Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser's Faerie Queene
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Sixty-two years ago Spenser criticism woke up to the Berger alarm. It was 1957. Benny Goodman was old hat, but the New Criticism was in full swing. The New Critics didn’t think much of Spenser, though, and while there was plenty of good work filling the pages of scholarly journals, most of it was rather old-fashioned: A. S. P. Woodhouse’s “Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene” was still recent (and controversial). Once “conspicuous irrelevance” had fastened itself like a burr under the saddle of Spenser criticism, there would be no going back.
Over the next three decades, Harry Berger, Jr., would publish sixty strikingly original and enduringly influential essays on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, Milton, Plato, Alberti, Virgil, Dante, Da Vinci, Pico della Mirandola, Vermeer, Beowulf, Erasmus, More, Theocritus, the concept of cultural change, the theory of periodization, and the poetry of Robert Frost. A number of these were gathered into a pair of volumes issued in 1988 by the University of California Press: Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, edited by John P. Lynch, and Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics, with an introduction by Louis A. Montrose. Side by side on the shelf those two big books stand like pillars for a monument to critical intelligence, but that is the wrong image. Berger is no less restless in revising previous arguments than he is prolific in spinning new ones. In fact, he was just getting started. A dozen books later, on topics as various as Rembrandt, “structural misanthropology,” caterpillars, courtesy books, and Christian nudes, readers may be forgiven for feeling as if they have encountered not a monument but a whirlwind.
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