Arthur and the Failed Pursuit of Imitatio Christi: Christological Allusion in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King

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.

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Gloriana’s “True Glorious Type”

10.1093/oso/9780198807070.003.0006 ◽

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.

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Cain’s Castles

10.1093/oso/9780198824466.003.0002 ◽

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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