Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (review)

Reading the Allegorical Intertext is a compilation of nineteen essays by Judith H. Anderson, most of them published previously, the earliest in 1971 and one forthcoming in another collection in 2009. As such, the book is a summary of a career, and its essays testify to the quality of that career. Anderson’s work over the last four decades has combined some of the best qualities of modern literary criticism: erudite philology, sensitivity to poetic nuance, theoretical sophistication, a wide-ranging command of literary tradition, and a careful attention to historical context. Her books are numerous and influential. Words that Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (1996) has become a touchstone study for early modern ideas about language, and The Growth of a Personal Voice: “Piers Plowman” and “The Faerie Queene” (1976) remains a definitive example of intertextual literary interpretation. Above all, Anderson is a close reader, attending to the subtleties of texts (the poetic expressions of individual authors) and of text (the field of linguistic relations and literary conventions in which individual texts participate). In her ceaselessly self-reflexive interpretive practice, her juxtaposition of close analysis and theoretical speculation, and her refusal to specialize in only one or two authors, Anderson’s work resembles that of Harry Berger Jr., a critic whom she admires enormously and with whom she often disagrees in Reading the Allegorical Intertext. Rather like Berger, Anderson is a scholar who writes a lot about Spenser and who has much to offer to Shakespeareans.

Reading the Allegorical Intertext gives rich attention to its four authors—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton—although Spenser, who plays a major part in seventeen of the nineteen chapters, remains at the heart of the book. Eight chapters feature Chaucer, four Shakespeare, and three Milton. The emphasis on Spenser and allegory gives the book a strong sense of thematic coherence that a compilation of essays might otherwise lack. There is a gentle chronological development in the collection’s organization, with the early chapters focusing on the Chaucer-Spenser intertext, while later chapters consider the relations between Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The Chaucer-Spenser chapters are uniformly excellent, definitively demonstrating the striking degree to which the two poets shared a common textual reservoir at both the micro and macro levels. Both poets make similar use, for example, of the conspicuously illogical placement of the adversative conjunction “but” as a means to introduce mimetic and conceptual complexity into their narratives. A chapter on the function of despair in Chaucer and Spenser offers a fascinating tour of shared topoi: the Old Man of the flesh, projection allegory, wandering woods, and despairing lovers. For Anderson, book 1 of The Faerie Queene “becomes also a reading of Chaucer and a text in the history of interpretation,” yielding “an intertextuality that is truly inter-text, text being understood as a whole” (69).

Two of the three chapters on Milton were written for this volume, and we sense that Paradise Lost has quite recently been occupying Anderson’s mind. Indeed, the collection ends with “Spenser and Milton: The Mind’s Allegorical Place,” which at forty pages is the longest essay. Here, Anderson mounts an inquiry into place and metaphor in Milton’s epic, with frequent reference to the mindscape quality of The Faerie Queene. There is a splendid comparison between Milton’s Chaos and Spenser’s Night, and the essay is consistently illuminating in its demonstration of how sin in Paradise Lost “overwrites Edenic monism with metaphorical tension, which, when continued, becomes openly allegorical” (293). Freely chosen sin imposes a moral valence on an otherwise neutral landscape, reminiscent of the allegorically inflected landscape of The Faerie Queene. Anderson’s discussion of Milton exemplifies her conviction that we need to set aside the Bloomian assumption that poets secretly hate each other. We will understand the allegorical intertext more clearly once we realize that Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, despite their differences, often admired their predecessors and gladly learned from them.

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