Reviewed by Meg Pearson
(megp@westga.edu)
Professor Helen Cooper, the author of vital texts ranging from the recent Shakespeare and the Medieval World to her groundbreaking book, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance, consistently forces literary scholars to rethink and even reject labels of periodization for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This collection in her honor, a lovely thank-you note to Professor Helen Cooper from her former research students, so recreates the exciting entanglements and continuities of Cooper’s own work that even organizing a review of the essays is challenging. The richly researched offerings may focus on a topic or a trope, but they are also constantly engaging in periodization and genre and reception as well.
A bit more than half the
essays in this collection explicitly interest themselves in reception,
particularly how authors from the medieval and renaissance periods conceived of
their works’ future readers. For example, Alexandra Gillespie argues that
Chaucer models a “complex, self-reflexive, relentlessly ironizing mode of
literary authorship” for Gower, Spenser, and Milton by tracing the play on the word
“uncouth” in several earlier works (20). How the later poets interpret and
allude to Chaucer demonstrates both their careful reading of his work and
portrayal of authorship as well as their simultaneous investment in their own
authorship and their future readers. The successful poet, the laureate, is
considered in Mary Flannery’s study of John Skelton. In his explicit reflection
on this role, Garland of Laurel,
Skelton looks to the past for models while contemplating fearfully a future
threat of obscurity. Andrew King similarly addresses the anxious author in his
examination of Samuel Sheppard’s The
Faerie King, a Civil War era poem that looks back to Spenser’s Faerie Queene while also nervously
comparing the poet’s ambitions to those of the doomed Charles I. All three
essays are rich examples of writers reading each other and reconsidering their
themes. Such intertemporal influence appears in four other arguments in the
collection that consider how readers and revisers give texts, tropes, and
genres new purpose and life.
The adaptation studies in
this collection combine considerable archival work with bold historicizing
arguments. Helen Vincent reveals how thoroughly eighteenth-century rewritings
of Sidney’s Arcadia adapted and
refocused the poem to address their contemporary interests. She writes, “the
story of Argulus and Parthenia both takes on the colours of contemporary
conceptions of courtship and marriage and becomes an influential text in the
development and propagation of those conceptions” (249). Sidney is novelized,
reflecting the generic concerns of the age, and the doomed lovers become
emblems of mutual desire and happy marriage, concepts with greater significance
and cultural import in the eighteenth century. Megan Leitch’s investigation of
Middle English prose romances argues that these prose works, frequently
concerned with offspring who inherit bad traits, may be read as responses to
more conventional romances; they are revisions that “kill the confidence in
proper inheritance that infuses earlier popular romance” even as they
demonstrate their reliance upon the worth of their predecessors (72). As in
Vincent’s essay, this piece reveals just as much about the audience of these
texts – merchants who relied upon learned virtue rather than aristocratic
inheritance (61). In an even more explicit discussion of adaptation, Matthew
Woodcock depicts how Thomas Churchyard tailors medieval de contempt mundi tropes for an Edwardian audience, resulting in
literature that criticizes using a mix of medieval prophetic discourse and
mid-Tudor language of justice and commonwealth while simultaneously redirecting
attention to the complainer himself. Similarly, Joyce Boro argues that Swetnam the Woman-Hater adjusts its
source material to associate misogyny with disease in order to diagnose the
Jacobean court. The play recrafts the work of a famously misogynist pamphleteer
and an adaptation of a late fifteenth-century Spanish romance by Juan de Flores
to respond directly to the hypermasculine and dysfunctional court under James
I.
The inherited text is not
only read but remembered, both in the senses of recalled and reconstructed. One
of the main continuities uncovered by the essays in this collection is that of
readers remembering: remembering genres that now need tweaking, grieving places
which no longer exist, and recalling commonplaces and sententiae from their youth. Personal and cultural memories create
expectations that can be violated for impact or exploited for their emotional
resonances, as several pieces demonstrate. Nandini Das, in her wide ranging
discussion of travel narratives and poetry about Arcadia, argues that the space
of Arcadia is both present and lost; it is a memory theater where early modern
authors and travelers stored their idealized notions of the pastoral. Arcadia
becomes shorthand for the meeting space between the real and the ideal, and it
accomplishes this by existing only as a memory. In the same way, Jason Powell
in the essay immediately following argues that Hamlet is full to bursting with moral sayings and fatherly advice,
commonplaces that would echo in the minds of every audience member and create
“extra-textual meaning” (171). However, the familiarity of Polonius’s advice,
for example, only serves to make Old Hamlet and Claudius’s paternal suggestions
to Hamlet all the more horrifying. The misuse of advice and the presence of bad
fathers becomes its own tragic trope.
Audience and scholarly
expectations of genre feature prominently in another group of essays. Once
again we see examinations of influence and reception across periods, although
here they might be contained within one of Professor Cooper’s own wheelhouses:
the romance. R.W. Maslen, Aisling Byrne, and James Wade all focus on medieval
and renaissance romances; their work reveals anew the ubiquity of this genre.
Maslen’s piece, which encompasses Chaucer, Malory, the Pearl Poet, Spenser, and
Shakespeare, traces the presence of bad armour in late chivalric romances. The
bold reach of the piece reveals how common broken armour truly is, and the
trope (or anti-meme, to use Maslen’s words) forces readerly attention to the
vulnerability of the knight. Rather than taking on all English romances, Byrne
uncovers how frequently early modern Irish audiences read medieval English romances.
Her work on these poems’ circulation westward offers a persuasive argument for
a “more thoroughly archipelagic approach” to their study (76). James Wade
similarly challenges what we think we know about penitential romance by
outlining the genre’s surge in popularity after the Reformation and its
appearance in texts such as King Lear
and The Faerie Queene.
Much like the recent Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature,
which argues convincingly against the labeling of the mid-Tudor period as “The
Drab Age” by piling on insurmountable amounts of data to the contrary, this
collection encourages the reader to defy the cliché of period labels and
generic assumptions by using the irresistible weight of textual evidence. The
broad perspective offered by these essays illuminates how closely intertwined
the so-called “Dark Ages” and the frequently fetishized “Renaissance” were for
contemporary readers and writers. As this collection proves, neither audiences
nor authors saw these periods as distinct. Chaucer was just as relevant to
Stuart poets as he was during his lifetime, and that recognition offers a
corrective to the flawed understanding of poetry which suggests that medieval
literature was replaced or supplanted or exceeded by later writing. Even when
the collection’s arguments suffer from overreaching, they delight and inspire
readers to make their own bigger and bolder claims and reject the scholarly
silos we too frequently inhabit.
Meg Pearson
University of West Georgia
