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Allegory as a Form of Wit1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Judith Dundas
Judith Dundas*
Affiliation:
Montana State University
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Extract

The line of wit, I would contend, includes Spenser as well as Donne. But that statement is meaningless until some sort of significance is attached to the word 'wit’ that would make it apply to poets now felt to be very different. I do not propose to summarize Rosemond Tuve's Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, or repeat in brief her attempt to show that the Elizabethan and metaphysical poets were operating under the same poetic theory. Rather, I should like to take a little semantic excursion to find what uses of the word 'wit’ make it as applicable to Spenser as to Donne. It is curious that the metaphysical poets, even inferior ones such as Cleveland and Cowley, may still be described as witty. To the extent that we apply this word to poets who may be singularly unamusing but who are ingenious, we have accepted its seventeenth-century use. But Spenser witty? No, indeed. Yet in his own day his reputation for ‘fine Poeticall inuention, and most exquisit wit’ was unrivaled.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 11 , 1964 , pp. 223 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1964

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References

2 P.53

3 Nicholas Breton, The Wil of Wit (1599), fol. 5V (wrongly numbered 3).

4 Wright, Thomas, The Passions of the Minde in Generall(1604), p. 57 Google Scholar

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13 Edward Hyde, appended to Donne's Poems (1633), p. 377.

14 The subjoining of judgment to wit occurs for the same reason that judgment is subjoined to invention in Cox's Arte or Craj'te oj Rhethoryke (1529?). When the original rhetorical meaning of'invention’ as the finding of materials for an oration was being lost in the association of invention with imagination, it followed that judgment would be introduced as a separate operation—one more sign that the imagination was not thought to possess its own principle of order.

15 ‘On Elizabethan Wit', in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 1:1 (1961), 75-91.

16 Cf. Leonard Digges, ‘Upon Master William Shakespeare', prefixed to Shakespeare's Poems (1640), sig. *3r : he speaks of Shakespeare as ‘the patterne of all wit, Art without Art unparaleld as yet', which evidently means that Shakespeare by nature possessed that judgment usually acquired only by ‘art, imitation, and exercise'.

17 Arte of English Poesie [1589], ed. G.D.WiUcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 19.

18 Epistle to Can Grande della Scala, in Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, tr. Paget Toynbee (Oxford, 1920), p. 200.

19 ‘Brief Apology’ in G. Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford, 1904), n, 203.

20 ‘A Free and Offenceles Justification … ‘ in The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett (New York, 1941), p. 327-

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34 Brief Apology, in Smith, II, 202.