"The World's a Garden": Garden Poetry of the English Renaissance.

There are marked differences among disciplines, institutions, and nations in the generic requirements of the doctoral dissertation, but it is probably a good thing that apprentice scholars are asked to demonstrate their acquaintance with the learned tradition of their subjects. It is probably also a good thing that the dissertation is no longer universally required to be "an original contribution to knowledge," as untrodden patches in the ever-expanding and increasingly specialized field of literary scholarship have become harder for the novice to discover.

Ilva Beretta's book on late Renaissance poetry which is about or is set in gardens is published as a dissertation in the Studia Anglistica of her university, and exhibits the virtues and disadvantages of that form. It is clearly structured and expounded, comments on a vast body of literary and intellectual history with admirable economy and point, and it supports its critical arguments with a wide range of citation to both major and gratifyingly unhackneyed primary texts.

Its thesis is grounded in the largely unexceptionable contention that a Renaissance poet writing about or as if from a garden was working with a store of inherited ideas and images that were themselves the products of a mixed lineage, descending from classical and Biblical ancestors. Within these genealogies she distinguishes, in the classical line, between characteristics of visions of the Golden Age and the attributes of mythological locales such as the Hesperides.

Beretta treats the tropes and concepts of the "Biblical" tradition as if they were fundamentally Christian, so that the literary garden inhabits a divided ethical universe, in part an earthly representation of the promised heavenly paradise and in part the setting for sensual temptation and a perpetual reminder of the Fall. Despite the fact that her primary texts here are inevitably Genesis and the Song of Songs, her discussion does not dwell on matters of exegesis and interpretation, nor on the literary (and other) relations between the two testaments. Although the ultimate intent of her argument is to demonstrate a change in the influence of literary tradition on "garden poetry" from the end of the sixteenth century through the early years of the seventeenth, and although fully a third of the book is taken up with a survey of classical, medieval and Renaissance writings in gardens, Beretta does not show any marked interest in the impress of cultural and historical difference on these admittedly entailed concepts. Thus, when dealing with the English poetry that occupies the major sections of "The World's a Garden," she juxtaposes texts from the mid-sixteenth century with Jacobean poems as if the difference between poet-courtiers imagining earthly paradises during the reign of Elizabeth I and those praising their mistresses as they strolled the alleys of a country-house garden had nothing to do with the "conditions of production" of such literature. Extensive contextualization is undoubtedly beyond the limits set by dissertation norms, which also tend to make inevitable a reliance on secondary sources and on generalizations derived from them.

Beretta's thesis is that early seventeenth-century garden poetry reveals poets' awareness of actual gardens, as distinguished from conventional elements drawn from the major classical and biblical literary traditions. She documents this with well-chosen and far-sought examples, from Spenser to Nicholas Breton to Nicholas Hookes to anonymous praisers of knots and borders, grottos and automata, all instances of the impulse to imitate the original creation in the microcosmic garden world. Beretta is thorough in her treatment of the many ways in which the Renaissance garden reflected both old doctrines and new aspirations in the continuing dialectic of Art and Nature; but she is less alert to the implications of the conscious ordering of what she calls the "physical" garden by literary and philosophical principles. The garden was itself "literary" in that its concrete realization was shaped by the ideas and conventions Beretta traces so assiduously; it is not surprising, then, if late Renaissance poetic gardens resemble actual gardens of the period. Both the "real" gardens and the "literary" ones are products of the same set of archetypes.

"The World's a Garden" is a useful survey of what has been written about the persistence of the idea of the garden in the western imagination; it relies heavily, as it should, on such authorities as John Dixon Hunt, Roy Strong, and Ernst Robert Curtius (the absence of Stanley Stewart's The Enclosed Garden and the work of William McClung is to be regretted, however). Its own contribution to our knowledge of this ever-crescent subject lies in bringing to light a number of little-known poems that demonstrate the complexities of "green thought" and the interplay between formal and intellectual design in the creation of both poems and gardens.

DONALD M. FRIEDMAN University of California, Berkeley