self- MUP_Smith_Printer.indd 13 02/04/2015 16:18 14 The senses in early modern England, 1558–1660 portraits by female artists such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Tudor argues for a distinctively early modern configuration of viewing, tracing the significance of this configuration for encounters with a painting through a wide range of texts, including writings by Edmund Spenser and James Shirley. These specific understandings of visual engagement with paintings yield significant suggestions about the sensory configurations of early aesthetic encounters. August
apparent in her criticism of Dr Eliot, her politically motivated poems responding precisely to situations of domination by inclusion. ‘Sojourn in the Whale’, ‘He Digesteth Harde Iron’ and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ each coordinates its response to imperialism through a play of incorporation, the poetry absorbing the words of the dominant regime in the name of resistance, and incorporating alongside them hermeneutically stubborn elements. And then it was in the spirit, surely, of ‘heroics which do not confuse transcendence with domination’ that Moore arrived at her bestknown
unnamed narrator of the romance, Urania, Liana, and Alanius. See Urania, pp. 158–60, 196–98. 31 Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 64 and pp. 140–42 in particular. On the identification of Philisides to Philip Sidney, see Dennis Moore, ‘Philisides and Mira: Autobiographical Allegory in The Old Arcadia’, Spenser Studies, 3 (1982), pp. 125–37. 32 Mary Wroth, ‘Love’s Victory’, in Early Modern Women’s Writings. An Anthology 1560-1700, ed. by Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 82
, Renaissance Essays: Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 98–99; John Coates, ‘“The Choice of Hercules” in Antony and Cleopatra’, in Shakespeare Survey Volume 31, ed. by Kenneth Muir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 45–52. MUP_Smith_Printer.indd 183 02/04/2015 16:18 184 Aesthetic sensory experiences 41 Early modern plays often ask audiences to engage with narratives through imagination and fantasy; the Henry V Chorus speeches are merely the most famous and explicit examples of this (Prologue; 2.0; 3.0; 4.0; 5.0; Epilogue). 42 I am
notions of civilised life, is central – e.g. Greek tragedy, the drama and epics English Renaissance (especially Spenser and Milton), countless modernist texts, including some which have been interpreted quite otherwise. Again, a disquieting half-realisation of this has often occurred even within conservative aesthetic perspectives. We can detect it in the most basic category of the humanist aesthetic, that of ‘character’. Time and again, and literally across centuries if not millennia, the most compelling individual creations are the daemonic ones: the vice figures in
conscious abandonment of such a ‘religious frame’ may propitiate a kind of literary decline: chapter6 28/1/05 152 1:33 pm Page 152 Expanding deity So far as we can tell, there are no works of poetry being produced in English today that are of comparable stature with those of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare or Milton. Whether these writers themselves were avowedly Christian or not, they wrote within a Christian framework. Is there a relation between the decline of Christianity … and the decline in works of high poetry? Many like to associate poetic decline or
poetry that cannot be disinterested. Percy drew inspiration from, but also fuelled, English fascination with the primitive.17 Along with men like Thomas Warton and Richard Hurd, both of whom read romance (although Hurd reads very little) as a function of their interest in Spenser, Percy promotes the Middle Ages as an age of romance, wild with imagination but, in perfect antithesis to his own eminently tasteful time, irredeemably barbarous; at the same time he promotes himself as someone able to know the difference. Where Percy encapsulates all of the ambivalence that
The Carey family had close ties to other members of Shakespeare’s circle. George Carey’s wife and daughter, both named Elizabeth, were patrons of writers including Edmund Spenser and Nashe. George’s daughter and heiress, Elizabeth, married Sir Thomas Berkeley, son and heir of Henry, Lord Berkeley
. 9 James A. Knapp, Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 ), p. 1. 10 Knapp, Image Ethics , pp. 1–2. 11 Leonard Barkan, ‘Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan
Aquinas. Tradition and Transformation’, in Ysabel de Andia (ed.), Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en Orient et en Occident. Actes du Colloque International Paris, 21–24 septembre 1994 (Paris 1997), pp. 405–38, and Wayne Hankey, ‘Augustinian Immediacy and Dionysian Mediation in John Colet, Edmund Spenser, Richard Hooker and the Cardinal de Bérulle’, in Dominique de Courcelles (ed.), Augustinus in der Neuzeit. Colloque de la Herzog August Bibliothek de Wolfenbüttel, 14–17 octobre, 1996 (Turnhout 1998), pp. 125–60. 10 Dagens, Bérulle, pp. 118–32; Krumenacker, L