Typology, Allegory, and Protestant Poetics

Typology, Allegory, and Protestant Poetics* by Thomas P. Roche, Jr. The enormous influence of Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, since its publication in 1979, has established the term "Protestant poetics" as an accepted term of literary inquiry and has invested that term with an unquestioned reality that should be examined within the larger context of late medieval and Renaissance poetry, not exclusively lyric. The critical acceptance of this term ignores many problems that should deeply concern us as an academic community. One such problem is that in English literary studies we tend to set up sub-groups; we are "definers," in the Latinate sense of "setting limits." Thus, we in Departments of English separate the Renaissance in England from the Renaissance on the Continent ; separated by that narrowchannel, we further divide that English Renaissance into Sixteenth Century vs. Seventeenth Century, Elizabethan vs. Jacobean, and within those temporal and monarchical schemes, we further divide into dramatic vs. non-dramatic, epic vs. lyric, etc. The problem is further compounded by a universal law that insists on a virtually total separation between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These divisions are helpful for the clarity of our departmental curricula, but they are not helpful for a full picture of a culture at any period. Lewalski had every disciplinary right to choose the seventeenth-century religious lyric as the subject of her book, but in that choice her imposition of the term "Protestant poetics" equally forces her to disregard the work of Richard Crashaw, an English Roman Catholic poet of the period, whose similarities to the poets she chose makes his omission seriously call into question the validity of her claims for a "Protestant poetics," as Louis Martz noted in his review when 'An earlier version ofthispaper was given as a lecture at the LeMoyne College Forum on Religion and Literature, September 1989. 2 Thomas P. Roche, Jr. her book first appeared.1 A more serious omission in inventing a "Protestant poetics" is her disregard of Edmund Spenser, who as poet of The Shepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene (especially Books I and V), and the Fowre Hymnes, makes him the most influential Protestant poet of the sixteenth century. It cannot be denied that Spenser contained his life in the sixteenth century and therefore falls outside the time scheme of Lewalski's net, but this is surely because of our professional divvying up of time rather than of Spenser's lack of influence, most especially on those Protestant poets about whom she writes. I am even more worried about the triumph in this "protestant poetics" of another critical term, typology, which seems to devour its parent allegory in much the same way that Error's offspring devour their parent in the first canto of The Faerie Queene. Many years ago I was part of a conference held at Princeton on the subject of typology in literature. My article was included in a collection of essays, The Literary Uses of Typology, edited by my colleague Earl Miner, and I was clearly in the minority of the contributors to that volume in that I was firmly opposed to what I saw as their literary uses of typology.2 My opposition was quite simple: typology was the name given to that kind of reading of the Bible that found "types" of Christ in persons or events in the Old Testament. Early Christian readers of what we now call the Bible, as the original Deconstructionists , asked new questions about the old text and found new answers. Jonah was a "type" of Christ in that he spent three days in the belly of the whale as Christ spent three days in the grasp of Death between his crucifixion and resurrection. The typological relationship so established between Jonah, the Woody Allen of the prophets, and Christ does not deny the historical reality of Jonah or his exploits; it simply asserts another dimension of that story that could only be read after Christ's triumph and which justifies that reading by insisting on the greater significance of the original story in God's providential plan of salvation because of the new reading. Typology is a function...