 |
 |
I'm sure a lot of you will disagree, but it would never occur to me to use this list to promote my own new books. On Oct 24, 2011, at 10:52 AM, Bruce Danner wrote: > Fellow Spenserians/Sidneyans: > > My monograph on Spenser's Complaints and the "War on Lord Burghley" has been released in the UK and is slated for release in the USA in the coming weeks. See the extended blurb, below, and read a sample chapter online at the Palgrave book site: > > http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=501332 > > Please feel free to forward this on to interested colleagues, lists, and librarians. > > Bruce Danner > > * > > Edmund Spenser’s War on Lord Burghley > Bruce Danner > Palgrave Macmillan (2011) > ISBN-10: 0230299032 > ISBN-13: 978-0230299030 > List Price: $85.00 > > In February of 1591 Edmund Spenser received the gift of a 50 pound annual pension from the crown, the first of only two such awards ever to be offered to a poet in the Elizabethan era. Granted in the wake of the publication of Spenser’s national epic, The Faerie Queene, this honor conveyed with it the queen’s personal approval, elevating the author to the highest regard among his peers by the regime. Three weeks later, Spenser’s career suddenly fell into crisis. Despite the immanence of his pension, the poet published the Complaints anthology, a work that was swiftly confiscated by the government for its subversive portraits of the court, the institutions of the state, and its particularly scathing allusions to William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This event, described by contemporary Thomas Nashe as a “disgrace,” remains an unsolved mystery at the heart of Spenser’s work, a fall from favor that would alter the course of the poet’s career. What caused these events, and why did Spenser single out Burghley for special criticism, both in the 1591 Complaints and in the second edition of The Faerie Queene in 1596? > > Spenser is still thought to be among the most conservative voices of the Elizabethan period, and few remember him for his repeated attacks on Burghley. These assaults on the Lord Treasurer’s character and judgment, however, rank among the era’s most politically-charged literary writings, provoking the impounding and censorship of the Complaints while deflecting the author from his Virgilian-inspired career as a state laureate. Despite the literary, historical, and biographical significance of these episodes, Spenser’s remarks on Burghley have never been the focus of significant and sustained critique. This study revisits the poet’s public attacks on Elizabeth’s powerful first minister, reassesses the timeline of events that led to them, and argues for their centrality in Spenser’s increased self-definition as a political and cultural outsider. While new historicist arguments have framed the poet in varying degrees of submission or deference to the Elizabethan state, such assessments cannot be reconciled with the Spenser of the Complaints, whose defiance is in no way constrained by his professional self-interest. > > Spenser’s central importance in the art and politics of Elizabethan culture has been offset by a neglect of his life-story by critics and biographers. The last full-length biography of the poet was published in 1945, and while important efforts have increased our understanding of his multiple careers as Virgilian laureate, courtier poet, government administrator, and colonial landowner, many areas of his life remain subject to outdated suppositions or simple inattention to events not connected to his two most famous works, The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene. Blending the strategies of literary criticism and critical biography, Edmund Spenser’s War on Lord Burghley aims to re-situate the Complaints as a central text of the poet’s career, and to correct the distorted picture of the poet that has emerged by its absence from wider study. In a still widely-influential reading, Stephen Greenblatt defines Spenser as a figure who subordinates himself to state power and its ideological aims. Even in subsequent, more dialectical models of Spenser’s relationship to Elizabethan ideology such as Louis Montrose’s, the poet remains a figure of ambiguous agency against the Elizabethan state and its institutions. And yet the poet’s sustained criticism of Cecil throughout the 1590s reveals an altogether different figure from the one conceived in contemporary scholarship. Such anti-authoritarian gestures demonstrate not only that Spenser possessed a robust internal skepticism of state ideology, but that he also was prepared to challenge openly its most powerful figures and cherished fictions. > > In its original readings and historically-informed focus on the Complaints, the book offers a range of new insights into Spenser’s anthology, challenging prevailing scholarly arguments on the work as a whole as well as perspectives on its individual poems. It debunks the view that Mother Hubberds Tale was written in 1579 during the queen’s marriage crisis, and instead demonstrates new directions of inquiry by illuminating the poem’s context as a work published, received, and censored in 1591. By examining The Ruines of Time within the context of its contemporary reception, the book corrects new critical misreadings of the poem, demonstrating how its incendiary statements on Burghley and Elizabethan patronage culture reveal gestures of defiance and subversion equal to those of Mother Hubberds Tale. Its focus on the 1591 context of the Complaints reconceives the allegory of Virgils Gnat, reimagining Spenser as the memorial figure of the shepherd, and not the powerless gnat, who instead reflects the deteriorating reputation of the late Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The book also tests Spenser’s own statements about the origins of Burghley’s displeasure by examining the 1590 Faerie Queene from the perspective of Cecil and his family. In its reading of Burghley’s role in the ouster of Lord Grey as Lord Deputy of Ireland, it connects the Lord Treasurer to the figure of the Blattant Beast in The Faerie Queene, Book 5, a role that complements Spenser’s associations between him and the Beast in Book 6. In this reading William Cecil emerges not merely as an antagonistic reader of Spenser’s epic; by undermining the virtues of both justice and courtesy, Cecil functions as an antagonist to the very epic struggles within Spenser’s own narrative. > > The range and originality of the book—its revisionist approach to a major canonical figure and its broader engagement with English literary culture of the 1590s—will attract the interest of a wide field of critics and historians. Correcting inaccuracies in the historical record that have stood for a hundred years, it will provoke spirited reaction and debate on a series of critical and biographical questions, and compel the reexamination of texts that have suffered comparative neglect against Spenser’s better known works. Consequently, it will spur new thinking on the literature and culture of the 1590s, and will draw increased attention to the laureate career that Spenser envisioned for himself in The Shepherds Calendar, but failed to achieve with The Faerie Queene. In presenting the most sustained and historically informed focus on the Complaints volume to date, the book disputes accounts of the poet’s mid-career in Richard Rambuss’s Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge 1993) and Richard Danson Brown’s ‘The New Poet’ (Liverpool, 1999). While Rambuss in particular works to shape the Complaints into the arc of the poet’s secretarial career, my work explores a bolder, more radical vision of Spenser’s anthology, one in keeping with its being censored from print for over 20 years.