“A gallant knight”: The Renaissance charm of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser

Because I’ll occasionally want to read something not related to Shakespeare (or even Stephen King), I recently returned to an old favorite. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser—“with an s like the English poet”—is a tough-guy private eye with his own code of honor and a heart of beaten gold, and on my latest reread of his novels, I discovered the hard-boiled Boston detective’s medieval and early modern roots go even deeper than I remembered.

An ex-boxer and former army infantryman, Spenser confounds people’s expectations. He considers himself a modern “knight errant,” a medieval figure who helps those in need and asserts chivalric ideals. (“There are worse careers,” he explains to his longtime love Susan Silverman.) Edmund Spenser, the detective’s namesake, wrote The Faerie Queene in 1590, which chronicles the adventures of several such knights (who Miguel de Cervantes burlesqued in Don Quixote in 1605). A key aspect of the wandering knight is the freedom to be guided by his own moral compass. Fired from the police for insubordination (“one of my best things,” he says), Spenser explains, “I handle the problems I choose to; that’s why I’m freelance. It gives me the luxury to worry about justice. The cops can’t.” Spenser is tenacious, unstoppable, very good at what he does, and extremely loyal, reassuring one victim, “You are in trouble enough to pull up over your head and tie a knot in. But you’re not in it alone. I’ll help you. It’s my line of work.”

Spenser also loves to quote liberally from long-dead authors, especially Shakespeare, on occasions ranging from fraught to philosophical. His creator Parker, who received both masters and doctoral degrees in English literature from Boston University, wrote his dissertation in part on Raymond Chandler and taught for several years at Northeastern University, which he turned into the fictional unnamed setting for The Godwulf Manuscript, Spenser’s debut, published in 1973.

Inspired by Chandler’s novels featuring Philip Marlowe—from which Parker got the idea of giving his own detective an English Renaissance name—Spenser’s novels are mostly told in the first person, and the private eye’s ruminations about clues become interior monologues that feel a lot like Shakespeare soliloquies. In one moment where he realizes he’s overthinking something, he mentally rolls his eyes and says, “Sometimes I’m deep as hell,” which, to my ear, echoes Hamlet’s similarly self-critical “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” (though I’m not sure Parker ever used an exclamation point, even ironically). Parker’s language has a poetic spareness with few flamboyant flourishes that don’t immediately get called out, as in this moment where Spenser has to force himself to focus:

“[I] went up the ramp over Commonwealth Ave and looked down at the weeping willows underneath the arch—bare now, with slender branches crusted in snow and bending deep beneath winter weight. There was a Frost poem, but it was about birches, and then I was off the ramp and looking for a parking space. This was not a business for poets anyway.”

This contrast between the almost-rhapsodic being yanked back to mundane reality creates a propulsive dynamic that pulls the reader along, even when our hero’s just looking for parking.

Parker lives for these contrasts between the high-flown and the workaday. Spenser’s very first sentence in The Godwulf Manuscript—“The office of the university president looked like the front parlor of a successful Victorian whorehouse”—tells you right away his attitude towards authority and institutional pretension, as well as his appreciation of an elegant turn of phrase. The titular MacGuffin, a stolen (fictional) 14th-century manuscript that Spenser is hired to recover, showcases the private investigator’s distinctly literary heritage and allows Parker to satirize academia while using references to literature and authors to give Spenser surprising depth.

Where exactly Spenser gets his easy familiarity with poets and literary themes is never explained (although we do learn in A Catskill Eagle that Spenser, whose mother died in childbirth, was delivered by Caesarian section like “not born of woman” Macduff in Macbeth). “I went to college once,” Spenser says in The Godwulf Manuscript, and in Chasing the Bear, he explains that his uneducated father and uncles who raised him “didn’t know what they were supposed to read. So they read everything.” In addition to Shakespeare and Robert Frost, Spenser frequently quotes Lewis Carroll, W. H. Auden, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, John Keats, and A. E. Housman—yet it doesn’t come off as affected, probably because he isn’t concerned with accuracy or proper attribution. He just loves poetic irony and an aphorism’s application to the moment, however imperfect. “You talk good for a dumb slug,” an admiring cop tells him, and it’s true: Spenser enjoys verbal sparring as much as he does sparring with actual gloves in the ring.

Spenser is equally conversant with the pop culture of his era (the mid-20th century), quoting or referencing everything from radio shows (The Lone Ranger, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Shadow) to plays and musicals (Mourning Becomes Electra, Anyone Can Whistle, Man of La Mancha), to music (the Gershwins, Roger Miller, the Beatles), movies (Casablanca, The Magnificent Seven), and comedians like W. C. Fields and Nichols and May. Still, those closest to Spenser don’t suffer his frequent allusions in silence; his fierce colleague Hawk tells him flat-out, “Never knew somebody knew more stuff that didn’t matter.”

Spenser knows his early modern literary history, too. When he’s told that a dead artist was “stabbed through the eye in a drunken brawl,” Spenser replies, “Like Christopher Marlowe.” (“My, my,” comes the patronizing response, “You do know more than you let on.”) One of the amusing ironies of The Godwulf Manuscript is that the principal suspect is an English professor who teaches a course on “pre-Shakespearean drama” (The Play of the Weather and Gammer Gurton’s Needle are both name-checked) and thinks he wields as much power over real-life mobsters as he does over the students in his classroom. Spenser is more than a match for these academics, both physically and intellectually, telling another professor who’s stalling his investigation that he’s trying to save a student who’s been wrongly accused of murder:

“Now, that may not rate in importance up as high as, say, the implications of homosexuality in Shakespeare’s sonnets, or whether he said solid or sullied, but it is important.”

(Spenser doesn’t explain to the professor—or the reader—that the ‘he’ is Hamlet; he trusts us all to know.) One imagines Parker enjoyed sending up pompous scholars in the same way Shakespeare amused himself by creating the Latin-spouting Holofernes in Love’s Labor’s Lost or the long-winded Polonius in Hamlet.

Parker’s Spenser novels are dialogue-driven and action-packed, the language terse and spare. But as in his description of the university president’s office (go back and count the syllables), every so often Spenser says something that, if it were punctuated differently, you’d swear it was a perfect iambic pentameter speech, as in his glorious response to an overbearing policeman (from The Godwulf Manuscript):

“There are whole days at a time, Lieutenant,
That go by without me ever giving
A real g–ddamn about what you want.”

As any Shakespeare speech coach will tell you, that missing tenth syllable in the last line holds space for the cop’s silent shocked reaction.

Spenser also knows the limits of such poetic musings. Standing over the grave of a woman he was unable to save and whose death will haunt him for years, Spenser fails to find words of comfort. “None of the stuff that anyone had ever written seemed useful,” Spenser thinks to himself … but it sure provides depth and color for readers of his fleet and entertaining adventures.