The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England. by Alistair FoxReview by: Ellen MoodyThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 511-514Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2544532 .

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Book Reviews 511

tions as well as the hypocrisies, self-delusions, and other weaknesses endemic to fleshly exist- ence that hold them back. As one might expect, this approach works particularly well with the play's central antagonists, Angelo and Isabella, whom Ross presents as kindred spirits and parallel characters, deeply principled and idealistic figures who are drawn to sin by their very love of virtue. His detailed, nuanced treatment of the pair sets up a similar reading of the Duke as well-meaning but flawed, inadequate to his Godlike role. This in turn prepares us for the play's-and the reading's-climax: the fifth act's judgment scene. Departing from what he identifies as the standard readings of the play's resolution-as unproblematic "happy ending" or as Shakespeare's failed attempt to impose order on a recalcitrant reality-Ross acknowledges the ending's discomforts but assigns the blame not to Shakespeare but to the Duke, whose failure to provide the full, unambiguous closure we desire fulfills his creator's intent to hold a mirror up to our own flawed and ultimately uncertain earthly nature.

While scholars of the play will find much familiar here, both specialists and nonspecialists will take pleasure and insight from Ross's persuasive use of detail to build a complete reading of the play. It is partiality in its other sense, however-biased or motivated reading-that might lead one to take issue with Ross's book.There is, of course, nothing wrong with treat- ing a text from a particular perspective-but this is not what Ross claims to be doing. Acknowledging the impossibility of "last word" criticism, he claims for his work the status of"first word or sine qua non criticism-that without which we cannot hope to proceed with approximate truth to the object," and his writing is peppered with terms like "true,' "objec- tive," "right," and "wrong." Such claims place an unsupportable burden on Ross's reading, and invite skeptical attention to its otherwise unremarkable privilegings and blind spots.This skepticism is increased by the book's most significant blind spot, its lack of substantive engagement with recent criticism of the play, particularly criticism informed by contempo- rary theoretical methodologies-not only the sort of poststructuralist criticism that would challenge the very possibility of "first word" criticism, but also the new historicist and neo- formalist criticism that has of late offered compelling alternative accounts of the play's prob- lematic ending. In a sense, Ross's own work mirrors his description of Measure for Measure's characters: unable to live up to their own lofty aspirations, but compelling and instructive nonetheless. Stephen Cohen .................................. ... University of South Alabama

The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England. Alistair Fox. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. viii + 240 pp. $64.95 cloth / $26.95 PB.

In his latest book Alistair Fox examines a selection of English sixteenth-century texts and compares them with the nearly contemporary Italian ones from which these were adapted. By close readings of all these texts Fox seeks to demonstrate that English writers turned to "Italianate literary imitation" to articulate individual compromises between the demands of a reformed religion that insisted its adherents abstain from sensual pleasure, except when legitimized by narrowly controlled conventional relationships and their manifestations in resulting social obligations, and an apparently ceaseless desire for such pleasure, which desire the chosen Italian texts confronted frankly or evasively. According to Fox, these Italianate English texts come to terms with and debate a newly aggressive "Calvinistic" contention that those acts which fulfill the private bodily self and sensual imagination are deadly sins because such release must lead to self-destructive, brutal, and asocial or malign words and acts. He presents Italian texts whose pagan sensuality, courtly or sophisticated assumptions,

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512 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX / 2 (1998)

and demotic character combine with an expert "Catholic" casuistry, to allow such impulses to speak on their own behalf wherein human longings for sexual fulfillment, an "idealized tranquillity," and "absence of care" do not lead to a nadir of evil, but rather to a natural and actually less corrupt, and intensely satisfying and joyous experience.

The strengths of this book are considerable. As in all his previous books, Fox writes lucidly and with grace; those who remember his inspired analyses ofJohn Skelton's poetry and thorough studies ofThomas More's work in the context of their specific milieu will not be surprised to know The English Renaissance is a treasure trove of refreshing, careful, percep- tive readings which add to our knowledge of Fox's writers' inward motives. One cannot do justice to this book unless one quotes some of these. Thus, for example, Fox prefaces his detailed reading of Petrarch: "Wyatt, because of his deep personal entanglement in the trou- bles of the Henrician political Reformation, wrote many of his Petrarchan imitations as a response to the traumatic effects of those troubles on his psychic being"; here and elsewhere he resists the temptation to disparage one man or text in favor of another. Fox can placeVir- gil's texts before us to show how they fuse a "sensuous apprehension of the pastoral world with various states of feeling," and make us grasp how Boccaccio and Sannazzaro deliber- ately "intensify" their "pervasive mood of eroticism... to create "a [comforting] country of the mind" into which the suffering individual can retreat to seek refuge from the troubles of the outer world," and yet turn round to examine Sidney's "very un-Arcadian episodes" which serve to signify the presence of a mutability in things, and a force of disruptive evil resulting from human sinfulness, a world where "treachery" abounds." Having vindicated Ariosto's "focus on the injustice of the sexual double standard that men often invoke in their treatment of women, together with the idea that crimes are ultimately impossible to con- ceal," he does not find in Spenser a warning which advises repression but rather "a new emphasis on the inferior degradation that is liable to be set in motion by a failure to bridle intemperate emotions:"

The book is, however, also disappointing.There is not one poem by a woman, nor is any female writer, Italian, French, or English, even mentioned.Vittoria Colonna,Veronica Gam- bara,Veronica Franco, Louise Labe, Pernette du Guillet, Mary Sidney, Lady Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth are just the better known women. Con- sider one sonnet, the first from Mary Wroth's sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, which deliberately recalls the opening of Petrarch's Trionfe d'Amore: "When nights black mantle could most darkness prove,/And sleep deaths Image did my senses hiere/From knowledge of my self, then thoughts did move/Swifter than those most swiftness need require:/In sleepe, a Chariot drawne by wing'd desire/I sawe: wher sate brightVenus, Queene of love,/ And att her feete her sonne, still adding fire/To burning hearts which she did hold above,/ Butt one hart flaming more then all the rest/The goddess held, and putt itt to my breast,/ Deare sonne, now shutt sayd she: thus must wee winn;/Hee her obay'd, and martir'd my poor heart,/I, waking hop'd as dreams itt would depart/Yett since: Oh mee, a lover I have binn."The self-abasement, self-mockery, and shame of a woman who gave up her virginity lies behind a tradition of Italianate motifs which, to use some of Fox's favored phrases, "exploited the potential of Petrarchism to serve as a vehicle for the investigation of [the poet's] own comparable struggles." The tradition begins earlier than Mary Wroth-for her aunt adapted Petrarch's "Triumph of Death" in an original way that takes into account Mary Herbert's intense joy in and love for her brother's poetry; it may be plotted through the obscure mid-seventeenth-century Scots poet Anna Hume's translation of three of the tri- umphs (Love, Chastity, and Death) and is perhaps best known in Aphra Behn's late-seven- teenth-century Song (from Abdelazer, 1677), where the definition of an encounter outside

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Book Reviews 513

love as a triumph for the man and loss of all status or caste for the woman explains the last couplet's paralyzed despair: "Love in fantastic triumph sat/Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed,/For whom fresh pains he did create,/And strange tyrannic power he showed,/ From thy bright eyes he took his fire,/Which round about, in sport he hurled;/But 'twas from mine, he took desire,/Enough to undo the amorous world./ From me he took his sighs and tears,/From thee his pride and cruelty;/From me his languishments and fears,/And every killing dart from thee;/Thus thou and I, the god have armed,/And set him up a deity;/But my poor heart alone is harmed/Whilst thine the victor is, and free."

This is but one of the many uses of Italianate tradition we find in English Renaissance poetry by women, chosen in order to cite Petrarch's Trionfe d'Amore, which, as it is never mentioned by Fox, will exemplify the second weakness of his book. Fox writes the purpose of his book is to show how the English "national identity" changed and to provide "a window into the minds" of sixteenth-century English people. He also says his book will explain why there was a hiatus of Italian imitation in the fifty years between 1520-30 and 1580-1610. But how can he when (in a familiar apposite line) he has simply rounded up the usual suspects? Fox does not go outside the old canon of, on the one hand,Wyatt, Surrey, a few mediocre mid-century males, Daniel, Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare, and, on the other, PetrarchVirgil, Boccaccio, Mantuan (Baptista Mantuanus Spagnuolo), Sannazzaro, and the Italian sources of Shakespeare's plays familiar to us since Bullough. He does not turn to Baldassare Castiglione and Pietro Bembo, or the influential and moralizing Italian critics or the kind of minor Italian poetry found in anthologies. Religious intermediaries such as Philippe du Plessis de Mornay are strangely absent.There is one French sonnet, by Philippe Desportes.

It is also important to discuss a small but disturbing anomaly in Fox's book. Until a cen- tral passage in his discussion of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, when he reaches the sonnet and song which precede Sidney's demand for consummation, Fox suddenly shifts from a judi- cious and disinterested tone, the empathic advocacy towards all his writers up to then, and calls Astrophil's frustrated rage at Stella's refusal "male egotism in its nastiest guise," "spiteful vindictiveness"; he writes of the "self-serving shallowness of [Astrophil's] unctuous poetic flattery"; and Astrophil's attempt to blame Stella is called "typically male." The tone is harsh, strident, and angry. The phrase "typically male" reveals an assumption about female inno- cence and male guilt when it comes to analyzing the deep ambiguity of all human experi- ences, including that of sexual encounter. What makes this sudden bias troubling is in another central section on another poem, this time Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar. Fox is not similarly critical of "self-serving" when the poet is, in Fox's now customary neutral lan- guage, "voicing [one man's] personal and political discontents through decorous displace- ment."Why is Fox not troubled to find himself expending a great deal of effort to explicate an aesthetic ruse (for that is what the poem's allegory is) in the service of one man's ambition and argument that one group of people is morally superior to another? As a woman, I would not like to think that the sudden attack on Sidney shows an unconscious or somewhat dis- ingenuous deference to a presumed bias on my part since Spenser's more generally danger- ous amorality (as demonstrated by Spenser's brutality in Ireland and its justification in book 5 of The Faerie Queene) is accepted without demur.

All this said, that which Fox does, he does extremely well. He provides a wealth of per- suasive insight into some of the most famous quietly dissident poetry of the Italian and English Renaissance. The modern scholarly conversation and the wide-ranging interaction between the people and cultures of Italy and England since the fourteenth century have since the publication of Lewis Einstein's The Italian Renaissance in England (1903) and Rod-

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514 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIX / 2 (1998)

erick Marshall's Origins of the Romantic Interest in Italy (1934) been continuous and rich. I think, to name but a few voices, of classic books by Mario Praz and Graham Hough, and the recent studies like that of Albert Russell Ascoli, Thomas P. Roche, and Robin Kirkpatrick; yet that so much remains to be done demonstrates how very fruitful this area of study has been and can continue to be. Ellen Moody........................................ George Mason University

The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570-1625. Jennifer Woodward. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1997. 250 pp. /40.

This study draws on art history, literary criticism, sociology, and anthropology to set a compelling subject in the framework of political history. It takes account of, and sometimes issue with, recent work on public ritual and funeral customs generally, and, as the title implies, projects the complex process of state mourning as a dramatic spectacle, to be judged by performance criteria. It is of course no novelty to draw parallels between liturgy and drama, but it is a specially apt image for the period under discussion.Woodward's chief con- cern is to examine how the English royal funeral was affected by the Reformation; how in some respects it continued as before, or even developed in apparent contradiction to the new religious order. It is therefore unfortunate that little can be said about the funerals of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I. In Henry's case, Jennifer Loach, in an article briefly referred to here, showed what could be done from the limited source material.Woodward tackles the funerals of Mary, Queen of Scots (1587 and 1612), Elizabeth I (1603), the Prince of Wales (1612), Queen Anne (1619), and James I (1625). For each there is a chapter combining description and analysis.These particular studies are interleaved with general discussion. By way of introduction the funeral of the third Earl of Derby (1572) is taken to illustrate features common to aristocratic as well as royal funerals.Woodward shows that the offering ritual, a key element marking the succession of the heir as much as paying tribute to the deceased, continued into the post-Reformation era. Although this is explained as "choreography" not "iconography" and therefore compatible with the rejection of Catholicism,Woodward does not accept the argument that the evolving former rite was a simple process of seculariza- tion.It must be said, however, that in Elizabeth's reign at least the queen and her ministers operated a kind of mortuary dirigisme by which the dead were put firmly in their place, socially and even geographically. Sir Nicholas Bacon appears to give ultimate expression to this by willing his body to be buried wherever the queen might choose.

Of particular interest is the interaction of French and English royal funeral rites. This is the subject ofWoodward's primary research; a summary of Charles IX's obsequies is given as an appendix. In some details the supposedly iconophobic Glynis are seen to outperform their French models. Anglo-French interest combines in the first funeral of the queen of Scots at Peterborough Cathedral. This was so awkward and unscripted an occasion that six months elapsed before the ceremony was staged. Woodward shows that French accounts were elaborated, perhaps in deference to Mary's status in the French royal house, by inven- tion of an effigy when in fact the coffin was topped only by a crown. What might seem a peculiarly hollow symbol for a headless monarch would (when the effigy itself passed out of usage) become a funeral convention adaptable to all grades of society. Mary's subsequent removal to Westminster Abbey was an early example of another, briefer, fashion-that of nocturnal burial. Meanwhile Elizabeth's funeral had posed different problems for its organiz- ers, who had to look far back for precedent while taking account of the new liturgical set-

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