Joseph Loewenstein

Echo's Ring: Orpheus and Spenser's Career

rean traditions has already received considerable attention in the numerological criticism of his poem, and these traditions provide a context for the Orphean analogy? The Orpheus of these traditions is the knowing poet par excellence; he is the familiar of the learned sisters,” the poet-as-magus? Surely Spenser’s most Ficinan poem, the Epithalamion is a poem particularly anxious for power, with the sooth imperatives of its daylight stanzas distributed across the enormously precise grid of the poem’s structural plan. As Thomas Greene suggested long ago in his treatment of the night movement of the poem, Spenser has left traces of these anxieties beneath his will-to-power: it is not only the marriage, he writes, “but the whole of human experience which is menaced by the night’s sad dread. . . . The threat of disaster, the irrational fear of vaguely specified suffering, hovers faintly over the poem. ”4 Thus the poem’s last “ S O A Orpheus did for his owne bride. ” 1 Spenser’s evocation of Pythago-

Personal Material: Jonson and Book-burning

To examine the many topoi of the personality of writing as they appear in early modern texts is to survey a dire topography, for there is a surprisingly large field of representations of books as suffering persons, as victims of corporal violence — the book as victim of kidnapping or rape; the book as mangled infant or as aborted fetus; the book as victim of torture; the book as unrevenged ghost. I shall be concentrating here on images of the burning book, hoping that doing so will enable us to peer into Jonson’s experience of literary relations within the material culture of books. But I want to begin with perhaps the most famous early modern instance of the figure of the personal book. It’s a remarkable instance, composed late in the Gutenberg era, when the figure had almost become what we too casually call a dead metaphor, and largely because books had become part of the furniture of living and begun to lose the authority to arrest attention by their very presence — which authority was part of the interior bracing of the topos of the personal book. This is a judgement call, of course: one of the more delicate problems facing the cultural historian is to assess when the value of an object or a gesture has become deflated, or when a topos has lost its aura.

The Poets' Poet's Poet: James Merrill's Spenser Lectures

To the challenging question, “What did X learn from Spenser?,” this essay responds, “let X equal James Merrill,” and continues, in part, in a mathematical vein, investigating how Spenser’s interest in number informs Merrill’s conspicuous engagements with prosodic measure, how Spenser’s encyclopedism manifests itself in Merrill as explicitly summative, and, generally, how insistently Merrill works to make imagined cosmogony count across The Changing Light at Sandover, the epic to which Merrill devoted his attention for more than half his career. The essay takes up other, non-mathematical Spenserianisms in Merrill as well: the relation between Merrill’s color-sense and Spenser’s, their shared commitment to making a larger social sense of the intimacies of friendship, Merrill’s special interest in the somewhat lubricious myth of renewal in the Garden of Adonis, and the urbane Spenserian-Stevensian hybrid of his reimagining of the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie at the conclusion of The Book of Ephraim, the first installment of Sandover.1

Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship

List of illustrations Acknowledgements 1. An introduction to bibliographical biography 2. Community properties 3. Upstart crows and other emergencies 4. Jonson, Martial and the mechanics of plagiarism 5. Scripts in the marketplace: Jonson and editorial repossession 6. Afterword: the second folio Index.

Marston’s Gorge and the Question of Formalism

To begin with some afterwords: in Shirley’s The Cardinal, Antonio marvels over the Duchess, who seems to him as Serene, as I Have seen the morning rise upon the spring, No trouble in her breath, but such a wind As came to kiss and fan the smiling flowers.