Hi again,


> I find myself more or less convinced of Spenser's implication in English
> atrocities in Ireland.

'Atrocity' is a word that is part descriptive, part prescriptive. Would
Spenser have understood Grey's actions in Ireland to be 'atrocities'? 
Would the Irish? Would the Spanish? A lot of what we sometimes
anachronistically read as complaints about abuse of human rights turns
out, for someone at least, to boil down to opportunistic factional
politics at court (quite similar to today). I don't object to the idea
that there are basic fundamental rights and wrongs, and believe that
state-sponsored massacre or planned starvation of civilians qualify as
'bad'. I could not do these things. And yet 'atrocity' is a term that
presupposes a context within which these acts might be understood to be
'atrocities', and I'm not sure that that context obtained. I would like to
understand more about this. If you mean to say that you find what Spenser
and his contemporaries did in Ireland to be atrocious, I'm with you there;
but I do think we need to be careful not to let that language slip into
judgment *within* the historical frame, when that kind of language, and
that kind of judgment, might not have been available, useful, relevant,
etc. 

> At the same time, judging from the level of emotion
> and care given to the posts in this thread, I'm impressed that there is felt
> to be so much at stake in arriving at a decision on this question.

I would like to register, for my own part, that my own commitment to the
question of Spenser's argument in A view (does he advocate certain
policies or not? What are the limits on his advocacy? What were his
intentions?) is 1. primarily historical rather than literary in interest,
and 2. in any case quite specifically tied to the issue of what Spenser
'might have thought about the current situation'. Any emotion that
blossomed in my account of Spenser's poetics or rhetorical/military
strategy in A view stems from this root, my quite overwhelmingly emotional
preoccupation with the current disaster in US/UK foreign policy. 

> Biographical Spenser is always fascinating, but are people expecting to
> adjust their understanding of Spenser's poetry by way of those biographical
> narratives?  Even FQ Book 5, with all its historical allegory and what
> Goldberg has called a "straitening" of Spenser's art, is far from a clear
> and present view of things--perhaps despite Spenser's fiercest intentions.

I'm skeptical of this idea of a 'straitening' of Spenser's art in Book V,
generally speaking. Tasso argues in the Discorsi that the heroic poet
ought be careful not to let his allegorical intentions obscure the
historical narrative or blunt the moral purpose; for him, that was bad
craft. I think Spenser has a different view about the relative importance
of history and philosophy in poetry--at least I register a different
practice, and suspect that it is, in line with what he writes in 'A letter
of the Authors', not just a practice but a thoughtful understanding. If
Spenser's historical method is intended to 'fashion' and to 'move' his
reader to ethical action--here taking ethics in its etymological and
Aristotelian sense of 'practice' rather than 'armchair moralizing'--then
the need to *instantiate* his examples right down into plain, worldly,
mucky soil becomes necessary at some stage in his composition. I do think
in part that Book V is testing, putting pressure upon this move from the
study to the battlefield, asking what kinds of compromises might be
involved, what kind of contamination might be inevitable. For example, the
displacement of Artegall's agency, for certain bloody and summary acts,
onto Talus is I think quite important; in no other quest does the knight
so obviously delegate responsibility for unpalatable actions. Think back
to Pontius Pilate in the delve of Mammon, who cannot rinse the 'filthy
feculent' muck of sacrilege (O sacrilege) from his hands. Artegall has
that kind of contamination fairly well sorted. But is it ethical?

> Can authorial biography provide us with a stable hermeneutics for
> reading an author's works?  Must our approach to Spenser turn on the
> question of his biography?  If not, then why are the stakes so high
> here? 

These are very different questions. First of all, what *can* provide us
with a stable hermeneutics for reading an author's works? Biography is
perhaps one valid way, insofar as we acknowledge its limitations and do
not claim more for it than is due. But 'must our approach to Spenser turn
on the question of his biography?' Is there only one approach to Spenser?
Of course not. Does that mean we ought not to consider how his biography,
how the historical events of his experiences both in Ireland and in
England affected his poetry, how they gave voice and material to his
speculation and philosophy? Of course not. He is screaming at us, all
through Book V, that we had better not.

The stakes are high for some, here, I think because they want to totalize
one or another approach to Spenser. I wish we wouldn't. The stakes also
seem to be high because we are probably all a bit tired with warplanes
passing overhead (from Lakenheath in Cambridgeshire, every night at dusk
for the past two weeks), and the knowledge that bulldozers can crush a
human skull without, it seems, meaning to.

It seems I have 4¢. Sorry.

andrew