Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (review)

Jeff Dolven’s wickedly intelligent and often surprisingly affecting study joins a body of work (including the scholarship of Joel Altman, Richard Lanham, Rebecca Bushnell, Arthur Kinney, and Mary Thomas Crane) addressing the literary fallout of the humanist classroom. Dolven identifies a kind of cognitive dissonance in romance writers who, seeking to make their narratives the vehicles of instruction and to render the process of learning in narrative terms, inscribe within their texts their own “pedagogical misgivings” (171). Romance, argues Dolven, offers “a way of testing given understandings and exploring alternatives by reinvesting them in time” (64). Seeking to translate atemporal “paradigmatic understanding” into “narrative understanding” (64), his authors find it increasingly difficult to map “the oblong box of the Tudor classroom” on to the ever-exfoliating “labyrinth of romance” (63).

Dolven begins with a “poetics of pedagogy” based on a witty and learned digest of early modern educational treatises, grammars, and rhetoric books. His survey of the instructional methods of the sixteenth-century English classroom (repetition, catechism, analysis, classification, epitome, drill, translation, disputation, and composition) emphasizes in particular the costs of reading as you have been taught to read within an anti-narrative system of instruction. Subsequent chapters examine complex scenes of instruction in the work of John Lyly, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, addressing the uneasy relationship between the “repertory of representational conventions” (18) inculcated in a Tudor schoolboy and the agendas of the didactic romancer.

Dolven has a particular talent for disclosing unsettling ambiguities within the humanist classroom’s own terminology. Discussing Lyly’s Euphues and its sequel, he points out that the notion of “experience” can encompass both the lessons of history, frozen in maxims and sententiae (the kind of experience Roger Ascham wished to substitute for hedonistic wanderings abroad) and the extracurricular product of trials and errors in resolving practical problems. Lyly, he suggests, interrogates but cannot quite escape Ascham’s certainties. In the first Euphues, its protagonist is merely transformed from a prodigal schoolboy, recycling the contents of his commonplace book to rationalize his wilful desires, into a reclusive pedant, recycling other people’s treatises within his epistolatory polemics (and arresting the narrative dynamic of Lyly’s project). In the more expansive and experimental romance of Euphues and His England, the hero teeters on the brink of allowing new experience to revise his paradigms, only to return to his cell to regurgitate William Harrison’s “Description of England” and Plutarch’s advice on marriage.

Dolven’s interest in Lyly’s second thoughts — the second Euphues’ attempt to explore alternatives to a narrative that ends up indicting both its author’s education and its author’s pedagogy — also informs this study’s account of Sidney and Spenser as self-revisers. Discussing the Old Arcadia, he suggests that while Sidney’s narrative is at one level a patchwork of sententiae, the work nevertheless attempts to narrate transformations of perception and understanding that cannot be contained by decontextualized apothegms. This results in the narrative impasse of the climactic trial scene in which Euarchus’s “sententious detachment” (123) collides with Musidorus and Pyrocles’ self-interested deployment of maxim after maxim in their own defense: the work becomes an “anatomy of the abuses of sententia” (127), critiquing the consequences of attempting to confine particularity and complexity within a nutshell. Dolven argues that the New Arcadia’s exfoliating and encyclopedic narrative suggests a Ramist attempt to diagram a much more inclusive map of experience and example for the reader to ponder in the absence of a schoolteacher (the interventionist narrator of the Old Arcadia having largely disappeared). At the same time, the revised romance locates its proliferating exemplary narratives within a wide variety of interpretive contexts and frames: narrative and experiential circumstantiality is not erased by its governing method.

Dolven’s recursive reading of The Faerie Queene highlights Spenser’s confrontation with the slipperiness of “example” as the poet attempts to circumscribe a middle ground between...