ABSTRACT
The return to Spenser is a return under somewhat expanded terms of reference now including, in addition to 'theater', 'sympathy', and 'representation', the 'career' and the 'author'. Spenser does not of course have a theater unless we can count the "paper stage" on which he performs as a poet, and represents his own version of the world, as a legitimate instance of 'theater'. To the extent that Spenser is antitheatrical, there is something there for him to resist, and perhaps resistance is not that entire Spenser's relation to theater entails. In fact, contextual proliferation to the point of apparent contradiction becomes characteristic of van der Noot's Theatre and hence, mutatis mutandis, of its English translation. The emblems to which the poetic translations refer are ones that have their place in a high Renaissance tradition of hieroglyphic exegesis and humanistic hermeticism, yet as emblems they also invoke a tradition of elementary popular instruction.
