South Central Review

Roy Eriksen, The Building in the Text: Alberti to Shakespeare and Milton . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. 215 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

In his groundbreaking book, Ben Jonson: Poetry and Architecture (1994), A.W. Johnson looks closely at the encomiastic poetry and masques written by Ben Jonson between 1598 and 1616, finding in them substantial evidence of the poet's use of mathematical and architectural principles from Euclid, Vitruvius, and Leon Battista Alberti, as well as his interest in the work of Francesco Colonna and Andrea Palladio. Convincingly, Johnson argues that architecture and an architectural aesthetic greatly informed many of the works written (often in collaboration with Inigo Jones) during the first two decades of Jonson's career.

Roy Eriksen's rich, learned, and persuasive recent study under review here represents an important expansion (and redirection) of the critical task undertaken by Johnson, inasmuch as the book exposes the impact of architectural theory and thought on the compositional practices (the tectonics of literary production) of a range of early modern writers including William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Torquato Tasso, and Ludovico Ariosto. Truly interdisciplinary in its objectives and methodologies, The Building in the Text elegantly directs our attention to—in Eriksen's words—"the intriguing nexus between ornament and inner structure and the shared aesthetic ideas that allowed Renaissance artists, theoreticians, and poets to use rhetorical terms to describe buildings in the language of writing, and poetry as a form of architecture" (xxi). It is a direction well worth following, and Eriksen, who has been developing this kind of inter/intra-textual/imagistic/disciplinary critical approach [End Page 139] to literary texts in a number of important essays published in the past ten years, knows the scholarly, historical, and aesthetic terrain well.

It is a good thing too, because in less able hands this could have been a very dull book, one of those all-too-common studies in which the reader is compelled to be a kind of innocent bystander at several nearly identical scenes of ingenious critical juxtaposition—in this book's case (potentially!), for example: Alberti says such and such in his On the Tranquillity of the Soul, Giorgio Vasari's mid-sixteenth-century biography of Michelangelo does such and such; Alberti builds on the work of his predecessors in much the same way that Milton relies on Alberti's architectural vision to fashion for himself a perspective of sorts from which to view some of the events depicted in Paradise Lost. And so on.

Eriksen sidesteps this critical "beyond the pleasure principle" in two significant ways. First, he introduces us at the outset to the analytical method he intends to use throughout the book—what he calls "topomorphology," that is, an analysis of the hermeneutic role played by spatial relationships and the shape of segments of verse within a poetic text, or the hermeneutic significance of the relationship of parts in either pictorial art or architectural designs. In short, as Eriksen teaches us how to read topomorphologically, to become sensitive to the ways in which early modern rhetoric—informed by architecture—contributed to the arrangement of poetic texts, we begin to see how the binary of form and content may be our own uneasy, anachronistic imposition on various modes of literary and artistic production, one that impedes our ability to interpret early modern poetry. Second, Eriksen structures his book and its argument so that literary texts serve as both the foundation and the roof—to hint at a possible link between the form of his study and its content—with his examination of intersections between architecture and rhetoric constituting the central stories.

Beginning with a close reading of a speech by Bardolph in 2 Henry IV that borrows liberally from the discourse of architecture for much of its imagery and rhetorical force (I.iii. 35-62), Eriksen proceeds to consider a range of (predominantly) English literary texts, finding in them much evidence of the fifteenth-century Florentine architectural theorist Alberti's influence. Accordingly, the first chapter maps out the contours of—in Eriksen's phrase, "the implied alignment between architecture and the construction of texts" (15)—in the work of writers as diverse as John Dee, Jonson, Henry Wotton, Richard Wills, John Shute, Philip Sidney, and, of course, Shakespeare. Chapter 2 backtracks from texts by early modern poets and architectural theorists to St. Augustine's influential writings on Christian rhetoric, then moves on to examine a distinct genre of Latin love elegies known as paraclausithyra written by Propertius, Ovid, and others. In their poetic over-determination of the structural threshold of the beloved's house, these poems suggest to Eriksen an essential preoccupation with architecture, and provide him with a framework for assessing and distinguishing between formal techniques employed by Samuel Daniel, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Campion. [End Page 140]

Chapter 3 performs a strategic reversal by focusing intently on an important act of intellectual reciprocity. If, as Eriksen has argued up to this point, rhetoric had often turned to architecture for many of its key concepts, then it is also true that one of the great early Renaissance architectural thinkers, Alberti, found it necessary to pillage the discourse of rhetoric, especially as he set out to write about Filippo Brunelleschi's dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. Here, as Eriksen patiently and methodically works through the metaphorical, conceptual, ethical, and even sensual intersections between architecture and the arts of writing and painting in Alberti's texts, he makes a convincing case for the Florentine theorist's importance in passing on an intense preoccupation with form and design to subsequent generations of writers. One such writer, Eriksen argues, was Giorgio Vasari, and chapter 4 of this study offers an extensive reading of two versions (1550 and 1568) of Vasari's tripartite epic biography, The Life of Michelangelo. The payoff for Eriksen's argument, based on a close comparative analysis of the subtle changes made by Vasari in the initial period of the two versions, is to show how in the nearly two decades that separate them, Vasari's text—like other writings by his contemporaries—has become more saturated with verbal devices generated by an evolving link between architecture and rhetoric.

The remaining two chapters of the book bring the discussion back to literature, seeking to demonstrate further that in the Renaissance, rhetorical theory and practice constituted a significant point of connection between a range of poetic strategies—especially with regard to the formal qualities of the sonnet—and contemporary architectural discourse. In chapter 5, the subject is the rhetorical structure of an episode—the nocturnal duel between Clorinda and Tancredi—in Book Twelve of La Gerusalemme liberata, and the form of its subsequent adaptation by Claudio Monteverdi in his 1624 piece Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda. Eriksen's analysis of this episode's architectural structure is persuasive, providing the reader with a justification of sorts for having spent much of the book negotiating with some very complex material in the context of works that are less well-known (especially to students of early modern English literature) than perhaps they ought to be. The final chapter lands the reader in much more familiar territory, as Eriksen examines closely the topos of divine intervention in Book Three of Paradise Lost, comparing it with what he identifies as antecedent episodes in Tasso and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. He convincingly locates in all three of these works' attempts to represent divine intervention a comparable reliance on rhetorical design rooted in a topos—ultimately Biblical in origin—that figures God's presence in epic architectural terms. Here the focus of Eriksen's analysis may unduly limit his perception, for surely Biblical representations of God's presence—especially in the Hebrew Bible—rely more heavily on the notion of his Glory (Kavod Yahweh) than on the image of "epic rooms" that Eriksen favors. Yet, it is also true—a truth that suggests Eriksen is onto something—that the three writers he considers seem to favor an architectural approach to representing [End Page 141] God's intervention in human affairs. Indeed, in the specific case of Paradise Lost it could be argued—though Eriksen does not—that Milton's decision to begin the poem not with Christ's birth and exaltation, but instead with Satan in hell can be traced to an architectural metaphorics of Satan that was current in his time. Joseph Ben Israel, for example—writing in 1653—asserts in his The Converted Jew: or the Substance of the Declaration and Confession which was made in the Publique Meeting House at Hexham (Printed at Gateside [by S(tephen) B(ulkley)] for William London, book-seller in Newcastle, 1653, sig. br), "There is not a design in the world, but either Satan hath a main hand in the laying of the foundation and chief corner-stone of it." Whatever the actual chronological sequence of the poem may be, the first image of Paradise Lost's worldly design, that of Satan lying in the fires of hell, would seem to be a literalization of Israel's architectural notion of Satan. In short, Milton's Satan is literally the bottom or foundation of Paradise Lost, while God, who begins the poem's chronological sequence by initiating the exaltation of his son, is the "great architect" (8:72).

The Building in the Text, by bringing together material from a number of sources and applying it to an analysis of how evolving rhetorical conventions shaped the compositional, structural, and visual form of early modern literary production, offers the reader an important interdisciplinary study of how architecture and rhetoric converged over time and emerged in the Renaissance in the form of writing and poetry that was recognizably architectonic and visual in nature.

Douglas A. Brooks is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and the editor of the journal Shakespeare Yearbook. Brooks is the author of From Playhouse to Printing House (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and the editor of a collection of essays entitled Parenting and Printing in Early Modern England (Ashgate Publishing Co., 2003). His Globe Quartos Edition of the play Ram Alley by Lording Barry is forthcoming in 2004 from Routledge.