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The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature Rachel Stenner
Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth Century French Literature and Visual Culture Time Politics and Class Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature 1st Edition Claire White
Susan McHugh Department of English University of New England Auburn, ME, USA
Robert McKay School of English University of Sheffeld Sheffeld, UK
John Miller School of English University of Sheffeld Sheffeld, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, crossdisciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifcally, at the implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the feld of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the key marker of humanity's difference from other species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifcally human concerns), this series signifcantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such fguration with the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and flm to fne art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages.
Series Board:
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
Rachel Stenner • Abigail Shinn Editors
Edmund Spenser and Animal Life
Editors Rachel Stenner
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
Abigail Shinn Goldsmiths, University of London London,
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Acknowledgements
This volume was inspired by conversations with Bob McKay at the University of Sheffeld, which led to a conference at the University of Sussex. We would like to thank Bob for providing the initial impetus, and leap of faith. Also, we would like to thank the participants and attendees at the conference. Special thanks are due to Jonny Thurston-Torres for their contribution. Sussex’s School of Media, Arts, and Humanities Research Committee and Centre for Early Modern and Medieval Studies provided invaluable support. We would also like to thank the contributors who diligently and with utmost collegiality read each other’s work (and our own). This volume is all the better for the collectivity of the endeavour.
1 Introduction: Edmund Spenser and Animal Studies 1
2 Did Edmund Dream of Shorthaired Sheep?
Andrew Hadfeld
3 Spenser, Marine Life, and the Metaphysics of Extinction: Overfshing and the True Monsters of the Deep 45 Todd Andrew Borlik
4 The Politics of Hunting: An Aristotelian Reading of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti 67 71 Kat Addis
5 Errour’s Repercussions: Dragons, Race, and Animality in The Faerie
6 Spenser’s ‘Apish Crue’: Aping in Prosopopoia or Mother
Abigail Shinn
7 Scorned Little Creatures?: Insects and Genre in Complaints (1591)
‘Good
[With]’:
notes on contributors
Kat Addis recently completed her PhD at New York University, in which she studied slavery and race in sixteenth-century European epic poems by Spenser, Tasso, and Juan Latino. Her work is published or forthcoming from The Spenser Review, Spenser Studies, and English Literary Renaissance, and she is writing a monograph on the epic genre, slavery, and the concept of necessity.
Chris Barrett is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University. The author of Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety (2018), Barrett’s research interests centre on early modern literature, poetry and poetics, and ecocritical approaches to literature. She is currently completing a monograph on the ecopoetics of the obvious.
Todd Andrew Borlik is Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of Huddersfeld. He is the author of Shakespeare Beyond the Green World: Drama and Ecopolitics in Jacobean Britain, Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology, Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature, and over a dozen articles in academic journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, and English Literary Renaissance. He is currently preparing a new edition of As You Like It and editing a collection on The Winter’s Tale
Richard Danson Brown is the author of three acclaimed studies of Spenser: The New Poet: Tradition and Novelty in Spenser’s ‘Complaints’ (1999); A Concordance to the Rhymes of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (2013, with Julian Lethbridge); and The Art of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (2019), as well as many essays. He has been book reviews editor of The Spenser Review (2013–19), and is currently Professor of English Literature at The open University.
Pia F. Cuneo is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Arizona. Her research and multiple publications explore the intersections between art history and hippology in early modern Germany. She also edited and contributed to Animals and Early Modern Identity (2014; 2017). Her current book project attends to the dynamic exchange between professional, gender, and religious identities in the equine imagery of the German artist Hans Baldung (d.1545).
Bethany Dubow is a postdoctoral research fellow in English at the University of Cambridge. She is currently writing her frst book, SixteenthCentury Poetics, Mathematics and ‘The Faerie Queene’, which develops the fndings of her PhD. Beth is interested in the theory and practice of early modern poetics in relation to the period’s mathematics and natural philosophy. Her work is published or forthcoming in journals including Spenser Studies, The Spenser Review, Exemplaria, and Renaissance Drama
Andrew Hadfeld is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of a number of books, most recently, Lying in Early Modern English Culture (2017) and Literature and Class from the Peasants’ Revolt to the French Revolution (2021).
Raphael Lyne is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Murray Edwards College. He is the writer of four books, most recently Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature (2016), and, with Cathy Shrank, the editor of The Complete Poems of Shakespeare (2017).
Namratha Rao is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Essays in Criticism, The Spenser Review, Spenser Studies, The Review of English Studies, and English Literary Renaissance. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Spenser Studies, Companionable Thinking: Spenser with …, and is writing her frst book, Poetics of the Material: Spenser and Milton.
Abigail Shinn is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (Palgrave, 2018) and co-editor with Andrew Hadfeld and Matthew Dimmock of the Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England (2014). She is currently working on a new monograph project: Spenser’s Popular Voices: Culture and Play.
Rachel Stenner is Senior Lecturer in Literature, 1350–1660 at the University of Sussex. Her research is about Tudor literature and print culture, with a particular focus on Edmund Spenser and William Baldwin. Her monograph, The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature came out in 2018 (repr. 2021), as did the collection she coedited with Tamsin Badcoe and Gareth Griffth, Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete. Rachel is currently co-editing the Collected Literary Works of William Baldwin and she co-directs People of Print, a book series which profles understudied fgures in the print trades across four centuries.
Conor Wilcox-Mahon recently completed his PhD at Corpus Christi College Cambridge on rest and pause in The Faerie Queene. He is interested in caesura and periodicity, early modern and classical poetics, the social history of time, and hermeneutic and narratological theory. He is currently Teaching Fellow in English at Durham University.
list of AbbreviAtions
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OED Oxford English Dictionary
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900
SENC Spenser Encyclopedia
SSt Spenser Studies
list of figures
Fig. 1.1 Woodcut accompanying Epigram 5; attributed to Lucas de Heere. In public domain
Fig. 2.1 Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579), January eclogue, woodcut. In public domain
Fig. 2.2 Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579), February eclogue, woodcut. In public domain
Fig. 2.3 Romney Marsh sheep. Public domain
4
32
33
34
Fig. 3.1 The Stack, Ireland’s Eye. Photo Courtesy of Stephanie Jud 57
Fig. 3.2 olaus Magnus, Carta marina (detail; 1539). Courtesy of James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota
Fig. 3.3 John Speed, Map of Leinster, Theatre of Empire (1611). From Wikimedia Commons
60
63
Fig. 13.1 Hans Baldung, Horses in a Forest, woodcut, 8 15/16 × 13 3/16 in. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1922. Public Domain 280
CHAPTER
1
Introduction: Edmund Spenser and Animal Studies
Rachel Stenner and Abigail Shinn
Animal life is a marked feature of Spenser’s poetry from his earliest publication onwards. The collection that readers know as A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), with its epigrams translated from Petrarch via Marot and its sonnets by Du Bellay and Jan Van der Noot, has prominent animal motifs or images in over half of its 22 poems.1 Erupting from the pages
1 The epigrams are from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse (c.1327–1368), as translated from Italian into French by Clément Marot. The frst eleven sonnets are from Joachim du Bellay’s Songe (1558); the remaining four were probably composed by Van der Noot (Spenser 1999, 508). See MacFaul (2010) for detail on the translation and a discussion which positions the poems within Van der Noot’s book as a whole. Cf. Hadfeld (2012), 38–47.
R. Stenner (*)
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
e-mail: rachel.stenner@sussex.ac.uk
A. Shinn
Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK e-mail: a.shinn@gold.ac.uk
R. Stenner, A. Shinn (eds.), Edmund Spenser and Animal Life, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4_1
1
R. STENNER AND A. SHINN
alongside statuesque lions and horses (Sonnets 3 and 4), are the terrifying beast of Revelation (Sonnets 12–14), dogs pursuing their quarry (Epigram 1), a hind, phoenix, and eagle meeting grisly ends (Epigrams 1 and 5, Sonnet 6), and a serpent stinging a lady (Epigram 6). There are more benefcent scenes too, as birds chant in the shade of a laurel tree (Epigram 3), and a wolf nurses her offspring (Sonnet 7). Albeit a translation this text contains, as Tom MacFaul notes, ‘almost all of Spenser’s later preoccupations in embryo’ (2010, 149). But a preoccupation with animal signifcation is not regularly listed among Spenser’s major concerns. In contrast, the chapters in Edmund Spenser and Animal Life collectively demonstrate that the poet’s writings are closely engaged with animals: he leverages various early modern discursive contexts for them; he explores how they signify; he folds them into moral and educative analyses; he thinks through the ways in which animal form and literary form intersect; he considers poetic possibilities for the expression of animal characters; and, critically, his works make space for thinking about the animal as a being unto itself.
In the sixth sonnet of the radically Protestant Theatre, for example, ‘the birde that dares beholde the Sunne’ fies higher and higher, eventually reaching ‘the temple of the Gods’ only to be dashed ‘tombling through the aire in lompe of fre’ (1999, 13, ll.1, 8, 10). The accompanying woodcut depicts the bird as an eagle, but the poem also attributes to ‘her’ (1999, 13, l.3) the properties of a phoenix when she arises ‘as a worme’ out ‘of hir ashes’ (1999, 13, l.14). She functions typologically to invoke both Christ and Icarus, in fabular mode to warn over-reaching humanity against hubris, and was read allegorically in the period as both the papacy’s rise from the ashes of empire (Spenser 1999, 511) and Elizabeth I herself (MacFaul 2010, 150).2 The lines also construct a poetics of ambivalent vatic inspiration: the ‘feeble fight’ of the singing poet elevates them to cloud-piercing heights before their aspiration comes to nought, with ‘bodie turned all to dust’ (1999, 13, ll.2, 12). Yet, they revive in humble form as the owl is born from the debris. Spenser’s poetry is replete with moments such as this, where animals occupy multi-layered signifying roles.
Spenser’s investment in the animal as symbol or motif gave rise to Joseph Loewenstein’s oft-quoted remark that ‘Spenser [...] seems to have
2 The phoenix was an Elizabethan and Jacobean image of royal succession and successful lineal continuity; for a discussion of this mythical bird’s signifcance in the period see Kantarowicz (1997, 385–400).
virtually no affective engagement with fauna’ (Loewenstein 2007, 244), a remark to which Andrew Hadfeld responds in this collection’s opening chapter. As Chris Barrett also reports, Spenser has been accused of presenting animals as ‘lacking individual subjectivity, [...] always vehicles for the invocation of traits or abstractions’ (Barrett 2013, 148). This is the critique—which is central to Animal Studies as a feld—that fgurative language and literary form de-realise the animal, subordinating them in a species hierarchy that humans dominate. It is worth pausing, however, over the phoenix motif in A Theatre for Worldlings as a whole because it offers a greater sense of subjectivity to the bird than Sonnet 6 alone appears to convey—and thus a deeper understanding of what Spenser is up to with animals.
In Epigram 5, the speaker relays a scene to which the Phoenix is central (see Fig. 1.1). When the speaker regards the bird ‘in the wood alone’, its ‘purple wings and crest of golden hew’ astonish him, so that he takes the impression ‘that of some heauenly wight’ he ‘had the vew’ (1999, 5, ll.1–4). The solitude, beauty, and divine aspect of the bird heroise him (the Phoenix is gendered male by the poem), foregrounding him in the eyes of the speaker and the reader as the sonnet’s protagonist. The poem compounds this sense when the speaker brings the Phoenix into an encounter with ‘the broken tree / And [...] the spring that late deuoured was’ (1999, 5, ll.5–6); these are the settings of the previous two epigrams. Epigram 3 describes a laurel tree being struck by lightning and torn up by the root, and Epigram 4 describes a spring, implicitly the Hippocrene Spring, being devoured by ‘the gaping earth’ (1999, 5, l.10). The Phoenix is now present in these locations as if a wanderer in a broken (romance?) landscape. Moreover, he has an affective response to the site, smiting himself ‘with his beake, as in disdaine’ and then dying ‘in great dispite’ (1999, 6, ll.10–11).
On one level, Spenser’s rendering of the Phoenix’s emotion is an anthropocentric interpretation that draws on the sorrow the speaker himself expresses in response to the events of Epigrams 3 and 4. The scene is an emblematic visualisation of the doleful complaint and grieving heart that the epigrams’ closing lines evoke; Epigram 4’s speaker, for example, laments that what he has witnessed ‘agreues’ his ‘heart euen to this houre’ (1999, 7, l.12). It is thus possible to read the Phoenix not as a subject in its own right but merely as an avian avatar of the human poetic subject. On another level, readers might fnd that the closing line of Epigram 5, ‘for pitie and loue my heart yet burnes in paine’ (1999, 5, l.12), directs
R. STENNER AND A. SHINN
Fig. 1.1 Woodcut accompanying Epigram 5; attributed to Lucas de Heere. In public domain
their attention generously towards both the Phoenix and the damaged environment it occupies and experiences. Readers are being invited to empathise, like the speaker does, with the pain of the Phoenix protagonist. Informed by current ecocritical concerns, readers might further be lured to read Spenser’s emblems of poetic catastrophe—the uprooted laurel and the disappearing spring—as a narrative of environmental degradation. In
this reading, the Phoenix performs a silent, self-wounding lament. The fact that in medieval and early modern mythography there was only ever one phoenix alive tempts the reader further still to read into the scene a parable of extinction; however, its powers of rebirth work against this (Todd Borlik discusses early modern thought on extinction in Chap. 3). Spenser’s bird does, surely, substantiate Barrett’s observation that ‘the very imagining of ecologies in early modern literature seems tied up in bird/song’ (Barrett 2022, 585), but it is the inverse of the futtering creatures that, she notes, sing the cosmos into being in early modern poetry. Barrett’s coinage, ‘bird/song’, expresses the way that literary avian ‘marvels exist midway between their feathered form and their poetic representation’ (2022, 592). As with Spenser’s Phoenix, when literary texts depict birds and other animals, they do not always compel readers to choose between the animal as an abstraction or an affectively—and materially— realised subject. Creatures are often critters too.3
AnimAls, spenser, And literAry Form
A theorised relation between animals and literary form is at least as old as Aristotle’s explanation of plot perfection in his discussion of tragedy: ‘just the same way as living creatures and organisms compounded of many parts must be of a reasonable size, so that they can be easily taken in by the eye, so too plots must be of a reasonable length, so that they may be easily held in the memory’ (1965, 42). Aristotle’s animal analogy, uncannily proleptic of Descartes’ beast machine with its pieces and parts, presents tragic plots as animal bodies: made of many functioning components, they must ft a particular size to be comprehensible by people. The remark with which Aristotle leads into this analogy is also signifcant: ‘beauty is bound up with size and order. A minutely small creature [...] would not be beautiful, for it would take almost no time to see it and our perception of it would be blurred; nor would [an] extremely large one, for it could not be taken in all at once’ (1965, 42). In this foundational work of literary criticism, humans’ ability to perceive the animal is linked to aesthetic taste. And it seems paradigmatic that of the thousands of students who have
3 ... to use two terms paired in tension by Dominic O’Key and Donna Haraway. For the history of ‘creature’ see O’Key (2022, 22–37). ‘Critter’ is Haraway’s alternative to convey the idea of living organisms as opposed to the aesthetically-mediated, Biblically-freighted ‘creature’. See Haraway (2016, passim).
R. STENNER AND A. SHINN
learned about the dramatic unities, very few will have paused to consider— or been directed to by their instructors—the animal simile which undergirds Aristotle’s theory, let alone the amorphous animal body within the simile.
Precisely because of its extensive engagement of forms associated with the elision of the animal, combined with the sheer expansiveness of his imaginative worlds, Spenser’s oeuvre is, in fact, especially useful for thinking through literary animals. Edmund Spenser and Animal Life represents the frst sustained critical attempt to situate the poet in early modern Animal Studies. Central to this feld in scholarship of later periods are the ways that fguration shapes readers’ engagement with animals, and this is a discussion to which several chapters in this book contribute an early modern perspective (see Kat Addis, Abigail Shinn, Richard Danson Brown, Chris Barrett, Namratha Rao, Bethany Dubow, Conor Wilcox-Mahon). Spenser’s aptitude for techniques ‘censured for their complicity in human exceptionalism’ (Boehrer 2015, 338), such as personifcation, prosopopoeia, allegory, and animal metaphor, makes his writings a superb early modern site for this discussion. The erasure of the actual animal via form has acquired new ethical urgency in recent decades, as expressed by Dominic O’Key when he asks, ‘how does fction express and thereby formalize modernity’s planetary impacts on human and animal life?’ (2022, 2). O’Key highlights that literature’s formal procedures can contribute to a mindset which instrumentalises animals, the broader environment, and other humans. Giorgio Agamben articulated the same problem when he conceptualised literature as an anthropological machine, a ‘device for producing the recognition of the human’ (2004, 26). Metaphor and allegory might function within such a device, instrumentalising the animal as a ‘tool in the construction of the human as subject’, rendering them ‘passive, silent, hollow’, and coercing them into reproducing ‘notions of human uniqueness, signifcance, and complexity’ (Lönngren 2021, 40).
Responses to the problem of extractive form frequently aim at a sharper understanding of the work that form itself does. Emerging from discussions of the eighteenth century, Mario Ortiz-Robles and Heather Keenleyside both contend that, rather than wringing out their actuality, it is tropes and fgurative language that enable readers to comprehend
1 INTRODUCTION: EDMUND SPENSER AND ANIMAL
animals (Ortiz-Robles 2016, 18; Keenleyside 2016, 2).4 That comprehension might be limited, but the characteristics of poetic language as both excessive to rationality and conducive to empathy, as both generic and defamiliarising—the Phoenix’s ‘purple wings and crest of golden hew’ (Spenser 1999, 5, l.2)—help to create it.
For Spenser’s readers, the particular qualities of allegory hold special signifcance, and here The Faerie Queene, raucous with animal fgures, metaphors, and allusions, is central. Spenser’s romance epic prompts much thought in the chapters that follow, with Borlik considering its sea creatures, Rachel Stenner its dragons, Raphael Lyne the wings of its fying creatures, Rao addressing the transformations of Gryll and Malbecco; and Dubow and Wilcox-Mahon analysing its animal analogies for form (as ‘coursers’ and ‘Hydran’ respectively). These chapters collectively point to Joseph Campana’s description of allegory as a system by which a series of capacities—agency, speech, will, vitality, affect, and cognition—are distributed to a range of creatures, objects, and landscapes including but not limited to the human. [...] a system for the incitement and distribution of life, one in which the entanglement of literary form, life form, and form of life is especially apparent. (2015, 280)5
One component of allegory particularly attentive to the ‘entanglement of literary form, life form, and form of life’ is termed ‘allegraphy’ by Barrett. Flipping the early modern understanding of allegory as doublespeaking, ‘when we speak one thing and mean another’ as George Puttenham described it in 1589 (2004, 159), allegraphy is other-writing. Authors leave allegraphical signs within their allegories. Reading for allegraphy means noticing a text’s ‘agentic and unsignifying beings’ who resist ‘allegorical assimilation’ (Barrett 2016, 1) and refuse to be instrumentalised. This is a strategy invested not in doubleness but in singleness, conveying the dull ‘unabstractable’ (Barrett 2016, 3) self-identity of the thing
4 As Keenleyside (2016), alongside Tobias Menely (2015), makes clear, the Enlightenment and eighteenth century created particular conditions for animal life and its comprehension by people. This is not solely owing to the major hinge of Descartes’ articulation of the beastmachine thesis in his Discourse on Method (1637). It is also because the concept of sensibility changed how people could think about animal communication, while the emergence of animal rights discourse increased people’s consciousness of their duties to animals (Menely 2015). For a discussion of Descartes turned towards the sixteenth century see Bach (2018).
5 This description resonates with Oerlemans’ argument that complexity and doubleness characterise allegorical representations of animals (2018, 28; see 27–51 for extended discussion of medieval and early modern animal allegory).
R. STENNER AND A. SHINN
itself. Allegraphy cultivates an ethical and ecological hermeneutic that is ‘key to recuperating allegory’s potential’ now, as a mode ‘of making sense’ (Barrett 2016, 3) of, and creating sense in, a catastrophically unstable world. O’Key might fnd in allegraphy an example of what he calls ‘creaturely forms’, those that ‘compel new ways of relating to other creatures’ and are typical of ‘texts which stage human–animal relations in ways that seek to pause the anthropological machine’s decisionist logic’ (2022, 22). Allegraphy is a space within allegory that recomposes the mode’s limits (O’Key 2022, 29) by noticing the actants that allegory can accommodate but that it refrains from sifting for an inner meaning.
Though allegraphy is a formal method, it has affnities with the infuential, and intensely readerly, ‘surface reading’ model proposed by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus (2009).6 Ann-Sofe Lönngren pursues surface reading when she determines to be guided by ‘the animal’s traces, scents, presences and noises’ rather than ‘metaphysical notions about human exceptionalism’ (2017, 241). Elsewhere Lönngren considers animal metonymy, the fgure characterised by ‘similarity, presence, and closeness’ (Lönngren 2021, 41), as opposed to metaphor, which is invested, like allegory, in difference (and in a similar vein Addis’ chapter in this volume picks up the simile/metaphor shift). These strategies resist, in different ways, a depth model which presents animals as the shallow or transparent symbol and humans as the deep signifed.
Yet such dualities of surface/depth, animal/human, material/intellect, body/soul undergird the socio-politico regimes of power that construct what Judith Butler terms the ‘differential norm’ of the human: ‘a value and a morphology that may be allocated and retracted, aggrandized, personifed, degraded and disavowed, elevated and affrmed’ (2016, 64). Registering, instead, that the animal characteristically defes dichotomies is a powerful critical move in a conceptual arena thrumming with binary thinking. As Spenser’s Phoenix indicates, readers do not have to choose between one or the other. The literary animal can be double, abstraction and actant, creature and critter. As Lönngren writes, the animal has a ‘character of simultaneousness: it is both a material organism with its own agency and phenomenology, separate from the human and her experiences, and part of a human epistemological system’ (2021, 43). While the textual habits of early modern readers trained them to think analogically and in fabular ways, they also operated within theological and political
6 Barrett herself notes this, but distinguishes between surface reading’s focus on reading strategies, and her own focus on the text’s internal strategies (Barrett 2016, 20).
discourses that saw ‘animals as political subjects in themselves and not just didactic fables for humans’ (Shannon 2013, 68). It is also important that although the Enlightenment’s fattening of the animal via Descartes’ beast machine thesis was undeniably consequential (and Keenleyside (2016, 9) observes that much animal studies scholarship seeks to recover the animal’s invisibility post-Descartes), Spenser’s works are prior to that moment. They are in dialogue with the extended tradition of literary, philosophical, and natural historical writing that precedes Descartes. The complexity of the early modern understanding of animal life is one reason that the period has become particularly signifcant for Animal Studies.
spenser in eArly modern AnimAl studies
The wider feld has been in the ascendant for some time, producing work across disciplines and periods including the early modern. Vital research has highlighted the signifcance of animals in early modern thought and cultural production. Foundational contributions by Erica Fudge construe the ways that humans ‘defne themselves as human in the face of the animal’ (Fudge 2002, 1), and the role of humanist approaches to language and reason within those defnitions. Her more recent work uses wills to trace people’s quotidian, affective relationships with their livestock (Fudge 2018). The scholarship so far has generated an increasingly textured historicised understanding of the entanglements of humans and animals, philosophically, materially, and psychically. Thus Karen Raber (2013) explores the complexities of overlapping embodiment, and Pia Cuneo’s 2014 collection focuses on identity in the period across geographies, genres, and cultures.7 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shakespeare is central, with the recent Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals (Raber and Dugan 2021) consolidating the feld and building on crucial work by Bruce Boehrer on animal character (2010), and Laurie Shannon on animals’ subjective investment and existence ‘within the reach of politics’ (2013, 3).8 Further interventions focus on particular groups of animals. Andreas Höfele (2011), for example, considers the overlap of bear gardens, public executions, and theatres, positing that the animal is central to
7 See also Fudge et al. (1999).
8 See also Boehrer (2002) on animal metaphor. 1
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Shakespeare’s wielding of violence as spectacle.9 Analysing a different class of being, Rebecca Ann Bach (2018) foregrounds the importance of bird sociality and voices for human culture.
Only recently have scholars interested in animals turned their attention to Spenser, despite the extensive range of fauna present in his poetic worlds. There are notable exceptions, however. The frst phase of work, starting in the 1960s, was largely taxonomic, deploying modes of interpretation informed by fables and bestiaries. Madeleine Pelner Cosman’s analysis of The Faerie Queene counts two hundred and thirty images ‘drawn from animal life’ (1963, 85), taxonomising animals according to ‘families’, formal classifcation, ‘genus and species’, ‘characteristics’, and ‘images of animals and man’ (1963, 105–7). Arthur Marotti, contextualising Cosman’s identifcation of a ‘numerical preponderance’ (1965, 85) of animal analogy, focuses on the lion, the tiger, and the fight of Florimell to demonstrate how Spenser leverages the rich symbolic relationship of animals with scripture, the classics, and mythology (Marotti 1965). Elizabeth Porges Watson also emphasises Spenser’s range of animal symbolism, equating it with chivalric bestiary (Watson 1997).
Critical interest then lulled until the publication in 2007 of a cluster of articles in Spenser Studies, featuring Elizabeth D. Harvey and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy alongside the infuential piece by Loewenstein cited above. All of these contribute to an early phase of Animal Studies which demonstrated the ambivalence of the species ‘divide’—not only culture’s need to assert and police it, but the porosity of the divide itself. Loewenstein’s disavowal of Spenser’s affective relationship with fauna informs his exploration of the poet’s assertion of kinship between ‘certain animals and certain humans’ (2007, 243), a kinship that Spenser analyses through philosophical scepticism. Bellamy argues that The Faerie Queene reveals a fear that human access to animality, and specifcally insect-being, is ‘less mediated than we may think’ (2007, 229). Harvey, in turn, puts Spenser into conversation with John Donne’s Metempsychosis (1601), arguing that Donne can help clarify the ‘ethical dimensions’ of Spenser’s animals (2007, 257).
The feld’s next sustained engagement was the 2015 Spenser Studies special issue, Spenser and ‘the Human’, edited by Ayesha Ramachandran and Melissa E. Sanchez, which reads Spenser through the framework of
9 See also Box Offce Bears, a project about animal baiting in the playing culture of London’s Bankside.
1
the posthuman. Seeing the animal as emblematic of human ontological instability, Ramachandran and Sanchez write that ‘Animal Studies offers one of the most persuasive challenges to the conceptual privileging of the human as a category’ (2015, xiii). They dedicate three articles to the subject. Joseph Campana’s piece, ‘Spenser’s Inhumanity’, considers why Spenser’s interest in the animal has been generally overlooked, positing that the poet’s focus on forms of ‘inhumanity’, including that of allegorical reading and writing, reveals the violence of human vitality (2015). Sean Henry explores goats in The Faerie Queene through a detailed analysis of Calepine in Book IV, arguing that goat imagery collapses species boundaries (2015), while Bradley Tuggle (2015) sees in Mother Hubberds Tale a similar drive to elide distinctions between life-forms. Rachel Stenner continues this conversation in a 2021 chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature, via a discussion of The Faerie Queene, Book VI and The Shepheardes Calender. Engaging Lindgren Johnson’s idea of fugitive humanism (Johnson 2018), Stenner fnds a ‘fugitive alterity’ (2021, 168) at play, in which a feeting mode of being is shared by human and non-human alike.
Animal-related Spenser scholarship is methodologically and theoretically eclectic, dialoguing not only with posthumanism, but with ecocriticism and studies of monstrosity (some would see Animal Studies as a subsidiary of the former). Alongside Barrett’s formulation of allegraphy discussed above, she explores elsewhere Spenser’s use of contemporary natural historical accounts of whale stranding (2013), focalised through the dragon’s corpse in The Faerie Queene, Book I. Watson analyses how animals shape monstrosity in the same poem, arguing that Spenser’s employment of hybrid creatures renders description ‘literally and fguratively chaotic’ (2000, 169). Maik Goth, in his comprehensive terratology (2015), also highlights the centrality of the poem’s human-animal composites, framing his ideas via the scholarship of Fudge (2002) and Joyce Salisbury (1994). It is to this incipient but already diverse critical conversation that Spenser and Animal Life contributes.
ChApter summAries
The chapters in this volume offer provocations for rethinking how Spenser engaged with animal life, a phenomenon—whether insect or whale, monstrous hybrid or ubiquitous sheep—that is present throughout his career and that animates his fertile literary worlds. Our contributors pay
R. STENNER AND A. SHINN
sustained attention to the intersection of the animal and poetic form, providing innovative readings of Spenser’s poetics as animal-like or indebted to animal movements and behaviours such as the pace of a horse, the wings of a butterfy, or the contortions of a performing ape. Several chapters locate Spenser’s writings within the discourses of his day, be they agricultural, maritime, or natural historical. Others demonstrate that animals provide Spenser with a multi-layered means of signifcation, a way of thinking about the natural world but also about the human on gradations between visibility and shadow. Several contributors respond to the increasing recognition that Animal Studies needs to make space for other critiques around race, gender, and including (though not treated explicitly here) sexuality and ableism.
The two chapters in part 1, ‘Animals and Cultural Practices’, investigate the real animals and habitats whose exploitation informs Spenser’s depiction of animal life. Hadfeld, in ‘Did Edmund Dream of Shorthaired Sheep?’, considers Spenser’s representation of sheep and sheep farming, responding to Loewenstein by asking whether the poet’s work demonstrates a sympathetic understanding of animals. Hadfeld argues that despite the importance of sheep farming for his own life, Spenser reveals little about his thoughts on the animal, being more interested in literary shepherds than literary sheep. Borlik, in ‘Spenser, Marine Life, and the Metaphysics of Extinction: Overfshing and the True Monsters of the Deep’, investigates Spenser’s representations of the sea and marine life in the context of mounting anxiety about the decline of Britain’s fsheries. Borlik details how The Faerie Queene contrasts Lucretian views of the ocean as the site par excellence of ecological instability with a Neoplatonic vision of the ‘fruitful’ (p. 48) ocean as a nursery of proliferating, and copious, biodiversity.
In part 2, ‘Animals, Slavery, and Race’, Kat Addis and Rachel Stenner read Spenser’s positioning of the animal in political hierarchies and theories of racial difference. Addis’ chapter, ‘“Beholde her Selfe in Mee”: The Politics of Hunting in Spenser’s Amoretti, Sonnet 67’, analyses the sonnet alongside the suture between hunting and war in Aristotle’s Politics. Addis looks to the sonnet’s alignment of hunting with literary fguration, arguing that the incorporation of the animal into the human formulates a political conception of ‘grace’ (p. 73), whilst the dynamic of hunter and hunted resembles the relationship of master to slave. Stenner’s chapter, ‘Errour’s Repercussions: Dragons, Race, and Animality in The Faerie Queene’, focuses on two of Book I’s monsters, the dragonlike Errour and
1
the dragon that Redcrosse must defeat to save Una’s Eden. She fnds that Spenser conceptualises the human through an intersection of animality and race working in tandem. Redcrosse’s quest to destroy the dragon refects how British homogeneity relies on the defeat of a composite animal and racial alterity.
In ‘Animals in Complaints’, the volume’s third section, Shinn, Brown, and Barrett interrogate Spenser’s 1591 poetry collection. Shinn’s chapter, ‘Spenser’s “apish crue”: Aping in Prosopopoeia, or Mother Hubberds Tale’, looks for a performing simian behind Spenser’s characterisation of his dissembling Ape who usurps the Lion’s throne. Shinn analyses the contortion of the Ape’s body and how its performativity relates to the pain of the animal in the baiting arena, reading the animal as a critique of the abuse of prosopopoeia and the risks that personation entails. Brown, in ‘Scorned Little Creatures? Insects and Genre in Complaints (1591)’, explores the miniature bestiaries of Visions of the Worlds Vanitie. Finding the insect to be an important component in Spenser’s shift from epic to complaint, Brown ponders whether poems in Complaints may be ‘negligible by design’ (p. 140). The fnal essay on Complaints is Barrett’s ‘Spenser’s Parenthetical Butterfies’. Reading Muiopotmos, or, The Fate of the Butterfie, Barrett focuses on Spenser’s conceptualisation of this famboyant insect, and his engagement of early modern natural history. She posits a lepidopteran practice of reading parenthetically which locates a fragile hospitality, at once essential and unnecessary, in the winged parentheses which fit through the poem.
The last section, ‘Readers and Poetics in The Faerie Queene’, ranges through the animal poetics of Spenser’s epic. In “‘Good to Think [With]”: Spenser’s Animals Against Materiality’, Rao argues that it is possible to read Spenser’s poems as both in touch with and resistant to the creatures they invoke or name. Centring Gryll, Malbecco, and the trembling deer from Amoretti 67, Rao critiques the tendency to distrust fguration, seeing in the animal a source of speculative interpretative possibilities. Dubow’s chapter, ‘A Fruitful-Headed Beast? Rhyme in The Faerie Queene’ explores the poem’s Hydran proliferation of regenerating rhymes. Dubow identifes a ‘snaky generativity’ (p. 204), thematically refected in the serpentine Errour, which promotes a tendency for rhyme to proliferate beyond the bounds of the formal architecture of Spenser’s verse. An appendix to Dubow’s chapter presents for the frst time new data backing her analysis of run-on rhymes. Wilcox-Mahon, in ‘Coursers and Courses in The Faerie Queene’, links the poem’s horses to its pacing, analogising a horse’s agility
R. STENNER AND A. SHINN
in motion with the narrative course of Spenser’s epic. Lyne, in ‘Spenser’s Wings’, thinks carefully about how wings in The Faerie Queene can be at once light and heavy, their fight informing the reader’s conceptualisation of Christian experience. When heavy, and even sharp, these wings correspond to the weightiness of sin.
Finally, in the ‘Coda’, Cuneo shifts our disciplinary focus as she refects on and concludes the work of the volume. She brings the insights of Art History to a discussion of German artist Hans Baldung’s (c.1485–1545) woodcuts, Horses in a Forest. Like Spenser’s poetic animals, the stallions in these images provoke the viewer to perceive new possibilities in a ‘fractious defance of narrative and classifcation’ (p. 280). Cuneo closes by considering the ethical call of the animal and the potential of Animal Studies to ‘encourage a new radical interdisciplinarity’ (p. 284).
To return momentarily to Spenser’s Theatre for Worldlings, the Phoenix with which we opened this introduction is only one of many animals in that text deserving critical attention. The frst epigram features a hind, ‘so faire as mought the greatest God delite’ (1999, 2, l.5), being pursued and vanquished by two ‘egre Dogs’ (1999, 2, l.6). As the speaker observes, the hind is rapidly chased, ‘pinchte’, and fnally ‘opprest’ (1999, 3, ll.5–11) into untimely death. It is, however, neither the conventional marring of the hind’s ‘noble beautie’ (1999, 3, l.13) nor the deadliness of the dogs’ force that stands out in this poem. Rather, it is the epigram’s striking image of construal and affect: animal interaction is witnessed and interpreted from a vantage point in which human subjectivity is marked. But how suffcient is the human response? In the face of the scene’s whirlingly concise bite, the speaker’s passivity—sitting at the ‘window all alone’ (1999, 3, 1.1)—jars curiously. He refects that ‘so many strange things hapned me to see, / As much it grieueth me to thinke theron’ (1999, 3, ll.2–3); death’s triumph, he states, ‘oft makes me waile so harde a destinie’ (1999, 3, l.14). Despite the strangeness and suddenness of the hind’s appearance, the speaker’s reaction is familiar, almost habitual, even in its emotiveness. We hope that this collection, provoking its own new construals and perspectives, brings the rewarding differences of Spenser’s animal entities closer into view. As for affect, our chase is not the urge to vanquish, but an acknowledgement of the power of defamiliarisation and the spirit of empathetic curiosity.
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It was only the vicar's dog who had accidentally found his way in, but he was dressed in a paper cap, and though he turned his head from side to side he could not get it off.
There was holly on the stair-rail and it pricked Noel; he leant over farther to get away from it, and then to the horror of Nurse, who had followed him out, she saw him over balance himself, and with a sudden awful thud, his little figure fell, his head striking the tiled floor of the hall with awful force.
Chris uttered a horrified cry which brought his mother out of her room.
She was the first to reach her darling, and raised him in her arms; but he lay still and unconscious. It had been so swift, so sudden an accident, that he had not had time to utter a cry
The little household gathered round him.
"He is killed!" cried Diana and Chris together
"No—no—stunned!" said Mrs. Inglefield in her agony, still striving to allay the fears of her children.
Then she turned to Chris:
"Fetch the doctor. Go on your bicycle. Nurse, come with me."
Diana watched the limp, unconscious form of her small brother being carried upstairs. Mrs. Tubbs followed Nurse; Cassy put her apron up to her eyes and began to cry
"Oh, Miss Diana, 'tis his birthday; what an end to it!"
Diana seemed turned to stone.
How and why did these things happen? They were all so happy a few minutes ago, and now Noel was perhaps dead and would never speak or laugh again.
She went slowly into the dining-room. The tea was all laid upon the table, the silver kettle boiling over the methylated lamp. They would have all been sitting round the table now, mother would be pouring out the tea, Noel's cake would have delighted him. It was a surprise—made by Mrs. Tubbs, who had put her very best work into it. It was a big iced cake, and had seven candles upon it. In the centre was a tiny little Christmas tree—a copy of Noel's. Its leaves and branches were frosted with sugar and a robin perched on the topmost branch. In pink letters on the white surface was written:
"Noel Inglefield. Happy Returns of his Birthday, and best Christmas Wishes."
As Diana gazed at the cake, tears crowded into her eyes.
Noel's cake! And he might never see it!
There were crackers round the table. What fun they would have had! There were jam sandwiches and sugarcoated biscuits, and coco-nut cakes and shortbread.
Who would enjoy the tea now, when Noel lay dead or dying upstairs?
"Oh, it's awful! awful!" she cried, "worse than anything I have ever thought of or made up for my stories! And I've spoken so crossly to him to-day, even though it was his birthday! Oh, what shall we do! What shall we do!"
When Chris returned he found Diana pacing the hall like a demented person.
The doctor followed on his heels, and with two or three strides had mounted the stairs and gone into the nursery
"Oh, Chris," said Diana with tearful eyes, "what shall we do? I believe he is quite dead already."
"He can't be," said Chris. "Wasn't it awful seeing him fall! I've been thinking the whole way along to the doctor's and back, of my cross words to him about the carol. We haven't been kind to him, Dinah —over and over again we haven't! And we can't ask him to forgive us. And it's his birthday. Do you think we could pray to God? Noel gets all his prayers answered, he says."
"He's so fond of God," moaned Diana; "perhaps God is very fond of him and wants him in heaven. I wish mother would come to us."
But it was a long while before their mother came, and when she did, all the glow and brightness of her face had vanished. She and the doctor went into her boudoir and talked a little, and then he went away, saying:
"I'll be up the first thing in the morning, but there's nothing more can be done."
Then Chris and Diana crept up to their mother
"Is he dead, Mums?" Chris whispered.
Mrs. Inglefield looked at them sorrowfully
"He is very, very ill, dear. It is bad concussion of the brain, and he may be unconscious for a long time. We must ask God to spare his precious little life."
A choke came in her voice, then she seemed to pull herself together
"We must have some tea. Nurse is watching by him, and I will go and relieve her soon. Come along."
That was a most miserable meal for both mother and children.
Noel's chair opposite his cake was empty. His cheerful little voice, which was always making itself heard, was hushed and silent now. Would they ever hear it again, his mother wondered?
And at last in desperation Chris spoke out his thoughts:
"Why has God let it happen on his birthday and on Christmas night, Mums? Any other time it wouldn't have been so bad."
"Be quiet," said Diana in a whisper, giving him an angry nudge. "You'll only make Mums more miserable."
Mrs. Inglefield caught the whisper
"No, he won't, dear. God loves Noel better than any of us. He has sent this trouble to us for some good reason. We must never question God's will."
The children were silent. They were glad when tea was over, but when their mother left them to return to the sickroom, they wandered about the house, not knowing what to do with themselves. Nurse came down at last, and told them that they must keep out of the nursery, as Noel must be kept as quiet as possible.
"I should go to bed early if I were you," she told them. "Perhaps your little brother will be better tomorrow morning."
"I know why God has let this accident happen," said Diana to Chris when Nurse had left them, and they had gone into their mother's boudoir, and sitting down on two chairs near the fire had faced each other in despairing silence; "it is to punish us. We haven't been good to him. We haven't loved him, and now God is going to take him away from us."
"We'll miss him horribly if he dies," said Chris. "I wouldn't let him ride my bicycle the day before yesterday."
"And I pushed him out of the nursery when I was writing," said Diana; "and told him he was a horrid little bother."
These torturing memories went with them when they went to bed.
For the first time their mother failed to come and wish them good night. Nurse was having her supper, and Mrs. Inglefield could not leave Noel.
But she did not forget them; only later on, when she did come, they had both forgotten their regrets, and remorse, in sleep.
The following days were very sad. Noel lay unconscious for two days and two nights; and then when he was able to eat, and take notice, his memory seemed to have left him. The house had to be kept very quiet, and for days his life seemed to hang upon a thread.
It was astonishing how many friends the little fellow had. The back door was besieged by the villagers during the first few days of his illness. Foster took the Christmas tree out of the drawingroom and planted it in its old bed, but as he did so he was heard murmuring to himself:
"We'll never see his like again. He were too near heaven for a little chap like him!"
Mr. Wargrave, Miss Constance, Ted and Inez, all tried in turns to comfort and amuse poor Chris and Diana.
As the days went on they began to hope, and when at last the doctor said that Noel was going to pull through, they cheered up and began to smile once more.
But they were not allowed to see him. Mrs. Inglefield looked worn to a shadow; it was heart-breaking to her to see her busy chattering little son lying in listless apathy on his bed, only moving his head to and fro, and hardly recognizing his own mother
Chris had to return to school before Noel was convalescent. Just before he went his mother let him come in and see the little patient. Chris could hardly believe that the tiny pinched face with the big restless eyes belonged to rosy, sturdy Noel.
He stooped over and kissed him very gently, and called him by name; but Noel took no notice, only moved his head restlessly from side to side.
And Chris went out of the room fighting with his tears. The very next day Diana said to her mother:
"Will Noel never get better, Mums? God isn't answering our prayers. I pray ever so many times in the day about him."
"Oh," cried her mother in anguish of tone, "don't pray too hard, darling, that we may keep him here. God knows best. For his sake I dare not pray too earnestly for his recovery."
Diana could not understand this until she talked to Mrs. Tubbs in the kitchen about it.
"Bless your heart, missy, your poor mother is afraid he'll never get his senses again. Some is left idiots after such a blow in the head.And Master Noel knows nobody yet, and p'r'aps never will."
This was a fresh horror to Diana. It was a good thing for her when Miss Morgan returned and lessons began again.
But at last steady improvement set in, and Mrs. Inglefield went about with the light again in her eyes and a smile upon her lips.
Inez came to wish Diana good-bye upon the day when the doctor was for the first time hopeful. She was going to school, and had been dreadfully distressed about Noel.
"I liked him the best of you," she said; "he was always so funny and so naughty, and yet so very good. And he talked like an angel. He's taught me more than anybody else, and I'm going to school with quite a good character."
"I'll write to you, Inez, and tell you about him," said Diana, "and perhaps you'll like me to send you a bit of my new story sometimes."
"I should love it."
They parted. Diana felt very lonely; she had never imagined that she would miss Noel so very much.
And then one Saturday when Chris was home, he and she went upstairs together to sit for a short time with the little invalid.
He was decidedly better, his eyes were dear and bright, and he was able to talk a little, though his voice was husky and weak. He smiled when he saw them.
"I've been very ill," he announced to them.
"Yes," said Diana, "we've missed you dreadfully, Noel. It will be nice when you're quite well again."
"I b'lieve," said Noel in his old slow way, "that I've been away to heaven, only I can't remember. I know I haven't been here all the time."
Chris stooped over him:
"We'll never be cross to you again, Noel, never."
Noel looked at him, then asked gravely:
"Do you love me now?"
And Chris and Diana both cried out with all their hearts:
"Indeed we do. We'll always love you."
Noel smiled contentedly. Then after a pause he said: "Then will you be kind to my Chris'mas tree? Will you give him some water and take care of him?"
"I'll water him every day," Diana rashly promised.
The interview was over; but Noel began to recover rapidly. It was a happy day when he was downstairs again: and the first thing he did was to totter out into the garden, and make his way to his
beloved fir tree.
It stood there, looking rather bedraggled, and showing a great gap where the branch had been cut off.
Noel was distressed at first, and then Chris, who was with him, said:
"He is like a soldier who has lost his arm in fighting for his King."
Noel's whole face brightened as he said:
"And he gave his branch to God for Jesus' birfday." He was comforted.
That same day, Bessie Sharpe came up to tell Mrs. Inglefield that her father had quietly passed away
"He were always talking of Master Noel. The last thing he said was, 'Tell Master Noel when he's well enough to hear it, that my time of waiting is over and I'm going like his Christmas tree, to be taken in for my Master's glory.'"
This message was given to Noel. He quite understood it.
"And Mr. Sharpe will be covered with glory," he said. "Everybody who goes to heaven will be like Christmas trees lighted up. I almost wish I had wented there."
But Chris and Diana had cried out together:
"We want you here."
And their mother looked at them with a smile upon her face and deep thankfulness in her heart. She knew now what had been the purpose in Noel's accident and illness. It was to bring the brothers and sister closer together, and to bind them in a strong chain of love and understanding that would not break under any provocation.
And Noel cried out:
"And I want to be here, for I love you all, specially—my dear Christmas tree."
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