The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature: Kisses of their Mouths. (Reviews).

Noam Flinker, The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature: Kisses of their Mouths.

(Studies in Renaissance literature, 3.) Cambridge, MA: D. S. Brewer, 2000. viii + 173 pp. $75. ISBN: 0-85991-586-7.

I tell my children that I'm happy to talk about sex: along with God and money, it is among the most fascinating of conversational topics. Flinker gets to talk about not just sex, but God as well: the essence of his "Canticles tradition" is "the balances between holy and sexual, oral and written, lyric and apocalyptic" (91).

According to Flinker, the Canticles tradition begins with ancient Near Eastern poetic texts which bear striking parallels to the Song of Songs and celebrate a sacred wedding or other cultic rite. Plinker thinks that the biblical Canticles (lyric rather than apocalyptic, carnal rather than holy) secularize these pagan analogues (the second stage of this tradition). In the third stage, Jewish and Christian interpreters spiritualize the poem through allegorical reading. (Flinker suggests that commentators' shrill insistence on their "spiritual" reading, together with the appearance of language borrowed from the Canticles in secular literature, testify to a primarily oral, competing tradition which read the Canticles in a "carnal" way.)

Flinker's first case study for English Renaissance literature, William Baldwin's Canticles, or Balades of Salomon, continues the tradition of spiritualizing: it recreates the biblical text as an allegory of the Protestant Reformation. Flinker has ambitious claims for the influence of Baldwin's innovative format, experimental verse forms, and support for Edwardian religious reforms.

It's easy to see Baldwin fitting into the "Canticles tradition" at its allegorical stage. But from the mid-sixteenth century, the "line of development" "moved on different planes" (160). Spenser's Amoretti, the subject of the second chapter, develops the tradition through allusions to the language of the Canticles; it also brings romantic love and Christian commitment into the same poem. The link Flinker suggests between the Canticles tradition and the sequence seems to be that Spenser saw sexual love as being compatible with holiness (presumably analogous to the inclusion of a secular love lyric in the canon of sacred scripture) - but the chapter does not specifically relate Amoretti to contemporary developments in interpreting the biblical book.

The third chapter, "Erased Convention in Venus and Adonis," finds that, despite contemporary Renaissance interest in pagan mysteries surrounding the cult of Adonis, Shakespeare declined to develop any mythic link between spirituality and sex. But with chapter four, "The Spenserian Canticles of Robert Aylett: The Protestant Tradition Continues," Flinker focuses on a little-known versification of the Canticles which offers an allegory of salvation. Lovely women with names like Meeknesse and Humilitie "appeal to [Aylett's] narrator as attractive women before he can learn anything about their allegorical import" (103). Flinker explains that this "movement from sexual to holy love" develops Aylett's point: that "man's sexual nature is a hint of the sweetness of Christ's love" (103, 106). Aylett "replaced the carnality of the original with allegory" (108), which places him, like Baldwin, within stage three of the tradition's development.

With his chapter on the Ranters' use of the language of the Canticles to publicize their program (to promote personal holiness by undertaking acts of illicit sex in a spiritual" frame of mind) Flinker provides a fascinating counterpoint to the chapters which investigate literary texts. This less-familiar material, considered in its literary and interpretive contexts, positions him well for the book's last chapter, 'Adam's Revised Rant with Eve." Adam's "carnal approach to Eve in his love song in Book 5," which echoes the same phrases from Canticles as some Ranter texts, "[insists] upon the validity of Ranter positions in a prelapsarian world" (145). Thus Milton affirms the goodness of sex and remains faithful to his libertarian political views while warning against the deceptiveness of lust in postlapsarian times.

Flinker writes well, and I admire the range of his examples as well as his subtlety of analysis. But his discussion of the language which served his exemplars in describing both spiritual passion and sexual desire could have benefited from an engagement with historical insights like, for instance, Debora Shuger's in The Renaissance Bible. His sensitivity to points of connection between the varied writers he sees as representing the Canricles tradition leads him at times into rarefied abstractions. But his study is valuable, no less in its ambitious claims than in its careful attention to minor poets and spokesmen and -women for minority religious views.