Could we compare Spenser to Nabokov in Pale Fire, where the
Commentary is not entirely reliable?
Bill
At 06:14 PM 10/1/2006, you wrote:
>Hi Charlie,
>
>To agree with you: it seems to me that, even if someone were to
>discover an acrostic in 'October' reading 'I AM E K', we would still
>have to consider the question open. (Though please don't let me stop
>anyone from looking for acrostics in 'October': a very noble
>enterprise.) Isn't that the fun of masking, as time us taught, &c?
>(Oh, and the identity of E.K. seems to me as good an explanation as
>any for understanding why Spenser's name continues not to appear on
>The Shepheardes Calender during his lifetime.)
>
>Anyway, as for why Spenser might have written a bad gloss on elves,
>or allowed his friend to write a bad gloss on elves: doesn't that
>sound like fun, too? I mean, if you are writing a pseudo-learned
>commentary on your own works, obviously you will want some of the
>glosses and annotations completely to miss the mark, because that
>makes the whole project of self-disclosure and self-interpretation
>less stable and more productive (see the glosses on Hobbinol and
>Rosalind in, say, 'Januarye'; and again in 'Aprill'); then, to
>compound the joke, you play most havoc with the reference that has
>most to do with your own interests and future career prospects. Keep
>in mind, too, that Spenser gives some pretty spectacularly bad
>etymologies to Irenius in A view, as well. And I think it's also
>probably worth considering, with Matthew Woodcock in his recent book
>_Renaissance Elf-Fashioning_, that Spenser deliberately used in FQ
>what he and his contemporaries seem to have considered to be a
>low-comic, folkloric, and altogether silly convention (fairies)
>precisely because it was anti-epic; in that light, this gloss
>doesn't look so strange, but rather seems to be playing the same game.
>
>andrew
>
>
>andrew
>
>Andrew Zurcher
>Tutor and Director of Studies in English (Part 1)
>Queens' College
>Cambridge CB3 9ET
>United Kingdom
>+44 1223 335 572
>
>hast hast post hast for lyfe
***************************************
W. L. Godshalk *
Department of English *
University of Cincinnati Stellar disorder *
Cincinnati OH 45221-0069 *
513-281-5927
***************************************
|