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• W2078539589 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewGillian Austen, George Gascoigne George Gascoigne. Gillian Austen. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008. Pp. xviii+236.Stephen HamrickStephen HamrickMinnesota State University, Moorhead Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreGillian Austen’s much-needed monograph effectively debunks the modern critical myth that George Gascoigne (ca. 1534–77) remains best understood as a Reformed Prodigal and castrated or failed poet. In five lucid chapters, in fact, Austen establishes that Gascoigne achieved a lasting reputation at Queen Elizabeth’s court and strongly influenced (and was celebrated by) later Elizabethan writers, including Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney. Providing a coherent overview and introduction to Gascoigne’s work, Austen’s text will prove highly useful to both advanced and beginning scholars.Austen begins with a persuasive introduction arguing that rather than being simply a moralizing writer recycling a prodigal son persona, Gascoigne adapts a broad range of personalities within his many groundbreaking texts both early and late in his career. In place of the inaccurate and limited literary-biographical paradigm established by C. T. Prouty,1 Austen indicates that “a more copious model is required for Gascoigne’s career, which can accommodate the variety of personae he presents and the many instances where Gascoigne is clearly working to his own agenda or offering his own apologia.” Writing for both individual patrons and a broader market, Gascoigne, for Austen, was served quite well by his pragmatism. The many and dynamic self-portraits deployed by Gascoigne are thus each aptly described as complex elements in “a gambit, a manoeuvre to attract the attention or favour a potential patron” (19). The five chapters thereafter provide an analysis of these personae or literary roles and Gascoigne’s never-ending pursuit of patronage from the 1550s to 1577.Austen’s first chapter contextualizes Gascoigne’s dramatic works within the literary and historical context of the Inns of Court to about 1569. The analysis clearly shows that Gascoigne worked effectively as a collaborator, translator, and innovator in these years. Austen persuasively claims that “Gascoigne can be seen to be engaging enthusiastically with the politicized literary milieu of the Inns of Court” without specifying what stance Gascoigne takes on issues central to members of the Inns of Court. She rightly indicates that Gascoigne’s Jocasta (1573), for example, evokes Queen Elizabeth’s marriage and the succession debate, but she fails to clarify Gascoigne’s concerns surrounding the “threat of civil war” or exactly how his “dumb shows construct an alternative narrative sequence which engages in an audacious way with the succession debate” (56–57). Undoubtedly correct in her assessment of Gascoigne’s political engagement, Austen’s argument would benefit from a clearer indication of Gascoigne’s claims in these texts.Contextualizing Gascoigne’s move into print in his largely anonymous A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), Austen’s second chapter usefully distills modern critical findings on Gascoigne’s participation in the nascent culture of the book, offering her own claim that, in this, “he applied his wit and inventiveness to the presentation of the volume in a quite unprecedented way” (70). Gascoigne’s ingenuity, in part, comes from his ability to blur the distinction between the real world and the fictive world created within his texts. Straddling the distance between those critics who have linked his fictions, most notably his widely studied A Discourse of the Adventures passed by Master F. J. (1573), to Gascoigne’s biography or contemporary events and those critics who have asserted the texts’ wholly fictional nature, Austen asserts that “the evidence is inconclusive” and that “it is unlikely that” his fictions “referred to any particular situation” (76). Rather, Austen sees Gascoigne as deploying a sometimes dizzying array of personae that enable him to attract readers through his potentially revealing gossip while retaining a “number of poetic voices by which he could obscure the issue of responsibility for the publication” (77) of potentially slanderous material. For Austen, Gascoigne’s adaptive and considerable skill resides in effectively suggesting contemporary events or scandalous behaviors through his fictions without ever identifying such events or behaviors with particular individuals. Although this reconstruction seems accurate, Austen’s critical argument would have been better served by a direct response to some of the critics who have effectively read Gascoigne fictions as biographical and topical; as it stands, she only references these critics in passing.While aptly analyzing and contextualizing the (minimal) changes Gascoigne made to the second edition of his work The Posies of George Gascoigne (1575), Austen’s third chapter establishes that Gascoigne’s pose as a Reformed Prodigal, traditionally seen by literary critics as Gascoigne’s singular identity from this time onward, both predated this period and, most significantly, was always complimented by courtly personae fashioned through his printed texts, through courtly performances before Queen Elizabeth, and through printed visual images of himself and others. In addition to fragmenting itself within his works (92), such a reformed identity, even in a text as moralistic as The Glasse of Government (1575), must “be considered as a part of Gascoigne’s strategy to improve his standing with potential or actual patrons rather than as conclusive proof of his personal reformation” (104).As the controlling theme of Austen’s monograph, this reconstruction of Gascoigne’s successful courtly identity receives strongest support in her analysis of his widely referenced hunting manual, The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575); his talented performance in and writing for courtly summer entertainments at Kenilworth Castle (1575); and, in chapter 4, The Tale of Hemetes the Heremyte (1576). The most extravagant and memorable festivities of Elizabeth’s reign, the Kenilworth entertainments enabled Gascoigne to perform directly for Elizabeth on behalf of Robert Dudley (and himself ) and later that summer before Elizabeth at Woodstock. With each of these texts and performances, Gascoigne assumed the persona of a skilled woodman (including the Savage Man, Sylvanus, Hemetes, and others) and thereafter effectively attracted the patronage of Elizabeth’s government. Gascoigne’s talent “for improvisation and extemporisation” (121), in fact, enabled him to work the following year as a government agent reporting on events on the Continent and in the Low Countries. His success also enabled or emboldened him to present Elizabeth with two New Year’s gifts, including the Hemetes manuscript and the courtly satire The Grief of Joye (1577), which Austen effectively analyzes in her fifth chapter, debunking, once again, its inaccurate reputation as simply a moral work instead of a highly sophisticated courtly text.In George Gascoigne, Austen effectively revises our received understanding of Gascoigne and his place in British literary history, providing a comprehensive overview of his written and visual works and introducing readers to the all-too-often-ignored political and courtly contexts necessary to understanding the accomplished artist and soldier. As one of its greatest strengths, the text’s comprehensive introduction to Gascoigne will undoubtedly become a necessary starting point for the serious study of his life and work. This substantial strength also generates the perhaps unavoidable drawback that some of Gascoigne’s texts and contexts here receive too general a treatment, which, positively speaking, will encourage further analysis of the works. I was consistently intrigued by Austen’s passing references to religion and religious elements in Gascoigne’s work, yet the monograph fails to substantively address either relevant contemporary Reformation debates or our own critical (re)turn to religion in early modern literature as applied to Gascoigne. Informed by Austen’s recognition that Gascoigne’s work bridges the transitional period between manuscript and print cultures in Britain, some readers may wish for further analysis of nonelite or popular audiences and contexts for Gascoigne’s work, yet her necessary focus brings attention to those elite or courtly elements of his work that have remained largely invisible to students of early modern literature.As Austen points out, Gascoigne’s palpable success has remained largely unnoticed until the twentieth century because, in addition to publishing the Noble Arte and his sophisticated edition of the Kenilworth festivities anonymously, his reputation largely (but not completely) evaporated with the death of Queen Elizabeth and the demise of her court. Such a literary-historical lacuna seems quite inappropriate for an author who produced a host of literary “firsts” in Britain, including the first Italian comedy in English, the first Dutch-type prodigal-son play in English, the first English nondramatic poem in blank verse, and the first published English essay on poetics. Gascoigne also remains one of the earliest writers of masques, sonnet sequences, and prose fiction, which makes Austen’s text even more timely and necessary. As she observes, our understanding of Gascoigne must go beyond analysis of the moralistic works published under his own name and must be “balanced by what he and his contemporaries would have thought was important: his literary innovations; his wit and inventiveness; his patrons; the courtly entertainments; manuscripts and anonymous publications” (217). With her persuasive text, Austen has provided just such a balanced understanding of George Gascoigne’s output, which will undoubtedly engender further analysis of the work of this central Elizabethan writer and artist. Notes 1.C. T. Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 109, Number 4May 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/664521 Views: 148Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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