Temperate Conquests: Spenser and the Spanish New World & "The New Poet": Novelty and Tradition in Spenser's Complaints & Spenser and Biblical Poetics.

David Read, Temperate Conquests: Spenser and the Spanish New World

Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. 164 pp. $34.95. ISBN: 0-8143-2872-5.

Richard Danson Brown, "The New Poet": Novelty and Tradition in Spenser's Complaints

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999.x + 293 pp. $23.95. ISBN: 0-85323-813-8.

Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics

Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999.xiv + 210 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-8014-3679-6.

In Michael Frayn's 1999 novel Headlong, pursuing an interpretation through an allegorical landscape gets one "close to the edge of the dizzy precipice named You-can-fit-almost-anything-into-any-pattern-you-like-to-name" (178). Edmund Spenser's poetry has for centuries encouraged this sort of intellectual brinksmanship. Three new studies of his works all argue coherently for their patterns but maintain their footing on the firm ground of necessity variously well.

David Read explores how situations in Book Two of The Faerie Queene mirror those of the Spanish conquistadors, but Sir Guyon and Prince Arthur contrast with intemperate figures to suggest how creating an empire might be conducted in a more restrained, British way. Such an interpretation attends to the book's literal aspects, raking textual violence as real violence and landscapes as versions of actual geographies. Read carefully acknowledges his debt to Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning, but he distances his conclusions by "suggesting finally that a work like The Faerie Queene is by its nature divorced from actual politics and that its political impact, as such, is restricted to the field of literature" (19). Even more strongly, he separates his approach from later New Historicists who make Ireland the center of Spenser's imperial concerns. As Read argues, for the English to think about empire in the 1580s was inevitably to confront the Spanish precedent: "But because the identity of the English empire was so closely bound to a negative model ... the writers and thinkers who drafted schemes for the New World enterprise were faced with a conceptual void and the difficult task of filling it" (34). Guyon and Arthur do not so much prophetically predict the conduct of the British Empire as present the moral problems involved in the creation of the Spanish one.

It's an intriguing argument, especially because Read recognizes Spenser's focus, as historical allegorist, on "'pertinent generality' stressing how over what in his querying of human affairs" (16). To make his case, however, Read must often parallel events in Book Two with the Spaniards' American adventures. For example, in treating Pyrocles, Read acknowledges an allegory of sloth and wrath but wishes to compare Pyrocles' wounding by Furor's flaming brand to the effects of the poison arrows used by the native warriors -- and he cites Oviedo's Historia generaly natural de las Indias byway of Richard Eden's sixteenth-century translation. Yet it is Pyrocles' own servant Atin who has the actual poisoned arrows in the narrative, and Read backs away from his comparison, saying, "It is worth stressing not the precise connection between Pyrocles' wound and the poisoned arrows, but the... encounter... echoes a notorious. . . type of confrontation between conquistador and native in the New World" (59). Or again, when G uyon an his sea voyage in Canto Twelve, sees "a goodly ship... I Laden from far with precious merchandize" (2.12.19) sinking into the Quicksand of Unthriftyhead, "this argosy could readily be construed as hailing from Spain" (99). In these and other arguments, Spanish failings exemplify, plausibly, consequences of intemperance that fit under Spenser's general headings, but the Spanish linkage seldom appears a necessary one. A couple of asides go further astray, such as the implication that the 1596 Faerie Quenne ends with the Mutability Cantos (101).

And yet Read's eloquently written study contains a great deal of valuable information. The book would help anyone trying to gauge English reactions to the successes of the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century or trying to understand the sources on the subject available to an Elizabethan writer. Indeed, Read traces how Spenser may have had access to these sources, and it seems, finally, feasible but not conclusive that Spenser may have had the Spanish conquest in mind as among examples of intemperance.

Richard Danson Brown finds the ground for his interpretation of Spenser's 1591 Complaints in a concern with poetics, proposing that Spenser's use of the well-established complaint mode leads, first, to an impasse as the poet confronts the insufficiencies of both world-engaging humanist and world-denying Christian poetics, and then to a new but less reassuring representation of "the complexity of lived experience" (254). Brown's method imitates the movement of his argument, for his traditional literary historicism surprisingly produces a modern, relativistic view of the volume. This study steadies itself with careful reasoning, clarity, and a firm command of classical and medieval texts, and it resolves many of the more unsatisfactory aspects of the Complaints. Whether the readings truly root themselves in the tones of the poems and whether the pieces can legitimately be reordered and even redated, however, provide slipperier considerations.

Brown starts with the translations in the volume Virgils Gnat, where "Spenser made use and made sense of a literary past he admired artistically and disparaged doctrinally" (61), and Ruines of Rome, where Spenser adopts "Du Bellay's mantle as a new poet who will recover poetry's ancient power" (88). The Ruines of Time joins "a relatively uncritical confidence in 'eternizing,' and the need to make a more intellectually strenuous defence of poetry in the light of the Protestant suspicion that art is a mortal 'vanitie"' (131). The tension increases in The Teares of the Muses, which "demonstrates the fragility of traditional poetics in the face of cultural change" (134), making "Christian and humanist poetics.. . themselves diminished poetic alternatives" (165).

The larger thesis about the volume as a "deliberate grouping of poems" (31) builds on this impasse, with Mother Hubberds Tale and Muiopotmos embodying a new aesthetic. Brown, therefore, takes the dedication to Mother Hubberds Tale, "long sithens composed in the raw conceipt of my youth," as itself a fiction, and he would date this "sophisticated and mature performance in a low style" from the late 1580s (174-75). Certainly the Tale represents unsatisfying social complexity, as Brown says, but he claims, "We must now ask how the fable narrative fits in with the volume's overarching, self-conscious concern with poetry" (184) before establishing the "overarching" nature of that concern. And to see "the Fox and the Ape ... as amoral poets" (184) requires taking their intermittent albeit effective rhetorical displays as versions of poetics central to the text. Brown, however, convincingly points out that "The Court episode reveals that amoral skill can achieve actual power" (203).

The analysis of Muiopotmos darkens that light piece. To steer the poem toward poetics, Brown reads "His armour -- and its ultimate ineffectiveness -- [to suggest] that Clarion is symbolically a naive work of decorative art" (232). Aragnoll is an "artificer" too, a "malevolent" one (239), and "Like the world of art, which contains both Clarion's wings and Aragnoll's web, the natural order [the world of the garden] is both 'good or ill'"(235). In this way, and through the tapestries depicted in the verse, "The poem constitutes a realistic mimesis, which reverses Sidney's idea that a 'golden' didactic Art can improve on the 'brazen' world of Nature" (254).

Thus throughout the volume of Complaints, "Spenser moves away from traditional didacticism towards a new relativism" (258). This view, as the final chapter shows, can be applied to explain untidy threads of narrative in The Faerie Queene. Yet despite all the careful argumentation in Brown's study, the difficulties that a sitive poet faces when confronted with intractable material may not necessarily constitute a conscious new poetic.

Carol V. Kaske's Spenser and Biblical Poetics resembles Brown's study in that it examines oppositions within Spenserian texts and reaches a relativistic understanding of the poet's method, but she concentrates mainly on The Faerie Queene and meticulously grounds this relativism in historically situated practices of biblical interpretation. Thus her Spenserian poetics sound deconstructive, but her book explicitly addresses why this resemblance between sixteenth- and twentieth-century reading occurs and why it is not an identity. Indeed, the skillful coordination of various interpretive modes (including New Criticism and reader-response approaches) explains not only Spenser's method in particularly puzzling passages but the ways we may be tempted now to misread those puzzles.

What keeps Kaske away from the precipice of too-coherent interpretation is her ability to explain contradictions within Spenser's oeuvre without necessarily resolving them. This power comes from close attention to "both the Bible's stylistic features and Elizabethan ways of reading it" (3), that is, the Bible in the shapes that Spenser would have known it and the commentators to whom he would have had access at Cambridge in general and his own college, Pembroke: some patristic exegetes, some late medieval and sixteenth-century Romanist commentators, and the Protestant interpreters (5). When Kaske's way of reading Spenser includes "image-hopping" (21), between adjacent passages or distant ones, she can explain that such concordance-like reading is a type which Spenser himself would have known well. (A table at the back enumerates various commentaries at Cambridge during Spenser's enrollment there, though half-way through, the numbers for two of the catalogs listing the volumes are shifted confusingly one col umn to the left).

First, Kaske examines the biblical and Spenserian habit of presenting images in bono et in malo, like the dragon on top of Arthur's helmet and the dragons at the beginning and end of Book One. Not only does Kaske note such patterns of good and bad images in biblical commentary by discussing their compilation in distinctiones, she establishes that the particular images can be found as cruces in the Elizabethan understanding of biblical poetics. Kaske historicizes reader psychology in the responses to such splits, discussing the ways Spenser's readers might then and have recently reconciled them, and here she applies the sequence of reading to this concordantial style. An analysis of the abandoning of shields in Book Five, first by Sir Burbon and then by Artegall, leads to an accommodationist view of Spenser, reinforced in Book One by the Hermit Contemplation's evaluation of earthly and heavenly cities, voicing "a situational ethic, a historical relativism," which had been "applied to biblical hermeneutics" ( 95). This hermeneutics results in a view where Spenser is "promoting religious toleration" (97).

The next major section of Kaske's argument concerns contradictions between direct propositions, also finding antecedents in the Bible and biblical commentary. The works/free-will versus grace/predestination dispute occupies much of Kaske's attention. She does not "paper over" the reversals here, even though she explains at which points Spenser does, and also when he does not. Some of the contradictions are supplementary or corrective, copying, for example, the relation of the New Testament to the Old. But free will and predestination are ultimately irreconcilable: "By echoing such works-righteous Scriptures as well as predestinarian ones, Spenser obeys Melanchthon's principle of echoing the Bible even where it contradicts itself, thus making contradiction part of biblical poetics" (118).

A short final chapter looks in particular at Guyon's encounter with Amavia in Book Two and at the biblical technique of tapinosis, "a breach of decorum between image and meaning" (174). Unexpected juxtapositions include the positive bloodstain on Ruddymane's hands and the fatal nature of the pure well. Here, if anywhere, Kaske's reasoning, though carefully backed with biblical commentaries, may stretch after the allegorical reading as she interprets the well in terms of Mosaic law. Yet, on the whole, Kaske has brilliantly and winningly explained sources of Spenser's poetics and the relation of those to our own expectations.