Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context. .

Robert Matz. Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context. (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 37.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xi + 188 pp. index. bibl. $54.95. ISBN: 0-521-66080-7.

The title of this slender book does not indicate that it focuses narrowly on the social aspects of the Horatian conjunction of pleasure and profit in Elyot's Boke Named the Governour, Sidney's Defence of Poetry, and the second book of Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Only Sidney's Defence is primarily concerned to defend literature, and Spenser's defence of his poem (The Faerie Queene 4. proem) against the charge of seducing the young with the pleasing bait of love instead of disciplining them in virtue is not even mentioned. Rather than a study of-sixteenth-century literary theory this book is an exploration of the ambivalence of Elyot, Sidney, and Spenser about their social position as writers. Matz studies the ways in which these authors grapple with class-specific kinds of pleasure and profit as they try to find a place for humanist study and literature that will satisfy both aristocracy and middle class.

In addition to seeking to demonstrate how the three works under discussion reflect "conflicts in standards of aristocratic conduct during the social and cultural transitions of the sixteenth century" (3) Matz uses Bourdieu to critique the New Historicist exaggeration of the political power of literature. Following Bourdieu, Matz distinguishes cultural from economic and political capital, and this distinction serves as a basis for his attempt in the final chapter to defend literary study in today's university by arguing for a relative autonomy of literature and the pleasurable profit of studying it.

The three main chapters of the book shift away from New Histoticist concerns about the relationship between literature and political power to the place of literature in elite Tudor society over the course of the sixteenth century. Matz wants to show the "complex and contradictory ways" (20) in which pleasure and profit functioned. Elyot tried to establish the pleasure and profit of study in an effort to transform a warrior, courtly elite into intellectual, administrative one. Sidney tried to defend the courtly pleasure of poetry to promote warrior service and to mediate between his Protestant and courtly allegiances. Spenser intensified the critique of the court while seeking the courtly pleasures of leisure and consumption as a source for poetic authority.

Despite some valuable discussions of particular passages, Matz's book is a disappointment. As he acknowledges in his first footnote, Horatian teaching and delighting were a commonplace in the sixteenth century, and the restriction to his three authors is too limiting. The only other author treated in any detail is Stephen Gosson but mainly as a foil to Sidney. Matz barely mentions the Horatian topos in Gosson, apparent from part of the title (not quoted by Matz) of A discourse as pleasaunt for Gentlemen that favour learning, as profitable for all that wyll follow vertue. The quotation on the title page from Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes 1.6 (also unmentioned), further demonstrates the importance of mingling pleasure and profit to Gosson. But this importance is not analyzed.

In addition, Matz's use of categories such as warrior elite, the court, and Protestant industry can be too rigid. To characterize Gosson as nostalgic for a feudal, warrior elite Matz relies on a description of "old England's martial discipline" (60) -- without noting that Gosson is paraphrasing Cassius Dio's description of the inhabitants of Britain at the time of Septimius Severus' expedition. A feudal aristocracy was not active in Britain in A.D. 208. Nor does Gosson's "Leaue Rome" have anything to do with a "Protestant ethos of discipline and service" (61). In the paragraph preceding the one excerpted by Matz, Gosson gives several examples of the treatment of poets and players in ancient (not Catholic) Rome.

Finally, the book begins inauspiciously by misunderstanding the Horatian passage that provides its point of departure. Horace does not present an "either/or." "Aut prodesse. . . aut delectare" (words which Matz uses in the title to his introduction) are clearly the first two elements of a tricolon that culminates in "aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae" (Arspoetica, 333-34). It is equally clear a few lines later that this third alternative -- to combine pleasure and profit - is the one that wins everyone's vote.