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  • Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson
  • Judith Owens (bio)
Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne and Jonson. By Tom MacFaul. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. x + 276. $100.00 cloth.

Patriarchy and its discontents have been catalogued with impressive diligence and far-reaching insight by social historians and literary critics. Their efforts have layered our understanding of early modern lives and literature, to the point that few teachers of Renaissance literature would design a course that did not address the effects of patriarchy on authors, works, and audiences. If that suggests that “patriarchy” has settled into comfortable and predictable contours, Tom MacFaul brings new vigor to this issue, taking “seriously,” as the dust jacket informs us, “all the anxieties that a culture with contradictory notions of sexuality imposed.” Those before him have likewise taken very seriously indeed the effects of patriarchy. His contribution lies in his taking figuratively and literally ideas of paternity, his close readings, and his conviction that these poets take their work seriously, “investing” themselves (12), to use one of MacFaul’s key words, in deeply meaningful ways.

MacFaul’s starting premise is that paternity is a “central preoccupation” for the poets he studies, furnishing “a model for all forms of achievement” (1). He analyzes the themes and imagery that form a “procreative nexus,” asserting that “four central modes of generativity . . . occupied Elizabethan and Jacobean minds: the biological, the poetic, the political and the economic” (25, 21). These “spheres,” although “fairly distinct” (21), are analogous, a discursive convenience that permits him to consider how the authors he studies work within this nexus to find new accommodations between the sexes, connect their private lives and public considerations, and establish literary authority. The paternal analogy does not simply furnish poets with a way to signal their personal investments in their work. More importantly, it provides a mechanism for creating “unity which resolves the divisions of selfhood” (12) resulting from what chapter 2 heralds as “uncertain paternity” (36). For MacFaul, the uncertainties attendant upon paternity develop from several historically contingent causes, including the long reign of a female monarch and the absence of a unified ideology, despite “the desire to fashion a settled and harmonious order in which paternal identity can happily rest” (36). Neither the natural sciences nor theology offered up firm grounds for validating the centrality of paternity, while “social, economical, political and educational matters . . . developed their own relatively autonomous agendas” (37). Such gaps in the meaning of fatherhood generated anxieties, but [End Page 261] with “uncertainty . . . comes the possibility of choice, with associated glimmers of hope—something that must be worked through in poetry” (61).

MacFaul erects a large edifice on these premises, one with room for the very different accommodations with uncertainty reached by the major authors of his study. Sidney “presents himself as infantilized by the Queen”; Greville imagines “all human activity as necessarily childish in the face of God the Father” (35). Spenser, who “never loses faith in the feminine, the sexual, and the reproductive” (101), conceives of a “masculine selfhood that is always in hopeful progress towards full and paternal adulthood” (35). Shakespeare “conjures an aesthetic realm that trumps biological and political generativity, but concedes the necessity of the non-aesthetic”; Donne “rejects paternity,” opting instead for “union with a woman or with God” (35). Jonson “struggles to create a detached paternal self, but . . . loses some of the passionate energy of his predecessors” in the process (35).

In examining these writers, and a handful of others in smaller compass, Mac-Faul offers strenuously detailed readings. With Spenser, for example, he follows the imagery of fruitfulness in its sometimes derogatory implications (Error, for instance) and in its ultimately redemptive connotations, to argue that Spenser “attempts to rehabilitate” female sexuality (116). Indeed, the “central lesson of The Faerie Queene as a whole” might be that “a father must trust his wife in order to be a father” (98). This is a large claim, one with which a large number of Spenser scholars might take issue. It is one of the strains in MacFaul’s argument that he occasionally overstates...

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