The Marriage of Thames and Rhine

2021 ◽  
pp. 70-88
Author(s):  
Nadine Akkerman
Keyword(s):  
Entire Population ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Faerie Queene

This chapter details the public solemnization of the wedding of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V. Three days before the solemnization, King James, Elizabeth, and Frederick, accompanied by practically the entire population of London, watched a spectacular fireworks display. These public festivities sought to establish a connection between Princess Elizabeth, English Protestant chivalry, and the late Queen Elizabeth's fervent Protestantism. Indeed, the program was a thinly disguised version of the first book of Edmund Spenser's allegorical celebration of Elizabeth I, The Faerie Queene. The chapter then looks at the cancelled masque, which was un-titled but is now known as The Masque of Truth; it was pro-Protestant, and emphasized Britain's alignment with the Palatine, portraying his Calvinism as the true faith that would convert Catholic powers. The Protestant propaganda shows just how divided the country had become, as large swathes of the Protestant faithful now appeared to have more belief in Elizabeth than they did in their king. The Palatine wedding had turned Elizabeth Stuart into their new warrior queen, a mystical heir to both Henry and the late queen Elizabeth, her godmother.

End-songs: final vistas of Spenser and Shakespeare

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Lanier Reid
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Face ◽  
Holistic Design ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Does Spenser’s Mutabilitie Songcomplete his epic,or point to a more transcendent scope in its final half?It derogates the pagan gods; itreforms the titan Mutability (unlike the discarded demon-titans in books 1-6); and its grand pastoral pageantfalls short of the symbolic city toward which the poem moves. Spenser’s holistic design is more clearly implied in his ordering of deadly sins (FQ 1.4). Compared with Dante’s pattern of sins, of purgations, and of ascensions in the Commedia, it offers a vital clue to The Faerie Queene’s format–based on the Christian-Platonismthat informs all its figures and sequences. Much evidence suggests Elizabeth I would admire a mystic structuring of this epic that so honors her. As for Shakespeare’s attentiveness to last things, we explore the theme of ‘summoning’ in Hamlet and King Lear, both concerned–as in The Summoning of Everyman–with ‘readiness’ and ’ripeness’ in the face of death and judgment. In The Tempest’s deft collocation of all social levels and artistic genres, and its odd convergence with Spenserian allegory, we debate the insistence on Shakespeare’s secularism by examining the range of meaning in Prospero’s ‘Art’.

Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Borris
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Poetic Imagination ◽  
National Significance ◽  
Shepheardes Calender ◽  
The Faerie Queene

This book defines Platonism’s roles in early modern theories of literature, then turns to reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent new understandings of Spenser’s poetics, his major texts, his poetic vocation, and his cultural influence. By combining Christian resources with doctrines of Platonic poetics such as the poet’s and lover’s inspirational furies, the revelatory significance of beauty, and the importance of imitating exalted ideals rather than the world, he sought to attain a visionary sublimity that would ensure his enduring national significance, and he thereby became a seminal figure in the English literary “line of vision” including Milton and Blake among others. Although readings of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender typically bypass Plato’s Phaedrus, this text deeply informs the Calender’s treatments of beauty, inspiration, poetry’s psychagogic power, and its national responsibilities. In The Faerie Queene, both heroism and visionary poetics arise from the stimuli of love and beauty conceived Platonically, and idealized mimesis produces its faeryland. Faery’s queen, projected from Elizabeth I as in Platonic idealization of the beloved, not only pertains to temporal governance but also points toward the transcendental Ideas and divinity. Whereas Plato’s Republic valorizes philosophy for bringing enlightenment to counter society’s illusions, Spenser champions the learned and enraptured poetic imagination, and proceeds as such a philosopher-poet.

scholarly journals Re-Conceiving Britomart

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Abbott Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Intellectual Knowledge ◽  
The Faerie Queene

In Books 3 and 5 of The Faerie Queene, the crux of virtue is that one must be able to conceive the difference between right and wrong. But what happens when, according to popular 16th-century belief, "conception" - the ability to generate both intellectual knowledge and biological progeny - is limited to the males of the species? Is the female knight of Chastity an oxymoron? This essay examines Spenser's shift in his representation of Britomart's "virtue" in the 1590 and 1596 versions and the implications generated for the fashioning of both Britomart and her female readers - especially Queen Elizabeth. I will show how Spenser espouses a traditional Aristotelian (one-sex) model of creation in Britomart's story in Book 3 in order to demonstrate his shift to an egalitarian, dual-sexed model in her reprisal in Book 5. Spenser's revision of Britomart's capacity for "conception" and the resulting implications for fashioning her "virtue" will also be analyzed via the palimpsest of allusions to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Plutarch's The Myth of Isis and Osiris, and Apuleius' The Golden Ass.

The Faerie Queene

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Of Reformed Versifying

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Native Form ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
English Verse ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Stylistic Ideal

This chapter examines how the development of English poetry in the second half of the sixteenth century is characterized by the search for an appropriate style. In this context, ‘reformed versifying’ may be understood as a reconciliation of high and low in which the common is reconfigured as a stylistic ideal of the mean. That development can be traced in debates about prosody where an alternative sense of ‘reformed versifying’ as adapting classical metres to English verse is rejected in favour of native form. At the same time Sidney recuperates poetry by reforming it as an agent of virtue. Reformation and Renaissance finally come together in Spenser, who realizes Erasmus’ aim of harmonizing the values of classical literature with Christian doctrine, and reconciles the foreign and the ‘homewrought’. The Faerie Queene of 1590 represents the triumph of the mean in both style and, through its celebration of marriage, in substance.

Gloriana’s “True Glorious Type”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Borris
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
God's Image ◽  
Literary Narrative

Despite the centrality of Spenser’s faery queen for his Faerie Queene and its Platonically idealized mode of mimesis, most studies do not define her symbolic scope or address her transcendental implications, though the poem explicitly evokes them. Elizabeth I was typically represented as God’s image and proxy, and Spenser extrapolates Gloriana from her through Platonic idealization of the beloved (I.pr.4). Just as Gloriana never directly appears in the action and Arthur cannot find her despite his continuing searches, so she is definitively beyond representation. Her role reflects divinity’s paradoxical immanence yet transcendence in Platonic and Judeo-Christian traditions: to some extent mediated, rather as Gloriana’s agents somewhat express her nature; yet still beyond apprehension. Spenser’s engagement with these issues of theology and representation approximates Florentine Platonism’s serio-ludic “poetic theology” involving paradox, wordplay, and riddling fables. By creating this deliberately inconclusive fiction, he audaciously rejected the prevailing requirements of literary narrative so as to adumbrate sublimities beyond the ordinary scope of language.

Cain’s Castles

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Acts And Monuments

In Chapter 1, the Reformation is presented as the paradigmatic site of Gothic escape: the evil monastery can be traced back to Wycliffe’s ‘Cain’s castles’ and the fictional abbey ruin to the Dissolution. Central Gothic tropes are shown to have their origin in this period: the Gothic heroine is compared to the female martyrs of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; the usurper figure is linked to the papal Antichrist; and the element of continuation and the establishment of the true heir is related to Reformation historiography, which needs to prove that the Protestant Church is in continuity with early Christianity—this crisis of legitimacy is repeated in the Glorious Revolution. Lastly, Gothic uncovering of hypocrisy is allied to the revelation of Catholicism as idolatry. The Faerie Queene is interpreted as a mode of Protestant Gothic and Spenser’s Una provides an allegorical gesture of melancholic distance, which will be rendered productive in later Gothic fiction.

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