knights, one expects this knight to be clad ‘in poem more broadly to its own culture and especially mightie armes and siluer shielde’, and would be only to ours. While its excesses have been challenged, for momentarily puzzled on learning that he is wearing example by Stewart 1997:52–89, as the pendulum second-hand armour. The simple pleasure of reading continues to swing, soon one may expect a consolid-a story, as it were for its own sake, is interrupted and ated interest in the poem as both a cultural and a complicated only when we are told that he bears ‘a literary artefact shaped by the intervening centuries, bloodie Crosse’ on his breast as ‘The deare remem-and shaping our perception of them. brance of his dying Lord’. The ‘bloodie Crosse’ These critical movements considered only incid-names him the Red Cross Knight, and, for its first entally Spenser’s declared intention in writing his readers, involves his story in the complexities of poem, even though he announces it on the title-Renaissance religion, one minor example being the page: ‘THE FAERIE QUEENE. Disposed into twelue controversy over the use of commemorative icons, books, Fashioning XII. Morall vertues’, and at the end such as the proclamation by the Lord Deputy in of the 1590 edition declares in the Letter to Raleigh Ireland in 1579 that every horseman wear a red cross that ‘the generall end . . . of all the booke is to fash-on his breast and another on his back. (See R. Smith ion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and 1955:673.) Another such complexity is the knight’s gentle discipline’ (7–8). He adds that his means of identity: after he slays the dragon, the poem’s doing so is ‘to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was earliest annotator, John Dixon, names him ‘Christe’. king, the image of a braue knight, perfected in the As meanings and associations multiply, the poem is twelue priuate morall vertues, as Aristotle hath exposed to what Spenser most feared and needed deuised’ (18–19). This led earlier historical scholars to control, ‘the daunger of enuy, and suspition of to examine almost exhaustively how the virtues were present time’ (LR12). For its early reception, see defined in the classical and Christian centuries, for Cummings 1971. they assumed that Spenser inherited a tradition of the virtues that flowed from its source in Aristotle’s Criticism

2014 ◽  
pp. 24-24
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Bunyan and Spenser

PMLA ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 216-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold Golder
Keyword(s):  
Tree Of Life ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
House Beautiful ◽  
The Faerie Queene

That John Bunyan had read at least the first book of Spenser's Faerie Queene, and had transformed certain adventures of the Red Cross Knight into the adventures of his own hero in Pilgrim's Progress, is a statement which has been frequently made. And, indeed, the idea has much reason on its side. The parallel between a series of incidents in Spenser's first book and a series in Pilgrim's Progress is fully as close as many another which has been held sufficient to establish a literary relationship. To Spenser's House of Holinesse, with its porter, its four grave damsels, its sober entertainment of the knight, corresponds Bunyan's House Beautiful. To the closing episode of the Red Cross Knight's sojourn at the House of Holinesse, his sight of the pilgrim's road and of Hierusalem from the near-by Mount of Contemplation, corresponds the view which Christian, from the top of the House Beautiful, has of the Delectable Mountains, from which, in the course of the story, he is to see the Celestial City itself. To the immediately succeeding conflict with the dragon, to the monster's fiery breath and horrid shrieks, to the hero's distress and eventual triumph, and particularly to the miraculous restoration of the wounded knight through the agency of the Tree of Life, corresponds Christian's battle with Apollyon, fought in the Valley of Humiliation, just after he has parted from the damsels of the House Beautiful. When to the parallel between these series of incidents in The Faerie Queene and in Pilgrim's Progress is added a certain similarity between the allegorical significances of these incidents, as well as a much more doubtful likeness between Spenser's Despair and the Giant Despair of Bunyan, some sort of relationship between the earlier and the later author appears evident enough.

much more needs to be done before we may begin and are summed up in Book VI, with its climactic to grasp the ‘goodly golden chayne, wherewith yfere vision of the Graces’. Clearly the poem was meant to | The vertues linked are in louely wize’ (I ix 1.1–2). be read as a verse in the Bible was read in Spenser’s For example, in displaying the special powers of a day: any stanza is the centre from which to recon-virtue, each book displays also its radical limitations struct the whole. without the other virtues, and, above all, without A study of the virtues makes it increasingly clear divine grace. No book is complete in itself, for each that before ever Spenser began to write he had seen (after the first) critiques those that preceded it, so at least the outline of each virtue and had mapped that understanding what has been read constantly out their relationships. (On the formal idea of each expands and consolidates until by the end all the virtue, which his narrative unfolds and realizes, see virtues are seen in their unifying relationships. Heninger 1991:147.) Early in his career, he dedicated A general survey of all the books of The Faerie his talents to fashion the scheme of virtues in a poem Queene is offered in a number of introductions to the he could never expect to complete, no more than poem: Spens 1934, Nelson 1963, R. Freeman 1970, could Chaucer in projecting the Canterbury Tales – Heale 1987, Tonkin 1989, Meyer 1991, Waller 1994, on its unfinished state, see Rajan 1985:44–84, and and Oram 1997. Tonkin and Oram especially offer Hamilton 1990 – and he never faltered or changed. close and perceptive readings of each book. In addi-What he says about the Red Cross Knight may be tion, there are studies of individual books. Book applied to him: ‘The noble hart, that harbours ver-I: Rose 1975; II: Berger 1957; III and IV: Roche tuous thought [i.e. knowledge of the virtues], | And 1964, Silberman 1995; IV: Goldberg 1981; III, IV, is with childe of glorious great intent, | Can neuer and V: Broaddus 1995; V: Dunseath 1968, Aptekar rest, vntill it forth haue brought | Th’eternall brood 1969, Fletcher 1971; VI: A. Williams 1967, Tonkin of glorie excellent’ (I v1.1–4). As he testifies in the 1972. See also the entry on each book in The Spenser final canto of the 1596 poem: as a ship may be Encyclopedia. In addition, there are general studies delayed by storms on its way to a certain shore, of the virtues: for example, Horton 1978 finds the ‘Right so it fares with me in this long way, | Whose poem’s unity in the binary pairing of the books (see course is often stayd, yet neuer is astray’ (VI xii also his entry, ‘virtues’, in the SEnc), and M.F.N. 1.8–9). While we may speculate that Spenser wrote Dixon 1996:13 argues that Spenser offers ‘a gram-for patronage, a pension, or a position at court, we mar of virtues’, i.e. ‘an iterative series of interde-know from the opening stanza of The Faerie Queene pendent virtues’. There are also many studies of the that ‘the sacred Muse’ commanded him ‘To blazon techniques used by Spenser to structure the virtues: broade emongst her learned throng’. Clearly he had for example, the ‘resonances sounding at large no choice but to devote his life to writing that poem. throughout the poem’ examined by Lewis 1967, the The third step in relating the virtues is to recog-structural triads by A. Fowler 1973, the poem’s nize that they are fashioned in the poem through the analogical coherence by Nohrnberg 1976, its self-actions of the major characters in order to fashion reflexiveness by MacCaffrey 1976, the ‘echoing’ by readers in ‘vertuous and gentle discipline’. In the Hollander 1981, the demonic parody of the virtues Letter to Raleigh, Spenser distinguishes between his by N. Frye 1963 and Fletcher 1971, the poem’s am-‘general intention and meaning’, which is to fashion bivalence by Fletcher 1964, the structural patterns in the virtues, and his poem’s ‘generall end’, which is Books I and II by Røstvig 1994, the symmetrical to ‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous ring structure in Book III by Greenfield 1989, the and gentle discipline’ (8). Accordingly, our under-poem’s broken symmetries by Kane 1990, the use of standing of the nature of holiness, for example, is gained image-patterns in which images are repeated in bono only by reading the story of the Red Cross Knight, et in malo by Kaske 1999, the sequence of emblems and not by bringing to it anything more than a which make the poem ‘the most emblematic long general awareness that the virtue relates our life in poem in our literature’ (A. Fowler 1999:23), and this world to God. His quest traces the process of the narrative’s self-reflectiveness by Goldberg 1981. sanctification as his will cooperates with divine grace; The poem interprets and reinterprets itself endlessly, and, through him, we learn how to frame our lives in as Tonkin 1989:43 suggests in commenting on holy living. The virtues do not exist apart from the

2014 ◽  
pp. 28-28
Keyword(s):  
Ring Structure ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Broken Symmetries ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Canterbury Tales ◽  
General Studies ◽  
The Faerie Queene

The Faerie Queene

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene

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.

Cain’s Castles

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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