Architectonics of Imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton by David Galbraith (review)

humanities 387 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Further, despite the well-researched nature of much of the information presented in McGhee=s volume, there are odd lapses, particularly when he turns to Inuit-English relations. As an example, his seeming bewilderment at Frobisher=s attempt to capture Inuit hostages during the third voyage despite clear instructions to win the friendship of the people ignores the contradictory but equally clear instructions to capture Inuit of both sexes in a variety of age groups. The volume is also marred by unfortunate errors in copy editing. Some errors do not influence the meaning of the text (agreeed for agreed). Others, however, do have some impact: at one point the Michael is misnamed the Mathew B which was, of course, the name of Cabot=s ship in 1497. Later, a ship is said to have carried >eighty-four tons of beer,= instead of so many tuns B barrels or casks B of beer. Another unfortunate problem in the publication is the omission of clear labelling arrows on some of the maps and illustrations. This causes confusion when, for instance, it appears that McGhee places the Queen=s Foreland in northern Labrador instead of off Baffin Island. In the end, McGhee writes strongly and engagingly for a general audience, but his exciting and intriguing history suffers from small lapses and editing problems. (MARTIN REININK) David Galbraith. Architectonics of Imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton University of Toronto Press 2000. xvi, 230. $55.00 This book is the most original contribution to its field B broadly, the European Renaissance epic and its development in England B since Thomas Greene=s classic study, The Light in Troy (1982). Although Galbraith wears his learning lightly, the precision and range of reference to classical and Renaissance sources will make this book a standard for generations of scholars. Galbraith=s theme is the complex ways in which Edmund Spenser and his major followers, Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, used the idea of Rome to legitimate epic poetry in English as a cultural enterprise of the first rank. In the past, scholars have regarded this work of legitimation, which was carried out by Spenser, as a formal matter of imitating classical models, especially Virgil, who treated the founding of Rome as the heroic achievement of the Trojan prince, Aeneas, the fictional ancestor of Virgil=s patron, Augustus. Thus, in The Faerie Queene, the female knight Britomart, and the knight of justice, Artegal, are prophesied by Merlin to be the parents of a line of monarchs culminating in Elizabeth, the poet=s patron. Galbraith argues that this picture of how the English epic was legitimated B and hence how what we call >English literature= got its start B is too simple because it is concerned too exclusively with form. For a deeper 388 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 understanding it is necessary to examine the shadowy boundaries between history and poetry in the epics themselves, and in Renaissance theories of literary imitation B imitatio. Unlike Aristotle=s mimesis, which means the imitation of something outside art, the Latin imitatio takes from rhetoric the idea of imitating the style or the formal properties of a genre, or of an exemplary work in a genre. But after the discovery and translation of the Poetics, imitatio was contaminated B not to say confused B by association with mimesis, the imitation of an action. In the Renaissance such an action was taken to be a decisive moment in the larger movement of history. Galbraith seizes on this problem to expose the various ways in which the poets attempted to lend gravity to their fictions by associating them with Rome, where >Rome= is a figure for historical greatness in itself. By >architectonics of imitation= Galbraith means the formal methods by which the poets attempted to grasp a historical reality that lies beyond artistic form, in the real. But their efforts to anchor the literary in the historical (in a manner not unlike recent critical trends in the field of Renaissance studies) end in this shadowy realm between poetry and history. In...