Gascoigne's accidents: Contingency, skill, and the logic of writing

Journal article

In the letter to Sir Walter Ralegh “annexed” to the first three books of The Faerie Queene in 1590, Edmund Spenser undertakes to reveal “the general intention and meaning” of his poem “without expressing of any particular purposes or by-accidents therein occasioned.” This distinction reappears at the end of the letter, which explains that “by occasion” of the main structure of the story “many other aduentures are intermedled, but rather as Accidents, then intendments.” The accidents to which Spenser refers are not simply the carefully plotted incidents of the artful epic poet, designed to ensure plausibility or to provide additional interest by ornamenting the main plot. Instead, accident and intention are understood as opposed but necessary elements of the process of literary composition; Spenser seems to admit that unexpected events occur even in the execution of a rationally worked-out plan for poetic invention, leaving an indelible mark on the finished product. The Aristotelian metaphysical, logical and ethical framework on which Spenser’s letter and his poem rely determines that the poem is indeed a “whole,” unified by the final cause or “generall end… of all the booke”; but not all of the poem’s elements are wholly subordinate to this telos, nor indeed are they all aimed at any target or scope. Artful intention, if understood as the coherent direction of all of the poet’s and the poem’s resources towards a single goal, is deemed inadequate to describe how the poem came to be and what the poem does.

This essay argues that for George Gascoigne (one of Spenser’s most important English predecessors, both for his poetic example and for his pioneering attempts to reflect critically on his own practice) accident plays a central role in coming to terms with the nature, status and permanence of his literary compositions. Many of his writings are occasional, or are at least presented as such, but Gascoigne mooted different ways in which such texts might transcend the particularity of their provenance to form part of a more enduring body of work. In the book that inaugurated his brief but busy career as a writer in print, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), Gascoigne harnessed the still emerging form of the printed literary miscellany to explore the kinds of corpus that might emerge when works of varied occasion and genre were bundled together. The book purports to be a miscellany composed of translations from “Euripides, Ovid, Petrarke, Ariosto, and others” and original works by “sundry Gentlemen,” but was in truth almost entirely written by Gascoigne. The volume challenges its readers with the problem of its own unity, and asks us always to think about the degree to which it has itself been shaped by both accident and intention. In so doing it plays out on a larger scale a drama visible in the varied individual works that it contains.

Authors: Hetherington, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: English Literary Renaissance
• Volume: 46
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 29-59
• Publication date: 2016-06-27
• Acceptance date: 2015-08-25
• DOI: 10.1111/1475-6757.12059
• ISSN: 1475-6757