Coleridge and Spenser
I had my own version of Write Night at home with my books and papers, so this is what I came up with. Hope you enjoy it. This is only the beginning. And yes, "Shepheardes Calender" is the correct spelling; it's the Middle English genitive.
Scholarly sources on both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edmund Spencer abound. From biography to critical explications and readings of their works, library shelves and journals are filled with copious materials. On investigation of this panoply, the idea of an inspiration for the gloss that appears in later editions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as originating from Spenser’s use of the same in The Shepheardes Calender bears further investigation. Various sources allude to the Spenserian-Coleridgean connection, but none directly attack this possible and tenable link. Then to look at information explaining marginal glosses and their background, works about the glosses of The Shepheardes Calender and The Calender, discourses on the glosses of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, data on Coleridge, and interpretations of the poem itself all help to weld the parts together into a contiguous discourse, leading to a new synthesis and understanding of the works in question and how the glosses in both works function.
In the article, “The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books,” William Slights writes that Renaissance authors had various reasons for adding marginalia to their texts: the impetus behind adding textual “clues” ranged from making a text more accessible, by referring to other works better known by the readership of the time, to leading the reader to a certain conclusion that coalesced with the author’s intentions. The downside to adding in glosses and other sorts of marginalia to any given text is that the additional information can add more complexity and “radically destabilize it” (682). Slights maintains that marginalia also steer a reader toward locating a work in a certain context, be it literary, social, or political (683). Slights also begins by saying that his study of marginalia in the English Renaissance is not comprehensive of all the available texts from the era but does consist of a key sample from 1558-1603. Such authors such as Erasmus, Ben Jonson, and Edmund Spenser Slights regards as “justly privileged…with particularly revealing marginalia” and serve his purpose of illustrating how marginalia accomplish certain, earlier-mentioned, ulterior tasks (684).
As well, Slights outlines a list of goals that marginal glosses might accomplish; they run a long gamut: amplification, annotation, appropriation, correction, emphasis, evaluation, exhortation, explication, justification, organization, parody, pre-emption, rhetorical gloss, simplification, and translation (685-686). Importantly, Slights urges readers to be mindful that glosses have the power to alter a reader’s sense of the passages glossed; the will of the author, through careful glossing, can open and close certain doorways of perception in the readership, by authorial design (687). Spenser’s glosses in The Shepheardes Calender serve as a prime example of a gloss used to discretely relegate the sensitive issues raised in the allegory to a secondary position, thus somewhat obfuscating the true brunt of the poem’s message (690).
The Shepheardes Calender contains several marginal devices to achieve this darkening and confusing illumination. The additions to the poem include a dedicatory letter, an address to the poem in verse, an epistle to Gabriel Harvey, an argument, “emblems” at the end of each month’s verses, and finally the glosses themselves. Critics have argued whether or not E.K., the glossist, was Spenser or not as the additions to the poem make up half the length of the work (704). Slights believes that the use of a word such as “religiously” that would connote the same idea as “tenaciously” to a modern reader might have insinuated a pejorative stab at Roman Catholicism to a reader in the 1580s (706). The glosses in the May eclogue evens serve to “inflame[e] the reader with an allusion to the most sensational public atrocity of the Catholic authorities” in its direct address of the concerns E.K. felt surrounding the possible marriage of Elizabeth I to Duc d’Alençon of France (707). Slights makes a very astute observation on Spenser’s E.K.: “he claims considerable authority…and incites speculation about political pressures” (715). Along similar lines, the author notes how the glosses of the 1817 edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by an “anti-supernaturalist…whip [it] into comprehensible shape nineteen years after its unannotated first appearance…” (715). Slights overall presents a well-conceived and thoughtful discourse on the topic of marginal glosses in the English Renaissance with some relation to the Coleridgean use of the same.
To follow up Slights, looking at Theodore Steinberg’s “E.K.’s Shepheardes Calender and Spenser’s” helps to shed light on the implications of this poem’s gloss. The critical argument over who E.K. is in Spenser’s glosses and notations within The Shepheardes Calender is long-running, as Slights touches upon; that aside, Steinberg adds that the glosses assist “Spenser to develop his themes through a kind of irony” (46). That is, they contribute more to the structure of Spenser’s poem than is initially apparent, giving it a unity and extra-textual meaning. According to Steinberg, the E.K.’s gloss can be read as “comic genius” and demonstrates a large measure of poetic prowess (46). Steinberg delves into some of the history of glossing, as Lipking also does later, but he cleverly explains how the gloss serves as a sort of “patristic exegesis” in the tradition of the Church fathers. Considering the tradition of taking the word of authority as meaning in varying historical text, the addition of glosses corroborated the poetic principle of allegory in which the reader needed clarification and required guidance to reach a canonical meaning (47).
As Frank Kermode explains in The Genesis of Secrecy, literature, poetry specifically, often is shrouded in a mystic secrecy; however, Steinberg maintains that Spenser rejected the idea that readers had to be specially initiated to get to the heart of the author’s message (48). To illustrate this concept, one might look to Spenser’s letter to Raleigh at preceding The Faerie Queene; it outline exactly where the reader is about to be taken. E.K.’s exhibits “amazingly deficient perception” throughout the glosses and additions to Spenser’s poem, but this tactic illustrates just how glossing can change meaning intentionally or unintentionally (48). Further, continuing on Steinberg’s path of logic, he notes how E.K.’s “commentaries on ‘hidden’ meanings are inaccurate or irrelevant, while at the same time, he misses the obvious points that the poet is trying to make” (49). E.K. strives to find the key to the poem constantly through his divisions of the work into thematic sections and through his additions. He ironically demonstrates “an inability to see things as a whole” while giving the poem unity through his emblems and notations (50). (Each of the eclogues, one per month, is seemingly related by nothing more than the sequence of months.) Also, the gloss justifies archaism in places by trying to show how usages are a part of the linguistic heritage of English (52). Strikingly, E.K. in some places “illuminates nothing by pointing out what anyone would recognize” (54). Steinberg yet moreover seeks to prove how, by opposing Spenser’s positions within the poem, E.K. highlights them, giving them more gravitas (54). Summing up, Steinberg decides E.K.’s commentary gives the reader “the proper way to approach the poem” (56).
Scholarly sources on both Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edmund Spencer abound. From biography to critical explications and readings of their works, library shelves and journals are filled with copious materials. On investigation of this panoply, the idea of an inspiration for the gloss that appears in later editions of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as originating from Spenser’s use of the same in The Shepheardes Calender bears further investigation. Various sources allude to the Spenserian-Coleridgean connection, but none directly attack this possible and tenable link. Then to look at information explaining marginal glosses and their background, works about the glosses of The Shepheardes Calender and The Calender, discourses on the glosses of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, data on Coleridge, and interpretations of the poem itself all help to weld the parts together into a contiguous discourse, leading to a new synthesis and understanding of the works in question and how the glosses in both works function.
In the article, “The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books,” William Slights writes that Renaissance authors had various reasons for adding marginalia to their texts: the impetus behind adding textual “clues” ranged from making a text more accessible, by referring to other works better known by the readership of the time, to leading the reader to a certain conclusion that coalesced with the author’s intentions. The downside to adding in glosses and other sorts of marginalia to any given text is that the additional information can add more complexity and “radically destabilize it” (682). Slights maintains that marginalia also steer a reader toward locating a work in a certain context, be it literary, social, or political (683). Slights also begins by saying that his study of marginalia in the English Renaissance is not comprehensive of all the available texts from the era but does consist of a key sample from 1558-1603. Such authors such as Erasmus, Ben Jonson, and Edmund Spenser Slights regards as “justly privileged…with particularly revealing marginalia” and serve his purpose of illustrating how marginalia accomplish certain, earlier-mentioned, ulterior tasks (684).
As well, Slights outlines a list of goals that marginal glosses might accomplish; they run a long gamut: amplification, annotation, appropriation, correction, emphasis, evaluation, exhortation, explication, justification, organization, parody, pre-emption, rhetorical gloss, simplification, and translation (685-686). Importantly, Slights urges readers to be mindful that glosses have the power to alter a reader’s sense of the passages glossed; the will of the author, through careful glossing, can open and close certain doorways of perception in the readership, by authorial design (687). Spenser’s glosses in The Shepheardes Calender serve as a prime example of a gloss used to discretely relegate the sensitive issues raised in the allegory to a secondary position, thus somewhat obfuscating the true brunt of the poem’s message (690).
The Shepheardes Calender contains several marginal devices to achieve this darkening and confusing illumination. The additions to the poem include a dedicatory letter, an address to the poem in verse, an epistle to Gabriel Harvey, an argument, “emblems” at the end of each month’s verses, and finally the glosses themselves. Critics have argued whether or not E.K., the glossist, was Spenser or not as the additions to the poem make up half the length of the work (704). Slights believes that the use of a word such as “religiously” that would connote the same idea as “tenaciously” to a modern reader might have insinuated a pejorative stab at Roman Catholicism to a reader in the 1580s (706). The glosses in the May eclogue evens serve to “inflame[e] the reader with an allusion to the most sensational public atrocity of the Catholic authorities” in its direct address of the concerns E.K. felt surrounding the possible marriage of Elizabeth I to Duc d’Alençon of France (707). Slights makes a very astute observation on Spenser’s E.K.: “he claims considerable authority…and incites speculation about political pressures” (715). Along similar lines, the author notes how the glosses of the 1817 edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by an “anti-supernaturalist…whip [it] into comprehensible shape nineteen years after its unannotated first appearance…” (715). Slights overall presents a well-conceived and thoughtful discourse on the topic of marginal glosses in the English Renaissance with some relation to the Coleridgean use of the same.
To follow up Slights, looking at Theodore Steinberg’s “E.K.’s Shepheardes Calender and Spenser’s” helps to shed light on the implications of this poem’s gloss. The critical argument over who E.K. is in Spenser’s glosses and notations within The Shepheardes Calender is long-running, as Slights touches upon; that aside, Steinberg adds that the glosses assist “Spenser to develop his themes through a kind of irony” (46). That is, they contribute more to the structure of Spenser’s poem than is initially apparent, giving it a unity and extra-textual meaning. According to Steinberg, the E.K.’s gloss can be read as “comic genius” and demonstrates a large measure of poetic prowess (46). Steinberg delves into some of the history of glossing, as Lipking also does later, but he cleverly explains how the gloss serves as a sort of “patristic exegesis” in the tradition of the Church fathers. Considering the tradition of taking the word of authority as meaning in varying historical text, the addition of glosses corroborated the poetic principle of allegory in which the reader needed clarification and required guidance to reach a canonical meaning (47).
As Frank Kermode explains in The Genesis of Secrecy, literature, poetry specifically, often is shrouded in a mystic secrecy; however, Steinberg maintains that Spenser rejected the idea that readers had to be specially initiated to get to the heart of the author’s message (48). To illustrate this concept, one might look to Spenser’s letter to Raleigh at preceding The Faerie Queene; it outline exactly where the reader is about to be taken. E.K.’s exhibits “amazingly deficient perception” throughout the glosses and additions to Spenser’s poem, but this tactic illustrates just how glossing can change meaning intentionally or unintentionally (48). Further, continuing on Steinberg’s path of logic, he notes how E.K.’s “commentaries on ‘hidden’ meanings are inaccurate or irrelevant, while at the same time, he misses the obvious points that the poet is trying to make” (49). E.K. strives to find the key to the poem constantly through his divisions of the work into thematic sections and through his additions. He ironically demonstrates “an inability to see things as a whole” while giving the poem unity through his emblems and notations (50). (Each of the eclogues, one per month, is seemingly related by nothing more than the sequence of months.) Also, the gloss justifies archaism in places by trying to show how usages are a part of the linguistic heritage of English (52). Strikingly, E.K. in some places “illuminates nothing by pointing out what anyone would recognize” (54). Steinberg yet moreover seeks to prove how, by opposing Spenser’s positions within the poem, E.K. highlights them, giving them more gravitas (54). Summing up, Steinberg decides E.K.’s commentary gives the reader “the proper way to approach the poem” (56).
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