Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism
by Catherine Nicholson

Reviewed by Raphael Magarik

Offhand remarks about Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene reveal quite a bit about how scholars understand themselves and their discipline, if only because almost no one today reads it outside of English departments. “I hate this thing,” a professor muttered to me, immediately before devoting three weeks of his course, for which I was a teaching assistant, to the poem. Someone at a department to which I applied for a job, I was told by a bemused gossiper, had insisted they were looking for the kind of Renaissance scholar “who had read all of The Fairie Queene.” When I relayed this rumor to a friend, she said that if those were their requirements, they had better be prepared to exhume the candidates.

Some of this resistance to the Fairie Queene is understandable. The poem is immensely long (over 36,000 lines of verse, or roughly three times the length of John Milton’s Paradise Lost). But unlike comparably long novels, it is written in dense, tightly coiled stanzas, so reading it demands, somewhat impossibly, that you squint closely at each word even as you hold in mind a massive cast of knights, ladies, monsters, witches, and so on. Furthermore, behind the poem’s labyrinthine Arthurian romance, lies a second, secret story, an allegory in which characters represent abstract ideals like “chastity,” historical persons like Queen Elizabeth I, or both at the same time. Sometimes the allegory is obvious (a snaky lady named “Error” who spits out Catholic propaganda is easy enough to identify), but often it is not. In one of my favorite moments in the poem, one character asks another, “what the lion meant,” next to which, in my undergraduate edition, I penciled in, “beats me!”

To compound the difficulty, the poem is, even in student editions, traditionally printed in its original spelling (that is, “what the lyon ment”), which I was taught was archaic even in Spenser’s own day, an affected, faux medievalism, like an Elizabethan version of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. Only reading Catherine Nicholson’s Reading and Not Reading ‘The Fairie Queene’ did I unlearn this old chestnut of Spenser teaching. We do not know, Spenserians have proved in the last decade, that the early printed editions of the poem reflect Spenser’s orthographic preferences. Indeed, those published in his lifetime do not even agree with each other. Recent computer analysis shows the poem’s spelling does not notably differ from that of other Elizabethan texts. (Renaissance English had no standardized spelling, so in a trivial sense, every sixteenth century text is an alphabetical snowflake.) Eighteenth-century editors created the myth of Spenserian spelling, influenced both by aesthetic impression of the poem as a vast, archaic ruin and by a desire to mark The Fairie Queene, Nicholson writes, as “the preserve of specialists.”

The boring way of describing Nicholson’s book would be to call it “reception history”—that is, the field of critical study devoted to literary texts’ afterlives. Yet that description would be misleading. She does not attempt to canvas all of the poem’s reception, or even tell a unified, continuous historical narrative, as, say, John Leonard has done for Paradise Lost in his mammoth, two-volume work. Neither does she restrict herself to reception. Rather, most chapters tackle a question about a book of Spenser and move back and forth between reading the poem and reading its readers. In each case, she tells a story of a particular moment in the poem’s reception, which initially seems to reveal the idiosyncrasies of the moment that produced it: the Renaissance practice of mining literary texts for pithy, moral sentences at the expense of the broader narrative contexts, say, or the way Victorian children’s books and adaptations made a particular female character an attractive heroine but sidelined her allegorical function. But in each case, she argues the later misreading counter-intuitively reveals something genuine about the original text. Thus, these episodes in The Fairie Queene’s afterlife become more than just windows onto the misguided, even comic readings of later generations; they offer oddly askew, but for that reason surprisingly new windows onto the poem itself.

This pivoting works because The Fairie Queene (as is well-known among scholars) is itself obsessively fascinated by acts of interpretation, especially bad ones. When the Redcrosse knight, the protagonist of Book I, arrives at the obviously disreputable House of Pride, to give an early example, he is greeted by bards singing “melancholy” songs that echo almost word-for-word Spenser’s own poem. The adroit reader is thus made uncomfortably aware of the dubious moral possibilities of the poem she is reading and challenged to distinguish it from these intra-textual models. In particular, she is challenged to interpret better than Redcrosse, who has already disastrously misread his surroundings, mistaking a wizard-created succubus for his beloved and, believing her to have been unfaithful, thus fled her and eloped with her evil double (to be clear, that’s another evil double). In these and numerous other ways, what Nicholson calls “wrongheaded responses” are built into the fabric of the poem. It thus makes perverse sense that she “cherishes them, as an index of the poem’s own ambivalently mixed symbols.” Misunderstanding (or, in the idiom of her title, “not reading”) the Fairie Queene is what the whole poem is about.

As an example of how readers’ misunderstandings of the poem surprisingly illuminate its internal interest in misreading, consider partial reading: reading from a highly specific vantage point, which neglects many of the text’s details in favor of ones that most solicit a particular reader’s interests. Every teacher of literature has students who read this way—finding surrogate characters with whom to identify. In its extreme versions, this hermeneutic turns every literary work you read into “Where’s Waldo.” When I teach Bible as Literature, for instance, I encounter numerous students eager to show how Christ is the protagonist of each and every story in Genesis. But as Nicholson argues, The Fairie Queene peculiarly demands partial reading, because in one sense, the poem’s “primary—and ultimate—audience… was a singularly potent subject,” namely Queen Elizabeth, to whom the poem is dedicated and its eponymous character allegorically refers. Thus, to read Spenser as he intended is “to inhabit the imagined perspective of its first and most important audience.” But crucially, Elizabeth was a peculiar, even unique audience.

For instance, take The Fairie Queene’s middle books, which center on romantic coupling and uncoupling and were influentially read by C. S. Lewis as celebrating the bliss of monogamous eros. Nicholson, building on more recent feminist and queer scholarship, argues ingeniously that such a celebration was crucially inhibited by the idiosyncrasies of the poem’s most important reader: Elizabeth, who, known as the virgin queen, avoided marriage almost as the condition of her rule. Nicholson suggests this partial reading helps us understand the poem’s focus on the partiality of marriage itself, the sense in which “every marriage was also a divorce from the larger community,” which removes the celebrants from the porous, public space of friendship and non-exclusive association. Yet Nicholson finally complicates this account, showing how yet another form of partiality built into Spenser’s writing—that he had short extracts (that is, parts) of the poem read aloud in friendly, social audiences—offers an early alternative to Elizabeth’s private control of its meaning. This mode of reading was just as, if not more, partial as the queen’s, yet also incomplete, fragmentary, and non-exclusive—and thus opens a second alternative to either the private individuality of marriage or Elizabeth’s tyrannical, personal interests.

Readings like this one move agilely between the finest details of the text (an aspect that my synopsis shortchanges, because it is nearly impossible to summarize efficiently), how the poem was read in Spenser’s days, multiple layers of later readers, and a particular theoretical question around reading. They also illustrate the book’s central thesis, namely that as The Fairie Queene became “ideal object of academic research,” and its readers became increasingly only the disciplined and scholarly, crucial dimensions of the poem have been lost. Earlier modes of The Fairie Queene, partial as they were—whether that meant dwelling on favorite characters, skipping dull bits, collecting memorable lines, or deliberately ignoring dimensions of the poem—were “reading’s indispensable adjunct,” which both afforded the poem a wider readership and opened vistas on it we now tend to overlook. The remaking of The Fairie Queene as a proving ground for disciplined scholarship—particularly antiquarian digging to identify Spenser’s allusion and the search for a unifying principle beneath its messy, wandering exterior—also explained to me the ambivalent reactions the work seems to produce among contemporary academics. As early as the 1940s, the New Critics, who wanted to revitalize literary scholarship with a focus on present significance and prized the fine, compact ironies of Donne’s lyric, disdained Spenser’s poem precisely for its length and amenability to historical scholarship. The Fairie Queene has often since seemed both the book we must read and the book with which we can do nothing, a proving ground for a peculiarly infertile version of scholastic rigor.

In tapping The Fairie Queene’s history of undisciplined reading, Nicholson has helped to thaw some of the marmoreal frigidity with which twentieth century scholarship not infrequently imbued the poem. (Paradoxically, she has done so without herself sacrificing an iota of rigor.) Spenser himself might well have appreciated the project. On one, common and broadly convincing account of his poem, it is so massive because it enfolds literary material the legitimacy of which had been called into question by some of the new rigors of sixteenth century readers: Humanists contemptuous of the un-classical plots and dubious morality of medieval romance, and fervent Protestants opposed to classical mythology’s paganism. A consummate borrower and re-worker, Spenser uses allegory to justify morally and religiously all these stories—that is, to make them speak to contemporary concerns and conversations. The Fairie Queene is thus a massive archive of, and attempt to recuperate, writing that might be otherwise deemed undisciplined and old-fashioned. The poem, and Nicholson’s book, thus teach us both caution in discarding past texts as outdated and audacity in finding new pathways to make them relevant.