Lear, Land and Expropriation without Compensation

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Haresnape
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Human Cell ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
The Body ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Faerie Queene

King Lear has been extensively used by Shakespearean critics in South Africa for the discussion of land ownership issues. This essay alludes to the work of Martin Orkin and Nicholas Visser, who brought postcolonial and materialistic critiques to bear upon the play in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The essay itself carries the investigation forward to present times, when the text asks to be read in relation to expropriation without compensation: a land proposal being ventilated at the highest political level. The issues which emerge are diverse and unexpected. King Lear’s gifts of land to his daughters are actually ‘deals’ requiring the compensation of their public declarations of love for him. For various reasons this strategy fails. The reader is then invited by the play’s imagery to see the body of the old king as a piece of ‘real estate’ that is incrementally expropriated by the ageing process and the onset of dementia. Spenser’s allegory of the House of Temperance in Book II of The Faerie Queene is discussed as a likely influence here. By the end of the play, Lear is divested of his own bodily health and cognitive ability by the arch expropriator, ‘time’, and its subaltern, the fallible human cell. With regard to critical reception, this essay argues that King Lear has complexity and substance enough to engage the interest of postcolonialists, materialists and universalists alike – even in relation to a topic as specific as land.

The Psychology of Memory in Spenser's Faerie Queene

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-96
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Boughner
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
World City ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Extended Treatment ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Faerie Queene

From Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, through the medieval commentators, the Elizabethans inherited a body of complex psychological principles. An examination of these principles and their bearing on The Faerie Queene has so far been only casual and incidental. Since in Book ii, Canto ix, the poet combines one of the most widely used of medieval motifs—the conception of the body as a world, city, or castle—with certain current doctrines of psychology, such an inquiry is especially apposite. Spenser's use of the abundant contemporaneous literature of psychology affords material for an extended treatment such as that which Miss Anderson has made of Shakespeare's plays. The present study purposes to set forth one aspect of his system of psychology—his psychology of memory in the allegory of the Castle of Alma, to make clear the relationship of his system to the current Elizabethan doctrines, and to establish the purpose of certain departures from those doctrines.

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’.

realities they name. Though corrupt, they remain dictions, fissures, discord, repressions, aporias, etc. divinely given and the poet’s burden is to purify the Inasmuch as their response is a product of their language of his own tribe. Words have been ‘wrested time, so is mine for I remain caught up in a vision of from their true calling’, and the poet attempts to the poem I had during my graduate years at the wrest them back in order to recreate that natural lan-University of Cambridge when I began seriously to guage in which the word and its reality again merge. read it. What I had anticipated to be an obscure alleg-Like Adam, he gives names to his creatures which ory that could be understood only by an extended express their natures. His word-play is a sustained study of its background became more clear the more and serious effort to plant true words as seeds in the I read it until I had the sense of standing at the reader’s imagination. In Jonson’s phrase, he ‘makes centre of a whirling universe of words each in its pro-their minds like the thing he writes’ (1925– per order and related to all the others, its meanings 52:8.588). He shares Bacon’s faith that the true end constantly unfolding from within until the poem is of knowledge is ‘a restitution and reinvesting (in seen to contain all literature, and all knowledge great part) of man to the sovereignty and power (for needed to guide one’s personal and social life. In the whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by intervening years, especially as a result of increasing their true names he shall again command them) awareness of Spenser’s and his poem’s involvement which he had in his first state of creation’ (Valerius in Ireland, as indicated by the bibliographies com-Terminus). Although his poem remains largely piled by Maley in 1991 and 1996a, and such later unfinished, he has restored at least those words that studies as McLeod 1999:32–62, but best shown in are capable of fashioning his reader in virtuous and Hadfield 1997, I have come to realize also the pro-gentle discipline. What is chiefly needed to under-found truth of Walter Benjamin’s observation that stand the allegory of The Faerie Queene fully is to ‘there is no document of civilization that is not at the understand all the words. That hypothesis is the basis same time a document of barbarism’. The greatness of my annotation. of The Faerie Queene consists in being both: while it My larger goal is to help readers understand ostensibly focuses on Elizabeth’s court, it is impos-why Spenser was honoured in his day as ‘England’s sible even to imagine it being written there, or at any Arch-Poët’, why he became Milton’s ‘Original’ and place other than Ireland, being indeed ‘wilde fruit, the ‘poet’s poet’ for the Romantics (see ‘poet’s poet’ which saluage soyl hath bred’ (DS 7.2). in the SEnc), and why today Harold Bloom 1986: If Spenser is to continue as a classic, criticism must 2 may claim that he ‘possessed [mythopoeic power] continue to recreate the poem by holding it up as a . . . in greater measure than any poet in English mirror that first of all reflects our own anxieties and except for Blake’, and why Greenblatt 1990b:229 concerns. It may not be possible, or even desirable, may judge him to be ‘among the most exuberant, to seek a perspective on the poem ‘uncontaminated generous, and creative literary imaginations in our by late twentieth century interests and beliefs’, as language’. Stewart 1997:87 urges, and I would only ask with As I write in a year that marks a half century of my him that we need to be aware of ‘historical voices engagement with the poem, I have come to realize other than our own, including Spenser’s’. As far as the profound truth of Wallace Stevens’s claim that possible criticism should serve also as a transparent ‘Anyone who has read a long poem day after day glass through which to see what Spenser intended as, for example, The Faerie Queene, knows how the and what he accomplished in ‘Fashioning XII Morall poem comes to possess the reader and how it nat-vertues’. Of course, we cannot assume that under-uralizes him in its own imagination and liberates standing his intention as it is fulfilled in the poem him there’ (1951:50). It has been so for me though, necessarily provides a sufficient reading, but it may I also recognize, not for many critics today whose provide a focus for understanding it. Contemporary engagement with the poem I respect. With Mon-psychological interpretation of the poem’s characters trose 1996:121–22, I am aware that ‘the cultural reads the poem out of focus, and the commendable politics that are currently ascendant within the aca-effort to see the poem embedded in its immediate demic discipline of literary studies call forth condem-sociopolitical context, chiefly Spenser’s relation to nations of Spenser for his racist / misogynist / elitist the Queen, fails to allow that he wrote it ‘to liue with

2014 ◽  
pp. 40-40
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
Word Play ◽  
University Of Cambridge ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Mutability and Mortality in The Faerie Queene

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith H. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Staged Construction ◽  
The Cantos ◽  
Death Of The Soul ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos engage the subjects of sin and death from start to finish—from the introduction of Mutability herself through the end of her pageant—but Spenser’s Mutability is neither a simple mirror of the Fall nor a metonymic encoding of it. The Cantos open with a staged construction of Mutabilility’s figure, and her story draws on numerous renderings of change, including the Bible, Ovid, Lucretius, and Boethius, without merely repeating any one. Related passages on sin and death in The Faerie Queene, books I and II, have particularly relevant, significant ties to the subjects of time and mortality in the Cantos, as well as to questions of narrative and figuration. Mutability’s pageant explicitly engages with mortalism, the death of the soul, or the individual soul, along with the body, a concern that makes sense as an offshoot of Spenser’s engagement with materialism elsewhere in his epic. (This is another preview of Milton as well.)

Sexual Generation and the “two-bodied” shapes of creatures in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Moreana ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 43 & 44 (Number (4 & 1-2) ◽  
pp. 150-177
Author(s):  
Emilien Mohsen
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Female Representation ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Sexual Generation ◽  
The One ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Bodily Representation

This article follows an aspect of Spenser’s structure of the The Faerie Queene, namely that of duality, to discuss how the notion of the body is treated. This representation gives way to doubleness, if not to say problematic expression of bipolarity, someties as both male and female figures, in the process of “sexual” regeneration or creation. The article, thus, mostly highlights the role of Britomart, the heroine of Book III, and Artegall, hero of Book V, as the one is presented in an armour, brandishing a “phallic” lance, and the other is introduced in a woman’s attire. In both of them, therefore, one finds the principle of the duality of bodily representation, or as Pico della Mirandola has it, that the male and female representation can be seen as “two powers in the same substance.”

scholarly journals Writing and Weaving: The Textual and the Textile in Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene, III.i

Sederi ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Joan Curbet Soler
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Double Movement ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Most often, Ovidian allusions are woven into Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Books I–III, 1590) without developing into an open re-telling of myths. One significant exception occurs in Book III, Canto 1: there the action comes to a temporary stop in order to make space for a detailed description of the tapestry in the hall of Castle Joyous, which depicts the story of Venus and Adonis. This article intends to offer a reading of that episode that focuses on the importance of materiality and self-reflexivity as keys to its significance at the opening of Book III, and in the larger structure of The Faerie Queene. Here, the descriptive powers of the poet are both foregrounded and questioned, in a double movement of ekphrasis which gestures towards a serious interrogation of the value of representation, both in poetry and the visual arts. Implicitly, it is the poet (and through him, the reader him/herself) that must question his/her role and participation in the gradual and often painful awareness of the body that is foregrounded throughout Book III.

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