Edmund Spenser. Books I and II of The Faerie Queene, The Mutability Cantos, and Selections from the Minor Poetry, ed. by Robert Kellogg and Oliver Steele. New York: Odyssey Press, 1965. xv+542 pp. $1.65. paper.

1966 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-394
Author(s):  
A. Kent Hieatt
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene — Selections

2018 ◽  
pp. 137-142
Author(s):  
Edmund Spenser
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene

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.

Edmund Spenser and the 'Faerie Queene'

1949 ◽  
Vol 7 (42) ◽  
pp. 292-293
Author(s):  
W. J. B. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene

“To hear the rest untold“: Shakespeare's Postponed Endings

1984 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Kay
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Faerie Queene

According to Edmund Spenser, trivial art was merely “painted forgery,” no more than “th'aboundance of an idle braine.” Its antithesis, exemplified by The Faerie Queene, was “matter of just memory” (FQ II.Proem, i). In this distinction, the double sense of “just,” i.e. both “righteous” and “exact,” tellingly suggests the response he desired—demanded even—from readers of his epic. Other works aspiring to the status of high art similarly make demands upon their audience which implicitly continue into the memory of the reader or viewer. It was thus, Ben Jonson argued, that the text of a masque could be elevated above the mere physical spectacle of its performance: it was in the imagination of the audience that the “more removed mysteries,” only shadowed forth in the action of the show, could be fully subjected to the understanding (rather than simply experienced externally by the sense) of the beholders.

The Cross cult, King Oswald, and Elizabethan historiography

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-57
Author(s):  
Paul J. Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Religious Controversy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Church ◽  
Made In

In Thomas Stapleton’s The History of the Church of Englande (1565), the first modern English translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, the cross cult is promoted as a definitive element of English religious and national identity, via the legend of the Saxon king Oswald. The version of the legend in Stapleton’s narrative, which includes textual supplements like illustrations, appears to be intended as a corrective in light of attacks upon the cross cult made in works of religious controversy by the reformists William Turner, John Jewel, and James Calfhill, but also in works of historiography such as the 1559 edition of Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle. In response to Stapleton’s expanded presentation of the Oswald legend, John Foxe reconfigures the narrative in the 1570 Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs, but in a bifurcated manner, perhaps to appease members of Matthew Parker’s circle of Saxon scholars. Surprisingly, in Book Three of The Faerie Queene (1590), Edmund Spenser carries on Stapleton’s iconodule understanding of Oswald’s cross in contrast to his reformist Protestant precursors.1

The Works of Edmund Spenser. A Variorum Edition. The Faerie Queene, Book II

1934 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 346
Author(s):  
B. E. C. Davis ◽  
Edwin Greenlaw ◽  
Charles Grosvenor Osgood ◽  
Frederick Morgan Padelford ◽  
Edmund Spenser
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Variorum Edition
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