“But wisht, that with that shepheard he mote dwelling share”: Spenser with Jacques Rancière

Abstract

Drawing on The Faerie Queene and Aisthesis, this essay brings Spenser and Rancière together to demonstrate a scenographic style they share. The scenographic style starts with an idea and interweaves that idea with the interpretive network that gives it meaning. Both writers engage concepts at work in ways that cannot be appreciated in advance of the context they appear in. Writing in this descriptive style requires attending to dispositions—how things are arranged in relation to other things. Despite their differences on how to best imagine such dispositions, each author overwhelms and refigures any available criteria for forming normative critical judgments by positioning together objects that typically don’t belong alongside each other. I propose Rancière’s word “reverie” for moments in Spenser’s poetry where the plot relaxes in favor of a daydream-like entertaining of new dispositional arrangements. The unlikely alliance of these two authors is itself a scene of missed understanding (“la mésentente”) opening up new forms of belonging.