My machine keeps turning allegoria into allegory.  I've tried to correct it here, and fix a couple of other things too.  My apologies for being doubly tedious.  

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James Nohrnberg, Prof. Emeritus
Univ. of Virginia
Dept. of English / Bryan Hall 209
P.O. Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
From: Nohrnberg, James C (jcn) <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, March 5, 2020 5:16 PM
To: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: name for a figure?
 
The emblematic armour of God, in the passage cited by Hannibal Hamlin, and itemized by its allegoria, and with its adoption urged upon a militant Pauline christian—in Ephesians 6:13f—is indeed an obvious example for Spenserians schooling themselves in Book I and its allegories and rhetorical forms.  The Redcrosse Knight, for example, should be wearing the  Pauline “helmet of salvation,” but he arrives at Despair—or his cave—with a terrified companion who is bare-headed (FQ I.ix.34):  that is, without “the [Pauline] hope of salvation for a helmet”—1 Thes. 5:8, after Isa. 59:17.  Sir Treuisan is disarmed by a lack of proper Christian hope. {See Luther on Gal. 5:5, “our righteousness is not in actual possession, but lies under hope.”  “This is a sweet and sound consolation, whereby afflicted and troubled consciences, feeling their sin, and terrified with every fiery dart of the devil, may be marvelously comforted;  For the feeling of sin, the wrath God, death, hell, and all other terrors, is intensely strong in the conflict of conscience; … Then counsel must be given to the tempted … For my righteousness is not yet perfect, it cannot yet be felt; yet I do not despair: for faith shows me Christ in whom I trust, and when I have laid hold of Him by faith, I wrestle against the fiery darts of the devil, and I take good heart through hope against the feeling of sin”: Commentary on Galatians:  Modern-English Edition[1924] (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House / Revell, 1988 edn. [1924 edn. reprint]), pp. 328-29).  These fiery darts reappear near the end of Spenser's Despair episode as "the brond of hellish smart" (I.ix.53) as quenched by grace.}  
   The question being posed, however, is how does the rhetoricians' figure of allegoria differ from "the kind of BIG allegory we see in Pilgrim's Progess or The Faerie Queene" and how does that differ "from the more compact [kind] that takes a conceit and then works out the allegory of the parts in compact fashion."  The parable had been earlier mentioned; the parables of Jesus are stories to which topical references are magnetically attached; they are thematically loaded and pointedly suggestive anecdotes.  And it is this same story element that also characterizes the enlarging of allegoria into those lengthier allegorical forms that feature the extended biography or life-story of a figurative protagonist:  one like Spenser's Redcrosse, Bunyan's Christian, and Dante's otherworldly tourist-pilgrim.  These characters' stories all take time--time is the medium of narration, and incidents, episodes, and events, endowed with follow-ability and sequentiality, are any narration's substance.  By comparison, so to speak, allegoria presents a tableaux or schemata, and only a potential or nuclear scenario, and not a mural in developmental, panoramic, serially dilated action.  In allegoria a conceited thought unfolds in a condensed form, while in the grander fictions cited a persona's drama or thematized life-story unfolds at length.  Here allegorical and emblematic props like Redcrosse's shield, Christian's scroll, and Dante's waist-cord may seem to turn into what Harry Berger might possibly be tempted to discard as distracting McGuffins.  And yet Redcrosse's new colleague's missing helmet pre-appears in the appalled Sir Treuisan's initial appearance, and we must pay it mind--"they might perceive his head / To  be unarmed" (I.ix.22), this being as allegorically telltale as the rope around Treuisan's hopeless neck.  The Pauline allegoria has been put in the episodic service of the Spenser's narrative unfolding of a protracted legend.  

(As I have reported elsewhere, this rope also may appear around the neck of Shakespeare's Cordelia--see Edmund's falsehood of Cordelia's desperate act--and likewise Edmund Spenser's at FQ II.x.32, "kept in prison long,/Till wearie of her wretched life, her selfe she hong." See previous remarks, about emblem into narrative.)                                

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James Nohrnberg, Prof. Emeritus​
Univ. of Virginia
Dept. of English / Bryan Hall 209
P.O. Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Hannibal Hamlin <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2020 11:04 AM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: name for a figure?
 
I was reading an old article by Terence Hawkes recently, and he argues that Richard's problem is that his imaginative and verbal energy is always directed inward rather than outward. He peoples his mental realm with various thoughts, but he is unable to connect with the actual people of the kingdom he is supposed to be ruling. An interesting argument. I wonder if allegoria is a figure that tends toward dehumanizing and solipsism? I'm not sympathetic with the Romantic (Coleridgean) dismissal of allegory, but it is a figure that necessarily sees the world as something other than it really is -- though I suppose at least from a Christian allegorical perspective one might argue that it's the allegorical that is the real.

This has been a rich thread, and very illuminating, but I'm still feeling that the rhetoricians have missed a term that distinguished the kind of BIG allegory we see in Pilgrim's Progess or The Faerie Queen, from the more compact that takes a conceit and then works out the allegory of the parts in compact fashion, like the examples Jim, John, and others adduce. For yet another example, and one relevant to Spenser, there is Paul's armor of faith:

Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;
And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.
And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God....  (Ephes. 6:13-17)

Hannibal



On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 5:14 AM Penny McCarthy <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
'not always a very good one’ - but he is pretty good, isn’t he? Why shouldn’t Richard have different similes for different kinds of thoughts, ones ‘tending to ambition’ and so on?  All are different, but the flinty ribs of the prison walls is v. good, I think. It feels like a soul unable to get out. An atheist’s soul.

What could be said about Vaughan’s ‘I saw Eternity the other night/  Like a great ring of pure and endless light’? Two abstracts; or one abstract and a concrete? Which is more concrete?

Penny
On 3 Mar 2020, at 21:03, Nohrnberg, James C (jcn) <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

The figure of allegoria

To John Leonard's earlier self-compounding Shakespearean examples one could add Richard II's opening speech in Act V, scene 5 of his play, "I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live uno the world," where Richardhammers out the comparison by peopling his solitary space with his myriad thoughts, in place of the populousness of the world.  Richard in this play speaks largely in verse, and seems to have pretenses to being a concettist poet, but not always a very good one.  Here the figure-maker's speech is a rambling, somewhat miscellaneous, and perhaps lugubrious one, and perhaps it illustrates the hazards of undertaking an extended allegoria in a disordered and distraught state of mind.  John's example from the calculating and cunning Iago goes just the other way.      

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James Nohrnberg, Prof. Emeritus
Univ. of Virginia
Dept. of English / Bryan Hall 209
P.O. Box 400121 
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
From: Nohrnberg, James C (jcn) <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, February 29, 2020 4:57 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: name for a figure?
 
Yes, allegoria is the apt answer.  Parabola is not altogether wrong (see Analogy 97-98, sub chap. "Allegoria, the Figure of...").  Continued metaphor is an equivalent of allegory: as asserted in Puttenham (and:  "an Aligory doth differ from a Metaphore in this, that in a Metaphor, there is a translation but of one word, but in an Aligory of many").  

--Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum, qtd. Rix:  Allegoria est cum aliud uerbis, aliud sensus proponitur, uel cum ex verbs propisitis longe allius sensus, interim etiam contrarius colligitur.  Continet illa plures translationes and continuas, ob idque perpetua etiam Metaphor dicta.

Quintilian, Inst. Orat. IX.ii.46, calls allegory a "continua metaphora": prius fit genus plerumque continuatis translationibus (Inst. Oral. VIII.vi.44).  (See also Cicero Orator 94.)

David Rix's example is:   

Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous grief, 
Wherein my feeble brake is tossed long,
Far from the hoped hauen of relief,
Why do thy cruell billowes beat so strong,
Threatning to swallow vp my fearfull life?
O do thy cruell wrath and spightfull wrong
At length ally, and stint thy stormy strife,
Which in these troubled bowls raingnes, and rageth rife.
 For else my feeble vessell crazd, and crackt
Through thy song turrets and outrageous blowes,
Cannot endure, but needs it must be wrackt
On the rough rocks,or on the sandy shallowes,
The whiles that loue it stores, and fortune rowes; 
Love my lewd Pilot that a restlesse mind
And fortune Boteswaine no assurance knows,
But smile withouten stars against tide and wind:
How can they other do, sith both are bold and blind? 
               Britomart's Petrarchan expostualiton qtd. in Alexander Gill, Logomania Anglica

Compare, in the latter day, the allegory deployed, by the distressed Clarissa, in Samuel Richardson's novel:

Tost to and fro by the high winds of passionate control, I behold the desired port, the single state, into which I would fain enter; but am kept off by the foaming billows of a brother's and sister's envy, and by the raging winds of a supposed invaded authority; while I see in Lovelace, the rocks on one hand, and in Solmes, the sands on the other; and tremble, lest I should split upon the former or strike upon the latter.

Further:  the blazon is related to allegoria, insofar as it entails a systematic or anatomic emblematization (as of the bride in the Song or Songs or Serena in FQ VI.viii).   See Analogy 93-96, on allegoria or detailed similitude as "the lexis of allegory":  

"The figure of the house for the body in Ecclesiastes (12:3-4) is a haunting biblical example. [Fn: Taking the allegorical households as its clue, the Geneva Bible solves the meaning of the other figures systematically (the voice of the bird, insomnia; the daughters of singing, the windpipes; the almost tree, white hair; the river cord, the spinal cord; the pitcher, the veins; the well, the liver; the cistern, the heart, "out of which ye head draweth the powers of life").]  A slightly larger figure of the same kind is Spenser's smithy of heart-fretting Care, with his throbbing hammers of jealousy, and bellows of sights moved by Pensiveness (IV.). [Fn: The relation of Spenser's figure to the emblematic mode is insisted upon by its origins in the emblem poem of Bruno's Heroic Frenzies, V.v, which is based on the conceit of the hammer of jealous, as discovered by John Steadman, "Spenser's House of Care: A Reinterpretation," Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1960), pp. 207-223.  Regarding the lover, Bruno's Vulcan says, "A better forger of Aetna, a better smith, unveil and hammer did I find / here in this breast which exhales sights and whose bellows vivify the furnace, / where the soul lies prostrate from so many assaults / of such long tortures and great martyrdoms, and brings a concert / which divulges so bitter and cruel a torment." ... etc.]"  

Cp. Dante, Purg. xv.51, "Envy moves the bellows to your sighs."  At the other end of the spectrum of comparison, i.e., from brief to diffuse, The House of Alma is obviously an even more extended, anatomizing allegory than any so far adduced here, but it surely belongs to the kind.  



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James Nohrnberg, Prof. Emeritus
Univ. of Virginia
Dept. of English / Bryan Hall 209
P.O. Box 400121 
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Loewenstein, Joseph <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, February 29, 2020 1:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: name for a figure?
 
Maybe “epanodos,” although the post-classical “anatomy” would work and, of course, “allegory" will do in the particular case. 
On Feb 29, 2020, at 11:12 AM, Hannibal Hamlin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Learned Friends and Colleagues,

I feel like this is something I ought to know, but I'm stifling my pride in the interest of increasing my knowledge. Is there a name for the figure so common in poems (perhaps prose too) where a conceit is worked out systematically term by term? E.g., A is X, and B is Y, and C is Z. The example I have to hand is from one of Quarles's emblems (3.9), but there are any number of examples one could find.

"These purlieu men are devils; and the hounds
(Those quick-nos'd cannibals that scour the grounds) 
Temptation; and the game, the fiends pursue,
Are human souls, which still they have in view; 
Whose fury if they chance to 'scape, by flying, 
The skilful hunter plants his net, close lying 
On th' unsuspected earth, baited with treasure, 
Ambitious honour, and self-wasting pleasure."

Does this have a name, or is this just an elaborated conceit?

Hannibal



-- 
Hannibal Hamlin
Professor of English
The Ohio State University
Author of The Bible in Shakespeare, now available through all good bookshops, or direct from Oxford University Press at http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199677610.do
164 Annie & John Glenn Ave., 421 Denney Hall
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--
Hannibal Hamlin
Professor of English
The Ohio State University
Author of The Bible in Shakespeare, now available through all good bookshops, or direct from Oxford University Press at http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199677610.do
164 Annie & John Glenn Ave., 421 Denney Hall
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