Praise in ‘The Faerie Queene’ by Thomas H. Cain (review)

406 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 poetic or to the scientific view of nature and have been unwilling (or unable) to strike a balance. It is hardly surprising that a Renaissance scholar should break the iceI and with that enthusiasm and catholicity of interests which characterized the two centuries between early printed books and Newton's Principia. The title might lead one to expect in this book only pictures, fanciful as well as mathematical; and indeed those selected for reproduction would alone have justified its existence. They are accompanied, however, by a lucid and well-organized text that provides useful information not only about the competing astronomical systems but also about some symbolisms , familiar enough to readers during the Renaissance but now almost forgotten (apart from a few associated with astrology). Some artists of the timeI as the author points out, felt free to create their own universes; so did some scientists and philosophers, yielding to the longing for a pervading unity or a universal harmony. A fascinating dimension is added to the work by textual portrayal of the tension between symbolism and science in the Renaissance. Against criticisms that might be offered of a few statements concerning matters lying in the reviewer's special province the author is protected by his prefatory disclaimer of writing a history - and even if he were not, they would be mere pedantry in view of what he has accomplished . (STILLMAN DRAKE) Thomas H. Cain. Praise in 'The Faerie Queene' University of Nebraska Press. 229· $13.95 Students of that great English poem dedicated to the first Queen Elizabeth 'to live with the eternitie of her fame' must often, if idly, have thought how desirable it would be for someone to examine, with due historical and critical care, the rhetorical tradition of praise from antiquity to the Renaissance, the actual praise given or withheld in the poem, the self-revelation of Spenser in his role of encomiast and the assimilation of the element of praise to the substance of The Faerie Queene. Now that Professor Thomas H. Cain has properly done the job, we feel the need the more strongly as we find it at all poihts met. Undergraduates looking for a reference or two will spend the evening with his book, and their instructors, convinced that epideictic rhetoric deserves a lecture in itself, will find that the 'laudable exercises' of Cain's material and argument, for all his economy 'of organization and conciseness of expression, reach far beyond the compass of a single hour in the classroom. . The title Praise in 'The Faerie Queene' does not perfectly reflect the actual disposition of the book. The opening chapter has to do not with HUMANITIES 407 The Faerie Queene but with The Shepheardes Calender, giving indeed one of the most articulate and convincing interpretations of the April ecologue to be found anywhere. The 'praise' there and throughout the book is pretty well confined to praise of the Queen, which is almost but not quite as it should be. Nothing at all is said about the considerable portion of the Calender that is written in praise, or dispraise, of bishops. Similarly, the courtiers are neglected for their sovereign lady in the main discussion having to do with The Faerie Queene; yet I cannot help recalling one of the few germane passages that Cain does not cite, from the proem to Book III, a stanza that begins with a protestation of the poet's inadequacy to rise to the praise of chastity but ends with a phrase that insists on the diffusion as well as the concentration ofpraise in the poem: How then shall I, Apprentice of the skill, That whylome in diuinest wits did raine, Presume so high to stretch mine humble quill? Yet now my lucklesse lot doth me constraine Hereto perforce. But 0 dred Soueraine Thus farre forth pardon. sith that choicest wit Cannot your glorious pourtraict figure plaine That I in colourd showes may shadow it, And antique praises vnto present persons fit. While we still await a census of the 'present persons' who are praised in the epic, we are given substantial treatments of Ralegh and Essex, the latter as part of an...