The Faerie Queene, VI.viii.32.1, A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.i.2, and Paradise Lost, IV. 538

Chapter 4 conceptualizes the device of ‘manifestation,’ the term identifying the causal power of desires, thoughts, and words to call forth objects and even characters in Shakespeare’s comic world. In the spirit of critic Elena Zupančič, the device shows, among other things, the way that comedy can surface the amusing monstrousness and presumptuousness of human wishes. The concept of manifestation entails various literary and dramatic values that characterize Shakespearean comedy. Historically, it reflects interests and theories found in Renaissance treatises on magic, and it even parallels certain modern-day linguistic patters. The chapter formalizes and theorizes the device, drawing examples from a range of comedies. The Comedy of Errors (Dr. Pinch), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Helana and the love potion), and The Merry Wives of Windsor (the Witch of Brainford) come in for special discussion. The chapter ends by situation manifestation in relation to entrance effects in medieval and Tudor drama and to allegorical effects in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Download Full-text

“Use Me But as Your Spaniel”: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Early Modern Sexualities

PMLA ◽

10.1632/pmla.2012.127.3.493 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 127 (3) ◽

pp. 493-511 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Melissa E. Sanchez

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Queer Theory ◽

Female Sexuality ◽

Radical Feminism ◽

Faerie Queene ◽

Female Behavior ◽

Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽

Female Masochism ◽

The Faerie Queene

In this essay, I take A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene as case studies that show how critical commonplaces may become so entrenched that they limit the horizons of what we can see in a given text, genre, or period. The essay has two purposes. The first is theoretical. I aim to make explicit the often unspoken (perhaps even unconscious) theoretical subtexts that have shaped readings of female sexuality, and I propose some historical reasons for the dominance of certain strains of feminism—those best known as “subordination feminism” and “cultural feminism”—in criticism of early modern literature. The second purpose is hermeneutic. I explore the alternative readings that become available if we approach Shakespeare's and Spenser's work through the lens of one competing strand of feminist thought, described by its practitioners as “prosex” or “sex-radical” feminism. In this essay, my reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Faerie Queene limits its interpretive frameworks to those offered by sex-radical feminism and the strands of queer theory that emerged from it. Drawing on these often overlooked frameworks, I explore the tensions and hierarchies among women in the play and the poem to challenge the assumption that women's relationships are always egalitarian and nurturing; I propose that homo- and heteroerotic desires are not mutually exclusive but may coexist in these works; and I argue that female masochism is not always a pathology that enables patriarchy but can be a legitimate form of desire that challenges traditional ideas of normal and proper female behavior.

Download Full-text

‘A place pickt out by choyce of best alyue,/That natures worke by art can imitate’: the Bowre of Blisse and Armida’s garden revisited

Tasso's Art and Afterlives ◽

10.7228/manchester/9780719090882.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Jason Lawrence

Keyword(s):

Paradise Lost ◽

English Literature ◽

Faerie Queene ◽

Complex Relationship ◽

Half Century ◽

The Faerie Queene

The second chapter focuses on the best-known and most extensive imitation of Tasso’s poem in all of English literature, Spenser’s re-imagining and re-working of Armida’s enchanted garden in cantos 15 and 16 as the Bowre of Blisse in the final canto of Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser’s almost immediate engagement with Gerusalemme liberata in his own romantic epic has long seen him acknowledged as ‘the arbiter of Tasso’s glory in the first half century of his life in England’. However, despite the voluminous critical work on Spenser’s episode and its sources, the profound indebtedness to Tasso throughout has, surprisingly, still not been fully appreciated and acknowledged. The second chapter of this study therefore offers a detailed re-appraisal of the complex relationship between the two episodes, to try to underline the sustained imitative virtuosity of Spenser’s emulation of his principal Italian source. The chapter also includes a brief consideration of Milton’s indebtedness to Tasso’s episode, and Spenser’s earlier imitation of it, in the poetic evocation of Eden in Book 4 of Paradise Lost.

Download Full-text

"The Wombe's Burden": The Undermining of Female Agency within Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene

USURJ University of Saskatchewan Undergraduate Research Journal ◽

10.32396/usurj.v6i3.553 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 6 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Delane Just

Keyword(s):

Paradise Lost ◽

Faerie Queene ◽

Female Characters ◽

Female Agency ◽

The Faerie Queene ◽

Ultimate Purpose

Through their depictions of Eve and Britomart, Milton and Spenser undermine the agency of their female characters and perpetuate and preserve patriarchal values and hierarchy. Britomart, at once a strong martial knight, is undermined by Spenser’s tying of her ultimate purpose and goal to her ability to birth a noble lineage into existence. Milton’s Eve, while being a more positive depiction than her predecessors, is intended to be subservient to Adam and her purpose lies in copulation and procreation. Ultimately, while both texts do give their characters some agency beyond procreation, it is imperative to recognize the historical degradation of women to wombs, and how this still affects women to the modern-day.

Download Full-text

Christians and Adversaries in the Evolving Norton Anthology of English Literature

10.1093/oso/9780190864170.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Wayne Glausser

Keyword(s):

Paradise Lost ◽

English Literature ◽

Faerie Queene ◽

The Faerie Queene ◽

Christian Beliefs

This chapter examines fifty years of evolving annotations in the influential Norton Anthology of English Literature. As editors provide information about canonical works that aim to present Christian truth—like The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost—they find themselves entangled with an increasingly secular literary world. Notes from earlier editions tend to reflect the perspective of a Christian insider; later editions gradually revise these notes to reflect a more secular literary landscape and to attract the broadest possible audience. The chapter studies these effects by focusing on three “adversaries” to Christianity (as seen by many traditional Christians): Milton’s Satan, Islam, and queer sexuality. Later editions of Norton secularize the anthology by excising or revising notes that endorse or privilege Christian beliefs, but the new notes are not belief-neutral in any simple sense.

Download Full-text

National Poets, the Status of the Epic and the Strange Case of Master William Shakespeare

Multicultural Shakespeare ◽

10.1515/mstap-2016-0004 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 13 (28) ◽

pp. 35-50

Author(s):

Paul Innes

Keyword(s):

National Identity ◽

William Shakespeare ◽

World Literature ◽

Paradise Lost ◽

Faerie Queene ◽

High Status ◽

The Status ◽

Cultural Status ◽

The Common ◽

The Faerie Queene

This essay contextualises Shakespeare as product of a field of forces encapsulating national identity and relative cultural status. It begins by historicising the production of national poets in Romantic and Nationalist terms. Lefevere’s conceptual grid is then used to characterise the system that underpins the production of Shakespeare as British national poet, and his place within the canon of world literature. The article defines this context first before moving onto the figure of Shakespeare, by referring to various high status texts such as the Kalevala, the Aeneid, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. The position accorded Shakespeare at the apex is therefore contingent upon a series of prior operations on other texts, and their writers. Shakespeare is not conceived as attaining pre-eminence because of his own innate literary qualities. Rather, a process of elimination occurs by which the common ascription of the position of national poet to a writer of epic is shown to be a cultural impossibility for the British. Instead, via Aristotle’s privileging of tragedy over epic, the rise of Shakespeare is seen as almost a second choice because of the inappropriateness of Spenser and Milton for the position.

Download Full-text