A Theatre for Spenserians

Abstract

The Spenser colloquium held in Fredericton in 1969 was memorable for many reasons.For a start, the proceedings took place in the bosom of Duessa (St.Thomas University was the unstintingly generous sponsor: the Babylonians still know how to fill a golden cup) and that alone gave the affair a peculiar piquancy.And then there was that one hilarious moment when an overseas visitor took a stunned and very British look at the orgias- tic and multifarious events in the offing-six papers, a panel discussion on the state of Spenser scholarship, the establishment of the Spenser Newsletter, a banquet, a reception, parties galore-and dazedly pronounced the whole business a Spenser freakout. (Lest any one wonder, that list of events was Spenserianly hierarchical.)Something of the same sense of overindulgence in Gloriana's banquet remains in the elegant little volume in which the six papers are now printed, if only because the fare is so varied and so rich.Though they range over wide areas, they fall into two immediately separable groups: the first and the last deal with the Complaints and the Amoretti, the others with the Faerie Queene.Millar MacLure's is an allusive and poetic consideration of Spenser's lifetime concern with time, mutability and history.Meditative and evocative rather than analytic, atmospheric rather than assertive, it works very well as an introduc- tion.Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for G.K. Hunter's quirky piece as a conclu- sion.He sees the Amoretti as an aberration from the English sonnet tradition embodied in Wyatt, Sidney and Drayton, a tradition that is dramatic and less concerned with elabora- tion of language; in other words, the expansive language of narrative (Spenser's major

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