Milli mála - 2021, Page 207

MILLI MÁLA
206 Milli mála 13/2021
If my previous discussion concerned individual sonnets, in this sec-
tion I consider how in Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) the pre-
carity of lyric ontology manifests itself at the level of the book.85
The 89-sonnet record of Spenser’s courtship of Elizabeth Boyle not
only examines its status as a work of verbal art and alludes to early
modern textual practices,86 it also inscribes its existence at the lim-
its of the totality of the book qua book. By conditioning a reading
protocol based on corporeal engagement with the book’s material-
ity and simultaneously deconstructing the book’s architectonic,
Spenser’s sequence foregrounds the misalignment between the
energies of lyric and the material conduit of poetic labour. Amoretti
may be “remarkable for its time in leading not to despair, irresolu-
tion or spiritual sublimation but to the fulfilment and legitimation
of sexual desire in matrimony.”87 But it displays the same anxieties
about textual fragmentation and ontological instability of lyric
found in other Petrarchan sonnets from the period.
A poetic collection—such as Spenser’s 1595 volume AMORETTI
and Epithalamion, which includes 89 sonnets, a handful of
Anacreontics, and an epithalamium—already presupposes a degree
of interplay between its poems and the material facts of their or-
ganization. For many readers, Amoretti and Epithalamion is a single
unit that follows the trajectory of the poet’s love from courtship to
marriage. The liturgical, calendrical, and biographical forces oper-
ating in the sequence appear to codify its unidirectional narrative
and structural coherence, with the lovers’ union celebrated in the
Epithalamion providing the ultimate point of reference for all other
texts in the volume.88 But several elements of the book’s poetics and
typographic design suggest a degree of independence enjoyed by
the Amoretti. Perhaps J. W. Lever’s claim that Spenser’s book was
crippled by “haste and botching” is extreme.89 However, as I discuss
below, the volume does send “mixed messages” about the relation-
ship between its texts.90 Spenser’s control over the shape of the
85 Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion. I quote this edition.
86 See Wall, Imprint of Gender, 46–47; Gold, “Trembling Leaves.”
87 McCabe, “Shorter Verse,” 179.
88 For example, Dunlope, “Unity;” Kaske, “Spenser’s Amoretti.”
89 Lever, Elizabethan Love Sonnet, 101.
90 Dubrow, “Dressing,” 94.
“PEN, PAPER, INKE, YOU FEEBLE INSTRUMENTS”
10.33112/millimala.13.8