Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance ed. by George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (review)

HUMANITIES 111 Thus its larger treatmentinvolves the cure of the soul. A section of Vicari's analysis of Burton's divinity engages his reading of the Bible, again supplemented by an appendix of the biblical quotations in the Anatomy. In her final chapter on Burton's reading of history and poetry, Vicari finds Burton very much a man of his time, neither critical of his historical sources nor inclined to allow imaginative literature an independent aesthetic claim. Not surprisingly, Burton's favourite poetic genre is satire, which he values primarily for its didactic sense. But just as he does not privilege any single authority, neither does he privilege any particular branch of knowledge. If Burton bewilders us with his learning, Vicari seems to imply, it was because he was not himself entirely in control of it. The pursuit of learning is what interests him, and it is this rather than some vision of truth that he offers as therapy for his fellow sufferers. This is a genuinely learned study, obviously the fruit of long experience with Burton. It displays an enviable familiarity with much that Burton himself knew and an ability to gauge with precision his learning and opinions. If Vicari leaves larger theoretical and interpretive questions to others, she nevertheless provides readers of Burton with a very solid sense of what he made of the learning in which he was steeped. {MICHAEL 0'CONNELL) George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey, editors. Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance Cornell University Press. xviii, 324. us $37.50 Since the 1961 publication of The Structure ofAllegory, many readers of The Faerie Queene have entered its dark wood with A.C. Hamilton as their guide. With him, over the years, the distinguished contributors to this volume (many Emeriti, no 'Immerit6') have indeed - as teachers, writers, and editors- 'unfolded' for us the strangely wonderful tales to which the title refers. Their long experience and the editors' precise care make this Festschrift for Hamilton a deeply learned and highly professional volume. Gordon Teskey introduces this collection of twelve essays with a thoughtful account of the complicated and fruitful relations between romance and various classical forms in Renaissance literature. The two essays on Robert Greene's language directly address this issue, with both Robert Heilman and W.W. Barker testing the fit of a classical style (the former euphuism, the latter deliberative rhetoric) to the romance narrative in Carde of Fancie. Heilman identifies Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte as later writers who join euphuistic style and romance plot, but he does so only at the cost of diluting his definition of euphuism to the overly general 'quest for order.' Barker offers some 112 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 valuable and detailed readings of particular works as he traces Greene's evolution from romance to autobiography; he adapts Mikhail Bakhtin's distinction between monologic and dialogic forms to his characterization of this shift. Two other essays on language focus on Spenser's words. Alastair Fowlertreats Spenser's virtuosityin naming;Judith H. Anderson covers the etymological associations of the two words serine and permanent in her more limited essay. The middle essays of the volume share a characteristic practice of Spenserian criticism: the pursuit of sources and allusion. Traces of Spenser's Ruins ofRome in the image patterns of Shakespeare's Cymbeline preoccupy A. Kent Hieatt, while Carol V. Kaske argues for Hawes's Example of Vertue as a model for Spenser's particular hybrid of romance and allegory in book I of The Faerie Queene. Donald Cheney, Thomas P. Roche, Jr, and Patricia Parker, in three expert essays, bring their accounts of an author's assimilation of source materials to the reconsideration of long-standing critical questions: what is the argument of The Shepheardes Calender? what muse does Spenser invoke in The Faerie Queene? how are we to account for the anachronistic juxtaposition ofRenaissance Italy and Augustan Rome in Cymbeline? William Blissett's elegant meditation on caves and labyrinths in The Faerie Queene, which closes off the volume, is related to this middle group in its concern with antecedents for Spenser's images. The unending practice of discovering fresh allusions in Spenser requires some justification. It...