eneralizations about developments in one’s discipline both require and repay substantial caution. Evaluating the status and influence of our own specialties and subfields can readily engender an overestimation of their significance or, in contrast, an exaggerated representation of oneself and one’s fellow travelers as a disrespected minority, a narrative written by and about the slippage between embattled and embittered. Moreover, for all the widespread commitment to transhistorical global analyses, such generalizations still too often representwhat happens in one’s own country or circles or favorite texts as typical. But even attempts to adduce global perspectives more fully entail their own risks, notably observations based on limited knowledge of the languages and cultures in question. And Jahan Ramazani, one of the leading lights in transhistorical and transcultural analyses, has cogently demonstrated that neglecting the local when studying the global can obscure much of what it claims to illuminate. The essays in this cluster generally meet such challenges successfully, and I attempt to do so as well. Yet these potential problems remain clear and present dangers in this and similar academic work. If the literal bottom lines in this response enumerate recommendations for future studies of lyric, this initial paragraph launches that list with a recommendation adapted from Spenser: be bold, be bold, be not too bold. Without ignoring such risks, however, one can confidently assert that these five authors are apt choices for reexamining lyric, that this is an apposite juncture for that project as well as for advancing many related issues, and that Spenser Studies is a surprisingly appropriate venue for such endeavors. To begin with, the qualifications of these five scholars for this project are
{"title":"Afterword: Reinterpreting Lyric","authors":"H. Dubrow","doi":"10.1086/717197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717197","url":null,"abstract":"eneralizations about developments in one’s discipline both require and repay substantial caution. Evaluating the status and influence of our own specialties and subfields can readily engender an overestimation of their significance or, in contrast, an exaggerated representation of oneself and one’s fellow travelers as a disrespected minority, a narrative written by and about the slippage between embattled and embittered. Moreover, for all the widespread commitment to transhistorical global analyses, such generalizations still too often representwhat happens in one’s own country or circles or favorite texts as typical. But even attempts to adduce global perspectives more fully entail their own risks, notably observations based on limited knowledge of the languages and cultures in question. And Jahan Ramazani, one of the leading lights in transhistorical and transcultural analyses, has cogently demonstrated that neglecting the local when studying the global can obscure much of what it claims to illuminate. The essays in this cluster generally meet such challenges successfully, and I attempt to do so as well. Yet these potential problems remain clear and present dangers in this and similar academic work. If the literal bottom lines in this response enumerate recommendations for future studies of lyric, this initial paragraph launches that list with a recommendation adapted from Spenser: be bold, be bold, be not too bold. Without ignoring such risks, however, one can confidently assert that these five authors are apt choices for reexamining lyric, that this is an apposite juncture for that project as well as for advancing many related issues, and that Spenser Studies is a surprisingly appropriate venue for such endeavors. To begin with, the qualifications of these five scholars for this project are","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81711096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scudamour, as Cupid’s man, in all the ambiguous complexity of this nomination, is a more crucial figure than he has often looked. As the specified male representative of Cupidean Love, his figure and fate could hardly be of greater thematic importance in Spenser’s epic romance. But Scudamour’s figure is also a magnet for doubleness of various sorts, for irony, ambiguity, and anomaly, and these characteristics are finally as much a part of his figuration as Love is. To a great extent, the whole of the exploratory, formally experimental Book IV answers to similar characteristics. While others’ love stories reach a happy plateau in this book, that of Scudamour accrues endless questions to itself. Scudamour’s culminating exploit in the Temple of Venus serves as a challenge to any promise of fulfillment in Book IV and asserts a typically Spenserian complexity of meaning at the erotic, gendered heart of this book. Scudamour’s tale of the Temple is the culminating instance of the doubleness that Cupid’s man cannot seem to shake, much as his figure starts to improve in Book IV before he returns in his tale to the outset of his career, the abduction of Amoret, and thereby introduces a temporal doubleness into his narrative—a doubleness marked by the conspicuous absence of Amoret. This doubleness continues in the evocation of Orpheus at his tale’s end.
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This essay announces the identification of five large seventeenth-century notebooks in the Cambridge University Library as the work of English theologian and poet William Alabaster (1567–1640) and provides a general physical description of the volumes favoring their English-language contents. It provides an overview of the current critical landscape of Alabaster’s biography and writing, describes his unique linguistic and kabbalistic Christian projects, and discusses how the “nonsense” visible in his notebooks led to their miscataloging in the nineteenth century. The essay itself is followed by transcriptions of six previously unknown poems from the notebooks, the longest of which, “The Office of the Blessed Virgin,” is a masterwork of linguistic and liturgical transformation.
这篇文章宣布了剑桥大学图书馆中五本17世纪的大笔记本的鉴定，这些笔记本是英国神学家和诗人威廉·阿拉巴斯特(William Alabaster, 1567-1640)的作品，并提供了对这些卷的总体物理描述，这些卷倾向于它们的英语内容。它提供了对雪花石膏传记和写作的当前批评景观的概述，描述了他独特的语言和卡巴拉基督教项目，并讨论了他的笔记本中可见的“废话”如何导致19世纪的错误编目。在这篇文章之后，还抄写了六首以前不为人知的诗集，其中最长的一首《圣母的办公室》(The Office of The Blessed Virgin)是语言学和礼仪转变的杰作。
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This essay proposes that Redcrosse’s battles with the multihazard threat of the flesh, the world, and the devil can be read as subject to what twenty-first-century theorists of risk modeling describe as “cascade” effects. It reads the earth-shaking imagery of Spenser’s Legend of Holiness in light of the literature produced in response to the 1580 earthquake, contending that early modern attitudes to an unsettled planet can illuminate in more precise terms both the threat, and the potential recovery, embodied by Spenser’s treatment of the deadly sin of pride. For the 1580 earthquake respondents, natural disasters invited tentative construals concerning the consequences of human behavior, as situated in ethical and eschatological, rather than solely environmental, terms. As a cataclysmic force that vanished, leaving only ruin, the earthquake gave shape to interpretative strategies alert to the difficulties of reading signs, casting aspects of Spenser’s allegorical work into sharp relief.
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The three central books of The Faerie Queene present a poetic puzzle in the abrupt appearance and disappearance of Florimell and the adventures of her golden girdle. But when the events are considered as developing an allegory for the flowers (flores) and honey (mel) of rhetoric, the sequencing of the episode and many of its problems resolve. These natural images, highlighted in his character’s name, exemplify Spenser’s idea of a natural, decorous rhetoric. This essay details how Spenser’s Florimell embodies such a natural rhetoric, and her girdle, a rhetorical figure. The events, which touch on how rhetoric can be misused and misinterpreted, add to our understanding of the episode as a focal point of Spenser’s poem.
{"title":"Florimell and the Flowers and Honey of Natural Rhetoric","authors":"Juliana Chapman","doi":"10.1086/717096","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717096","url":null,"abstract":"The three central books of The Faerie Queene present a poetic puzzle in the abrupt appearance and disappearance of Florimell and the adventures of her golden girdle. But when the events are considered as developing an allegory for the flowers (flores) and honey (mel) of rhetoric, the sequencing of the episode and many of its problems resolve. These natural images, highlighted in his character’s name, exemplify Spenser’s idea of a natural, decorous rhetoric. This essay details how Spenser’s Florimell embodies such a natural rhetoric, and her girdle, a rhetorical figure. The events, which touch on how rhetoric can be misused and misinterpreted, add to our understanding of the episode as a focal point of Spenser’s poem.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77562370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
he more time I’ve spent with the keyword I chose to think about earlymodern lyric, themore difficulty it has givenme. This is in part, I think, because “meter” is something that can often come across as profoundly unlyrical. By this I don’t mean that we don’t account for meter when we approach the analysis of a lyric poem: that is fundamental to poetic and prosodic interpretation. What I have in mind is, rather, the critical tendency—or the readerly tendency—to designate rhythmically regular or emphatic or predictable verse in a category apart from the “lyrical,” as the “metrical.” And so, to resist that tendency to see what insights may result, my idea is a simple one: that meter, being closely tied to, and indeed emerging from, the concepts of sound and rhythm, can serve as a key to understanding the category of lyric in early modern England and to the experience of reading it. I do not propose (here) to align myself with any of the several camps that have formed in lyric studies. “Lyric”will serve simply as my term of approach, one that foregrounds the connection between poetry andmusic, a thread also picked up in the essays by Wendy Beth Hyman (“Patterns, the Shakespearean Sonnet, and Epistemologies of Scale”) and Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld (“Do You Hear What I Hear?”). In the sixteenth century, the earliest sustained theorization of English meter appears in George Gascoigne’s 1575 Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English. One of the first notes discusses “measure,” a cognate for “meter,” and is devoted to the question of holding “the iust measure wherwith you begin your verse.” This is decided by the number of syllables in a line (“whether it be in a verse of sixe syllables, eight, ten, twelue, etc.”) rather than the number of rhythmic feet;
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hat’s in a lyric? This basic definitional question, one that lies beneath the very notion of “lyric keywords,” can point down a number of critical avenues—inviting us to consider, for example, lyric poetry’s thematic preoccupations (love or longing, God or small things), its formal or stylistic quiddities (meter or rhyme, tone or voice), or its verbal texture (all those “I”s and “ah”s).While this essay will venture down some, if not all, of those avenues, it will focus on the modest preposition at the center of the originating question. This vanishingly brief, deceptively reticent monosyllable metonymizes some of the most enduring critical concepts in the study of lyric. It also, more interestingly, hints at what we might call a prepositional understanding of the genre. And with that, to borrow the words of a poet who will reappear later in this essay, “Let’s in.” Let’s start, in fact, with one of the most familiar critical definitions of the lyric: that it is a genre profoundly concerned with interiority or inwardness. Critics have long argued over what kind of address we take a lyric poem to be; is it, to quote John Stuart Mill, “feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude,” or is it an address (direct or indirect) to a listener (visible or invisible)? Setting aside the vexed question of audience or occasion, we might still wish to grant that the stated subject of much lyric poetry is the speaker’s inmost feeling or thought and the nuances of individual psychological, emotional, or spiritual experience. Examples of this kind of lyric inwardness crowd the Renaissance canon, with poetic speaker after poetic speaker claiming to have followed, in one way or another, the directive of Astrophil’s muse: “Looke in thy heart and write.” This inward turn can sometimes be presented as reluctant, even painful—as, for example, in the claustrophobic self-scrutiny of the “hurt imagination” in Fulke Greville’s Caelica 100 (“In
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At the risk of casting aspersions, it has to be admitted outright: Lady Capulet is not quite sure how old her own daughter is. To answer this pressing question, Juliet’s mother must turn to the woman who has long stood in loco parentis: Juliet’s aging wet nurse. “I’ll lay fourteen of my teeth,” the fond woman wagers, that Juliet is not quite fourteen; her birthdaywill come about a fortnight (or fourteen days) hence, on the harvest festival of Lammastide. We learn much more, too, as the nurse’s fulsome memories tumble forth: that she had a daughter, now deceased, named Susan; that Juliet was weaned with the help of a bitter herb eleven years ago, while her parents were away in Mantua; that, the day before her weaning, Juliet had fallen forward and cut her forehead, prompting a dirty joke from the nurse’s husband, heartily anticipating when an adolescent Juliet would, instead, “fall backward”; and that, during the very time of Juliet’s weaning, “of all the days of the year,” there was, simultaneously, an earthquake. Even in this highly edited summary, it is a lot to process. But if the nurse’s memories seem jumbled together, their underlying coherence surfaces when we consider that each of these details actually means something. The dead daughter. The absent parents. The harvesttime, which symbolizes sexual fruition. The bitter herb (apothecary’s poison). The number fourteen (the lovers’ cocreated sonnet). The enforced absence in Mantua (this time Romeo’s). The bleeding girl who has fallen on her back (conflated: “the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads”). And—for those directly involved—the earthshaking events: in short, the remembered mock tragic scene of Juliet’s prelapsarian tumble shows the audience precisely, albeit
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Colleen Rosenfeld’s response to Rachel Eisendrath’
I n English Literature of the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954), C. S. Lewis makes a surprising claim about the final line of Philip Sidney’s Sonnet 71: “But ah, desire still cries, ‘Give me some food.’” Lewis writes that Sidney’s skill as a poet is evidenced not by the artistry of the line that he wrote, but by the artistry of any number of lines that he did not write. “In almost any other poet,” Lewis claims, “the first thirteen lines would have the air of being a mere ‘build up’ for the sake of the last. But Sidney’s sonnet might have ended quite differently and still been equally, though diversely, admirable.” Those first thirteen lines, Lewis insists, have a value that is neither actualized nor diminished by the pivot of “But ah.” Lewis invites us to imagine that Sonnet 71 might have ended differently. What else might desire have said? Or who else might have spoken in the final lines that could have been but were not written, lines that would have “still been equally, though diversely, admirable”? The poem offers little evidence with which to elaborate this imaginative exercise. The preceding lines of the poem appear to shut the whole thing down. Syntactically unnecessary to the sentence which comes before, the “But” that opens Sidney’s final line comes out of nowhere—as if, if not for the conventional form of the sonnet, Astrophil might have kept a lid on the “cries” of “desire.” But even as Lewis insists on the integrity of those first thirteen lines, the persistent “cries” of “desire” resurface still in Lewis’s prose. The sentence with which Lewis declares the independent value of those first thirteen lines, as well as the interchangeability of the final line with any number of other, unwritten final lines, begins with “But” and attributes to the poem’s aesthetic value the same temporality that characterizes the “cries” of
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M y focus in this essay is tone: a word that I have long loathed and occasionally banned from my seminar room. I can hear tone in conversation, mostly. I can modulate my own tone (when required). My primary experience of tone in poetry, however, has been the experience of someone who cannot hear what everyone else can hear.Which is to say, I can hear them hearing tone, but I secretly suspect that they are all engaged in a formof self-congratulatory cahoots. I. A. Richards confirms: “subtleties of tone are rarely appreciated without some special training. The gift reaches its heights perhaps only in certain favourable social settings.” The literary-historical costs of my inadequacies around tone have been, thus far: irony, satire, Romanticism. But then I read John Heywood’s poem “A quiet neighbour.” Originally published in a 1550 volume entitled The firste hundred of Epigrammes, “A quiet neighbour” departs from its ninety-nine companions, all of whichmight be better interpreted under the rubric of “wit” rather than “tone.”Between the fart jokes, squabbling husbands and wives (across species), and anatomical comparisons, the best of Heywood’s epigrams pick up a linguistic gambit and exhaust its resources, as with “Of the letter H,” which you hope never to find on any body part (“ache”) or as with the poem “Biyung of showes,” in praise of the shoemaker who is able to alter the reality of fit by way of words like “stretche” and “shrinke.” In his opening “To the reader,”Heywood offers a veritable humanist catalog of the lexical choices that will follow—“Some woordes, shewe one sence, a nother to disclose, / Some woordes. them selues sondrie senses signifie: / Some woordes, somewhat from common sence, I
我在这篇文章中的重点是语气:这个词我一直很讨厌，偶尔也会禁止出现在我的研讨室里。我基本上能听到谈话的语气。我可以调整自己的语气(必要时)。然而，我对诗歌语气的主要体验是，一个人听不到别人能听到的东西。也就是说，我能听到他们的语气，但我暗自怀疑他们都在进行某种形式的自我祝贺的串通。i·a·理查兹证实:“不经过特殊训练，很难欣赏语气的微妙之处。这种天赋也许只有在某些有利的社会环境中才能达到顶峰。”到目前为止，我在语气方面的不足给文学历史带来的代价是:反讽、讽刺、浪漫主义。但后来我读了约翰·海伍德的诗《安静的邻居》。《安静的邻居》最初出版于1550年的《前一百首警句》一书中，与它的99个同伴不同，所有这些都可以用“机智”而不是“语气”来更好地解释。在放屁笑话、争吵的丈夫和妻子(跨物种)以及解剖学上的比较之间，海伍德最好的警句在语言上采取了一种策略，耗尽了它的资源，比如“字母H”，你希望永远不会在身体的任何部位找到它(“疼痛”)，或者像诗“Biyung of showes”，这首诗赞美了一个鞋匠，他能够通过“stretche”和“shrinke”这样的词来改变合适的现实。在他的开篇“致读者”中，海伍德提供了一个名副其实的人文主义词汇选择目录——“有些词，显示一个意思，另一个要揭示，/有些词。”/有些词，在某种程度上来自于常识
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