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The Allegorical Interpretation of Renaissance Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Rhodes Dunlap
Rhodes Dunlap*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa Iowa, City
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Extract

That there are figures in all things is a notion which in the Renaissance, certainly no less than in any other period, demonstrated both its potential sublimity and its potential absurdity. Like many other sublime commonplaces, we find it in Shakespeare; and in Shakespeare, too, we find the quintessence of at least one kind of allegorical interpreter, for “there is figures in all things” is spoken by that redoubtable combination of learning and bravery, the valorous Welsh captain Fluellen in Henry V. To Fluellen's mind, as he pursues the universal figurative correspondences, Macedon and Monmouth are as “alike as my fingers is to my fingers.” He not only perceives such allegorical richness, he is eager to communicate it. Ancient Pistol cannot complete his tirade against “that goddess blind / That stands upon the rolling restless stone” before Fluellen must break in with an explication in which iconographic and thematic elements are finely balanced: “By your patience, Aunchient Pistol, Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning and inconstant and mutability and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls; in good truth, the poet makes a most excellent description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral.” But Shakespeare does not allow us to dismiss Fluellen, in his comical character, as a mere bundle of clichés and correspondences, the theorist of a river in Macedon (though it is out of his brains what is the name of it) and also moreover a river at Monmouth, and salmons in both.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 1 , March 1967 , pp. 39 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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Footnotes

*

This paper and the two preceding were presented in English Section I at the 80th annual meeting of the MLA, in Chicago, 28 Dec. 1965.

References

1 Torquato Tasso, Opere (Milano, 1804), iii, 121.

2 Cited by C. H. Herford in his edition of Spenser's Shepheards Calendar (London, 1921), pp. xxx–xxxi.

3 Dedicatory epistle to Volpone; “To the Readers” before Sejanus.

4 “Apologie de Raimond Sebond,” in Montaigne, Essais, ed. Jean Plattard (Paris, 1951), ii, 375–377.

5 Preface to Of the Wisdom of the Ancients, in Bacon, Works, ed. Spedding and Ellis (Boston, 1860), xiii, 79–80.

6 Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson (Oxford, 1954), vii, 213.

7 Bacon, xiii, 76–78.

8 E.g., Lilian Winstanley, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession (Cambridge, Eng., 1921) and “Othello” as the Tragedy of Italy (London, 1924); Edith Rickert, “Political Propaganda and Satire in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” MP, xxi (1923–24), 53–87, 133–154; Evelyn May Albright, “The Folio Version of Henry V in Relation to Shakespeare's Times,” PMLA, xliii (1928), 722–756.

9 Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory (Baltimore, Md., 1932), p. 76.

10 Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (London, 1936), p. 31.

11 “Qui est dire que tout est en toutes choses, et par consequent rien en aucune, car rien n'est où tout est” (Montaigne, ii, 375).

12 Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures. By G. S. (Oxford, 1632). “To the Reader”: “In the Muthologie [sic] I have rather followed (as fuller of delight and more usefull) the varietie of mens severall conceptions, where they are not over-strained, then curiously examined their exact proprietie; which is to be borne-with in Fables and Allegories, so as the principall points of application resemble the ground-worke.”

13 Sir John Harington, The Metamorphosis of Ajax, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York and London, 1962), p. 184.

14 E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1930), ii, 326–327.

15 Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, i, 137.

16 The Works of Guillaume De Salluste Sieur Du Bartas, ed. Holmes, Lyons, and Linker (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1938), ii, 184–185.