Simultaneously, however, Milton derives a certain kind of virtue from remembering the era of queenship: the virtue of virginity, which in the Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle signifies the capacity to resist unjust authority by means of inviolable self-rule. Hence, Paradise Lost’s engagements with the nature of human will, I argue, also are engaged with Milton’s reminiscences of female monarchy—in this case, reminiscences of the advantages the model of female monarchy might suggest. Further, Paradise Lost is a literary experiment that derives from feminine authority in that it not only revives, in Eve, the perceived dangers of Elizabeth Tudor’s or Mary, Queen of Scots’s self-willed rule, but also revisits Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s enabling associations of feminine authority with the genres of romance, of tragedy, and of tragicomedy, genres with which Milton’s epic both disputes and colludes. In many ways, Eve’s willfulness is also the will of the poem, the engine of open-ended action that replaces both the deluded, self-defeating heroism of Satan’s reworkings of epic, and the foregone tragic conclusions of God’s oddly crabbed divine dispensation. Insofar as Adam follows rather than leads Eve, he participates simultaneously in a Spenserian willingness to be ravished by the queen and by lush poetry; in a Hamletesque capacity for suspending action in favor of self-examination; in a Cleopatran ability to spin out endless scenarios for alternative realities; and in a Leontes-like real, if brief, desire to hear his revived queen speak what she will. In this way, the literary shape of Milton’s poem runs against the grain of his prose tracts’ politics, which amalgamate a supposedly enlightened republicanism with the subjection of a queen into, as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra puts it, “no more but e’en a woman.”
It is this tension between historical circumstance and literary form with which this book is, finally, most concerned. My sense is that reviving “old” questions of when and how literary genres are invented can usefully broaden, as well as challenge, recent work on the relation between English Renaissance literature and the monarchy. Whereas my predecessor critics have noticed that literary works puzzle out the ambiguities of feminine authority, I wish to explain what literary advantages might accrue from such a focus. I do so, however, not to reconstruct in retrograde fashion the oldhistoricist image of the author supremely in command of the “historical background” his or her times provide to the writing of literature. Rather, I want to extend Montrose’s insight regarding the reciprocal relation between culture and the literary work it informs, in order to articulate the reciprocal relation between culture and the very form of that literary work. The author, in this case, is neither entirely the product of his or her culture nor entirely the producer of new literary modes; rather, he or she exists as the mediator between the two, as that intelligence that employs each to test, protest, stretch, and/or revel in the accepted boundaries of the other. The disruptions of social and political hierarchy initiated by queenship become the occasion for major literary innovations, which in turn set new limits for what might be attempted in drama and poetry.
In a broad sense, then, my aim in this book is to marry a new-historicist account of literature as a cultural form to a literary-historical account of the succession of texts. More particularly, my intent is to account for the microcosmic shifts in attitudes toward feminine authority within a literary work, or within a series of works like Shakespeare’s history plays. While such shifts are explicable partly in terms of the complex array of responses toward queenship that are always available in Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan England, they also come about as spur-of-the-moment strategies for handling the shaping of any number of transitory but tricky literary moments. To the new-historicist description of the Renaissance author as engaging in as well as submitting to improvisations of power, I thus want to add my description of the Renaissance text itself as improvisatory, shape-shifting, and in flux. As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse put it, the course of any narrative is an important object of study because narrative itself consists of “the traces of the labor that went into organizing various materials, representations, representations of representations, into a reproducible and consumable body of knowledge that [can] be converted into speech.”43 I am interested in those narrative moments in which the labor of representing female authority manifests itself, not just in anxiety and bitter toil, but also in stunning craft. In this way, issues surrounding feminine authority are most enabling for Renaissance writers precisely when they are not fully articulated and delimited within the literary text either as predictable characterizations of queens or as pressing, extraliterary historical events. Rather, the historical circumstance undergoes, as in Ariel’s song, a kind of sea-change within the text, becoming something “rich and strange” as the text absorbs it and reconfigures itself in response. I have in mind a version of what Harry Berger describes as the dialectical relation between “page and stage” in Shakespeare’s plays. Appropriating Berger’s terms regarding Shakespeare’s treatment of theatricality, I would argue that the literary works with which this book is concerned “textualize” both the anxiety-producing and the liberating circumstances of feminine authority that surround or precede them. It is only when those circumstances are “detextualized”—that is, “[d]isplac[ed] … to the local habitation of theatrical and narrative circumstances”—that they “impos[e] a land of ideological closure on the semiotic power of the text.”44 Displacing all the possibilities and contingencies of feminine authority merely onto the prosaic activities of female characters, as Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton at times do, “detextualizes” and hence closes off the alternative strategy of these texts, which is to retain femininity, in all its frightening open-endedness, as a strategy of literary endeavor.
Female authority counts so strongly as a touchstone for such improvisations because Renaissance culture viewed women, usually with great suspicion, as inherently changeable and hence unreliable.45 As the anonymous 1560 tract entitled The deceyte of women, to the instruction and ensample of all men, yonge and old puts it, “Now beholde, what myschyefe, what marvayles and what folyshnes that the false and subtil women can brynge to passe, yea that semeth unpossyble for to be, that can they doo and brynge to passe.”46 That mischief, those marvels, and that foolishness—all “that semeth unpossyble for to be”—translates into Spenser’s, Shakespeare’s, and Milton’s examinations of their own capacities for marvelous, unanticipated literary innovation.
2
Genre and the Repeal of Queenship in Spenser’s Faerie Queene
TO BEGIN HIS DISCUSSION of the allegory of The Faerie Queene’s Book 5, the great Spenser scholar A. C. Hamilton voices the private opinion of even the most enthusiastic of Spenser admirers. “Spenser’s fiction seems to break down in Book 5,” says Hamilton. “Probably for this reason the book is the least popular.” A few pages later, however, Hamilton slightly revises his assessment of what happens to the poem’s fiction in Spenser’s Legend of Justice. It is not that the fiction has broken down, like some neglected machine in the garden, but that the fiction has been suppressed and restricted by Book 5’s adherence to a nonfictional point of reference: “Throughout Book 5 the reader is aware of fact pressing down upon the fiction.”1 As it turns out, “fact” for Hamilton, as for most readers, exerts its greatest pressure not on the whole of Book 5, but rather on the last five cantos, where the poem turns for the first time into a series of barely allegorized events in English history of the 1580s and 1590s: the defeat of the Souldan (read England’s defeat of Spain’s Philip II and his Armada); the trial of Duessa (Mary, Queen of Scots); Arthur’s liberation of Beige (England’s liberation of Belgium from Spain); Burbon’s fight for Flourdelis