Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets by Barnabe Googe (review)

HUMANITIES 113 and then explain his 'error'; Roche's discriminating Spenser knows what he is about in invoking Calliope and Clio for different purposes in The Faerie Queene. How odd then that the undifferentiated status of Calliope and Clio in 'The Teares of the Muses' calls forth Roche's patronizing judgment that 'one of the main faults of this poem is its imprecision.' With relaxed good humour, Harry Berger, Jr announces at the outset of his essay his intention to try out- as a self-styled 'old New Critic'- the 'hip' language and concepts of 'discursive regimes' and 'inscribed ideologies.' He concludes that these can make a real difference to his reading of how in book III of The Faerie Queene 'erotic relations are formulated in the idiom of hunting.' Particularly welcome in this volume of essays so often preoccupied with patrilineal literary descent, with fathers and sons, and with the shaping of masculine identity through the adventures of romance, is Berger's awareness that romance tales may unfold different experiences for male and female readers. It seems important to find a sensitive and inclusive language for these (and other) differences ifour teaching ofRenaissance studies is not to bear out Northrop Frye's gloomy claim in the foreword that education intensifies adversarial'sexual and social relations, even relations within the individual psyche itself.' When the majority of students of English literature in Canadian universities are women, scholarly readings cannot continue to ignore the particular position of the woman reader invited to join 'the reader' in steeling himself against the seduction of Acrasia's bower or to identify with the digressing hero of the romantic epic, who, like any 'grown man' - we are told - would not turn 'his gaze from Venus's breast to her eyes.' Essays like Maureen Quilligan's should help us rethink these matters. In her brilliant account of the unconventional self-definitions enacted by the heroine Pamphilia in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania and by Mary Wroth in her own life, Quilligan unfolds a different tale, (A. LYNNE MAGNUssoN) Bamabe Googe. Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets. Edited by Judith M. Kennedy University of Toronto Press. viii, 223. $5o.oo One immutable feature of the International Porlock Society's annual meeting at Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a progress report on the endlessly delayed Barnabe Googe Encyclopedia. At least one generation of nowmiddle -aged Renaissance scholars grew up learning Googe's name as a type of the minor, the ridiculous, and the (no doubt deservedly) unread. Judith M. Kennedy is aware of such codes: 'It seems unlikely,' her Preface assumes, 'that the Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets will receive another full-scale edition in the next century or two.' And so she has allowed Googe to enjoy, through her efforts, a small but pleasing revenge 114 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 upon us all. For how many of us have read him with any attention in the last twenty years, ifindeed at all? In view ofthat question's likely answer, reviewing Kennedy's edition falls into two parts, ofwhich the first is, in a sense, a review of Googe himself. It is in no way condescending to say that for a twenty-three-year-old, the performance in this volume is outstanding. Although much betrays the minor poet, there is little or no sign of uncertainty, lack ofconfidence, or simple stumbling, such as one still finds in, say, the anonymous sonnet sequence Zepheria of 1594. Googe's voice is easy, civilized, and assured at all times, and occasionally a little more. 'Out of Sight, Out of Mind,' reprinted also on the dust-jacket, is an early attempt at what would a generationlater become the style ofRaleigh; and the Epitaph on Nicholas Grimald justifies its opening sententiae by their modulation into a tough, caustic regret for Death's choice of the finest over doltish geese and witless heads. The stumbling block for the modern reader, as Kennedy recognizes in her Introducton, is of course the fourteeners in which many of these poems are couched. She follows sixteenth-century practice by printing these in broken lines; and if one can forget all one has learned about their supposedly unpleasant jog, one comes to the pleased...