The Longest Study of Spenser

Reviews The Longest Study of Spenser WILLIAM BLISSETT James Nohmberg. The Analogy of'The Faerie Queene' Princeton: Princeton University Press 1977. xxi, 870. $40.00 One is struck first, in picking up The Analogy of'The Faerie Queene,' by the sheer size of the goo-page book; on reading it, one is impressed by the magnitude of Professor James Nohmberg's scholarly and critical achievement. It comprises more pages and many more words than Bishop Joseph Butler's Analogy of the Christian Religion and is far and away the longest study of Spenser. It must have cost a king's ransom, or a university press's endowment, to produce - especially with the notes placed, as they should be, at the foot of the page. To say that a reader with a professional interest in Spenser willleam something on every page would be excessive; but if, as in my case, there is something important or new or finely stated every dozen pages, that still adds up to a total too grand for a review to encompass. Here then is a tithe that I hope will give some impression of the quality of the book. Every student of Spenser and the Renaissance romantic epic needs to think about the terms 'epic' and 'romance,' and most of us find it useful to relate the Iliad to the former and the Odyssey to the latter. This admirable paragraph is part of Nohrnberg's contribution to the discussion: The most obvious contrast between romance and epic is the least susceptible of precise critical description. It is the proportion of fiction in each genre, not so much what is true and what is false, but what is authorized and what is apocryphal or palpably made up: fiction with an analogy to truth, and fiction with an analogy to lies. Without explaining whyI almost every theorist will also say that the romance differs from the epic in the multiplicity of the actions it treats, for there is a further analogy between the true and the simple, and between the false and the mUltiplex or digressive. Certainly the immense simplification of the action of the Iliad is in marked contrast to the dilation of the storytelling in the Odyssey. The art of the Iliad observes certain aesthetic criteria analogous to the unifying shield of Achilles; the art of the Odyssey resembles the overelaborated, repeatedly woven shroud of Laertes. Both the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLVIII, NUMBER 1, PALL 1978 0042-0247' 78/1 100-0076 $01.50/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1978 The Faerie Queene 77 critics Cinthio and Pigna note the analogy between the Odyssey romanzi: the pleasures of uninhibited fabrication surely belong to it. and the (P 11) Nohrnberg is a sophisticated form critic, and it is instructive to see his mind at work in the act of completing a form: If Archimago and Duessa correspond to Satan and Lilith in the cycle of Adam, to Babylon and the false prophets in the later cycle of Israel, and to the Antichrist and Rome in the cycle of Revelation, then to whom do they correspond in the cycle of the Church? Duessa is discovered to have a fox's tail; this comes from the false prophets of Ezekiel 1):4, who resemble jackals in a ruin and are traditionally linked to the foxes who spoil the vineyards in the Song of Songs (2:15). The foxes were thus recognized as a type of heresy, and in the cycle of the Church the false Una must in part represent early errors. One thinks especially of Gnostic dualist and the Docetist doctrine that Christ's mortal body was only a seeming body. Christian Gnosticism, as we know it, dates from the second century, but early heresioiogists identified its founder as Simon Magus, the magician of Acts. (Pp 246-7) The analogy of Simon Magus and his paramour Helena to Archimago and Duessa is then explored with ample citation of relevant learning. Again, consider this passage on the grouping of the books of The Faerie Queene: The odd-numbered books treat a specifically human hero whose virtue comes into existence with a 'fall': the fall into sin (Book...