O, Professor Godshalk, would that I should dead as living ever be able to
lure you even further into Spenser's in-verse ... I think your question
about the first line, and some of your suggestions, are most apt. Yes,
sixteenth-century significations of "maske" drifted from hiding to
bewilderment, even bewitching, significations having much to do with a
deviation from a prosaic, linear, teleological, all too predictable and
familiar path of progression from "lowly" pastoral to "lofty" epic (such as
outlined, yet again, in Professor Berry's post). Does not that deviation
have the constitutively in-verting structure of verse, the structure of
leading aside, of seduction?
And yes, I think the sense of "maske" in the first line has everything to
do with the poetic play which went by that name, as a concept, not, of
course, a historical allusion to Spenser's participation in one. A
Renaissance masque is the most extravagant of performances in the terms of
the number of arts its itretwines: dance, song, verse, lavish costume,
scenery, machinery, a veritable assault on the senses -- quite the re-verse
of the public plays, where verse is allowed to do most of the work. And yet
this consummate spectacle is paradoxically and tellingly called a "masque"
-- an indication, perhaps, that we should not be too captated by its
extarvagant surface which masks more? My sources tell me that th eearlier
term from the performance known as "masque" in Spenser's day was
"disguysing." I find this intriguing, as (like in the case of "declare" I
mentioned in a previous post) this term means at once masking or hiding and
teh discarding of a guise, an unmasking or unveiling. All of these have to
do with teh category of teh veil, which phonically resonates, does it not,
in "whilome" -- a signifier which, as Professor Letbridge aptly pointed
out, not only disallows the "now" but veils its placement.
As for the "Muse," to some extent I agree with Professor Kuin; the speaker
alludes to a part of himself who had written before, a part already other.
But, to invoke Agamben again, "Muse is the name the Greeks gave to the
ungraspability of the originary place of the poetic word." He invokes not
only his own verses past other, but verse's Other.
The Other, origin, is what seduces (maskes) constitutively. Some forms of
verse respond to and presentify this seduction of/to the in-verse more
courageously than others: masque is one example, pastoral another. I think
that in that line, Spenser is celebrating the seductions of Muse-qua-poetic
origin, seductions which can only be performed in the veils of masques or
pastorals such as his own Muse (I as an other) had engaged in.
Finally, I note, for the benefit of the prosaicists and teleologists among
us, that Spenser speaks of the call to write FQ as a "far unfitter task"
than writing pastoral. And, as I've said before, I do not "reede" FQ as any
less a masque, any less a seduction to explore origin, than the
*Shepheareds Calender*.
best to all,
Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser
>Even so, I think we can still ask in what senses Spenser's Muse "did Maske"
>in "lowly Shepheardes weeds." And when Spenser invokes his muse, is he
>really invoking his own verse -- as Roger Kuin seems to believe?
>
>Yours, Bill Godshalk
>**********************************************
>* W. L. Godshalk
*
>* Professor, Department of English *
>* University of Cincinnati *
>* Cincinnati OH 45221-0069 * Stellar Disorder
>* [log in to unmask] *
>*
> *
>**********************************************
>
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