The Symbolic Design of ‘Windsor-Forest’: Iconography, Pageant, and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work by Pat Rogers (review)

123 Volume 14 of the Shandean has the virtues of previous volumes, and Sterneans owe a great debt of gratitude to Mr. de Voogd for initiating the journal and continuing it through fourteen years. As its reputation spreads, fears of not having enough good material to fill each volume will dissipate, and the editor (and editorial board) may begin to be more selective; that would provide the final well-deserved feather in his highly decorated cap. Melvyn New University of Florida BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED* PAT ROGERS. The Symbolic Design of ‘Windsor-Forest’: Iconography, Pageant , and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work. Newark: Delaware, 2004. Pp. 270. $52.50. Windsor-Forest, for Mr. Rogers, reaches back to the traditions of iconography in ceremonial art among the earlier Stuarts to celebrate the state of prosperity under the last Stuart. In its ‘‘symbolic design ’’ or ‘‘underpinning,’’ it is a sort of foliation, layer upon layer, of emblems and mythologies and topoi derived from masques, pageants, coins, painting, gardening , heraldry, river poetry, panegyric, and much more. In other words, these are not contexts but sources of a texture. Learned and copious, Mr. Rogers’s pages are rich with the spoils of more thanthirty years of investigation and reflection. Though a ‘‘through-written book,’’ chapters tell of their origin in separate studies. All chapters are categories of aspects (‘‘The Poem as Pageant,’’‘‘The Poem of the Forest’’), categories of his ‘‘gaze,’’as Mr. Rogers puts it, rather than parts of an argument. Right away he assumes a collaborative effort in that gaze. One needs to do the comparing of passages and details. Even the poem itself *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. very often is left to the reader for comparison to a source, as withhisparaphrase of stage directions of a Jonson pageant: ‘‘Irene carries the usual attributes of peace, the olive branch and dove, as at WF 429–30; Plutus bears a heap of gold ingots (cf. WF 412); Mars finds his armor scattered and his weapons broken (cf.WF 418).’’ Such correspondences work only up to a point. It is important that Mr. Rogers wants to proceed through sources.Earliercritics supposed that the reader answered allusions or formed pictures in the mind. Mr. Rogers instead gives latitude to the source. By imagining a completion of the action in a sketch of Pan and Syrinx by Rubens, he can say that it ‘‘corresponds in almost every tiny detail to the moment in the poem when Lodona is caught by her pursuer on the brink of the water.’’ Some of the attribution in the editing of Pope at his disposal does not make aclose discrimination between a source and a resemblance . He thus envelops the lines on the Thames and tributaries in the mythmaking of the marriage of rivers from Camden, Spenser, and Drayton, the latter two among the sources glossed by the ‘‘Twickenham editors,’’ but Pope is patently not allegorizing the ‘‘winding Isis, and the fruitful Tame’’ in gendered nuptials . 124 Mr. Rogers’s envelopment of the poem in sources, so that the interpretation itself of a source may approach a property of the poem, reminds me of E. R. Wasserman , whose chapter in the Subtler Language (1959) enjoys repeated endorsement , although Mr. Rogers never endorses its reduction of the poem (and most everything else Pope wrote) to concordia discors. If Pope is a ‘‘Renaissance poet,’’ on the other hand, he does not always seem to know what a symbolism is to do. It is odd that the ‘‘heraldic language ’’ that Mr. Rogers ‘‘translates’’ out of the poem operates as a symbolism if it is ‘‘not so much another level of meaning as an alternative system of signification ’’ redundant of what Pope says ‘‘in the poem by other means.’’ The politics of the poem are still not much beyond Wasserman’s own elaboration of J. R. Moore. ‘‘The whole dialectic of WindsorForest ,’’ as Mr. Rogers has it, ‘‘is organized around the notion of an evil Williamite interregnum jeopardizing true British virtues, as embodied by the Stuart family, and reviving some of the horrors of the interregnum.’’ Mr. Rogers’s emphasis on the artistic tests tolerances between old Turks and young fogies among Scriblerians. No...