Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age.

Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman, eds., Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age

Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000.288 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 0-8131-2126-4.

This rich, if occasionally uneven, collection makes a strong case for seeing in Spenser (and Spenser studies) a productive staging-ground for a variety of concerns central to early modern studies today: colonialism, gender, literary history, and self-fashioning, to name but a few. Roland Greene's suggestive and sometimes elusive essay sets the terms for much of the volume through its opening question: "What is a world in The Faerie Queene?" (9). Greene answers his own query by locating the text in relation to two opposed ways of "worldmaking": the ambassadorial (which emphasises plurality, difference, and alterity) and the immanentist (whose impulse is towards unity, singularity, and identity). In his view, Spenser is a complex immanentist. Different and multiple worlds come into view, opposing and destablizing identity through mixture and miscegenation, but, ultimately, these are narratively "subducted" (16) back into the poem's unitary world -- though, as the metaphor suggests, the tectonic faultlines persi st. A number of the essays that follow could be seen to engage and question Greene's final turn to "immanentism" by showing how Spenser self-consciously emphasises the impossibility of turning alterity into identity. A particularly fine example is Mary Ellen Lamb's discussion of how The Faerie Queene merges a written classical tradition (marked as masculine) with an oral practice of telling fairy tales (that derives from popular culture and Elizabethan childrearing practices, and is marked as feminine). Rather than simply evoking the latter negatively in order to "subduct" it into the dominant (which he also does), Spenser preserves through fairy tales a "cognitive dissonance" (98) that refuses to submit to the power of (allegorical) meaning and the classical tradition.

A related focus on the ambiguity of Spenser's "worlds" and "worldmaking" techniques is shared by the numerous essays on the uses to which Spenser was put in the seventeenth century. Susanne Woods, Jacqueline T. Miller, and Shannon Miller trace the ways in which Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth respond to and appropriate Spenser as a poetic model. They reveal not only how women's writing drew on his texts as a means of self-legitimation, but also show how the very provisionality or instability of these later constructions of self and world lead us back to ambiguities in the Spenserian oeuvre. Spenser's theological impact constitutes the subject of essays by John King (on the relationship between Milton's Sin and Spenser's Error) and John Watkins (on the "afterlife" of the millenarian tensions that underwrite the conflicted treatment of Queen Elizabeth). Elizabeth Jane Bellamy and David J. Baker turn to Spenser's own uses of history, showing how a constitutive indeterminacy -- in the representation of "India" and of "Britain" respectively -- uncovers a "political unconscious" (182) that both supports and fractures Spenser's proto-colonial and proto-national project. Finally, as Heather Dubrow's wide-ranging contribution argues, the difficulty of policing the boundaries or frontiers among different worlds -- the domestic, the inside, the agrarian, the national, and the literary -- expresses itself through the trope of the "invasive thief" (211), which appears in a climactic passage of book six.

The remaining essays seem more disparate, though David Quint's piece (paired with Greene's) perhaps provides a sense of shared interests. In Archimago -- Spenser's "dark double," in the editors' phrase -- Quint locates a parodic and prophetic link to the poem's subsequent narrative as well to the literary and historical antecedents that The Faerie Queene feeds on and disguises. The idea of a doubling of language, specifically the citing of a proverb and its echoes within a broader culture, becomes significant for Judith Anderson, who traces how Spenser participates in a "multiplicity or qualified indeterminacy of self and voice" (229). Michael Schoenfeldt's essay on the grotesque body and its disiplining in turn pursues the question of self-fashioning in terms of the emergence of a fragile and provisional inwardness. The literary historical dimension of Quint's argument loosely connects it to essays by William J. Kennedy (on the literary history and functions of the Squire of Dames) and Anne Lake Prescott (o n how the tension between "epic and Eros" in Ronsard's literary career reveals a continuity with Spenser's own, seemingly unique, literary concerns).

While some of its essays still bear the marks of having been conference papers, this substantial and diverse collection both engages and provokes thought. Coincidentally, I write this review as I teach Spenser in an undergraduate course, and the discussion in the classroom has been the richer for my having read these essays.