Hostname: page-component-669899f699-ggqkh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-26T16:59:12.367Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Contingency of Form in Renaissance Poetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2024

Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Metaphrasis is an exercise of the English humanist schoolroom that harbors both a theory of form and a method of reading. From the perspective of metaphrasis, the central question one asks of a form is not what it is. Metaphrasis encourages us to ask, instead: What is the range of this poem's formal possibilities? What variety of forms might this poem take? What variety of forms should this poem take? Or what variety of forms would this poem take under a specific set of alternative conditions, whether we conceive of those conditions along historical, aesthetic, or ethical axes? In this essay, I take up a single stanza from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), and I argue that where form establishes the parameters of possibility for a poem, the critical activity of metaphrasis permits us to imagine the world of the poem otherwise.

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 138 , Issue 5 , October 2023 , pp. 1094 - 1109
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

This essay is dedicated to Jacqueline T. Miller on the occasion of her retirement from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she taught me and so many others to read The Faerie Queene. Thank you, Jackie.

References

Works Cited

Adamson, Sylvia. “Literary Language.” The Cambridge History of the English Language, edited by Lass, Roger, vol. 3, Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 539–653.Google Scholar
Anderson, Judith. Reading the Allegorical Intertext. Fordham UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by Lawson-Tancred, Hugh, Penguin Books, 1986.Google Scholar
Aristotle. G eneration and Corruption. Aristotle: Introductory Readings, translated by Irwin, Terence and Fine, Gail, Hackett Publishing, 1996, pp. 69–75.Google Scholar
Aristotle. The Metaphysics. Translated by Lawson-Tancred, Hugh, Penguin Books, 1998.Google Scholar
Aristotle. Physics. Translated by Waterfield, Robin, Oxford UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Ascham, Roger. The Schoolmaster (1570). Edited by Ryan, Lawrence V., U of Virginia P, 1967.Google Scholar
Avery, Bruce. “Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland.” ELH, vol. 57, no. 2, 1990, pp. 276–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barret, J. K. Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England. Cornell UP, 2016.Google Scholar
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Translated and edited by Stoekl, Allan, U of Minnesota P, 1985.Google Scholar
Baxandall, Michael. Giotto and the Orators. Clarendon Press, 1971.Google Scholar
Berger, Harry Jr. The Allegorical Temper. Yale UP, 1957.Google Scholar
Berlinski, David. The King of Infinite Space: Euclid and His Elements. Basic Books, 2013.Google Scholar
Best, Stephen, and Marcus, Sharon, editors. The Way We Read Now. Special issue of Representations. Vol. 108, no. 1, 2009.Google Scholar
Bois, Yve-Alain, and Krauss, Rosalind E.. Formless: A User's Guide. Zone Books, 1997.Google Scholar
Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets. Yale UP, 1969.Google Scholar
Borris, Kenneth. Spenser's Poetics of Prophecy in The Faerie Queene V. U of Victoria, 1991. English Literary Studies Monograph Series.Google Scholar
Brooks, Cleanth. “The Formalist Critics.” Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Parker, Robert Dale, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 19–24.Google Scholar
Brown, Marshall, and Wolfson, Susan, editors. Reading for Form. Special issue of Modern Language Quarterly. Vol. 61, no. 1, 2000.Google Scholar
Burton, Ben, and Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth, editors. The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture. Oxford UP, 2014.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198702818.003.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cicero. De oratore. Translated by Rackham, H., Harvard UP, 1942.Google Scholar
Cicero. Orator. Translated by Hubbell, H. M., Harvard UP, 1939.Google Scholar
Cohen, Stephen, editor. Shakespeare and Historical Formalism. Ashgate Publishing, 2007.Google Scholar
Colie, Rosalie. The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance. U of California P, 1973.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crane, R. S. The Languages of Criticism and the Structures of Poetry. U of Toronto P, 1953.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Croll, Morris. Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm. Princeton UP, 1966.10.1515/9781400879205CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daniel, Samuel. “A Defence of Rhyme.” Sidney's ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, edited by Alexander, Gavin, Penguin Books, 2004, pp. 207–33.Google Scholar
Davies, John. Wit's Bedlam. London, 1617.Google Scholar
De Grazia, Margreta. “Lost Potential in Grammar and Nature: Sidney's Astrophil and Stella.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, vol. 21, 1981, pp. 21–35.10.2307/450110CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Demetrius. On Style. Translated by Innes, Doreen C., Harvard UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Dimock, Wai Chee. ‘‘Subjunctive Time: Henry James's Possible Wars.’’ Narrative, vol. 17, no. 3, 2009, pp. 242–54.10.1353/nar.0.0030CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, Michael. Politicke Courtier. McGill-Queen's UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dolezel, Lubomír. “Possible Worlds of Fiction and History.” New Literary History, vol. 29, no. 4, 1998, pp. 785–809.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dolven, Jeff. “The Method of Spenser's Stanza.” Spenser Studies, vol. 19, 2004, pp. 17–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dolven, Jeff. “Reading Wyatt for the Style.” Modern Philology, vol. 105, no. 1, 2007, pp. 65–86.10.1086/587199CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dolven, Jeff. Senses of Style: Poetry before Interpretation. U of Chicago P, 2017.10.7208/chicago/9780226517254.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology. New Left Books, 1976.Google Scholar
Elsky, Stephanie. “‘Wonne with Custome’: Conquest and Etymology in the Spenser-Harvey Letters and A View of the Present State of Ireland.” Spenser Studies, vol. 28, 2013, pp. 165–92.10.7756/spst.028.007.165-192CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. 3rd ed., New Directions, 1966.Google Scholar
Erasmus, Desiderius. Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style. Translated by Knott, Betty I., U of Toronto P, 1978.Google Scholar
Erasmus, Desiderius. De conscribendis epistolis. Translated by Fantazzi, Charles, U of Toronto P, 1985.Google Scholar
Euclid. The Elements of Geometrie. Translated by Billingsley, Henry, London, 1570.Google Scholar
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.10.7208/chicago/9780226294179.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fish, Stanley. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics.” New Literary History, vol. 2, no. 1, 1970, pp. 123–62.10.2307/468593CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fletcher, Angus. The Prophetic Moment. U of Chicago P, 1971.Google Scholar
Foley, Stephen. “Not-Blank-Verse: Surrey's Aeneid Translations and the Pre-history of a Form.” Poets and Critics Read Vergil, edited by Spence, Sarah, Yale UP, 2001, pp. 149–71.Google Scholar
Fraunce, Abraham. The Lawiers Logike. London, 1588.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. U of Chicago P, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gascoigne, George. “Certayne Notes of Instruction. 1575.” Elizabethan Critical Essays, edited by Gregory Smith, G., vol. 1, Oxford UP, 1904, pp. 46–57.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Jonathan. Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse. Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. U of Chicago P, 1980.Google Scholar
Gross, Kenneth. “Shapes of Time: On the Spenserian Stanza.” Spenser Studies, vol. 19, 2004, pp. 27–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grossman, Allen. Summa Lyrica. The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers, Johns Hopkins UP, 1992, pp. 205–375.Google Scholar
Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life. Henry Holt, 2012.Google Scholar
Hoover, Paul. Sonnet 56. Les Figues Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Howard, Edward. Spencer Redivivus. London, 1687.Google Scholar
Ingarden, Roman. “The General Question of the Essence of Form and Content.” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 57, 1960, pp. 222–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, Heather. “The Problem of Poetry in The Faerie Queene, Book V.” The Spenser Review, vol. 45, no. 1, 2015, www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/45.1.1/.Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. “Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden.” Ben Jonson, edited by Donaldson, Ian, Oxford UP, 1985, pp. 595–609.Google Scholar
Jonson, Ben. Discoveries. Edited by Castelain, Maurice, Hatchette, 1906.Google Scholar
Kahn, Victoria. Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance. Cornell UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford UP, 1969.Google Scholar
King, Andrew. The Faerie Queene and Middle English Romance: The Matter of Just Memory. Clarendon Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knevet, Ralph. A Supplement of the Faery Queene. Edited by Burlinson, Christopher et al., Manchester UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Kramnick, Jonathan. “Criticism and Truth.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 47, no. 2, 2021, pp. 218–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kramnick, Jonathan, and Nersessian, Anahid. “Form and Explanation.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 43, no. 3, 2017, pp. 650–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krier, Theresa. “Time Lords: Rhythm and Interval in Spenser's Stanzaic Narrative.” Spenser Studies, vol. 21, 2006, pp. 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kunin, Aaron. Love Three. Wave Books, 2019.Google Scholar
LaDrière, Craig. “Form.” The Dictionary of World Literature, edited by Shipley, Joseph T., Philosophical Library, 1953, pp. 167–71.Google Scholar
Laskey, Dorothea. Poetry Is Not a Project. Ugly Duckling Press, 2011, issuu.com/uglyducklingpresse/docs/poetry_is-_not_a_project_ebook.Google Scholar
Leeds, John. “Language and Metaphysics Rejoined: Thomas Linacre and Grammar beyond the Sign.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 46, 2016, pp. 213–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leighton, Angela. “Poetry's Knowing.” The Philosophy of Poetry, edited by Gibson, John, Oxford UP, 2015, pp. 162–82.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603671.003.0009CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lethbridge, J. B., editor. Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions. Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline. “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies.” Victorian Studies, vol. 48, no. 4, 2006, pp. 625–57.10.2979/VIC.2006.48.4.625CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Marjorie. “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 2, Mar. 2007, pp. 558–69.Google Scholar
Magnusson, Lynne. “A Play of Modals: Grammar and Potential Action in Early Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Survey, edited by Holland, Peter, Cambridge UP, 2009, pp. 69–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Magnusson, Lynne. “‘What May Be and Should Be’: Grammar Moods and the Invention of History in 1 Henry IV.” Shakespeare's World of Words, edited by Yachnin, Paul, Arden, 2015, pp. 147–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mallette, Richard. “Book Five of The Faerie Queene: An Elizabethan Apocalypse.” Spenser Studies, vol. 11, 1990, pp. 129–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, Jenny C. Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England. Cornell UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Masten, Jeffrey. Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mathews, Harry. “Thirty-Five Variations on a Theme from Shakespeare.” The Penguin Book of Oulipo, edited by Terry, Philip, Penguin Books, 2019, pp. 1–4.Google Scholar
McLane, Maureen M. “This Is Not an Essay on Poetry of the Past Twenty Years.” Public Books, 15 Oct. 2020, www.publicbooks.org/this-is-not-an-essay-on-poetry-of-the-past-20-years/.Google Scholar
Miller, Andrew H. “Implicative Criticism; or, The Display of Thinking.” New Literary History, vol. 44, no. 3, 2013, pp. 345–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, David Lee. “Gender, Justice, and the Gods in The Faerie Queene, Book 5.” Reading Renaissance Ethics, edited by Grossman, Marshall, Routledge, 2007, pp. 19–37.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry.” New Literary History, vol. 43, no. 2, 2012, pp. 205–24.10.1353/nlh.2012.0018CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mueller, Janel. “Periodos: Squaring the Circle.” Renaissance Figures of Speech, edited by Adamson, Sylvia et al., Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 61–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myers, Benjamin P. “The Green and Golden World: Spenser's Rewriting of the Munster Plantation.” ELH, vol. 76, no. 2, 2009, pp. 473–90.10.1353/elh.0.0043CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicholson, Catherine. Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance. U of Pennsylvania P, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norbrook, David. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. Oxford UP, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ogden, Emily. On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays. U of Chicago P, 2022.10.7208/chicago/9780226751498.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ovid. The Thre First Bookes of Ouids De Tristibus, Translated into Englishe. Translated by Churchyard, Thomas, London, 1572.Google Scholar
Ovid. Tristia. Translated by Wheeler, Arthur Leslie, Harvard UP, 1924.Google Scholar
Palfrey, Simon. Shakespeare's Possible Worlds. Cambridge UP, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parker, Patricia. Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode. Princeton UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Puttenham, George. The Art of English Poesy. Edited by Whigham, Frank and Rebhorn, Wayne A., Cornell UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Quintilian. Institutio oratoria. Translated by Butler, H. E., Harvard UP, 1921.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Colleen Ruth. “In the Mood of Fiction.” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 52, 2022, pp. 385–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenfeld, Colleen Ruth. “Poetry and the Potential Mood: The Counterfactual Form of Ben Jonson's ‘To Fine Lady Would-Be.’” Modern Philology, vol. 112, 2014, pp. 336–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saint-Amour, Paul K. “The Literary Present.” ELH, vol. 85, no. 2, 2018, pp. 367–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandler, Florence. “The Faerie Queene: An Elizabethan Apocalypse.” The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, edited by Patrides, C. A. and Wittreich, Joseph, Cornell UP, 1984, pp. 148–74.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Debapriya. “The Tempest’s Other Plots.” Shakespeare Studies, vol. 45, 2017, pp. 203–30.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Shelby, L. R. “Medieval Masons’ Tools. II. Compass and Square.” Technology and Culture, vol. 6, 1965, pp. 236–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shuger, Debora. “Irishmen, Aristocrats, and Other White Barbarians.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 2, 1997, pp. 494–525.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sidney, Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” The Major Works, edited by Jones, Katherine Duncan, Oxford UP, 1989, pp. 212–50.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation” and Other Essays. Octagon, 1978.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by Hamilton, A. C., 2nd ed., Longman, 2007.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. A View of the State of Ireland. Blackwell Publishing, 1997.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund, and Harvey, Gabriel. Three Proper, Wittie, and Familiar Letters. London, 1580.Google Scholar
Stewart, Susan. “Rhyme and Freedom.” The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, edited by Perloff, Marjorie and Dworkin, Craig, U of Chicago P, 2009, pp. 29–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teskey, Gordon. Spenserian Moments. Harvard UP, 2019.Google Scholar
Tottel, Richard. Tottel's Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others. Edited by Holton, Amanda and Macfaul, Tom, Penguin Books, 2011.Google Scholar
Turner, Henry S. The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630. Oxford UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tutino, Stefania. “Nothing but the Truth? Hermeneutics and Morality in the Doctrines of Equivocation and Mental Reservation in Early Modern Europe.” Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 1, 2011, pp. 115–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Es, Bart. Spenser's Forms of History. Oxford UP, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Es, Bart. “‘The Streame and Currant of Time’: Land, Myth, and History in the Works of Spenser.” Spenser Studies, vol. 18, 2003, pp. 209–29.Google Scholar
Vives, Juan Luis. De ratione dicendi: A Treatise on Rhetoric by Juan Luis Vives. Translated by Cooney, James Francis, Ohio State U, 1966.Google Scholar
Waller, Gary. Edmund Spenser: A Literary Life. Macmillan Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Thomas. “Spenser's Irish Hubbub.” ELH, vol. 81, no. 3, 2004, pp. 757–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williamson, George. The Senecan Amble: Prose from Bacon to Collier. U of Chicago P, 1951.Google Scholar
Wittreich, Joseph. “Apocalypse.” The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by Hamilton, A. C., U of Toronto P, 1990, pp. 46–48.Google Scholar
Wolfson, Susan. Formal Charges. Stanford UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Wyatt, Thomas. The Complete Poems. Edited by Rebholz, R. A., Penguin Books, 1978.Google Scholar