Britomart's old nurse Glauce is introduced in The Faerie Queene Book III as a stock figure who nonetheless transcends her low generic origins through comic improvisation and transformation. Initially a figure of fun who provokes Merlin to smile, the humble nurse becomes invested with the powers of a Sidneyan poet to teach and inspire; in her application of generic frames to the interpretation of experience, she is both a product and practitioner of genera mista. Britomart is motivated to pursue her chivalric career through Glauce's pragmatic narrative interventions. Through a comparison of the earthy materialist Glauce with Britomart's other primary mentor, the prophetic Merlin, we may see how Spenser's comic impulse informs his revisionist treatment of the romance itself. Glauce is a low comic figure by definition, in all respects without learned or textual authority. Her literal adoption of chivalric identity as she steals Angela's armor for Britomart exemplifies her violations of decorum with respect to class, gender, and even genre. As squire, Glauce achieves genuine heroic stature in Book IV, as her poetic interventions help to "upknit" the relationship of Artegall and Britomart.
The figure of the woman as hero in pastoral romance is shown to grow in importance and complexity in this important new study.
This intriguing study reflects ongoing scholarly interest in the pastoral mode as a vehicle for social commentary during the Renaissance. Sharon Yang's analysis of a character type she calls the female pastoral guide contributes to the developing critical discussion of women as practitioners of pastoral, either as writers or as characters. The author has chosen drama as the primary area in which to explore the development of the pastoral guide, citing the genre's accessibility to varied audiences. For Yang, the guide is a version of the ''eternal woman'' of Bakhtinian carnival, temporarily inverting a cultural hierarchy privileging masculinity as the primary locus of power, virtue, and learning. Yang's study focuses less, however, on the pastoral genre itself than on a feminine archetype she derives from a wideranging review of ancient Near Eastern Great Goddess figures, late Greek romances, medieval Mariology, and early modern European discourse on witches. After providing an overview of the historical development of the archetype through the Continental pastoral romances of Boccaccio, Sannazaro, and Montemayor, she offers a comparative analysis of several examples of the female pastoral guide in English drama ranging from the closet drama of aristocratic coteries (such as Wroth's Love's Victory) to plays produced for a popular audience (including Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess). She also discusses three of Shakespeare's plays (A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and All's Well That Ends Well) for their employment of the guide type. Yang separates the guide into three main categories: the goddess-queen, the white witch, and the female scholar, all of which may overlap. The study concludes with a speculative account of the decline of the pastoral heroine toward the end of the seventeenth century, her disappearance linked to pastoral's falling out of fashion as a discourse of popular art. In sum, Yang locates the female pastoral guide in English Renaissance drama as a liberating figure that appropriates and subverts forms of male authority, including the intellectual and the spiritual, under Puttenham's ''vaile'' of pastoral triviality. The book's tight focus on drama is simultaneously effective and limiting. It leads Yang to overstate somewhat the originality of the guide figure, ignoring the predominance of the pastoral romance heroine in multiple Renaissance genres including prose narrative and epic poetry. The author correctly identifies the cult of Elizabeth I as an important source of goddess tropes in Lyly's Endymion, but slights, for example, the overwhelming pastoral influence of Spenser's Faerie Queene on Fletcher's play. While her reminders of the Continental influence of pastoral romance on English examples are useful, the relevance of Great Goddess archetypes seems stretched. While applying Bakhtin's concept of carnival to pastoral drama, she also is compelled to note that her heroines frequently uphold qualities of temperance and restraint that reaffirm Renaissance societal norms of feminine ...
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