Patricia Wareh. Courteous exchanges: Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s gentle dialogues with readers and audiences. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2024. 304 pp. ISBN: 9781526149855. $130.00 hardback.

Patricia Wareh’s study of courtesy in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s drama begins by calling attention to a “contradictory portrait” of Spenser that represents his humility on the one hand and his authority on the other (1). The poet in need of light from his “Goddesse heauenly bright” is also the author of a letter that “giveth great light unto the Reader.” In the Proem to Book One of The Faerie Queene, Spenser expresses a sense of humility as he shows deference to the Muses, Cupid, Venus, Mars, and his Queen—the last of whom he requests to “raise my thoughtes too humble and too vile,” and Wareh contrasts this deferential pose with the authority Spenser asserts in the Letter to Raleigh, where he articulates his poem’s end “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline”(4; LR 4).¹ Shakespeare reproduces this “contradictory portrait” of humility and authority in the Prologue to Henry V. The Chorus deprecates himself before “a muse of fire” and subsequently articulates authoritative agency as he, like a king, raises the play’s audience, even the groundlings, to the rank of “gentles all.”² Although it seems as if Spenser and Shakespeare set different ends for themselves, insofar as Spenser concerns himself with the project of fashioning a virtuous person while Shakespeare aims to entertain his theater audience, Wareh shows that early modern readers and theater audiences would have recognized their “contradictory portraits” as the same type of courteous gesture. Scholarly accounts of early modern reading practices and theater audiences have long been isolated from one another, but Wareh brings them together in an exciting way to show how active engagement with poetry and drama contributed to the fashioning of early modern social identities.

Courtesy is the means by which Wareh tears down the wall dividing Spenser’s readers and Shakespeare’s theater audiences. Regarding the Prologue’s address to the audience, she argues, “As is the case with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the active responses of both readers and theatergoers are essential to how the work makes meaning, while they concurrently form a fundamental part of how readers and audiences constitute themselves as courteous actors” (3). A great strength of this book is its ability to read Spenser’s poetry and Shakespeare’s drama not as texts developing similar ideas independently of each other but as texts in conversation with one another by means of their respective critiques of courtesy. Courteous exchanges: Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s gentle dialogues with readers and audiences satisfies the aspirations of critics who, for a long time, have sought to show Shakespeare’s familiarity with Spenser’s poetry. By uniting the two authors through courtesy, Wareh demonstrates that Shakespeare’s drama is as deeply implicated in the project of early modern “self-fashioning” as Spenser’s poetry. The argument that runs throughout the book is that readers and audiences must themselves participate in resolving courtesy’s internal tensions and unresolved contradictions.

The unresolved contradiction that appears most frequently in Wareh’s book concerns how courtesy is simultaneously an expression of noble birthright and a lesson that can be taught. The book’s first chapter shows how an interest in learning pervades Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, and it argues that courtesy texts appealed to early modern readers not only through their promise of offering “practical advice” but also because Castiglione’s dialogues pose the same kind of interpretative challenges present in The Faerie Queene and plays such as Hamlet. After delineating how Polonius’s advice to Laertes lends itself to two interpretations—interpretative work that must be done by the spectators—Wareh goes on to argue that The Book of the Courtier “encourages readers to consider critically how they interpret social performances. As the text attempts to dissect the workings of courtly habitus, it both analyzes and reveals the complexity of judgments at work in an atmosphere of uncertainty” (43). The social performances that interest Wareh are “competitions” that allude to internal tensions in courtesy as they are portrayed by Spenser and Shakespeare.

While the first chapter on Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier demonstrates the impact of courtesy on pedagogy and the creation of literary works, the subsequent chapters cover the portrayal of a tension internal to courtesy in The Faerie Queene and in one of Shakespeare’s plays that requires the reader’s and the audience’s judgment to be resolved. The book’s second chapter on The Faerie Queene and Loves’s Labour’s Lost nestles the interpretive role of readers and audiences within Elizabethan pedagogy, delineating how Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s characters who receive instruction function as “inset audience members” mapping themselves onto gentle pedagogical programs derived from Castiglione and Ascham (77). The unresolved contradiction of how courtesy is both a performance of aristocratic lineage and a performance of learning receives its most extended and penetrating analysis in a chapter on Spenser’s Legend of Courtesy and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, in which Wareh reads both authors through the intertextual lens of an Italian dialogue on nobility called the Nennio. This chapter significantly expands upon Wareh’s important article previously published in Spenser Studies, incorporating new material on The Merchant of Venice.³ Here Wareh argues, “Spenser and Shakespeare associate noble blood with virtue but also demonstrate both the hollowness and costs of noble characters’ victories” (155). The intertextual connection between Spenser’s Legend of Courtesy and the Nennio is made explicit in the argument, in part because Spenser’s Calidore and the Nennio’s Fabricio both give tokens of their victories to the losers of competitions, but the connection between these two texts and The Merchant of Venice at first appears more tenuous. Although one might argue that the exchange of the rings in The Merchant of Venice obliquely alludes to the Nennio’s token of victory, Wareh connects these texts not through an exchange of tokens but through their competitions. In The Merchant of Venice, both the selection of Portia’s casket and Antonio’s trial evoke the same sense of competition between the Nennio’s Possidonio and Fabricio as that between Spenser’s Calidore and Coridon. Such performances require readers’ and audiences’ judgment to discern true courtesy from its mere appearance. Because Portia disguises herself as a judge and a man, her nobility suffers from similar defects that she attributes to Morocco’s and Arragon’s inflated senses of self-worth. She merely appears as a judge without being one as Morocco and Arragon present themselves as noble, wise, and deserving without being such. Readers and audiences of the Nennio, The Faerie Queene, and The Merchant of Venice are left with the impression that noble birth and material wealth provide significant advantages in demonstrating courtesy, but their authors call these advantages into question and ask their readers and audiences to fashion themselves accordingly.

The outward shows of courtesy problematized by Spenser and the Nennio emerge in a different guise in the surrounding chapters. The book’s third chapter compares Spenser’s Phedon and Claribell episode in Book Two of The Faerie Queene with Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The book’s final chapter concerns the pastoralism and romance fiction in Book Six of The Faerie Queene and The Winter’s Tale. These two chapters were previously published in scholarly journals, but they have been significantly revised to argue the thesis of this book.⁴ The chapter on Book Two and Much Ado About Nothing critiques how a culture “obsessed with impersonation” and “maintaining the appearance of masculine honor” poses role-playing as a replacement for decisive action (124). The chapter on pastoralism and romance fiction in The Faerie Queene and The Winter’s Tale shifts the focus of role-playing and performance to the fictions that construct Pastorella’s and Perdita’s aristocratic identities. Consistent with the rest of the book, Wareh reveals how, in light of these performances, readers and audiences are “spurred by metapoetic commentary to ask themselves how their relationship to a literary text fits in with their own self-creating performances” (234). Readers and audiences who cannot easily relate to Pastorella’s and Perdita’s nobility nonetheless identify with them through experiences of recognition and mirroring and fashion themselves accordingly.

Courteous exchanges unites a number of conversations taking place in the study of Spenser and Shakespeare. At the time of its publication, it is the most recent title in Manchester University Press’s highly regarded Manchester Spenser book series. This book contributes to a line of conversation published in the series about a decade ago as well as another published more recently. The treatment of Spenser and Shakespeare in tandem owes some debt to J.B. Lethbridge’s 2008 edited collection, Attractive Opposites, and its account of courtesy opens a dialogue with Andrew Wadoski’s 2022 monograph, Spenser’s Ethics. Although Wareh does not present an explicit portrait of Spenser as a moral philosopher, her study of courtesy makes an important contribution to seeing Spenser as a poet engaged in the project of articulating a moral philosophy able to respond to the materialistic pressures and political obligations that vexed early modern England. This line of criticism’s more contemporary roots lie in Jeff Dolven’s Scenes of Instruction (2007) and Jane Grogan’s Exemplary Spenser (2009). Wareh’s arguments strengthen the relationship between courtesy and pedagogy, restoring courtesy’s potential to teach despite its reputation as a suspicious virtue. Shakespeareans who read this book might approach it from the perspective of Patricia Akhimie’s Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference (2018) because Wareh builds on Akhimie’s analysis of how courtesy institutes and organizes human difference on the basis of class, gender, and race. Given the permeable boundary shared between courtesy and pedagogy, Lynn Enterline’s Shakespeare’s Schoolroom (2012) provides another potential point of entry for Shakespeareans. Although this book considers the implications of courtesy and “self-fashioning” for theater performance by leveraging materialist theater studies and performance histories to support its arguments, its interventions are mostly confined to literary touchpoints shared between Spenser and Shakespeare.

A number of critical conversations ought to change in response to Courteous exchanges. Although this book attempts to read Spenser and Shakespeare in tandem, some of its findings will impact criticism of the individual authors themselves. More competitions that require the judgment of readers and audiences take place in The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s drama than this book has space to cover. Wareh, predictably, directs the vast majority of her attention to Book Six of The Faerie Queene, in which courtesy serves as the titular virtue. She makes forays into Book One and Book Two, but Books Three, Four, and Five receive little sustained attention. The episodes in these books may not as easily open themselves up for comparison with Shakespeare’s plays, but they most certainly include competitions in courtesy that require the judgment of Spenser’s readers. Paridell, for instance, finds himself competing with Britomart in Book Three as he flaunts his aristocratic lineage derived from Paris of Troy. Shakespeareans might be tempted to build on this book by looking at outward shows of courtesy by Duke Vincentio and Angelo in Measure for Measure or by Orlando, Rosalind, and the exiled courtiers in As You Like It. Courteous exchanges calls attention to the suspicious and duplicitous nature of courtesy. Wareh leverages recent criticism on race and class to do this, but more could be said about why Shakespeare and Spenser find courtesy so attractive. The practical advantages promised by courtesy authors speak as to why a knight such as Sir Calidore, for instance, is a problematic hero who indulges his erotic desires but, nonetheless, is the exemplar of a virtue and the titular hero of Book Six. Spenser’s allegory of courtesy demonstrates how seeking one’s own advantage may be smoothed over by shows of deference and service. Shakespeare’s Bassanio is not a hero in the strict sense of the term, but he is the victor of a competition in courtesy. His outward performances, even if only indirectly, result in saving his friend’s life. For all the fault one can find in courtesy’s vain shows and counterfeit performances, they hold the potential to produce desirable ends. Departing from Courteous exchanges, future studies on Spenser and Shakespeare might pursue questions that concern how courtesy presented an attractive alternative to humanism and how Spenser and Shakespeare show their support or express their reservations for this kind of pragmatism.

Vincent Mennella

Southern Methodist University