I've been holding off responding to this discussion, but Mitchell
Harris's reference to Hollywood has pushed me over the brink. Throughout
my teaching career I was very aware of the Renaissance version of the
dimension he alludes to. My students used to say dismissively "oh well,
but they didn't have the media." Ha! This is the point where you
introduce them to masques, late-medieval plays and especially
processions -- "Spenser in the street," as it were. I am embarrassed to
flog my own work, but this is precisely the reason why I edited a
paperback student version of "The Queen's Majesty's Passage" (written by
Spenser's old schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster, of course) so that student
could get a glimpse of how allegory worked in the actual life of London
people. I always used the QMP in teaching Book I, and the publication
itself,with its multiple appendixes of documentary material, pays a lot
of attention to the way Londoners participated in organizing that royal
entry, and how the religious and dynastic conflicts were negotiated,
both in Mulcaster's text and in other earlier processions. They didn't
have any problem in reading the allegory, though (as my introduction
points out) things got a little stickier in the 17th century. There is
of course a vast and sophisticated literature on the Royal Entry as a
European phenomenon, but you don't need much specialization to be able
to imagine a guildsman working on scaffolds and paintings, a merchant
marching in the procession, or a little boy (William Camden, perhaps?)
watching from the sidelines. You can take a look at the publication at
http://www.crrs.ca/publications/bookpages/ts04.htm -- Germaine
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Germaine Warkentin // English (Emeritus)
VC 205, Victoria College (University of Toronto),
73 Queen's Park Crescent East, Toronto, Ont. M5S 1K7, CANADA
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“The primary rule of intellectual life: when puzzled,
it never hurts to read the primary documents” (Stephen Jay Gould)
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