The Marriage of Thames and Rhine

This chapter details the public solemnization of the wedding of Elizabeth Stuart and Frederick V. Three days before the solemnization, King James, Elizabeth, and Frederick, accompanied by practically the entire population of London, watched a spectacular fireworks display. These public festivities sought to establish a connection between Princess Elizabeth, English Protestant chivalry, and the late Queen Elizabeth's fervent Protestantism. Indeed, the program was a thinly disguised version of the first book of Edmund Spenser's allegorical celebration of Elizabeth I, The Faerie Queene. The chapter then looks at the cancelled masque, which was un-titled but is now known as The Masque of Truth; it was pro-Protestant, and emphasized Britain's alignment with the Palatine, portraying his Calvinism as the true faith that would convert Catholic powers. The Protestant propaganda shows just how divided the country had become, as large swathes of the Protestant faithful now appeared to have more belief in Elizabeth than they did in their king. The Palatine wedding had turned Elizabeth Stuart into their new warrior queen, a mystical heir to both Henry and the late queen Elizabeth, her godmother.

The Manifestation of Desire

Chapter 4 conceptualizes the device of ‘manifestation,’ the term identifying the causal power of desires, thoughts, and words to call forth objects and even characters in Shakespeare’s comic world. In the spirit of critic Elena Zupančič, the device shows, among other things, the way that comedy can surface the amusing monstrousness and presumptuousness of human wishes. The concept of manifestation entails various literary and dramatic values that characterize Shakespearean comedy. Historically, it reflects interests and theories found in Renaissance treatises on magic, and it even parallels certain modern-day linguistic patters. The chapter formalizes and theorizes the device, drawing examples from a range of comedies. The Comedy of Errors (Dr. Pinch), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Helana and the love potion), and The Merry Wives of Windsor (the Witch of Brainford) come in for special discussion. The chapter ends by situation manifestation in relation to entrance effects in medieval and Tudor drama and to allegorical effects in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

"Acquire and Beget a Temperance": The Virtue of Temperance in The Faerie Queene Book II and Hamlet

<p>Shakespeare's Hamlet, like Spenser's The Faerie Queene Book II, is a work systematically concerned with the virtue of temperance. This conclusion is reached partly from comparison between Spenser and Shakespeare. But I also set their works in the context of a range of relevant sources available to the Early Modern period. While comparisons between aspects of FQII and Hamlet are not unknown, critical attention to their common foundation in temperance has been limited. Like Spenser in FQII, Shakespeare in Hamlet is concerned with a virtue that has its roots in the interconnected Greek precepts "Know Thyself", "Nothing in Excess' and "Think Mortal Thoughts." To be sophron (temperate) is to live in accordance with these precepts. Spenser presents the opposed vice of intemperance through the excesses of avarice and lust in the Cave of Mammon and the Bower of Bliss. Shakespeare portrays a court in Elsinore where excess, irascibility, lust and avarice for power are barely concealed beneath a veneer of Ciceronian social decorum and a didactic commitment to self-control. Comparison with the varied aspects of temperance in FQII makes clear how constantly and variously Hamlet reflects upon temperance and intemperance. There is an underlying tension in both FQII and Hamlet between traditional ideals of moderation and self-control on the one hand, and imagery and archetypes of the Fall and tainted human nature on the other. This tension arises naturally in a treatment of a virtue which, although it derives from classical thought, was carefully assimilated into Christian theology by the Church Fathers. As in much Early Modern writing, we find strands of Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic thought that privilege reason (on the one hand) intermingled with (on the other) an Augustinian emphasis on the heart, the will, and dependence on Christian grace. In Hamlet Shakespeare portrays Claudius as one intractably intemperate in the Aristotelian sense, a condition made apparent in his inability to repent. Claudius' apparent rational self-control is based on premises that are ultimately false; his actions therefore derive from "false prudence" as defined by Aquinas. His projection of reasonableness forces his antagonist, Hamlet, into a range of irascible and irrational behaviour, some of which is calculated and some of which is not. Both Spenser and Shakespeare present an anatomy of the processes of rational self-control and their disruption by the passions. Both are also concerned with the metaphysical dimensions of temperance, both Platonic and Pauline. When Hamlet (like a Greek sophronistes) sees it as his duty to act against Claudius, "this canker of our nature," he is expressing a confused mixture of desires--for ethical and spiritual transformation, political reformation, justice, and an irascible lust for vengeance. It is no coincidence that the problematic endings of both FQII and Hamlet echo the conclusion of the Aeneid and its failure to reconcile justice and temperance.</p>

"Acquire and Beget a Temperance": The Virtue of Temperance in The Faerie Queene Book II and Hamlet

<p>Shakespeare's Hamlet, like Spenser's The Faerie Queene Book II, is a work systematically concerned with the virtue of temperance. This conclusion is reached partly from comparison between Spenser and Shakespeare. But I also set their works in the context of a range of relevant sources available to the Early Modern period. While comparisons between aspects of FQII and Hamlet are not unknown, critical attention to their common foundation in temperance has been limited. Like Spenser in FQII, Shakespeare in Hamlet is concerned with a virtue that has its roots in the interconnected Greek precepts "Know Thyself", "Nothing in Excess' and "Think Mortal Thoughts." To be sophron (temperate) is to live in accordance with these precepts. Spenser presents the opposed vice of intemperance through the excesses of avarice and lust in the Cave of Mammon and the Bower of Bliss. Shakespeare portrays a court in Elsinore where excess, irascibility, lust and avarice for power are barely concealed beneath a veneer of Ciceronian social decorum and a didactic commitment to self-control. Comparison with the varied aspects of temperance in FQII makes clear how constantly and variously Hamlet reflects upon temperance and intemperance. There is an underlying tension in both FQII and Hamlet between traditional ideals of moderation and self-control on the one hand, and imagery and archetypes of the Fall and tainted human nature on the other. This tension arises naturally in a treatment of a virtue which, although it derives from classical thought, was carefully assimilated into Christian theology by the Church Fathers. As in much Early Modern writing, we find strands of Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic thought that privilege reason (on the one hand) intermingled with (on the other) an Augustinian emphasis on the heart, the will, and dependence on Christian grace. In Hamlet Shakespeare portrays Claudius as one intractably intemperate in the Aristotelian sense, a condition made apparent in his inability to repent. Claudius' apparent rational self-control is based on premises that are ultimately false; his actions therefore derive from "false prudence" as defined by Aquinas. His projection of reasonableness forces his antagonist, Hamlet, into a range of irascible and irrational behaviour, some of which is calculated and some of which is not. Both Spenser and Shakespeare present an anatomy of the processes of rational self-control and their disruption by the passions. Both are also concerned with the metaphysical dimensions of temperance, both Platonic and Pauline. When Hamlet (like a Greek sophronistes) sees it as his duty to act against Claudius, "this canker of our nature," he is expressing a confused mixture of desires--for ethical and spiritual transformation, political reformation, justice, and an irascible lust for vengeance. It is no coincidence that the problematic endings of both FQII and Hamlet echo the conclusion of the Aeneid and its failure to reconcile justice and temperance.</p>

The Acidale test: Spenser’s jettisoning of Sidney as poetic authoriser

This article questions the commonplace that Edmund Spenser always depicted Philip Sidney as his poetic authoriser by finding undercurrents in works through 1595 and by reading the Mount Acidale scene in the 1596 Faerie Queene as jettisoning Sidney. This study calls into question the accepted version of Spenser’s role in the historical development of Sidney’s image. It demonstrates that Spenser rethought his relationship to Sidney and reimagined himself as a poet. This study also resolves the disjunction between earlier depictions of Sidney as poet and the Sidney-like qualities of the unpoetical Calidore.

Edmund Spenser as Promethean poet: critical issues and the role of magic and Platonism in The Faerie Queene

One of the key points at which Platonism and magic or what could be called ‘Platonic magic’ is found in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is in his use of the image of the classical Titan Prometheus. Examining Spenser’s text in light of Renaissance Platonist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s writings on magic, we can see that Prometheus serves as a model for Spenser’s tremendous creative ability as a ‘poet magus’. However, an examination of the Promethean qualities of ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ also reveals that in the final sections of The Faerie Queene Spenser appears to lose hope in the Promethean power of the poet.

Emblems of Temperance in The Faerie Queene, Book II

This chapter discusses the emblems of temperance in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II. It was Spenser’s invariable practice to build into the imagery of The Faerie Queene, at strategic points, the traditional emblems of the virtue whose legend he was writing. These emblems must once have helped to make at least the main drift of his allegory widely intelligible; but unfortunately it no longer works like that. In Book II, where emblems are heavily relied on for structure as well as for imagery, either their existence is now not even noticed, or else they are treated as mere surface decoration. Yet they are essential to Spenser’s method, which is oblique, working indirectly through details. The chapter focuses on perhaps the most common emblem of temperance in The Faerie Queene: the pouring of water into wine. This emblem makes the least obvious appearance, but only because it is developed on a scale not expected; it is hidden, only because it is most deeply structural.