Spenser, Plowden, and the Hypallactic Instrument

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Zurcher
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Good Works ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Since at least the work of Jones and Stallybrass on Renaissance clothing, the materially distributed nature of human identity—not merely reflected in, but constituted by, garments and other prosthetic objects—has been marked as a recurrent and distinctive feature of early modern English literary accounts of person. This article explores hybrid objects in two works by Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and A view of the Present State of Ireland (c.1596), charting connections between Spenser’s hypallactic allegoresis and early modern common law evidentiary conventions. Spenser’s mingling of inward, psychological states (purpose, inclination, guilt, etc.) with material objects pushes against sixteenth-century protestant rejections of embodied ritual, popish vestments, devotional icons and shrines, and good works, but emerges as a powerful instrument in his proposals for social and legal ‘reform’ of Ireland.

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.

Henry viii and the “Bewhoring” of the Petrarchan Beloved in Sixteenth-Century English Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-16
Author(s):  
Susan Dunn-Hensley
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Sacred Feminine ◽  
Male Control ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Female Power

This article examines the ways in which changes in Marian theology and the defaming and execution of two of Henry viii’s queens affected early modern literary representations of female power. It argues that, through the translations of Thomas Wyatt, Petrarchan poetry entered into a world of state-sponsored iconoclasm, a world where images of the sacred feminine, once revered, could be destroyed, and queens, once exalted as beloveds, could quickly be reduced to “whores” and executed. The first part of the article considers Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” a translation of Petrarch’s “Rime 190,” as a lens for examining the female body as both object of desire and site of violent destruction. The second part of the article considers English Petrarchism late in the reign of Elizabeth i, examining how John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book ii) construct violent fantasies of male control over the powerful female.

Remembering the Death of Turnus: Spenser'sFaerie Queeneand the Ending of theAeneid*

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 430-471
Author(s):  
Lars-Håkan Svensson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Faerie Queene

AbstractMost of the key episodes in book 1 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590) replay famous passages in Virgil's Aeneid. However, the concluding canto, describing the Redcrosse knight's betrothal to Una, is based on Maffeo Vegio's fifteenth-century Supplementum to the Aeneid, while, surprisingly, the Aeneid's much-disputed ending appears in triplicate in early sections of book 1. This article examines the place and function of book 1’s three imitations of the Aeneid's ending, while also relating them to Spenser's appropriations of the ending in later books of The Faerie Queene. It argues that, in making Redcrosse assume the position of Aeneas in largely negative contexts, book 1 opposes standard sixteenth-century interpretations of Aeneas's pietas, whereas later books of The Faerie Queene usually conform to prevalent early modern interpretations of the moral import of this powerful cultural memory.

scholarly journals On Not Defending Poetry: Spenser, Suffering, and the Energy of Affect

PMLA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Campana
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Dense Networks ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Early modern defenses of poetry, such as Philip Sidney's influential Defence of Poesy, respond to long-standing anxieties about the validity of poetry by asserting the primacy of its moral function. Sidney's heroic rhetoric locates poetry's “power” in its capacity to create iconic portraits (“speaking pictures”) of unchanging moral truths. Edmund Spenser departs markedly from Sidney's static moral vision of the function of poetry. Whereas Sidney privileges enargeia, or vividness, The Faerie Queene works consistently to disarm the heroic masculinity that violently produces enargeia as a form of iconic, moral clarity. Spenser's Legend of Temperance finds energeia, or vitality, in moments of suffering and in corresponding moments of sympathy. Through suffering, Spenser highlights the dense networks of affect and obligation that defy moral and visual clarity. For him, poetry resonates with the affective energies of corporeal experience, from which language derives its capacity to move.

scholarly journals Abridging the Antiquitee of Faery lond: New Paths Through Old Matter in The Faerie Queene*

2005 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 857-880 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wheatley Chloe
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Ready Access ◽  
The Faerie Queene

AbstractSixteenth-century history may have been recorded most spectacularly in prestigious folio chronicles, but readers had more ready access to printed books that conveyed this history in epitome. This essay focuses on how Edmund Spenser (1552?– 99) appropriated the rhetoric and form of such printed redactions in his rendition of fairy history found in book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1596). Through his abridged fairy chronicle, Spenser connects to a broadly defined reading public, emphasizes the deeds not only of kings but their imperial and civic deputies, and provides an alternative interpretive pathway through his poem.

Hymnic Epic andThe Faerie Queene’s Original Printed Format: Canto-Canticles and Psalmic Arguments*

2011 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 1148-1193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Borris ◽  
Meredith Donaldson Clark
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Heroic Poem ◽  
Popular Ballads ◽  
The Faerie Queene

AbstractWhen Edmund Spenser (1552?–99) published hisFaerie Queenein 1590 and 1596, two pervasive structural features would have seemed surprising: the abbreviationCant.in sectional and running titles, used instead ofCanto;and a four-line stanza of common meter for each section's argument, instead of a more expansive and prestigious stanza. Study of the relevant early modern Italian and English norms of publication indicates that these were complementary and innovative means of merging heroic form with divine poetry and hymnic discourse, and recognized as such.Cant.readily suggestedcanticleand the Solomonic Canticles, and the poet himself calls one of his so-called cantos a “canticle” (4.5.46). In style and prosodic form, his arguments would have particularly evoked the nationally distinctive Elizabethan Protestant psalmody and hymnody, as well as popular ballads. By incorporating these two metamorphic devices intoThe Faerie Queene's framework, Spenser reconfigured the heroic poem to serve his different, English vision.

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.

“Swords, ropes, poison, fire”: The Dark Materials of Spenser’s Objectification of Despair-Assisted Suicide, with Notes on Skelton and Shakespeare

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-201
Author(s):  
James Nohrnberg
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Face ◽  
X 32 ◽  
The Faerie Queene

In the Despair episode in Spenser’s Faerie Queene i.ix, the provocative material means for self-slaughter are emblematically doubled with the psychological inducements, particularly on the models of predecessor texts in Skelton’s Magnyfycence and the Cordela story in The Mirrour for Magistrates. The pairing of means and causes is part of a tradition. So also is the despair of a Christian believer over his own sinfulness, in the face of God’s law, as voiced by a conspiratorial evil conscience, leading to a sinful “unbelief and despair of God” (Luther) and likewise unbelief in salvation—and to an unconquerable self-accusation, which doubles the sinner with tormentors, or a diabolic Accuser, and tempts him or her to cut his/her losses, relieve his/her pain, sorrows, and world-weariness, and take his/her life. Other suicidal types in The Faerie Queene and elsewhere, who are not theologically confirmed in their wanhope or assisted by it to their end, such as Phedon or Malbecco, can nonetheless illuminate the projections, temptations, demons, and motions of the Christian despair-er, and his or her adversity, depression, distress, impatience, furor, world-weariness, melancholia, and driven-ness. The despair-er’s condition, as found in Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto Death, can be further illustrated, diagnosed, and ministered to, by means of a variety of early modern and medieval moralizing and homiletic texts. And while the death of Shakespeare’s Cordelia by hanging conforms to Spenser’s account ( fq ii.x.32), her suicidal despair is only a slander bruited by the character Edmund. Rather, it is her would-be rescuer Lear who is the picture of misery and despair.

Renaissance Epics: Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-135
Author(s):  
Peter Mack
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Torquato Tasso ◽  
Ludovico Ariosto ◽  
Orlando Furioso ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Faerie Queene

This chapter takes a look at Orlando Furioso (1516, 1532), Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), and The Faerie Queene (1596), which are the recognized epic masterpieces of their eras. They draw in succession on each other and on a wide range of classical and romance texts, many of them known to the first audiences of these three poems. The chapter investigates the ways in which Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, and Edmund Spenser used their predecessors and the different effects they achieved from a shared heritage. It examines the ways in which a series of authors used both their immediate predecessors and their sense of a long tradition of epic writing to create something new. The chapter argues that Ariosto aimed to shock and surprise his audience. Tasso reacted to Ariosto by combining a more serious and unified epic on the lines of the Iliad. Spenser's idea of devoting each book to a hero and a virtue presents a structure which is easier to comprehend than Ariosto's, yet looser and more open to surprises than Tasso's.

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