Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance by David Norbrook

CITATION: Norbrook, David. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Can poetry animated by an "organic society" (see FR Leavis, esp.) transcend politics?
• Answer: Critics must politicize aesthetics, and by determining the "specific ideological allegiances" of poets the critic can reconstruct authorial intention. 
• Method: New Historicism. The chapters move mostly chronologically through More, early Milton,  Sidney, Spenser, Greville, Jonson, and Milton. Norbrook's methods re-integrate these poets into their radical, prophetic tradition, and the canon--because New Critics favored private and apolitical metaphysics. Norbrook finds The Shepherdes Calender and Lycidas to have paid homage to earlier prophetic poetry.
• Assumptions: The introduction responds to both new critical and radical traditions, asking chiasmically, whether to aestheticize politics or politicize aesthetics. The chapter arrangement bases the prophetic tradition of English poetry in the Edwardian period--Mary's reign is seen to have produced a "paucity" of poetry. These poets are interpreted in terms of class consciousness, especially under patronage. Shakespeare, lastly, is viewed separate from the tradition.
• Sententiae: 

"To attempt to politicise the sphere of the aesthetic is to risk the accusation of reductionism... And a rigid antithesis between political and aesthetic spheres is itself reductive... From religious rituals to conventional sexual roles, such systems postulate particular power relations as part of the natural order... Our conventional notion of the 'political' itself involves certain assumptions about those institutions which are open to question and those which are not..." (6-7)
"Literary historians have sometimes regarded the ideals of humanism as inimical to those of the Reformation, and regarded radical Protestantism as hostile to literary culture. but it was the application of humanist methods of the exegesis to the Bible that provided the rationale for the Protestant critique of ecclesiastical tradition, for a decisive and unprecedented break with the past." (8)
"In questioning abstract systemisation, the humanists emphasized the need to set texts in their historical context; and their historical scholarship made them increasingly aware of the discrepancies between medieval and classical conceptions of human nature." (23)
"More's communism is a way of criticising the aristocratic belief that work is degrading." (28)
"Spenser... draws attention to the difficulties, and the political implications, of interpretation...  No new collection of English poems before 'The Shepheardes Calender' had provided such an array of aids to interpretation: a preface, general and particular arguments, woodcuts, and lengthy glosses." (73)
"Interpretations which tie the 'moral' eclogues down to personal allusions or to a defence fo a pure Church of England against Roman corruption fail to do justice to the work's prophetic character." (76)
"Spenser's stanza overgoes by one line the eight-line stanza favoured by Ariosto and Tasso. The self-enfolding dispersion of the rhymes reinforces the effect of self-conscious analysis rather than unreflective narrative movement, while the final alexandrine permits a further reflection before moving to the next stanza." (112)
"Spenser may have been drawing on Neoplatonic theory in which the highest kind of unity is not just a prosaic mean between extremes but a more dynamic and paradoxical kind of coincidence of opposites." (114)
"On Elizabeth's progresses this process [of poetic prophesy remaking the world] of transformation could be made actual: landscape artists would prepare the way for the queen's advent by smoothing out blemishes, adorning statues, even digging whole lakes. The transformed landscape symbolised the civility which good rule produced." (147)
"The masque form dramatised this dependence of the nobility on the monarch: all the participants had to act out a formal pattern that centered on the ruler." (180)
"But Jonson aimed to naturalise the artifice of his poetry, to give an impression of directness and colloquial energy. The verbal texture of a poem, he said, should be 'like a Table, upon which you may runne your finger without rubs, and your nayle cannot find a joynt; not horrid, rough, wrinckled, gaping, or chapt'." (186)
"The Spenserian poets tended to adopt a style which drew attention to its own artifice and thus highlighted the inability of language fully to embody transcendent truths: where Jonson's verse gives the impression that ideals can be organically embodied in existing institutions and linguistic formulations, Spenserian verse constantly confesses its inadequacy." (200)

"Rubens was a diplomat as well as an artist and used his influence with Charles and Buckingham and their advisers to try to dispose the English government better towards Spain. Buckingham's artistic tastes made him ideologically suspect... His enemies were particularly  prone to associate him with illusion because he loved spectacular masques, which lacked the lasting value of Rubens's canvases but had an immediate  if short-lived appeal. He had first brought himself to the king's favour by his skill in dancing in a masque." (224)

"[Milton] believed that an element of disorder and dissension was essential to the maintenance of liberty, that to try to achieve complete, static harmony  was to invite stagnation. When he used aesthetic analogies in his political works he modified their traditional associations. If building the reformed church was carving a statue, it was necessary to acknowledge that this task was bound to produce an element of waste matter, the sects that could not be harmonised with the main church: here Milton's emphasis was on the process, the 'struggl of contrarieties', not on the finished project." (239)

"Milton adopted a Protestantised version of the Renaissance theory that music and poetry had once been indissolubly allied, that the music of the ancients had unusual emotional power because each note was precisely adjusted in pitch and quantity to a corresponding syllable... Champions of the new 'monodic' music saw themselves as overcoming this aural 'idolatry'  and restoring the just relations between sound and sense." (244)

"Puritans had long valued music as more spiritual, less immediately sensual than the visual arts, and they especially valued the ability to harmonise sound with sense." (260)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Norbrook veers at times away from his own warning against reductionism, politically by  describing Rubens mostly as a diplomat, or formally by granting Spenser's alexandrine a universal capacity for reflection.
• Synthesis: Norbrook argues that Buckingham was controversial for selling off lower titles (223), a claim sympathetic to DiGangi. And, of course, Norbrook's new historicism is compatible with King's Tudor Royal iconography, albeit with a through-line following the prophetic tradition rather than courtly power.
• Application: Norbrook's treatment of music is infrequent, but still useful for a formalist overview of the period. 

(NB: written with reviews.)
King, John N. "Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance." Huntington Library Quarterly. 49.3 (1986): 277-280. Print.
Rudnytsky, Peter L. "Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance." Renaissance Quarterly. 40.1 (1987): 153-155. Print.