of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles) (bibliography); Lewis 1936; Lubac 1959–64; MacQueen 1970; Joseph Mazzeo 1978 ‘Allegorical Interpretation and History’ CL 30:1–21; Timothy Murray 1987 Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France (New York); Murrin 1969; Murrin 1980; A.D.Nuttall 1967 Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’ and the Logic of Allegorical Expression (London); Jean Pépin 1958; Pépin 1970 Dante et la tradition de l'allégorie Conférence Albert-le-Grand 1969 (Montreal); Pico ed 1572–3; Quilligan 1979; J.Stephen Russell, ed 1988 Allegoresis: The Craft of Allegory in Medieval Literature (New York); Charles S.Singleton 1965 “‘In Exitu Israel de Aegypto’” in Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays ed John Freccero (Englewood Cliffs, NJ) pp 102–21; Torquato Tasso 1853–5 Lettere ed Cesare Guasti, 5 vols (Naples); Teskey 1986; Van Dyke 1985; Stephen L.Wailes 1987 Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables (Berkeley and Los Angeles); Jon Whitman 1987 Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, Mass).
In his major poetry Spenser devotes significant attention to symbolic portrayal of the contemporary world and to moral comment on its political and religious issues. This dimension of his poetry has generally been called the ‘historical allegory.’ The term is misleading, however, especially if it suggests to readers that such concerns are frequently expressed in topical allegories that parallel the moral allegory. In fact, Spenser more often refers to the contemporary world allusively, through momentary indications of a moral relationship between the poem and its political context. At certain points, particularly in the second half of The Faerie Queene, this concern for contemporary events and issues does grow into full-scale allegorization. But it is more accurate to speak of the historical dimension of Spenser's poetry, a term that includes the full range of allusion, satire, symbolic characterization, historical catalogue, and topical allegory.
The historical dimension of The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene derives from Spenser's ambition to be the acknowledged laureate poet of Elizabethan England (see Helgerson 1983). He wished his voice to be heard by those in power, especially the Queen. His celebrations of Elizabeth and his concern about her policies are of a piece with his desire to create a poem of moral engagement, concerned not only with private behavior but with a larger sense of England's moral and political identity. To a nation arrived at the edge of empire, Spenser hoped to provide a vision of accomplishment and possibility.
Because of the fragmentation of Italian politics in the sixteenth century, Spenser could not find such a vision in his Italian models, Ariosto and Tasso. The model for his engagement with history he found rather in Virgil, whose Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid are vitally concerned with questions of national identity and morality. Spenser's most profound debt to Virgil remains the latter's redirection of pastoral and epic toward history. What he found most attractive was the way Virgil confronted his age—and his ruler—with a complex vision of celebration and judgment.
Spenser read the historical dimension of Virgil refracted through the late-fourthcentury commentary of Servius. Though Servius sees topical allegory in the Eclogues, he describes the treatment of history in the Aeneid as purely allusive. Equally significant is his insistence that Virgil celebrates all of Roman history from the arrival of Aeneas in Latium down to his own day, but in a concealed and fragmented way. In this, he distinguishes Virgil's weaving of history into the fictional fabric of his poem from Lucan's direct representation. In describing the allusive nature of the Aeneid, Servius defines a relationship that can be most aptly called typological: Aeneas is both ancestor and prophetic type of Augustus; historical events are made to appear fulfillments of things caused or shadowed in the epic fiction, as Dido's tragedy stands behind the tragedy of Carthage. For Spenser the significance of such an understanding of history in the Aeneid lies in the model it provides of an epic typologically connecting fictional past with historical present. Virgil's example may also suggest why Spenser did not begin with topical allegory in the early books of The Faerie Queene but initially treated history more allusively.
In The Shepheardes Calender Spenser follows Virgil's precedent by directing several of the eclogues toward his own political world. Arguments have been made that the entire Calender is a topical allegory (most notably McLane 1961 who sees the poem as a multifaceted warning to the Queen of the dangers of marrying Alençon). But few readers have been persuaded. Certainly Aprill, Maye, Julye, and September are concerned in a primary way with contemporary issues. Aprill celebrates Elizabeth's rule through iconographic details that point to the peace and contentment of her reign. By placing the eclogue fourth, Spenser enforces the parallel to Virgil's celebratory Eclogue 4. The other three, however, are critical of Elizabeth's policies toward the church. In these pastoral dialogues, Spenser gives the interlocutors names that suggest contemporary churchmen; and by exploiting the gospel metaphor of shepherd, he is able to address such questions as Elizabeth's suspension of her independently minded Archbishop of Canterbury (Edmund Grindal, shadowed in Julye as ‘Algrind’) and depredations of church livings by venal courtiers (September). The political comment in the three eclogues grows increasingly specific until in September Hobbinol warns Diggon Davie to speak less plainly about the corruption from which the reader understands Diggon's prototype had suffered (102–3). Taken together, and in the context of the poetic coming-of-age represented by The Shepheardes Calender as a whole, the four eclogues show a poet determined to direct his work toward the public world, yet aware of the consequent dangers and difficulties. Also evident is the way Spenser moves between the poles of celebration and critical judgment in his engagement with history.
The historical dimension of The Faerie Queene, though more complex, remains true to this beginning. In the Letter to Raleigh, Spenser calls attention to the way Gloriana and Belphoebe are used to celebrate the Queen; Una, Britomart, and Mercilla also partake of such celebratory aims. Each book of the poem except the sixth contains a figure who mirrors Elizabeth in some fashion and ties the virtue in question to her accomplishments as Queen. The proems to the first three books in particular play suggestively with the idea that the attentive reader will discover the Queen in the fiction. FQ II proem 4 asserts that by following ‘certaine signes’ in the poem Elizabeth will find not only herself but a mirror of her ‘owne realmes in lond of Faery.’ But the poet also sits in judgment of his world; the poem is saved from becoming mere flattery by the moral scheme into which these celebrations of royal accomplishments are set. On occasion he will even hint at negative royal images, implying not so much satire as caveats for the Queen. One such example is the image of the proud and ambitious Lucifera, suggestively called ‘A mayden Queene’ and linked to images of the sun that Elizabeth also used (I iv). In FQ IV, he constructs an episode that advises the Queen to take the disgraced Raleigh back into her favor (vii 23–viii 18).
How exactly the poem reflects history has been a tantalizing question for readers. One consequence of Spenser's assertion that Elizabeth's England is mirrored in the poem has been the temptation to claim detailed and explicit allegorical connections. Indeed, several of the dedicatory sonnets appear to hint that prominent noblemen or their ancestors are to be found in the poem. In his Discourse on Satire (1693) Dryden claims that ‘the original of every knight was then living in the court of Queen Elizabeth; and [Spenser] attributed to each of them that virtue which he thought most conspicuous in them.’ In his edition of 1758 Upton makes specific identifications, though he generally considers them as more allusive than allegorical. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this tendency led critics to discover detailed historical allegories which were frequently more indebted to the learning and imagination of the writer than to the poem. (For Book I, for example, Lilian Winstanley constructed a detailed allegory of the Reformation under Henry VIII; see also *Dixon.) Later arguments for detailed historical allegories include Kermode 1962 and 1964, and Hankins 1971.
But it is important to consider whether the narrative surface of the poem does in fact gesture toward an historical reality beyond it, and how the narrative makes such gestures. What we discover in answering these questions is that the poem points toward history intermittently and then by means of particular devices. Sometimes the narrative will suggest a reference, particularly when a character is meant to allude to the Queen. At other times, an allusive name or an iconographic element will indicate the reference. Occasionally the reader is alerted by a curious narrative detail, as when the mention of ‘divine Tobacco’ suggests Raleigh (III v 32). Through such moments, the reader comes to understand that the historical world does not impinge constantly upon the poem but is rather an impending presence that in a general way pervades its moral reality.
Although Spenser did come to write historical allegory in the second half of The Faerie Queene, in the first three books the historical dimension is conveyed by allusions that point to a typological relationship between poem and history. Book I most consistently and successfully creates this Virgilian sense of a fictional world set in an undefined past which finds its fulfillment in the present. The Book of Revelation is the principal medium through which Spenser defines the relationship. He depends on the historical reinterpretation of Revelation by the Reformers, in which the symbols of the Roman Empire were redefined as the Roman church; in this way, he points to a specifically English fulfillment of the spiritual mythos of Revelation. Typically, when the pressure of the moral allegory is somewhat lessened, the poem will gesture allusively toward the contemporary progress of the Reformation in England as an analogous battleground of spiritual forces. Most of the allusions are concentrated in the reign of Mary, when England, like Redcrosse, strayed from the path of Protestant faith. For example, the narrative suggests that Una, separated from Redcrosse and driven out into the wilderness like the woman of Revelation 12.6, may be seen as a version of Elizabeth in her sufferings under Mary (I iii 2). Indeed, the name Una was used as a cult title of Elizabeth, alluding to her virginity. The effect of this relationship between Una and Elizabeth is to indicate the Queen's role in guiding England back from apostasy and despair to spiritual strength. The reader is thus to understand that the sacred archetype of Revelation is relevant both to the individual and to history.
In Books II and III, the historical dimension is more intermittent. Belphoebe is used in both books to connect temperance and chastity to Elizabeth's political character. In Book III, Britomart also bears a typological relationship to Elizabeth as her fictional ancestor; the stanzas that relate her progeny and her Trojan ancestry tie her to Elizabeth as a prophetic example of female strength (iii 21–50, ix 44–51). These historical catalogues and the one contained in the book Arthur reads in FQ II x are drawn from Tudor chronicles that themselves show the popular fascination with national history. In the context of the poem, the catalogues are concerned to demonstrate the tumultuous processes of history that will lead to the peace of Elizabeth's reign. Both Britomart and Elizabeth embody an historical discordia concors: Britomart early, fictional, prophetic; Elizabeth present, actual, fulfilling. In FQ II x, Spenser contrasts Arthur's Briton moniments with the idealized history of Guyon's Elfin chronicle; he thus indicates that the order of history the poem projects is an ideal held up to his age.
Spenser's method of treating history alters significantly in the second half of the poem. Here we find narratives specifically fashioned to reflect historical situations, narratives which can be properly described as historical allegory. The first of these portrays Raleigh's disgrace over his marriage and the deception he practiced on the Queen (IV vii 23–viii 18). In the earlier allusive reference to Raleigh, Spenser had portrayed the love of Timias and Belphoebe as a general and idealized image of the relationship of courtier and queen (III v 13–55). But in Book IV, the episode is clearly designed to comment on a specific situation, and its purpose is to plead the cause of Raleigh's return to favor. Such historical allegories come to dominate the poem in Book v, especially in its second half. There are many references to contemporary political issues in the early cantos (eg, the issue of monopolies in the episode of the tollbridge, ii 5–19, or the threat of insurrection in the Giant with the scales, ii 29–54); but in the second half, the primary purpose of such episodes (eg, the trial of Duessa in canto ix, the rescue of Belge in x, and Burbon's recovery of Flourdelis in xi 43–65) is to portray and justify particular events.
One consequence of this historical allegory is a blurring of moral focus in the poem. Since the fictional episodes are designed to reflect historical events, they tend to assume their morality from history. At its best The Faerie Queene moves on a moral and psychological plane in which poet and reader seem imaginative collaborators in interpreting experience. The allusive approach to history in the early books contributes to this collaboration, since contemporary events are admitted more as an illustrative adjunct to the moral dimension. But historical allegory appears to reverse the order and make history primary; as a consequence, the moral vision of the poem must wait upon the ambiguities of the actual world. Some readers have felt that the historical allegory, besides giving Book v a more apologetic character, diminishes the poem's imaginative vitality.
In its final completed book, the poem draws back from history. Unlike the previous books, Book VI contains no figure who represents the Queen. Though it begins by finding the etymology of courtesy in the word court, its narrative never comes close to portraying the Elizabethan court. It has been suggested that Calidore shadows Sidney or the Earl of Essex but in fact no heraldic or narrative details support such an identification. The allegorical core of the book, Colin's vision of the Graces, substitutes personal for political sources of inspiration as Colin begs Gloriana's pardon for singing the praises of a fourth Grace, his own love, instead of hers (in SC, Aprill, the fourth Grace had been Eliza). The historical dimension of The Faerie Queene essentially ends with Book v; in the final completed book, Spenser turns inward, away from history.
Among Spenser's minor poems, only Mother Hubberd's Tale can be said to have a significant historical dimension. Though scarcely his most polished or consistent work of political comment, it may well be his most daring. In its first two-thirds, the poem is a traditional estates satire and appears to share with The Shepheardes Calender certain political concerns, especially over the church. Some commentators have also seen in it a covert warning about the Alençon marriage, which would place it close to 1579. Yet the heartfelt lament about the trials of a suitor at court (892–914) appears to derive from Spenser's own experience in 1589–90; and in its final third, the poem turns into a beast fable which oddly redoubles the earlier court satire. Here the political cunning of the Fox is portrayed in terms that refer to Burghley, the powerful Lord Treasurer, with surprising boldness (1137–1204). The supposition that the Fox satirizes Burghley is strengthened by the contemporary belief that Complaints, in which Mother Hubberd was published in 1591, was ‘called in,’ that is, suppressed by the government; and it is true that the poem was not reprinted until after the death of Robert Cecil, Burghley's son. If the poem is Spenser's most daring piece of historical comment, it may also be the one he had most cause to regret: in the last stanza of FQ VI, he complains feelingly that some unspecified verses had brought him ‘into a mighty Peres displeasure.’ No peer's displeasure was less to be invited than Burghley's.
Cain 1978; Fichter 1982; Greenlaw 1932; Hankins 1971; Frank Kermode 1962 ‘Spenser and the Allegorists’ PBA 48:261–79, and Kermode 1964–5 (both essays rpt in Kermode 1971); McLane 1961; O'Connell 1977. See also the summaries of earlier criticism in the Variorum ‘Historical Allegory’ appendices.
Alma represents the immortal, God-given, rational soul that ‘doth rule the earthly masse, /And all the service of the bodie frame’ (IV ix 2). Spenser refers to her as ‘the soule’ and to her castle, the temperate body, as ‘the fort of reason’ (II xi 1). The immediate source of the name may have been current Italian usage: John Florio defines Alma as ‘the soule of man.’ It is both a poetical contraction of the original Latin and Italian anima, whose meanings evolved from ‘breath’ to ‘the vital principle’ to ‘the soul,’ and the feminine form of Latin almus, ‘that [which] norisheth: fayre: beautifull,’ as in the common phrase alma mater (T.Cooper 1565; cf FQ II ix 18–19; and see Florio ed 1611 and others from 1578 on).
The soul has been figured as a woman in Christian culture since the early Middle Ages, and so appears in Dante's Divine Comedy (Beatrice), the Middle English Pearl, Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), and, more recently, in Jung's concept of the image of the male soul as female ‘anima.’ Spenser's characterization of Alma as the much-sought-after virgin in whom heaven rejoices (ix 18–19), identifies the human soul as bride of Christ. His description beginning with her ‘robe of lilly white’ and ending with her head crowned with roses, suggests that virginity (the lily; cf Una in I xii 22 and Belphoebe in II iii 26) can develop its potential for both human and divine love (the rose, sacred to Venus; cf Belphoebe, III v 51).
The castle of Alma belongs to a long tradition of allegorical castles, such as the Castle of Anima in Passus 9 of Piers Plowman B-text (c 1377), and the castle in du Bartas’ Divine Weeks 1.6 (1578). Spenser describes it enigmatically in FQ II ix 22. In the earliest extended commentary on a single stanza of The Faerie Queene (1644), Kenelm Digby interprets the circle, perfect and without beginning or end, as the mind or soul; the triangle, imperfect and the first of the geometrical figures, as the body. The quadrate he interprets as the four humors uniting body and soul (choler, blood, phlegm, and melancholy). The proportions, seven and nine, refer to the created world (the seven days of Creation, the seven known planets) and to the immortal world beyond (the nine hierarchies of angels). It has been pointed out that these lines may be read ‘either as an architectural description of Alma's Castle or as a geometrical description of the human body, or as generally allusive arithmology, or as step-by-step instructions for a specific geometrical construction or arithmetical operation’ (Fowler 1964:260). The stanza may also convey an image of the universe—the lower regions, the earth with its four elements, and ‘the circle set in heavens place’—as well as of the music of that ‘worke divine’ with its three parts created as discordia concors ending in the great diapason.
Literally it is a castle; the primary allegorical reference is to the human body with its basic parts of legs (triangle), chest (quadrate), and head (circle), as the introductory stanza suggests in its celebration of the temperate human body (ix I; cf xi 1–2). As the subsequent description implies, however, the castle of Alma is not merely the body inhabited by the soul but also the house that is the soul, traditionally divided into three parts: the vegetable soul of nourishment and growth (the triangle of the lower functions), the sensitive soul (the quadrate of the breast), and the intellectual soul (the circle of memory, judgment, and imagination). Bartholomaeus Anglicus had earlier used triangle, quadrate, and circle to image the three functions of the soul in his De proprietatibus rerum (see ed 1582:14r).
The functions of the vegetable soul are presented in a simple tour of the castle (ix 24– 32). The terms of the description are concrete details that indicate their referents immediately: the lips appear as a porch, the mustache as a vine over it, the teeth as ‘Twise sixteen warders,’ the throat as a hallway, the stomach as a kitchen, and so on. The rather startling metaphorical juxtapositions create indirect humor which finally becomes direct, in puns on the ‘Port Esquiline’ through which waste matter ‘was avoided quite, and throwne out privily’ (32).
The functions of the sensitive soul are presented differently, in a single scene set in the parlor of the heart (33–44), where implications are conveyed by the characters’ actions and reactions rather than by static images. In a sophisticated courtly scene out of medieval romance, Spenser describes the diverse passions of the heart as dames and courtiers. Arthur and Guyon pay court to ladies and discover things about themselves. In an ironic contretemps, Arthur discovers that the lady he courts is Prays-desire, an image of the desire for glory that motivates him; in a similarly comic encounter, Guyon finds that his lady is Shamefastnesse, an image of the fear of shame that is at the center of his character.
Returning to description again for a presentation of the functions of the intellectual soul in the castle's ‘Turret’ (45–60), Spenser stresses not simple images or a scene but rather a set of generalized and abstract characterizations that call upon the heroes’ abilities to understand and make distinctions. The focus is on Alma's three counselors: the young Phantastes (imagination) who foresees the future (both true visions and lies), the mature unnamed counselor who comprehends present events, and old Eumnestes (memory) who records the past. Taken together, they suggest prudence, the practical wisdom needed to govern the body so as to preserve the whole in temperance by learning from the past, considering the consequences of action in the future, and judging and acting accordingly in the present (see Panofsky 1955:149–51).
The progress of Arthur and Guyon through the three regions of the castle of Alma suggests an education whereby they come to know their own souls, as they move from sensation to feeling to understanding, from youth to maturity to age. The three regions may also suggest the four traditional levels of exegesis of the Bible. The journey itself is the literal level. The vegetative region may represent the allegorical or historical reflection of things we know; the sensitive region, the moral sense of what choices we must make; and the intellectual region, the anagogical sense of what things mean in the fullness of time.
The castle of Alma may be contrasted detail-by-detail with the vision of intemperance in the house of Mammon in II vii (Nohrnberg 1976:327–31, 343–51). It should also be compared with the vision of temperance in the house of Medina in canto ii, where Medina frantically tries to keep the perilous mean between excess and defect. Alma's castle is the image of achieved temperance figured as the fitting together of parts (L temperare to mix equally): harmony among parts of the body, among parts of the soul, between body and soul, and between human and divine.
Barkan 1975; Hopper 1940; Jordan 1980; Panofsky 1955
A composite romance that describes the life and adventures of Amadis of Gaul and his descendants. Deriving ultimately from French prose stories about Arthur, a romance of Amadis of Gaul existed in the fourteenth century, but the redaction by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo (4 vols, 1508) introduced the hero to Spanish readers. When a fifth book, an original addition also by Montalvo, was published in 1510, a pattern was established. Other Spanish writers added further books. The romance grew in both size and popularity first in Spain and then, after 1540, in France and other countries until it finally reached 24 volumes and was known in most major European languages. Since the process of translation into English did not start until 1590, most Englishmen knew it in the French version which, because it added language and episodes from the Orlando furioso and other romances, is often quite different from the Spanish. Sidney, who borrowed the main plot of his Arcadia from episodes in Books 8 and 11, praised Amadis for its ability to move readers ‘to the exercise of courtesy, liberality, and especially courage’—even though it ‘wanteth much of a perfect poesy’ (ed 1973b:92).
Spenser's debt is much harder to establish in detail. The general features of Amadis and The Faerie Queene are common to many romance narratives, and both works draw upon a similar chivalric tradition. In addition both incorporate, in different degrees, elements of pastoralism and allegory. Many set scenes in both works are also standard in romance: the bed in Dolon's chamber (FQ v vi 27) has a counterpart in Amadis (3.6, 15.23), as does the seven-headed beast of Revelation (FQ I vii 18, Amadis 14.31). Since these and other parallels are common to romance narrative, they are probably best regarded as analogues.
Yet at least one part of The Faerie Queene suggests that Spenser read Amadis. The house of Busirane contains motifs of the wall of flame (III xi 21), the exposed heart (xii 21), and the procession of Cupid (xii 3ff). All three occur separately in Amadis but are found together in the episode of Amadis and Zahara (8.85ff). Despite a major difference in the outcome—the romance counterpart of Amoret dies when her enchanter is killed by Amadis of Greece—Spenser seems to have derived the idea and many of the details from Amadis.
Citations given above are to the books of the French Amadis, published as 21 separate volumes in Antwerp, Paris, or Lyon from 1548 to 1581. Book I has an edition by Hughes Vaganay (Paris 1918). See O'Connor 1970:287–9.
The Ancient, Famous, and Honourable History of Amadis de Gaule 1619 (Books 1–4; Book I first pub 1590, Book 2 in 1595) tr Anthony Munday (London); Al. Cioranescu 1963 L'Arioste en France (Paris); John J.O'Connor 1970 ‘Amadis de Gaule’ and Its Influence on Elizabethan Literature (New Brunswick, NJ).
At FQ II i 35, Guyon and the Palmer come upon the dying Amavia and her recently dead husband Mortdant beside a well or spring, with their child Ruddymane, who sits in her lap playing in the blood flowing from her self-inflicted wound. She accuses fortune and the heavens of injustice, commends her child to fortune, and bids him live and testify by his bloody hands that she died guiltless of any crime. When she was pregnant with this child, she informs Guyon, her good and beloved husband left on a knightly quest, in the course of which he was drugged by Acrasia and seduced into an adulterous liaison. Taking the guise of a palmer, and undergoing en route a painful childbirth in a wood, Amavia found a Mortdant who had ceased to reason and reformed him. Then Acrasia slyly gave him a drink designed to kill him when ‘Bacchus with the Nymphe does lincke.’ The pair departed in apparent safety; but on their way home, Mortdant happened to drink of this well, thus catalyzing instead of tempering the delayed-action poison within him, and fell dead, whereupon Amavia stabbed herself—from which she now dies. Guyon and the Palmer reflect sadly on this overthrow of reason by passion, they give the couple a pagan funeral (see *hair), and Guyon vows vengeance. According to the otherwise erroneous synopsis in the Letter to Raleigh, this vow is ‘the begin-ning of the second booke and the whole subject thereof.’ In canto ii, Guyon tries unsuccessfully to wash Ruddymane's ‘guiltie’ hands in the nymph's well. His explanations of why he cannot are ‘corrected’ by the Palmer: the indelibility arises not from any fault, either in the well, whose feminine shape and soil-resistant property originated in its nymph's resistance to the lustful Faunus, or in the blood, valuable as a ‘sacred Symbole’ of vengeance and of Amavia's innocence and chastity. Satisfied, Guyon gives Ruddymane to the Palmer and takes up Mortdant's bloody armor; they leave for the castle of Medina.
In part, Amavia's story exemplifies passion with such pathos as to enlist the passions of the reader. The reader then participates in Guyon's quest for its control by temperance. The reader is irresistibly reminded of original sin: the love triangle of Mortdant, Acrasia, and Amavia somehow refers psychologically to that inner conflict between concupiscence and moral law described in Romans 7, and typologically to Adam's fall (eg, Acrasia as conflation of both tempters, Eve and the Satan-serpent)—the original cause of this concupiscence as well as of the inherited guilt manifested in Ruddymane. These two biblical subtexts are connected both in their own exegesis and in the poem, particularly in the situation of Mortdant recounted in canto i. The four alternating evil and good forces that impinge upon him—Acrasia, Amavia, the cup, and the well (especially the first three as described by Guyon in stanza 57)—correspond to the four ‘laws’ in Paul's summary of his story (Rom 7.22–5). In terms of selfknowledge, Paul says he progressed (as does Mortdant) from happily oblivious intemperance to rational continence to realization of the sinfulness of his continuing concupiscence.
Of Mortdant (original spelling at 49) the etymology ‘him that death does give’ (55) was doubtless intended honorifically and chivalrically (as in ‘your dead-doing hand’ iii 8) but turns out to identify him as the ‘one man’ by whom ‘sinne entred into the world, and death by sinne, and so death went over all men’ (Rom 5.12; see also I Cor 15.21–2; and for Spenser's and E.K.’s paraphrase of both, see SC, Nov emblem and gloss). In addition, beneath Amavia's exculpation of him ‘For he was flesh’ (i 52), there may be a Pauline diagnosis of his inherent weaknesses (Fowler 1960–1). Since he does not literally give death to anyone (except proleptically to Ruddymane, ii 2, and allegedly to Acrasia, according to her heartbroken pose), it is Adam's fall which explains both his name and the charm, which resembles the curse of death on the forbidden fruit (Gen 2.17).
Psychologically, the cup has been identified as concupiscence, or involuntary evil desires, both because Mortdant's volition is played down by Spenser's saying Acrasia deceived him with a cup and because only in trying to be good does one become aware of involuntary evil. Mortdant's two sins thus reflect Augustine's reputed tracing of concupiscence to the Fall: ‘because man would not abstain from evil when he could, it was inflicted on him, that he could not abstain, though he would’ (quoted by Hugh of St Cher ed 1645, 7: fol 42 col 4 on Rom 7.9).
Mortdant is executed by the pure well either for an undeliberate and victimless sin or for a mortal one of which he has repented. Yet neither of these sins exceeds in gravity those of Acrasia's other lovers, whose punishment is to be metamorphosed into beasts (xii). As if to accentuate his fate by theirs, Mortdant too was temporarily ‘transformed’ by his initial adultery ‘from his former skill’ (i 54)—an Elizabethan synonym for man's specific faculty. His failure to recognize Amavia, dramatizing the drug's blockage of his reason, thus confirms that Amavia allegorizes reason. His impure death from contact with purity bears a physical parallel to Guyon's faint and apparent death upon emerging from Mammon's realm to the pure air (vii 66, viii 7, 13)—but one which does not tell us much. Only Paul's portrayal of law in Romans 7 as announcing spiritual or eternal death—not baptism, or a too-sudden reformation, or the virtue attainable by pagans, or the opposite extreme of insensibility to the erotic, or the female generative principle—can explain the death of Mortdant.
Amavia is at once an actor like Mortdant and a narrator. Her name can mean ‘I have loved,’ ‘she loves in order to live,’ or ‘[she] that loves to live’ (i 55), or ‘[she] who loves life,’ all of which point to the literal story or to her serving as an example of intemperate grief. Her initial speeches and her general role as a suicide for love imitate Virgil's Dido (Nelson 1963:179, 181), or the chaste Dido. Her painful childbirth in a wood while seeking her philandering husband imitates the similar plight of the mother of Tristram in Malory (Morte Darthur 8.1). But this is only part of her complicated and controversial symbolism. Her loss and reclamation of Mortdant recalls the Palmer's previous loss and recovery of Guyon, as Amavia herself points out, ‘As wont ye knights to seeke adventures wilde’ (50). In that Amavia literally acted as the voice of reason in reclaiming Mortdant and emblematically ‘wrapt [herself] in Palmers weed’ (52), she may exemplify the rational person and somehow reflect not only the Palmer but also such female personifications as Reason in Romance of the Rose, who offers herself to the hero, and Logistilla in Orlando furioso (6.43–6), who opposes Alcina, a prototype of Acrasia. She tries to redress the Fall reenacted by Mortdant and Acrasia; so reason remained more or less untainted by the Fall (Peter Martyr Vermigli 1583, 2: fol 223 col 2), constituting in its historical role as natural law the sole guide of mankind until the advent of Mosaic law (Rom 5.13–14; Geneva gloss; Luther ed 1883–1987, 56:315).
Although Amavia is doing everything for her charge that the Palmer did for Guyon, she cannot control him, for just at this point Acrasia deceives Mortdant with the poisoned cup—a reversal the Palmer never experiences. That Mortdant's reform under Amavia's tutelage actually causes this backlash of feeling illustrates the paradox of negative suggestibility noted even by secular authors such as Ovid (Amores 3.4.11; see also Metamorphoses 15.138) and Montaigne (‘That Our Desire Is Increased by Difficulty’), but treated extensively in Romans 7, where the law's ‘Thou shalt not lust’ actually revives lust. Besides this law, Amavia also corresponds to ‘the law of my minde’ and ‘inner man,’ which approves Mosaic law's prohibitions but is balked by ‘the law of sinne, which is in my membres’ (7.22–3, especially in Origenistic and Catholic exegesis of Romans, which stress reason and natural law). Her character as thus revealed vitiates her ‘reliability as teller inasmuch as she is undisturbed by, and seemingly ignorant of, concupiscence or frailty, even endearingly but insufficiently excusing Mortdant's first sin on the grounds that ‘all flesh doth frailtie breed’ (52); so reason and pagan ethics condone concupiscence. Her complacent tolerance is shattered by his death: even frailty is declared sinful by Mosaic law as embodied in the well, which in this regard ‘goes beyond’ classical ethics (Calvin ed 1960a:143, on Rom 7.7). In reaction, she accuses the heavens of injustice (i 36–7, 49–51).
In one way or another, Amavia's suicide fulfills Acrasia's curse on her (55). ‘Losse of love’ could mean either loss of the beloved, which goes with the ‘loves-in-order-to-live’ etymology of her name, or loss of the emotion, which goes with ‘she who loves life.’ Amavia's terminal mood, ‘hating life and light’ (45; cf 36), reverses her characterization as ‘[she] who loves life.’ One of Spenser's motives for giving his reason-figure this name is that its reversal might dramatize the confession of inadequacy which Augustine sees in the rationalistic ethics of the Stoics: although it pins its hopes on this life alone (‘loves to live’), it concedes that this life may frequently become so intolerable as to warrant suicide (City of God 19.4). Consequently, although Amavia first resists, she later shares and augments Mortdant's ‘Tragedie’ (ii 1). While we admire her, the way in which she wishes her child luck and abandons him to the mercies of the forest (i 37; she does not know that Guyon and the Palmer are there) seems unfeeling. (Similarly, the protagonist of Daphnaïda, in despair over the death of his spouse, ignores thei welfare of their child by irresponsibly contemplating suicide, 77–91, 442–8.) Such irrationality under pain identifies Amavia as mere reason, not the right or divinely illuminated reason embodied in the Palmer. Her grief is caused by Mosaic law without grace (here symbolized by the well), which leads to despair, to cursing God as the cause of one's own damnation (cf i 49), and sometimes to suicide (Luther ed 1883–1987, 42:133, on Gen 3.12). Thus Guyon's summary is faithful (omitting the well) to the end if not the beginning of Amavia's story: ‘passion...Robs reason of her due regalitie,/And makes it servant to her basest part’ (57).
Yet even Ruddymane is not so unqualifiedly innocent as Amavia (ii I, 3; cf i 37, ii 10). That she imbibes the poison of the cup, albeit innocently, is indicated not only by the curse but by Guyon's otherwise curious remark that she also drank the cup (ii 4). Because he goes on to refer to her and Mortdant as a single ‘senselesse truncke’ (4), presumably she did so through intercourse, suggested again by the converse metaphor of drinking as linking (i 55). This defilement by association, as by a venereal disease, seems to explain away her sins. The Palmer—reasoning from the well's acceptance of her blood when it falls directly into it (40) and her claim to innocence (37)—virtually equates her with the Virgin Mary insofar as her blood symbolizes another and typologically significant part of human nature, the ‘seed of the woman’ (Gen 3.15) which did not carry ‘blemish criminall’ (37), that is, original sin (transmitted by the seed of the man), and hence was able to produce in the Virgin Mary an Adamically innocent ‘seed,’ the avenger Christ. The link between this final typological and genetic role and her psychological one seems to lie in her association with nature (Fowler 1960–1:148)—more exactly, mankind's generative nature and natural law—whose corruption is frequently qualified as adventitious and imaged as a wound.
Ruddymane's name means ‘red hand.’ His literal birth was incommodious but acceptable to the nymphs (i 53); his recapitulatory second birth at the well with Guyon as midwife is condemned by the nymph as unclean. As a foundling washed, whether successfully or not, by a superior male figure and a nymph, Ruddymane recalls both Jerusalem in Ezekiel 16 and Bacchus in the Greek epigram also echoed in the lines ‘So soone as Bacchus with the Nymphe does lincke’ and ‘in dead parents balefull ashes bred’ (i 55, ii 2; Kaske 1976). The last two of Guyon's three conjectures about the stain's indelibility (ii 4) constitute two standard definitions of original sin (Fowler 1960–1:144). This child of Mortdant and Amavia represents mankind (see ii 2) tainted at birth by original sin (Rom 5.12–21, 39 Articles 9, Hamilton 1958b:157–8, Fowler 1960–1:144), as the well allegorizing Mosaic law declares. Since the well does nothing for Ruddymane but diagnose his state, baptism is conspicuous by its absence (cf Fowler 1960a:145, 147, Fowler 1960–1, and others). Just as the well's nymph, allegorizing man's original righteousness, rejects both Ruddymane and the lustful Faunus, who allegorizes both the Tempter and concupiscence (ii 7–9; Fowler 1960–1:146), so Mosaic law holds up this righteousness as an impossibly high standard and thereby serves only to condemn for having original sin both the concupiscent adult and the innocent child. In ii 10, there is nevertheless a note of hope based on Ruddymane's role as mankind. In a final reversal, amplifying Amavia's ‘testament’ (i 37), he is also declared to represent, to borrow Milton's phrase, ‘that greater man’ who escaped inheriting original sin by being born of an altogether chaste woman, but whose vicarious assumption of it (allegorized not only by Ruddymane's present stain on his hands but by his future donning of his father's bloody arms; see Piers Plowman B, 18, where Christ's joust ‘in Piers armes... humana natura’) expiates it for all the others (Kaske 1976:207–8; cf Evans 1970:119, Hamilton 1958b:158).
The religious works cited in this article and some other relevant medieval and Renaissance commentaries on Romans include Augustine ed 1957–72 The City of God against the Pagans tr George E.McCracken, et al 7 vols (Loeb Library); Augustine Sermones in scripturis 153–4 (PLat 38:824– 41); John Calvin 1960a Calvin's Commentaries: The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and to the Thessalonians tr Ross Mackenzie (Grand Rapids, Mich); Hugh of St Cher 1645 In epistolas Pauli in Opera (many eds through 1598) 7 (Lyon); Lapide 1627 In epistolas Pauli in Lapide 1614–45; Luther Genesisvorlesung and Der Briefe an die Römer in ed 1883–1987, 42, 56, Eng tr in ed 1958–75, 1–8 (Genesis), 25 (Romans); Origen Commentaria in... Romanos tr Rufinus (PGr 14); Peter Martyr Vermigli 1568 Commentaries [on] Romanes tr H.B[illingsly] (London); Vermigli 1583.
For Spenser, see Brooks-Davies 1977; Evans 1970; Fowler 1960a; Fowler 1960–1; Hamilton 1958b; Hankins 1971; Hoopes 1954; Kaske 1976; Kaske 1979; Lemmi 1929; L.H.Miller 1966; Nelson 1963; Spenser FQ ed 1965a; FQ ed 1977; FQ ed 1978; A.Williams 1948; K. Williams 1966.
The first direct reference to Spenser in American literature appears in Anne Bradstreet's poem ‘In Honour of Queen Elizabeth’ (1643), where her glory is said to be so great that not even Spenser's poetry can do it justice. A second reference, to ‘Phoenix Spenser’ in her elegy for Sidney in The Tenth Muse (1650), was dropped from the 1678 edition, an indication that Bradstreet had been made aware that Spenser was not the author of the unsigned elegy for Sidney in the 1593 anthology The Phoenix Nest (Crowder 1944).
Evidence exists that seventeenth-century Harvard students copied portions of Spenser's poems, and eighteenth-century Yale students were familiar enough with them for John Trumbull to have made Epithalamion the basis for a ribald parody in 1769. Late in the century, the influence of James Thomson led young American poets to experiment with the Spenserian stanza. One such attempt by Elihu Hubbard Smith, called ‘In Imitation of Spenser: A Fragment’ (1791), might better have been named ‘In Imitation of Thomson,’ for it combined the landscape detail of The Seasons with the Gothicism of The Castle of Indolence (Franklin 1970:923–5). Smith was the close friend of Charles Brockden Brown, America's earliest creator of romance fiction, whose enthusiasm for William Sotheby's translation of C.M. Wieland's Oberon, fashioned into Spenserian stanzas, caused him to call for a similar translation of The Faerie Queene to overcome the obstacle of Spenser's language (Brown 1805).
No such effort was forthcoming, however, and in 1817 the North American Review reiterated Brown's call by pointing to the need for a critical edition to elucidate the allegory (Gilman 1817). The significance of the article lies in its year of publication, 1817, a crucial one for the Review when its conservative founder, William Tudor, gave over leadership to the more liberal Willard Phillips who encouraged contributions from such romantics as Dana, Bryant, and W.E.Channing. Though willing to admit of the fatigue induced by a ‘steady perusal from beginning to end’ of The Faerie Queene, Bryant nonetheless proclaimed it the repository of a poetic language so perfect that it remained unparalleled (Bryant ed 1884, 1:152). His comments were part of a series of four lectures on English poetry delivered in New York in 1826, the first important study done in America on the subject. Later they formed the introduction to his anthology A Library of Poetry and Song (1871) which included five selections from Spenser. William Cullen Bryant was the only nineteenthcentury American poet of note to use the Spenserian stanza (James Gates Percival's Prometheus [1820–2] has not survived) and did so in just one poem, his paean of praise to his native land, The Ages’ (1821).
Spenser fared well in the 1820s and 1830s when American writers and painters sought ways to romanticize their country's natural landscape. The epithalamium pronounced by Samuel L.Mitchill at the 1823 opening of the Albany lock of the Erie Canal echoed Spenser's Prothalamion in its rapture at the wedding of the waters of the Hudson River with those of the Great Lakes (Colden 1825:60–1). Samuel F.B.Morse had studied with Benjamin West in England, and, influenced by West's Spenserian canvasses, ‘Una and the Lion’ and ‘Fidelia and Speranza’ as well as by Copley's ‘Red Cross Knight with Fidelia and Speranza,’ had produced ‘Una and the Dwarf for the art gallery that graced the Hudson River steamboat The Albany. James Fenimore Cooper's pictorial descriptions of landscape draw on the same kind of forest quality seen in West's ‘Una and the Lion’ and Allston's romanticized landscape in ‘Flight of Florimel.’ The strongest of these influences on Cooper can be found in The Pioneers and The Prairie (Krieg 1985).
From the best American critic of the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe, we have only the speculation that Milton's famed ‘darkness visible’ may have been suggested by Spenser's ‘A litle glooming light, much like a shade’ in FQ I i 14 (Poe 1836), and a left-handed compliment that excepted only The Pilgrim's Progress and The Faerie Queene from his general opinion of all allegories: ‘contemptible’ (Poe 1845a). At another point, he seems deliberately to misunderstand Spenser's meaning in Mother Hubberd 895–6 and 905–6 in order to justify revising the text by omitting the final comma in line 906 (Poe 1845b).
Before the first American edition in 1839, the unavailability of texts seems to have been as much a factor in Spenser's lack of popularity as were the perceived obstacles of his language and mode. The Transcen-dentalist educator Amos Bronson Alcott valued Spenser as a moralist, but was forced to send to England for copies of The Faerie Queene to use at his Temple School in Boston. About this time began the practice of publishing prose redactions of The Faerie Queene designed for children. The first and best of these was a retelling of Book I, Holiness, or The Legend of St. George: A Tale from Spencer's Faerie Queene (1836), by Nathaniel Hawthorne's future mother-in-law, Elizabeth (Palmer) Peabody, though published anonymously. In 1842, two such redactions appeared: Caroline Kirkland's Spenser and the Faery Queen, and John S. Hart's Essay on the Life and Writings of Edmund Spenser with a Special Exposition of ‘The Fairy Queen’ (see also *FQ, children's versions).
Through works such as these, the practice followed by the more privileged families in nineteenth-century America of reading The Faerie Queene in the nursery moved into the public classroom. There is little evidence that either public or private study did much to increase Spenser's reputation, though critic Samuel Gilman had argued ardently in 1817 that Americans—especially American children—should read The Faerie Queene as a form of mental discipline as well as for the pleasure it would yield. Gilman blamed his countrymen's inability to read the allegory on an impatience for immediate understanding bred by such things as childhood riddle books that present riddle and answer side by side on adjoining pages, and storytellers too eager to point out their moral. While his argument is well made, the relegation of The Faerie Queene to the nursery and classroom had the effect of placing Spenser beyond the pale of serious poetic consideration for many Americans.
When Little, Brown published The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser in 1839, the North American Review claimed that with this first American edition ‘Spenser is now universally acknowledged, both in England and in this country, to belong to the first class of poets’ (Cleveland 1840:175). In 1841, the New York Review prophesied that the edition ‘would elevate the literary taste of our country’ (8[Jan]:50). The editor of the five-volume edition was George S.Hillard, attorney and literary critic. His preface makes quite clear his intention, to eliminate the ‘learned rubbish’ of the Todd edition published in London in 1805 by paring the notes to a minimum. One democratic principle thus served was the reduction in price which had kept the Todd edition ‘quite out of the reach of a large majority of readers.’ A second democratic principle was served in the editor's ‘Observations on The Faerie Queene,’ in which he dismisses both the historical and spiritual levels of meaning, and directs his readers to the narrative and its characters, the true object of Spenser's interest, ‘a warm flesh-and-blood interest, not in the delineation of a virtue, but in the adventures of a knight or lady.’ Such feelings can be shared by all readers, Hillard claims, and need no interpretation.
The attempt at democratization was successful enough to warrant reprints of the 1839 edition in 1848 and 1853 before Little, Brown issued a new edition in 1855 featuring extensive scholarly notes by Francis J. Child of Harvard, who was just beginning his great work of collecting old English and Scottish ballads. This edition became the one favored by the more highly educated in America, while the Hillard edition was taken over by the Philadelphia firm of W.P. Hazard in 1855 and appeared only once more, in 1857, outstripped by the Child work which persisted through editions in 1860, 1864, 1866, and 1875. As the publication history suggests, Spenser seems to have been claimed not by the masses of Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century, but by the intellectual class. Except for Shakespeare, he was the most popular dissertation subject in Renaissance studies, with The Faerie Queene a clear favorite. The greatest number of these dissertations were written at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton (see McNamee 1968).
George S.Hillard became a close friend of Hawthorne in the year his edition was published, 1839. The coincidence and the edition reawakened Hawthorne's early love for the poet whose allegorical mode exerted a strong influence on his own writing and provided a moral structure for his fictions. Specific Spenserian themes and characters have been discerned in his works, as they have been, though to a lesser degree, in the writings of Melville, who shared his enthusiasm for Spenser but not his sensibility. Melville's ironic use of Spenserian themes often projects his own dark vision of an indifferent universe.
Neither Spenser nor the first American edition of his works can be shown to have had an important influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is possible that his interest in Spenser came about chiefly through his newly established friendship, in July 1835, with Amos Bronson Alcott, whose appreciation of Spenser as a teacher of virtues and morals seems to have influenced Emerson's judgment of the poet's worth. In the same month that the two met, Emerson borrowed two volumes of Spenser from the Harvard College Library and copied Hymne of Beau-tie 127–33 into his journal (Cameron 1941:25). These lines appear in his essay The Poet,’ written some time between 1841 and 1843, as evidence for the Platonic belief that ‘the soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches’ (ed 1971–, 3:14). A similar sentiment along with the same lines from Spenser was used in an 1837 lecture, The Eye and Ear’ (ed 1959–64, 2:264), and line 133 appears yet again in English Traits (1856) as an example of Platonic thought in English literature.
Disagreement between Emerson and Alcott about evaluating Spenser, whether to assign ‘poet’ or ‘moralist’ as his primary title, may be inferred from a journal entry of October 1835 in which Emerson muses on the modern reader's difficulty in imputing to a dead artist the precise high thoughts or emotions inspired by his art in others. Singling out Spenser and his allegory, he claims we hesitate to credit the poet with the meaning we ourselves find in it. It is unlikely that the hesitation was Emerson's. That Alcott's estimate of Spenser as a moralist prevailed over Emerson's appreciation of his poetic genius is borne out by Emerson's categorizing Spenser as one of the ‘Ethical Writers’ (along with Donne, Milton, Bunyan, and More) in a January 1836 lecture. Rather than a planned lecture on Spenser (fifth in a series of ten on English literature), he substituted a second one on Shakespeare, a safe substitution, since American audiences in general shared the feelings of their more literate countrymen that there was no more universal poet than Shakespeare (Krieg 1985a).
Emerson's public references to the poet thereafter were limited to paralleling Spenser's golden mean ‘Be bold, be bold...Be not too bold’ to what Emerson termed Plato's ‘circumspection’ in Representative Men (1850), and a partial reference in the late essay ‘Resources’ to Spenser's Wood of Error. Occasionally he entered a line of Spenser in his journal; and once, shortly after he had published a volume of poems in 1846, he indicates what may have been his true evaluation of Spenser as poet. Reflecting on the delight Spenser seems to take in his art for its own sake, Emerson turns to Muiopotmos as an example of the poet's artistry and compares it to that of a weaver who can confidently defy all competitors with the superiority of the art he alone can fashion on his loom (ed 1960–82, 9:453).
In an earlier journal entry that comments on the exhibition of paintings by Washington Allston in Boston during the summer of 1839, Emerson makes oblique reference to Spenser, linking his genius to that of Allston: both are ‘Elysian,’ lacking in emotion (7:222). This sentiment was shared by a fellow Transcendentalist, critic John Sullivan Dwight, in his review of the 1839 American edition of Spenser in the Christian Examiner (May 1840). Years later when Emerson edited an anthology of his favorite poems, Parnassus (1874), he included selections from FQ I, Epithalamion, Hymne of Beautie, and some lines from Mother Hubberd which he titled ‘Spenser at Court.’
Others among the Transcendentalists who made reference to Spenser were Margaret Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), where she extolled The Faerie Queene for its delineation of female character, and Henry David Thoreau, whose familiarity with Spenser is evident from his first published work, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) with its four Spenserian references. The first compares a New England scene to that described in FQ III v 39 (Thoreau ed 1968, 1:196). The second quotes the concluding couplet of Ruines of Rome 29 (1:264); the third occurs in a discussion of dreams that includes Spenser's description of the sleep-inducing environment in which Morpheus dwells (1:316); and the fourth, the last four lines of FQ II xii 29, appears as the epigraph for the final chapter of the book. A Week, the record of a trip made with his brother in the fall of 1839, abounds in poetic quotations, for Thoreau was widely read, especially in English poetry. The use of Spenser quotations beyond the more usual limit of FQ I might have some relation to the American edition published in the year of the trip. The record of the river journey was written during the two years Thoreau spent at Walden Pond, and his published account of that experience also includes some lines from FQ I i 35, which he claims he would be proud to own as the motto of his cabin (2:158).
While the quotations from Spenser do not indicate any real influence on Thoreau's work, they at least show evidence of an appreciative reading, and none of the ambivalence of a reader such as Walt Whitman, a self-proclaimed ‘rough’ of the America of the 1840s, who lacked the educational advantages of Thoreau and his fellow Concordians. In an attempt at self-education, Whitman kept notebooks in the late 1840s and early 1850s into which he inserted literary selections, articles, and his own notes. For a time he was interested in the English poets, including Spenser, and his notes betray mixed feelings of distaste for the fact that the poet had ‘danced attendance like a lackey for a long time at court,’ and of admiration for the way their author's ‘reverence for purity and goodness is paramount to all the rest’ (ed 1902, 9:77–8).
In 1888, James Russell Lowell published his book of essays on The English Poets, which included his 1856 lecture on Spenser. Here for the first time since Bryant's 1826 lecture was a genuine appreciation of Spenser from an American writer. Lowell's longsustained passion for his subject pervades the essay. His delight in Spenser's poetry and his awareness of how little it was known to his countrymen led him repeatedly to break off his commentary and insert huge chunks of the work under discussion. He completely disregards the worries of earlier Americans concerning both the allegory in The Faerie Queene and its difficulties of language. The allegory, he claims, can be set aside, as a mere poetic ‘fashion’ of Spenser's time; and the language is seen as proof of what Lowell deemed Spenser's greatest glory, the fact that it was he who brought to his native tongue a melody and harmony it had not known (see Lowell 1888:59). In his youth, Lowell produced numerous poems in imitation of Spenser, the best of which was ‘Callirhoe,’ later revised as ‘lanthe.’ His appreciation of the poet did not prevent him from parodying Spenser in his 1853 comic poem ‘Our Own,’ where a verse table of contents pokes fun at Spenser's headings to the books of The Faerie Queene.
Lowell's essay had little impact on a reading public caught up in the new enthusiasm for literary realism. William Dean Howells, the arch-realist who exerted great literary influence at the time, confessed in My Literary Passions (1895) that Lowell's praises made him want to read Spenser, but he found it impossible. Perhaps the deepest cut of all came from the gentle Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, who, in his preface to the 1876 anthology of favorite poems, Songs of Three Centuries, expressed a preference for Thomson over Spenser.
Disheartening though most of these reactions to Spenser are, it may not be assumed that little or no influence is to be found outside the works of Hawthorne and Melville. Spenser himself had located Fairyland on the frontier of knowledge when, anticipating the inquiry ‘Where is that happy land of Faery?’ he referred his imagined questioner to the ever-expanding limits of geographical knowledge of the New World (FQ II proem 1– 4), thereby suggesting that the regions of Fairyland, though yet unknown, might be discovered there at any moment. The efforts of the American pre-Romantics, Bryant, Cooper, and the artists of the Hudson River School to idealize the New World natural landscape caused them to follow Spenser's suggestion and to seek in landscape not only the picturesque and sublime, but moral qualities as well. For this there was no better model than Fairyland, where there was a direct correspondence between the physical conditions of the regions of faery and the spiritual condition of the individual soul. This same moral structure, though not always fully realized in the allegories of Hawthorne, brought him to the ranks of the most powerful writers of his century, and became a link between the romance tradition of English poetry and the prose romance as it developed in America.
Charles Brockden Brown 1805 ‘Spencer's Fairy Queene Modernized’ Literary Magazine 3:424–5; William Cullen Bryant 1884 Prose Writings ed Parke Godwin, 2 vols (New York); Kenneth Walter Cameron 1941 Ralph Waldo Emerson's Reading (Raleigh, NC) corr ed 1962; [H.R.Cleveland] 1840 ‘Spenser's Poetical Works’ (review of The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser ed George S.Hillard) North American Review 50(Jan):174–206; Cadwallader D.Colden 1825 Memoir Prepared at the Request of a Committee of the City of New York ...at the Celebration of the Completion of the New York Canals (New York); Richard Crowder 1944 ‘“Phoenix Spencer”: A Note on Anne Bradstreet’ NEQ 17:310; Ralph Waldo Emerson 1959–72 Early Lectures ed Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E.Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass); Emerson 1960–82 Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks ed William H.Gilman et al, 16 vols (Cambridge, Mass); Emerson 1971- Collected Works ed Robert E.Spiller and Alfred R.Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass); Benjamin Franklin, ed 1970 The Poetry of the Minor Connecticut Wits (Gainesville, Fla); Samuel Gilman 1817 ‘The Faery Queen of Spenser’ NAR 5(Sept) :301–9; Joann Peck Krieg 1985; Krieg 1985a ‘Spenser and the Transcendentalists’ ATQ 55:29–39; James Russell Lowell 1888 The English Poets (Boston); Lawrence F.McNamee 1968 Dissertations in English and American Literature... 1865–1964 Supplement I in 1969, Supplement 2 in 1974 (New York); Edgar Allan Poe 1836 ‘Pinakidia 67’ Southern Literary Messenger (August); Poe 1845a [Review of The Coming of the Mammoth] Broadway Journal 12 July; Poe 1845b ‘Fifty Suggestions 43’ Graham's Magazine 34(June):364; Henry David Thoreau 1968 Writings 20 vols (New York); W.Whitman ed 1902.
Spenser's figure for the married state of love, ‘goodly womanhed,’ in FQ III and IV. She is the twin of Belphoebe, the figure for virginity; and their initial relationship and adventures spell out Spenser's allegory of these two states which are the two extremes of his virtue of chastity. Amoret's story runs from her birth and early education in the Garden of Adonis (III vi) to her final disappearance in IV ix, although we do not hear Scudamour's story of her courtship until IV x.
Rescue and separation are key motifs in her adventures. She is rescued by Venus immediately after her birth to Chrysogone and brought to the Garden of Adonis (III vi 28–9); in the 1590 version of the poem, she is rescued by Britomart from Busirane's enchantment and reunited with Scudamour (xii).
With the addition of Books IV–VI in 1596, Spenser rewrote the ending of Book III: although Amoret is rescued by Britomart, she remains separated from Scudamour for the rest of the poem. The new series of her adventures in Book IV continues the theme of rescue and separation. In the opening canto, we learn that Busirane had enchanted her at her wedding to Scudamour, a development that casts a new light on her torment by Busirane in the last two cantos of Book III, which in the 1590 version portrays merely the romance motif of the distressed maiden finally restored in happy union with her true love. The complication of this motif at the beginning of IV alters her adventures, so that we learn more about her nature and are made aware of her marriage and of Scudamour's winning her from the Temple of Venus (IV x). Both events are presented as prior to her imprisonment by Busirane, and both are crucial to understanding Busirane's power over her. Nothing in Scudamour's remarks to Britomart before she enters the house of Busirane (III xi 7–24) indicates that Amoret is anything more than ‘My Lady and my love’ (II), although he does suggest that she has yielded her favors to him (17). Therefore the description of the marriage celebrations as the occasion of her separation from Scudamour (IV i 3) comes as a surprise, and her abduction is now to be seen as a violation of the sacred bond of matrimony. It is significant that we learn of this violated bond at the beginning of the Legend of Friendship, and that the last we hear of either of these lovers—Scudamour's story of winning Amoret—should represent an affirmation of the virtue. Amoret's adventures in Book IV are thus contained within the frame of her wedding and her wooing, and this reversal and fragmentation of the essentially linear story fits the fragments into an allegorical mosaic of the complementary virtues of chastity and friendship.
Amoret's birth is placed at the center of Book III, and her imprisonment by Busirane occupies its last two cantos. In both episodes, she is of less significance than the circumstances that surround her. Her miraculous birth to Chrysogone through impregnation by the sun is overshadowed by the circumstances of the birth. She is paired with Belphoebe but immediately separated from her by Venus, who takes her (as a replacement for her lost son, Cupid) to the Garden of Adonis, where she is brought up as the companion of Pleasure, the child of Cupid and Psyche. This Venus is the good Venus of the Renaissance mythographers: her association with a married Cupid and the fertile domain of the Garden of Adonis confirm that she represents married love in the poem. Up to this point, there is no possibility of judging Amoret's nature.
With the two principal episodes involving Amoret, those at the house of Busirane and the Temple of Venus (III xi–xii, IV x), the problem of interpreting her does arise. Her imprisonment has been seen as resulting from a fear of sex, which puts her in the power of Busirane, the abuse of love (Roche 1964). Alternatively, her imprisonment has been attributed to Scudamour's bold mastering of her in the Temple of Venus, his practice of ‘maisterie’ (Hieatt 1962). Both claims are based on moral and psychological interpretations, and neglect Spenser's allegorical characterization. Why Amoret learned so little about love, in either the Garden or the Temple, remains an unanswered question. That Busirane's power is both potent and awful and that he is the enemy of chastity is undoubted. In Book III, Amoret is defined by her allegorical surroundings: her miraculous birth, her adoption by Venus, and her nurturing in the Garden of Adonis tell us about her only through the circumstances of her placement; and even in the Busirane episode, she does not speak about her predicament until the enchantment has been broken by Britomart. Only in Book IV does she begin to take on any life as a character.
Amoret's adventures in IV repeat the theme of rescue and separation, and she is twice brought to a possible reunion with Scudamour. In the first, she wanders away from Britomart—‘faire Amoret, of nought affeard,/Walkt through the wood, for pleasure, or for need’ (vii 4)—and is ‘rapt by greedie lust’; in the second, she simply drops out of the poem with no explanation why she is not recognized by Scudamour (ix). This second event has been interpreted as a maddening narrative inconsistency—perhaps a moment where Spenser nodded—yet attention to the allegorical narrative may reveal an order that is not apparent from a literal reading.
In canto i, Britomart and Amoret ride along after leaving the house of Busirane, Britomart deceiving Amoret with her warlike male appearance, until they come to a castle where no knight may stay without a lady. A young knight claims Amoret for his own, and is defeated by Britomart, who then pities him, reveals herself as a woman, and claims her right as a woman to include him as her companion. Amoret and Britomart subsequently go to bed together. The episode is both ludicrous and serious in that it recapitulates the opening canto of Book III, where Britomart, again because of her disguise, misleads the unchaste Malecasta to her bed. In the interim, Britomart has passed from an unfledged woman in love to a woman who has experienced the house of Busirane and is now sharing her bed with Amoret, a figure of married love. Later in this same canto, Scudamour (who had been left behind with Glauce when Britomart entered the house of Busirane) is abused by Duessa and Ate with the information that the knight served by Glauce has gone to bed with Amoret (47–9). Thus an enmity is created between Scudamour and Britomart, to be resolved only in canto vi, where Britomart reveals herself both to Scudamour and to her own love, Artegall. The revelation of Britomart's true gender relieves Amoret's fears in canto i and Scudamour's jealousy in canto vi. When Britomart leaves behind her nurse in Book in and takes Amoret as her companion in the first half of IV, the exchange suggests a passage from childhood to maturity. Scudamour's complementary exchange, of wife for nurse, may be equally suggestive.
Amoret's final adventure with Britomart is at Satyrane's tournament for Florimell's girdle. After the other ladies fail to secure the belt around their waists, Amoret succeeds, but to no avail because the raucous crowd wants to award the prize to the false Florimell (v 19–20): chaste love is overcome by false beauty. After this disappointing injustice, Britomart and Amoret ride off again, to a chance encounter with Scudamour and Artegall, the latter still disguised as the Salvage Knight. On Britomart's victory and revelation of self, both Artegall and Scudamour are relieved of their false opinions of Britomart (vi 28–32); and at this point, where Scudamour and Amoret might once more have been united, Amoret has disappeared.
Her solitary sojourn is interrupted by Lust, who carries her off to his den. Here again the question of Amoret's responsibility for her own capture is offset by the inclusion of the young Aemylia, whose assignation with her squire has made her susceptible to lust as Amoret's actions have not. The distinction between the two women is further developed when Timias’ attempts to rescue and console Amoret are misinterpreted by Belphoebe, who asks ‘Is this the faith’ and flees (vii 36–7). Timias despairs at the loss of his beloved Belphoebe.
The episode has been interpreted as Spenser's depiction of Elizabeth's wrath at Raleigh's secret marriage to her lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton. Like the Queen, Belphoebe seems not to have made a proper judgment, as we, who know Amoret to be faultless here and a figure of married love in the poem as a whole, tend to realize. Since lust can be an external as well as an internal passion, we are free as readers to see that Aemylia must experience the internal passion and Amoret be, once more, the passive victim of an external Lust. The fact that it is her twin sister, unrecognized and unrecognizing, who destroys Lust adds an ironic nicety to Spenser's ‘defense’ of Raleigh's misdemeanor.
Aemylia and Amoret (for the last time) are rescued by Arthur (viii 19–22) who cures Amoret's wounds with some of the ‘pretious liquour’ he had presented to Redcrosse in I ix 19, where it is described as that ‘liquor pure... That any wound could heale incontinent.’ Arthur's intervention in previous books as a figure of grace signals that this liquor is grace to heal the wounds inflicted on Amoret by Lust and (inadvertently) by Timias. Aemylia will be restored by time (and by marriage in the next canto); Amoret requires divine intervention as a passive victim of another's misdeeming. Spenser is playing a dangerous game in this episode: he must justify his figure of married love, exonerate the undoubted indiscretion of Raleigh and his lady, and avoid the wrath of Elizabeth. Probably for this very reason, he shows Arthur, Amoret, and Aemylia all subjected to the venom of Sclaunder. Since the reader knows that Sclaunder's vilifications are false, Arthur and his two ladies can ride off to reunite Aemylia with Amyas. Again, however, just when we might expect Spenser to reunite Scudamour and Amoret (IV vi 36 or vii 4), she is no longer present; and at the urging of Arthur and Britomart, Scudamour tells his story of winning Amoret.
Scudamour's story is crucial for Amoret's existence as a figure in the poem. Some readers will see his ‘bold’ venture in winning Amoret as an enactment of the legend in the house of Busirane: ‘Be bold, be bold... Be not too bold’ (III xi 54); others will see it as comparable to Adam's need to draw Eve away from her watery narcissism. In any case, this is the last we hear of either one of these sad but faithful lovers; and even before we finish this story, Spenser pushes us into the even sadder story of Florimell, whom he has left languishing since III viii.
Florimell's story will end happily with Marinell finally coming to marry her (v iii). She has been imprisoned within the watery walls of Proteus’ house for seven months (IV xi 4), just as Amoret has spent seven months within the fiery walls of the house of Busirane (III xi 10, IV i 4). Although we cannot know what Spenser had in mind for the reunion of Scudamour and Amoret beyond the canceled original ending of Book III, his careful elaboration of the first part of Amoret's narrative, at the moment of Scudamour's winning her, suggests a conscious juxtaposition of the stories of these two loving couples.
(See ed 1912:561–84.) Spenser's sonnet sequence Amoretti and his marriage hymn Epithalamion were published in a single octavo by William Ponsonby in 1595 (Johnson 1933 no 15; STC 23076). The book was entered in the Stationers’ Register 19 November 1594, and Ponsonby's title page describes the contents as ‘Written not long since’ (only sonnet 8 seems to predate the 1590s; see L.Cummings 1964). Amoretti is a unified sequence of 89 sonnets; Epithalamion is a canzonelike poem of 23 stanzas and an envoy. Intervening between them are four light ‘anacreontic’ poems. Except for one of the Anacreontics, each sonnet and stanza occupies a single page, and the volume is visually unified by a decorative border employed throughout, though Epithalamion has a separate half title. The poems are recognized as Spenser's tribute to Elizabeth Boyle, whom he married probably on the feast of St Barnabas, 11 June 1594, the day of the summer solstice according to the Julian calendar then used in England. The biographical associations of the poems were closely scrutinized early in this century (Var 8:631–8, 647–52) but remain unchallenged.
Amoretti belongs to the popular Renaissance genre of the sonnet sequence, most influentially employed by Petrarch. Sonnet sequences or canzonieri (song books) are composed of separate poems (Petrarch referred to his as rime sparse ‘scattered rhymes’) which make their own dispersedness an emblem of the desolation of the suffering lover who composes them. In contrast, the epithalamium is a classical genre, one public and festive in purpose rather than private and expressive of personal grief. Spenser's imagination was perhaps the least naturally equipped of all great writers of sonnet sequences for the exigencies of the genre: to Petrarch's spiritually troubled meditation on the ‘scattering’ of his poems, he brought to bear a vision which was fundamentally inclusive. Thus Amoretti, though it pays homage to the convention of the suffering lover, is paradoxically a book made up of happy leaves, and it moves steadily towards the moment in sonnet 68 when the poet announces the fulfillment of his hopes.
In the classical marriage song, Spenser encountered a genre which rejoices in an integrated vision. Thus, while Epithalamion is still that Spenserian poem which appeals most intimately and concretely to its readers, it is also very learned and highly conventional. Written in an antique genre, woven with consummate skill into a fabric of personal, classical, folkloric, and theological allusions, the poem deals with two themes central to Spenser's imagination: the generation of life in human and divine love, and the relation between the mortal experience of change and the heavenly attribute of constancy. Here too Spenser transforms the convention, for the marriage hymn is not sung by the public and representative voice of priest or friend, but by the bridegroom himself, whose poetic gift is thus committed to the task of singing the mortal figures of himself and his bride into the sacramental bonds of what is ideally the most enduring of human social relationships.
The pairing of two such works in one book has puzzled critics, who for practical reasons usually treat them separately. But Spenser's linking a group of short poems with a longer one has precedents in both English and continental collections of poetry. The epithalamium by Marc-Claude de Buttet which provided Spenser with a number of verbal allusions (McPeek 1939:160–84) was associated with a collection of sonnets by a repeated motto celebrating the Amalthée in whose honor (if not for whose marriage) the poems were collected. Such graceful devices were made plausible by the convention prevalent since Statius and confirmed by Scaliger (1561, 3.101), that the bridegroom has suffered love's trials but is now to be freed of them because his obdurate lady has relented (as Medway at last gives in to the wooing of Thames in FQ IV xi 8). Sidney's epithalamium speaks of ‘justest love’ having vanquished ‘Cupid's powers’ (Old Arcadia 63.3 in ed 1962), and Puttenham begins his rules for the genre by contrasting ‘honorable matrimonie’ with the ‘vaine cares and passions’ of mutable love (Arte of English Poesie 1.26). The epithalamium as a form thus represents release after trial, amplitude after limitation (Forster 1969, Tufte 1970). In so doing, Spenser's chosen genre also—and by no means accidentally—fulfills the Book of Common Prayer's statement that marriage ‘was ordeined for a remedie against sinne, to avoid fornication, that such persons as have not the gift of continencie, might marry, and keepe them selves undefiled members of Christs bodie’ (BCP, eg, 1580).
Spenser extracts these possibilities from the convention, but he transforms them into a social vision by enclosing the smaller and more limited sphere of Cupid's activities represented by the ‘little loves’ of Amoretti within the amplitude of ‘justest love’ represented by the marriage hymn. In FQ III, Cupid usurps Jove's place: ‘Lo now the heavens obey to me alone, /And take me for their Jove, whiles Jove to earth is gone’ (xi 35). But here, as in a Renaissance triumph, the greater and more powerful form absorbs and transforms the lesser, a strategy which particularly lends itself to Renaissance theories about the relative status of men and women.
To achieve this, Spenser employs a design he uses recurrently: the moralized pageant of time. In The Shepheardes Calender, Colin's aimless wanderings in ‘the common Labyrinth of Love’ are expressed in twelve eclogues in order ‘to mitigate and allay the heate of his passion’ and ‘to warne...the young shepheards...of his unfortunate folly’ (Epistle to Harvey). These are ‘proportioned to the state of the xii. monethes’ by means of a seasonal cycle beginning in January, to show us that despite Colin's December despair the Christ-child's winter birth ensures our eventual redemption. In the Cantos of Mutabilitie, the pageant of the months is intended to instruct Mutabilitie in the principles of orderly change; Spenser's calendar there is the ‘year of grace’ beginning in March, the month of the Annunciation.
The workings of time are a subject of both Amoretti and Epithalamion. In Amoretti, time seems to be arrested as the lover suffers: ‘How long shall this lyke dying lyfe endure,/And know no end of her owne mysery: /but wast and weare away in termes unsure, /twixt feare and hope depending doubtfully’ (Am 25). In contrast, Epithalamion makes possible the lover's entry into time, as it celebrates his wedding day, that one day which is to be his alone. These counterpoised visions of time are presented with great complexity in the physical design of the two works (Hieatt 1960; Dunlop 1969, 1970). Alastair Fowler (1970b) has argued that the entire volume has a unifying design of 117 sonnets and stanzas arranged in a five-part pattern, A B C B A. These units are made up as follows: (A) sonnets 1–34; (B) sonnet 35; (C) the 47 sonnets from 36 to 82; (B) sonnet 83; (A) a unit of 34 made up of sonnets 84 to 89, the 4 Anacreontics, and the 24 stanzas of Epithalamion.
Even if the two works combine to form a coherent structure, each possesses its own pattern. The Lenten trials of Amoretti belong to the mutable world of the moon; its presiding deity is Cupid and its length is that of winter's 89 days, though the addition of the four Anacreontics yields the 93 days of spring. Epithalamion belongs to the sun and to the sphere ruled by Christ; it gives us the 24 hours of the solstitial day itself, on which the Cupid-poet and his untouchable Diana are transformed into an Elizabethan bride and groom. This elaborate scheme has precedents in the Augustinian-Pythagorean tradition of poetic design (see *topomorphical approach), and Spenser uses many such devices elsewhere in his poetry. Its details and significance are still being debated (eg, Kaske 1978), but its outline is firm enough to convince all but the most skeptical that Spenser's marriage book is not the miscellaneous compilation it has sometimes been thought. Once demonstrated, the design of Epithalamion is quite apparent; probably its secret was simply lost by later readers unsympathetic to the visual conceits of medieval and Renaissance poetry. The design of Amoretti is much less penetrable. Today, as possibly in Spenser's own day, it can be ‘judged onely of the learned’ (SC Epistle to Harvey), but in 1594 no more than two need have been in on the secret, for the problematic action of time is surely traced here for the edification of those most deeply concerned, the bride and groom.
For its sources, Amoretti draws on the standard topoi of the love lyric which originated in Horace, Ovid, and Propertius. Many of these had been transmitted in medieval vernacular and Latin lyric to the early Italian sonneteers. They were eventually assembled by Petrarch into a compositional repertoire which later European lyricists both drew on and enriched through their own study of the classical poets, of Petrarch, and of each other. While Spenser's debt to this tradition is evident, none of the poets on whom he draws most closely—Petrarch, Desportes, Tasso—is quite congenial to him. He rejects Petrarch's sonnet form outright, and employs—only to repudiate it implicitly—the psychic stasis of Petrarch's constantly reformulated canzoniere. Like other Elizabethans, Spenser exploits Desportes, but chiefly for his conceits. A recent reading of Torquato Tasso leaves its mark, especially on the later sonnets of Amoretti. Yet though Tasso's Platonism may have attracted him, Spenser's copiousness and the Italian poet's compact elegance remain in conflict. If his search for alternatives led Spenser as far as the ‘conjugal lyric’ of Bernardo Tasso and others, it left no evidence in Amoretti. The most lasting influence remains that of du Bellay, less on specific poems than in that seriousness of temperament which in the 1580s had drawn Spenser away from the paradoxes of amorous lyric towards the moral and philosophical tradition of the didactic sonnet represented in Complaints. Spenser's reluctant commitment to continental Petrarchism is not balanced by a significant debt to the native poets of Tottel's Miscellany and their heirs. Here as elsewhere, he creates his own vision of the possibilities of his chosen genre: he assimilates to the canzoniere echoes of the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, and the collects of the Book of Common Prayer, or of Renaissance Latin versions of Anacreon, and stubbornly resists conventions of the sonnet or sonnet sequence which conflict with the structure he is assembling.
Nonetheless, like all Renaissance sonneteers Spenser exploits standard topoi (fire and ice, the ‘galley’ sonnet, the solitude of the lover, the slanderer), and like them he shows the influence of rhetorical training, varying poems on the same subject for purposes of display (Am 7, 8, 9, 12, 16 on the lady's eyes), or juxtaposing variant treatments in order to effect some essential change in the pattern of the sequence (58, 59). He can take a conceit from Desportes, as he does in sonnet 22, and turn the resulting poem into a key element in his plan; and his treatment of Tasso can embrace both inventive variation and the homage of direct translation. The outstanding example of this assimilative method is sonnet 67, ‘Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace,’ which, at the same time as it pays tribute to Petrarch, Wyatt, Tasso, and Marguerite de Navarre (Prescott 1985), uses suppressed Christological echoes to enact the conquest of the beloved which the Petrarchan sonnet sequence otherwise so persistently defers.
The religious wonder with which Spenser contemplates the anagogic significance of his beloved (eg, Am 68), and the growing conviction of critics that a Lenten calendar is present in the collection, have lured some readers to interpret the sonnets as literally moral or liturgical; but in Amoretti as elsewhere, an essential feature of Spenser's imaginative universe is its capacity for structural irony and amused variation. Repeatedly the sonnets suggest the liturgical potential of an image, yet turn gracefully away from making it explicit. The result is a reservation of strength for the celebratory aspect of the poems, and an opening of the sequence to other kinds of association drawn from Neoplatonic love theory and cosmogonic myth. Amoretti is above all a smiling sequence: its opening poem announces happy leaves, lines, and rhymes, and we are allowed to suspect that certain conventions are being very lightly mocked, rather in the manner of sonnet 18, where the lady ‘turnes hir selfe to laughter’ before the abject spectacle of the lover's pleading (Bieman 1983). As a result, Amoretti is distinguished among sonnet sequences for its ‘goodly temperature’ (Am 13), that benign moderation of tone and absence of exhausting paradox which come from Spenser's modification of the sonnet sequence's characteristic lamenting stance by the celebratory purpose of his volume as a whole (Martz 1961). The title evokes the ‘legions of loves with little wings’ that lurk in the lady's glance (Am 16) or will flutter about the marriage bed in Epithalamion 357–9. It suggests a lightness and intimacy which is borne out by the gravely humorous wordplay in many of the poems and by the ideal of mutual love which they keep before us: ‘Sweet be the bands, the which true love doth tye,/without constraynt or dread of any ill’ (Am 65).
In the Petrarchan sonnet sequence (eg, Sidney's Astrophil and Stella), the lover engages in reiterated poetic lament for his lady's failure to accept a suit which he is wrong to press in the first place. But in Amoretti, the poet's love is virtuous; it seeks ‘to knit the knot, that ever shall remaine’ (Am 6). Instead of being tormented by an unworthy passion, the lover is afflicted by the puzzling juxtaposition in his lady of ideal beauty and obdurate cruelty. From one point of view, the poet's beloved is a sovereign presence whose light kindles heavenly fire in his frail spirit; in sonnet 7 he asks, ‘Fayre eyes, the myrrour of my mazed hart,/what wondrous vertue is contaynd in you,/the which both lyfe and death forth from you dart/into the object of your mighty view?’ In her radiant certitude, she descends more directly from Dante's Beatrice (Hardison 1972) than from the shifting and evanescent figure of Petrarch's Laura, though she is a donna gentile envisioned in terms of the systematic Neoplatonism of the late Renaissance. Yet in some sonnets, the poet attacks her with astonishing force; she is ‘more cruell and more salvage wylde,/then either Lyon or the Lyonesse’; she ‘shames not to be with guiltlesse bloud defylde,/but taketh glory in her cruelnesse’ (Am 20). Here the Petrarchan heritage of Amoretti becomes evident: the donna gentile is equally a ‘proud love, that doth my spirite spoyle’ (33) who wages unremitting warfare on her suitor in a remarkable hypertrophy of the ‘beloved warrior’ conceit dear to the Petrarchists. This obduracy becomes the chief problem her lover must address in trying to comprehend her significance.
The severity of such poems as Trust not the treason of those smyling lookes’ (47) is hard to relate to the wondering stance of other sonnets, until we realize that in Amoretti those extremes of amorous experience which another sonneteer would fuse in the paradoxes of a single poem are polarized in sharply differing sonnets. Here Spenser was aided by his own characteristic method of constructing sonnets. He early rejected both the Italian rhyme scheme with its dialectical structure and the English sonnet with its concluding reversal, in favor of an aggregative form devised by himself. Its pattern (abab bcbc cdcd ee) produces a cohesive network of interlaced rhymes culminating in a final confirmatory couplet. Employing it meant that instead of exploring the contradictions of love within single sonnets Spenser was more likely to dismantle the Petrarchan oxymoron and mingle sonnets praising the lady with others that sharply condemn her. In a Petrarchist sequence, the paradoxes of the individual sonnet have two results: a woven stylistic effect of timeless allusiveness, and an equally timeless situation of inner debate. The result is brilliant, but essentially static. By frequently deploying the Petrarchist contraries in different sonnets, indeed by giving us two conflicting views of the lady, Spenser forces us out of the stasis and narcissism of the Petrarchan sequence into a consideration of the problems of action in the situation itself. However static and fragmenting the convention of the canzoniere, he views it as a potential scene for moral action.
In Amoretti, both lover and lady are eventually engaged in this action, though only in ways which the convention of rime sparse will permit, for the sphere of Amoretti always remains that of frustration and mutability. Insofar as it is a Petrarchan sequence, Amoretti like hundreds of such collections represents the unchanneled diversity, the mutability, of the uncreative love in which poet and lady are struggling. But in the arrangement of the sonnets is hidden a paschal motif which silently points to the regenerative and integrative tasks before the lover. In Cupid's variable sphere, this redemptive scheme remains veiled, like the implicit Christological meanings of certain sonnets; but its tacit presence ensures the eventual rejoicing of the wedding day even in the conventional desolation of the concluding sonnets.
In sonnet I, the poet attempts to please his lady by offering her a record of his own endurance, the poems of Amoretti itself. Three sonnets at the beginning and three at the end compose a frame which displays the poems resulting from this courtship. The sequence begins in established conventions—the lover's address to his book, the onset of his affliction, the virtues of his lady—and terminates in the equally conventional sorrow in which his love must (in this case temporarily) conclude. A number of the poems are tied to dates in the church calendar for early 1594. In sonnet 4, the poet makes a New Year's Day announcement of his passion, telling his lady that his ‘fresh love...long hath slept in cheerlesse bower.’ This probably means he has loved for some time in silence, an interpretation borne out by his otherwise confusing claim later in the spring (60) that he has already been in love for a year. Now at ‘Janus gate’ he speaks of his love at last, inviting his ‘faire flowre, in whom fresh youth doth raine,’ to ‘prepare your selfe new love to entertaine.’ But between his first open admission of love and the Easter Day rejoicing in which God's blessing is called down upon the now mutually committed pair, lover and lady must become potential husband and wife. Thus at the same time as her lover frames the book which testifies to his trials, the lady must naturalize herself in the relationship of marriage. She must give over the ‘portly pride’ which her lover tries so hard to praise (5), and submit her as-yet-uncreative liberty to the ‘Sweet...bands’ (65) of human and natural love. The poet in turn must accept that the lady's seeming obduracy is not mere rigor but a sign of potential constancy. The disposition of the sonnets within the larger scheme of the whole volume represents emblematically this shared process of discovery.
Perceiving the arrangement of Amoretti's sonnets requires three kinds of information which writers and readers in Renaissance England would ordinarily have possessed. First is a willingness, arising in their schoolroom experience of rhetorical composition, to accept that repetition, pairing, and deliberate inversion of poetic elements may advance the reading of a work as effectively as pure narrative (which is rare in sonnet sequences in any case), Second is a knowledge of the 30-year almanac which regularly appeared in editions of the Book of Common Prayer from the 1560s on. Thus, sonnet 62, seemingly a New Year's poem like sonnet 4, refers rather to Lady Day, 25 March, which the Prayer Book informed churchgoers is ‘the same day supposed to be the first day upon which the worlde was created, and the day when Christ was conceived in the wombe of the virgin Marie’ (BCP). If consecutive dates are assigned to the sonnets preceding and following, Spenser's Easter sonnet (68) falls on 31 March, which was Easter Day in 1594, and sonnet 22, ‘This holy season fit to fast and pray,’ falls on 13 February, Ash Wednesday (Dunlop 1969). Amoretti also owes to the almanac its groupings of eighteen sonnets; as well as being the golden number for 1594, eighteen was the ‘epactal’ number for that year, indicating that the moon was in the eighteenth year of the cycle which every nineteen years brings its shorter circuit into congruence with that of the sun (Brown 1973). Thus the Prayer Book and its almanac offered Spenser three interlocking calendars, one beginning on I January, the second the lunar year beginning on 1 March, and the third the ‘year of grace’ beginning on 25 March.
Finally, the January-to-June calendar of Amoretti represents the half-year round comprising the events connected with the Lord's birth, life, resurrection, and death, from Christmas Day to Corpus Christi. In medieval times this bifurcation was emphasized by the way the liturgical calendar seemed to fall into two parts, an ‘active’ one concerned with the extremes of sacred and profane drama, and the more secular period (harvest time in Europe) from Trinity Sunday to Advent, which was without special symbolic coherence (Phythian-Adams 1972). The interplay between the calendars in the almanac in Spenser's Prayer Book, and this deeply rooted awareness of the ceremonial pace of the year's religious observances, offered opportunities the Spenserian imagination could hardly have resisted.
Within the larger pattern it shares with Epithalamion, the Amoretti sequence thus appears to constitute a triptych of ‘scattered rhymes,’ each panel of which exploits the intricate relationship of these calendars in various ways. The first panel is composed of the three introductory sonnets followed by the eighteen which precede the Lenten sonnet 22. The concluding panel opens with the eighteen rejoicing sonnets which begin on Easter Day and closes with three conventional sorrowful poems. In the central panel of 47, each poem represents, in a general way, a day in Lent of 1594, and thus a moment in the lovers’ Lenten preparation of themselves for a new life. The groups of eighteen keep before us the image of the moon, symbol of the female principle in Spenser's cosmogony, which in Epithalamion will be replaced by that of the sun's cycle, image of the male principle. Finally, it has recently been noted that the 89 sonnets are equal in number to the 89 readings provided by the Prayer Book for the Sundays and holy days of the ecclesiastical year (Prescott 1985).
Some useful but still inconclusive work has been done to refine this pattern, which has been regarded with healthy skepticism (G.K.Hunter 1973, 1975; Kaske 1978). But the lapidary gesture with which Spenser mirrors the central 47-unit block of the Amoretti-Epithalamion design within Amoretti itself, though using a different set of poems, suggests that the sequence (and one might extend this to the book as a whole) expresses the Renaissance interest in harmonic ratios. The collection is like a fretted fingerboard or a scale: Spenser ‘perceives a length to be tabulated in terms of duplicated intervals. Pause at such and such a point on this length, and the remaining length is charged with analogous proportions’ (Nohrnberg 1976:71). In this sense of harmonious proportion, obscured here by the struggle of the lovers, the joy of the wedding day will in due course openly express itself.
In the eighteen sonnets which follow his January declaration, the poet works that series of variations on the contrasted themes of the lady's sovereign virtue and her obstinacy which enables him both to praise her excellence and yet create an impasse between the lovers: ‘With such strange termes her eyes she doth inure,/that with one looke she doth my life dismay:/and with another doth it streight recure,/her smile me drawes, her frowne me drives away’ (Am 21). In this, the lover's perceptions— changeable and various like those of all Petrarchan lovers—resemble Spenser's Mutabilitie, who will be instructed by Nature on the right relationship between change and steadfastness: the variability of earthly things is in fact a dilation of being which ultimately works their ordained perfection (FQ VII vii 58). But at this point the lover is in the situation of Cupid's victims as they are described in Hymne of Love, ‘languishing like thrals forlorne’ (136). In that hymn, Spenser outlines clearly the process which a lover must undergo to be worthy of his lady; it recapitulates in simple form much standard Renaissance love theory, as the lover is first depicted in confusion and sorrow and then, in the ‘hard handling’ (163) to which Cupid and the lady's obduracy subject him, learns the steadfastness which distinguishes true lovers.
‘For things hard gotten, men more dearely deeme’ (HL 168). In Amoretti 22 (the number signifies temperance), the poet makes an Ash Wednesday vow: he will ‘builde an altar to appease her yre:/and on the same my hart will sacrifise,/burning in flames of pure and chast desyre.’ This poem and this vow initiate the central panel of Spenser's triptych, an exploration of the ‘lyke dying lyfe’ of Lenten denial in which the lover wanders ‘carefull comfortlesse,/ in secret sorow and sad pensivenesse’ (25, 34). In the series of 40 sonnets that includes 23–62 (one for each of the fasting days of Lent, and for each of the poet's pretended 40 years), the Petrarchan contraries are exhausted in the attempt to reconcile them. ‘Sweet warriour when shall I have peace with you?’ sonnet 57 asks in open homage to Petrarch's famous oxymoron; ‘High time it is, this warre now ended were.’ The poet's struggles in these poems are intimately linked with the incompleteness of vision which is the central problem of the repeated sonnet 35 and 83, the keystones of the design that Fowler argues unites Amoretti with Epithalamion. The two sonnets mirror each other in an emblematic representation of the fruitless self-contemplation of the Narcissus-figure who is the subject. Like Narcissus, the lover starves in the midst of plenty, and the impasse that separates the lovers is thus an insult to Creation: ‘What then remaines but I to ashes burne,/and she to stones at length all frosen turne?’ (Am 32).
Within the paschal design, however, the assurance of rebirth is implicit; we have heard its note in the confident persistence of the lover's voice (which recalls the exhortations of the Song of Solomon) and seen its plentitude in the copiousness with which pairs of sonnets transmute affliction into joy (see Nohrnberg 1976:68–71). Sonnets 58 and 59 form just such a pair, which begins the restoration of the lover's fortunes by contrasting two views of the beloved's seeming pride. In sonnet 58, she is reminded, ‘Weake is th'assurance that weake flesh reposeth/In her owne powre, and scorneth others ayde’: pride is seen here as an obstacle to the shared condition of a happy union. But in sonnet 59, this theme is converted rhetorically to its benign opposite: narrow pride is transmuted into a steady constancy ‘that nether will for better be allured,/ne feard with worse to any chaunce to start.’ This poem is a version of the conventional galley sonnet, and here as elsewhere Spenser deliberately transforms the reader's expectations by turning an accustomed motif to an unexpected purpose.
Sonnet 60 is a key poem in assessing both the design and tone of Amoretti. At this critical point, when struggle is giving way to knowledge, Spenser distances the experience with an amusing conceit: as a lover in servitude, he occupies the planetary sphere of Cupid, whose imaginary cycle, ‘by that count, which lovers books invent,’ is 40 years long. In Epithalamion, the fanciful sphere of the god of love will give way to the actual sphere of the Ptolemaic cosmos; and the agonizingly slowed time perceived by the suffering lover to the majestic regularity of the real time of his wedding day. But all this is deftly done; here, at this crucial moment of transformation, as later in the Anacreontics and in the ‘consummation’ stanza of Epithalamion, Spenser smiles.
The metamorphosis of cruelty into constancy clears the way for the poet's recognition in sonnet 61 that his beloved's rigor is to be explained by her anagogic function. In this poem, the woman of stone is transformed into The bud of joy, the blossome of the morne,’ and her lover from the ashes of fruitless desire into a man who can humbly admit, ‘Such heavenly formes ought rather worshipt be,/then dare be lov'd by men of meane degree.’ There follows sonnet 62, with its ‘shew of morning mylde... betokening peace and plenty to ensew,’ a March New Year which cancels the suffering begun in January.
The implications of this new beginning are apparent in sonnet 63, where the poet announces that ‘After long stormes and tempests sad assay... I doe at length descry the happy shore.’ The galley-sonnet conceit is identical to that in sonnet 59; that it should be repeated to another purpose stresses the oneness towards which the lovers must move. Yet Spenser's design is not all duplication; part of the charm of Amoretti is the grace with which the upward movement of the lover's education in resolving contradictory aspects of his beloved is countered by the downward movement in which this numinous and transcendent figure is eventually naturalized in the sublunary orbit which an obedient bride must occupy. Spenser's problem here is also a concern of FQ III: the lady's fear to marry lest she lose her liberty (Kaske 1978). In sonnets 61–7, the lady is thus invited to share in the lover's earlier discovery of humbleness. He is both her guide and her prefiguration in this task, which culminates in sonnets 66 and 67. Coordinated with Good Friday and Holy Saturday in Spenser's calendrical scheme, these poems are triumphs of an art which can convey a liturgical subtext while at the same time preserving an elegant secular surface. In sonnet 66, the lady's incarnation of her love in the meanness of the poet's darkness is seen (in consonance with his treatment of permanence and change in FQ VII) as a ‘dilation’ of her light. In sonnet 67, a magisterial variation on the topos of the hind inherited from Petrarch and his epigones, Spenser invokes Psalm 42, ‘As the hart braieth for the rivers of water,’ to portray his lady entering of her own free will into the relationship which he will hymn with such joy in the ensuing Easter sonnet. There, all contradiction will be resolved in the lovers’ mutual vow. And the lines with which that poem ends are those which will begin the Communion on St Barnabas’ Day, the day of their marriage (Kaske 1977).
Despite the lovers’ Lenten trial of endurance, Amoretti is thus almost devoid of the Augustinian tension that the sonnet sequence inherited from Petrarch. Though it plays freely with Petrarchan conceits, they are means to an end, and much the same is true of its Neoplatonism as well. Spenser persistently ‘salvages’ negative topoi—the galley sonnet, spring solitude, the hind escaped—in order to give them integrative power. This inclusiveness operates at every level, from the interwoven calendars of its springtime chronicle, to the gesture in which the lover's education is made to include that of his lady, to the letters of ‘Elizabeth’ he praises in sonnet 74, which unite under one name the poet's Queen, mother, and bride.
In the rejoicing sonnets which follow his Easter hymn, Spenser rewrites a series of notable topoi so as to produce this sense of integration. One of these is the Spider and the Bee poem (71), which answers more constructively to its earlier version in sonnet 23. Another is sonnet 70, ‘Fresh spring the herald of loves mighty king,’ where the conventional sorrows of the lover, desolate amidst verdant nature, are set aside in favor of a joyous invitation to ‘pluck the day.’ Yet here the beloved is bidden not to Hymen's masque, which lies before her in Epithalamion, but ‘to wayt on love amongst his lovely crew,’ which, however charmingly put, reminds us of the fearful masque of Cupid in FQ III and Amoret's imprisonment by Busirane. In sonnet 72, the image of the poet's ‘fraile fancy fed with full delight,’ which ‘doth bath in blisse and mantleth most at ease,’ actually disrupts the celebratory mood of the sonnets around it, for fancy or imagination is the weakest of the faculties in Renaissance psychology. A note of sensuality crops up in the two sonnets on the lady's breasts (76, 77), and in others (75, 78, 79) images of her are first suggested and then canceled in a thoughtful revision which signals the poet's awareness that a state of being beyond the ‘harts astonishment’ of sonnet 81 awaits him.
In many of these poems, there is an uneasy balance between the desire for sexual fulfillment and the knowledge that it cannot yet take place. Thus in sonnet 83 we meet with the Narcissus poem again, a reduplicative token of the perilous balance which must be maintained during the state of betrothal. The poet is much aware of this, as he shows in sonnet 84: ‘Let not one sparke of filthy lustfull fyre/breake out, that may her sacred peace molest.’ In the concluding sonnets of the sequence, even this nervous balance is disrupted. The ‘Venemous toung, tipt with vile adders sting’ (86)—the slanderer who figures in much courtly poetry (cf Sclaunder, Blatant Beast)—makes his appearance, that necessary serpent in the poet's Eden who symbolically unleashes the destructive force of sexuality misapprehended, as well as intruding the problematic question of society into the lovers’ solipsistic world (DeNeef 1982:74–6). Three final poems, all variations on the topos of the lover's solitude, express the inevitable sense of loss which results. In completing the frame initiated by sonnets 1–3, they signal the three lunar months between 31 March and II June and, by their insistence on the need for a meditative space between betrothal and marriage, recall the three months Britomart and Artegall are required to wait before their nuptials (Brown 1973).
In FQ IV, Florimell is imprisoned in a seagirt dungeon by Proteus, who has failed to move her ‘constant mind’ to love; she languishes for love of Marinell, who will not have her: There did this lucklesse mayd seven months abide,/Ne ever evening saw, ne mornings ray,/Ne ever from the day the night descride,/But thought it all one night, that did no houres divide’ (xi 2, 4). Here the psychic imprisonment of fruitless love is equated with the absence of time. In contrast, the love of Venus and Adonis is time-full; it endures perpetually because Adonis, father of all forms, is ‘eterne in mutabilitie’ (III vi 47). Amoretti captures both these aspects of Spenser's mythopoeia. As the ‘scattered rhymes’ of a never-satisfied lover, its stasis exemplifies the aimless diversity of a love which, however idealistic, is still incomplete. That completeness will come only when constancy can both contain and transcend the mutable nature of ‘cruell love’ in the creation of true concord (Epith 317; Tufte 1970), and the eternal and the temporal inform and act through each other. In Amoretti, this possibility is foreshadowed in the paschal calendar veiled in the diversity of ‘little loves’ which are the poems. But in Epithalamion, the concord of temporal and eternal is fully revealed in an emblematizing which takes the very form of that most ‘timely’ of days, when the sun seems to stand still.
An important instrument of this process is the generic transformation which moves us as readers from sonnet sequence to wedding hymn. In Amoretti and Epithalamion, two works separate in themselves yet united in purpose are made to contemplate each other in a structural chiasmus: Italianate posed against classical, moon against sun, trial against fulfillment. The central bridging term is the mischievously light, but nonetheless metamorphic Anacreontics, for all of which except the first Spenser has sources in French poetry or Anacreon himself. In the first epigram, the poet, made bold by Cupid, is stung when he searches a hive for honey; in the second, chaste Diana exchanges one of her darts for Cupid's, and the god of love wounds the poet's lady with it. In the third, Cupid mistakes the poet's beloved for his mother, Venus. In the fourth, a diminutive fable in six stanzas, cruel Cupid, despite his mother's amused advice, tries to capture a bee and is stung for his hardihood. This genuinely funny poem has a powerfully erotic conclusion: Venus heals the wound with salve and bathes the miscreant ‘in a dainty well/the well of deare delight.’ But Cupid, restored, succeeds in wounding the poet, who now pines in anguish awaiting the appeasement of his passion. These poems recapitulate unresolved elements in Amoretti, the paralysis of the lovestruck poet and the similarly inactive chastity of the lady (figured here as the lunar goddess, Diana). Typically, Spenser introduces images (honey, salve, well) which can be vested with a biblical meaning but here seem erotic because any other significance is obscured by physical frustration.
The centering of a source of erotic tension at an important structural point in the volume is not unlike the placing of the Garden of Adonis ‘in the middest’ of FQ III. The poems make clear that the lover's suffering is necessary to his eventual bliss (Miola 1980), and they also bring into the open the not-yet-explicit sexuality of the contract between the Spider and the Bee in a way appropriate to the anticipation of the betrothal period (Kaske 1978). Indeed, within the epigrams themselves a process of recapitulation and dismissal can be seen, as the immature lover and unmoved maiden of the first and second epigrams are transformed in the third and fourth into the Venus and Cupid of erotic allegory. In the Latin epithalamia of Statius and Claudian, Venus and Cupid play important roles in bringing about marriages. Catullus also mentions Venus, but he observes that without Hymen, god of marriage, she can take no pleasure ‘such as honest fame may approve’ (61.62). The erotic allegory of the Anacreontics, this would suggest, has a dual role: it acknowledges the incitements of the goddess of love and her errant son, but in the diminutive scale of the poems, their hilarity and postponement of closure prepare us for the necessary subordination of Venus and Cupid to Hymen. ‘Anacreontics’ were perceived as poems in which care is banished. By their recapitulation of the lover's woes in a deliberately objectifying tone of amusement, these little fables both admit and dismiss the sorrows of love; and their transforming laughter prepares us for the joy of the wedding day, which after this brief interlude now awaits us.
In Amoretti, the stasis and timelessness of the sonnet sequence is equated with uncreating love and Cupid's limited sphere. In order to have meaning, the act of generation must be framed within the concentric spheres of society, nature, the aesthetic theophany of the Muses and Graces, and finally the Christian heaven (Greene 1957). Thus, when Epithalamion is joined to Amoretti, timeless struggle gives way to ‘endlesse matrimony’ (Epith 217), and we hear and see the full diapason of Spenser's harmonic scheme, made accessible at last by the social and religious act in which erotic love is consecrated to the earthly life and spiritual destiny of the lovers. These large considerations are framed in a poem whose appeal is the instantaneous and delightful one evoked by the ordinary pleasures of a midsummer wedding in a small provincial place.
The sources of Epithalamion lie deep in Spenser's own development. Many of his poems constitute preliminary exercises (Hallett Smith 1961) for this masterpiece: the lost Epithalamion Thamesis (which may survive in the marriage of Thames and Medway in FQ IV xi), the Aprill eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, the betrothal of Una and Redcrosse in FQ I xii. Perhaps from the confidence of long experiment, Spenser's use of his literary sources in Epithalamion is direct and appreciative in contrast with the reserve with which he had approached the Petrarchan canzoniere in Amoretti. With strength of purpose and eclectic method, he draws on the full range of classical, Neo-Latin, and French epithalamia. Like Catullus (61), he calls up the ritual of the wedding day; and the English poem catches the same combination of genial good humor and ceremonial awe as the Roman. Like Statius’ Stella (Silvae 1.2), the bridegroom is a poet. As in Statius and in Claudian's Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria, the supporting mythological personages give the poem a cosmogonic dimension which modifies Catullus’ festal abandon. Finally, like his French near-contemporary Buttet, Spenser associates his epithalamium with a sonnet sequence.
But there are changes as well, such as the restriction of Venus and Cupid to the miniature arena of the Anacreontics. The epithalamic poet is conventionally a spokesman for society, who invokes the events and ceremonies of the day like the arranger of a masque. Spenser makes poet and bridegroom one: ‘Helpe me mine owne loves prayses to resound,’ he begs those Muses who had earlier aided him to lament (Teares 1, 49–52). The bridegroom is thus at once social voice and subjective presence, organizer of Hymen's masque and one of its central participants. Classical and Renaissance epithalamia usually celebrate the union of noble houses, though Puttenham had already imagined a bourgeois setting. In Spenser, the couple is an ordinary gentleman and his lady, and the celebrations take place not in a palace but amidst the rural scenes of Spenser's Ireland, perhaps Kilcolman, Cork, or Youghal. In earlier epithalamia, the pleasures of the bedded pair are enthusiastically anticipated in fescennine allusions; and with greater propriety, the poet also looks forward to the princely child who will be born of their union. In Spenser, conjugal pleasure is never doubted, and the poet asks less for a personal heir than for ‘a large posterity,/Which from the earth, which they may long possesse’ may eventually ‘heavenly tabernacles there inherit,/Of blessed Saints for to increase the count’ (417–23).
By transforming his model in these ways, Spenser provides Epithalamion with the basis of a typological structure. As poet he is Orpheus, who mastered nature with his harmonies; as ordinary Elizabethan he is Adam, our earthly progenitor. As spiritual being he typifies Christ, his marriage ‘signifying unto us the mistical union that is betwixt Christ and his Churche’ (BCP and see Allman 1980), and reminding us of the ultimate spiritual significance of generation itself. This typological pattern is a self-contained one, balancing the similarly selfcontained erotic concept of Amoretti; against Cupid's governance of the sphere of unfulfilled love, it poses the ordering of the sphere of fulfilled love on the principles of the Creator (for the pairing of the genealogies of Cupid and Christ in Fowre Hymnes, see Mulryan 1971).
But these separate concepts are linked in a larger structure by filiations which evoke the mythopoeia of The Faerie Queene: the Orphic cosmology which gives us, in the persons of Phoebus the sun and Phoebe the moon, the male and female principles which inform the world (Fowler 1964:82–3, and chs 8–9). As beseeching male and obdurate female in Amoretti, the lovers occupy the static and insecure world of the moon as representative of change and transience; and the yearly cycle of solemn feasts, though authentic, remains hidden. In Epithalamion, Phoebus Apollo governs, and male completeness absorbs to itself in marriage the imperfection of the female. In a typical Elizabethan moral paradox, this makes it possible for the female to emerge as truly constant, the law-giving figure and generative force which she becomes within the social and sacramental bonds of marriage. Just so, in the poem, when Apollo's light has given way to night, the moon reappears not as chaste Diana or heavenly Phoebe but as Cynthia, protectress of women in childbirth.
One of the most effective instruments in the process by which Amoretti is incorporated in and transcended by Epithalamion is the contrast in tone between the two works. Amoretti has the rarefied atmosphere of Petrarchan complaint. No one else exists in its world besides the striving lover and his obdurate lady. Spenser's temperate tone modifies the ethos of complaint but does not alter the isolation of the lovers. This is a long way from the jollity of Epithalamion; there the poet, though he sings alone, is not lost in complaint but joyfully exhorts the crowd of participants—both mythical and local—to join in the celebration. Spenser takes pains ‘to make the poem as native, immediate, and personal as he could, within the limits of decorum’ (Smith 1961:139). Thus Epithalamion has a concreteness and a pictorial quality which transform the conventions of the genre (Clemen 1968) and subsume the narrower beauties of the sonnets. There is some precedent for this in Puttenham's remarks on epithalamia, but more in the deliberately provincial character of the celebrations of the wedding of Thames and Medway in FQ IV xi. The amplitude of Epithalamion's structure is thus matched by the spaciousness of a style which can give us both the graces of the nymphs of Mulla and the raucous cries of boys in the street, both the transcendent images in which the bride is portrayed before the ceremony and the wine poured out afterwards ‘not by cups, but by the belly full’ (251). A principal device is climax: Spenser's practice of treating an image in a simple and infectious way, and then in successive stanzas unfolding it at greater and greater levels of power. A calculated inversion of this method is his use of understatement, which we have already seen in the artful repression of the Christological elements in Amoretti and in the ‘goodly temperature’ of the sequence. It takes a social and ethical form in the praise of the bride's downcast glance in Epithalamion (159–61, 234–5), but it appears also as an expressive choice, in the natural modesty with which the poet refers to the marriage bed, and in his generous and self-abnegating wishes for the happiness of his posterity.
The subject of Epithalamion, as befits a marriage song, is harmony. The intricate musical harmonies of the stanza structure (see *echo) make us sensuously aware of this, as does the refrain—ever varying, yet ever constant—which weaves the separate stanzas together from opening invocation to concluding envoy. At every point, Spenser calls on perceivable concords—the song of birds, the caroling maidens in their circle, the ‘roring Organs’ (Epith 218)—to evoke and give voice to the unperceived concords he must bring us to understand. Harmony is made operative in human life by the creating power of time; the Hours who help to dress the bride in stanza 6 are described as ‘ye fayre houres which were begot/In Joves sweet paradice, of Day and Night,/Which doe the seasons of the yeare allot,/And al that ever in this world is fayre/Doe make and still repayre.’ In stanza 7, the poet begs the sun god Apollo, ‘fayrest Phoebus, father of the Muse,’ for a place in time on his own behalf: ‘let this day let this one day be myne,/Let all the rest be thine’; and throughout his poem Spenser focuses intensely on expressing the importance of this particular point in time, this ‘one day’ on which he and his bride will enter creating time themselves.
Epithalamion demonstrates in the design of its song the harmony of which it sings. The invocation and envoy represent it quite literally as a artifact, an ornament wrought for his bride by a poet who has long worked to adorn others with his praise and who now seeks the aid of the Muses in a personal cause, ‘mine owne loves prayses to resound’ (line 14). The poem is divided into 23 stanzas and a brief envoy; the stanzas, composed of long and short lines in slightly variant combinations, resemble canzone stanzas in their amplitude and complexity but have a rhyme scheme of Spenser's own devising. This is dictated in part by deliberate irregularities in stanza length, in part by an apparent desire to make every stanza fall roughly into four sections. Each stanza is a set piece recording one of the phases of the weddingday activity. As individual units, they recall the separateness of Amoretti's sonnets; but the linking refrain binds the 24 into a design which forms an emblem of the hours of the day—indeed, its quarter-hours—on which the wedding is thought to have taken place, 11 June 1594. Thus, at stanza 17, the coming of night at the latitude of Kilcolman, Cork, and Youghal is marked by a change in the refrain: The woods no more shal answere, nor your echo ring.’ The astronomical details of the poem's siting are worked out with some care (see Eade 1972).
The cycle of the hours represented by the 24 stanzas is set within a larger, less immediately apparent structure representing the cycle of the year. The number of long lines in the poem add up to 365, and the 68 short lines represent the sum of the 4 seasons, 12 months, and 52 weeks. Without the envoy, the long lines total 359, the number of days through which the sphere of the sun moves while the celestial sphere travels its full 360 degrees. ‘Spenser wishes to communicate the relationship between the daily shortcomings of the sun and the total measure of 365 days created by this shortcoming, and between the 359 long lines of the full-size stanzas and the 365 long lines of the poem complete with envoy’ (Hieatt 1960:44). The seven lines of the envoy thus function as numerical compensation for the ‘incompleteness’ of the cycle of 359, and the poem can claim in its final line that it is ‘for short time an endlesse moniment.’ This paradox reminds us of the description of Adonis as ‘eterne in mutabilitie’ and also of Nature's ruling that things in their mutability ‘are not changed from their first estate;/But by their change their being doe dilate’ (VII vii 58). In its design (one critic has called it a ‘poetic orrery’ Pearcy 1980–1:248), Epithalamion attempts to achieve that harmony between the mutable and constant which is one of Spenser's deepest preoccupations, juxtaposing the placid creating and repairing power of the Hours in their perfect celestial circuit with the urgent and specific time of the disciple of Apollo, who can beg from Phoebus in his shorter circuit only one day for his own concerns, the day of the solstice.
The poem thus must function as an instrument of transformation, a means of invoking and mastering the order of nature. This sense of transformation is present from the beginning, as the poet calls the Muses from sorrowful lament to celebratory joy, and turns from his familiar stance of solitary complaint to the firm confidence of ‘So Orpheus did for his owne bride,/So I unto my selfe alone will sing’ (16–17). Spenser's source here is Virgil's account of the legend of Orpheus: ‘But he, solacing love's anguish with his hollow shell, sang of thee, sweet wife—of thee, to himself on the lonely shore; of thee as day drew nigh, of thee as day declined’ (Georgics 4.464–6). In Virgil's lines, there is already a hint of the calendrical image Spenser develops so fully, and it suggests what the myth fully supports: Orpheus’ connection with the order of nature. For the mythographers, Orpheus is at once the most blighted of lovers (losing Eurydice to the sudden madness which makes him look back as they journey out of Hades) and a powerful magus, whose ‘mery musik and mellifluate,/Complete and full wyth nowmeris od and evyn,’ as Henryson earlier described it, conveys the mathematical principles on which the cosmos is organized (Orpheus and Eurydice 237–8; see Fox in Henryson ed 1981: cv–cx). For Natale Conti, Orpheus brings uncivilized men together in a gentler way of life, teaching them to found cities and observe the bonds of marriage; Conti also recounts the many traditions which make Orpheus the son of Apollo (Mythologiae 7.14). In Epithalamion, the refrain persistently reminds us of the ordering power of musical numbers; in his song, this new Orpheus will bring the order of nature under his control: The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring’ (line 18). And like Orpheus, the poet will call up the image of his beloved from the obscuring darkness of inchoate love (Neuse 1966).
Spenser's service to Apollo governs the division of Epithalamion into the seemly ceremonies leading up to the wedding, which take place under the tutelage of Apollo in his role as giver of laws, and the jollity after it, which is governed by the unbuttoned Bacchus, god of wine and celebration. The right order created by the presence of Apollo as guardian of conduct thus presides over the masque of Hymen which occupies the first half of the poem. Stanza by stanza, the poet convokes the companions of the masque: first the Muses themselves, who are bidden to sing of joy and solace to the bride as she is dressed, then nature in the figures of the nymphs of forest, river, and field who will weave her garlands, deck her bower, and bind her hair. In stanza 5, the bride is summoned to awake by the ‘lovelearned’ song of the birds: The merry Larke hir mattins sings aloft,/The thrush replyes, the Mavis descant playes... So goodly all agree with sweet consent,/To this dayes merriment.’ The images of concord which have thus been established gather in force as the bride awakes and is dressed by the Hours and Graces, ‘Goddesses of al bountie and comelines’ as E.K. calls them (SC, Aprill gloss). Her eyes are compared to stars which, once dimmed by cloud, are now brighter than Hesperus. When in stanzas 7 and 8 she emerges into the sun, these concords take a cheerful domestic form: the clamor of minstrels and the caroling of girls. Yet all is resolved in one consonance, even among the boys who ‘run up and downe the street,/ Crying aloud with strong confused noyce,/ As if it were one voyce’ (137–9).
Spenser's technique of unfolding images from simple to more complex, of moving from the immediately personal to the philosophical and mythopoeic, is exemplified both in the way the masque of Hymen moves through meadow and stream and down village street to the moment when the bride emerges, and in the successive revelations of the bride herself as she comes forth in stanzas 9–11. In stanza 9, she is first Phoebe, virginal in white like the moon for which she is named, then an angel, and finally a ‘mayden Queene’ with modest downcast gaze. Stanza 10 is a formal blazon of her beauties like those which praise the lady in countless medieval and Renaissance love lyrics. Yet this blazon reaches beyond its origins in merely amatory verse to recall the wording of the biblical Song of Solomon. In stanza 11, the moral meaning of these successive images of perfection is climactically revealed in the terrifying image of Medusa's shield, deliberately placed to arrest and awe the watcher (Young 1973–4). What is revealed, however, in this vision, is an entirely inward beauty: There dwels sweet love and constant chastity,/Unspotted fayth and comely womanhood,/Regard of honour and mild modesty,/There vertue raynes as Queene in royal throne,/And giveth lawes aione’ (191– 5).
Stanzas 12 and 13, in which the wedding ceremony takes place, trace closely the rites of the Book of Common Prayer (W.C.Johnson 1976). They are at once the formal and the visionary center of Epithalamion, as the Garden of Adonis is at the center of FQ III. Spenser's eyes remain on the bride before the altar, as the organ and choristers peal out the musical harmonies to which her fulfillment in harmonious matrimony will give social meaning. The interchange of earth and heaven at the crucial moment is manifest both in her role as worshiper, listening to ‘the holy priest that to her speakes,’ and as one who is worshiped by the very angels serving about the altar who flock to peep into her face. It is only at this point, as The praises of the Lord in lively notes’ sound about the bride's downcast head, that the bridegroom steps forth in person to ask, ‘Why blush ye love to give to me your hand,/ The pledge of all our band?/Sing ye sweet Angels, Alleluya sing,/That all the woods may answere and your eccho ring’ (238–41); and with the sublime pun on wedding ring and ringing echoes, their union is solemnized.
If the first half of the poem has belonged to the bride as representative of Apollonian order and to the maidens attending her, the second half belongs to Bacchus, to the ‘yong men of the towne,’ and to the groom. No longer the invoker of the masque and its wondering observer, the poet is now an involved participant in a happy wedding party and the larger scene of revelry that still attends the bonfires of the midsummer celebration in many places in Europe. It is here that the unresolved erotic problems of Amoretti are finally worked out. Spenser's foremost task in this second part is to raise and answer the challenge which the darker powers of sexuality and social disorder (hinted at in the merriment of the youths and the urgency of the groom) pose to the Apollonian clarity of the hymeneal procession and its virginal central figure. The theme of sexuality unleashed is also pressed on him by the fescennine motifs which are to be expected in an epithalamium. But here the epithalamist cannot invite the revelers to muffle with their noise the cries of the bride behind the closed chamber door, for with the poet-bridegroom we enter that chamber and the scene in which marriage begins to act out its mundane course.
Sexuality first appears in comic form, in stanza 15 where the longing groom laments, ‘But for this time it ill ordained was,/To chose the longest day in all the yeare,/And shortest night, when longest fitter weare.’ (Fittingly, too, this stanza, in a spatial joke, is one line shorter than any other except the envoy.) It is precisely here that Spenser points most strongly—though with sudden irony—to the day's astronomical significance: This day the sunne is in his chiefest hight,/With Barnaby the bright,/From whence declining daily by degrees,/He somewhat loseth of his heat and light.’ In doing so, he reminds us not only of the power of Phoebus but of its limits; and in the ensuing stanzas, he evokes the darkness that comes with its waning. The refrain modulates into the negative—‘The woods no more shal answere’—and the joyful sounds of man and nature cease with the light. The bride, earlier arrayed by the Hours and Graces, now lies between perfumed sheets, but her damsels must leave her alone. The groom who before called up the masque of Hymen now must employ his Orphean gift of utterance and his mastery of number to dispel fear of ‘perrill and foule horror,’ of ‘false treason’ and ‘dread disquiet.’ He must send about their business ‘the Pouke’ and ‘other evill sprights,’ mischievous witches, hobgoblins, and birds of evil omen. As in the village scene of the earlier part of the poem, these homely superstitions are part of Spenser's endearing naturalization of his great images of order and truth in the intimately understood scene of his readers’ own world. But at work at this moment is a strength resembling that which forces Busirane to reverse his charms (FQ III xii): like Jove engendering Majesty upon Night herself (Epith 330–1), the poet confronts and masters the evil face of darkness with the power of his own magic. In this act, suffering lover is finally transformed into Christian husband, for only when the charms of this new Orpheus have dispelled the phantoms and shriekings of fearful darkness can the ‘trew night watches’ of ‘stil Silence’ take the place of daytime sun and festive song.
It is in this mood of ‘sacred peace’ that in stanza 20 the marriage is consummated. Like the angels that flew about the bride's head as she approached the altar, ‘an hundred little winged loves’ are invited to play their sports about the bed. Yet the poet's tone is light and dismissive: ‘For greedy pleasure, carelesse of your toyes,/Thinks more upon her paradise of joyes,/Then what ye do, albe it good or ill.’ This is not the mythopoeic eroticism with which Spenser earlier depicted Venus’ continuing conjunction with Adonis in FQ III vi 46, nor is it the amusing naughtiness of the Anacreontics. All the cares ‘which cruell love collected’ have been ‘sumd in one, and cancelled for aye’ (317– 18). The epithalamic task of absorbing the erotic into the social order is nearly complete.
In the final stanzas of the poem, Spenser obeys the further epithalamic convention that the poet wish the union be blessed with issue. In doing so, he develops yet another of those crescendos of implication which distinguish his poem. In stanza 21, the preoccupied poet recognizes at his window the familiar face of ‘Cinthia, she that never sleepes,/But walkes about high heaven al the night.’ The moon goddess is not only the bringer of light in darkness ordained by the celestial order but the goddess of childbirth as well. In this and the next stanza, the poet begs all the gods of generation—Cynthia, ‘great Juno’ patron of the laws of wedlock, ‘glad Genius,’ ‘fayre Hebe,’ and ‘Hymen free’—to ‘Send us the timely fruit of this same night.’
The word timely chimes throughout Epithalamion in a variety of auspicious meanings; here it signifies that which is of time, one with time, and its effect is to make the child of epithalamic convention the focus of the cosmographical design of the whole poem. Yet in Spenser's climactic stanza 23, all this is in turn canceled and summed in one, as in the time-bound individual child is forecast a whole long posterity. Amidst the ‘dreadful darknesse’ inhabited by ‘wretched earthly clods’ like Edmund and Elizabeth is imagined the temple of high heaven, aflame not with Hymen's single tead, but with ‘a thousand torches flaming bright’ The solitary poet with whom we began ceases his song in hope of begetting a race ‘Of blessed Saints for to increase the count.’ In thus reminding us of the spiritual world above the earthly bustle (Clemen 1968:96), Spenser completes the upward-reaching theological movement of Epithalamion. But he also replaces the genealogy of Cupid (child of Plenty and Poverty; see HL 53) with the genealogy of his own people, one founded in individual history and issuing in eschatology. The closed narcissism of Amoretti 35 and 83 has been reviewed and dismissed in the poet's wishes for his inheritors.
In Epithalamion's seven-line envoy, Spenser returns to the image of the poem as device:
Song made in lieu of many ornaments,
With which my love should duly have benedect,
Which cutting off through hasty accidents,
Ye would not stay your dew time to expect,
But promist both to recompens,
Be unto her a goodly ornament,
And for short time an endlesse moniment.
Do these lines speak of gifts to the bride which were delayed, or adornments which were lost (Var 8:494, 650)? Do they refer to unwritten sonnets of Amoretti (Judson 1945:172)? Is the poem as a whole a form of recompense for the limitations of human time (Hieatt 1960:56–9)? Or does the poet here ‘shed all poetic disguises and renew [his] history on the stage where all are merely players for the short time allotted to them’ (Neuse 1966:174)? An answer is suggested by the fact that Epithalamion is suffused with images and figures of exchange and compensation. Some of these may originate in the allusion to lovers’ counting games in Catullus 5 (Pearcy 1980–1); others certainly allude to the different circuits of the spheres (Hieatt 1960:32–41). But they are all made more intelligible by the generic convention which regards a wedding hymn as treating the lover's just reward after his trial. Seen in this way, the images of exchange and compensation express the interplay Spenser recognizes between love and law, multiplicity and unity, change and concord. The effect of the envoy is to incorporate the poem in this interchange, making it a sounding emblem of Spenser's long-held conviction that constancy ‘is not, in this world at least, a power “contrayr” to Mutabilitie. It is a purpose persisting through mutability, redeeming it. It combines the energy of love with the stability of law; it is not a denial of change but a direction for work’ (Hawkins 1961:101–2).
Epithalamion, writes Hallett Smith (1961:136), ‘is a poem which needs no defense.’ The general affection in which Spenser's wedding hymn is held has meant that criticism, when not panegyric, has largely been divided between early efforts to identify bride and date, sources and style (Var 8:647–58, Greene 1957), and attempts since 1960 to correlate Hieatt's description of its numerological scheme with Spenser's known procedure in this and other poems (see modern studies in *number symbolism). Hieatt's central argument is now doubted by only the most adamant critics of numerological analysis; however, his theory that the ‘compensatory’ design offers a message of consolation has been rejected or seriously qualified (Neuse 1966, Welsford 1967, Kaske 1978, and others). And some of the details of his scheme still provoke debate (see W.V.Davis 1969, Eade 1972, Hieatt 1960 and 1961, Pearcy 1980–1, Welsford 1967, Wickert 1968).
Such debate is only to be expected, for numerological readings are most vulnerable in their minute details. Hostile critics tend to insist that schematic patterns must be both rigid and complete to be credible. But our expanding knowledge of spatial strategies of composition and reading suggests that schematic patterns are often deliberately varied or interrupted by their makers for expressive reasons. For example, since II June is 103 days after 1 March, the numerological scheme explored by Hieatt should place the poet's plea that ‘this one day be myne’ at the 103rd long line (line 125), yet it in fact occurs at the 105th. The conjunction is too close not to be noticed and too imperfect not to be debated, especially since Spenser could easily have revised the sentence to claim his day precisely in the 103rd long line, yet did not. If the discrepancy was intended, there are several possible reasons. Common superstition often obliges the folk craftsman to work a flaw into his design as a charm, or to signify its human origin; like the ‘ribald’ in a civic pageant, it is there to remind us of our mortality (Kipling 1977b). Medieval conventions of schematic ordering permit the elaboration of such designs by the deliberate addition or subtraction of elements (Hopper 1938:82). Then there is sheer wit, which Spenser himself employs in making the longing stanza 15 shorter by a line.
Epithalamion has been almost untouched by recent post-structuralist criticism, perhaps because it is so intransigently logocentric. However, Douglas Hamer once wondered with flat literalism why Irish crowds might have lined the street in a year of simmering rebellion for the marriage of a hated Englishman (1931:287). In his study of Spenser's genre, Thomas M.Greene (1957) argued a weakness in stanza 20 (the consummation), and he continues to regard the poem from a deconstructionist standpoint as in fact reversing its convention (1982:50). Taken as a whole, the volume evades such skepticism by admitting its own premises so totally. Indeed, it could be said to reverse the deconstructionist procedure by beginning in the area of doubt and misprision and out of it reconstructing a mode of discourse so comprehensive as to defy acceptance on any terms other than its own. Spenser uses the symbolic images and the formal conventions of his time to produce an intensity of social meaning so great that Epithalamion still touches deeply those who enter into a shared life, though they may share nothing with Spenser himself.
Epithalamion is arguably Spenser's greatest poem: his most fulfilled personally and spiritually, and his most complete aesthetically. In it, as at crucial points elsewhere in his work, he adopts a first-person stance or a persona closely identified with himself. But in Epithalamion, this figure's longing can at last be fulfilled as it can never be in Colin's pastoral laments in The Shepheardes Calender, in the vision of which Calidore later deprives that piping shepherd in FQ VI x 17–18, or even in the expectant stance of the prayer which forms the ‘unperfite’ eighth canto of FQ VII. Epithalamion is bound to other parts of Spenser's work as well, in particular to the mythopoeic vision of the generation of being in FQ III, and to the themes of social concord examined in FQ IV. In Epithalamion, these myths of generation and concord are situated in a vision of the poet's own historical and temporal existence. The result, as in all of Spenser's later works, is to sharpen and focus the question of the relation between energy and order, the existential and the eternal. As the 1590s progress, Spenser prevailingly treats this problem in the form of a diptych. Thus the paired genres of Amoretti and Epithalamion are paralleled by the pairings of Fowre Hymnes and the pairing of the two Cantos of Mutabilitie. In each case an unchanneled source of energy—the lover, Cupid, Mutabilitie—is first envisioned and comprehended with wit and compassion, and then juxtaposed to a perfected and higher version of that energy—the married man, Christ, constancy—which both contains and transcends it. In this way, we find Spenser even at the end of his career at work fashioning in one more form the great myth of spiritual liberation which earlier underlay the time-scheme of The Shepheardes Calender, and which was then expressed in the freeing of Amoret from her bondage to Busirane, and the prayer for liberation at the conclusion of the Cantos of Mutabilitie. This is the liberation he makes possible for himself and his bride when, in Epithalamion, he calls up Hymen's masque through his mastery of numbered song, surmounting the limitations of Cupid's sphere and the greater threat of darkness itself by devising his poem as a simulacrum of the divinely ordained round of the cosmographical day within which human action pursues its humble but transcendently important course.
It will be clear from the essay above how much I am indebted to the several hundred scholars and critics who have studied these poems before 1985. I have cited specific obligations where possible, and drawn much from other work which is known to all Spenserians (particularly Hieatt 1960) and is cited in the General Bibliography. The edition of the Book of Common Prayer cited is 1580 (STC 16307; like other BCPs of these decades, its almanac includes 1594). For special insights, I am particularly indebted to Eileen Jorge Allman 1980 ‘Epithalamion's Bridegroom: Orpheus-Adam-Christ’ Renascence 32:240–7; John D.Bernard 1980 ‘Spenserian Pastoral and the Amoretti’ ELH 47:419–32; Fowler 1970b; Hawkins 1961; W. Speed Hill 1972 ‘Order and Joy in Spenser's Epithalamion’ SHR 6:81–90; Kaske 1978; Luborsky 1980; Waldo F.McNeir 1965 ‘An Apology for Spenser's Amoretti’ NS ns 14:1–9; Martz 1961; Richard Neuse 1966 ‘The Triumph over Hasty Accidents: A Note on the Symbolic Mode of the “Epithalamion”’ MLR 61:163–74; Nohrnberg 1976; Charles Phythian-Adams 1972 ‘Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry, 1450–1550’ in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700 ed Peter Clark and Paul Slack (London), pp 57–85.
A ‘shepherd,’ now dead, who attended Cynthia's (ie, Elizabeth's) court (Colin Clout 432–43); he was both poet and patron, piping with ‘passing skill’ and supporting others who did so. His beloved, Amaryllis, mourns his death (564–71).
Amyntas has long been identified with Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, fifth Earl of Derby (Church in Spenser ed 1758b, Morris 1963). Amaryllis is then Alice Spencer, daughter of Sir John and Lady Spencer of Althorp (to whom Spenser claimed kinship; see Colin Clout 536–71) and wife of Stanley. Spenser dedicated Teares of the Muses to her in 1591, praising her ‘noble match with that most honourable Lord the verie Paterne of right Nobilitie’; and later Milton wrote Arcades and Comus for her and her family. Nashe, too, apparently refers to Stanley in Pierce Penilesse when he criticizes Spenser for not celebrating ‘Amyntas’ in the 1590 Faerie Queene: ‘But therefore gest I he supprest thy name,/Because few words might not comprise thy fame’ (ed 1904–10,1:244).
Stanley was about 35 years old when he died on 16 April 1594; the tribute to him in Colin Clout must have been written or revised shortly thereafter, as the opening indicates: There also is (ah no, he is not now)/But since I said he is, he quite is gone’ (432–3). The lines are a brief elegy for him as poet and patron; he was also praised by Chapman, Harington, and others. He was the principal supporter of a company of actors known as Strange's (later, Derby's) men. (After his death they became the Lord Chamberlain's men, Shakespeare's company.) A few of Stanley's poems may survive in Bel-vedére, or The Garden of the Muses (1600); others have survived in manuscript (see May 1972–3).
‘Amyntas’ is a stock pastoral name descending from Theocritus (Idyll 7) and Virgil (Eclogues 2, 3, 5, 10). It is common in Renaissance pastoral, including the work of Mantuan (Eclogues 2, 3, 6) and Barclay (Ec-logue 5). The best-known instances are Tasso's Italian play Aminta and Watson's Amintae gaudia and Amyntas (the last translated into English by Fraunce as The Lamentations of Amyntas 1587, with three more editions shortly after). Thus, the ‘Amintas’ lamented at FQ III vi 45 is evidently not Stanley but Watson's hero, finally transformed into the amaranthus (W.A.Ringler 1954).
Although Anacreon, a Greek poet of the sixth century BC, had long been known by name, the texts of 60 odes attributed to him first came to light in 1549 when the scholar Henri Estienne (Henricus Stephanus) found them appended to an eleventh-century manuscript of the Greek Anthology. He published these Odae with his own Latin translations of 31 of them (Paris 1554, rpt 1556), and again in his Carminum poetarum novem...fragmenta along with a complete Latin translation and the works of eight other Greek poets (1560). The Anacreontic poems were later discovered to have been composed by a number of poets over seven centuries. However, they were attributed to Anacreon in Estienne's anthology, which was reprinted many times and was certainly known to poets such as Watson, Jonson, and Herrick.
Ronsard, one of Estienne's friends, immediately wrote imitations of the newly discovered odes; and Remy Belleau translated a number of them into French (1555), adding a few of his own anacreontics at the end. Soon other poets from France, Italy, and England were copying both Anacreon and Ronsard. Sidney tried imitating the anacreontic meter ([U]U-U-U--) in a song labeled ‘Anacreon's kind of verses’ in the Old Arca-dia (ed 1973a:163), and Barnabe Barnes used the same meter for his ‘carmen anacreontium’ in Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593; ed 1971:123–5). Usually, however, the themes rather than the meter inspired the anacreontics of European poets. Popular anacreontic themes include the rejection of worldly cares and heroic ambitions in favor of the carefree enjoyment of wine, love, and song; the celebration of small or trivial objects; and (combining both of these) brief narratives about the little Cupid who hides in a flower and stings like a bee, or appears at one's door like a little boy wet with rain and then shoots his unsuspecting host.
Spenser uses the Cupid-as-bee theme in both the first and last of the four poems placed between the Amoretti and Epithalamion (ed 1912:577–8). This theme can be traced back to both Anacreon and Theocritus; but Spenser's poems seem to be based almost entirely on Renaissance imitations, especially by Tasso and either Ronsard or Baïf (Hutton 1941). The last two stanzas of the fourth poem are Spenser's own development; their reference to the poet's own feelings has been called a ‘Petrarchizing’ of the anacreontic mode (Baumann 1974:40, 42). His second poem concerns an exchange of arrows between Cupid and Diana. In the third, Cupid mistakes Spenser's beloved for his own mother. These poems have been labeled ‘Anacreontics,’ although the original 1595 edition does not distinguish them from the rest of the Amoretti by any heading or separation (Var 8:455). Another Cupid narrative, anacreontic in character though not directly imitative of a Greek ode, occurs in FQ III vi 11–26, where Venus searches for her son.
The placing of the Anacreontics between the Amoretti and Epithalamion has perplexed readers. The poems have been called a‘haphazard addition’ which ought to be ignored (G.K.Hunter 1973:124, Martz 1961:152), as well as a sort of interlude or playful pause between two serious acts (Nohrnberg 1976:68–9). Sidney had similarly used his anacreontic as a song in the interlude between two acts of the Arcadia; and two Cupid poems appear at the end of Shakespeare's sonnets, followed by ‘A Lover's Complaint.’ Spenser's use of anacreontics as interlude, therefore, would be in keeping with other Renaissance treatments of their traditional theme of turning from serious to more playful and pleasurable topics.
Yet Spenser's Anacreontics have also been taken to have a serious meaning, integral to the volume in which they occur. They seem to provide a coda to the Amoretti, summing up its themes and preparing for the marriage poem (Cummings 1970–1, Miola 1980). Furthermore, the title Amoretti evokes the little cupids associated with anacreontic odes. Various organizational patterns have been proposed which integrate the Anacreontics into Spenser's sequence and thus enhance their meaningfulness in relation to the surrounding poetry (Dunlop 1980, Fowler 1970b).
Like Spenser, several other Renaissance poets end their sonnet sequences with anacreontic poems. Their model seems to have been Ronsard, whose ‘Sonnets a diverses personnes’ (in his Oeuvres 5th ed 1578) are followed by an imitation of the ode on the lodging of Cupid. In general, the brief odes provide a witty, epigrammatic ending to a sequence, functioning rather like the final couplet of an English sonnet. Although Shakespeare's final two sonnets derive ultimately from another poet in the Greek Anthology, they share a similar theme: Cupid's brand falls into the hands of Diana's nymphs, who plunge it into a spring that subsequently becomes a medicinal hot spring, although its waters cannot cure the poet of his love. The dipping of Cupid's brand into a ‘bath’ or ‘well’ and the well's healing virtues are close to the themes of Spenser's fourth anacreontic. Spenser uses the combinations of Diana and Cupid or Venus, both in his Anacreontics and in FQ III, to explore the possibilities of chaste married love.
Spenser refers to Anacreon in Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, published one year after the Amoretti volume. Describing Sapience as a beautiful queen, he contrasts his high subject and lowly skill with the lowly subject and high skill of Anacreon of Teos (218– 24): ‘But had those wits the wonders of their dayes/Or that sweete Teian Poet which did spend/His plenteous vaine in setting forth her prayse,/Seene but a glims of this, which I pretend,/How wondrously would he her face commend,/Above that Idole of his fayning thought,/That all the world shold with his rimes be fraught?’ The moral status of Anacreon's poetry had been questionable from the start, so vaine may be a pun which, along with Idole, criticizes the frivolous pagan poet from a Neoplatonic and Christian point of view. Despite his own enthusiasm for the poems, Estienne had included in his preface to Carminum poetarum novem a warning that they might be abused by readers who sought only voluptuous pleasure from poetry. The odes themselves acknowledge (albeit with protest) the power of duties, time, and death to undermine life's pleasures; they recognize the limitations to the good they celebrate. Spenser does not take the line of Jonson and Marini in equating Anacreon's drunkenness with poetic rapture (Jonson ed 1925–52, 8:637; Michelangeli 1922:99–100). For Spenser, however serious its function within a given context, anacreontic verse seems to mean brief, light, narrative verse about Cupid, often with relation to the poet himself.
A modern text and translation of the Anacreontea, including fragments from various sources, is in J.M.Edmonds, ed 1931 Elegy and Iambus 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library.
Michael Baumann 1974 Die Anakreonteen in englischen Übersetzungen (Heidelberg); Gordon Braden 1978 The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry (New Haven) pp 255–8; Peter M.Cummings 1970–1 ‘Spenser's Amoretti as an Allegory of Love’ TSLL 12:163–79; G.K. Hunter 1973; James Hutton 1941 ‘Cupid and the Bee’ PMLA 56:1036–58; Janet Levarie 1973 ‘Renaissance Anacreontics’ CL 25:221– 39; Martz 1961; Luigi Alessandro Michelangeli 1922 Anacreonte e la sua fortuna nei secoli (Bologna); Miola 1980.
Venus is represented as an androgyne (a single individual uniting the traits of both sexes) in FQ IV x 41 and in Colin Clout 800–2. In both passages, the goddess is described as possessing male and female characteristics and able to procreate without the help of a consort. In the Temple of Venus passage, her attributes are remote from human gaze, for her statue is veiled. In one other passage of The Faerie Queene, moreover, androgyny is associated with selfsufficient procreation and with mystery: Nature, described by Mutabilitie as ‘the highest him, that is behight/Father of Gods and men by equall might’ (VII vi 35), is presented by the narrator as ‘great dame Nature,’ with veiled head and face, so that ‘Whether she man or woman inly were,/That could not any creature well descry’ (vii 5).
In most antique and Renaissance representations of bisexual deities in the visual arts, effeminate male figures were portrayed (often on the model of Hadrian's favorite, Antinous), rather than explicitly hermaphroditic individuals; examples of the latter tended to verge on the grotesque or obscene (Wind 1958). Spenser's verbal descriptions, however, resemble the Aphroditus of Cyprus and similar deities described by ancient mythographers (Delcourt 1961). That Ve-nus and Nature are veiled may indicate his sense that explicit disclosure of the physical image would detract from their ‘sacred completeness’ as primal figures of fertility and make them into hermaphroditic grotesques (Fletcher 1971:95, Cheney 1972).
The term androgyne appears with some frequency in sixteenth-century French literature. In Ronsard, it figures the union of two bodies; in Marguerite of Navarre, the spiritual union of the soul with Christ. Whether erotic or spiritual, the concept stems from the fantastic myth of origins attributed to Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium 189E-92E, which Ficino translated into Latin and Italian and made the object of a Christianizing commentary. In their erotic poetry, the Pléiade occasionally used the term Hermaphrodite in a roughly equivalent sense, their source being Ovid's Metamorphoses 4.285–388, a myth not of a primal state of unity preceding sexual difference, but of the loss of that difference in sexual intercourse. Alchemical works, with their illustrations of a fused ‘hermaphrodite’ in the transforming ‘bath,’ contributed to further mingling of the two myths.
With the exception of certain episodes like the hermaphroditic embrace of Amoret and Scudamour in the stanzas which concluded the 1590 Book III, or the glimpse of the Red Cross Knight ‘swimming in that sea of blisfull joy’ at the end of Book I (xii 41), physical union between the sexes does not constitute a major element in Spenser's narrative dynamics. But the androgyne is a recurrent image of human completeness or containment. A lady ‘full of amiable grace,/ And manly terrour’ (III i 46), Britomart embodies chaste love as an ideal for both women and men until she is unmasked in combat by Artegall and accepts the prospect of a marriage which will lead to the generation of Elizabeth. Britomart is an ‘almost bisexual figure’; her chastity is not a rejection of sexuality but its actualization; she stands in contrast to Florimell who denies her own sexuality and that of others, and to Busirane for whom sexuality is a source of lust and oppression (Brill 1971). This interpretation, which employs Freudian theories of the libido, is complemented by one which compares Britomart and Belphoebe with Radigund and Florimell: the former have been called ‘Apollonian’ androgynes and the latter ‘Dio-nysian’ (Paglia 1979). This distinction establishes two categories of bisexuality within the Spenserian imagination: one is self-contained and joins psychosexual elements to morality and aesthetics; the other subjects them to primeval forces.
Queen Elizabeth herself, by destiny and choice, exhibited attributes of both sexes, as woman and ruler. Spenser's androgynes thus emerge from the work of a loyal subject concerned to fashion a good governor and a virtuous individual, and of a visionary poet whose narrative technique mingles polarities of male and female with comparable oppositions between night and day, dark and light, time and eternity. His use of androgyny brings into play mythopoetic structures which belong to both GrecoRoman and Judaic traditions (Meeks 1974).
Brill 1971; Cheney 1972; Marie Delcourt 1961 Hermaphrodite: Myths and Rites of the Bisexual Figure in Classical Antiquity tr Jennifer Nicholson (London); Fletcher 1971; Wayne Meeks 1973–4 ‘The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity’ HistRel 13:165–208; Camille A.Paglia 1979 ‘The Apollonian Androgyne and The Faerie Queene’ ELR 9:42–63; Wind 1958.
The angel who watches over Guyon, after the knight's passage through Mammon's house, incarnates the love that is the subject of the narrator's marveling commentary: ‘And is there care in heaven? and is there love/In heavenly spirits to these creatures bace,/That may compassion of their evils move?/There is’ (FQ II viii 1–8). The heavenly care rendered visible in the angel's descent is manifested in Christ's redemptive journey through history. Guyon's quest imitates one episode of that journey when the solitary knight, traveling through a desert wilderness, encounters and resists the temptations of Mammon (I.G.MacCaffrey 1976:101). Paradoxically, as he emerges from his infernal ordeal, moving upward to ‘living light,’ the hero falls into a deathlike trance (vii 66). The faint indicates the limit of his powers: the body's need for food and rest, the soul's hunger for that which selfreliant nature cannot comprehend. At this moment of crisis, the angel appears, evoking remembrance of the ministering spirits who came to Christ after his trial in the wilderness (Matt 4.11). The mystery of the grace that touches Guyon is preserved in the angel's revelation to the Palmer that ‘he that breathlesse seemes, shal corage bold respire’ and in his own promise ‘evermore’ to ‘succour, and defend’ the knight against his enemies and God's.
The descent of an emissary god or angel bearing a message to earth is one of the noblest conventions of epic literature. Renaissance versions of the motif derive from Virgil's description of the flight of Mercury (Aeneid 4.219–78) and its models in the epics of Homer (Greene 1963:7). Spenser's representation of the angel transfigures its classical, medieval, and Neoplatonic sources in both literary and pictorial memory to direct attention to ultimate sources, ultimate ends.
Characteristically, the passage of the celestial descent describes the swift, dramatic movement of a figure through space. Guyon's guardian is first known not in the motion of flight, but in a voice calling the Palmer back to his charge. Like Tasso's Gabriele (Gerusalemme liberata 1.13–14), the angel submits himself to mortal sight in the form of ‘a faire young man.’ But the wings at his back identify him as one of the cherubim, whose special gift is knowledge of the truth of God (Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum 2.9). A fifteenth-century Italian sermon notes ‘the painters’ license to give the angels wings to signify their swift progress in all things’ (Baxandall 1972:50). Spenser accommodates his vision of grace to human eyes by giving his angel wings ‘like painted Jayes.’ Among the visual arts in the collections of Leicester and others of the court were illustrated Books of Hours displaying angels golden-pinioned, red-, blue-, purple-, and peacock-winged (Tuve 1970:127–9). Spenser reinterprets these traditional images through visual and literary allusions that enlarge the immediate narrative context of the descent: the angel's aspect ‘Like Phoebus face adorned with sunny rayes,/Divinely shone.’ The comparison conveys the effect of dazzling light and suggests an analogy with the divine Son who entered the world to redeem it. Spenser does not explicate the simile, but, in the rhetorically defined imagery of his angelic portraiture, visual perception yields to visionary experience. The vision is presented to the Palmer and to the reader—but not to Guyon, ‘slumbring fast/In senseless dreame.’ The irony of the knight's unconsciousness points to the truth of the relationship of the figures in tableau and to the cosmic setting of Guyon's journey. The angel is not a figure in a dream, and it is in the climactic isolation of the knight's unconsciousness that his relationship to God becomes clearest: ‘the love he cannot give, he receives for he is in God's world’ (Sonn 1961:29).
The image of Phoebus dissolves immediately into a stanza-long epic simile comparing the angel to ‘Cupido on Idaean hill,’ a deity and setting apparently alien to the knight of Maidenhead (Cheney 1966:67). But the angel-Cupid comparison is the converse of the ‘angel-like’ images of the god of love in the dream-visions of romance literature (Hyde 1986:156–7). The god in the comparison is the celestial Cupid invoked in FQ I proem 3. The point of the comparison is a point of change, in time and in the poem, a reorientation of vision (Berger 1957:42). Cupid has ‘laid his cruell bow away’ and is revealed in the presence of his mother, the celestial Venus, and his sisters, the Graces. The unclassical grouping of these figures on Ida (R.M.Cummings 1970:319) and their displacement in the local habitations of Spenser's fiction (cf VI x 8–9) suggest the imagination's search for the true source of beauty, love, and joy. But in the presence of the angel, in this moment of mysterious convergences, Guyon is placed within that love recognized by Ficino as ‘the perpetual knot and link of the universe’ (‘Commentary’ on Plato's Symposium 3.3; Wind 1958:41). By this love, the human alliances of the poem are drawn into a new purposiveness (Berger 1957:49). The angel alerts the Palmer to the enemies at hand. The Palmer intercedes for Guyon with Arthur, the human instrument of grace. Arthur, as Guyon's ‘dayes-man’ (viii 28) dispatches Pyrochles and Cymochles, in fulfillment of the angel's revelation. ‘By this, Sir Guyon from his traunce awakt’ (53), and the action of the quest is renewed.
Michael Baxandall 1972 Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford); Berger 1957; Cheney 1966; R.M.Cummings 1970; Ficno ed 1985; Greene 1963; Hamilton 1961a; Hamilton intro to Book II in FQ ed 1977; Hyde 1986; I.G.MacCaffrey 1976; Panofsky 1939; Carl Robinson Sonn 1961 ‘Sir Guyon in the House of Mammon’ SEL 1:17–30; Tuve 1970:112–38.
According to a commonplace of Renaissance thought, all things are arranged hierarchically ‘from the Mushrome to the Angels’ (Ward ed 1622:2). Moreover, the angels are themselves ordered according to a scheme twice specified by Spenser as ‘trinall triplicities’: in The Faerie Queene, during the betrothal of the Red Cross Knight and Una (I xii 39), and in Heavenly Love (64–70), where the ‘Angels bright’ are envisaged as congregated about the throne of God, their tasks clearly defined. Oddly, however, the nine orders of angels are reduced to eight in Heavenly Beautie; in ascending sequence, they are: Powers, Potentates, Seats, Dominations, Cherubim, Seraphim, Angels, and Archangels.
The immediate appeal is to the time-honored scheme first propounded by the pseudonymous fifth-century writer who, adopting the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, St Paul's convert in Athens (Acts 17.34), arranged the angels into a hierarchy (again in an ascending sequence) of Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim (De coelesti hierarchia 7–9). Although enormously popular throughout the Middle Ages, the scheme was not the only one available. In two other alternatives, the angels were rearranged into ‘trinall triplicities’ so different from the primary scheme that the inevitable result was galloping confusion. On the advent of the Reformation, at any rate, every scheme was promptly dismantled. The principle of order among the angels was retained because the Bible makes it ‘most plaine’ that there are indeed ‘degrees of angels’ (Perkins 1591: sig B5v), but schemes like the popular one advanced by Pseudo-Dionysius were dismissed by both Luther and Calvin.
Spenser's list of angelic orders in Heavenly Beautie may reflect both his desire to adhere to the traditional ‘trinall triplicities’ and his unease over the common confusion about their precise arrangement. All the same, the importance of angels as executors of the divine behests is given decisive prominence. In Teares of the Muses, Angels are seen ‘waighting on th'Almighties chayre’ (510); in Heavenly Beautie, Angels and Archangels ‘attend/On Gods owne person, without rest or end’ (97–8); and in The Faerie Queene, they sing ‘before th'eternall majesty’ (I xii 39). In Amoretti 8, they ‘come to lead fraile mindes to rest/in chast desires on heavenly beauty bound.’ Their creation and duties are described in Heavenly Love 50–70. Incidental references to angels scattered throughout Spenser's poetry (eg, they are said to wear a ‘heavenly coronall...before Gods tribunall’ FQ in v 53) show how entirely they inhabited his imagination. In The Faerie Queene, the primacy of grace emphasized in Book I—‘Ne let the man ascribe it to his skill,/That thorough grace hath gained victory./If any strength we have, it is to ill,/ But all the good is Gods, both power and eke will’ (x 1)—leads to an even more lucid affirmation on ‘th'exceeding grace/Of Highest God’ whose angelic ministers are dispatched ‘to and fro, /To serve to wicked /To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe’ (II viii 1–2; see Guyon's *angel).
Following Revelation 12.3–4, 7–9, Spenser records the prehistoric war in heaven when ‘a whole legione/Of wicked Sprights did fall from happy blis’ (III ix 2; cf viii 8 and HHL 71–98). This vision of their fall is countered by two glorious epiphanies. On the Mount of Contemplation, Redcrosse sees the New Jerusalem: ‘As he thereon stood gazing, he might see/The blessed Angels to and fro descend/From highest heaven, in gladsome companee,/And with great joy into that Citie wend,/As commonly as friend does with his frend’ (I x 56). Its secular counterpart is the climactic vision of Mercilla: her cloth of state is upheld by little angels and thousands more encompass her throne (v ix 29). On the whole, then, Spenser's angelology is thoroughly traditional.
Robert Ellrodt 1980 ‘Angels and the Poetic Imagination from Donne to Traherne’ in English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of Her Seventieth Birthday (Oxford) pp 164–79; Lewis 1964:40–2, 71–4; William Perkins 1591 A Golden Chaine tr R. Hill (London); Samuel Ward 1622 The Life of Faith 3rd ed (London). On the rise and fall of the Pseudo-Dionysian scheme, see C.A. Patrides 1982 Premises and Motifs in Renaissance Thought and Literature (Princeton) ch I.
Both fabulous animals and animals with fabulous characteristics are images compounded within the mental faculty of the fantasy (or imagination). In the description of Phantastes’ cell, all perceived reality is mixed together with things imagined, so that apes and lions, lovers and children, are found with ‘Infernall Hags, Centaurs, feendes, Hippodames’ (FQ II ix 50). Even though these images may be ‘such as in the world were never yit,’ they exist in the mind and are therefore subject to interpretation.
Yet by comparison with the many other beasts in Spenser's poetry, fabulous animals are rarely mentioned. Basilisk, centaur, chimera, cockatrice, dragon, griffin, hydra, minotaur, phoenix, unicorn, and various sea monsters are the only ones named directly, though others, such as Duessa's seven-headed beast (I vii 16–18) and the Blatant Beast (v xii and VI) may be termed fabulous even though Spenser has reworked them from the Bible or traditional fable. Except for these two, fabulous animals are seldom directly present in the narrative except in pageants (cf MHT 122–4); usually they are mentioned in similes and ecphrases.
Six are used in similes. According to classical lore as transmitted through medieval bestiaries, the cockatrice and basilisk are lizardlike creatures that can kill with their gaze; eyes have the same power, and thus the poet's beloved in Amoretti 49 can ‘kill with looks, as Cockatrices do,’ and Corflambo ‘Like as the Basiliske of serpents seede,/From powrefull eyes close venim doth convay/Into the lookers hart, and killeth farre away’ (IV viii 39).
The unicorn and lion are traditional enemies; the lion, being the only creature that can capture the fabulous unicorn (a beast that may not be tamed, according to Job 39.12–15), lures it to attack, then slips aside so that its horn (precious because of its special medical and near-magical powers) becomes caught in a tree. Thus, in an extended simile where Pyrochles is described as the unicorn and Guyon as the lion (II v 10), the point, is not only that Guyon is more clever but also that Pyrochles is an especially difficult opponent. Since the unicorn was known for its wrath, the comparison with the fiery Pyrochles is the more apt.
Another traditional mythical struggle is that between the dragon and the griffin (a lion with eagle's wings, one of the four beasts in the vision at Dan 7.4). At FQ I v 8, Redcrosse is compared to the griffin and Sansjoy to the dragon—‘With hideous horrour both together smight.’ The comparison of Redcrosse's enemy to a dragon is entirely apt: all his enemies may be termed dragons. To picture Redcrosse as a griffin seems less apt; yet in this battle, Redcrosse shares the bestiality, magnanimity, covetousness, and strength which are traditionally attributed to the griffin (see note on FQ I v 8.2 in ed 1977).
Another fabulous animal is the hydra, that many-headed serpent slain by Hercules (Ovid Metamorphoses 9.68–74). The comparisons of Duessa's seven-headed beast and the Blatant Beast to the hydra (I vii 17, VI xii 32) imply that they can be overcome only by the ultimate hero.
Centaurs appear in both ecphrases and pageants. They are painted on the walls of Phantastes’ chamber (II ix 50); the tapestries of the house of Busirane show Saturn transforming himself into a centaur (III xi 43); ‘relicks of the drunken fray’ between the Lapiths, Centaurs, and Hercules are exhibited in the house of Ate (IV i 23); November rides the ‘dreadfull’ centaur Chiron, son of Saturn, in the pageant of the months (VII vii 40). Centaurs in these various displays recall the ancient mythological world in which the natural and the human are often mixed, sometimes with dangerous consequences.
Only a few animals appear as part of the direct experience of characters in The Faerie Queene, and even then their presence is shadowy. Trompart asserts that ‘Dragons, and Minotaures’ haunt the wilderness in which Hellenore is lost (III x 40); although Trompart is not the most reliable witness, his claim seems plausible to the reader who has already met several dragons in the narrative. Dreadful sea monsters, many of them believed to exist, delay Guyon's progress towards Acrasia's island: as the narrator comments, ‘Ne wonder, if these did the knight appall’ (II xii 25). Yet the Palmer tells Guyon that they are not real monsters but imaginary shapes ‘disguiz'd/By that same wicked witch’ Acrasia, thus instructing him to separate vain images from reality—a continuation of the theme established earlier in the visit to Phantastes’ chamber.
Certainly the most important fabulous animals in Spenser's poetry are the five images of absolute evil derived from classical and Christian tradition and the Bible, chiefly Revelation: Error (I i), Lucifera's dragon (v), Duessa's seven-headed beast (vii), the Dragon killed by Redcrosse (xi), and the Blatant Beast (v x, VI).
For further discussion, see Bernard Tannier 1980 ‘Un bestiaire maniériste: monstres et animaux fantastiques dans La Reine des Fées d'Edmund Spenser’ in Monstres et prodiges au temps de la Renaissance ed Marie Thérèse Jones-Davies (Paris) pp 55–65. For medieval lore, see T.H.White 1954 and Bartholomaeus Anglicus 1582, Book 18; for the Renaissance, see Topsell 1607; for a mid-seventeenth-century critical examination of much of this lore, see Book 3 of Sir Thomas Browne 1981 Pseudodoxia Epidemica ed Robin Robbins, 2 vols (Oxford). See also Carroll 1954; Hamilton's notes to FQ ed 1977; Robin 1932; and Beryl Rowland 1973 Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism (Knoxville, Tenn).
Spenser uses the word antique in many different senses, so that the meaning of the phrase antique world in his works is not always consistent or clear. A useful way to examine his range of meanings and their relationships is to consider the proems to the books of The Faerie Queene.
The word antique appears in four proems and in the second stanza of the Cantos of Mutabilitie, antiquity in one, and former ages in another. In the reference to Mutabilitie's ‘antique race’ (VII vi 2), the adjective means ‘primeval, original.’ In the phrase ‘antique praises,’ which refers to the celebration of Queen Elizabeth (III proem 3), the adjective means ‘antic’ in the sixteenth-century sense: ‘fanciful,’ ‘formulated in an imaginative fiction.’ In I proem 2 and II proem 1 and 4, antique means primarily ‘of that past recounted in this poem.’ In Book v proem 1 (see also 3 and 9), ‘the antique world’ means primarily the Golden Age: the period of virtue, simplicity, and harmony which, according to many classical writers, initiated human history. The myth of the Golden Age, which Spenser would have known best from Ovid's Metamorphoses I, was revived by frequent descriptions in Renaissance texts. It was supposedly followed by the Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, each harsher and more violent than its predecessor. The Iron Age was associated with the present, so that the myth expressed nostalgia for a pristine happiness opposed to fallen reality. In IV proem 3, the phrase ‘former ages,’ also evoking a nobler past, appears to refer primarily to classical antiquity, since an allusion to Socrates follows immediately.
Spenser's use of antiquity in FQ VI proem 4 and 6 seems to bring together somewhat elusively several of these meanings: the past of this poem, the Golden Age, the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome, all represented as superior to the shrunken present. This elision of meanings is typical of Spenser. Each of those distinguished above is present to some degree in all the uses cited. In this way, through the various nuances of the word antique, a medieval, chivalric world overlaps with classical antiquity, a historical period overlaps with a mythical fiction, and all are associated with the action of the poem.
Of these diverse referents accruing to a single word, one had special force in Spenser's education and in his culture: the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome. The word antiquity in his age was already coming to denote primarily that civilization, as it does today. Spenser's own relationship to this particularly influential era of the past was complex and remains in some aspects confused, but three questions help to organize what is known about this relationship. First, with what elements of antiquity (authors, works, genres, myths, values, ideas) did he have contact? Second, through what intermediary avenues did this contact occur? Third, how were these elements, already altered by the passage of history, further assimilated and transmuted in his poetry?
The sixteenth century witnessed a dramatic renewal of interest in classical antiquity throughout northern Europe, a renewal which had been anticipated roughly a century earlier in Italy (see *humanism, *Renaissance). This renewal heavily influenced literature written in the national vernacular languages; it produced a large body of NeoLatin poetry and prose; it affected the ways in which men and women viewed their human dignity and their existence on earth; it directed the minds of the intellectual elite back to their pagan and Christian origins; it dominated the education of the young. Merchant Taylors’ School, which Spenser attended, had as its first headmaster a devotee of the ‘new learning,’ Richard Mulcaster. There can be no doubt that Spenser's early schooling had a strong humanist character.
The principal subject studied at Tudor grammar schools was Latin. The acquisition of Greek was in contrast a much rarer phenomenon, reserved for a select group of students at the most advanced schools; even in these cases, few students equaled the proficiency all achieved in Latin. The best schools generally introduced boys to Latin literature in the form of the Precepts of Cato (a series of moralizing distichs), and then taught them to read texts by such major authors as Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Aesop and Lucian were sometimes taught to younger boys in Latin translation. Neo-Latin authors, generally Mantuan and Erasmus, were often included as well. Great stress was placed upon memorizing; at Winchester, for example, all boys who reached a given level were required to learn twelve lines of Ovid's Metamorphoses a week, thus about 500 lines a year. It is quite likely that Spenser knew long passages of Latin poetry by heart.
As students advanced, they were required to write Latin compositions imitating those of the classics under study. They were also encouraged to keep commonplace books, in which they entered notable maxims, idioms, topoi, epithets, images, and turns of phrase garnered from their reading. These books were then mined when the student came to write his own compositions. Thus imitation was central to the educational process, not only in the conception of an entire composition but in its smallest elements. This process did not of course ensure a grasp of the true distinction or particular spirit of a given author, and doubtless it led most schoolboys to produce a merely mechanical likeness. But it did produce a strong pressure for continuity both of genre and of semantic unit; and in this respect, its effects are traceable on virtually every page of Spenser's writing.
Spenser's instruction at grammar school was followed by seven formative years at Cambridge, where he received the degrees of BA and MA. His formal education there took the form of attendance at lectures, delivered in English, and public disputations with other students. In 1570, his second year at the university, a revised set of statutes governing its curriculum was approved by the Queen. Since these statutes are extant, they can inform us concerning the texts and subjects taught, although it would be naive to assume that they were invariably followed to the letter. For a future BA, they prescribe rhetoric (Quintilian, Hermogenes, Cicero), logic (Aristotle and Cicero), and ‘philosophy’ (Plato, Pliny, Aristotle's Problems, Ethics, and Politics). Lectures on the Greek texts in this list would probably have discussed them in Latin translation. An MA candidate studied quadrivial subjects (arithmetic, geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy), drawing, more philosophy, and Greek (both the language and such authors as Homer, Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Euripides). The fact that language training was necessary at this level suggests that readings in Greek authors consisted of selected excerpts. A Cambridge professor of Spenser's era refers to student theatricals enlivening winter evenings with Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca (Judson 1945:26). But his nostalgic and expansive tone makes it unclear whether this list is to be taken altogether literally.
Humanism at Cambridge had received strong impetus during the middle third of the century from a group of scholars led by Sir John Cheke and Roger Ascham, a group based at St John's College but influential well beyond its walls. Spenser's student friendship with Gabriel Harvey, an erudite classical scholar, must in itself have widened and sharpened his interest in ancient literature. A passage in a published letter from Harvey to Spenser drops the names of authors Harvey clearly thought his fellow student ought to be reading: ‘Tully [Cicero], and Demosthenes nothing so much studyed, as they were wonte: Livie, and Salust possiblye rather more, than lesse: Lucian never so much: Aristotle muche named, but little read: Xenophon and Plato, reckned amongest Discoursers, and conceited Superficiall fellowes’ (Three Letters 3, Var Prose p 460). This may or may not be an accurate reflection of Cambridge taste in 1580, but it evokes an atmosphere in which it is fashionable to talk about ancient writers and debate the rise and fall of reputations. The little reading of Aristotle reported by Harvey, in marked contrast with the statutes’ prescriptions, suggests that the study of this author was mediated by that medieval scholastic philosophy whose survival at Cambridge would exasperate Milton two generations later.
Although we shall never know with any certainty just how widely Spenser read in classical literature, the uncertainty is particularly acute in the case of Greek. He must have learned some at university, if not at school, but it is hard to say how much. On the one hand, he knew enough to form the names of characters in The Faerie Queene from Greek roots. His friend Lodowick Bryskett, in his fictional dialogue Discourse of Civill Life, describes Spenser as ‘perfect in the Greek tongue’ (ed 1970:21). The Letter to Raleigh refers to Homer, Plato, and Xenophon; SC, March imitates an idyll by Bion and ‘Astrophel’ another; echoes of Plato's Timaeus and of Plutarch can be found in the Fowre Hymnes; the Pastorella story in FQ VI may be indebted to Greek romances; a translation of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus into English may be Spenser's. The Greek emblems which conclude Maye form an hexameter found in Theognis. Other allusions and ‘sources’ could be cited.
Yet on the other hand, all of Spenser's known sources that involve a Greek text were also available to him in another language. The Axiochus translation, for example, is based on a Latin version of the Greek by a certain Welsdalius. At FQ II vii 52 and IV proem 3, two serious errors concerning the participants in two Platonic dialogues raise the question whether Spenser had read the Phaedo and the Phaedrus in any language. Although E.K. in his Argument prefacing The Shepheardes Calender cites Theocritus as ‘the first head and welspring’ of the eclogue form, there is very little of Theocritus in the work itself. The eclogue closest to his idylls, August, depends more immediately on Sannazaro, Baïf, and Ronsard, as well as Virgil. March does not derive from Bion directly but either from Latin or a French translation. Spenser may have read many Greek authors in translation or in original excerpts, but there seems to be no firm evidence other than the tribute of his friend Bryskett that he could read Greek texts of any length in the original.
The case of Latin literature is totally different. There is ample evidence that Spenser's mind was steeped in it, especially in its poetry. He translated the Culex (mistakenly attributed by his contemporaries to Virgil) as Virgils Gnat, and he drew heavily on Ciris (another pseudo-Virgilian poem) for an episode at FQ III ii 30–51. Many other passages in his poetry allude to specific passages in Latin poetry, and his entire corpus is dense with phrases, images, motifs, and details stemming originally from ancient Latin writing.
Nonetheless, it is not easy to state with precision just how widely Spenser read in Latin. He certainly knew Cicero, Terence, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid—all likely school texts. He certainly knew works by Seneca and Statius; he uses the latter's Thebaid in The Faerie Queene. He must have read some Caesar, Pliny, Sallust, Quintilian, and Livy. Lucretius was less commonly read during the Tudor period, but some readers claim that he influenced Spenser. Spenser translates the opening of De rerum natura in FQ IV x 44– 7, although there is no strong evidence that he read the entire Latin poem. Elements from Diodorus Siculus appear in The Shepheardes Calender and elsewhere. It is doubtful that Spenser knew well the elegists Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus. The structure of Epithalamion is fundamentally Catullan, but this structure had become conventional during the continental Renaissance. Of the Late Latin authors, Spenser clearly knew Macrobius and the protomedieval philosopher Boethius. The list of authors could probably be lengthened if individual motifs or phrases implied conclusive proof of Spenser's familiarity with a given ancient text. But the use of commonplace books was so heavy, the passage from imitation to topos so common, that this kind of attribution is risky.
More useful than seeking to compile a reading list is asking how Spenser ‘knew’ a given classical text at all. Like most readers, he apparently tasted many more books than he digested. FQ II x, for instance, suggests that his grasp of Roman history was weak. The discussion of ancient historical evidence in Vewe of Ireland has many references which have proven untraceable or simply wrong. For example, the word mantelum (cloak) is assigned to a passage in the Aeneid where it does not appear (Var Prose p 99). The ideal of historical precision was not high during Spenser's lifetime, and he did nothing to raise it.
More generally, it should be remembered that Elizabethans, like moderns, could read a book for many reasons: as a storehouse of usable phrases and images; as a rhetorical performance exhibiting a variety of classified tropes; as an imitation or emulation of a well-known earlier work; as a set of positive and negative moral examples; as ‘matter’ for instruction and as a source of ideas; as an allegorical source with implications for ethics, metaphysics, or theology, especially if the surface appeared to be unrewarding. Even so gifted a mind as Spenser's would not have approached all books, including the classics, with all these considerations at work simultaneously. On the basis of his published works, we can guess which ancient writers he read with the most sympathetic attention and active receptivity; but except for two or three dominant masters, we can only guess. We can be sure only that the assumptions and expectations guiding his reading differed both from our own and from those of the original ancient audience.
Spenser's contact with the classics was achieved through a series of screens. First was the screen of language, formidable in the case of Greek, less opaque in the case of Latin, but nonetheless interposing a foreign element between reader and text. For most Greek texts, translation was probably an additional screen. Massive historical change was also a screen between the culture or cultures of antiquity and that of Elizabethan England. No reader at any period can accurately estimate the density of this screen. Tudor England witnessed a growth in the awareness of historical change more or less coincident with the growth of native humanism, but it would remain for men and women of the seventeenth century to gauge the profundity of change with something approaching that clarity we like to call ‘modern.’ Spenser never reached the awareness of his younger contemporary Jonson, although this contrast should not stamp him as a correspondingly weaker poet. But it is fair to say that the screen of change was doubled for him and almost all his contemporaries by an imperfect perception of change. Further, when pagan authorities and Christian authorities were seen to differ, many Renaissance writers, including Spenser, attempted to minimize or reconcile the difference, often in the process reading with a bias the texts they were reinterpreting. Thus the very conflict of authorities could be considered a screen to understanding.
Still another, more visible screen lay in the immense corpus of glosses, commentaries, and interpretations which intermittently illuminated but also oversimplified or obscured classic texts. Many of these commentaries were published along with the texts and were impossible to avoid, just as E.K.’s glosses cannot be avoided in reading The Shepheardes Calender. In many sixteenth-century editions of Virgil, for example, the original text would occupy a relatively small part of the folio page, the rest of which was given over to commentators. These could include both Late Latin figures such as Servius and Donatus, and modern humanist scholars such as Badius Ascensius. Some editions would mingle many chronological layers of ‘explanation’ and interpretation, which could be grammatical, philological, historical, rhetorical, moral, religious, or allegorical. This screen of commentary on single works is not always easily distinguishable from original treatises which reiterate, reformulate, embroider, simplify, and wittingly or unwittingly distort the content of the classical text.
Plato's dialogues, which were subjected to many reformulations both pagan and Christian, are perhaps the clearest example of how screens are created by commentary's ramification and deformation of a text. One of the most influential philosophical treatises of the Italian Renaissance was Ficino's ‘Commentary’ on Plato's Symposium. It in turn helped to produce a new wave of Neoplatonic treatises throughout Europe which both disseminated and altered its thought. This is why it is difficult to sort out specific sources for Spenser's Neoplatonism in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and Fowre Hymnes.
Beyond the screen of commentary stood another composed of encyclopedic gatherings, florilegia, manuals, dictionaries, and handbooks designed to make antiquity more accessible. Among the best known examples are the Adages and Apothegms of Erasmus, the Mythologiae of Conti and comparable mythographic compilations by Vincenzo Cartari and Cintio, and the farraginous Elizabethan compendium commonly called Batman uppon Bartholome. Encyclopedic collections like these brought together information and misinformation of a superficial kind enabling people to seem better educated than they were. Their net effect was to fragment what was known about antiquity into bits of knowledge or pseudoknowledge: proverbs, anecdotes, iconographic details, debased myths, random facts, cliché descriptions. This screen also prevented such a reader as Spenser from perceiving ancient civilization as anything like a series of organic cultural configurations.
The final screen was the peculiar temperament, taste, imagination, and bent of mind of Spenser himself, who responded to the tangled values and traditions of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance Europe as a unique, discriminating agent, never receiving the imprint of the past as a tabula rasa but as a specific, developing, idiosyncratic artist. To enumerate these screens is not to belittle the humanism of Spenser's age but rather to describe the particular forms of mediation then at work in the perennial interplay between past and present.
Understanding this Tudor interplay is needed to understand Spenser's assimilation and transmutation of ancient culture in his poetry. It was not easy to intermingle late medieval, native English elements with what Spenser knew of the classics and with what he knew of the continental Renaissance, which was itself attempting to achieve a similar synthesis. The task of incorporating Greek and Roman culture into the contemporary world was markedly easier in France, since the leaders of the French po etic revival were much more willing to jettison almost all their native, medieval culture. This was not so in England, however, least of all with Spenser, whose first major work deliberately imposed an archaic English flavor and vocabulary on the imported literary mode of pastoral.
We can measure the tension in this imposition and, more broadly, the tension in English humanism by noting E.K.’s ambivalence in his introductions and annotations to The Shepheardes Calender. He is clearly anxious to point out (sometimes erroneously) all the echoes and allusions to ancient and continental sources; yet in his prefatory Epistle to Harvey, he attacks those who, finding the English language barren, have ‘patched up the holes with peces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the french, there of the Italian, every where of the Latine.’ E.K.’s linguistic purism seems to fit badly with his literary eclecticism. Spenser would have avoided so awkward a straddle, but he had to cope nonetheless with the problem of assimilation.
Spenser himself seems to have written a fair amount of Latin verse as a young man. His first letter to Harvey speaks of an Epithalamion Thamesis and a Stemmata Dudleiana (3 Lett I, Var Prose pp 17–18); and his second letter contains a poetic tribute to his correspondent in 237 Latin hexameters (‘Ad ornatissimum virum’ in 2 Lett I, Var Prose pp 8–12), although this ‘one existing specimen of Spenser's Latin verse gives us no high idea of his skill in the scholarly art’ (Renwick in Var Prose p 259).
A deeper concern and a far more difficult challenge to the young Spenser was to write quantitative verse. The predicaments inherent in this enterprise, disagreements over specific words and syllables, and poetic trial balloons occupy a substantial part of his published correspondence with Harvey, to whom he expostulated, ‘For, why a Gods name may not we, as else the Greekes, have the kingdome of oure owne Language, and measure our Accentes, by the sounde, reserving the Quantitie to the Verse’ (3 Lett I, Var Prose p 16). Here he underestimates the difficulty of cultural assimilation, and illustrates the larger and more difficult drama of creating a vernacular humanist poetry.
The most tangible evidence of Spenser's early humanist ambitions lies in his translation from Latin of the pseudo-Virgilian Culex as Virgils Gnat, published with the Complaints in 1591 but probably an earlier work. This is a creditable version which no longer makes a strong appeal to modern taste. Like many Renaissance translators, he felt no compunctions about adding to his original, so that the resulting English poem is considerably longer than the Latin; but it is reasonably accurate and is especially faithful to the shifting tone of the original. Also included in the Complaints is a translation from French of the Antiquitez of Joachim du Bellay as Ruines of Rome, as well as a translation of du Bellay's poetic epilogue to this work, entitled Songe, as Visions of Bellay. This latter series had been part of Spenser's first published work, a group of translated visionary poems in A Theatre for Worldlings, which appeared in 1569 when the poet could not have been much older than seventeen. Another poem in Complaints, Ruines of Time, associates the fall of Rome with the fall of an ancient British city, Verulam; this poem's elegiac style reflects du Bellay's influence. Teares of the Muses, also in Complaints, laments the fallen state of the Muses in the present age, in contrast to the prestige and inspirational power they once enjoyed. In various ways, all of these poems express pathos, that sense of loss and privation endemic to the humanist enterprise. However Muiopotmos in the same collection displays a more playful humanism, opening with an echo of the Iliad and closing with an echo of the Aeneid, as though to frame with epic allusions the mingled regret and mock-heroic bravura of its narrative.
The Complaints as a collection reflects a more self-consciously humanistic Spenser than does The Shepheardes Calender, despite E.K.’s learned annotations. Of the pastorals, three exemplify diverse aspects of his relation to antiquity. March includes an anecdote traceable to Bion's fourth idyll, lengthened with details from Moschus’ first. Translations of both poems were available to Spenser, and these, rather than the original Greek, seem to have been his immediate sources. (The attempt in March to assimilate a coy, decorative, slender hellenistic pastoralism to native English rusticity has not generally been admired.) August presents a singing match between two shepherds, a highly conventionalized pastoral sub-genre leading back through many Renaissance examples to Virgil's third and seventh eclogues, themselves indebted to the first, seventh, and eighth idylls of Theocritus. Spenser substitutes a rollicking English roundelay for the slower-paced contests of the convention and brings off poetic assimilation of undeniable appeal. October expresses aspirations for poetry beyond the pastoral low style and cites Servius’ famous ‘Virgilian progression’ from eclogue to georgic to epic (lines 55–60). Although Cuddie here refuses Piers’ invitation to let his ‘Muse display her fluttryng wing’ (43), the ambition to write a Virgilian epic in the high style is formulated vigorously, and Colin Clout is named as one who might one day fulfill it. Piers’ evocation of heroic grandeur, soaring above the ‘lowly dust’ of pastoral, already situates The Shepheardes Calender as the first step in Spenser's own Virgilian progression.
The implicit promise of October is explicitly affirmed by the opening lines of The Faerie Queene: ‘Lo I the man’ and the lines that follow paraphrase those all sixteenthcentury readers believed to open Virgil's Aeneid and describe Spenser's own progression from pastoral to epic. Thus they set The Faerie Queene in a tradition whose central figure was Virgil, preceded by Homer as the Letter to Raleigh reminds us, and followed by Ariosto and Tasso. They invite the reader to consider Spenser's poem in the Virgilian, or more broadly the classical, tradition sketched by Piers in October. The dissonance between this tradition and the Ariostan epic-romance was reduced for Spenser because the body of commentary associated with each tended to nudge them closer to each other, to represent them as more alike than they actually are. Spenser believed that he could be faithful at once to the classical line and to the Italian line which for him harmoniously extended the classical. He misgauged their unlikeness, thus heightening the problem of poetic assimilation but not necessarily impoverishing the substance of his greatest work.
Assimilation of ancient culture in The Faerie Queene takes diverse forms, many of which are liable to misunderstanding. Renwick's caveat is still useful: The use of quotations may be proof of study, but it is not necessarily proof of intellectual discipleship, still less of complete acceptance of a system of thought. Nor did quotations necessarily come direct from their originals, for many phrases and arguments had done duty many times, and not always the same duty or in the same connexion’ (Var 4:235).
Similar caution is advisable when we consider Spenser's use of a given passage from an ancient narrative. It may be legitimate to examine in detail his transmutation of a story, for example, the recasting of Ovid's Diana and Actaeon myth in the Faunus episode of FQ VII vi. But fragments of Ovid's version of that myth can be traced in many other passages of the English poem—one scholar has pointed to ten (Friedmann 1966)— and a survey of such passages does not take into account intermediate retellings of the Ovidian story which Spenser may have known. Thus assimilation and transmutation are slippery concepts. They can operate at the smallest, almost microscopic level of the poem as well as at the very broadest global level; but it is easier to demonstrate their presence than to describe their function and effect.
In theory, various types of assimilation can be distinguished, although for practical analysis these tend to shade into each other. The kind of fragmentation just noted distributes minuscule details over the body of the poem; for example, the pumice stone, which is not found in England but in Ovid's description of Diana's grotto, is relocated in Spenser's fairy world (Met 3.158; FQ II v 30, III v 39). At the other extreme, the virtue of magnificence is incarnated by Arthur and derived from the supreme Aristotelian virtue of magnanimity, as the Letter to Raleigh makes clear. In contrast with this macrocosmic conception, there is the stereotyped narrative unit such as the descent to the house of Morpheus (I i 39–44), which derives from earlier accounts in the Iliad, the Aeneid, Statius’ Thebaid, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, and Poiitian's Stanze per la Giostra; likewise, the bleeding tree motif (I ii 30–4) derives from earlier examples in the Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, Boccaccio's Filocolo, and Ariosto's Orlando furioso. There is the imitation of a recognizable passage from a single ancient text, such as the imitations of Virgil's Hades (I v 32–5, II vii 21–3); this type allows more scope for textual analysis and thus for an understanding of the actual process of poetic transmutation. There is the general resemblance in narrative elements between two sharply different plots, such as the resemblance between Spenser's story of the true and false Florimells (III–IV) and the story of Euripides’ Helen, a tragedy which also involves an actual woman and her magically contrived look-alike. There is the allusion to a genre of ancient literature, as when the Greek romance of Longus, Heliodorus, and Achilles Tatius is revived in the Pastorella story (VI ix–xii). There is comic burlesque, as when Aeneas’ encounter with Venus (Aeneid I) is travestied in Trompart's meeting with Belphoebe (II iii 21–33). There is the lifting of a scene from the pseudo-Virgilian Ciris already mentioned; and there is the allegorization of a straightforward narrative, such as the seachange of Homeric elements at II xii 2–38. There is Spenser's free translation of a set passage, such as the hymn to Venus (IV x 44–7) which Englishes the opening lines of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. There is finally a type of assimilation too diffused for quotation which can be regarded only as an imaginative or spiritual kinship, ‘Unseene of any, yet of all beheld’ (VII vii 13).
There is indeed very little in The Faerie Queene which is not assimilative of something, whether it is ancient or whether it can be located somewhere else in Spenser's enormous cultural heritage. The basic process of the poem is parodic, if the implication of ridicule is removed from that term, for almost everything in it constitutes a revision or displacement of something else, much of which ultimately has classical roots. ‘His originality has long been recognized to lie in his devotion to other poets and to myths he recombined from other sources’ (Fletcher 1971:105–6). Part of this revising, displacing, and recombining can be attributed to Spenser's deliberate artistic will; another part, indefinable and immeasurable, can be attributed to the screens standing between the poet and the materials he sought to revise.
The paraphrase of Lucretius’ opening lines in Book IV illustrates the interaction between subtext and Renaissance text. Spenser shares Lucretius’ quasi-religious awe before the natural regeneration of the spring season, but he Englishes the Latin with a proper sense of his own independence. Part of the difference stems, of course, from the larger context of each invocation. Venus in The Faerie Queene is one in a series of personifications; in the Latin, she is a deified force in a work which demystifies all other traditional deities. But there are significant verbal variations as well. Spenser reduces slightly Lucretius’ celebration of the goddess as genetrix (life-giving) and as alma (nourishing) in order to heighten her role as a pacifier and source of joy: ‘Mother of laughter, and welspring of blisse’ (IV x 47). It is she who prepares for pleasure all that is fair and glad on earth; and this ‘pleasure,’ in contrast to the Christian and Stoic austerities which also attracted Spenser, acquires a brave intensity which the Latin could not have achieved. In Lucretius, Venus stimulates lusty, even violent activity; in Spenser, the ‘fury’ of sex is absorbed in a cheerful and frisky animal gaiety. Perhaps the most characteristically Spenserian line praises Venus not only for creating the world (Conti's idea, not Lucretius’) but also for maintaining it against destruction: ‘And dayly yet thou doest the same repayre’ (x 47). This repairing, with its implication of a perennial struggle between undoing and remaking, is Spenser's most vivid personal signature. However keen his awareness of his actual historical remoteness may or may not have been, here he distances his own poem and its metaphysics from their prestigious source.
Of all ancient writers, Virgil and Ovid dominate The Faerie Queene. In some respects they represent antithetical pressures on Spenser's imagination. He seems to have perceived Virgil, rightly or wrongly, as a poet of stability. Aeneas embodies, according to the Letter, ‘a good governour and a vertuous man,’ and this he was thought to have remained steadfastly throughout his many trials. Spenser's view of Aeneas may well have been influenced by such a commentator as the Florentine Neoplatonist Cristoforo Landino, whose allegorical reading of the Aeneid presents Aeneas as a kind of ideal Stoic—wise, temperate, strong, successful, resistant to all perturbations. The Virgilian principle endows each book of The Faerie Queene with whatever continuity, progression, and steady movement toward victory it possesses. It also endows action with dignity and nobility, and allows the reader to hope that this action will alter the state of affairs definitively, irreversibly.
In Virgil, Spenser found an authority endowed with both his own moral seriousness and his capacity for stubborn hope in temperate courage when faced with misfortune. He also found an imagination strong enough to confront an underworld and authoritative enough to provide a model for his own descents into the terrible darkness which permanently threatens his poetic universe. The descents into a demonic underworld of FQ I v, II vii, and IV i, more pagan than Christian, depend upon Virgil as a guide, especially the first two; yet even here Spenser finds his own note. There is nothing in the Aeneid comparable to The trembling ghosts with sad amazed mood,/Chattring their yron teeth, and staring wide/With stonie eyes’ (I v 32). The presence of Virgil allowed Spenser to explore personal fantasies of horror and provided the example of a survival from horror in a universe moving toward concord.
The presence of Ovid in The Faerie Queene can be situated at a pole opposite to Virgil's. The Ovidian principle is that force which turns every victory into a partial failure, which distracts every narrative from proceeding directly to its end, which calls into question the stability of character, of plot, and of cosmos. The same force also invests the fluctuating physical world with the dynamism which informs the Garden of Adonis and the marriage of the rivers.
Spenser gives evidence of knowing most or all of Ovid's works, but the ancient work which nourished his epic beyond all others was the Metamorphoses. From that labyrinth of changes, as it was visible to him through screening intermediaries, he would have learned the possibilities of mythography for moral and metaphysical meaning; he would have learned the charm of structural distraction, postponing the promised end; and he might also have learned the deceptiveness of intended conclusions. His poem, at any rate, typically withholds a ‘Virgilian’ finality for an Ovidian divagation or frustration. Spenser would have found in the Meta-morphoses blurred divisions between supernatural and natural, divine and human, transcendent divine and immanent divine, pantheistic world and inert world, possessed prophet and earthbound versifier. The absence of sharp divisions between metaphysical realms permitted the creation of a fairy world in which the status of creatures and places is happily ambiguous; the very term fairy illustrates this ambiguity. What he partly failed to see in Ovid's corpus is the witty skepticism shading into cynicism, not least toward the subject of erotic love. Part of that skepticism would have been screened out by the moralistic recuperations of the commentators. But the Faunus story of FQ VII vi demonstrates that not all Ovidian comedy was lost on him, as it demonstrates his pleasure in creating his own, quite explicitly Ovidian metamorphosis.
Perhaps most crucially, Spenser found in Metamorphoses 15 a usable philosophy of eternal mutability, there attributed to the sage Pythagoras. The transformations which occupy the fourteen preceding books are revealed now as manifesting the fundamental activity of the universe, the constant transformation of the elements, of things, of creatures, and of forms. Spenser's most memorable dramatizations of this philosophy are in the Garden of Adonis (III vi) and the Cantos of Mutabilitie, but in fact his poem is saturated with an intuition of the fragility and cyclicity of all things. The Faerie Queene is a poem of primeval alternations—of day and night, light and darkness, victory and defeat, joy and sorrow, love and strife, life and death, creation and destruction. It bears witness to these perennial alternations, sometimes in the mode of celebration, sometimes in the mode of lament. The very last line expresses lament; but that final moment cannot cancel out the joy of the union of Venus and Adonis, of matter and form, a union whose offspring are mortal but which is nonetheless suitable for celebration. Ovidian alternation, mutability, cyclicity are of course the patterns of Spenserian narrative itself, always impeding the Virgilian drive toward a conclusive repose, but yielding in the end to a provisional and partial closure.
Thus Spenser responded to Ovid with the intuitions of a great poet, even though he never freed himself from the constrictions of his own cultural and temporal provinciality. He may never have realized how radically his art and his world differed from Ovid's; he may never fully have recognized the distortions imposed by the screens of fifteen centuries of sedimented interpretation. But his work does exemplify admirably the range of artistic strategies available to the Tudor humanist poet in assimilating not only Ovid but all of the ancient world he knew. Even if he perceived that world eccentrically, fragmentarily, ethnocentrically, it gave him an alternative vocabulary, with alternate myths, structures, values, images, channels of feeling, all of which produced a polyvocality that thickens the texture of his poetry and complicates its meanings.
Ellrodt 1960; Ettin 1982; Fletcher 1971; Friedmann 1966; Hankins 1971; Hughes 1929; Judson 1945; Lotspeich 1932; Nohrnberg 1976.
of Cos (or perhaps Chios) (fourth century BC) The fame of Apelles as the greatest painter of antiquity extended into the Renaissance. Although none of his works survived, his fame was attested by many classical writers, including Pliny, Lucian, Ovid, and the poets of the Greek Anthology. According to Pliny the Elder (Natural History 35.79–80), what distinguished him from the other notable painters of his time was the indefinable grace of his pictures. He was praised for knowing when to take his hand from a picture before it was spoiled by too much effort. His works included the Aphrodite anadyomene (‘Aphrodite Rising from the Sea’), to which Spenser alludes as a supreme depiction of ideal beauty (Heavenly Beautie 211–14).
So impressed was Spenser with the fame of Apelles that in his FQ Court Sonnet he ascribes to him a story associated with Zeuxis, another great artist of the ancient world: Cicero relates that when Zeuxis set out to paint Helen of Troy and was unable to find a perfect model, he assembled five maidens of Crotona, taking the best features from each (De inventione 2.1.3). Whether or not Spenser confused Apelles with Zeuxis, his point in the sonnet is that the artist in pursuit of the ideal cannot find models here below: The Chian Peincter, when he was requirde/To pourtraict Venus in her perfect hew,/To make his worke more absolute, desird/Of all the fairest Maides to have the vew’ (cf FQ IV v 12). Similarly, Spenser, drawing ‘the semblant trew’ of Queen Elizabeth, has to see many beautiful ladies of the court. Elsewhere he refers to Zeuxis by name, linking him with the sculptor Praxiteles as exemplars of the highest skill in portraiture (III proem 2). In these stories of ancient painters and sculptors which had come down to the Renaissance through classical authors, he found readymade symbols of his own artistic ideals.
Cast 1981; Ernst H.Gombrich 1976 The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY).