The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England by Kevin Pask (review)

186 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Nor is the book brilliantly original or highly stimulating. It is, however, a thorough study of late Elizabethan legislation, albeit without much reference to society, and will long be a valuable reference tool for future scholars. (MICHAEL FINLAYSON) Kevin Pasko The Emergence ofthe English Author: Scripting the Life ofthe Poet in Early Modern England Cambridge University Press. x, 218. us $49.95 Michel Foucault once remarked that it was only during the Renaissance that poets began to be heralded in the same exalted terms that they had formerly reserved for their noble patrons: 'The heroic dimension passed from the hero to the one whose task it had been to represent him at a time whenWestern culture itselfbecame a world ofrepresentations.' Kevin Pask does not cite this remark in his new book, but his argument is essentially an elaborationofFoucault's point. Pask's subject is how Englishpoets were represented in increasingly heroic terms within early examples of literary biography from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. His central claim is that the nature of this authorial heroism was gradually 'retooled' during this period, with vernacular poetry eventually becoming equated with certain values that were no longer determined by monarchic or religious authority: by end of the eighteenth century, the English poet was to be 'secular, national, non-aristocratic.' The emergence of a distinct genre known as the 'life of the poet/ Pask suggests, ought thus to be taken as a sign not only of the increasing stature of literature in the vernacular, but equally of the formation ofanew kind ofspecificallycultural authority, one that would eventuallycomeunder the regulatory aegis ofthe 'professionalized university,' Pask devotes much of his survey to detailed analyses of select passages from early life-narratives of five English poets - Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton - yet his study is not intended as a history of the genre. Rather, Pask considers these biographical accounts in relation to both the actual historical conditions under which these poets wrote and the changing reputations more generally of each poet's life and writings, with the aim of demonstrating how poetic authority has historically been 'a site of social contestation.' Pask is necessarily selective in his account of each poet's reception. A fascinating chapter on Milton focuses mainly on how eighteenth-century biographers dealt with the fact that the poet had obliged his daughters to read to him from works in the classical and foreign languages, even though they could not understand what they read, since Milton had refused to educate them in these languages. Faced with such embarrassing evidence of Milton's'domestic tyranny,' his later biographers attempted to sacralize the blind, aging poet as a heroic 'man of feeling' whose children were said HUMANITIES jOflatl1an Hart; editor. the Renaissance: and Drama Garland Studies in the Renaissance. Garland PulJlishing. that the volume is a .1..1. u"'..................,... "'f"tI",.,,.<.t"Olu Divers Critical .tl.'J11i1'YI'\I"I"M,~t:' ...