Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a brief background of three schools of literary criticism: New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction. These three schools exposed serious concerns, emphasizing neglected aspects of literature. The chapters in this book focus on genre, realism, and relations with visual art. Concepts of genre figure in any sound literary theory. Meanwhile, chapters on realism demonstrate how the development of representation, far from being one of steadily improving verisimilitude, has gone through several distinct sorts of realism. They distinguish medieval and Renaissance realisms from the realism of pre-modern novels. Finally, chapters on visual art consider how conventions of visual art offer essential parallels with those of literature. The ‘sister arts’ display many family resemblances—obviously so in imagery, less obviously in their strategies of realism. The essays also look at emblems and emblematic poems.

The ‘Better Marks’ of Jonson’s To Penshurst

This chapter analyses To Penshurst, which first appeared in print in 1612 as the second poem of Ben Jonson’s The Forest. To Penshurst established an emergent English genre: the country-house poem. In To Penshurst, as in Jonson’s poetry generally, many readers are aware of a special relation between the ideal and the real. Penshurst, a house that had developed through the accretions of centuries, could offer no ideal significances; and that is why Jonson credits it instead with ‘better marks’, or symbols. These he finds in the beauties and advantages of its estate: most of the poem goes to show that the estate of Penshurst possesses as much order and symbolism as the prodigy houses, but in land and use rather than in architectural display. The chapter then looks at Jonson’s arrangement of the items in Penshurst, which he has ordered according to several independent organizational ideas: spatial, temporal, hierarchical, numerical, and rhetorical. The moral character of this well-ordered structure is displayed both in direct examples and in emblems.

Ut Architectura Poesis

This chapter investigates the analogy between architecture and literature, exploring the metaphors of the analogy and focusing on British examples. Renaissance architectural theory drew analogies with music, painting, or poetry, and developed these in progressively greater detail. The Horatian doctrine ut pictura poesis was restated in terms of architecture. The chapter then looks at shared number symbolisms. Numbers shared gave the ut architectura poesis doctrine a demonstrable basis. The chapter also considers the symmetry, analogies, and allegory in Renaissance poetry. It explores Renaissance shape poems, as well as the metaphor of the Renaissance frontispiece, which often resembled architectural (especially theatrical) façades. Finally, it examines the importance of Solomon’s Temple in the temple–poem metaphor.

Georgic and Pastoral

This chapter addresses the laws of genre in the seventeenth century. The idea of laws of genre, at least in their modern form, was imported into literary theory from linguistics. At a time when literary conventions were thought of as supplementary language rules, genres understandably came to be regarded as coding systems. The genres need to be restored to their settings in history and literary tradition, and to see them once more as diachronic existences. Among the strongest claims for the status of law is surely the arrangement of genres in pairs: epigram and lyric; pastoral and georgic; novel and romance. The chapter then looks at the connection between seventeenth-century pastoral and georgic. Pastoral is spoken dramatically by shepherds, and in consequence must use simple diction that avoids any hint of precise knowledge: a language of feeling incapable of particularization or detailed description. Georgic, on the contrary, is spoken in the poet’s own voice, and far from avoiding knowledgeability seeks to inculcate it through didacticism, albeit didacticism concealed by implicitness and sweetened by delightful details.

The Emblem as a Literary Genre

This chapter examines the emblem as a literary genre. Emblems, once dismissed as popular, trivial, and visually second-rate, have become the object of an independent specialism. Yet there is still little agreement as to what constitutes the emblem as a genre. And, now that literary criticism threatens to merge into media studies, the emblem is increasingly treated from a visual viewpoint, with consequent neglect of its literary aspects. The chapter then looks at how far emblems belong to literature, and constitute, indeed, a literary genre. As with any literary genre, we are faced with the diversifications of historical existence. Literary kinds have a diachronic dimension: change discloses, fashion fashions them. It is precisely innovation, in fact, that makes generic form apparent. And the emblem is no exception. It, too, came about through gradual transformation of earlier genres, and went on changing.

‘Paradise Regained’

This chapter focuses on John Milton’s Paradise Regained, looking at the alleged defects in its style. Several critics have spoken of a barer Miltonic style, found in Paradise Regained and in some other of his works, which contrasts with the grand style of Paradise Lost. This barer style is deliberately plain, and on principle avoids the ornate epic magniloquence of ‘swelling epithets thick-laid’. Indeed, Paradise Regained exhibits some low-style features, such as laconism. However, another approach has been to see Paradise Regained as reflecting a new personal phase in Milton’s development. The chapter then argues that the style of Paradise Regained was innovative, considering the characteristics of this new style. The style of Paradise Regained may be bare by some criteria; but it is incomparably rich in mimetic effects—richer, indeed, than most of Paradise Lost.

Penshurst Revisited

This chapter reviews Ben Jonson’s To Penshurst, a seminal English estate poem, which has been extensively but sketchily annotated, with key passages treated as mere commonplaces. The estate poem may have originated from the Netherlandish hofdicht or court-piece (perambulation of a country-house estate), but Jonson saw possibilities in the genre more far-reaching than his predecessors had done. The chapter then looks at emblematic trees, embedded anagrams, and the pastoral activity of writing names on trees in To Penshurst. It also considers the literary criticism of Jonson’s estate poem, which offers a mixture of genres. That To Penshurst is a poem of patronage presents difficulties to critics.

Shakespeare’s Renaissance Realism

This chapter illustrates William Shakespeare’s Renaissance realism, an intermediate mode between medieval and modern. Locally, this may imitate reality naturalistically; but in its larger coherence, it adopts multiple-perspective viewpoints that are often related morally or psychologically rather than causally. Shakespeare’s comedies even combine allegory with illusionistic representation. The chapter then turns to Shakespeare’s tragedies, particularly examining Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s Renaissance realism, what may seem gaps are really transitions between perspectives. Realism through relational mirror images seems to have been quite accessible to Renaissance audiences. Direct and indirect mimesis were not conflicting opposites but complementary, mutually supportive perspectives. Shakespearean mimesis could ‘suit the action to the words’, combining indirect with direct representation, ‘external’ metaphors with subjective introspection.

Perspective and Realism in the Renaissance

This chapter details how, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, ideas of realism changed almost beyond recognition. We may think of realism as composed of two distinct strands. The first developed from medieval allegory into spectator realism and has been much discussed. But another strand is largely ignored and little understood. The chapter then discusses participative realism. It also considers the shifting viewpoints of Renaissance realism. Unlike Renaissance fiction, where perspectives perpetually change, medieval allegory shifted viewpoint less often. Ultimately, in fiction, elements of Renaissance realism persisted long after the emergence of the novel. At first, however, this was disguised by the dominance of the epistolary genre.

Lord’s Space in Seventeenth-Century Britain

This chapter discusses the ‘Lord’s space’, which refers to the space (or notional space) round a feudal lord, especially a sovereign prince—or, indeed, space symbolically associated with the Lord God. It focuses on literary examples, particularly plays and masques, which were undoubtedly designed in part to assert through their display the prince’s greatness, even if they contained specific contents of an advisory or controversial nature. France and Britain in the seventeenth century are apparently to be regarded as ‘theatre states’. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the dominant symbol of nature had become the theatre. In the midst of all the significant theatricality, a prince’s location, both in the cosmic or intellectual and in the material theatre, must be a matter of moment. The prince required to be the cynosure of all the looking, so that theatres must be constructed accordingly. That was possible, because in the early seventeenth century court theatres were hardly ever permanent buildings, but rather temporary facilities, usually erected for a single performance, perhaps in a hall of Whitehall Palace that also served many other functions. The chapter then considers the hierarchic ordering of objects and people that had long governed the visual imagination of medieval people.