Comic Spenser

Faith, folly, and The Faerie Queene

Victoria Coldham-Fussell

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526131133
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Once a byword for Protestant sobriety and moral idealism, Spenser is now better known for his irony and elusiveness. But this study argues that his sense of humour is still underestimated and misunderstood. In a series of bold reinterpretations of key episodes in The Faerie Queene, Victoria Coldham-Fussell demonstrates that humour goes to the heart of Spenser's moral and doctrinal preoccupations. She charts amusing rifts between the poem's ambitious and idealising postures and its Protestant vision of corruptible human nature; yet contends that Spenserian humour is an expression of tolerance and faith as well as an instrument of satire. This study's application of modern comic theory to a key text of the English Renaissance and its detailed survey of the comic influences that shaped Spenser's literary milieu will be indispensable to teachers of the Renaissance period, to students of comic literature, and to established Spenserians.

1

Spenser and the comic Renaissance

Known for its heroic mythology, idealising love poetry, and forthright didacticism, the Renaissance is sometimes portrayed as a literary Golden Age sandwiched between the unheroic Middle Ages and the mock-heroic eighteenth century. More than a product of modern nostalgia, this reputation for gravitas was actively fostered during the period itself: the assumption that seriousness is synonymous with moral and literary value (the latter two things being theoretically equated) is frequently encountered in prefaces and dedications. Elizabethan theorists tell us that epic poetry concerns ‘great and excellent persons & things’, is characterised by ‘grauitie and statelinesse’, and should ‘erect the mind and lift it up to the consideration of the highest matters’.¹ The seemingly natural partnership of formality and moral seriousness was affirmed in a wide range of contexts other than epic poetry, moreover. Spenser’s Complaints volume (1591), for example, was advertised to prospective readers as ‘meditations of the worlds vanitie; verie grave and profitable’, adjectives that echo the rhetoric of Protestant piety.²

But there is another, diametrically opposite, reputation to consider. The sixteenth century produced a wealth of entertaining and irreverent material fuelled by (and fuelling) the growing book trade – jestbooks, comic plays, witty prose narratives, and voyeuristic exposés of society’s criminal underbelly. It also produced a series of comic masterpieces. Continental works include Erasmus’s Moriae encomium; Ariosto’s Orlando furioso; Rabelais’s La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel; and, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Cervantes’s Don Quixote.³ In England, the rise of the public theatre saw comic drama evolve from early Tudor farce to the sophisticated comedies and tragicomedies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with ancient Greece and Rome providing a mine of comic templates. Mock-epic, mock-encomium, Menippean satire, Ovidian epyllia, Lucianic dialogue, picaresque novellas, and collections of epigrams and anecdotes were among the diverse literary models to be rediscovered, translated, and imitated. Famously, Bakhtin described the sixteenth century as ‘the summit in the history of laughter’.⁴

Speaking of the period’s pendulum swings between elevation and bathos, Samuel Johnson observed, ‘the reign of Elizabeth is commonly supposed to have been a time of stateliness, formality and reserve, yet perhaps the relaxations of that severity were not very elegant’.⁵ The relationship between reserve and relaxation was, in an obvious sense, more complementary than paradoxical, because the period’s myths of ideal humanity and civilisation provided fertile ground for life’s unheroic realities. Areas of ambition and tension erupted into jokes and caricatures. Looking to the theatre alone, plays are full of rogues and fools empitomising religious hypocrisy and fanaticism (Malvolio, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy), mercantile culture and social mobility (Shylock, Winwife), pretension and pedantry (Jacques, Holofernes, Dogberry), and the unruly body (Falstaff, Ursula). The body is a universal and timeless comic subject, but in this period its consuming, excretory, and sexual aspects empitomised society’s anarchic energies as never before.⁶

It has been well observed of the Renaissance that in practice the division between comic and non-comic genres and between ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ literary spheres is frequently blurred.⁷ It is not unusual for readers to find title pages advertising, for example, ‘A Lamentable Tragedie, mixed full of plesant mirth’, bawdy puns and Petrarchan parodies infiltrating love sonnets, or collections of obscene tales compiled by humanist scholars and courtiers.⁸ Spenser’s inclusion of fabliau-esque material (the tale of Malbecco and Hellenore), bawdy jokes (the Squire of Dames’s antifeminist tale) and burlesque (the lampoon-knight Braggadochio) within the frame of The Faerie Queene is, in this sense, typical of the period.

The Renaissance proclivity for mixing modes was not, however, accepted without objection. I have noted that humour was fuelled by areas of social and political sensitivity; by the same token, humour raised anxieties. The frivolous and potentially anarchic nature of laughter was often emphasised by moralists, by literary critics, and by authors themselves. A capacity to subvert and unsettle is a timeless attribute of humour, but concerns about the right uses of humour were particularly acute during the period in question. First, unprecedented access to comic literary material, both on the page and on the stage, brought humour to the attention of the literary critic. What are the proper bounds of comic representation – when should mirth be indulged, and when eschewed? This was a formal question as well as a moral one. Despite the popularity of hybrid genres such as tragicomedy and epic romance, theorists influenced by Aristotle’s Poetics understood that genres were supposed to be distinct – and that, moreover, literature’s highest reach was non-comic.⁹ In the words of George Gascoigne, ‘to entermingle merie jests in a serious matter is an Indecorum’.¹⁰ Second, the morality of laughter had been questioned from the Christian viewpoint for centuries, but the upheaval of the Reformation served to intensify the debate. Even as satire was proving an indispensable polemical tool, the impiety of laughter was being newly emphasised.¹¹ The ‘mixed mode’ of Spenser’s Christian epic – its generic fluidity, its penchant for bathos, and its satirical energy – is, in this sense, both typical of the period and notably provocative.

The remainder of this chapter surveys, under two broad headings, the resources and debates that influenced the character of Renaissance humour, and thus – as I will argue – Spenserian humour. First we will turn our attention to the connections between the comic Renaissance and humanism; second, to medieval influences.

Humanism

The witty gentleman

‘Humanist wit’ is a familiar conjunction: it encapsulates the Renaissance ideal of the socially-at-ease gentleman who can tell jokes and amusing stories and play with words, and whose schooling in the humanities encompasses a familiarity not only with Virgil and Homer, but also with irreverent authors such as Lucian and Apuleius. Reading the dialogues of Castiglione’s handbook fashioning the ideal courtier, one is struck by the prominence of witty remarks and appreciative laughter, and indeed an entire section of the book is devoted to the art of jesting. It is clear that the courtier, in addition to being athletic and learned, also had to be good at making people laugh.¹² Renaissance scholars were aware that jests and anecdotes had an ancient pedigree. Both Thomas Wilson – described by Gabriel Harvey as ‘one of mie best for jesting’ – and Castiglione cite Cicero and Quintilian in praising the rhetorical and social uses of humour.¹³ Although the compliment is perhaps backhanded, Folly, Erasmus’s narrator, is quick to claim kinship with classical rhetoricians: ‘in the preceptes of theyr arte, amonges divers other trifles, they have written … largely and exactly, how to provoke laughter in an audience’.¹⁴

The series of five ‘witty and familiar’ letters written by Spenser and Harvey and published in 1580 should be considered against this humanist background.¹⁵ Like aphorisms and jokes, letter writing, as anatomised in Renaissance rhetorical handbooks and how-to guides, was a self-conscious classical revival. Far from being personal correspondence that has incidentally found its way into print (as the prefatory epistle would have us believe), the interchange between Spenser and Harvey was evidently an exercise in self-presentation by two aspiring literary men.¹⁶ Peppered with Latin and Greek and references to literary affairs being discussed at court, and with original verse compositions, the letters, as advertised, display their authors’ university backgrounds and credentials as witty gentlemen. Part of the appeal of published letters is the illusion of ‘listening in’ to a private exchange, and Spenser and Harvey include plenty of name-dropping and ambiguous references (including Spenser’s use of the pseudonym ‘Immerito’) to facilitate this pleasure. What is disconcerting for the modern reader of Renaissance epistolary exchanges is the peculiar combination of private and public references and modes of expression. The tone of the letters is by turns affectionate, scolding, baiting, confiding, and boasting – yet it is also highly formal. What is ‘familiar’ about the Spenser–Harvey letters resides not in the kind of casual informality we might expect today, but in elaborate and self-conscious prose that (though earnestly advertised in the prefatory epistle as material to ‘garnish our Tongue’) can seem like a facetious game of mutual flattery and tongue-in-cheek rhetorical display. Harvey, for example, teasingly describes Spenser’s epistolary style as ‘long, large, lauish, Luxurious, Laxatiue’.¹⁷

If the privacy of the letters is a piece of theatre for a public audience, the reader is nevertheless kept on the outer in trying to gauge the amount and degree of facetious posturing in the exchange. For example, if E. K., the assiduous Shepheardes Calender commentator, is (as is often suspected) a persona created by Spenser and Harvey, then Spenser’s comment ‘Maister E. K. hartily desireth to be commended vnto your Worshippe’ becomes a joke accessible, presumably, to only a few.¹⁸ Likewise, it is hard to know just how seriously we are supposed to take the verses attached to the letters; Spenser’s Iambicum trimetrum, for example, may demonstrate the art of English quantitative verse (the fashion for which is a dominant subject of the letters) but its ponderous depiction of love-sickness – sometimes criticised as inexplicably bad poetry – seems designed to be taken with a grain of salt, which Harvey duly does when he critiques his friend’s ‘Comicall Iambicks’.¹⁹

The ideal of male friendship that Spenser and Harvey embody in these letters is reminiscent of early humanist culture as epitomised by Erasmus and More, two learned literary men who also published ‘private’ and amusing correspondence. This model evidently continued to exert an influence later in the century. A point to underline is that even as such letters (much like Castiglione’s manual for courtiers) relegate humour and play to extemporal and private contexts, they also cement wittiness and ventriloquism as key attributes of the serious courtier poet.

Jestbooks

The wit of Renaissance courtesy books and published letters may be tame (i.e. learned wordplay, literary in-jokes), but the idea that humour ought to be part of the gentleman’s repertoire clearly provided a broad licence. Jestbooks are a case in point. These popular story collections featured gullible fools, wily pranksters, and plenty of scatological and sexual jokes, and they were notably fashionable within humanist circles – often circulating in Latin as well as the vernacular.²⁰ Although many jestbooks de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Spenser and the comic Renaissance
• 2 Humour and heroism
• 3 Spenser’s bawdy; or, Red Crosse’s problem with desire
• 4 Laughing at love: The Faerie Queene III–IV
• 5 Parody and panegyric
• Epilogue: Humour and allegory
• Bibliography
• Index