Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton.(Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity)(The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature)(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-05

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Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton. Ed. by ELIZABETH JANE BELLAMY, PATRICK CHENEY, and MICHAEL SCHOENFELDT. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. xii+216 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-333-98398-x.

Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity. By SUSANNAH B. MINTZ. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 259 pp. 38 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-87413-822-1.

The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature. By J. DOUGLAS CANFIELD. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2003. 252 pp. 38 [pounds sterling]. 0-87413-834-5.

One of Milton's most overtly Spenserian moments is in Paradise Lost, ii. 648-73, where his description of Sin recalls the serpentine Errour of The Faerie Queene, i. 1, and that of shapeless Death the 'Vnbodied, vnsoul'd, vnheard, vnseene' figure of vii. 7. 46. In their introduction to Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt make the wider claim that death 'is an indispensable backdrop for any attempt to articulate the relationship between Spenser and Milton' (p. 2). However, while Milton's epic narrates the events that 'Brought death into the world' (i. 3), and an impressive list of deaths in The Faerie Queene is provided by Andrew Hadfield in this volume (p. 28), death proves elusive or ambivalent in both poems.

In Spenser's epic, death is frequently deferred or transcended: The Faerie Queene is populated by persons such as the 'dead-liuing' Maleger (ii. 11. 44), an animate corpse who will not die, and Adonis, 'subiect to mortalitie' but 'eterne in mutabilitie' (iii. 6. 47). Perhaps it is in the nature of allegory to produce such freaks: as Gordon Teskey writes, 'The very liveliness of the allegorical figures, their frenetic, jerky, galvanic life, makes us think of dead bodies through which an electric current is passed' (p. 66). The death of a character such as Cymocles is therefore a fixing of value,...

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