Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton and Edmund Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory. (Reviews).

Kenneth Borris, Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii + 6 illus + 320 pp. $70. ISBN: 0-521-78129-9.

Jennifer Klein Morrison and Matthew Greenfield, eds. Edmund Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory.

Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. xi + 22 illus. + 201 pp. $69.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0227-3.

These complementary volumes explore the relationship between history and allegory from strikingly antithetical perspectives. In Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature, Kenneth Borris characterizes heroic poetry in terms of a continuous descent from Homer and Virgil to Sidney, Spenser, and Milton. In contrast, the Spenser essays collected by Jennifer Klein Morrison and Matthew Greenfield emphasize history as a site of disjunction, conflict, and irresolution. Both books, despite their divergent critical orientations, share a commitment to specifically literary language that offers an implicit -- and sometimes explicit -- challenge to the recent emphasis on material culture.

Borris casts his study as a riposte to the widely held view that allegory ended with Spenser. According to Borris, a later distaste for the mode has encouraged modern critics to disregard the allegorical basis of works written after 1600. Repudiating the familiar account of how poets turned from allegory to more mimetic modes of narrative that laid the basis for the English novel, Borris argues instead that allegory constituted such an integral part of writing in the heroic tradition that virtually any work modeled on Graeco-Roman epic was bound to be allegorical. Borris sees allegory as a "parasitic form" whose ability to insert itself within such aesthetically and ideologically permeable "generic hosts" as the heroic poem insured its longevity (5).

Borris' view of allegory as a mode capable of "polysemic expression" poses a refreshing challenge to the stereotypical emphasis on allegorical rigidity (9). But his canonization of Sidney and Milton as "major allegorists of English literature" may unsettle readers who associate allegory with extended passages of prosopopoeia or with a text's location of meaning beyond the terms of its immediate fiction. In three introductory chapters, Borris defines allegory instead in terms of its didactic capabilities. The book's strongest chapter - a survey of attitudes toward epic and allegory in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century continental criticism - argues that "the widespread assumption that poetry has personally and socially ameliorative purposes strongly tended to foster and privilege allegory... [by] authorizing the story through more or less latent 'higher meaning"' (22).

As the book unfolds, equating allegory with literary didacticism allows Borris to find allegory where few readers might expect it. Two chapters on the Arcadia, for example, counter the view that Sidney rejected allegory in favor of exemplary imitation. Borris notes that Sidney praised allegorical fables and parables in the Defense of Poetry, a work whose championship of poetry over history and philosophy depends on literature's ability to impart hidden wisdom. He treats the Arcadia itself as an extended allegory relating psychological conflicts to political disorder within the Arcadian state. Whereas previous critics contrasted Sidney's mimesis with Spenser's allegory, Borris characterizes Spenser as Sidney's principal literary inheritor. Borris' two chapters on The Faerie Queene center on Book VI's Legend of Courtesy, the section of the poem that critics have sometimes cited as evidence that Spenser himself, the English allegorist par excellence, abandoned allegory before he could finish his great national epic. While conceding that Spenser, in anticipation of Milton, interiorized the national matter of epic, Borris argues that Book VI's analysis of private virtue depends on a threefold allegorical response to Renaissance moral philosophy, faculty psychology, and theology. His discussion of how Spenser focuses "a select heroic community of idealized 'Englishness' ... in Arthur and his glorious aspirations" sets the stage for a radically Christocentric reading of Paradise Lost (180). According to Borris, "Milton subtly retains allegorical technique for articulating the complex interconnections of his Christian heroic ideal, whereby persons interrelate as members of the mystical body and refer to the Son as head" (215). Just as the mystical church subsumes all believers into a common identity with Christ, the story of Christ's heroic self-sacrifice subsumes the poem's particular narrative strands into a single religious allegory.

By arguing that Sidney, Spenser, and Milton derive their heroic fictions from a common, Christian allegorical tradition, Borris sometimes effaces crucial distinctions between them. Spenserians, for example, are likely to contest Borris' claim that the eschatoloical unity between Christ and His redeemed servants is "the ultimate significance of Arthur's quest for Gloriana" (179). This reading strangely conflates Spenser's dynastic interests with the Miltonic longing for the day when "God shall be all in all" (Paradise Last 3.341). In general, the book would have benefitted from a more profound engagement with recent studies of classical imitation by Barbara Pavlock, Theresa Krier, Mihoko Suzuki, and several other scholars.

Morrison and Greenfield have based their admirable collection of Essays on Culture and Allegory on papers first delivered at Yale University's 1996 conference on "The Faerie Queene in the World." In an introductory essay, Green field joins Borris in offering a broader definition of allegory, in this case one that encompasses "cultural description as a form of allegory" (4). The volume's dual concern with poetics and with cultural theory derives from the editors' conception of Spenser as poet, allegorist, and proto-anthropologist: "Spenser is not only a powerful theorist of allegory and poetics more generally, he is also a profound and subtle ethnographer of both England and Ireland" (4). The attention to poetics wards off the reductiveness that sometimes characterizes discussions of Spenser and Irish politics. Some of the essays are more polished than others, but even those that still read like conference talks are provocative and illuminating.

The volume opens with three essays by Leonard Barkan, Donald Chenev, and Maureen Quilligan that challenge the notion of the Renaissance as a point of distinct cultural rupture. While Barkan explores the relationship between the visual and the visionary in a meditation on Spenser's intertextual debts to Du Bellay, Cheney traces Horatian echoes in The Shepheardes Calender's epilogue. Quilligan's essay shifts to a more explicit concern with culture by examining Spenser's use of the woman-warrior topos in terms of the contrast between the conquest slavery that figured in classical societies and the mercantile slavery practiced by early modern Europeans.

A second group of essays by Richard McCabe, Linda Gregerson, and Nicholas Canny focuses directly on Spenser and Ireland. McCabe's brilliant essay "Translated States: Spenser and Linguistic Colonialism" treats the English response to the Irish language as a synecdoche for more general anxieties about cultural contamination. As McCabe argues in his concluding paragraphs, Elizabethan ethnographers, including Spenser, sensed that contemporary Ireland suspiciously resembled early Britain, and that contact with the Irish might expose the fragility of England's own veneer of civilization. Pairing Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland with Milton's History of Britain, Gregerson explores how Protestantism's internationalist claims simultaneously compromised and reinforced an emerging view of England as an elect nation. Reading the View and The Faerie Queene against the backdrop of humanist writings on war, Canny rejects the notion that Spenser only advocated violence in the later, allegedly disillusioned sta ges of his career. Canny argues that Spenser's belief that violence might advance reform remained consistent throughout his mature writings, and that his sentiments were generally in harmony with those of other leading European humanists.

Three final essays by Paul Alpers, Susanne L. Wofford, and Kenneth Gross return to the problems of Spenser's allegory. After a general discussion of Book V's changing critical fortunes, Alpers reflects on tensions between "the poet's speaking in the first person and his appearing in specific represented roles" (130). Wofford's broadly ranging essay on "Arthur and the Moral Economy of The Faerie Queene" begins with a close reading of the dragon crest on Arthur's helmet but unfolds as a highly suggestive treatment of the poem's classical, biblical, Tudor, and Celtic matrices. Gross' essay on "The Postures of Allegory" builds similarly from Spenser's personification of Envie in the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins to a larger consideration of allegory's paradoxical identity as a "mode of both purification and contamination, caught between idealism and illusion, given to posing as both a veiling and an unveiling, both humanizing and dehumanizing" (171). The volume concludes with Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley's "A View of the Present State of Spenser Studies," a critique of recent Spenser scholarship cast as a rollicking parody of Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland. The dialogue serves as the perfect conclusion for a volume committed to Spenser's poetry in its full tonal range from gravity to mirth.