Scholarship Fat and Lean

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 885, 20 July 1956, Page 12

Scholarship Fat and Lean

| THE ELIZABETHAN LOVE SONNET, by + W, Lever; Methuen, English price 25/-. ON THE POETRY OF SPENSER AND THE FORM OF ROMANCES, by John Arthos; Allen and Unwin, oa ope price 21/-. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, by William A. Appleton; Allen and Unwin, English price 12/6.

(Reviewed by

lan A.

Gordon

HESE three works of critical scholarship on Elizabethan | and Jacobean literature come in a range of prices. The dearest is the poorest and the cheapest is _the best. As the price of each depends not on its quality but its bulk, there is a moral for scholar critics, old and young. If ever you write a big

book, sweat it down. It will almost inevitably be improved | in the process. The | best scholars do not | carry a paunch. The Elizabethan Love Sonnet should have been a good book. The sonnet needs one-perhaps Professor Musgrove

will one day look over his radio scripts on the theme and write it. But all that | Mr. Lever has done is to write a bloated book. There is plenty of good stuff in the volume, but you have to dig around | for it. In a book of 280 pages there was room for a magnificent and definitive _volume on the whole genre. Instead we | have a study of five sonneteers, many { of whose sonnets are laboriously para- | phrased in prose line by line. The author ' saws throush them like a carpenter solemnly reducing them to fourteen | planks. The critical insight is on the | beta level. On the Poetry of Spenser has, what the first book lacks, a sense of literary perspective. The sonnet came from Petrarch; The Faerie Queene "came" from Boiardo and Ariosto and Tasso. In Mr. Lever’s book one cannot see the Enzlish wood among the Italian trees. EB it Mr. Arthos’s treatment of a much more complex series of influences from Italian romantic epic to-English romantic allegory illuminates on every page. Mr. Arthos is a good scholar and a good | critic. He has immersed himself in : Spenser and the Italians until he saw | the general pattern, and then he wrote : | his book. The general pattern in the Spenserian romance is (it may surprise some students) unity, not an Aristotelian unity, but a unity of variety, "an unity of design, and not of action," as Bishop Hurd pointed out back in the 18th century. Mr. Arthos has made good use of the Bishop’s starting-point and spent what was obviously a fruitful year as a Fulbright scholar in Florence to produce an excellent critical study in literary influence. Beaumont and Fletcher comes from another American scholar-how good the good Americans are! It is a tightly- , book of just over a hundred pages which deals, without scamping or staccato writing, with over fifty plays. It is a masterly book for the stu"ent of Jacobean drama and for even the most recondite a first-rate aide-memoire of the work and flunctuating reputations of two great dramatists. These three works of critical scholarship, however, raise a complaint I must voice against scholars-or perhaps publishers, Why is it so c paratively easy to get a critical book _ ie print and so

difficult to persuade scholars and publishers that an even more crying need ig the text of the originals? You cannot today buy (except occasionally secondhand) the complete plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, The Cambridge University Press (to its shame) has let its edition go largely out of print. You can buy Mr. Lever'’s book on the Elizabethan Sonnet. But if you want to read all of Sidney's sonnets (not just the anthology pieces), there is no edition of Sidney in print in the sterling area. And these are but two examples. I could name dozens. Mere canniness is not the only thing that sends me-to book auctions.