“Such as might best be”: Simile in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Practice ◽  
History Of Composition ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Central Claim

Chapter Four follows Braggadochio as he travels through Spenser’s faerie land collecting other men’s ornamenta, a word that describes both the figures of rhetoric and the weapons of war. His story proceeds according to the paradigm of accumulation that underwrote the humanist schoolroom’s central claim to facilitate social mobility. It argues that the early modern simile acted as an engine of accumulation and that its copious productivity resisted the very abstraction upon which humanist theories of reason were predicated. I examine how Spenser casts Braggadochio’s accumulation of comparative images, and the history of composition it implies, as a means of social mobility while also suggesting that simile encodes the time of poetic practice into The Faerie Queene.

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.

“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.

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 Plot of The Faerie Queene

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Blair
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Central Image ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Ideal

Courthope, in his History of English Poetry, asks the question: “Does Spenser's work satisfy the test of Unity which must be applied to every great creation of art?” Answering this question, Courthope thinks that there is undoubtedly poetical unity in the general conception of The Shepherd's Calendar. But of the Faerie Queene, he says the following:There is undoubtedly a noble, indeed a sublime, foundation for the poem in its central design “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” There is also something eminently poetical in the intention of embodying this image in the ideal knight—a figure consecrated like that of the shepherd, by ancient literary tradition—and in the person of “Arthur before he was king.” Moreover, as the subject was to be treated allegorically, it was open to Spenser to endow his knight with the “twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised.” … No poem in existence can compare with the Faery Queen in the richness of its materials. But the question occurs: In what way is all this “variety of matter” fused with the central image of the “brave knight, perfected in all the twelve private moral virtues”? For this, we must always remember, was Spenser's professed and primary motive; he chose to convey his moral in a form of allegorical narrative, because he thought it would be “most plausible and pleasing, being covered with an historical fiction.”

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.

clash between the beauty-loving Renaissance and the he [Spenser] was quickly swept overboard because of moral Reformation. In the light of the medieval reli-his inability to write like Donne, Eliot, and Allen gious tradition examined by Tuve, Guyon destroys Tate’ (1968:2). His extended interpretation of Book the Bower because he ‘looks at the kind of complete II, The Allegorical Temper (1957), followed by essays seduction which means the final death of the soul’ on the other books, traces the changing psycholo-(31). gical or psychic development of the poem’s major If the New Critics of the 1930s to the early 1950s characters by ‘reading the poem as a poem’ (9) rather had been interested in Spenser (few were), they than as a historical document. My own book, The would not have considered his intention in writing Structure of Allegory in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1961a), The Faerie Queene because that topic had been dis-which I regard now as the work of a historical critic missed as a fallacy. For Wimsatt and Beardsley partly rehabilitated by myth and archetypal criticism, 1954:5 (first proclaimed in 1946), ‘The poem is not examines the poem’s structure through its patterns the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached of imagery, an interest shared with Alastair Fowler, from the author at birth and goes about the world Spenser and the Numbers of Time (1964), and by beyond his power to intend about it or control it)’. Kathleen Williams, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’: The So much for any poet’s intention, conscious or World of Glass (1966). unconscious, realized or not. Not that it would have In any history of modern Spenser criticism – for a mattered much, for the arbiter of taste at that time, general account, see Hadfield 1996b – Berger may T.S. Eliot, had asked rhetorically: ‘who, except schol-serve as a key transitional figure. In a retrospective ars, and except the eccentric few who are born with glance at his essays on Spenser written from 1958 to a sympathy for such work, or others who have delib-1987, he acknowledges that ‘I still consider myself erately studied themselves into the right apprecia-a New Critic, even an old-fashioned one’ who tion, can now read through the whole of The Faerie has been ‘reconstructed’ by New Historicism Queene with delight?’ (1932:443). In Two Letters, (1989:208). In Berger 1988:453–56, he offers a per-Spenser acknowledges that the gods had given him sonal account of his change, admitting that as a New the gift to delight but never to be useful (Dii mihi, Critic he had been interested ‘in exploring complex dulce diu dederant: verùm vtile numquam), though representations of ethico-psychological patterns’ he wishes they had; and, in the Letter to Raleigh, he apart from ‘the institutional structures and discourses recognizes that the general end of his poem could be that give them historical specificity’. Even so, he had achieved only through fiction, which ‘the most part allowed that earlier historical study, which had been of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, concerned with ‘historical specificity’, was ‘solid and then for profite of the ensample’ (10). As a conse-important’. For the New Historicist Louis Adrian quence, he addresses his readers not by teaching them Montrose, however, earlier historical scholarship didactically but rather through delight. It follows that ‘merely impoverished the text’ (Berger 1988:8), and if his poem does not delight, it remains a closed book. he is almost as harsh towards Berger himself, com-Several critics who first flourished in the 1950s and plaining that his writings ‘have tended to avoid direct 1960s responded initially to Spenser’s words and confrontations of sociopolitical issues’, though he imagery rather than to his ideas, thought, or histor-blames ‘the absence of a historically specific socio-ical context. One is Donald Cheney, who, in Spenser’s political dimension’ on the time they were written – Image of Nature (1966), read The Faerie Queene a time when ‘the sociopolitical study of Spenser was ‘under the intensive scrutiny which has been applied epitomized by the pursuit of topical identifications or in recent decades to metaphysical lyrics’, seeking the cataloguing of commonplaces’ (7). In contrast, out ‘ironic, discordant impulses’, ‘rapidly shifting the New Historicism, of which he is the most elo-allusions’, and the poet’s ‘constant insistence upon quent theorist, sees a work embedded – i.e. intrins-the ambiguity of his images’ (7, 17, 20). Another is ically, inextricably fixed – not in history generally, Paul Alpers, whose The Poetry of ‘The Faerie Queene’ and certainly not in ‘cosmic politics’ that Thomas (1967) demonstrated that individual stanzas of the Greene 1963:406 claims to be the concern of all epics, poem may be subjected to very intense scrutiny. A but in a historically specific sociopolitical context. third, the most influential of all, is Harry Berger, Jr, (For further comments on their clash, see Hamilton

2014 ◽  
pp. 25-25
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
Death Of The Soul ◽  
New Critics ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Burton on Spenser

PMLA ◽  
1926 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merritt Y. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Critical Remark ◽  
The Third ◽  
Robert Burton ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Robert Burton has never been known as a commentator on The Faerie Queene and he certainly did not aspire to that honor, but it is my purpose in this article to show that unconsciously he left a valuable set of notes on Spenser's work. Burton was not a critic and his one critical remark about The Faerie Queene sounds oddly to-day, although readers of M. Jusserand's remarks in his Literary History of the English People on Spenser's borrowings from Ariosto will remember some ideas that chime with what Burton says in the passage in question. In his analysis of love-melancholy in the Third Part of The Anatomy of Melancholy he remarked casually:Our new Ariostoes, Boyards, Authors of Arcadia, Urania, Faerie Queene, &c., Marullus, Leotichius, Angerianus, Stroza, Secundus, Capellanus, &c., with the best of these facete modern poets have written in this kind, are but so many symptoms of love. Their whole books are a synopsis or breviary of love, the portuous of love, legends of lovers' lives and deaths, and of their memorable adventures, nay more, quod leguntur, quod laudantur, amori debent.

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.

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