Reading The Illustrated Theatre
As noted in the Renaissance Visionary Poems section of
this site Spenser's translations for Van Der Noot's Theatre
appear with illustrative woodcuts. When the reader opens the volume
and turns to the first of the poems, he see its woodcut on the right
hand side of the open book, on signature B2.
B1
B2
Though the woodcut "follows" the poem, we will see the image first
as we turn the page, and we will take it in quickly: two deer, each
pursued by two dogs. The poem, when we turn to it, explains the image:
it is a single deer at two moments in a narrative, two moments not
very different from each other. If the image seizes our eye first,
the poem reveals how poorly the image has communicated the content
of the poem. And that will be one of the main points of the sequence:
that the shows, the appearances, on display in the
Theater
are enigmatic; that they can only allude to a truth to which mere
looking doesn't give us full access. But, by itself, and without the
assistance of the poem, the image has already swiftly evoked suffering,
and that will also be the repeated theme of the sequence of both poems
and images. Because deer (two deer, it seems) and not humans suffer
here, we may not identify with this suffering and this, too, contributes
to the enigmatic character of the image. The poem's first line seems
to capture this sense of unsettling mystery: "BEing one day at my
window all alone/ So many strange things hapned mee to see/ As much
it grieueth me to thinke thereon."
This
establishes a pattern that will be repeated each time we turn a
page: we see, in two or three seconds taking in the basic pictorial
elements of an image, though we cannot construct the story that
will make sense of these elements; and then we read, looking from
right to left to take in, over a minute or two, the narrative the
illustration of which we have already uncomprehendingly observed.
We will often interrupt our reading to inspect the image for the
pictorial correspondences to the poem, and whether or not we pay
full attention to it, we will constantly encounter fundamental mismatches:
the poems unfold a sequence of events while the images can only
capture a moment or two of the narrative; the poems and the images
will specify and qualify differently; above all, the poems feature
an "I" who insists upon his discomfort and his grief, to which the
images seem almost constitutively indifferent.
A second look will reveal that the narrative is enigmatically
encoded onto some of the single images: the sea is calm on the left
side of B3,
B3 |
C1 |
but a bit of a sinking ship may be seen in the turbulent waters
at the right-hand edge of the image; the Temple of C1 is grandly sturdy
at its left side and collapsing in flames on its right. As was characteristic
of the sixteenth-century tradition of books pairing images and poems,
the images are intriguing but incomprehensible without the accompanying
poems. We don't know whether Spenser wanted the images stripped from
his poems when the poems were published, in revised form, in 1591.
(We don't even know whether he authorized that publication.) But the
absence of images in
Complaints profoundly changes our experience
of the poems. In the
Complaints volume, the poems are displayed
two to a page and this unelaborate array changes the rhythm and dynamics
of reading, for there is no ceremony, no excitement, to our passage
from one opening of the book to the next. As we turn pages, our eyes
move "normally," to the top of the left-hand side of the opening.
Without the specificities of illustration, we "see" only what the
poet tells us he sees: we see only through words, in sentences and
in narratives. Without rugged texture of interruption -- looking forward
to see, then back to read, forward to check the image, and back to
the poem;-- the subtler textures of the sonneteering itself emerge
without extrinsic competition.
Consider the fourth sonnet based on
Petrarch's "Canzone of Visions." In the
Theatre at B5, we first
face a somewhat cluttered illustration:
B5 |
we see four nymphs
seated in a landscape; one, gesturing towards a book, seems distressed;
the book is lined; it holds three of the four nyphs' attention. It
is quite unclear how the illustration is to be linked to the context
of narratives and illustrations of unexpected destruction, since all
seems so well here and this uncertainty compounds the lack of compositional
clarity. As before, we are obliged to consult the poem and we will
eventually infer that the book is a book of music, nowhere mentioned
in the poem, but present in the illustration as a guarantor of harmony.
In the poem, however, the guarantor of harmony is nature itself, for
the nymphs (or they may be Muses) "sweetely in accorde did tune their
voice / Vnto the gentle sounding of the waters fall." Not surprisingly
the illustration cannot seem to make the spring itself the agent of
harmony. Poem and image are intriguingly out of harmony with each
other. Once this illustration is removed, confusion comes on more
slowly: Within this wood -- this will be the wood of the previous
poem, printed above, on the same page, in
Complaints -- "Within
this wood, out of a rocke did rise/ A spring of water, mildly rumbling
downe/ Whereto approched not in anie wise/ The homely shepheard, nor
the ruder clowne." Now that the awkward mystery of illustration, imperfectly
linked from narrative, has been removed, we are left to confront the
quieter mystery of the undepictible negative: the spring not in any
way approached by shepherd or other rustic ["clowne"]. We could say
that the removal of the illustration clarifies the poem, by shifting
attention to its opposition of eye and ear.