for "history," although his definition of "history" dissociates it from the New Historicism with its Marxist and Foucaultian impetus. "It is the character of theory to generalize, to ignore what does not exactly fit; whereas it is the character of history to particularize, to and to attend with all the greater concentration to what does not fit, to listen with greater care to what to what the poem says and what it means.." (44) Lethbridge advocates a return to the text with a capacity to listen carefully, without preconceptions, to what it says, and believes that Spenser criticism is moving in that direction. Ive felt a kindred irritation at theory-driven essays deaf to tone and context and agree about the discipline of learning from counter-evidence. On the other hand its hard to imagine a reading not informed by theory or preconceptions of some kind. What's essential is to use the theory as a lens (aware that it is a lens) and not a steam-iron.
This is a strong book. Three essays (by Nohrnberg, Addison and Pugh) seem to me important reading for any Spenserian, and the level of the others, while variable, is high. The books major piece is James Nohrnberg's seventy-page "Britomart's Gone Abroad to Brute-land, Colin Clout's Come Courting from Ire-land: Exile and Kingdom in Some of Spenser's Fictions for Crossing Over" which, like The Analogy of the Faerie Queene, is hard to describe briefly. It's loosely organized, digressive and, toward the end, somewhat repetitive, but it's also splendidly imaginative, inventive, prodigiously learned and unconstrained by received opinion. I suspect readers will like or dislike it according to their tolerance for its playfulness. Nohrnberg here works in new-historicist territory, focusing much of the time on Spenser's relation to Elizabeth I.
He highlights two texts, the house of Busyrane and the Faunus episode of the Mutabilitie Cantos, arguing that "both stories center on a spectator who intrudes upon a kind of inward theatre whether erotic or merely female with the effect of breaking its spell. And both episodes refer to the Queen's jealousy of her courtiers' marriage or her interference with them" (267). In discussing Busyrane Nohrnberg suggests that Spenser's concern with the anxieties of marriage and consummation responds to the Queens own, and discusses her attitudes toward marriage and Spenser's many accounts of her relation to Sir Walter Ralegh. His reading of the Faunus episode sees Faunus as Spenser, Molanna as Ralegh and Fanchin as Elizabeth Throckmorton. Faunus near-fatal viewing of Diana is a comic version of Spenser's interview with the Queen (arranged by Molanna/Ralegh) at which Nohrnberg suggests that Spenser made a disastrous faux pas, either praising too intensely the Queene's aging body or telling her what to do in Ireland. As often with Nohrnberg's work, while the particular assertions may not command assent, the contexts he develops make one see the poem differently.
Such a summary gives no sense of the experience of the essay, which wanders dilatorily through many issues and passages, making unexpected and suggestive connections between them. Nohrnberg has a larger mind than most of us, a capacity for entertaining more texts and seeing more in them. He makes striking use of other critics here, especially Charles Ross Custom of the Castle, which he uses to study the perverse marriage customs of the House of Busyrane. Sometimes he is very funny. His language moves from the epigrammatic ("Molanna is Ralegh in drag") to the eloquent (a moving final paragraph on Mutabilitie) and, occasionally, to the obscure, mostly because he tends to neglect the signposts of his argument or to lose the reader in the details of particular analogues.
Contrasting with Nohrnberg's sprawling work is the fine, short piece by Catherine Addison, "Rhyming Against the Grain: A New Look at the Spenserian Stanza." It compares Spenser's treatment of his stanza with its adaptations by Byron, Shelley and Keats. In deft and convincing analysis Addison shows that Spenser differs from his imitators in rhyming more often on verbs than on other parts of speech. He does this by frequent inversion (hence going "against the grain of the language" p.347) which, by avoiding enjambment, stresses the individuality of each line, instead of treating the stanza, as the Romantics often do, as a verse paragraph. This is the best account Ive seen of the peculiar Spenserian deliberateness the way that each stanza proceeds additively, considering one matter at a time. These stanzas do not convey the voice of one rapt beyond the pole ("ecstasy in any of its forms is not a state in which the Faerie Queene narrator himself indulges" Addison comments p.346). Here attention to form throws into relief Spensers characteristic habits of mind.
A final superb essay is Syrithe Pughs, "Guyons Perversion of the Ovidian Erotic in Book II of The Faerie Queene" which dwells on the limitations of Guyons stoic repressiveness. "Guyon's Stoicism and the peculiar corruption of the inhabitants of the Bower have a common foundation in the reductive and negative view of the passions as evil in themselves and opposed to reason, a view limited by their shared materialism, which renders them oblivious to the Platonic idea of heavenly love, the Christian concept of divine love imaged in the angel of canto 8, and most importantly the close Spenserian relation between divine love and true love between man and woman which underlies book I" (159). The "Ovidian erotic"an ideal of mutual affection associated with Britomart later in the poem gets lost as Guyon tries simply to suppress all desire. Pugh shows brilliantly how the Spenser evokes the Latin subtexts of the Amavia episode (Dido and Lucrece) and the Bower of Bliss comment on the narrative. This is the best recent essay on the intertextuality of the FQ that I've seen, and one of the best readings of Book II.
Formalism appears again in "Well Grounded, Finely Framed and Strongly Trussed up Together: The Medieval Structure of The Faerie Queene." Andrew King asks what models gave Spenser the idea for the FQs structure independent, yet related, books sharing common themes, images, concerns. He argues that such models existed in medieval linked tales, saints lives and thematically connected groups like the Confessio Amantis or the Canterbury Tales. He attends especially to manuscript miscellanies and collections of romances, remarking that their mixing of genres occurs in FQ as "embedded texts" (146). While it doesn't account for some of Spenser's epic structures the pairing of books (I-II; III-IV, V-VI or I-VI; II-V; III-IV), or its movement from private to public virtues the essay gives a thoughtful and convincing account of models that Spenser must have internalized as he built his poem.
Richard Danson Brown's, "MacNeice in Fairy Land" is a fine piece of reception-history. Unlike many modernists who distrusted Spenser as a predecessor of the Romantics, MacNeice admired him for his "knack of making his abstractions concrete" (MacNeice quoted p.361), and for his ability to suggest by psychological symbolism a sense of the "inner situation" of a scene. Hence, Brown argues, Spenser's influence appears most concretely in MacNeice's psychologically dense later lyrics. He illustrates the argument with an arresting reading of "Truisms" a poem whose tree-symbolism draws on "Februarie" and the Fradubio episode.
In "Spenser's Last Days: Ireland, Career, Mutabilitie, Allegory" J.B. Lethbridge joins Nohrnberg in speculative Spenserian biography. He argues that Spenser wrote more of The Faerie Queene than we now have; that much or all of it was lost in Tyrone's rebellion; and that during his final days in Cork or London Spenser created the Mutabilitie Cantos to put the work he had published into perspective. In its bleak account of order and disorder, time and change, the poem responds to, and transcends, a personal disaster. Lethbridge admits that the evidence for a very late date isn't conclusive, but argues that there is little external counter-evidence, and that we have no other surviving verse for several years before Spenser's death. The argument is intriguing, though it partly depends on reading the Cantos as more mature than the rest of the epic, as if Spenser's poetry had deepened with his tragedy. For me, by contrast, the Cantos have the same joky melancholy as the rest of FQ. Its in book 1 that Arthur tells Redcrosse that "nothing is sure that grows on earthly ground."
Elizabeth Porges Watson in "Mutabilitie's Debatable Land: Spensers Ireland and the Frontiers of Faerie" treats Mutabilitie as the poet-heroes' moment of return from Faerie, resembling the homecoming of a ballad character like Thomas Rymer. Ireland, she argues, is in Spenser's imagination a "Debatable Land" between Faerie and the actual world: Spenser's renaming of his Irish surroundings here and in CCCHA suggests an overflowing of the imagined world into the actual. It is also a place where the poet can develop an account of the fall and its consequences and, in natures final speech, reconcile himself to it. While I see little evidence of the hero's return from Faerie in the poem, this is an imaginative and searching treatment of what Spenser made of Ireland in his final poem.
John Moores carefully argued "Pastoral Motivation in The Shepheardes Calender" sees the Calender as a religious work, with the shepherds standing for poets and preachers. The poem lays out a spectrum of views of God and the world and an attendant sense of one's duties, from the hedonistic view that the world is meant for enjoyment (the less devout pastors of the moral eclogues) to a view of God as a "sovereign and actively providential deity" (Colin in "November" and "December"). Although his life never lives up to his vision, Colin moves from an initial state of selfish innocence to a final Christian realization. While the attitudes that Moore lays out here do illuminate particular exchanges, his larger emphasis tends in my view to reduce the poem to fairly conventional tract. Further, I feel that the poems extraordinary variety of attitudes and voices along with its comedy gets lost.
Thomas Herron's "Plucking the Perrot: Muiopotmos and Irish Politics" argues that Muiopotmos allegorizes the fall of Sir John Perrot, Lord Deputy of Ireland, who was convicted in 1592 of treason. Herron associates Aragnoll with the Irish and Clarion with Perrot: "We see how Clarion-Perrot, a weak and arrogant but not entirely guilty soul, becomes caught in a sticky web of intelligence and intrigue to the point where it proves his downfall." (117) Herron supports his hypothesis with parallels, linguistic or historical, between the events of the epyllion and incidents in Anglo-Irish history and culture. This essay is deeply knowledgeable about Irish history but it would have benefited from cutting: its often hard to see the forest for the trees.
Graham Atkin in "Raleigh, Spenser and Elizabeth: Acts of Friendship in The Faerie Queene, Book IV" uses the Timias/Belphoebe relation in Book IV, to argue that friendship stabilizes "localized groups and eventually, by gradations, wider society" (195). Belphoebe, who has rejected Timias, is brought to an awareness of his plight by the dove, which Atkins sees as an version of Spenser himself, enabling Belphoebe to see the young squire without preconceptions, and to pity his grief. While some of Atkins's arguments are familiar, the essay illuminates the way book 4 connects the personal with the cosmic.
All in all this is a remarkably good collection.
William A. Oram
Smith College
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