“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.

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’.

Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Early Modern English Literature ◽  
Narrative Temporality ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Though the Renaissance map—made newly accurate and newly ubiquitous by the Cartographic Revolution—delighted, inspired, and fascinated, it also unsettled, upset, and disturbed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety is the first monograph to demonstrate how early modern anxieties about maps and map logics accompanied an early modern poetics of representational crisis. The book first considers the manifold ways that the cartographic provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain, and it highlights literature’s sensitivity to the map’s representational deceptions and politically menacing implications. Second, it explores how Renaissance English literature, and specifically epic poetry, mounted a sustained critique of cartographic materials, of their strategies of representation, and of their often realpolitik, strategically distortive uses. In considering the ways epic poetry channels anxieties about cartographic technologies into a critique of early modern literature’s own protocols of representation, the bookpursues an early modern poetics of anxiety, one that productively complicates concepts of allegory, description, personification, bibliographic materiality, narrative, temporality, analogy and other elements of literary representation. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety reads three major poems of the period—Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674)—in terms of their vexed and vexing relationships with cartographic materials, and shows how the productive protest staged by these texts inflects early modern and contemporary accounts of representation itself.

The bear myth in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Reinardus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 115-134
Author(s):  
Jesse Russell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Abstract The animals in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene have been skillfully treated as allegories, but these creatures also deserve a look from a mythological perspective. Perhaps the most important animal to begin with is the bear, which French historian Michel Pastoureau recently has explored in his monumental, The Bear: History of a Fallen King. Using many of Pastoureau’s insights (and criticizing others), we can make room for an analysis of The Faerie Queene as a text in which pre-modern and even ‘prehistorical’ images of bears meet with Early Modern views of the noble creature, demonstrating that, despite Spenser’s allegorical tendencies, the bears in The Faerie Queene still speak.

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.

scholarly journals For the Sake of the Arguments: Reading the Headnotes to The Faerie Queene

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (300) ◽  
pp. 460-485
Author(s):  
Esther Osorio Whewell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Geneva Bible ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Abstract This essay proposes taking a serious poetic and literary-historical interest in the ballad-stanza ‘Arguments’ which precede and summarize every Canto in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Short, simple, and economical, the four-line Arguments seem at first a very different poetical space from the Spenserian stanza—but on closer reading, they demand an investment in the dimensions of printed language and the spaces and syntax of its storytelling which fits persuasively with the wider poetics of The Faerie Queene and with its narrative structures. The first section establishes the Arguments in a context of analogous early modern paratexts—in the Geneva Bible, Thomas Speght’s 1598 collected Chaucer, printed plays, and the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter. The second reads them closely as a ‘didactic technology’ which might, as well as helping us to read The Faerie Queene, help teach us how to.

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

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (3) ◽  
pp. 493-511 ◽  
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.

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