Abstract
In 1596 Spenser resumes his engagement with Burghley in the opening and closing moments of The Faerie Queene. Despite such prominent locations for a discussion of his conflict with the Lord Treasurer, the poet’s remarks by no means settle the issue on either factual or motivational grounds. If the poet boldly proclaims and rejects the criticism of the great statesman, his response is less pointed than his attacks in 1591, more cryptic and deflective. It could hardly have been otherwise. If Spenser assumes a cloud of displeasure from Burghley in 1596, he does not dare tempt the calling-in of his national epic. While resolute and indignant, Spenser is also bitterly ironic, hinting at emotional registers supposedly not applicable to the misunderstood poet. In associating a ‘mighty Peres displeasure’ (FQ 6.12.41.6) with an assault upon his poem by the Blattant Beast, Spenser represents himself as the unjust victim of slander. But in 1596, could not Burghley have claimed the right to slanderous injury, after the attacks on his character, reputation, and family in the Complaints?
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Notes
Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser’s Historical Allegory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932), 104–32.
Harold Stein, Studies in Spenser’s Complaints (New York: Oxford University Press, 1934), 92–5.
Brice Harris, ‘The Ape in Mother Hubberds Tale’, Huntington Library Quarterly 13 (1941): 191–203, 201–3.
Thomas Herron, ‘Reforming the Fox: Spenser’s “Mother Hubberds Tale,” the Beast Fables of Barnabe Riche, and Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin’, Studies in Philology 105 (2008): 336–87;364.
For an analysis of the beast fable as a covert form of political commentary in sixteenth-century England, see Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 45–80.
M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Gabriel Harvey, Foure Letters, and certaine Sonnets (1592), 6–7.
On Spenser’s intellectual debts to Horace in Mother Hubberds Tale, see Richard S. Peterson, ‘Laurel Crown and Ape’s Tail: New Light on Spenser’s Career from Sir Thomas Tresham’, Spenser Studies 12 (1991 [1998]): 1–36, 16–17.
For a discussion of the context and implications of Nashe’s beast fable, see Henry Chettle and Robert Greene, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit: Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592), D. Allen Carroll, ed. (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1994), 107–13.
Thomas Nashe, Strange Newes, Of the intercepting certaine Letters, and a Conuoy of Verses, as they were going to victual the Low Countries (1592), E-Ev.
Richard Verstegan, The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (c. 1550–1640), Anthony G. Petti, ed. (London: Catholic Record Society, 1959), 115.
For a recent assessment of the 1599 bishops’ ban, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 198–217.
On the complexity of slander as construed by early modern English legal institutions, see Kaplan 12–19. Other examinations of legal conceptions of slander in the work of Spenser include Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Sclaunder, slander’, in Spenser Encyclopedia 632–3, and Kenneth Gross, ‘Reflections on the Blattant Beast’, Spenser Studies 13 (1999): 101–24.
Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 99.
The Latinate term of ‘transumptio’ derives from Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, vol. 3, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 3.6.37–9. For an index of English Renaissance treatments of metalepsis, see Warren Taylor, Tudor Figures of Rhetoric (Whitewater, WI: Language Press, 1972), 109.
For the most thorough survey of the term, see John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 133–49.
Susanne Lindgren Wofford defines the trope as a dual function of ‘ellipsis and … temporal inversion’ in The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 267. David Lee Miller offers an elaborate analysis of the rhetoric of sublimation in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene through metaleptic inversion in The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene, 76–81, and esp. 107–9. On metalepsis applied to Emerson’s notion of the sublime, see Eric Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 115–27.
also Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 240–3.
Harmon and Holman further define metalepsis as the compression of two tropes: ‘Definitions vary and even diverge, but the point of metalepsis seems to be the adding of one trope or figure to another, along with such extreme compression that the literal sense of the statement is eclipsed or reduced to anomaly or nonsense. The figure crops up in rhetorical situations of maximal drama and interest. We can say discursively, for example, that the sisters Helen and Clytemnestra had much to do with the causing of the Trojan War and certain events in its aftermath, such as the murder of Agamemnon. The many parts and steps of this complex process are transumed in the very powerful metaleptic figure in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” In two lines, Marlowe compounds a dozen figures, including question, metonymy, metaphor, hyperbole, and paradox (fortified by an elementary reference to water and fire, a deletion of all fully human elements, and emphatic alliteration and megaphonic IAMBS with very short syllables and very long long ones).’ William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 7th edn. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 314–15.
On the relation of metalepsis to a theory of ideology, see Wofford 21–2. On the trope’s applicability to Harold Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’, see Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 20.
Edmund Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers, Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 148–9, hereafter cited as Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers.
Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, W. L. Renwick, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 106.
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© 2011 Bruce Danner
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Danner, B. (2011). The Legacy of the Complaints and the Question of Slander. In: Edmund Spenser’s War on Lord Burghley. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230336674_7
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