Exemplary Spenser

Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in The Faerie Queene

Jane Grogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351937870
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exemplary Spenser analyses the didactic poetics of The Faerie Queene, renewing attention to its avowed attempt to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline" and examining how Spenser mobilises his pedagogic concerns through the reading experience of the poem. Grogan's investigation shows how Spenser transacts the public life of the nation heuristically, prompting a reflective reading experience that compels engagement with other readers, other texts and other political communities. Negotiating between competing pedagogical traditions, she shows how Spenser's epic challenges the more conservative prevailing impulses of humanist pedagogy to espouse a radical didacticism capable of inventing a more active and responsible reader. To this end, Grogan examines a wide variety of Spenser's techniques and sources, including Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy and the powerful visually-couched epistemological paradigms of early modern culture, ekphrasis among them. Importantly, Grogan examines how Spenser's didactic poetics was crucially shaped by readings of the Greek historian Xenophon's Cyropaedia, a text and influence previously overlooked by critics. Grogan concludes by reading the last book of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of Courtesy, as an attempt to reconcile his own didactic sources and poetics with the more recent tastes of his contemporaries for a courtesy theory less concerned with "vertuous and gentle discipline". Returning to the early modern reading experience, Grogan shows the sophisticated intertextual dexterity that goes into reading Spenser, where Spenserian pedagogy lies not simply in the textual body of the poem, but also in the act of reading it.

Chapter 1
To Fashion a Gentleman or Noble Person: Xenophon and English Protestant Poetics

Authorising the Letter to Ralegh

False trails and phantom guides abound in the critical pursuit of Spenserian poetics, and not just in The Faerie Queene. The tale of wilfully insufficient metapoetic commentary begins with E.K.'s erratic glosses and Epistie to Gabriel Harvey in The Shepheardes Calender (1579). The complex relations between text and image in this work betray the scrupulous care taken by printer and poet in producing it. Yet the inconsistent scholarship of the glosses and the avuncular posturing of the Epistle severely compromise the authority of E.K.'s paratextual commentary. If many of the interpretative difficulties posed by the paratexts of Spenser's first major work have their roots in the uncertainty of E.K.'s identity, the Letter to Ralegh proves even less tractable despite being signed by the author himself. The considerable textual and semantic problems with the Letter are by now notorious: that it appears only in the first (1590) edition of The Faerie Queene and not in the 1596 edition (thought by some to have been supervised by Spenser at the printing house); that it appears after the first three books, rather than prefacing them; that its account of the poem diverges in certain key respects from the poem itself.¹ The textual difficulties are matched by the challenges internal to the Letter: its inconsistencies, trickeries and bold, sweeping claims. Indeed, problem-solving remains the dominant mode of criticism of the Letter, turning critics into parodies of the knights of The Faerie Queene itself. That those problems and obstacles are designed to find some accommodation in the intellectual culture and literary experiences of its first readers is my first assumption; in this, I travel some distance with Paul Suttie and his recent argument that the poem supplies all of the cues necessary to deciphering its allegory within the world of Faeryland itself.² But where Suttie uses this approach to marginalise the Letter to Ralegh and the terms it proffers towards understanding the poem, I read the Letter as both illustrative of and continuous with the poem it accompanies, in all its poetic complexity. This chapter therefore situates the Letter in its immediate literary and generic context, and undertakes a fresh reading of its poetic principles, to argue that it remains a crucial guide to the poetics of Spenser's poem, one with a more organic relation to the poem than has previously been accepted. I will argue that it operates not just by stating but also by embodying the principles it describes. Exposition meets illustration, exhortation meets demonstration in the Letter, movements that are absolutely characteristic of Spenser's didactic poetics throughout The Faerie Queene.

In the past twenty years or so, critics have (with some success) sought to establish the significance of the Letter by teasing out the convoluted bibliographical history of the 1590 and 1596 texts, ultimately attributing its idiosyncrasies to economic or political expediencies. Its place at the end of the first three Books in 1590 impels these tales of hasty expediencies - sometimes bungled - whether by poet and/or printer.³ But the position of the Letter is further complicated by its intimate bibliographical and lexical associations with a volatile mix of dedicatory sonnets and commendatory verses. All commendatory and ten of the dedicatory verses appear on the same sheet as the Letter (pp. 1-8), and the continuity is reinforced in the imagery of the dedicatory sonnets. As in the Letter, the dedicatory verses endorse an ethic in which 'Precedent' ('Norris') and 'braue ensample of long passed daies' ('Cumberland') rather than rules of conduct give best guidance to impressionable young gentlemen. Further imagery and language typical of the 'continued Allegory' advertised in the Letter recur throughout the verses: the 'shady vele' ('Oxford'), 'dim vele' ('Burghley'), and hard-won, even 'wilde fruit' ('Ormond') shrouded by lush, green canopy. Similarly, the dedicatory verses also expand upon the explanations of the Letter to Ralegh to situate the poem politically, geographically, historically and poetically: written on 'saluage soyl,' this is an improving poem of state, of praise, of honour, of glorious heroic pursuits, of high literary tradition, one which follows 'all the antique Poets historicall' (Letter, p. 737).

Then, mysteriously, all but three commendatory verses by Ralegh and Harvey were omitted from the 1596 edition.⁴ Later, the posthumous 1609 folio (which included the Mutabilitie Cantos for the first time) omitted the Letter and dedicatory verses but included the three commendatory verses of 1596. It was not until the 1611 folio of collected works that the Letter to Ralegh returned, together with the dedicatory and commendatory verses. (Spenser's other works were also reprinted individually at various stages between 1611 and 1617 to be gathered in collected works that were reprinted as the demand arose.⁵) Nevertheless, early readers seem to have continued to associate the Letter and verses with the poem: at least one copy (British Library ms 686. g.21) reintroduced them by binding in the relevant gathering (2P1-8) from the 1590 edition to the 1596 First Part.

The political hazards and improprieties of re-printing the dedicatory verses have come to take most of the blame for the exclusion of the Letter to Ralegh in 1596. Walsingham, Hunsdon and Grey were dead by 1596, but if (as it seems) obvious and dangerous mistakes of omission and hasty inclusion were made during the printing of the dedicatory materials in 1590, neither printer nor poet may have wished to renew the memory of those offences, let alone reproduce the evidence.⁶ Other extra-textual political issues dog the Letter itself: by late 1595 its dedicatee was in disgrace, his costly exploits in Guiana having alienated him from the Queen's affections even more than his imprudent secret marriage of a few years earlier. Ralegh's inappropriateness as a talisman and advertised friend by 1596 was evident to all: dedications of books to him had dried up and only the most optimistic of reporters from Virginia or Guiana were brave enough to dedicate their works to him.⁷ That the Letter might be excluded on such strategic grounds is contradicted, however, by Ralegh's still-visible presence as 'W.R.,' author of two of the commendatory verses that survive at the end of the First Part, one of which his widow was proud to celebrate in the copy of The Faerie Queene owned by her son, Carew.⁸ Furthermore. Spenser continued to support Ralegh, through his favourable allegories of Timias in the Second Part, and as the dedicatee and 'shepheard of the Ocean' (1.66) of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe.⁹ Alongside these theories, and without necessarily compromising them, a relatively straightforward explanation for the Letter's 1596 exclusion suggests itself: the paratextual materials had already served their function and were now unnecessary to readers who wished to continue reading a text they had already enjoyed with all its intriguing paratexts. Indeed, in minimising the paratextual material, Spenser made no appeals to new readers, and as his next new works, Amoretti (1595) and the View of the Present State of Ireland (entered in the Stationers' Register in 1598) testify, he had moved onto other genres and concerns by then. The obvious continuity between the first and last three Books is itself sufficient to indicate a coherent conception of the work, one in which the Letter to Ralegh had already played its major rôle. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that by 1596 the Letter was not necessary to the edition: The Faerie Queene (and indeed Spenser himself) had acquired sufficient cultural prestige to make a defensive letter of explanation redundant, particularly to readers already acquainted with its contents, and its influence on the poem had already generated a shape and structure and vocabulary that would continue into Books IV-VI. (The Mutabilitie Cantos, however, seems (quite literally) to be a different story entirely.)

Bibliographical or historical examinations alone, therefore, have not yielded clear answers to the questions of why the Letter was omitted in 1596, or how significant that omission might be, or indeed why it was positioned at the end of Book III in the first place. Recent critical work suggests that any answers are likely to reveal more about the vicissitudes of the London printhouses than about Spenser's authorial design.¹⁰ And ultimately, as Gordon Teskey reminds us, the "positionality" of the Letter and the other paratexts is now lost to us (as it probably was even in 1596) after its place at the end of Books I—III was nullified by the appearance of another three Books and its disappearance from that text.¹¹ At this stage, then, it seems more productive to consider how the Letter, as it stood, might have spoken to its first readers. After all, the bibliographical uncertainty of the Letter is only matched by inconsistencies and ironies within the Letter's declarations, complexities that have hitherto been obscured by the intricacies of its textual issues. The following sections look to the form, language and content of the Letter itself to understand its significance and the kinds of challenges it poses. What emerges from this approach is the realisation that the Letter, as much as the poem itself, produces a fictional world within which Spenser's readers are fashioned and educated as better readers and better people.

Going Postal

In his 1606 conduct manual, James Cleland advises his young gentlemen readers to read their worthy books exactly as the author directs them:

begin in reading as yee were taught in hearing, at the Compend of the whole booke, which is the Epistle or preface made of purpose and dedicated vnto you, to the ende yee may have a general or confused notio[n] therof, as a man hath in his minde or table book of the way, whe[n] he goeth from London to Edinburgh, and as he learneth the waie in going and knoweth everie cittie and towne more distinctly then before, so shal you vnderstande your authors meaning the better and more plainelie.¹²

At first glance (and despite its appearance at the end of Book III), Spenser's Letter to Ralegh presents itself as just this kind of straightforward authorial explanation 'for that it giueth great light to the Reader' (Letter, p. 737). It promises itself as a key to the poem, a genial exposition of its intentions and methodologies. The reader is informed that he or she will be 'fashioned' by reading the poem, and that such 'doctrine by ensample', will operate primarily through the narrative ('historicall fiction') and its 'image[s]' of knights who are 'patrones' of twelve virtues ostensibly 'deuised' by Aristotle. But having read the first three Books, the diligent reader might struggle to recognise this unity of vision and practice. Discrepancies of subject and style abound, manipulations of fictional time puzzle, and enough naked ladies and lustful dalliances to worry humanist pedagogues cast doubt on Spenser's proclaimed didacticism. While the Letter proposes a stable template upon which, it claims, every book is styled, departures from it do occur.¹³ Moreover, the Letter itself invites distrust when after the initial promises of clarifying matters for the reader, it then steers clear away from prescriptiveness. from 'doctrine by rule', from the kind of programmatic glosses and interpretations Sir John Harington would provide to guide readings of his translation of the Orlando furioso a year later.¹⁴ Spenser's reader will struggle to get to Edinburgh or any other city of the mind from this confusing map.

The mixed genre of the letter is the source of many of its challenges. An authorial preface positioned askew, it crosses the familiar letter with a defence of poetry. The one produces a genial and privileged instructive situation; the other establishes the literary credentials of the poem. And yet, because this very hybrid was such a common defensive manoeuvre in writing of the period, Spenser's Letter to Ralegh faces the added challenge that such epistolary poetic defences had become cheapened and predictable. How, then, was the 'new Poete' Spenser to distinguish his daring national epic from run-of-the-mill texts that also made their grand claims in the hybrid form of the epistolary defence?

Separately, the rhetorical and pedagogic advantages of familiar letter and defence of poetry were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Misreading Spenser
• 1 To Fashion a Gentleman or Noble Person: Xenophon and English Protestant Poetics
• 2 Spenser's 'Gallery of Pictures'
• 3 'Bad Art' or Good Readers? Spenserian Ekphrasis
• 4 Making a Virtue of Courtesy
• Epilogue: Civil Conversation after Cyrus
• Bibliography
• Index