K

Keats, John

(1795–1821) The first and last poems written by Keats were imitations of Spenser, the first in 1814 when he was still a schoolboy and the last in the summer of 1820. These ‘imitations’ are characteristic of the way in which Keats, throughout his brief poetic career, passionately responded to whatever reading his swift empathic imagination fastened on and at the same time fought to prevent his keen literary sympathies from imperiling the discovery of his individual poetic voice. By 1819 it seemed to him that of those who ‘have ever been the food/Of my delighted fancy’ (from the sonnet of early 1816, ‘How many bards gild the lapses of time!’), the most strongly influential were Shakespeare (whom in April 1817 when embarking on Endymion he had already begun to think of as his true ‘Presider’), and Milton, from whom he struggled to free himself. ‘English ought to be kept up,’ he said in the autumn of 1819 (ed 1958, 2:167), now claiming that the language of the tribe remained pure and undefiled only in the early English tradition celebrated by Chatterton. Towards the end of his creative life, then, whether consciously or not, Keats reaffirmed a stance associated with Spenser, the poet who was uniquely responsible for first setting his poetic career in motion, and whose presence is felt here and there all along the way like—appropriately—an undersong.

Yet it is abundantly clear from the start that Keats's response was instinctively selective and that it was Spenser's richness of language, imagery, and stanzaic skills, not his moral themes, that captured his youthful enthusiasm and quickened his sense of his own potential poetic genius. Only later, in that year of 1819 when his growing command of a personal idiom was reinforced by powerful and conflicting emotional experiences recently undergone, did his poetry come to carry overtones reminiscent of certain kinds of Spenserian ambivalence. Even then, his use of narrative remained essentially un-Spenserian, being as always characteristic of his own age in its personal, lyrical, and reflective expressiveness. (It is significant that he was not at home with his epic conception in the unfinished Hyperion, transforming it in The Fall of Hyperion into a personal ‘dialogue of the mind with itself,’ a sign of the modern spirit, as Matthew Arnold recognized in the preface to his Poems [1853]).

Keats was introduced to The Faerie Queene in 1814 by Charles Cowden Clarke, his admirable teacher at Enfield School, who tells us he went through the poem ‘as a young horse would through a spring meadow—ramping,’ was bowled over by ‘the felicity and power’ of the epithets, and ‘hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said “what an image that is—seashouldering whales!”’ (FQ II xii 23, saluted in Endymion 1.529–30: ‘saw the horizontal sun/Heave his broad shoulder o'er the edge of the world’; see also C. and M.Cowden Clarke 1878:126). Keats's gratitude is expressed in ‘To Charles Cowden Clarke’ (September 1816), the verse letter which celebrates— albeit in un-Spenserian pentameter couplets—‘one who had by Mulla's stream/Fondled the maidens with breasts of cream;/Who had beheld Belphoebe in a brook,/And lovely Una in a leafy nook,/ And Archimago leaning o'er his book,’ and who ‘first taught me all the sweets of song,’ among them ‘Spenserian vowels that elope with ease,/And float along like birds o'er summer seas’ (34–7, 53, 56–7). It has been rightly noted, however, that these lines sound like Pope and that the next two lines, which are about Milton— ‘Miltonian storms, and more, Miltonian tenderness;/Michael in arms, and more, meek Eve's fair slenderness’—sound more like Spenser's own voice and are indeed alexandrines (John Hollander, private communication).

Charles Brown, another friend, records that Keats at once fell in love with the Spenserian stanza, ‘attempted to imitate it, and succeeded,’ this first trial of his awakened ‘genius’ being ‘Imitation of Spenser’ written in his eighteenth year (Rollins 1965, 2:55– 6). The poem, consisting of four Spenserian stanzas, describes a lakeside scene at sunrise and aims at a delicate opulence obviously inspired by Phaedria's island and the Bower of Bliss in FQ II vi, xii. But the piece is already characteristically Keatsian in gathering ‘unnumbered sounds’ from ‘many bards,’ in this case Milton's L'Allegro, Book 6 of the Aeneid (Keats's single classical passion then), and less felicitously the derivative diction of eighteenth-century Spenserians earlier studied at school, such as Beattie, Thomson, and Mary Tighe (who captured Keats's youthful attention for a while). He used the Spenserian stanza four times again: momentously five years later in The Eve of St Agnes (Jan 1819), amusingly in the three jeu d'esprit stanzas of ‘He is to weet a melancholy carle’ addressed to Charles Brown (Apr 1819), with touches of wit in the otherwise misjudged satire ‘The Cap and Bells’ (Nov-Dec 1819), and didactically in—by a strange irony—his last composition, a single stanza written during his final illness when he was ‘marking the most beautiful passages’ in his copy of Spenser for Fanny Brawne, the woman he had hoped one day to marry (ed 1958, 2:302). ‘In aftertime a sage of mickle lore’ is prompted by the Giant's ‘undemocratic’ behavior in FQ V ii 29–54 and expresses ‘this ex post hoc facto prophecy, his conviction of the ultimate triumph of freedom and equality by the power of transmitted knowledge’ (Milnes in Keats ed 1848, 1:281).

Such explicit comment is untypical. Keats's running debates with the poets he challenges while acknowledging their strength are usually conducted obliquely, as in his reply to Shelley's ‘Alastor’ in Endymion or to Wordsworth's ‘Expostulation and Reply’ in ‘O thou whose face hath felt the winter's wind.’ His finest ‘Spenserian’ poem, The Eve of St Agnes, suggests the intimate connection between such debates and the continuous inner dialogue about the conflicting claims of ‘sensation’ and ‘thought’ which attended his lifelong search for poetic mastery. The richly textured central stanzas, celebrating erotic love in a charmed setting radiant with warmth, color, music, and a feast which delights every sense, are framed in other stanzas which evoke age, sickness, death, and the remorseless erosions of time. The central stanzas celebrate qualities first quickened into poetic expression through that affinity spontaneously recognized in 1814 and soon confirmed by further Spenserian reading. The framing stanzas direct us to the ‘burden of the mystery’ which the harsher realities of existence lay upon those entering the dark passages beyond what Keats, in a famous metaphor, calls the Chamber of Maiden Thought. In the poetic program set out for himself in Sleep and Poetry (1817), he pleads for ten years to dwell in ‘the realm... Of Flora and old Pan’ before turning to nobler, darker themes inspired by ‘the agonies, the strife/Of human hearts’ (101–2, 124–5).

But the innocent pastoral pleasures that Spenser taught him to sing cluster in a mere handful of very youthful poems such as the February 1816 valentine for his pretty acquaintance Mary Frogley (‘Hadst thou liv'd in days of old’): he portrays her as the chaste Britomart of FQ III; her hair like ‘globes that rise/From the censer to the skies’ (21–2) seems to be inspired by the ‘rolling globes’ of incense at Colin Clout 608–11, while his descriptions of her breasts ‘like twin water-lilies born/In the coolness of the morn’ and of ‘the little loves’ that flutter round them ‘with eager pry’ (29–30, 33–4) seem to arrive directly from Epithalamion (eg, 176, 357–9). Numerous other early echoes include the direct quotation in ‘To George Felton Matthew’ (‘And made “a sun-shine in a shady place”’ 75; cf FQ I iii 4), as well as the reference to chivalric fantasies inspired by ‘knightly Spenser’ and the pastoral scene inspired by Colin Clout 640–4 in ‘To My Brother George’ (24–36, 81–8; see ed 1970:27, 50, 51–2).

To the same brief untried period belong the unfinished companion pieces ‘Calidore’ and its ‘Induction,’ which unsuccessfully attempt ‘a tale of chivalry’ with the ‘Courtesie’ of FQ VI in mind. Their style and diction suffer from the debilitating effects of Keats's current enthusiasm for his new friend and patron Leigh Hunt. The Spenserian ‘luxuries’ are refracted through the loose heroic couplets and sentimental eroticism derived from Hunt's popular The Story of Rimini but without its narrative verve. The latest Spenserian passages in this short sojourn in ‘the realm of Flora’ appear in some parts of Endymion, notably the bower of the sleeping Adonis (2.389–427). This garden of pleasure with its ‘chamber, myrtle-walled’ guarded by Venus’ cupids emulates the pictorial charm, though not the moral perspective, of the Garden of Adonis, where a ‘grove of mirtle trees’ shelters ‘a pleasant arbour, not by art,/But of the trees owne inclination made’ (FQ III vi 42–5).

Endymion, whose fortunate hero both eats and has his cake by winning earthly love with his Indian maid and enjoying immortal passion with his moon goddess, is Keats's last sustained effort to fend off the troubling perplexities surrounding his highly individual Romantic contribution to the process of reconciling the ideal and the actual. In early 1818, in his sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Again,’ he bade farewell to ‘golden-tongued Romance with serene lute’ (ed 1970:295). By the end of the year, we find him journeying still further along the ‘dark corridors,’ his imagination further quickened by increasing familiarity with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Dante, and his sensibility wrought upon by the emigration of one brother to America and the death of the other (portending his own fatal illness), and by his first experience of passionate love.

The next year opened with his one celebration of happy love in The Eve of St Agnes, whose Spenserian delights are nevertheless encompassed by what is not delightful at all. Thereafter, the gentle loved one vanishes forever, to be dramatically replaced by the Spenserian antithetical image of the fatal enchantress. This ambiguous figure focuses the destructive power of passion in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (Apr 1819) and Lamia (Jun– Sept 1819), which reflect Keats's now deeply conflicting feelings about the relationship between love, death, and poetic creativity. In the earlier poem, the ‘lady in the meads/Full beautiful, a fairy's child’ (13–14) owes much to earlier ballads such as ‘Thomas the Rhymer,’ Chatterton's medieval rhymes, and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ by Alain Chartier (c 1385–1433); but her nearest relatives are Spenser's Duessa, false Florimell, and Phaedria, who share her ‘garland’ and ‘fragrant zone,’ her sighs ‘full sore’ and ‘sweet mone,’ and her power to hold men ‘in thrall’ (cf FQ I ii 28–30, 45; II vi 2–18; III vii 17; IV viii 64).

Her sister enchantress in Lamia was discovered by Keats in Philostratus’ story as retold in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Any remaining traces of a Spenserian poetic style retreat before the oddly mixed tone of his Drydenesque couplets and incidental details drawn eclectically from various sources including studies of Greek antiquities, the Arabian Nights, and verse tales by Coleridge and Peacock; but the presence of the Elizabethans is still diffusely felt in echoes from Marlowe and Sandys’ Ovid. More importantly, the flavor of Spenser's false enchantresses continues to haunt the ambivalent appeal of this Lamia transmogrified into ‘a real woman,’ though now with tragic consequences for herself as well as her lover when their enchanted dream fades fades in the cold light of reason.

The ambiguous relationship between dream and reality in Lamia, as in ‘La Belle

Dame Sans Merci’ and in the odes (‘Was it a vision or a waking dream?’: ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 79), is altogether different from the ‘prefigurative’ dreaming of Endymion, Keats's early experiment with the long poem. The relationship has now acquired the resonance of Spenser's ambiguities, such as those in Arthur's dream of the Fairy Queen (FQ I ix 13–16) and in Amoretti 77, ‘Was it a dreame, or did I see it playne...?’ (Allott in Keats ed 1970:516). To these last writing months (illness prevented him from working consistently after December 1819) also belongs Keats's revision of Hyperion which shows Milton in retreat, the spirit of Dante presiding over his new purgatorial ‘vision,’ and his impressive personal manner resuming its progress after his major 1819 accomplishments in The Eve of St Agnes, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ the experimental sonnets, and the great odes. The poetic structure in the odes is shaped by the familiar Keatsian movement from painful actuality to intense delight in a ‘waking dream’ of idealized sensuous experience from which real awakening is as inevitable as its accompaniment of baffling questions.

If the nature and status of the ‘waking dream’ is at the heart of Keats's most celebrated reflective poems, then Spenser is there, too, his presence encouraged by memories of Hazlitt's description of him as ‘the poet of our waking dreams...he has invented not only a language but a music of his own for them...lulling the senses into a deep oblivion of the jarring noises of the world, from which we have no wish to be ever recalled’ (Hazlitt ed 1930–4, 5:44). “‘Load every rift” of your subject with ore,’ Keats advised Shelley in August 1820, quoting ironically from Spenser's description of the house of Mammon (FQ II vii 28), for ‘an artist must serve Mammon—he must have “self concentration” selfishness perhaps’ (ed 1958, 2:323). He followed his own advice in his ‘waking dreams,’ loading with ore the leisured stillness of the opulent scenes in Madeline's bedchamber in The Eve of St Agnes, the fragrant pastoral setting for the vision or waking dream in ‘Ode to Psyche,’ the ‘verdurous glooms’ and ‘embalmed darkness’ brimming with the scent of mid-May's fruits and flowers in ‘Ode to a Night-ingale,’ the dense magnificences transforming ‘the melancholy fit’ (‘Ode on Melancholy’) into a state of intense poetic creativity. Such ore, it is hardly too much to say, was mined first in the ‘realms of gold’ which, even before he discovered the ‘pure serene’ of Chapman's Homer in October 1816, excited the imagination of Cowden Clarke's brilliant schoolboy, and were still poignantly captivating him six years later when to delight his beloved Fanny he singled out the ‘most beautiful passages’ as he sat alone and ill, reading The Faerie Queene for the last time.

MIRIAM ALLOTT

John Keats 1848 Life, Letters and Literary Remains ed Richard Monckton Milnes, 2 vols (New York); Keats 1958 Letters 1814–1821 ed Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass); Keats 1970 Poems ed Miriam Allott (London); Keats ed 1978.
    John Barnard 1987 John Keats (Cambridge); Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke 1878 Recollections of Writers (London); Robert Gittings 1954 John Keats: The Living Year, 21 September 1818 to 21 September 1819 (London) reviewed by F.W.Bateson in EIC 4(1954):432–40; Hazlitt ed 1930–4; Greg Kucich 1983 ‘Spenserian Versification in Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes’ Michigan Academician 16:101–8; Hyder Edward Rollins, ed 1965 The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816–1878 2nd ed, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass).

Kilcolman Castle

Location: Republic of Ireland, County of Cork (roughly halfway between the cities of Limerick and Cork); 3¼ miles NNW of Doneraile; some 600 yards on the left of the road from Doneraile to Charleville. Data: Kilcolman Middle Townland; Doneraile Parish; Fermoy Barony; Imphrick District Electoral Division; Mallow County Division. Ordnance Survey: sheet 17, 1:10,000 (6 inches to 1 mile); plan 6, 1:2500 (25 inches to 1 mile); trace 3; 1:10,000 County Sheet Coordinates: 413mmE, 381mmN; National Grid Coordinates: R 581 113.

(See Kilcolman Castle Fig 1: location maps.)

topography The castle is situated close to the south of the western termination of the Ballyhoura Mountains, a geological and physical extension of the larger and higher Galty Mountains further east. These mountains are of extreme age, being of Old Red Sandstone of the Devonian period, with Silurian outcrops (Geological Survey 1979). The flat land on which the castle is built consists of Lower Carboniferous Limestone, a rock occurring over much of the great low central plain of Ireland. The extensive plain on which the castle is located, approximately 30 miles east-west by 10 miles north-south, is bounded, at successively further distances, by the Nagles Mountains to the southeast, the Boggeragh range to the southwest, the Mullaghareirk Mountains to the west, and the Knockmealdown Mountains to the east. The plain is drained by several rivers, principally the Blackwater, flowing west to east along the southern side, while the Awbeg curves southwards from the northwest to meet it, passing about 2¼ miles to the west of KilcolmanCastle, and 1¾ miles to the south. The Bregoge flows from north to south to join the Awbeg, passing one mile to the east of the castle. Further to the east the Funshion flows southwards to meet the Blackwater, while to the west the Allow flows south to join the Dalua and the Blackwater.

In Spenser's time, the champaign country surrounding KilcolmanCastle abounded in trees, adding beauty and interest, and was referred to by Charles Smith as ‘a most pleasant and romantick situation’ (ed 1774, 1:333; quoted in Spenser ed 1805, 1: l-li). A local tradition exists that the woods extended to Buttevant, three miles distance (Bart-lett 1842, 1:81). Spenser knew and loved this countryside, and reproduced its features in his poetry, with the Ballyhoura and Galty Mountains becoming the Mole, while the highest of them, Galtymore, became Arlo Hill. Rivers include the Blackwater or Awmore or Awniduff, the Brackbawn (a small upstream tributary of the Funshion) which became the Molanna, and most notably the Awbeg, which Spenser appropriated to himself by the name of Mulla. This name was extended to include the plain on which the castle stood, which became Armulla Dale.

Larger towns in this area include Kanturk, Mallow, and Fermoy; other towns include Mitchelstown, Liscarroll, and Glanworth, the latter two having large early castles which Spenser must have known and visited. (See Fig 1, left location map.) Kilbolane Castle at Milford is also of importance, and there are a number of fortresses picturesquely sited along the banks of the Blackwater. Medieval ecclesiastical establishments in this area include Ballybeg Friary, near Buttevant, Buttevant Friary which Spenser acquired c 1597 (Henley 1928:68–70), Bridgetown Priory, between Killavullen and Ballyhooly and which was owned by Spenser's friend Lodowick Bryskett, and Castlelyons Friary.

There are a number of medieval castles close at hand to Kilcolman which Spenser must also have known. Ballinguile Castle (some 2 miles 800 yards west from Kilcolman) is situated on the west bank of the Awbeg. Originally an ancient castle of the Stapletons and erected after the reign of King John (Smith ed 1893, 1:292), it now consists of a ruin of two periods. Almost the same distance to the east of Kilcolman, 2 miles 125 yards, lies Castlepook, a lofty square, massive tower with walls 8 feet thick. (For an early illustration, see Windele Mss 191.) It was probably erected at the same period as Kilcolman and is situated on a similar rocky outcrop. The name ‘pook’ (from the Irish ‘Phooka’ a wild bestial phantom) could have associations with an adjacent cave, known as Castlepook Cave, one of the largest in Ireland, which was excavated in 1904 (Scharff, Seymour, and Newton 1917–19). The cave contained, among other things, bones of mammoths, giant Irish elks, bears, hyenas, and reindeer. There is no evidence to show that it was known in Spenser's time, although it had been entered previous to the excavation.

Almost the same distance to the south, 2 miles 780 yards, is Richardstown Castle on the extreme border of Spenser's seignory, which he acquired (Henley 1928:61) but covenanted to a Mr Fienny (Smith ed 1893, 1:345–6). Unfortunately, the castle was knocked down by lightning in 1865 and only a large mound remains to show its location (White 1911–19, 24:175), but a bawn and castle are mentioned in the covenant. Another castle that Spenser had acquired, probably about 1597, and some 9 miles away to the southeast, near Bridgetown Priory, was Renny (Henley 1928:67–8). It was located near the Blackwater River on the edge of a cliff, and was constructed originally by the Fitz-Geralds (Smith ed 1893, 1:317). It is marked as the site of a castle only on the first edition of the 1:10,000 Ordnance Survey of 1841, although Windele (1897:260) states that a fragment remained in his time and O'Flanagan (1844:117–18) refers to the ruins of the old castle. This late acquisition was for his sons to inherit, and Sylvanus made over the lands to Peregrine after his inheritance (White 1911–19, 21:270). In the nineteenth century, ‘a very old oak tree still [threw] its branches over the river, called Spenser's Oak, under which he is said to have written part of the Faery Queen’ (O'Flanagan 1844:118). For short periods Spenser acquired other medieval structures, including Enniscorthy Friary (gone) and Castle, and the Augustinian Friary (gone) at New Ross, both in County Wexford, and the Franciscan New Abbey at Kilcullen in Kildare (Henley 1928:37–8).

site The castle is situated in level, arable countryside on the extreme southeast edge of a long limestone ridge, some 20 feet high and 170 by 270 yards in size, the longer axis running east-west. Owing to the flat nature of the terrain, this rocky outcrop forms a noticeable feature in the landscape, enhanced in this respect by the prominent remains of the castle tower, which forms a conspicuous object at the eastern termination. To the south, the castle is slightly west of the north-south axis of a large oval bog, some 1000 yards north-south by 730 yards east-west with an extension of some 170 yards to the west in the southwest quadrant. This bog may originally have been a permanent lake although now it is reduced to a narrow strip of water along the shore of the northeast quadrant, where it extends outwards to some 70 yards from the shore at the northeast. The water level in the remainder of the marshland varies according to the season, and floods almost completely during prolonged heavy rainfall. The earliest accurate plan, the Ordnance Survey map of 1841, shows a larger area of permanent water, with an extension down to the east side of the bog. At approximately the center of this shoreline, there was a rounded promontory extending into the lake with a dairy farm; this is now at the southeastern end of the lake, and the buildings have been converted into a residence. Charles Smith, writing in 1750 (ed 1893, 1:311), describes the castle as ‘situated on the north side of a fine lake, in the midst of a vast plain,’ which might authenticate the shrinking of the lake in recent times, although it could have been the flood season at the time of his visit. It was very likely partially overgrown even in Spenser's time, as he refers to it as a ‘rushy lake’ (Epithalamion 60). It may also be the ‘little bog’ mentioned in the survey of 1622 (Dunlop 1924:144), but its exact where-abouts remains uncertain. However, the Petty map (1685) of the area indicates a small bog of the correct shape and size, and which, being the only one in the vicinity, may verify the description of 1622, although the area of permanent water might have been larger, since the bog appears to have been drained. That marshland was in the area may be suggested by Spenser's reference to ‘th'unpleasant Quyre of Frogs’ on his wedding night (Epith 349).

Some 180 yards from the castle, to the northwest, at the bottom of the limestone ridge, a cave or ‘subterraneous passage’ is indicated on Ordnance Survey maps (for 1937 and 1841; see Fig 1, upper site plan). It has a wide, high entrance partially blocked by a low, modern stone wall, and narrows down gently, penetrating deeply into the rock until the roof contacts the present ground level. Excavation would undoubtedly penetrate further, since the floor level has been considerably raised by the use of the cave as a cattle pen.

history The earliest evidence for the occupation of the site of KilcolmanCastle is provided by archaeology and tradition. Traditionally, the limestone ridge on which the castle was built was the site of an ancient Irish fort named Cathair Gobhaun or ‘the fort of the Smith’ (Lynch 1908:7, L[ynch] 1912:109), belonging to the Ui Rossa of the race of Mogh Ruith. In the earliest period, these forts were built beside lakes and rivers, and this lake site would have appealed to the Dairine kings as most suitable for the smiths of Ross na Righ (a short distance to the south of Kilcolman). Thus the lake could be archaeologically fertile. An English Royal Bard is connected with the district of Kilcolman, further substantiating occupation at this period of time.

Irish forts were in use from the Late Bronze Age (c 750 BC) to the end of the seventeenth century, although the great fortbuilding period was the Iron Age, lasting from c 500 BC to the Early Christian period, which commenced when St Patrick introduced Christianity into the country in the fifth century and extended into the twelfth century. If a fort was constructed on this ridge, it would have come under the general category of a hill-fort or, more correctly in this instance, a promontory or ridge-fort, where the rocky outcrop was utilized to assist in the artificial defenses, which here would have consisted of a large stone wall enclosing the area of the ridge-top. The use of the rocky ridge would have rendered unnecessary the customary digging of a ditch, for the edge of the outcrop was of sufficient height to provide the protection required. The greatest occupation of this type of site would seem to commence around the time of Christ, and to continue well into the Early Christian period.

There are the remains of many ring-forts, mounds, enclosures, and so forth in the area; and evidence for early occupation in the district is also provided by the concentration of fulachta fiadh, there being no less than ten (and possibly more unmarked) within roughly a mile radius around Kilcolman Castle as indicated on modern Ordnance Survey maps, where each is marked Fulacht Fian. The names indicate that these were deer roasts or cooking places of the Fianna, and they consisted of a horseshoeshaped mound of burned stones with its opening towards a stream or small lake. In the hollow of the mound was a hearth of flat stones where a fire was built, and between it and the water supply was a wooden trough filled with water. The meat, placed in the trough, was boiled by heating stones in the fire and rolling them into the trough; the mound was formed of discarded stones which had split and become brittle. Dating of these sites depends on the finds, which are sparse, but suggests that they began in prehistoric times, certainly in the Bronze Age, and continued into historic times. Two fulachta fiadh are located on the south shore of Kilcolman bog (or possibly lake in this period). A pillar stone is recorded at Kilcolman (Windele Mss 171) which could suggest a marker for a Bronze Age burial, but not all examples served this purpose, if indeed the stone was from this period.

There is evidence of Early Christian activity in the Kilcolman area, since 1720 yards to the south of the castle lie the ruins of Templetaggart Church. This ancient church, located close to Kilcolman bog in a southeast direction near Rossagh, has an old graveyard attached to it. The name means ‘the Priest's Church,’ and it is also called Thoumpaleenhulmane (‘small church of Colman’) or Thoumpaleenawane (possibly ‘small church of the monks’); it is supposed to have been founded by St Colman in the sixth century (Jones 1910:56). The Annals of the Four Masters mentions that St Column Mac Lenine died in 600. This church gave its name to the district and castle, since Kilcolman means ‘church of Colman,’ although boundaries have been changed so that it is now in the townland of Rossagh East. The churchyard was in use in 1910, stillborn children being traditionally buried there (Jones 1910:57). A raised, roughly circular enclosure is shown on the Ordnance Survey maps immediately to the south of the church (on the other side of the road), which may have been connected with it.

During the medieval period, a castle was built by the earls of Desmond. It was held by Sir Philip Sidney (one of Spenser's first patrons) for some time in 1568 (Jones 1901:239). When the vast estates were confiscated in 1583, the escheated lands were surveyed and undertakers were solicited from England to run the seignories and make them profitable. The plantation of Desmond lands in Munster involved dividing the profitable land into various sizes. The seignory around KilcolmanCastle with the manor and town involved 3028 English acres (1226 hectares) including ‘a great quantity of mountain’ (Dunlop 1924:143–4). The castle seems to have been allotted in 1586 to Andrew Reade (Henley 1928:56), but he did not take possession and the castle and various lands formed part of the grant made later to Spenser, the patent not being passed until 1590. It is probable that Spenser bought the title of the estate from Reade since both their names appear officially for the same lands on the same date, Spenser's name appearing in the Articles for the Undertakers. Some doubt exists as to when Spenser arrived in Cork to administer his seignory, but in July 1586 he addressed a letter from Dublin, where he held a post in the Court of Chancery, and his name appears in 1587 in the list of those in arrears with the First Fruits (Henley 1928:45) so he must have held the living, which was prebendary at Effin, County Limerick, for at least a year. Effin is close to his seignory at Kilcolman, so he could have moved south from Dublin towards the end of 1586.

In 1598, insurgents attacked and burned the castle, where some fighting is inferred since it is recorded that an Irishman was killed at the spoil of the castle (Henley 1928:158), but Spenser with his family escaped to Cork and then to England. After his death in the following year, his wife and children returned to Ireland. The seignory descended to Sylvanus and the stone house (an addition to the castle?) built by Spenser was re-edified but again lately consumed by fire (1622) and replaced by a ‘convenient English house’ (Dunlop 1924:143–4). Upon his death, a fee-farm grant was made of the lands in 1638 to his son Edmund (Henley 1928:201). When Edmund died tragically in 1640, being thrown from his horse, his brother William, aged six, inherited the lands. Since William was brought up as a Roman Catholic, the lands were lost to the Spenser family in 1654, going to a Captain Courthope. William's appeal to Cromwell was successful, but the land he was then granted was near Ballinasloe, County Galway, though he eventually recovered Kilcolman (Henley 1928:208). Kilcolman must have passed into obscurity some time later, since the Petty map of 1685 shows no trace of name or structure on the site, and finally in 1738 it passed out of the Spenser family to Elizabeth, Lady Meade.

evidence of the site The principal remaining portion of Templetaggart Church is the north wall, 29 feet long. A central roundheaded door is in good condition, with a 4-foot-long hole for sliding the bar when the door is open. The heights are 6 feet 2 inches to the soffit of the arch, and 2 feet 10 inches to the springing of the arch. The east wall is missing, while the west wall has collapsed and is overgrown. The south wall has two portions remaining, that to the west being 5 feet long and that to the east 7 feet (White 1911–19, 25:190). A good portion of the stones of the church were removed to build a laborer's cottage (Jones 1910:57). A road of large blocks of stone runs from the church and fort towards the east and Brough.

Since the rock ridge on which the castle was built has been used for grazing for many years, the feet of the cattle have blunted its contours; also the details of the rocky edges are obscured by falls of earth and stone. However, it is apparent that the west end of the ridge was cut off by a deep rock-cut fosse at some earlier period. There are humps and hollows running over parts of the summit, suggesting previous occupation—perhaps a much larger castle or possibily a small, medieval settlement. In the field below the castle was a churchyard or cemetery (Windele Mss 179), a bush being said to mark the site of Kilcolman Church, which was 100 yards to the north of the castle (Power 1932:122). Another ancient church traditionally associated with the castle, Cill Colman Grec (ie, Kilcolman), once stood in the castle field some 300 yards to the northwest of the castle ruin (Power 1932:124–5); the term Grec derives from gar ‘the voice’ referring to the singing of St Coleman, who was famed for his poetry (L[ynch] 1912:109)—like a later famous site occupant!—and was poet-royal or poet-laureate in AD 550 (Jones 1901:238).

(See Kilcolman Castle Figs 2–8.)

Various modern structures exist or existed on or near the castle. The Ordnance Survey of 1841 marks the cave as a ‘subterraneous passage’ and shows a limekiln slightly to the east. A cottage with an outhouse is marked to the southwest of the castle at the extreme western end of the lake. Further away, to the southeast, a cottage and a limekiln are shown on the shore of the lake and appear in the foreground in the Bartlett engraving (Fig 5), while further away lies the dairy farm. On the 1937 1:10,000 map, the buildings are similar except that the cottage and limekiln shown on the Bartlett engraving have gone, and the cottage to the southwest has another outhouse. The cottage adjacent to the limekiln was still present in 1903 during the survey for the 1:2500 maps, but the limekiln had been removed.

the castle structures As the ruins were extensively repaired and altered in the middle of the nineteenth century, the following list of earlier views is given in chronological order.

(A) An oil painting, c 1820, by William Sadler (1782–1839), an accomplished landscape artist. From the northwest (Fig 3).

(B) A lithograph from a sepia painting, 1821, by T.Crofton Croker, published in Croker 1824. From the northwest.

(C) A sketch, 1883, by Samson Carter, presented to the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1856. Unlocated.

(D) An engraving, 1840, by J.W.Archer from a sketch by F.Lush, title page to Spenser ed 1840. From the northwest.

(E) An engraving, 1841, after a sketch by T.Crofton Croker. From the northwest (Fig 4).

(F) An engraving, after W.H.Bartlett 1842. From the southeast (Fig 5).

(G) A pencil-and-crayon sketch, c 1845, by William Denny, National Library Collection, Dublin, Number 1971 TX (mislaid and presumed lost).

(H) Ink sketches, 1850, by John Windele 12I10. From the southwest (Fig 6); and p 185, sketch of upper window. These sketches were copied by W.Frazer, National Library Collection, Dublin, Number 1975 TX (32).

There are a number of other views published around the middle of the nineteenth century in topographical works, and so forth, but they are copies of the views listed. The engraving in Savage (1878:457), for instance, is roughly copied from Fig 5 although some 25 years earlier the castle had been partially rebuilt. The castle was heavi-ly shrouded in ivy previous to the repairs, which left it ivy-free. Perhaps the best illustration of the castle after the repair work and before the re-advance of the ivy is from Lovett 1888 (Fig 7), for the engraving was taken from an early photograph. This can be compared with Croker (Fig 4) taken from a similar viewpoint. Soon after the ivy took hold again, until at present, apart from a few feet of masonry visible at ground level, the remainder of the structure is completely hidden (Fig 8, and esp de Breffny 1977:147).

For an impression of the appearance of the castle before being repaired, these views need to be scrutinized carefully. They more or less agree that the main block of the castle is ruined down to the stone vault and that the stair tower and south wall are still standing to a taller amount of their full height. However, details vary. The earliest depiction, view A (Fig 3), is artistically distorted, for the vault is shown open to resemble an arched gateway and is facing the artist when it should be at an angle, and the doors in the tower are too far apart. Also the south wall is practically nonexistent and the window is therefore omitted. It does show the upper door before its collapse, and that it was pointed in shape, and the open vault also indicates that the north and south walls are of comparable thickness. A number of unlikely features crept into views B and D, such as square-headed windows instead of a door on the upper level, and a projection on the north wall of the main block. View E (Fig 4) corrects these errors but continues in other ones shown, such as the short south wall of the main block and a string course running along the north wall of the stair tower, while all the views omit the splay on the northwest angle of this tower. The Bartlett view (Fig 5) is notable in that it is the only one taken from the southeast, but it is artistically dramatized and the main block seems to be incorrectly projecting in front of the stair tower. Perhaps the most faithful view is Windele (Fig 4), who has also taken a fresh viewpoint, the southwest. The profile of what could be part of the bawn wall is also indicated twice. Since Windele was an antiquarian as well as an artist, he would have been unlikely to try to misrepresent the castle in any way. Apart from Windele (whose sketch is from the wrong side), all the views indicate to a greater or lesser extent a projecting mass of masonry high up on the northeast angle of the stair tower. Lovett (Fig 7) shows an indication of this before the ivy concealed it.

A contemporary account of the repair work is given by Windele (Mss 183):

22nd July 1858 I was informed that Mr Barry the tenant of Kilcoleman, wishing to preserve this interesting ruin from further injury has been causing repairs to be made wherever most needed, erecting Buttresses etc. In digging outside the Castle to underpin a failing wall, they discovered a pipe of antique fashion... Mr Barry has the good taste to eschew all idea of renovation or restoration... The object in this case is merely to preserve and guard against further dilapidation a monument venerable from its age and interesting from its associations.

Jones (1901:239) states that Philip Harold Barry repaired and strengthened what remained of the castle in 1850, and that during the repairs a very curious chalk or pipeclay instrument was found. This pipe is also mentioned in Henley (1928:73n) where it becomes ‘a number of curiously-shaped tobacco pipes...also some deer bones...the pipes were removed, I have been told, to the National Museum.’ No record of these can be traced and the present owner of the castle, Mr Charles Harold-Barry, has no knowledge of them, so what might have been an interesting link with Spenser appears to be lost. Henley also says that one of the walls was buttressed, but rather more than that was achieved (1928:73n). Refer to section and floor plans, Figs 1, 2 (where the modern work is shown hatched), to assist with the following architectural description.

If one walks around the ground floor from the outside, it becomes apparent that all the masonry has been buttressed, with the exception of parts of the stair and garderobe tower. The original work is in limestone ashlar, roughly squared and semicoursed, while the quoins are large, hammer-dressed, and alternate in direction from the arris. Occasionally the purplish Old Red Sandstone occurs, sometimes decoratively, as in the stairwell, where courses are built in between the ground floor and the floor above the vault. The new masonry is also limestone and is composed of large squared blocks en bosse, that is, with a slightly raised, roughened surface, mixed with rubble work. Where the rectangular garderobe chute has been broken into, it has been incorrectly repaired as a window with brick and stone jambs. The chute continues downwards and should discharge lower down. The projecting portion containing the garderobe is an addition and straight joints are visible, probably indicating a design change during building. All the external openings on this level have been renewed and are not original. The present doorway in the south wall replaces what would have been a loop; similarly in the north wall a loop has been replaced by a square-headed window. The doorway in the east wall is in the correct position for the entrance but is completely new, and is provided with a flat lintel as are all the new openings. Both new doorways have spud stones with a pivot hole and bolt holes for doors. Rather more undisturbed masonry exists inside the castle, and an original aumbry remains at the north end of the west wall. The stair and garderobe tower projects into the interior space, the arris having been rebuilt and rounded. The linteled doorway leading to the stair is original work, badly spalled on the arrises by intense heat. Some original projecting stones survive above and to the left of this door. Inside it is rebated for a door, and there is a tiny lobby for the door swing before the spiral stone stair starts climbing up to the left, an unusual direction as most castle stairs spiral up to the right, so that a defender on the stair facing downwards has room to use his right arm to wield his sword.

The next level, under the vault, is not reached from the spiral stair, and access must have been obtained from a wooden stair or ladder. This area for storage or sleeping space is lit by one small, narrow, flat-headed loop set in a long embrasure whose flat soffit is cranked down to meet the vault arch in the south wall. (Since the loop is concealed by ivy on the exterior and blocked with loose rubble on the interior, information is taken from the Windele drawing; dimensions on section A-A and plan 2 [Figs 1, 2] have been estimated.) The continuous stone vault, running east-west, is a drop-pointed arch, and a socket for a beam survives at the east end of the north wall. At this level, the stair is lit by a squareheaded loop with a dished sill and drainhole for slops; it is provided with a long, narrow, flat-headed embrasure, which just avoids the adjacent rectangular garderobe chute. The straight joints noted on the ground floor are still apparent, and some original masonry projects forward on the outside over the main door, largely hidden by ivy, so that its purpose is not readily discernible.

The third level is reached after fifteen steps, and entry is made to the area over the vault through a drop-pointed arched doorway rebated to open into the floor space. (For this and some other views, see White 1911–19, 21: photographs facing pp 266, 268). Apart from the stair tower and the south wall, the remaining parapet walls are modern. The south wall, badly cracked near the stair tower, possesses the most decorative item of surviving architecture, a cusped lancet window set in a segmentally arched embrasure provided with a window ledge, and stone seats, one on either side (Fig 9; the sketch on Fig 2 is the inside elevation). The seats die into the splay of the embrasure jambs, which commences halfway along their length. The arched embrasure soffit is turned over wickerwork centering, and the centering holes remain, two on either side. This south-facing embrasure is known as the bower, or Raleigh's window, where traditionally Spenser used to sit with his friend and smoke the new tobacco. Entry to the stair to the upper floors is by a drop-pointed, arched doorway, rebated on the inside, with a tiny lobby for the door swing. The facing stone spiral stairs turn upwards, again to the left, while on the right above the first two steps a small linteled doorway, rebated on the inside for a door, leads, via a small lobby for the door swing which curves to the right, to the garderobe or privy. This is provided with two small flat-headed loops, one in the south wall and one in the west, the latter being provided with a slop sill and drain hole. The stone seat for the garderobe is missing. Halfway up the stairs, facing to the east, a flat-headed loop lights the stair, its northern jamb missing.

(See Kilcolman Castle Fig 9.)

The upper level is reached after fourteen steps, the lobby being damaged. The stair continues up two steps and one flag riser into a short corridor heading in a northeasterly direction which opens into a small chamber, now badly ruined and choked with ivy. This was once provided with a loop facing north (Croker sketch B, and see E [Fig 4]). Facing south from the lobby is a small wedge-shaped room; its doorway is missing, apart from the eastern jamb, which has a small bar hole, and it has two linteled windows in splayed linteled embrasures, one in the east wall and one in the south. A large aumbry is positioned at the east end of the north wall, and this room, with its segmental arched roof turned over wickerwork centering, would have made a pleasant bedchamber. The door into the main chamber is missing, although part of the bottom part of the north jamb survives. From Sadler's painting (Fig 3), this door would probably have had a drop-pointed arch, while from the Windele sketch (Fig 6), there was a south-facing window in the south wall of the main block where it meets the stair turret. This would have lit a small lobby, perhaps the beginning of a straight stair in the south wall leading to the top levels; part of its east jamb remains.

Outside the tower, to the south, is a wall running off to the east, now largely ruined, with upstanding pieces of masonry at either end. Its profile in 1850 is shown in two sketches by Windele (Fig 6) which indicates a possible window towards the east end. This returns northwards, denoting the corner of a building. The remains of these walls are very overgrown, and they may be represented by the wall to the rear of the tower in Croker's lithograph (B) and Lush's sketch (D), or this may be a continuation of this existing wall to the west, although this feature does not occur on the other views, possibly because (apart from Sadler) they are of a later date when this wall may have been destroyed.

conclusions The castle was undoubtedly of the tower-house type, a late medieval fortalice that was built in great numbers in Ireland, Scotland, and the north of England when social conditions were unsettled. They were intended to repel bands of marauders, although many of the larger examples held out successfully against military forces. They usually consisted of a strong tower, protected by enclosing walls surrounding a bawn, an area where cattle could be driven to be protected at night. The bawn could be protected by corner towers or a gatehouse or both. They were built from the end of the fourteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and in Ireland there were strong concentrations in some western counties, especially Limerick and Galway (Johnson [1985]:13). The tower could be especially strong, with stone barrel vaults over some floors for strength and protection against fire. The wall head was provided with battlements, machicolated galleries, and turrets for defense, while larger windows were kept to the upper stories, the lower stories being provided with gun loops and shot holes. Such a castle is shown under attack in Fig 10, which represents the siege of Glin Castle during the Elizabethan wars. Kilcolman could have superficially resembled this castle in appearance, and have had a similar type of bawn, the lake taking the place of the river in the illustration. Of course, Kilcolman could have had better defenses, being built on a limestone rock.

(See Kilcolman Castle Fig 10.)

With regard to the architectural details, Fig 11 shows a section through Blarney Castle, situated some 22 miles due south of Kilcolman. The similarity to Kilcolman can be seen, especially the very thick walls supporting the vault. Blarney is said to carry a date stone marked 1446, although the great tower is credited to Cormac Laider the Strong, who died in 1494 (Leask 1941:113–).

(See Kilcolman Castle Fig 11.)

Jones (1901:239) states that Kilcolman was built in 1347 by the first Earl, and Henley (1928:72) follows this; Jones also mentions that the sixth Earl of Desmond received the property from an uncle in 1418, and de Breffny (1977:146) prefers this date for the erection of the castle. The middle of the fourteenth century was a time of strife and plague during which little or no building work was carried out, and the style and detailing of the castle, as far as can be seen from what remains, is of the fifteenth century. A date for the commencement of the building of the castle in the 1420s could therefore be advanced with some confidence.

The buttressing or cladding of the lower walls in the 1850s, which so successfully arrested the decay of the castle, does not seem to have respected the original thickness of the walls, especially the north wall which should correspond roughly to the south wall. The rock upon which the castle is built seems to have been dressed vertically in two places outside the western end of the south wall (see floor plan 1, Fig 2), which could mark the original wall thickness where it was bonded to and above the rock; similarly, the projecting masonry to the east just over the present entrance to the tower, could have formed part of the original wall thickness. As for the west wall, although Sadler shows the vault broken completely open (Fig 3), he must be indulging in artistic license: although Croker suggests this slightly by shading on the north edge of his 1821 lithograph (B), in his much more accurate 1841 representation (E), the arch is again shown but without any deep shading to suggest an opening. The voussoirs of the vault arch would normally extend into the end walls in this type of construction, and they could be revealed if the outer skin were removed and the corework disturbed. That Windele (Fig 6), an antiquarian draftsman, shows no opening broken through (not even the arch is indicated) would seem to confirm this, as does the appearance of the actual internal face of the wall, which shows no definite sign of new work or disturbance.

The limekiln shown on the 1841 Ordnance Survey and in the foreground of the Bartlett view (Fig 5) has completely disappeared in the 1903 edition—possibly it provided the masonry for the 1850s repair work.

On all the views (esp Figs 4 and 5), the projection shown at an upper level on the northeast angle of the stair tower corresponds with the position of the ruined chamber at the end of the short corridor on the upper floor. The projecting masonry could represent the remains of a machicolated gallery or box machicolation at this level to protect the entrance door underneath—a standard feature on tower-houses.

The original height of Kilcolman is open to question: it could have had only two floors above the vault, but Blarney has three, and a total of six floors was not uncommon in the south and west of Ireland. The probability that the tower was considerably taller has to be seriously considered. That the upper staircase terminates does not necessarily mean that the castle went no higher: it was customary to change the position and type of stair at various levels as a means of defense. Perhaps an upper stone vault was incorporated, over the second highest floor, which would not be uncommon, since the lord's hall was on the top floor for security, and larger windows were possible since they were the furthest from the ground, and a stone floor was fireproof.

That the castle was burned shows in the spalling of the arrises of the original stonework in various places, especially on the door leading to the stairs on the ground floor.

The possibility exists that the remains of a wall to the south and east of the tower represents a bawn surrounding the tower. This could also perhaps incorporate at the east end the remains of the stone house or the convenient English house referred to in the 1622 survey (Dunlop 1924:143–4), or it could have been a church or hall which formed part of the castle complex, or merely a corner tower of the bawn. From the traces left on the site, there was definitely a rectangular structure to the southeast of the tower (see lower site plan, Fig 1). The masonry shown to the west (under the north point in this drawing) is a chunk that has fallen from the tower and rolled intact to its present position, which illustrates the strength of the mortar in use at the time. The area of disturbed ground to the east of the castle could also be the site of the churchyard, in which case the rectangular building in this area would have been a church.

White (1911–19, 17:178) mentions an underground passage between Burton House and KilcolmanCastle, which is not possible, since Burton House is over five miles away and any passage would have to go under rivers and bogs. Another passage from the castle, called the Fox Hole, is noted in the Ordnance Survey Field Book for 1840, possibly referring to the ‘subterraneous passage’ that may have led from the large cave in the northeast part of the limestone ridge to the castle, along which Spenser and his family could have escaped in 1598 (White 1911–19, 21:273). However, there is no visi-ble evidence of an entrance to a passage in the castle ruins.

How could the most delicate portion of the castle, namely the stair tower with its thin walls, remain, while the massive walls of the main portion of the castle have gone? The explanation must lie with the two limekilns that used the limestone ridge as a quarry, one of which remains to the north of the castle. The castle must have been systematically dismantled and fed into the kilns, the stair being spared to allow access to the upper parts for the wreckers. That there are no loose stones at all on the site bears this out. Perhaps it is rough justice that one of the kilns may have been similarly dismantled and used for the 1850s repair work.

One may conclude, then, that the castle was taller than now, and was surrounded by a bawn and other buildings. That it was higher is supported by Windele (Mss 186) who states ‘the present remains of Kilcoleman Castle are far inferior to their original height.’ It is possible that Smith, normally a shrewd observer, writing c 1750, also knew this when writing of the castle, which would explain his rather misleading statement that ‘the castle is now almost level with the ground’ (ed 1893, 1:311; ed 1774, 1:333 quoted in Spenser ed 1805, 1: l). It is on a ridge that was once an Iron Age fort, and part was cut off by a fosse to provide a citadel. That the castle was not located on this part of the ridge is puzzling, but the citadel could have fallen into disuse many years before the erection of the castle. Signs of occupation on the ridge and the tradition of churches and a graveyard suggest that a small settlement could have existed there. Since the 1591 grant to Spenser mentions the manor, castle, town, and lands of Kilcolman (Smith ed 1893, 1:345), perhaps the manor consisted of a small medieval settlement along the ridge adjacent to the castle.

Removal of the ivy from the castle and archaeological excavation would be needed to confirm or refute some of these possibilities. The former should be carried out without delay, for the main south wall of the castle is cracked through above the vault with ivy stems and needs immediate attention to prevent collapse.

Spenser, by coming to Ireland and especially by living in a castle in Kilcolman as an undertaker, was transported from a relatively peaceful environment into an area where he found that castles were still very necessary. His chivalric world of ‘fierce warres and faithfull loves’ was for him partly reality. In England the vast popularity of The Faerie Queene in particular caused a sympathetic reaction, strongly boosting the current preoccupation with chivalric pursuits, and wealthy landowners and merchants who had developed a desire to be knights-errant began to build massive castellated structures in more accurate simulation of earlier castles. These had the appearance of great strength but their thin walls and anachronistic lucid large windows belied this suggested power. This Elizabethan chivalric style, which peaked in the closing years of the sixteenth century and the first quarter of the seventeenth, is often labeled Spenserian (Girouard ed 1983:223–4; Platt 1986:183), and one of the first advocates of this more realistic baronial revival was Sir Walter Raleigh himself, whose castle at Sherbourne in Dorset, begun in 1594 as a three-story rectangular block, was provided with four large polygonal corner towers of four stories after 1600. Nearby Lulworth in Dorset—an embattled cube with massive cylindrical corner towers built by Viscount Bindon—followed around 1608, and its twin, Ruperra, Glamorganshire, was erected by Sir Thomas Morgan in 1626. Among others perhaps the most notable is Bolsover, Derbyshire, built by the prodigy house-architects Robert and John Smythson for Sir Charles Cavendish and begun on the ruins of a genuine castle in 1612. This spectacular fantasy castle stands high on a hilltop, the architectural climax being provided by a dramatic simulation of a Norman donjon modeled on examples such as Castle Rising, Norfolk, and Castle Hedingham, Essex. This is a high, massive, almost square crenelated block with narrow angle towers capped by a great staircase tower which soars some hundred feet into the sky. Paradoxically, it is known as the ‘Little Castle.’

While most of these Spenserian castles are still fondly tended, it is ironic that Kilcolman, the poet's castle and the indirect inspiration for much of this revival, lies mutilated and abandoned.

D.NEWMAN JOHNSON

W.H.Bartlett, illus 1842 The Scenery and Anti-quities of Ireland text by J.Stirling Coyne and N.P.Willis, 2 vols (London); Brian de Breffny 1977 Castles of Ireland (London); J[ames] C[olman] 1894 JCHAS os 3:89–100; T.Crofton Croker 1824 Researches in the South of Ireland (London); Robert Dunlop 1924 ‘An Unpublished Survey of the Plantation of Munster in 1622’ JRSAI 54:128–46; Geological Survey 1979 Geological Map of Ireland Ordnance Survey (Dublin); Girouard ed 1983; Mr and Mrs S.C. Hall 1841–3 Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, etc 3 vols (London); Henley 1928; D.Newman Johnson [1985] The Irish Castle (Dublin); Walter A.Jones 1901 ‘Doneraile and Vicinity’ JCHAS 2nd ser 7:238–42; Jones 1910 ‘The Munster Ros-na-Righ and Its Traditions’ JCHAS 2nd ser 16:53–9; Harold G.Leask 1951 Irish Castles and Castellated Houses (Dundalk); Richard Lovett 1888 Irish Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil (London); J.F.Lynch 1908 ‘The Ford of Ae’ Irish Independent 2 Oct: 7; J.F. L[ynch] 1912 ‘[Notes and Queries:] St. Coleman Grec’ JCHAS 2nd ser 18:108–10; James R.O'Flanagan 1844 The Blackwater in Munster (London); Ordnance Survey 1840 Field Book Ordnance Survey Mss (Dublin); William Petty 1685 Hiberniae delineatio (London); Colin Platt 1986 The National Trust Guide to Late Mediaeval and Renaissance Britain: From the Black Death to the Civil War (London); Patrick Power 1932 Crichad an Chaoilli: Being the Topography of Ancient Fermoy (Cork); John Savage 1878 Picturesque Ireland (New York); R.F.Scharff, H.J.Seymour, and E.T.Newton 1917–19 ‘The Exploration of Castlepook Cave, County Cork’ PRIA 34B:33–72; Charles Smith 1893 The Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork ed Robert Day and W.A.Copinger, 2 vols (Cork); James Grove White 1911–19 ‘Historical and Topographical Notes etc on Buttevant, Castletownroche, Doneraile, Mallow, and Places in Their Vicinity’ JCHAS 2nd ser suppl 17:1–128, 21:181–292, 24:109–180, 25:181–220; John Windele [1830s–50s] Mss Topography Co. Cork, W and N.E. Royal Irish Academy Number 12I10; Windele 1897 ‘Windele Manuscripts (Continued)’ JCHAS 2nd ser 3:246– 63.
    On Spenserian architecture, see further William Anderson 1970 Castles of Europe from Charlemagne to the Renaissance (London) p 289; Clive Aslet and Alan Powers 1985 The National Trust Book of the English House (Harmondsworth) p 124; Lord Montagu of Beaulieu 1987 English Heritage ed P.H.Reed (London) p 109; Olive Cook 1974 The English Country House: An Art and a Way of Life (London) p 71; Mark Girouard 1978 Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven) p 103; Girouard 1981 The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven) p 17; Girouard ed 1983:209, 223–5; J.Alfred Gotch 1909 The Growth of the English House...from 1100 to 1800 (London) pp 138–40; Christopher Hussey 1951 English Country Houses open to the Public (London) pp 14, 73; Platt 1986:183, 185, 187; Summerson 1953:51 and n 6.

L

labyrinths, mazes

Of these two terms, labyrinth is the more literary, being derived from the intricate subterranean structure built by Daedalus in Crete to hide and house the Minotaur (see Virgil Aeneid 6.14–30, Ovid Metamorphoses 8.155–68). The term maze (with related forms such as amazement) is closer to everyday language and experience: topiary mazes in gardens and pavement or turf mazes in churches and churchyards were commonly seen in Spenser's day.

If a way of life or course of events is traced, its path describes a maze. The image is especially insistent for a knight errant (L errare to wander) who pursues his quest through places of danger, testing, and reward. In choosing errantry as a controlling metaphor in The Faerie Queene, Spenser doubtless recalled the elaborate civic and royal processions winding through the streets of London from station to station. In literature, he would have found a prototype of all wandering in Homer's Ulysses, and of descents to a lower world in Virgil's Aeneas. The Bible imprinted on his mind Israel's 40 years of wandering in the wilderness together with backsliding and exile as sign and punishment of sin; the New Testament picks up wandering by the way as an image of sin but combines it with the assertion that the elect are ‘strangers and pilgremes’ in this world ‘with no continuing citie’ (Heb 11.13, 13.14; see also I Pet 2.11). Medieval literature, sacred and secular, makes explicit the pilgrimage and the quest.

There are few images of labyrinths in Spenser's shorter poems. E.K. says of the poet that ‘his unstayed yougth had long wandred in the common Labyrinth of Love’ (SC Epistle to Harvey), Hobbinoll speaks of ‘my wandring mynde’ (June 2), and Colin looks back over his wandering in ‘wastefull woodes’ when he was ‘wont to raunge amydde the mazie thickette’ (Dec 20–5). In Daphnaïda 372–3, the grieving Alcyon intends to ‘walke this wandring pilgrimage/Throughout the world from one to other end’; Virgils Gnat 542 refers to the whirlpool Charybdis, and Ruines of Rome 22 to the Cretan Labyrinth; in Muiopotmos 358–60, the spider Aragnoll lurks in a cave at the center of his labyrinthine web.

In FQ I, the Red Cross Knight's first appearance with his companions on the plain is emblematic; as soon as something happens to establish his errantry, he leaves the plain for a grove full of turnings which is explicitly called a ‘labyrinth’ and leads to a cave (i 11). ‘This is the wandring wood, this Errours den,’ cries Una; and the monster herself is an embodiment of both cave and labyrinth, with her ‘huge long taile...in knots’ with its ‘folds’ and ‘endlesse traine’ (13, 15–18).

Guyon's two main adversaries in FQ II are Mammon and Acrasia, who menace him with amazement and loss of bearings. The deeper he descends into the house of Mammon in canto vii, the more it becomes a vast labyrinthine realm with diminishing prospect of egress. The long twelfth canto of the voyage and the Bower of Bliss is differently arranged: except for the resolved will of Guyon as guided by the Palmer, everything is prearranged by Acrasia, the spider at the center of the web (xii 77; cf vii 28). The earliest manifestation of her power is the Gulf of Greediness, a watery labyrinth with ‘th'huge abysse of his engulfing grave’ (xii 5). The culminating peril of the deep, ‘threatning to devoure all,’ is the Whirlpool of Decay, which is called a ‘restlesse wheele’ and a ‘wide Labyrinth’ (20–1). Since the labyrinthine voyage is preparation and forewarning for the Bower itself, Guyon and the reader are steeled to resist the ‘wanton wreathings intricate’ of the witch's world of seductive illusion (53).

In the middle books, the Ariostan manner of interrupted narrative may be described metaphorically as a maze or knot or interlace, as many incidental phrases suggest: the hunt for glory ‘through wastefull wayes,’ the following of ‘false Ladies traine,’ the sea's ‘hollow bosome’ and ‘greedie gulfe,’ the ‘wandring forrest,’ and ‘miswandred wayes’ (III i 3, iii 11, iv 22, vi 26, vii 18). What is a drawn-out torment in Book III is delay in access in Book IV. The profusion of plurals and pairs in the Temple of Venus leads up to a phrase which in another context would certainly be menacing but here stands safe under the sign of innocency, ardor, and self-discovery: ‘False Labyrinthes, fond runners eyes to daze;/ All which by nature made did nature selfe amaze’ (IV x 24).

In Book VI, Calidore must ‘tread an endlesse trace’ in pursuit of the BlatantBeast (i 6, 37). The characteristic movement of Calidore and Calepine is deeper into the forest, and the Brigands and the Salvage Nation carry Serena and Pastorella into tenebrous thickets. Such groping ‘through this worlds wyde wildernes’ (vii 37) makes the pastoral episode especially welcome, with its culminating vision of the dance of the Graces on Mount Acidale (x 5–18). The dance is labyrinth in clear air and full sight, maze without danger, the knot that holds but does not constrain, the fully answered riddle. It must end, however, for the same reason that the Beast must escape its bonds and errantry resume. Similarly, Mutabilitie can be silenced only when her pageant—and with it the vast intricate labyrinth of Spenser's poem and Nature herself- disappear into ‘that Sabaoths sight’ which is not of this world (VII viii 2).

WILLIAM BLISSETT

Blissett 1989; Janet Bord 1976 Mazes and Labyrinths of the World (New York); Angus Fletcher 1971; Fletcher 1983 ‘The Image of Lost Direction’ in Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye ed Eleanor Cook, et al (Toronto) pp 329–46; Lima de Freitas 1975 O labirinto (Lisbon); Hermann Kern 1982 Labyrinthe (Munich); W.F.Jackson Knight 1936 Cumaean Gates: A Reference of the Sixth Aeneid to the Initiation Pattern (Oxford); Gertrude Rachel Levy 1948 The Gate of Horn: A Study of the Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age, and Their Influence upon European Thought (London); W.H.Matthews 1922 Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of Their History and Developments (New York); D'Orsay W.Pearson 1977 ‘Spenser's Labyrinth—Again’ SIcon 3:70–88; Paolo Santarcangeli 1967 Il libro dei labirinti (Florence).

Lamb, Charles

(1775–1834) Testimony from acquaintances leaves no doubt about Lamb's devotion to Spenser's poetry. In 1836 Walter Wilson remembered that ‘Spenser and Shakespeare were to him as household-gods’ (ed 1934:147), and in 1844 Leigh Hunt thought he remembered that his friend Lamb had titled Spenser the ‘Poet's Poet.’ Although the phrase is more likely a compressed variation on Hazlitt's ‘Of all poets, he is the most poetical’ (ed 1930–4, 5:34; already quoted by Hunt more than a decade earlier, 1833:161), the mistake is itself significant: Hunt knew enough about Lamb's high regard for Spenser to attribute the phrase to him.

Despite the superlatives, what Lamb did not do with Spenser is at least as remarkable as what he did do. In 1797 he encouraged Coleridge to write an ‘Epic’ in the spirit not only of Milton but of Spenser, and in 1815 he urged Wordsworth to write ‘more criticism, about Spenser etc’ (Lamb and Lamb ed 1975–8, 1:87, 3:149), but so far as we know Lamb himself attempted neither. He does mention Spenser by name in the early verses ‘To the Poet Cowper’: ‘with lighter finger playing,/Our elder Bard, Spenser, a gentle Name,/The Lady muses’ dearest darling child,/Elicited the deftest tunes yet heard/ In Hall or Bower, taking the delicate Ear/ Of Sidney, and his peerless maiden Queen’ (to Coleridge, 5 Jul 1796; ed 1975–8, 1:41). And Spenser influenced the subject and style of several other early poems, most evidently ‘A Vision of Repentance.’ Lamb dared to hope Coleridge might discern in the poem's imagery and diction ‘a delicacy of pencilling [ie, brushwork] not quite unspencer like’ (to Coleridge, 15 Apr 1797; 1:106–9). But the Spenserian influence faded with the enthusiasms of Lamb's early poetic period.

His prose, where the standard units of Spenser criticism are the glancing allusion and the telling phrase, is similarly unencouraging. It is characteristic of Lamb to drop the phrase ‘golden vapour’ into the middle of a letter of 1802 (2:52; cf FQ III ix 20); to write out Spenser's Harvey Sonnet in a fourteen-shilling copy of the 1679 folio that he had located for Wordsworth (to Wordsworth, 1 Feb 1806; 2:206); to report whimsically in the same letter the story of an associate who mistook Lamb's reference to Spenser (who ‘generally excites an image of an old Bard in a Ruff, and sometimes with it dim notions of Sir.P.Sydney and perhaps Lord Burleigh’) for a reference to an acquaintance, William Spencer, who had written a monody on his wife's death (2:206; the story was later incorporated into Lamb's essay ‘On the Ambiguities Arising from Proper Names’); or, without the aid of a concordance, to advise a correspondent correctly in 1815 that Spenser does not use the word air to mean ‘song’ or ‘tune’ (3:202). But only once in his life does he expound to the length of a paragraph. We can compensate for his reticence in two ways: by extending metaphors he never extended, and by drawing on his associates to establish a context that he never established. Only in the context of his associates’ views of Spenser can the coherence of Lamb's be seen, but nonetheless his view stands apart in certain key respects from theirs.

If Walter Wilson's memory of Lamb's pairing Spenser with Shakespeare is accurate, it is not quite typical of Lamb's circle, the first rank of whose pantheon is monopolized by Shakespeare and Milton. Spenser tends to appear in second-order rankings as the opposite of Chaucer, the poet supposedly closest to the gritty realism of everyday life. His ranking usually comes tagged with the corollary that he lacks some essential quality, as in Coleridge's assertion that he has ‘imaginative fancy’ but not ‘imagination, in kind or degree, as Shakespeare and Milton have’ (Coleridge ed 1936:38). Hazlitt's essay ‘Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen’ (1826), which takes the form of a remembered hearthside conversation dominated by Hazlitt and Lamb, shows the typical characterization of Spenser in action. Hazlitt proposes Chaucer as a candidate for recall from eternity. Lamb asks if Spenser might not be added. Hazlitt thinks not: worldly Chaucer deserves extradition back to the world, but otherworldly Spenser is in eternity where he belongs. If Lamb would extradite them both, it is presumably because he sees their opposition as complementary—divergent poets who converge at the center where real life is carried on (Hazlitt ed 1930–4, 17:126–7).

Put another way, Hazlitt's opposition is vertical, with Chaucer below, while Lamb's is horizontal, with earthdwellers stationed between Chaucer and Spenser. As different as these orientations are, Hazlitt and Lamb differ more in their portraits of real life and the place of Spenser in each than in their portraits of Spenser, which are constructed from an archive of metaphors in general use. For example, the innocuous stock phrase with which Lamb reinforces his suggestion that Coleridge write an epic, ‘by the dainty sweet and soothing phantasies of honey tongued Spencer’ (to Coleridge, 8 Jan 1797; ed 1975–8, 1:87), ties, in the way that was common among Lamb's associates, Spenser's rhetorical pleasures to sensual pleasures through the organs that they share. When paired with sweet, dainty opens the possibility of the female poet that Coleridge, also singling out Spenser's ‘sweetness’ but leaning on the association of tastes with temperaments rather than sounds, finds in Spenser's ‘feminine tenderness and almost maidenly purity of feeling’ (ed 1936:38). In turn, this female personification supports Lamb's characterization of Spenser's Harvey Sonnet as ‘Manly and rather Miltonic... with nothing in it about Love or Knighthood’—and thus, ‘as a Sonnet of Spenser's,’ rather ‘curious’ (to Wordsworth, 1 Feb 1806; ed 1975–8, 2:206).

It is no surprise that the metaphor of the female brings with it in potentia the conventional pleasures and burdens of that role, including children. Both Hazlitt and Hunt hint poetically of a nanny Spenser. As a figure of the relationship between poetry and audience, Spenser-as-female suggests that the poetry may have a role in early education analogous to the pedagogical role of women in the family—‘all manner of pitiable storys, in Spencer-like verse—love—friendship relationship etc. etc.’ (to Coleridge, 5 Feb 1797; 1:97)—reserving the manly Milton for a later stage when men take over as teachers, and locking Chaucer away until the time comes for terminal lessons in the school of experience.

Though it would be anachronistic to dismiss altogether the notion of introducing children to life and poetry through Spenser, in practice the application of the metaphor usually took a somewhat different turn to accommodate the adult reader. In that instance, Spenser's poetry addresses the child in the adult. In ‘To the Poet Cowper,’ Spenser, though ‘Our elder Bard,’ is ‘a gentle Name’ and ‘The Lady muses’ dearest darling child.’ Reopening childhood, Spenser becomes the poet of memory, speaking the (archaic) language of the past to satisfy the yearning for retrospection and nostalgia. Since the childhood that Spenser can help us remember is, as it were, shut away in a sleeping compartment of our brains, his poetry is identified with night, sleep, dream—‘mental space...in a dream, a charmed sleep,’ says Coleridge of The Faerie Queene (ed 1936:36)—and, insofar as dreaming is a means of escape from daylight cares, with leisure. Out of this line of identification, which Lamb shares with Hazlitt, Hunt, and Coleridge, comes the honeytongued Spenser who creates ‘phantasies’ and is easily assimilated to the retrospective rhetoric of Lamb's most retrospective productions, the essays of his persona Elia. He opens one of the most nostalgic, ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’ (1821), by using the eighth stanza of Prothalamion to tie his own past, as a child born and raised in the Temple, in a triple knot to the city's past and to the poetry of the past—‘There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide’ (Lamb and Lamb ed 1903– 5, 2:82). When Elia's subject is woven from strands of childhood memory, night, and dream, as in ‘Witches, and Other Night-Fears’ (1821), no poet can bind the fabric of association better than Spenser: ‘What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces...we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that country’ (2:65–6). The country is of course dreamland—‘What dreams must not Spenser have had!’ (2:354n)— and its laws are mental laws for mental space: ‘we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their “whereabout.” But in their inner nature...we are at home’ (‘Sanity of True Genius’ [1826]; 2:188–9).

If the story is stopped here, as it generally is, then the creation of the sweet and dreamy nineteenth-century Spenser, though coherent, seems entirely unmotivated. Motivation is supplied, however, by the dangers of poetry and the perceived failure of allegory. The dangers emerge in the very imagery that seems to make The Faerie Queene safe for children. The airy-fairy Spenser is distilled from only one side of the logic of association, while complications seep from the other side. Freeing the dream, for instance, reveals a connection with enchantment and delusion. Freeing the female reveals the adult sensuality hidden in the maiden, as her honey-tongued sweetness matures into license and luxury.

These dangers have been the perennial concern of the most significant negative tradition of Spenser criticism, which Lamb's generation lodges in the palpable undercurrent of suspicion flowing from the unstable metaphors of Coleridge, Hazlitt, and, despite his escapism, Hunt. The most reliable critical stabilizer, well illustrated by John Hughes’ essay on Spenser (prefixed to Spenser ed 1715), had always been the ‘two senses’ of allegory, a critical category long regarded as sufficiently powerful to contain the excesses of imagination in a balanced economy of sense translated into thought. But for the early Romantic generation, allegory had lost much of its remedial power to increasing fears of abstraction or of the senses, both, curiously, involved with the supposed tyranny of the eye. As either didactic child's poet or enchanting optical despot, Spenser cannot win. ‘What to do with the allegory?’ becomes a standard question in Spenser criticism. The first and perhaps most memorable in a nineteenth-century series of snappy responses, Hazlitt's figure of the allegory as a ‘painted dragon’ that readers, like children, need not ‘meddle with’ (ed 1930–4, 5:38), tellingly delivers child's play and adult allure simultaneously.

Lamb could hardly have avoided these issues, and his Spenser, which shores up an old foundation with new elements, is certainly created with them in mind. The metaphor that best focuses his conception is the venerable figure of The Faerie Queene as dream, traditionally two-sided: dream as the threshold of escapist fantasy, associated with romance, and dream as the threshold of deep truth, associated with allegory. Both retreat from everyday waking states of mind, but only the second insists on bringing the dream back into everyday life. Filtering the first through the second is so conventional a way of making romance respectable that romance and allegory have often seemed synonymous. Lamb, like his contemporaries, makes an almost automatic connection between nighttime dream and Spenserian ‘dream,’ or allegorical romance. His case for Spenser is based on the link between dream and a deeper reality. His most significant remarks occur in the Elian essay on the ‘Sanity of True Genius,’ which briefly develops the familiar paradox that dreams are more real than reality (ed 1903–5, 2:188–9). Here, the apparent madness of a great poet, manifested as the retreat to a dream world instanced by the house of Mammon episode, is ‘hidden sanity,’ while the apparent quotidian sanity of a modern novelist (William Lane, d 1814) is manifested outwardly as naturalism that cannot stand the test of coherence: ‘The one turns life into a dream; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every day occurrences.’

The key to Lamb's position is the implicit identification of dream with mind, on the strength of which he can claim that Spenser reveals ‘inner nature’ by a ‘subtile art of tracing the mental processes.’ The similarity between an actual dream and a dreamlike episode in Spenser is that ‘the transitions... are every whit as violent’; the difference is that, in Spenser, ‘the waking judgment ratifies them.’ The deep truths revealed in Spenserian dreams refer to the internal rather than the external world, and they seem to be revealed more in plot, whose apparent external incoherence is really a psychological coherence, than in character (Lamb slides over allegorical characters such as ‘the Money God’ and his ‘daughter, Ambition’ as if they were Lord Glendamour and Miss Rivers). Spenser's allegory presumably represents the ‘waking judgment’ that ‘ratifies’ its dreamlike plot, giving the reader access to the public ethical significance of private psychological truths. Lamb is modern—and Romantic, if Romanticism characteristically substitutes psychological for religious explanations—in his emphasis on the internal rather than external truth of dreaming. He is traditional and even conservative in his plain faith in allegory.

Allegory was a stock target for attacks on moralizing poetry, and those persistent nineteenth-century attempts to certify a deallegorized Faerie Queene that would supply instruction-free pleasure can be partly explained as attempts to remove Spenser from the line of fire. Lamb, however, is strongly committed to the moral efficacy of literature— ‘no book can have too much of SILENT SCRIPTURE in it’ (to Bernard Barton, 23 Jan 1824; ed 1935, 2:415). Although he is equally averse to undramatized morality, he expresses no reservations about the effectiveness of allegory as a strategy for putting morality where it ought to be in a poem, ‘wrought into the body and soul, the matter and tendency’ (to Southey, 15 Mar 1799; ed 1975–8, 1:163). In this respect, his appreciation of Spenser is of a piece with his better-known appreciation of Hogarth. As a critic of Spenser, Lamb belongs in the line that runs through John Hughes and Edward Dowden (‘Spenser, the Poet and Teacher’ 1882, rpt in Dowden 1888:269–304), readers who would recover Spenser's poetry for the purposes of real life by accepting the traditional estimation of the power and function of allegory.

MORRIS EAVES

Coleridge ed 1936; Leigh Hunt 1833 ‘A New Gallery of Pictures: Spenser, the Poet of the Painters’ New Monthly Magazine ns 38:161–77; Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb 1903–5 Works ed E.V.Lucas, 7 vols (London); Lamb and Lamb ed 1935; Lamb and Lamb 1975–8 Letters ed Edwin W.Marrs, Jr, 3 vols (Ithaca, NY; must be supplemented by ed 1935 for letters after 1817); Walter Wilson 1934–5 ‘Some Recollections of the Late Charles Lamb. By One Who Knew Him Well’ ed E.V.Lucas London Mercury 31:146–51.
    Winifred F.Courtney 1982 Young Charles Lamb 1775–1802 (London) discusses in passing Lamb's earlier interest in Spenser; J.Milton French 1933 ‘Lamb and Spenser’ SP 30:205–7 gives minor additions to Hard 1931, who responds in SP 30:533–4; Frederick Hard 1931 ‘Lamb on Spenser’ SP 28:656–70 compiles Lamb's significant references to Spenser.

Langland, William

Alone of major poems in English, Langland's Piers Plowman afforded Spenser the model of a Christian allegory in narrative verse that is at once encyclopedic, exploratory, satiric, and visionary. Written in the 1370s and 1380s, Langland's profoundly searching and original poem had strong ripple effects—as prophecy, satire, and allegory—during the reigns of the Tudors. In 1550, Robert Crowley, a Protestant printer living in London, published in slightly modernized form three editions of the B-text of Piers Plowman, based on at least two different manuscripts; and in 1561, Owen Rogers issued a reprint of Crowley's final edition. These four printings made the poem readily accessible to Spenser and his contemporaries.

As analogue, precursor, and source, Piers Plowman is relevant both to Spenser's early poetic manifesto, The Shepheardes Calender, and to his fullest achievement, The Faerie Queene. In Maye, the name and character of Piers as good shepherd (ie, good parson) come from Langland's poem. More generally in The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser's intermittent use of the alliterative long line (aaax), his frequent deployment of persistent alliteration, his vigorously plainspoken moral satire, and his homely archaisms suggest both Langland's Piers and other works, like the late fourteenth-century Plowman's Tale, which derive from Langland's. In manner and matter, the Calender thus invokes the Piers tradition, Langland's legacy to the ‘English Poete’ (the title, presumably, of Spenser's lost discussion of poetry). The argument to October mentions this lost work explicitly, and the eclogue itself posits in a character named Piers the admonition, encouragement, and inspiration of Cuddie, in whom Spenser represents ‘the perfecte paterne of a Poete’ for his own time. The only Piers in literature who qualifies perfectly for this role is Langland's.

In the envoy to The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser refers to the two English poets whose steps he follows from afar—first Chaucer (Tityrus) and second ‘the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde a whyle.’ The Pilgrim-Ploughman poet is Langland. (While there is also evidence in SC to suggest Spenser's knowledge of The Plowman's Tale, this work is a most unlikely referent for the Pilgrim-Ploughman, since sixteenthcentury editions generally attributed it to Chaucer: Spenser specifies two poets as his precursors, and both cannot be Chaucer.) Although recently there has been general agreement that Langland is the second poet to whom Spenser refers at the end of the Calender, less agreement exists about the meaning of the line in which this reference occurs. Different explanations of how the line applies to Piers are tenable because the subject and object of the verb playde (performed, acted) are interchangeable syntactically. What matters, however, is that all possible readings of the line make sense as references to the author of Piers Plowman.

The most complex relationship between Spenser's poetry and Piers Plowman pertains to The Faerie Queene and ranges from an occasional verbal echo or explicit allusion to fundamental and far-reaching similarities in technique and conception. Langland's Lady Meed, for example, is ‘Purfiled with Pelure, the fineste upon erthe,’ and her robe is ‘ful riche, of reed scarlet engreyned/With Ribanes of reed gold and of riche stones’ (2.9, 15– 16); Spenser's Duessa is ‘clad in scarlot red,/Purfled with gold and pearle of rich assay’ (I ii 13). The archetype behind both women is the Whore of Babylon (Rev 17.4); but direct influence is indicated by the word purfled and the combination of scarlet (rich cloth) with red in both descriptions, neither of which is to be found in the Bibles Spenser is likely to have used. Similarly unbiblical is Duessa's headdress, a tiara ‘with crownes and owches garnished’; it recalls suggestively the description of Meed, who is illicitly but emphatically ‘Ycorouned with a coroune’ (2.10). In FQ V, Lady Munera reincarnates Langland's Lady Meed yet again. Munera is merely a Latin form of meed, and Munera's ‘golden hands’ (ii 10) recall Meed's ‘fyngres...fretted with gold wyr’ (2.11).

The most striking of Spenser's direct allusions to Piers Plowman occurs in Redcrosse's moment of self-recognition and discovery—self-recovery, to be exact—on the Mount of Contemplation in FQ I. Here Redcrosse learns that as a child he was stolen from ‘Britane land’ (x 65) and transported to Fairyland, where he was found by a plowman in the furrow of a field and brought up in plowman's state until his own aspirations led him to Fairy court. Infolded in this allusion is a Spenserian myth of origins that includes Spenser's own origin as an English poet, and in it he again acknowledges the debt to Piers Plowman that underlies and informs his own courtly epic.

The deepest and most pervasive relations between Piers and The Faerie Queene involve the history of ideas and the literary history of allegory. The two poems feature remarkably similar treatments of the individual's efforts to reenact the historical Redemption in himself and in society, of the selfish greed and corrupting materialism that Mammon embodies, of the distance between received truth and earned understanding and the compelling quest to possess true wholeness, of the imagination's role in this quest, of the observable conflict between the complementary virtues of justice and courtesy, of the opposed realities of contemporary politics and poetic vision, and finally and movingly, of the poet's own presence in his poem. Held behind The Faerie Queene—200 years behind it—and viewed with something approaching Spenser's historical imagination, Piers Plowman becomes a conceptual grid for Spenser's massive poem.

A host of more specific ties connects the two poems: for example, resemblances between Langland's Lady Holy Church and Spenser's Una and Contemplation, between ‘Mede the mayde’ (2.20) and the ‘mayden Queene’ Lucifera (I iv 8), between envy and detraction throughout Piers and their quintessence in The Faerie Queene, the Blatant Beast; between the recurrent concerns in both poems with the creative and destructive powers of language; and between Piers and Arthur as symbols that evolve throughout the poems—symbols specially associated with divine grace and at times alluding specifically to Christ. Like Langland's use of the traditional dream vision, moreover, Spenser's is distinctive. Among medieval dream poems, a series of dreams, laced with inner dreams and with periodic waking in-tervals, is peculiar only to Piers. This structure not only influences directly Spenser's treatment of Redcrosse's dreaming in FQ I but also influences less directly other dream-like qualities of the poem and the nature of the poet's presence in it, in particular his tendency to participate in—even to appear within—his characters’ experiences.

Projection allegory—the representation of one character's state of mind or of an aspect of his identity in a second character—is also a striking feature of both poems and, as employed therein, another distinctive connection between them. When Langland's Dreamer meets Thought (8.70ff), for example, he finds his own thinking in a character who looks just like him and has been following him around for seven years; similarly, when Redcrosse meets Despair, he confronts a mirror image of the figure Arthur has rescued from Orgoglio's dungeon, that is, an image of himself. Sophisticated projection allegory in both poems extends to the merging of characters with other, less abstract, less simply personified ones (eg, of Hawkin or Piers with Will, Sansjoy with Redcrosse, Cymochles and Pyrochles with Guyon, or Colin with the poet of FQ), and it can include such highly distinctive details as the use of ambiguous, double pronominal referents to effect the merger.

Dialogue, essentially in the form of debate, to achieve through multiple perspectives evolving definitions of concepts, identities, or conditions, constitutes another major allegorical technique present distinctively in both poems. Piers Plowman is full of such debates, of which the exchange between Holy Church and the Dreamer affords a typical analogue to numerous debates in The Faerie Queene, such as those between Redcrosse and Despair or Contemplation, between Duessa and Night, between Guyon and the Palmer or Mammon, between Britomart and Glauce, between Calidore and Meliboe. A corollary to formal debating in both poems is the virtually continuous redefinition of key terms, such as nature and life.

Allegory, as it functions in these poems, is a distinctive habit of mind and a continuing process of reassessment. Above all it is a process organic to meaning. Definitively in both poems, it is a direct way of conceiving and conceptualizing reality.

JUDITH H.ANDERSON

William Langland 1975 Piers Plowman: The B Version ed George Kane and E.Talbot Donaldson (London). The Kane-Donaldson edition gives the variants for all three of Crowley's editions. Citations in the preceding article combine the Kane-Donaldson text with the readings of Crowley's third edition. Medieval þ in Kane-Donaldson has been modernized to th, and initial v to u.
    Anderson 1976; William R.Crawford 1957 ‘Robert Crowley's Editions of Piers Plowman: A Bibliographical and Textual Study’ diss Yale Univ; Greenlaw 1911; Hamilton 1961b; Barbara A.Johnson 1982 ‘From Piers Plowman to Pilgrim's Progress: The Generic and Exegetical Contexts of Bunyan's “Similitude of a Dream”’ diss Brown Univ; King 1982; Miskimin 1975; Reid 1981b.

language, general, and resources exploited in rhyme

(See also related articles on *archaism, *dialect, *etymology, *morphology and syntax, *names, *neologism, *pronunciation, *rhyme, and *versification.) Spenser is one of the most diverse, as well as prolific, of poets—a man to whose artistry in language almost universal tribute is paid, but whose language has received practically no attention during the last thirty years, when items for the Spenser bibliography have been pouring off the presses at an average rate of three a week. There is a long tradition of comment on certain linguistic eccentricities, especially in The Shepheardes Calender, and this preoccupation with selected aspects of his usage, especially diction, and notably archaism, dialect forms, loans, and inventions is a modern reflex of the almost contemporary view held by Jonson that he ‘writ no Language.’ There is also a tradition of exegesis, this, too, contemporary in origin. Systematic analysis, even a systematic attempt to relate his usage to the norms of his contemporaries, is wholly lacking. The reader of Spenser should approach the text as being in Spenser's language, which is a very different matter from reading him as if he were writing modern English with intermittent lapses into strange expressions which require glossing. The medium he forged is seen mature, and at length, in The Faerie Queene. If we hope to achieve even a provisional basis for generalization, we should start with that, and consider in a secondary way the more experimental forms he tried out and abandoned. Since the work is far too long for systematic analysis of the whole to be attempted, the most practical course is to undertake detailed study of a short sample: FQ I proem and canto i, a total of 59 stanzas, 531 lines, about 5000 words, consisting of two contrasted types of language use, which may be distinguished as invocation and narrative.

Since for those works which appeared more than once in Spenser's lifetime we do not know the measure of his control of textual detail, it does not seem profitable to lay too great stress on the sort of variable that might be due to the printer, or to worry too much about the choice of edition on which statistical tables are to be based (the figures in such tables must for other reasons be interpreted as approximate). Full textual details are available in the Variorum edition, which has been consulted on all points at issue; but of carefully edited single texts it is likely that the most widely current is that edited by J.C.Smith in 1909, which was incorporated in Spenser ed 1912 and taken as textual basis of FQ ed 1977.

We begin then with the media of transmission, realized in a printed text whose relationship to Spenser's intentions we can-not determine, and a phonological form we have to reconstruct from internal and external evidence. What can be said of the spelling and punctuation is said with conviction about the printer's practice, though they have a consistency of function, and an organic relationship to phonological patterning, that make it, at first sight, plausible that Spenser exercised considerable influence. Whatever can be reconstructed of the pronunciation of the past comes to us through the evidence of the written medium. That Elizabethan English differs from modern English in the repertoire of letters, their distribution, the degree of orthographic regularity, and the punctuation is obvious to any reader, and this is not the place for a systematic study. How much we can know of Spenser's personal usage is hard to say. There is clear evidence of an input from the printer to the spelling and punctuation as we know them. On the other hand, there are some signs of a Spenserian policy both in choosing among concurrent variants, and in adopting forms outside the range of normal Elizabethan usage. Most evident in Spenser's poetry is his concern for sound patterning, not only in his complex and varied metrical structures, but in the incidental features of alliteration, assonance, and sound symbolism. Related to this is his fondness for choosing or inventing spellings most suggestive of the sound structure (including the choice between alliterative pronunciations) of a particular passage. Thus, in rhyme with such words as rest and best, breast tends to appear as brest; and in rhyme with red and garnished, head and overspread tend to appear as hed and overspred, in contrast to where, in rhyme with dead, the head spelling appears. Likewise, with Sarazin, been will appear as bin, but with greene and seene as beene.

Spenser clearly liked rhyme forms to be visually matched even where pronunciation was not at issue; the inflection -(e)s, for instance, where it has no syllabic value, tends to appear either in adjacent rhyme words with -e- exclusively (plaines/vaines/paines), or, in other such adjacent words, exclusively without (arts/imparts/harts/smarts). Where words have longer or shorter forms, he prefers rhymes to make a consistent choice, even if one of the elements has to have an invented spelling and no difference in pronunciation is involved (pas [v]/gras/was/has, lesse/wildemesse/blesse/distresse). Distortion can go quite a long way, as when told is spelled tould to rhyme with would, which would sound like it only if an archaic pronunciation were revived (for the normal form, cf hold/manifold/told/behold).

What next concerns us is the rhythmical and metrical patterning of the spoken and written forms in the stanza he invented—a metrical form of exceptional difficulty in execution, and probably the most brilliantly original exploitation of the inherent possibilities of the language in the history of English versification.

In looking at Spenser's metrical technique, I shall confine myself to The Faerie Queene, so it is specifically the Spenserian stanza that concerns me. I shall concentrate on rhymes and look briefly at how the rhyme words get into the right places; I shall confine myself to masculine rhymes, since feminine ones (which in any case are rare) complicate the issue without in most cases adding any new light. It is hardly surprising that the qualities for which Spenser has been most admired have changed from century to century. But unwavering is the praise of his mellifluousness, his metrical inventiveness, ingenuity, and sustained facility. Yet there is a dearth of analyses of the technical demands made upon him, and of his precise methods of solving the problems he posed for himself. Commentators single out particular local effects for explanation and praise; historians of the language use his lines as evidence both of current pronunciation and of the existence of both spelling- and eye-rhymes. What I have not found anywhere is a careful look at what was involved in writing the longest poem in the language in an apparently demanding metrical form and a particularly difficult rhyme scheme, and in doing it in sixteenth-century English. Despite local attention to forms that were different then, the sense of wonder at his achievement is, I suspect, based on intuitions about what it would be like to achieve this feat now. There isn't even an account why, with all due respect to Pope, most readers find that the Spenserian stanza works, rhythmically and metrically, for them, though on all conventional patterns of metrical analysis it shouldn't.

The Spenserian stanza is a nine-line unit, the first eight lines being decasyllables, followed by an alexandrine, and linked by rhyme on the scheme ababbcbcC. Feminine rhymes, of which there is only one in the first three books, occur rather more often in the last three. The stanza uses lines of sharply marked identity, though there are instances of enjambment, even between stanzas. The rhyme scheme calls for a two-term (the two a’s in the scheme above), a four-term (4×b), and a three-term (3× c) rhyme pattern in every stanza. At only two points do these patterns constitute what in another context would be a couplet: between lines 4 and 5 where they help to prevent the eight decasyllabic lines splitting into two quatrains, and between lines 8 and 9, where they support the integration of the alexandrine with the decasyllabic lines in a unitary stanza.

Now, what characteristic resources and constraints did Spenser's English afford for the completion of his metrical task? I begin by asking questions about the repertoire of syllable-codas available to Spenser to form rhyme schemes: what did it consist of, how does it compare with that of modern English, and how fully did he exploit it so as to diversify his sound patterning? It is most convenient to start from present-day English, both because we know more about it, and because what we don't know about it may put our areas of ignorance about Spenser's English into perspective. I will accept Gimson's tabulation of present-day English syllable-codas (Gimson 1962). The most complex class of syllable-codas is those of -VCCCC structure (where−=preceding letters, V=one vowel, and C=one consonant), used only where an inflection is added to a base ending in a triconsonantal structure, as in exempts or glimpsed. Gimson does not list them, but I think there are about twenty; each type is realized in very few words, often only in one, which rules it out as an element in rhyme. Spenserian English was considerably richer in them, largely because of the survival of post-vocalic /r/, but Spenser never uses them in rhyme, and henceforth I shall leave them out of account. Even this negative point, however, may have the function of suggesting that he disliked them.

Next come the -VCCC structures, where we can speak rather more realistically of what is possible and what is done. Of these, on Gimson's analysis, the phonotactics of present-day English permit 912 in stressed syllables, of which 177 (about 19 percent) are used. Of these, II are marginal to the vocabulary, or stylistically improbable in poetry, or phonologically unique so that they cannot enter into rhyme schemes, or even all three. We might guess that not many over 155 (about 17 percent) belong to the real field of candidates for rhyming. I cannot begin to estimate how many billion words of running text, on various subjects, and in various styles, would be required to ensure that even 155 turned up.

The composition of Spenser's repertoire of stressed -VCCC syllable codas cannot be determined so precisely at that of modern English, if only because we do not know the limits of his lexicon with such precision, let alone the limits of the vocabulary suitable to his subject. Nor indeed can we fix exact limits to the possibilities and constraints of his phonotactics. Clearly, however, the repertoire would be different in total and in composition. He probably would have been working with a system of 13 stressed-syllable vowels (as against Gimson's 19), but all of them would have been able to precede clusters starting in /ŋ/ /nk/ and /r/ (for characters like these in the International Phonetic Alphabet, see introductory material in almost any standard English-foreign language dictionary), and the bisegmental status of / ŋg/ would make many of his clusters triconsonantal which for us are only -VCC. An educated guess is that there might have been about 250 realized codas of this class available in his English, of which perhaps 220 would have been serious candidates for rhyming. Of this possible total, he utilizes in rhyme at most 29, and this small set has distinct characteristics. First, the patterns that are used are not particularly rare and for the most part recur quite often. Second, 26 of them involve inflections—the same inflections that occur in four-consonant terminal clusters today. The remaining three are all questionable in one way or another. One is apparently imperfect: world on one occasion rhymes with extold (I xi 27 27) and on another with introld, hold and told (II ii 44). There are, of course, Early Modern English pronunciations of world in which the final cluster is simplified, but none are known involving both loss of /r/ and preservation of the /o(:)/ value of the vowel. The rhyme may be imperfect, but the most likely explanation is that it is conventional; if so, only the non-matching part of it perhaps has a three-consonant cluster, and if not, none of it has. The second example is unique, and appears from the spelling to have triconsonantal though it almost certainly represents : Hyacinct/extinct (III xi 37) [I =sound of first vowel in finny]. Finally, for the elements in length/strength (I v 29), two-consonant terminations are recorded from the seventeenth century—/lεn⊖, strεn⊖/—and one might suspect that they were already known in the sixteenth century. Much attention has been paid to Spenser's archaisms, which are superficial and limited; the essential character of his poetic language is its modernity. In many features, it is ahead of its time, and rhyme could well be one of them.

There is then no entirely convincing case in which Spenser uses a triconsonantal terminal cluster in rhyme unless the last element in it is an inflection. This again looks like aesthetic preference, the more so in that his language favored heavily consonantal terminations more than ours. Impressionistically, one might suggest that a consonant whose function is grammatical, and which does not contribute to the word in its lexical function, is somehow reduced in prominence. And one notes that in Spenser, the status of -VCCC codas corresponds to the status of -VCCCC codas in present-day English.

We come now to the main body of rhymes, which belongs to the remaining three types of coda, -VCC, -VC, -V. For these, in stressed position, present-day English as a whole affords the following figures:

Phonotactically possible		Realized	Real field for rhyming
-VCC	1121	566 (50%)	c 520–50
-VC	418	265 (63%)	c 220–45
-V	13	13 (100%)	13

To calculate Spenser's possibilities we have to take account of differences additional to those already mentioned, such as absence of final /ŋ/ and /3/. As an educated guess we might postulate a certain total of phonotactic possibilities, of which we can be fairly confident that a certain number are realized in rhyme. What we find in The Faerie Queene is a very low rate of -VCC, with very high rates of -VC and -V:

Possible		Realized
-VCC	c 942	c 162 (c 17%)
-VC	c 246	c 143 (c 58%)
-V	8?	8 (100%)

Considering that the sample is so small—about 11,700 patterns and three times as many words—the remarkable figure is that for -VC realizations. We are never likely to know whether the ratio of realizations to possibilities was the same in the sixteenth century as now, but the current figure is the only guide we have, and Spenser's percentage of realizations in a small sample nearly matches that of all English today. This observation gives a quantified basis to the impression that Spenser is astonishingly varied in the rhyme patterns he uses, but it limits the property to two of the possible types of coda, -VC and -V. In fact there are in this category some codas which Spenser employs out of rhyme, but not in rhyme (such as /Ib/ in sybbe; /Ig/ in big, dig; /I∫/ in dish, fish, wish), but this is only to be expected since the population of non-rhyming stressed syllables is over four times as large as the population of rhyming stressed syllables, and over twelve times as large as the number of masculine rhyme patterns. There are accidental gaps in the evidence, and some gaps are shown by FQ VII as in the case of /εk/ in the rhyme beck/check/speake/reck (vi 22); speake is probably imperfect, but late medieval shortening to /ε/ cannot be ruled out.

Closer inspection reveals a further difference between -VC and -VCC realizations. In the -VC group, there is a negligible difference in the rate of take-up between one-mora vowels (V₁) [mora: generally, a metrical time-unit equivalent to one unstressed, or short, syllable; here, a short vowel] and two-mora [ie, long] vowels (V₂): (-V₁C, 57/94=c 60%; -V₂C, 86/152=c 57%). In the -VCC group the difference is striking (-V₁CC, 95/368=c 25%; V₂ CC, 68/574 =12%). It is likely then, as now, that the language had a lower utilization rate in the two-mora category, and possible that properties of my reconstruction tend to distort the difference. But in addition, there seems to be at least a possibility that Spenser preferred to avoid such sequences in positions as prominent as rhyme. This impression is strengthened if we look at the composition of the 68 clusters. Of them, 51 commonly have their second consonant by virtue of the same two inflections as enter into the—VCCC codas, though occasional uninflected forms may enter into rhyme patterns involving the same codas. The other clusters (which may each co-occur with more than one vowel) reduce to types, seven of which (when combined with different vowels) match the clusters incorporating inflections (/ nd, nt, ld, lt, ns, rs, st/). This leaves only the liquid clusters /rn/ and /lv/, and in the latter the /l/ is doubtful. Once again we may suspect an aesthetic preference: in rhyme co das, Spenser tends to avoid structures consisting of two-mora vowel plus two-consonant cluster, unless either the cluster is one which could incorporate an inflection, or its first element is a liquid.

To sum up: generally the English available to Spenser was more heavily consonantal in its terminations than ours, but his selection of forms for prominent positions suggests a preference for forms which deemphasize this property. His deployment of final -CCC clusters is like that of general present-day English for -CCCC clusters; his of -Vi2CC or derived clusters is largely the same. His favored patterns for morphemically simple words are -V, -VC, -VCC, but his capacity for variation is demonstrated by the fact that up to the end of Book VI one is still recording new patterns.

Naturally the proportion of codas used is only half the story, both as to range and as to preferences and constraints. Rather more than 300 codas are distributed over nearly 12,000 pattern occurrences, so the average rate of coda recurrence must be high; and since the distribution is uneven, some codas will be very frequent indeed. The other half of the story depends on the words in which the codas are realized, and we may ask two things: are these varied or repetitive? and do they clarify the hints we have found of preference for certain types of coda rather than others? In our sample analysis of Book I, proem and canto i, there are 80 repetitions of the same element in the same grammatical function—more than one in seven, and if we were to slacken the definition to ‘the same word,’ there would be many more. This seems a high proportion. It is, for instance, more than the rate for a corresponding sample from the opening of the Canterbury Tales, in which the subject matter is more varied, and where the rhyme elements do strike me as repetitive. Spenser's seeming variety, I suggest, results from the variation in location and grouping of rhyme words, in twos, fours, and threes, elaborately interwoven, rather than from their actually being varied.

Finally, I return to the question of how difficult it was for Spenser to achieve his metrical smoothness, given what seem to be self-imposed optional constraints. It has, of course, long been recognized—at least since de Sélincourt—that Spenser made maximum use of the variability permitted by good Elizabethan English. In our sample analysis, I made a count of the forms for which he had alternatives available: they are nearly one in ten, and in many cases he had several variants at his disposal, which enabled one and the same item to hook into different chains of rhyme words. Aesthetic preference apart, he ranged with extraordinary freedom over the rhyming potential the language afforded. Of course, he lived in a century which afforded a greater range of acceptable variant pronunciations in a single city than any before or since, and he made full use of this. Among the -V patterns, the numerous common words in -y or-ly could be /i:/ or /I/. In only 55 stanzas (I i), pattern 3 links harmony to sky and dry; victorie to lye (v); Armorie to enimie; Yvory to lye (v), enemy, and quietly; die to destinie and indifferently; fly (v) to fantasy, privily, and sly (and in -VC flyes to applyes, enimies, and lyes); but pattern I links perplexitie to bee (‘are’) and free. Many -ea- words may have /ə:/, /əi:/, or /ε/ and so hook into three different populations of rhyme words; the domain of quantitative variation is extremely wide. All of this is too well known to require extensive exemplification. While Spenser makes use of this variability, he doesn't cheat. For instance, words like is, his, has, was, in their normal unstressed uses were already subject to Verner's Law—that is, their final consonant was voiced. But when such a word occurs in a masculine rhyme it is necessarily stressed, and the voicing does not take place. In every case where the rest of the rhyme provides a check, Spenser uses the unvoiced form. Thus we find amis with his, is, and kis and alas with was—there are no counter-examples. I would suggest there is a quality in Spenser's exploitation of variability that nearly always protects it from the appearance of license or mere contrivance.

This quality derives from something far less formal than a theory of language; perhaps we could call it a context of assumptions—the atmosphere his actual use of language breathes. It is most nearly overt in two linked areas, etymology and name-giving, in which Spenser's implicit views have rather a Platonic coloring. Characteristically, names are bestowed or revealed by the poet as name-giver, and are offered to us both as the culmination of, and check upon, our full comprehension of the being who has been introduced to us. It is essential that names be correct, and that we know enough to recognize their rightness before they are revealed to us. To this extent, the language of poetry is not arbitrary. These correct names (whether grammatically they are nouns or adjectives) typically operate etymologically—that is, they derive their meaning from a source other than contemporary usage, namely from an original or supposed original meaning which will often be suggested by the form of the word. Original is not really the right word, for the importance of etymology to Spenser and his contemporaries did not lie in the chronological dimension; it was nearer to what a twentieth-century philosopher would call analysis, that is, a way of getting at the irreducible elements of meaning in such a manner as to provide a correct interpretation which, because it is correct, is unchanging.

Only recently has the pervasiveness of this conception in Spenser's use of names and epithets been identified, but I will give an example which has always been recognized. Though faerie has earlier meanings in English which were revived after Spenser, its normal early Elizabethan meaning was rather like the modern fairy except that the little creatures were more sinister and more powerful. But etymologically, faerie is the realm of certain supernatural females, the Fates; the fusion of divinity, destiny, and womanly dominion makes it a correct and revealing name, or, as we would more usually say, symbol or image, of Elizabethan England, not as a temporal kingdom but as an unchanging idea. In each case, the etymological meaning is the immutable essence; vagaries through time, in form or meaning, are mere accidents. In proportion as the poet's goal is the permanent in language, variable surface realizations are functionally a matter of indifference. Contemporary variation in the standard language, advanced, even slangy colloquialisms, dialect forms, and archaisms are all on a par. To Jonson, this meant that Spenser writ no language, and in a surface sense this is undeniably true. But it is not a relevant sense. Spenser's exploitation of variation gives him great license, but the sympathetic reader does not perceive him as taking liberties or the easy way out because his freedom is in accord with a deep, pervasive, and coherent intuition about the nature of poetic language—at least for poetry of this kind. Comparison is often made with The Shepheardes Calender, where the linguistic eccentricities are not only more numerous and more extreme, but different in kind because they are different, more superficial, in function. The apt comparison is with Spenser's prose. There you see what language he writes when his object is to deal with matters of contemporary concern: classically correct sixteenthcentury English. In The Faerie Queene, he is the poet of universal grammar, and he keeps constantly before the reader, who is also the hearer, the accidentalness of any surface structure chosen as the realization of the underlying forms.

BARBARA M.H.STRANG

Professor Strang had planned to contribute an article on ‘Spenser and the English Language’ that would treat in a unitive manner the separate topics of diction (sources, deployment, varying characteristics in different poems, preferred and foregrounded elements, relationship, and diction in The Shepheardes Calender especially with reference to E.K.’s comments); grammar (both morphology and syntax); spelling; pronunciation; prosody (rhythm and meter); and style. The drafts of what she had written on Spenser's exploitation of the reservoir of language for his rhymes were organized by Margaret Cooper at the University of Newcastle. A lengthy account of the general character of verse and prose meter has been omitted very reluctantly because it would have made sense only if the original scope of the article had been fulfilled.

Latin literature

Latin was the commanding father tongue of the Renaissance, presiding over the vernacular mother tongues with the austere voice of distant authority. It had been the language of the Roman Empire, the older unity out of whose provinces and dialects the nations and languages of Western Europe had developed separately during the Middle Ages. Against this diversification, the church had preserved a sense of Europe's corporate identity, and had continued to do its business in Latin as the natural medium of such an identity. Much of the effort of Renaissance humanism was devoted to reaffirming that identity by strengthening that medium: restoring Latin to its classical norms, reasserting its associations with Roman civilization, and broadening its use by placing it at the center of an international program of educational reform.

So important was Latin's role in that program that even within the specialized field of classical scholarship Greek made relatively little headway; the most sophisticated classicists still saw antiquity largely through Roman lenses. The success of the humanist effort ensured that almost every Renaissance literary career, of whatever kind and in whatever language, began with an early encounter with Latin and its unique status. Not a dead language, since it was written and even spoken by all educated men, it was no one's native language either. Acquired by discipline and study amid the rigors of the schoolroom, it was preeminently the serious language, setting a standard of impersonal linguistic dignity and durability to which the vernaculars could only aspire.

Literary ambition of the time was often shaped by its dominance. Many writers chose Latin for their own mature careers; the substantial body of what is known as Neo-Latinliterature is one of the significant features of the Renaissance landscape. Even for writers who returned to their native languages, the literature of classical Rome retained a privileged position. Contemporary literary theory was dominated by a concern with classical imitation, the means by which modern literature might be raised to the level of Latin precedent; and learning to read Renaissance literature involves learning to read the signals of that effort.

For instance, the opening lines of The Faerie Queene—‘Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,/As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds’—are evidence that Spenser had read the reputed opening of the Aeneid: ‘Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena/carmen.’ They are also, for those who catch the allusion, a comparison of his career to Virgil's in order both to appropriate some of Virgil's prestige and to set himself a mark to reach; further, this is an announcement that the poem to follow is to be considered an epic, serving in English (the author hopes) something like the same purpose that the Aeneid serves in Latin. Subsequent intersections between Virgil's text and Spenser's evoke the same frame of reference, sometimes in complex ways. Virgil's comparison of the triumphant Cybele to Rome (Aeneid 6.784–7) was imitated by du Bellay in a poem about Rome's fall which Spenser translated (Ruines of Rome 6); both the Latin and the translated French seem to have been on Spenser's mind later when he compared Cybele's crown to Troynovant or London (FQ IV xi 28). But the Aeneid itself is about Rome as a ‘new Troy,’ about historical ruin repaired by a translatio imperii, a transfer of authority from one site to another; and the poem in which Spenser quotes Virgil is part of his effort to repair in a similar way the damage that du Bellay describes, to reestablish Roman dignity by English effort. Using classical texts this way to define and validate their own aspirations was almost second nature to Renaissance poets.

Nevertheless, the vitality of Renaissance classicism owes much to the unexpected lightness with which the paternal authority of the Roman heritage could be borne; by more severely neoclassical standards, Renaissance practice—and especially Spenser's— is often deceptive and irresponsible. Although The Faerie Queene begins with an implicit promise to be a Virgilian epic or heroic poem, it follows few of the overt rules of that genre. By the middle of its first stanza, Spenser has slipped out of the world of Virgil's Aeneid into that of Ariosto's Orlando furioso. His pledge to ‘sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds’ savors far less of Latin precedent (‘arma virumque cano’) than of Italian: ‘Le donne, i cavallier, l'arme, gli amori,/Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto’ (OF 1.1). Spenser's poem as it proceeds bears a far more obvious resemblance to Ariosto's digressive romanzo and the vernacular medieval traditions of romance behind it than to any classical model. Major critical battles were fought in the Renaissance over the right of such a poem as Ariosto's to be called epic; but Spenser's practice seems characterized by the absence of any real sense of incongruity in what he is doing. Quoting Virgil in his opening lines is a significant homage as far as it goes, but it is not a long-term commitment.

Such untroubled mixing of classical and nonclassical elements is made easy, and almost inevitable, by the general practice of classical imitation in the Renaissance, which did much to detach specific quotations from the control of their original contexts. Not the least important part of imitation was the systematic excerpting of particular moments from ancient authors for separate display in commonplace books, rhetorical manuals, mythological compendiums, dictionaries, and similar reference books: by this route rather than being read in the original works Latinliterature often found its way into contemporary writing. From such entry, particular topoi were capable of spreading so promiscuously that it can be impossible to be sure what a particular author had actually read. For instance, a modern researcher may think he has found Spenser's imitation of Catullus 7 in ‘More eath to number, with how many eyes/High heaven beholds sad lovers nightly theeveryes’ (FQ III xi 45): ‘aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox,/furtivos hominum vident amores’; but he has probably turned up Spenser's imitation of Ariosto's imitation: ‘e per quanti occhi il ciel le furtive opre/degli amatori a mezza notte scuopre’ (OF 14.99). Here no evidence suggests a conscious or meaningful triangulation such as that with Virgil and du Bellay. The quotation has lost any felt status as a classical quotation; it has become part of an anonymous rhetorical repertoire of sentiments and turns of phrase on which a writer could draw for any number of unrelated purposes. Classical literature, so assimilated, combined with all other manner of possibilities; and amid the particularly wide range of materials with which Spenser worked—chivalric, biblical, historical—it quickly lost its privileged standing.

Even when Spenser wrote more closely within the confines of an identifiably classical genre, he was as likely to be following the modifications of later imitation as to be attending to the ancient exemplar. The Shepheardes Calender resembles Virgil's Eclogues somewhat more securely than The Faerie Queene resembles the Aeneid; but for the conception and details of his individual months, Spenser looked to the more recent models available in Neo-Latin and French pastoral, which are not merely conduits for their own classical sources. Mantuan, for instance, despite his name and a reputation as the ‘second Virgil,’ helped give Renaissance pastoral an ethical and satirical edge barely hinted at in Virgil, but one that Spenser found very much to his own purposes. On the other hand, generic watchfulness did not prevent the spirit of classical pastoral from invading other traditions. For his Epithalamion, Spenser went back to the prime representative of the classical marriage hymn in Catullus (61, with 62 and 64); but what many readers find most memorable in Spenser's poem is the evocation of an extravagant, natural, and even cosmic sympathy not to be found in the original: ‘And hearken to the birds lovelearned song,/The deawy leaves among./For they of joy and pleasance to you sing,/That all the woods them answer and theyr eccho ring’ (88–91). Again, Spenser's cues are to be sought in exercises closer to home: ‘Let mother earth now decke her selfe in flowers,/To see her ofspring seeke a good increase’ (Sidney ed 1962:91, after Gaspar Gil Polo). The classical tradition in which Spenser can be placed is not one of definitive models and rules, but one of continuing experiment and change.

That disposition is perhaps unknowingly evident in Spenser's classical reading list itself, which includes a fair number of writers who do not exemplify the authoritative spirit of their language. Continental theory had already recognized that a significant narrowing of the classical canon was necessary to isolate and preserve that spirit, and had specified Cicero and Virgil as the preeminent, even exclusive, models for imitation. Subsequent neoclassicism would articulate a fuller theory of a golden age of Latin literature from which later works manifest a decline. Spenser's own reading included a generous share of Cicero and Virgil; but no theory of literary history seems to have constrained him to pay comparable attention to the other great practitioners of Augustan decorum like Livy and Horace, or to suppress an evident inclination for the more luxuriant and hyperbolic style of such later writers as Statius and Claudian (both of whom figure, for instance, in the epithalamic tradition). Some of Spenser's most significant mythological figures—Genius, Nature, Cupid, and Psyche—have their ultimate sources in the later antique milieu, where classical literature often verges on medieval allegory; and much of his sense of earlier Latinliterature was filtered through the late antique sensibility of such commentators as Servius and Macrobius. Even the Culex and the Ciris, which he surely believed were by Virgil, and which are the Virgilian poems he imitated most closely and extensively (the former is expanded into Virgils Gnat, the latter supplies the model for FQ III ii 30–51), are almost certainly post-Virgilian, and are now treated by scholars as early specimens of the decadence. Some of Spenser's natural affinities are with the margins of the classical tradition.

Ovid, the most subtly marginal of these figures, provides points of reference around which some of the most complex tensions in The Faerie Queene are organized. He falls loosely under the rubric of golden-age Latin; but his gamesome and elusive facility is something different from Virgilian epic momentousness, and an aura of official disrepute as the poet of sexual license clings to his career. Yet he was in practice the classical poet for Elizabethans, and for Spenser no less than for his contemporaries; any census shows notably more Ovidian than Virgilian moments in his works. What is alluded to in the process, though, tends to be not, as with Virgil, an authoritative cultural value, but a source of danger to the moral order. Ovid, for instance, provides the standard catalogue of the gaudy metamorphic lusts of the pagan gods (Metamorphoses 6.103–28); Spenser virtually translates this passage in Muiopotmos 277–99, and uses it as the basis for the tapestries that Britomart sees in the house of Busirane (FQ III xi 29–46). The antiqueworld in those tapestries provides some of the most violent yet enticing images of the sexual energies which threaten chastity, and which Britomart must learn both to confront and to master.

More generally, all the heroes in The Faerie Queene must confront and master the tumultuous mutability which challenges any sense of purpose and personal identity, even of reality itself, and which is also the titular theme of Ovid's Metamorphoses. At moments, the central visions of the two works can seem very close: ‘Nec species sua cuique manet, rerumque novatrix/ex aliis alias reparat natura figuras:/nec perit in toto quicquam, mihi credite, mundo,/sed variat faciemque novat’ (Met 15.252–5): ‘That substance is eterne, and bideth so,/Ne when the life decayes, and forme does fade,/Doth it consume, and into nothing go,/But chaunged is, and often altred to and fro’ (FQ III vi 37). The spectacle of constant change is more disturbing to Spenser than to Ovid, however, and the search for a definitive still point in the flux is far more urgent and complex in The Faerie Queene than in the Metamorphoses. A major effort of Spenser's poem is the attempt to bring the anarchic instability of which Ovid sings under the control of a firmer sense of moral direction; and the last section of his poem, the Cantos of Mutabilitie, makes unusually dense use of Ovidian material to articulate the most acute crisis of that effort. A certain ambiguity in the final resolution further witnesses an engagement with Ovid appreciably deeper and more serious than that with Virgil precisely because it is more unsettled.

One of the components of that unsettlement is a suspicion of Ovid's own cultural pedigree: all worldly authority is more vulnerable than it thinks, including the authority of the Latin language. Ultimately Spenser's work may illustrate the special place of that language in Renaissance literature less well than it does the contrary possibility of the submergence of Latin's prestige in the different authority that could be asserted by the vernacular. Humanist Latin in England never achieved the dominance that it did in continental culture; among the major Western European countries, England suffered the least significant break with her vernacular medieval past. Spenser's own Latin training at Merchant Taylors’ School was under Mulcaster, distinguished among humanist educational theorists for his concern with the importance and dignity of English in its unregulated native vitality. Throughout his career, Spenser's sense of his vernacular heritage remained at least as strong as that of his classical heritage: Chaucer remained as magic a presence as Virgil, and the archaisms with which Spenser seasoned his diction are more Anglo-Saxon than Latinate. In no other Renaissance poem of comparable ambition is the classical background less prominent, more thoroughly mixed with native elements, than in The Faerie Queene. Indeed, a settling of linguistic family politics to the unusual advantage of the mother tongue is perhaps only what might be expected in the background of a poem that, in its amplitude and decorative fertility, and its concern with sources of power that are often androgynous when not actively feminine—with service to a queen—is probably the most maternal epic of its age.

GORDON BRADEN

European classicism generally is most fully mapped by Bolgar 1954. For Renaissance Latin, see IJsewijn 1977; on the language's specially paternal authority and its relation to the vernaculars, see William Kerrigan 1980 ‘The Articulation of the Ego in the English Renaissance’ in The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will ed Joseph H.Smith (New Haven) pp 261–308. The reading list and methods of English humanist education are surveyed in T.W.Baldwin 1944; for scrutiny of Spenser's indebtedness to classical authors (with particular reference to his use of Renaissance dictionaries and mythographers), see Lotspeich 1932 and Starnes and Talbert 1955:44–110. Such material is assimilated into wider perspectives by Bush 1963:89–120 and Greene 1963:294–335. Discussions of Spenser's dealings with particular Latin authors are cited in their individual entries.

law, natural and divine

For us, law is made by man; it is a product of judicial and legislative decisions that result from conflicting political forces seeking to maintain or enlarge domains of economic or social privilege. For Spenser and his contemporaries, law derived from God: it was real, absolute, and eternal, and it governed all orders in society and in the cosmos.

The Elizabethan ‘realist’ conception of law has a long history. Contending with the Sophists, Plato argued that laws are neither factitious nor arbitrary but reflect an underlying order that sustains the observable regularities of the cosmos. Focusing more directly on law's functions in society, Aristotle subsequently developed the idea that equity—the adjustment of general laws to specific circumstances—holds a place superior to law itself (see *justice). Later, the Stoics, Cicero, Seneca, the Roman jurists, and the canonists all contributed to the synthesis of legal theory produced by Thomas Aquinas, the central features of which received influential restatement by Hooker. With varying degrees of emphasis, medieval and Renaissance authorities subscribed to a patristic idea restated by Calvin: God's ‘providence is an unchangeable law’ (Institutes 1.17.2). Similarly, Hooker argues that law is grounded in providence, which he defines as ‘the setled stabilitie of divine understanding’ (Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 1.3.1, 1.3.4).

Law's immutable and indivisible essence, serially enacted in the temporal world, appears to human observers in a hierarchy of partial manifestations, which Hooker defines in words that echo recurrent earlier formulations and anticipate later ones (Laws 1.3.1):

That part of [God's eternal law] which ordereth naturall agents, we call usually natures law: that which Angels doe clearely behold, and without any swarving observe is a law coelestiall and heavenly: the law of reason that which bindeth creatures reasonable in this world, and with which by reason they may most plainly perceive themselves bound; that which bindeth them, and is not knowen but by speciall revelation from God, Divine law; humane law that which out of the law either of reason or of God, men probablie gathering to be expedient, they make it a law.

As he concedes, ‘Natures law’ and ‘law of reason’ are often conflated; in common parlance, therefore, to follow the dictates of reason is to obey natural law (Laws 1.8.9).

Hooker's idea of a hierarchy of distinguishable systems of lesser laws issuing from the divine mind leads to a number of significant inferences. To legislate truly, for instance, is to base human laws upon dictates of divine will: ‘men...learne in many things what the will of God is...they by naturall discourse attaining the knowledge therof, seeme the makers of those lawes which indeede are his, and they but only the finders of them out’ (Laws 1.8.3; cf 1.16.2). Even Christ's two ‘great’ commandments (Matt 22.36–40) can be discovered in ‘axiomes and lawes naturall,’ and this double law of what Spenser's age called charity (‘love’ is the preferred modern term) provides the broadest foundation of the legislation and administration of human law. Out of the first commandment—the injunction to love God with heart, mind, and soul—derive ‘all offices of religion towardes God.’ The second—‘that it is [our] dutie no lesse to love others then [ourselves]’—‘is the root out of which all lawes of dutie to men-warde have growne’ (Laws 1.8.7; cf 1.8.5–6).

Likewise, Calvin held that the essence of moral law, which (in sixteenth-century English translation) he alternately calls ‘charitie’ and ‘equitie,’ ought to be ‘the marke and rule and ende of all lawes’ (Institutes 4.20.15, in Calvin ed 1561: fols 165v–6r). This use of ‘equity’ as a synonym for ‘charity’ provides another index of the link Spenser's contemporaries normally believed to exist between human laws and the higher ones that validate them. The usage was common: paraphrasing Christ's commandments, for example, King James bases ecclesiastical and civil government on ‘the whole service of God by man...which is nothing else but the exercise of Religion towardes God, and of equitie towards your neighbour’ (Basilicon doron 1.29–31).

Although they share a common, transcendent origin and frequently make similar demands, human laws differ from divine ones chiefly because human law is more restricted in scope of jurisdiction. The salient Christian pronouncement on law, the Sermon on the Mount, teaches that sinful intentions are as culpable as actions. In the view of the divine judge, adulterous intent is equivalent to adultery; anger is equivalent to murder. But human judges, who cannot assess conditions of the soul, must confine their judgments to outward actions, and, when obliged to infer anything about underlying motives, they must observe the law of charity (Matt 5–7, esp 5.17–48).

While enjoined to show charity toward others, however, individual Christians are equally obliged to use divine law to bring severe judgments against themselves. Protestant theology insisted that the standards of both Old Law and New are too high for any mortal to satisfy. By equating intentions with actions, divine laws aim especially to display the individual believer's unavoidable sinfulness and utter dependence on grace (see *nature and grace). Faith in Christ's merits alone will bring salvation, though works of charity prescribed by the law offer outward assurances that one has the grace which brings salvation.

Since individual categories of law-divine, natural, rational, human—belong to a single comprehensive system (eternal law or providence), a poet's reference to one category can invoke the others, which become implicit contexts for themes immediately at issue. In FQ I iii 5, the lion that bursts from ‘the thickest wood’ and becomes Una's obedient protector may suggest the absolute obedience of nonrational nature to dictates of natural law (as Hooker defines that law), and hence also to the eternal law, or truth, that Una can also, at times, represent. When it destroys Kirkrapine (19–20), however, the lion may represent the power of the Tudor monarchs suppressing the Roman church's economic and social abuses. It may also represent the compatibility of the human laws that enacted those reforms with the divine law which, because it demands true love of God and neighbor, required suppression of the monasteries and their uncharitable legalism, which Spenser embodies in Corceca and Abessa. As the narrative movement allows or requires, the lion's varying meanings reflect different manifestations of a single comprehensive idea, eternal law or providence.

Una, who often speaks specifically for divine law in her exhortations to the Red Cross Knight, at times appears to personify this most ample truth, the eternal law, which subsumes all her specific demands for virtuous behavior (eg, I iii 4, xii 23). At such moments, she appears similar to Dame Nature, whose garment ‘wondrous sheene’ the poet compares to the garment of the transfigured Christ (VII vii 7). This comparison implies that the beautiful and regular patterning of the natural world represents a perpetual revelation of the divine mind—a revelation available through nature of meanings Christ himself embodied. Natural law reveals eternal law.

Such expansive Renaissance concepts of law clarify and enrich many passages in The Faerie Queene. For instance, when Despair asks ‘Is not his [God's] law, Let every sinner die’ (I ix 47), reason's law might agree; so too would those articles of divine law that are designed to display man's incapacity to merit salvation. But the most comprehensive implication of the phrase ‘his law’ includes a feature of eternal law (providential rescue extended gratuitously to the faithful) that reveals the sophistry of Despair's argument. Una later makes this explicit: ‘In heavenly mercies hast thou not a part?’ (53).

All features of law are treated directly in FQ V, where they inform, among many other things, the appearance and significance of both Isis and Mercilla. In vii 1–2, Spenser invokes the widest implications of the term, locating the foundation of lesser laws in the eternal law by which God (here represented by Jove) regulates his entire creation: ‘For th'hevens themselves, whence mortal men implore/Right in their wrongs, are rul'd by righteous lore/Of highest Jove, who doth true justice deale.’ In vii 3, the poet announces an intention to treat ‘That part of Justice, which is Equity,’ referred to later as ‘clemence’ (22). Both terms appear in contexts that recall the ideal foundation of all human law: that part of eternal law which is charity. Mitigating Talus’ ire at vii 36, Britomart is moved to pity by her susceptibility to the fellow-feeling on which charity is based: ‘Yet when she saw the heapes, which he did make,/Of slaughtred carkasses, her heart did quake/For very ruth, which did it almost rive.’

These consonant and overlapping terms—mercy, clemency, equity, ‘ruth’—appear as central features of the Legend of Justice because each of them expresses in slightly differing ways a fundamental feature of eternal law: God's love toward us and our answering love (called charity and sometimes equity in Spenser's time) toward one another. Mercy, who in ‘th'Almighties everlasting seat...first was bred’ is, like the highest forms of love, ‘From thence pour'd down on men, by influence of grace’ (V x 1; cf III iii 1). So too, The Faerie Queene recurrently implies, is the capacity to perceive and to heed every sort of law, natural, rational, divine, eternal, or human.

DARRYL J.GLESS

Calvin ed 1960; John Fortescue 1567 A Learned Commendation of the Politique Lawes of Englande tr Robert Mulcaster (London; rpt Amsterdam and New York 1969); Hooker ed 1977–, Laws; James I of England 1918 Basilicon Doron (1616) in Political Works intro Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass) pp 3–52.
    Aptekar 1969; J.H.Baker 1971; Dunseath 1968.

Lear

The Lear story derives from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (2.11– 14). Spenser's version, which Arthur reads in the book of Briton moniments in the castle of Alma (FQ II x 27–32), fuses Geoffrey's account with details from the chronicles of John Stow, William Warner, John Hardyng, and Holinshed (Var 2:315). But Spenser is not concerned with historical accuracy alone. He transforms a story of division and internecine war into a moral and political exemplum illustrating the need for temperance in rulers.

Spenser's most significant departure from his sources is Cordelia's death by hanging, a change Shakespeare adopted in King Lear along with the spelling of her name (Bullough 1957–75, 7:276, 334n). Perhaps influenced by her ‘tragic fall’ in the 1574 Mirror for Magistrates where she is slain with a knife offered her by Despair (Bullough 1957–75, 7:330–2), Spenser turns Cordelia's death into suicide and thus into an emblem of despair, linking the Lear story both with the earlier Despair episode in I ix, and with Pellite's hanging (another change from the received text; Var 3:233) at III iii 36, in Merlin's chronicle of British rulers.

MARTIN COYLE

Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of

(c 1532–88) The exact nature of Spenser's relationship with Leicester is complicated and problematic, but his contact with the Queen's leading courtier certainly left an indelible mark on his poetry. As John Florio wrote in Florios Second Frutes (1591) of the two men, ‘so I account him thrice-fortunate in having such a herauld of his vertues as Spenser; Curteous Lord, Curteous Spenser, I knowe not which hath perchast more fame fame, either he in deserving so well of so famous a scholler, or so famous a scholler in being so thankfull without hope of requitall to so famous a Lord.’

At Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, Spenser met Gabriel Harvey. By 1576, Harvey was familiar with Leicester's nephew and heir Philip Sidney (Stern 1979:150), who had probably spent some time at Cambridge in the early 1570s after he had left Oxford (Wallace 1915:105–7). He would also have known one of the fellows, Humphrey Tindall, who as a chaplain to Leicester officiated at his wedding to Lettice Knollys in September 1578. Through these links, Spenser may have got the job of carrying dispatches between Leicester, Sir Henry Sidney, and the President of Munster in July 1577, but this is not certain (Judson 1945:46).

Having worked for John Young, Bishop of Rochester, Spenser probably joined Leicester's household in the spring of 1579, at about the same time as his new secretary Arthur Atey. The exact duties he performed for the Earl remain obscure, but he stayed until the summer of 1580 in his service at Leicester House. From there he wrote on 5 October 1579 to Harvey, enclosing a long Latin poem which announced he would soon be going abroad in ‘his Honours service’ and at Leicester's instigation (Two Letters I, in Var Prose p 12). The trip never came off, and its failure is probably related to Spenser's presumed marriage later that month and to his becoming secretary to Lord Grey, the newly appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland.

Spenser's poem and letter to Harvey form the earliest part of their correspondence, which was published in 1580. The letters (parts of which are related to Harvey's autograph notes in his letter book, preserved in BL, Ms Sloane 93) concern themselves, among other subjects, with Spenser's literary plans and were intended to promote interest in the recently published Shepheardes Calender. (High-spirited, laced with deliberate obfuscations, private jokes, and airy references, they represent a kind of humorous showing-off that would have been enjoyed in the sophisticated and ‘cultivated’ circles around the court; part of their intention is to imply that Spenser and Harvey were part of that milieu.) In his first full letter of 15 and 16 October 1579, Spenser reveals his doubts about the wisdom of dedicating the work and ‘My Slomber, and the other Pamphlets, unto his honor’ (Var Prose p 6). Writing again at the beginning of April 1580, Spenser tells Harvey that he is more careful than to send out his Stemmata Dudleiana with its ‘sundry Apostrophes therein, addressed you knowe to whome’ (Three Letters I, in Var Prose p 18). Leicester is clearly intended as the recipient of both these lost works.

Spenser's two letters are both signed ‘Immerito’—the pseudonym he used at the end of the little poem ‘To His Booke’ which prefaces The Shepheardes Calender. Although its title page carries a dedication to Sidney, the prefatory poem still bears the marks of its being intended for ‘his honor’ Leicester, ‘him that is the president/Of noblesse and of chevalree.’ The Oak in Februarie has been interpreted as representing Leicester (McLane 1961, ch 5), but this is by no means convincing. More plausible, and supported by E.K.’s gloss to October 47–8, is the association of ‘the worthy whome shee loveth best,/That first the white beare to the stake did bring,’ whom Piers urges Cuddie to celebrate, with Leicester and his badge of the bear and ragged staff. In the November eclogue lamenting Dido's death, the ‘greate shepheard Lobbin’ is a mourner (Nov 113). Leicester is probably intended, but as E.K. notes, ‘The person both of the shephearde and of Dido is unknowen and closely buried in the Authors conceipt’ (Nov 38 gloss).

(See Leicester Fig 1.)

The Earl's presence in Spenser's first major work is shadowy and hard to detect, especially as it could have been written at any time before he came to work at Leicester House. His employment there gave him the chance to discuss poetry with Sidney and Dyer (whatever the real nature of the socalled Areopagus was), and to have access to Leicester's fine library and his even finer paintings, tapestries, and other works of art.

Why Spenser stayed for such a brief time in Leicester's service is not known, but it is most unlikely that he was sent to Ireland in disgrace for any supposed indiscretion, such as has often been connected with the writing of The Shepheardes Calender or Mother Hubberds Tale. Leicester was on close terms with Grey and would hardly have recommended someone who had recently offended him to Grey's service. In any event, they were never to meet again since by the time Spenser returned to England in 1589 Leicester was dead. Their subsequent relations can only be inferred from what Spenser published after his arrival in Ireland.

Before then, however, he had begun The Faerie Queene, and critics have sought to determine Leicester's role in it. One popular view holds that Spenser planned it to help Leicester ingratiate himself with Elizabeth after his fall from her favor during the second Alençon courtship of 1578–82. According to this view, Leicester may be associated with Arthur in his service of the Fairy Queen. His moment of triumph comes in FQ V, which reflects Leicester's expedition to the Low Countries as Governor General in 1585–7. This traditional interpretation has been strongly challenged (Bennett 1942:84–6, 95–100), and instead the knights Artegall and Guyon have been taken to compliment the house of Dudley since their names are those of famous and legendary Earls of Warwick. As with The Shepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene was clearly the work of a poet familiar with and sympathetic to the political and religious views of Leicester's faction, but the Earl's own role in the epic is still a matter of debate.

The meaning and significance of Virgils Gnat are equally uncertain. The poem is said to have been ‘Long since dedicated’ to Leicester ‘late deceased’ and is accompanied by a sonnet in which the poet feels ‘Wrong'd’ by the Earl who is ‘the causer of my care.’ It has been connected with Spenser's supposed punishment of exile to Ireland for warning Leicester about the Alençon courtship (Greenlaw in Var 7:571–4). But the historical facts do not fit the poem and its allegory, while the closeness of its translation of the Culex makes a biographical interpretation problematic. It is possible that the poem reflects the episode before October 1579 which caused Spenser to call himself ‘Immerito’ in his letters to Harvey and in The Shepheardes Calender. The opening words of the gnat's speech in hell are ‘what have I wretch deserv'd’ (329). In his letter book, Harvey says that the name was assumed by Spenser ‘since a certayn chaunce befallen unto him, a secrett not to be revealid.’

Gnat appeared in the Complaints volume of 1591, which also contained Spenser's tribute to the Earl in Ruines of Time. Whatever wrong Spenser thought Leicester had done him, as implied in Gnat, it had clearly been forgiven when he composed the later work. There Verlame mourns his unhonored death (183–238)—‘Of greatest ones he greatest in his place’—and laments the passing of ‘his bounteous minde,’ forgotten by poets and those who ‘did goodnes by him gaine.’ His patronage is remembered again in Colin Clout when Hobbinol reminds Colin of when he waited on ‘Lobbin (Lobbin well thou knewest)/Full many worthie ones then waiting were’ (736–7) for him and Cynthia. Finally, at the very end of his career in Prothalamion, Spenser turned his thoughts once more to Leicester house: ‘a stately place,/ Where oft I gayned giftes and goodly grace/ Of that great Lord, which therein wont to dwell,/Whose want too well now feeles my freendles case’ (137–40).

H.R.WOUDHUYSEN

Florio 1591; Alan Kendall 1980 Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (London); Rosenberg 1955; M.W.Wallace 1915; Derek Wilson 1981 Sweet Robin: A Biography of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1533– 1588 (London).

Leland, John

(c 1503–52) A major figure in antiquarian and topographical studies in early Tudor England; probably he influenced several of Spenser's works. Born in London, he attended St Paul's School under the mastership of William Lily, took the BA at Christ's College, Cambridge, and after-wards studied at Oxford and Paris. Soon after his return to England (c 1529), Leland became seriously engaged in antiquarian research. Prompted by his passionate loyalty to the king and nation, he spent over a decade traveling throughout England, visiting libraries and collecting historical materials. He had grandiose publishing ambitions, mostly concerned with British history, but very little apart from his poetry was published during his lifetime. In 1547 he became insane and died five years later. Although a significant number of his papers survived and were used by generations of scholars before they were first edited by Hearne and published in 1710–15, many others were badly damaged soon after his death, and some appear to have been lost or stolen.

Leland's researches and intended projects were major shaping influences on Raphael Holinshed and William Harrison; in particular, the latter's Description of England shows a considerable debt to Leland, as Harrison acknowledges. Leland was also an inspiration and a specific source for Camden, whose Britannia may be seen as a culmination of Leland's pioneering antiquarianism.

Leland was a patriotic supporter of Henry VIII, whom he saw as a modern reincarnation of King Arthur. As a strong nationalist and dedicated Protestant, he defended Geoffrey of Monmouth's version of British history and of the Arthurian legend against Polydore Vergil, a foreigner and a Catholic (for the debate between Leland and Vergil, see Greenlaw 1932: ch 1). His Assertio inclytissimi Arturii regis Britanniae (1544), translated by Richard Robinson in 1582 as A Learned and True Assertion of...Prince Arthure, King of Brittaine, is a compilation of almost all the literary and archaeological evidence available in Tudor England on what would now be called the historical Arthur.

Leland's treatment of the Arthurian legend is the first example of a new way of looking at Arthur, one in which medieval romance has given way to a ‘topochronographicall’ mode (to use the term from George Wither's prefatory poem to Part 2 of Drayton's Poly-Olbion), For Leland, the landscape itself reflects the glory of the nation, its present king, and his famous ancestor. He sees a new kind of romance in historical fact and in close descriptions of actual landscape. His adulation of Arthur as a man, his sense of the almost numinous value of Arthurian sites, and his linking of contemporary monarch, nation, and Arthur prefigure many elements of the Renaissance Arthurian revival. The Arthurian world of The Faerie Queene is much closer to Leland than to Malory.

Modern scholars remember him for his prose remains; but Leland and his contemporaries regarded his Latin verse as equally important, and in certain ways he is the prototype of the glorifying national poet. Two of his major Latin works address themselves to the English countryside: Genethliacon... Eaduerdi principis Cambriae (first pub 1543, reissued in Principium...in Anglia virorum, encomia...ed T.Newton 1589) and Cygnea cantio (first pub 1545, reissued 1658). The Genethliacon describes the celebrations in honor of Edward VI's birth: the Muses, Graces, and sylvan nymphs all sing praises, and then Wales, Cornwall, and Cheshire pay tribute in appropriate regional manner. Apart from its metrical virtuosity, the poem is remarkable for its precise topographical information and for the fascination with local custom it reveals. It is a literary ancestor of Spenser's marriage of Thames and Medway (FQ IV xi).

An even more important connection with Spenser is Cygnea cantio, a river poem with historical commentary by the author. Here, as in Prothalamion, the reader finds gentle Zephyr, banks of flowers, garlanded swans glimmeringly white of hue, and detailed descriptions of high towers from the perspective of the Thames. The similarities in imagery and tone are noteworthy, and it is likely, as Thomas Warton first postulated, that Spenser made specific borrowings (see Todd and Osgood in Var 8:667, 673). Cygnea cantio may also have been a model for Spenser's concept of an Epithalamion Thamesis (see lost *works). The singing swan of Ruines of Time 589–95, too, finds many parallels in Leland's poem and in his shorter verse.

Ultimately, though, Leland's attitude to the past and to landscape is very different from Spenser's. The greatest part of the Cygnea cantio, for example, is devoted to a prose commentary, an encapsulated history of all the sites which the swans had seen. Leland wishes to describe the past and the landscape accurately, not to illuminate them. He does not look for patterns of moralization in the physical world; ultimately his poetry becomes subservient to his interest in historical facts. For him, verse is a medium through which to convey specific information, not to create a mythology.

JAMES P.CARLEY

Most of Leland's works and collections were edited by Thomas Hearne in The Itinerary 9 vols (Oxford 1710–12, 2nd ed 1744–5) and Johannis Lelandi...collectanea 6 vols (Oxford [1715], 2nd ed 1760). A later edition of The Itinerary is ed 1907–10. The Assertio (1544) as tr Richard Robinson (1582) is appended to Christopher Middleton 1925 The Famous Historie of Chinon of England ed William Edward Mead (London, EETS os 165). For a general introduction to Leland, see Kendrick 1950: ch 4; see also James P.Carley 1983 ‘John Leland's Cygnea cantio: A Neglected Tudor River Poem’ HumLov 32:225–41; Carley 1984; Carley 1986 ‘John Leland in Paris: The Evidence of His Poetry’ SP 83:1–50.

letter as genre

In the Middle Ages, letter writing was a professional skill practiced by dictatores, masters of the art of Latin prose composition. The ars dictaminis, as it was called, adapted the rhetoric of the classical oration to the public documents of a feudal society. Like the oration, the medieval letter was divided into parts, usually five: greeting (salutatio), opening (exordium or benevolentiae captatio ‘securing of goodwill’), statement of the situation (narratio), request (petitio), and conclusion (conclusio). Since etiquette required that the letter reflect the correspondents’ social status, handbooks offered formulas for courteously addressing such dignitaries as the pope, bishops, abbots, kings, noblemen, and magistrates. The style was as artful as the dictator could make it, often employing the cursus, an accentual prose rhythm.

Before 1420, letters were seldom written in English. In the fifteenth century, families like the Pastons, who could afford to hire scribes but not the professional secretaries who served the nobility, modeled their private letters on official documents. The first English handbooks on letter writing, published in the sixteenth century for the merchant class, followed the medieval tradition: William Fulwood's Enimie of Idlenesse (1568), Abraham Fleming's A Panoplie of Epistles (1576), Angel Day's English Secretorie (1586), and John Browne's Marchants Avizo (1589). Not until the seventeenth century did such gentlemen as James Howell and Suckling break with professional formulas to create a new literary genre, the familiar letter. The roots of this change in epistolary style can be found, however, in the humanist movement, which reached England from Italy in the late fifteenth century. The published English letters of Spenser and Harvey are a late sixteenth-century landmark in the development of the genre.

Harvey paraphrases observations on letter writing by Cicero, Seneca, Demetrius, and other classical authorities when he writes in his manuscript Letter-Book, ‘it makith no matter howe a man wrytith untoe his frends so he wryte frendlye; other praeceptes of arte and stile and decorum, and I know not what, ar to be reservid for an other place... What ar letters amongst frendes but familiar discourses and pleasante conferences?’ In letters to friends, he scorns ‘affectinge the comendation of an eloquent and oratorlike style by overcurious and statelye enditinge’ (ed 1884:76).

Ever since Petrarch had discovered a manuscript of Cicero's Letters to Atticus and had published his own correspondence following this great classical example, humanists had quoted the classical distinction between the private conversation of the familiar letter and the public discourse of the oration. The humanists were, however, ‘the professional successors of the medieval Italian dictatores,’ serving ‘either as teachers of the humanities in secondary schools or universities, or as secretaries to princes or cities’ (Kristeller 1979:23–4). Although they admired classical models, their professional expertise was defined by the ars dictaminis; and the elaborate medieval etiquette of letter writing resisted sudden change. Furthermore, the letter was a favorite composition exercise in schools, a miniature oration in which students practiced rhetoric before attempting longer, more complex assignments.

In their correspondence, the humanists gradually abandoned the cursus, purified the ‘barbaric’ Latin of the dictatores, and substituted simple Ciceronian expressions (salutem dicit, vale) for the fulsome medieval formulas; but letter writers who attempted wholesale imitation of Cicero were labeled extremists in Erasmus’ Ciceronianus (1528). His influential De conscribendis epistolis (1522) categorized letters, like orations, as judicial, deliberative, and demonstrative, while treating familiar letters as an exception to the rule. Aside from Juan Luis Vives’ De conscribendis epistolis (1533) and Justus Lipsius’ Epistolica institutio (1591), humanist handbooks on letter writing paid little attention to the familiar letter. While conceding that not every letter needs five parts, they insisted that letters, like orations, should persuade; and they recommended rhetorical figures and other artificial devices of style. As late as the end of the seventeenth century, most humanist handbooks only modified medieval tradition.

In effect, the humanists could not altogether abandon the complexities of the ars dictaminis without undermining their professional status, and this problem became more acute as their employers became better educated. The humanist ideal, expressed in such English works as Elyot's Boke Named the Governour (1531) and Ascham's Scholemaster (1570), was the education of the governing class. By the end of the century, literacy had joined military prowess as marks of the gentleman. Not ponderous medieval formulas, however, but the intimate, witty conversation of the familiar letter expressed the effortless grace, the sprezzatura, the art concealing art that defined the Renaissance courtier. In private letters to his peers, the seventeenth-century gentleman could afford to adopt fully the Ciceronian model. Furthermore, he could distance himself from his Latin secretary by writing on personal or courtly rather than on official or scholarly topics, and in English rather than Latin. The aristocratic revival of the classical familiar letter was nevertheless made possible by the experiments of such humanist scholars as Spenser and Harvey.

The Spenser-Harvey letters illustrate the uneasy marriage of medieval tradition and classical models in humanist epistolography. Their purpose was professional. Harvey or Spenser probably initiated their publication in 1580 and very likely Harvey himself wrote the preface. Harvey's Letter-Book contains first drafts for a similar project. By their name-dropping, their tantalizing reports of work in progress, their learned discussions of poetry and natural philosophy, and their exchange of poems in both Latin and English, the letters were intended to enhance the reputations of two ambitious young scholars seeking court patronage.

Nevertheless, the correspondence of these ‘two Universitie men’ is advertised as ‘proper, and wittie, familiar Letters.’ Here proper means ‘excellent’ (as it does in the phrase ‘proper and hable men with their penne’ from ‘the Preface of a wellwiller’), but it also implies that these are familiar letters proper; wittie suggests that they are intellectual. Together with the Two Letters that follow, the Three Letters self-consciously avoid formal structure. Frequent changes of topic and multiple postscripts make them seem unpremeditated. Their tone is intimate, excluding outside readers by alluding to unpublished letters and conversations and by recording the most personal messages in Latin (eg, Harvey's greeting to Spenser's wife, ‘mea Domina Immerito, mea bellissima Collina Clouta’ 3 Lett 3, Var Prose p 476).

The letters are even more avant-garde in language than in form. Renaissance humanists customarily exchanged letters in Latin or Greek, the languages of the universities. To write a fellow scholar in English was uncommon, although not unprecedented; Ascham, for example, had recorded his continental travels in English for colleagues at St John's College, Cambridge, in the 1550s, probably to avoid censorship by foreign officials. Comments in Harvey's Letter-Book suggest, however, that even scholarly taste was changing. To Sir Thomas Smith, he expressed impatience with stock Latin phrases: ‘when al is dun, I have nothing els to sai, but gratias ago habeoque, referat Deus, utinam par pari, and the like, for you ar well acquaintid with the stile’ (ed 1884:178). He petitioned John Young, master of Pembroke Hall, for his MA both in Latin, as university custom required, and in English. For a subject so close to his heart, he seems to have found Latin inadequate—‘I culd not possibely ani other wai expres the matter as it is’ (p 20)—and insincere: ‘becaus it is commonly the manner of schollars, to write more in there lattin epistles, then thai profes in there commun talk, or show in there outward doings, and mani things often times mai sem to be spoken rather of cours and custum, then of ani inward affection, I thouht it not amis, or rather I thouht it mi duti, plainly and simply in flat Inglish to utter mi mind’ (p 159).

Perhaps, though, both language and form are best explained by the intended audience. Courtiers ordinarily had not the inclination, if indeed the skill, to read Latin school exercises, so the two young scholars chose to present samples of their professional expertise (Harvey's discourse on earthquakes, their English poetic experiments, Spenser's Latin farewell, the translation exercises of Harvey's young brother John, and Harvey's own paraphrase of Latin verses on the mutability of all things but virtue) in the more playful context of familiar letters. As with their contemporary Lyly, whose similar intent produced the fictional Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, the result was highly original. The Spenser-Harvey correspondence heralds the development of the English familiar letter in the next century.

JUDITH RICE HENDERSON

Bennett 1931a; Cecil H.Clough 1976 ‘The Cult of Antiquity: Letters and Letter Collections,’ in Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller ed Cecil H.Clough (Manchester) pp 33–67; Harvey ed 1884; Helgerson 1983:55–100; Judith Rice Henderson 1982 ‘Euphues and His Erasmus’ ELR 12:135–61; Henderson 1983a ‘Defining the Genre of the Letter: Juan Luis Vives’ De Conscribendis Epistolis’ Ren&R ns 7:89–105; Henderson 1983b ‘Erasmus on the Art of Letter-Writing’ in Murphy 1983:331–55; Katherine Gee Hornbeak 1934 ‘The Complete Letter-Writer in English, 1568–1800’ SCSML 15.3–4; William Henry Irving 1955 The Providence of Wit in the English Letter Writers (Durham, NC); Jsvitch 1978; Kristeller 1979, chs 1, 5; James J.Murphy 1974 Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles); Malcolm Richardson 1984 ‘The Dictamen and Its Influence on Fifteenth-Century English Prose’ Rhetorica 2:207–26; Jean Robertson 1942 The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London); Snare 1970; Stern 1979; Whigham 1981; Louis B.Wright 1935 MiddleClass Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill).

letters, Spenser's and Harvey's

(See ed 1912:609–41.) Spenser's extant correspondence consists of two letters among the five exchanged between him under his nom de plume Immerito and Gabriel Harvey, identified only by his initials. The letters were published in two parts in one quarto volume by Henry Bynneman in 1580 (registered on 30 June). For reasons never made clear, the two groups of letters were published in reversed chronology. Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters, dated 1580, contains an unsigned address ‘To the Curteous Buyer’ (dated 19 June), Spenser's letter to Harvey (from Westminster, 2 April), Harvey's reply (from Saffron Walden, 7 April), and a second letter from Harvey (also from Saffron Walden, 23 April). There follows Two Other Very Commendable Letters, of the Same Mens Writing...More Lately Delivered unto the Printer, dated 1580, which contains a letter enclosing a Latin poem from Spenser to Harvey (written partly at Leicester House on 5 October 1579 and partly at Westminster and ‘Mystresse Kerkes’ on 15–16 October), and Harvey's reply (from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 23 October).

The letters were issued to complement the publication of The Shepheardes Calender by describing the literary and intellectual concerns of those associated with Leicester House. Their tone is familiar and intimate, knowing and rather joky, secret and yet clearly assembled with publication in mind. They are in Harvey's own words ‘Patcheries, and fragments’ (3 Lett 3), heavily edited and reworked from material at hand, some of which can be seen in its raw state in Harvey's Letter Book (see ed 1884). The letters caused some offense, and from his later quarrel with Nashe, we know that Harvey, who denied direct involvement in their publication, had to make some sort of public apology for what he had written.

The earliest part of the letters is Spenser's ‘last Farewell,’ the long Latin poem ‘Ad ornatissimum virum’ enclosed in Two Letters I, hurriedly written the week before he was to go abroad in ‘his Honours [Leicester's] service.’ In the covering letter written a week and a half later, the promise of travel has disappeared, and he is concerned with the dedication of The Shepheardes Calender, which he has now decided to publish, and the practice of writing English quantitative verse, which Sidney and Dyer have been promoting in their Areopagus. Spenser says that ‘they have me, I thanke them, in some use of familiarity,’ and that he has been drawn ‘to their faction.’ Warned by the example of Gosson's tactlessness in dedicating his Schoole of Abuse to Sidney, he will be careful about presenting ‘My Slomber, and the other Pamphlets, unto his honor. I meant them rather to Maister Dyer.’ E.K. sends his greetings. The first part of the letter closes here but is immediately resumed, for, having received Harvey's quantitative verses which he will show to Dyer and Sidney, he offers him an example of his own facility in the same style of writing, the ‘Iambicum Trimetrum,’ which he also asks him to keep ‘close to your selfe, or your verie entire friendes, Maister Preston, Maister Still, and the reste.’

Harvey's reply (2 Lett 2) contains Latin and English verses by himself and his friends, but is chiefly concerned with responding to Spenser's news about the Areopagus, his love, and his continental travel. Evidently Harvey has reused material here that he had earlier sent to his friend when he was still expecting him to go abroad. While urging him to publish The Shepheardes Calender, he criticizes the metrics of the ‘Iambicum.’

During the following gap in the correspondence, The Shepheardes Calender was published. Spenser refers to it in the ‘Post-scripte’ to the letter he sent Harvey from Westminster at the beginning of April (3 Lett 1). Although dated 2 April, the letter contains a reference to the earthquake which took place on 6 April. This is probably an interpolated passage to prepare the reader for Harvey's next letter with its ‘Pleasant and pitthy familiar discourse, of the Earthquake in Aprill last’ (3 Lett 2). Although Spenser mentions ‘that olde greate matter’ which may be the Alençon courtship, his letter is mainly concerned with his literary projects, especially ‘reformed Versifying.’ He quotes a tetrastich (quatrain) and a distich (couplet) (which E.K. cites in his gloss to Maye 69) and asks Harvey either to give him his rules for versifying, or to follow his which Sidney gave him. He announces that he will soon issue the Epithalamion Thamesis, says his Dreames and Dying Pellicane are soon to be printed (Dreames with a gloss), so that he can get on with The Faerie Queene, which he asks Harvey to return with his ‘long expected Judgement’ of it. He adds that he will not send his Stemmata Dudleiana abroad.

Harvey touches on some of these works, his own writings, and the debased state of learning at Cambridge in his long reply (3 Lett 2); but most of his letter is taken up with a discourse on the earthquake. In this, he satirizes traditional Cambridge philosophy by juxtaposing it with his own Ramist, logical exploration of the scientific causes of the event. The piece is set in ‘a Gentlemans house, here in Essex,’ which is probably to be identified with Arthur Capell's home at Rayne near Braintree. It was, E.K. tells us in the gloss to September 176, at Arthur's father Henry Capell's house, Hadham Hall in Hertfordshire, that Harvey presented the printed text of his Gratulationes Valdinenses to the Queen. The letter ends largely in Latin with exclamations about poverty and learning, internal university disputes, and the decline in general of Cambridge. Harvey pictures himself sitting back, watching, and being amused by it all, much in the same way that Spenser describes him in his Harvey Sonnet (‘Harvey, the happy above happiest men’). Once more he bids farewell and adds a tantalizing postscript that the letter may be shown only ‘to the two odde Gentlemen you wot of,’ who are presumably Dyer and Sidney.

In the final letter of the series (3 Lett 3), Harvey returns to the issue of writing English verse in classical meters, and shows off some of the poems he has written in this way including the ‘Speculum Tuscanismi,’ which satirizes the Earl of Oxford. He alludes to Spenser's service under Bishop John Young (‘Imagin me to come into a goodly Kentishe Garden of your old Lords’), and quotes from The Shepheardes Calender and E.K.’s glosses to it. Once more he discusses Spenser's literary plans, mentioning his Nine Comoedies and offering his famous judgment of The Faerie Queene (‘Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo’), and tells him that the contents of the letter can be communicated to ‘the two Gentlemen,’ and to the diplomat and poet Daniel Rogers.

The Spenser-Harvey letters are interesting examples of the Elizabethan vernacular, familiar letter. They were essentially designed to draw attention to the London literary life in which Spenser was then involved and to publish Harvey's poetic and academic compositions. Their artificiality puts much doubt on the statement of the ‘Welwiller of the two Authours’—possibly written by Harvey himself—that he acquired the letters at fourth or fifth hand from a friend who ‘had procured the copying of them oute, at Immeritos handes.’ Spenser's own interest in their publication is indeterminable. The rather oblique parts (often in Latin) dealing with love and travel may reflect on his imminent departure for Ireland after his first marriage. Certainly the correspondence is the most important, at times the only, source for Spenser's biography at this crucial time. The letters, despite their edited and sophisticated state, tell us almost everything that we know of his literary plans and projects from The Shepheardes Calender to the publication of FQ I–III. The information gained from them, however, should be treated with extreme caution: they are consciously self-promoting, a means of showing off the beginnings of the ‘new’ poetry and the literary and social milieu of London and Cambridge as the new decade began.

H.R.WOUDHUYSEN

The standard text is in Var Prose, which unsatisfactorily breaks the book down and prints Harvey's letters as an appendix; a more accessible ed is found in Spenser ed 1912. James H. Hewlett 1927 ‘Interpreting a Spenser-Harvey Letter’ PMLA 42:1060–5, Judson 1945, Rosenberg 1955, and Stern 1979 give a largely biographical analysis of the letters. The relation of Harvey's Letter Book to the Harvey-Spenser correspondence is discussed in Bennett 1931a. Snare 1970 gives a more literary analysis. David McKitterick 1981 Library 6th ser 3:348–53 reviews Stern 1979 and prints Harvey's handwritten corrections in a printed copy of the letters.

Life and Death

The last two figures in the pageant of Mutabilitie (FQ VII vii 46). Life is ‘like a faire young lusty boy,/Such as they faine Dan Cupid to have beene’; Death is ‘with most grim and griesly visage seene’ yet is less a presence than an absence, ‘Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseene.’

The personification of Death as an animated corpse comes from the later Middle Ages when the Dance of Death and the encounter between three living and three dead kings were popular themes in verbal and visual art. Related images of personified Death persist in the art of the Tudor period, although the typical medieval double tomb (where the body au vif surmounts the decaying cadaver) is displaced, as it had been in Renaissance Italy, by an emphasis on life not mortality. Like his predecessors, Spenser perceives the heterodox implications of the medieval figure: death, properly considered, is an absence not a presence, and is to be defined, like evil itself, in negatives.

The figure of Life is both medieval and classical in origin, related to portrayals of Cupid, the god of love. In the fourteenth century, Love began to be portrayed as a winged adolescent not unlike an angel (cf II viii 6). In representing Life as a ‘lusty boy,’ Spenser places the figure in the Renaissance tradition, where the clear-eyed Cupid of the ancients is distinguished from the blindfolded descendant of the medieval world: as spiritual, distinct from carnal, love (Panofsky 1939, ch 4).

Spenser's allusive use of these motifs ingeniously anticipates Nature's claim in stanza 58 that all things ‘are not changed from their first estate;/But by their change their being doe dilate.’ Interestingly, although Death is said by the narrator to be the last in the procession (cf III xii 25), Life is the last to be described. Similarly, the description of Day follows that of Night in stanza 44. The emphasis is on resurrection: on the New Testament (symbolized by Day or Life) following the Old (Night or Death), a common medieval conceit. The contrast is made emphatic by the imagery in stanza 46: Death is disembodied, a mere shadow of the mind, whereas Life is robust with color and vitality. The connection between Life and Death persists, but Life, like the Eros funèbre (the Cupid found on Renaissance tombs), is a power that frees the soul. As was said of Spenser's near contemporary, Lancelot Andrewes, ‘yea, then his life did begin, when his mortality made an end.’

PHILIPPA M.TRISTRAM

Chapters on ‘La Mort’ in Emile Mâle 1908 L'Art religieux de la fin du Moyen Age en France (Paris), and Mâle 1951 L'Art religieux de la fin du XVIe siècle, du XVIIe siècle et du XVIIIe siècle (Paris). See also Philippa Tristram 1976 Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London) esp ch 5; and for figures of Life and Death in Spenser, Whitman 1918.

light

In the cosmology of The Faerie Queene, Jove is the ruler of light and supreme deity: he created day and constricted darkness to ‘deepest dongeon’ (I vii 23), and at his command the moon and stars light the world at night (VII vi 12, III i 57). In his continual conflict with Night, the infernal deity who works to undermine his rule, he favors the ‘sonnes of Day’ (I v 25) who will ultimately subdue darkness and win heaven (III iv 59; cf Eph 5.8, 1 Thess 5.5). The Fowre Hymnes describe God, the heavens, and angels in terms of glittering light (see esp HHL 55–74, HHB 92–7, 118–26); and the soul's relation to its divine source is defined by light imagery (HB 106–12).

The sun's brilliance is analogous to the divine radiance, dazzling to mortal eyes: the face of the unveiled Una (FQ I vi 4) and of Fidelia (x 12) burn and daze the beholder, and Contemplation sees God not with his eyes but with his ‘spright,’ which like the eagle can look directly into the sun (x 47). The sun serves as an image of God because it both creates and sustains life. It is the ‘Great father...of generation...th'author of life and light’ (III vi 9); and as its beams can create life by their action on the moist earth, it conceives Belphoebe and Amoret in the womb of the virgin Chrysogone (3–9). Since the sun is associated with physical health and spiritual life, the Red Cross Knight in Orgoglio's dungeon, the lovestruck Marinell in Proteus’ hall, and Pastorella in the Brigands’ cave wither like a plant deprived of light (I viii 41, IV xii 34, VI x 44). The sun's power to regenerate and heal is represented by Apollo, whose chief role in The Faerie Queene is as a physician (I v 43, III iv 41, IV xii 25).

Spenser often describes physical beauty in terms of light or brightness since it is an earthly manifestation of ‘that soveraine light,/From whose pure beams al perfect beauty springs’ (HHB 295–6): Rosalind is ‘The beame of beautie sparkled from above’ (Colin Clout 468), the beloved in the Amoretti radiates light from her eyes and smiles (9, 40), and Queen Elizabeth is likened to the sun in both her pastoral role as Eliza (SC, Aprill 77) and her heroic role as Gloriana (FQ VI x 28). All the heroines of The Faerie Queene shine with radiant beauty: for example, Una's face shines like the sun (I iii 4, xii 23), Belphoebe's eyes dazzle with their fiery beams (II iii 23), Florimell's hair streams like a comet (III i 16), and when her womanhood is revealed, Britomart's hair shines like the moon (i 43), the sun (ix 20), the aurora borealis (IV i 13), and golden sand (vi 20).

False beauty may also shine brightly since it strives to emulate the true. Lucifera (light-bringing) in her ‘bright blazing beautie’ (I iv 8) is a counterfeit morning star in contrast with Una the true one (xii 21), and the brightness of her house of Pride (iv 4) parodies that of the heavenly city (x 58) and of Mercilla's palace (V ix 21). The brightness with which evil beauty shines is never genuine: Duessa's light is ‘borrowed’ (I viii 49), Philotime's is ‘wrought by art’ (II vii 45), and the ‘goodly glosse’ of the false Florimell is forged (IV v 15).

The virtue of Spenser's knights is associated with the brightness of their armor. At the beginning of his quest, Redcrosse's armor casts a ‘litle glooming light’ by which he sees Error (I i 14); and at the end, its radiance fills heaven (xi 4). A dazzle of ‘glitterand armour’ is the first impression we receive of the approaching Arthur (vii 29). The brilliance of his unveiled ‘sunshiny shield’ paralyzes Orgoglio (viii 19–20) and defeats the Souldan (V viii 37–8).

The light of day promotes virtuous activity, while darkness is a time of passiveness and often of moral laxity. Night distorts vision and conceals crimes, as Arthur laments, while daylight ‘discovers all dishonest wayes’ and shows things for what they are (III iv 55–60). Accordingly, sunrise is greeted cheerfully: dawn ‘maketh every creature glad’ (II xi 3), and sunshine ‘makes all skip and daunce’ (VII vii 23). The sun itself was created ‘mens wandring wayes to guyde’ (I vii 23). At night, the moon and stars give comfort and direction to the seaman, the traveler, and the lover (I ii 1, III i 43; Epithalamion 288–90).

Appropriately Phoebus, whose light both reveals and guides, is also the ‘god of Poets hight’ (FQ VII vii 12). By a tradition descending from Hesiod (Theogony 25–104), the Muses were the daughters of Zeus, and Phoebus (Apollo) was their companion. Spenser, however, following a little-known passage in Conti (Mythologiae 4.10), makes Phoebus the father of the Muses (I xi 5, III iii 4; Epith 121) and so emphasizes that as the god of light he is also responsible for poetic enlightenment.

GEOFFREY G.HILLER

Lindsay, David

(c 1486–1555) Scottish poet; courtier and herald to James V of Scotland. Lindsay was familiar to Elizabethan readers, but they did not take account of the works for which he is best known today: the romance Squire Meldrum (1550), the short burlesque poems, and the morality play A Satire of the Three Estates (1540–54). These were absent from sixteenth-century editions of Lindsay's Works, which were dominated by his longest, most serious work, A Dialogue between Experience and a Courtier, commonly called The Book of the Monarch (1554). Thomas Purfoote's three English editions of the Works (1566, 1575, 1581) are typical, in that numerous shorter poems (de casibus tragedies and ‘mirrors for princes’) are appended to this major work. English interest in Lindsay's Monarch was probably an offshoot of the growing popularity of the Mirror for Magistrates in the 1560s and 1570s.

The Monarch purports to be a survey of the four ‘monarchies’ of the ancient world: the Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires (cf Geneva gloss to Daniel 2.28ff). His treatment is eschatological, showing how mankind has degenerated since Adam, through the monarchies and into the mockmonarchy of the papacy towards a nowimminent Judgment. The work is essentially controversial in attacking contemporary abuses of secular power by church and court. From the hindsight of the 1560s, the Monarch established its author as a forerunner of the Scottish Reformation.

While Scottish and English readers valued what the Edinburgh printer Charteris called Lindsay's ‘hailsum and notabill counsellis and admonitionis to Princis, to Prelates, and to all estatis’ (Lindsay ed 1931–6, 1:397), they must also have relished his vigorous prosody and diction. Lindsay looks to the previous generation of Scottish poets for his stylistic models, although he seems less centrally concerned than they with stylistic experimentation. Above all, he lauds Douglas, ‘quhilk [which] lampe wes of this land,/ Off Eloquence the flowand balmy strand,/ And, in our Inglis rethorick, the rose’ (Testament of the Papyngo 22–4, ed 1931–6, 1:57). With his rhythmic energy, ingenuity of rhyme, and persistent alliteration, Lindsay represents the maturity of the Scottish poetic tradition; he need no longer make the gesture of looking south for his models of eloquence. In fact, his characteristic expression of moral earnestness in selfconsciously, artfully rustic style may in turn have provided a model for southern poets in the 1570s, not least the author of The Shepheardes Calender. (See also *Scottishantecedents.)

DAVID PARKINSON

Lindsay 1931–6 Works ed Douglas Hamer, 4 vols, STS 3rd ser 1, 2, 6, 8 (Edinburgh).

lineage

In The Faerie Queene, lineage is a historiographical and an allegorical device. It is the form that British history takes on the assumption that divine providence works through the royal blood line to determine England's political fortunes from one generation to the next. As an allegorical metaphor, lineage often signifies the interconnectedness of abstract moral principles: for example, Duessa, who personifies falsehood, is said to be the daughter of Deceit and Shame (I v 26).

Spenser's original audience believed that heredity determines one's proper place in a hierarchic social order. Lineage is correspondingly important in the aristocratic genre of chivalric romance, where, as a figment of class ideology, it justifies the economic and political power of the ruling class as a natural endowment, an ontological prerogative. To affirm the legitimacy of hereditary aristocracy, Spenser reinterprets a line from Chaucer (‘he is gentil that dooth gentil dedis’ Wife of Bath's Tale 1170) in such a way that its emphasis is reversed: ‘gentle bloud will gentle manners breed’ (FQ VI iii 2). This ‘truth’ is referred to often in The Faerie Queene (cf II iii 10, iv 1; III ii 33), especially in Book VI, which has several virtuous characters in lowly roles who turn out to be nobly born (cf ii 24, iv 36, v 2). Throughout the poem, lineage signals a character's importance and establishes who he or she ‘really is.’

As an allegorical device, an appeal to lineage generates abstract definitions of moral concepts while giving these concepts the status of primeval cosmic powers. For example, Spenser's claim that Duessa is the daughter of Deceit and Shame helps to define the abstraction she personifies: falsehood is produced by deceit and is a thing of shame. Duessa's ‘race,’ of which Night is the ‘root,’ is a system of interrelated evils. The ‘most auncient Grandmother of all,’ Night (who ironically but appropriately fails to recognize her ‘daughter’ at first) is a primeval power, at war until the end of time with ‘the sonnes of Day’ (I v 22, 25–7). This lineage suggests that falsehood is part of the human condition in a fundamental and abiding way. Lucifera's lineage gives pride a comparable status in Book I: ‘Of griesly Pluto she the daughter was,/And sad Proserpina the Queene of hell’ (I iv 11). Lucifera lies about her ancestry in claiming to be descended from Jove; but her lie helps to define the sin she personifies, since pride consists in willful self-deception about one's proper place in the scheme of things. Lucifera's parents are pagan gods, whereas Duessa's are personified abstractions; but these were overlapping categories for Spenser and his contemporaries. As early as Roman antiquity, the classical pantheon had been infiltrated by personifications like Fortune; and the gods themselves often personified abstract principles such as love or justice.

Not only in Book I but in every book, the most formidable enemies of the virtue in question are linked by genealogies that trace their origins to the Titans, or to the giants of the Old Testament, or to the primordial Chaos that threatens to reassert itself through their actions. In Book II, Guyon's principal antagonists are Pyrochles, the choleric or fiery man, and his brother Cymochles, the lecherous or ‘moist’ man. At II iv 41, they are said to be ‘sonnes of old Acrates and Despight’; Acrates (Gr akrateia intemperance) is the son of Jarre (discord) and Phlegeton (the burning river of hell, suggesting both the fire, Gr pyr, of Pyrochles and the watery nature, Gr kuma ‘wave,’ of Cymochles). Phlegeton, in turn, is said to be the son of Erebus and Night, and Erebus, the son of Eternity. Here again, personified abstractions are woven into a genealogical system based on classical mythology. This same system is invoked again briefly in Book III where Arthur addresses Night, the ‘Mother of annoyance sad,/Sister of heavie death,’ as wife of Erebus ‘the foe/Of all the Gods’ (iv 55). In Book VI, the BlatantBeast is ‘a Monster bred of hellishe race’; its parents are said to be Cerberus, the dog that guards the entrance to hell, and Chimera, the monster that guards the outer gates; a subsequent account of its origins extends them a generation further back, by citing as its parents the hideous monster Echidna, whom the gods thrust down to the lowest depths of hell, and Typhaon, father of the winds (i 7–8, vi 9–11).

For allegorical characters, genealogy, the tracing of lineage, often amounts to etymology, the tracing of a word back to its original, ‘truest’ sense. For example, Orgoglio is ‘An hideous Geant horrible and hye,’ whose mother is said to have been ‘The greatest Earth’ (I vii 8–9). In other words, this ‘Geant’ is etymologically derived from Gaea, the goddess Earth in Greek mythology. The Red Cross Knight is also linked to the earth by an etymological lineage. Contemplation explains to him that although sprung ‘from ancient race/Of Saxon kings,’ he was brought to Fairyland as a changeling and hidden in a furrow, where a ploughman found him and named him Georgos, which in Greek means ‘tiller of the earth’ (I x 65–6). The knight's Saxon lineage establishes that he has a predestined role to play in English history. His allegorical, ‘fairy’ lineage establishes that his sainthood as St George consists not in repudiation, but in acknowledgement and transformation, of one's earthly nature. The stupid boastfulness of the ‘Geant’ Orgoglio is from this point of view a demonic parody of the knight's saintly self-acceptance. (For a more extended treatment of these etymologies, see Craig 1967.)

Most of the heroes and heroines of The Faerie Queene are either British or Elfin/ Fairy. As with Redcrosse's fairy lineage, the lineage of the Elfin/Fairy characters is apt to be quasi-mythological and allegorically suggestive. Satyrane, for example, is the son of a satyr who raised him up to assert humanity's natural supremacy over the lower animals. Amoret and Belphoebe were begotten upon ‘the faire Chrysogonee’ by the rays of the sun; and their grandmother, a fairy ‘of high degree,’ is named Amphisa, a Greek word that means ‘of double nature’ or ‘equally both’ (III vi 4). (Hamilton in FQ ed 1977 cites J.W.Draper 1932 and Lewis 1966 for these etymologies.) Amphisa's name foreshadows the miraculous birth of her daughter's opposite-natured twins: Belphoebe is supremely aloof and self-sufficient, Amoret is supremely amiable and dependent, and ‘twixt them two’ they share ‘The heritage of all celestiall grace.’ In contrast to the heroes and heroines whose lineage gives them a predestined role to play in British history (Redcrosse, Arthur, Britomart, Artegall), the Elfin/Fairy characters tend to be simpler figures whose nature is more allegorically transparent and whose capacity for growth and change is virtually nil (Cheney 1966:9).

The difference between the two races emerges most clearly when the British Arthur and the Elfin Guyon are given their nations’ histories to read (II x). Briton moniments is a chronology of the rulers of Britain that traces Arthur's (and thereby Queen Elizabeth's) ancestry back to the nation's founding father, Trojan Brutus. The Antiquitie of Faerie lond meanwhile tells how the first man, called Elfe, was created by Prometheus with stolen fire, and how he married Fay, a native of the Garden of Adonis, ‘Of whom all Faeryes spring, and fetch their lignage right’ (71). Culminating with the reign of Gloriana, the Elfin chronicle gives Elizabeth a mythical ancestry that is conspicuously glorious, straightforward, and unproblematic. Spenser generates the line of Elfin kings etymologically by inflecting the original king's name: Elfin, Elfinan, Elfiline, and so forth. (Elferon's untimely death brings Gloriana's father Oberon to the throne; this one slight irregularity in the lineage calls attention to the link with Elizabeth.) Whereas Elizabeth's claim to the throne had been fragile on several counts at the time of her accession, Gloriana's title to rule not just England but Europe, America, and Asia—‘all the world’ (72)—is as crystal clear as the tower Panthea in Fairyland's capital city of Cleopolis. At stake in the Fairy/Briton distinction is the degree to which an originating purpose or principle can be seen to inform a nation's history or an individual's life (Roche 1964:31–50).

In FQ III, British history itself becomes transparent to a providential design. Merlin's prophecy speaks directly to Britomart of her own family tree, ‘Whose big embodied braunches shall not lin,/Till they to heavens hight forth stretched bee./For from thy wombe a famous Progenie/Shall spring, out of the auncient Trojan blood’ (iii 22). By casting this stretch of British history as prophecy, Spenser claims providential authorization for the political power of the Tudor royal dynasty. Dynastic mythmaking is a convention of Renaissance epic: Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser took their cue from Aeneid 6.713–892, where Virgil traces the origins of Augustus’ Roman empire. Later in Book III, Britomart demonstrates that she has internalized this understanding of her nation's history when she corrects Paridell's account of the outcome of the Trojan war. Boasting of his descent from Paris, he laments that Troy is ‘now nought, but an idle name’ (ix 33). Britomart is a better etymologist and genealogist, however; and at her urging, Paridell recalls that ‘of the antique Trojan stocke, there grew/Another plant’ (47), so that Troy now lives again as Troyno-vant. His descent from Paris finally means only that history repeats itself in a sterile and idle way: his theft of Hellenore from her miserly old husband is a petty domestic scandal without any effect on world history. Britomart, by contrast, experiences her own and her nation's history as part of an organic cycle whereby Trojan civilization is continually reborn, analogous to the cycle that perpetually renews the human species in the Garden of Adonis.

JANE HEDLEY

Fichter 1982; Hinks 1939.

Lodge, Thomas

(1558–1625) Poet, romancer, dramatist, satirist, pamphleteer, translator, adventurer, Catholic recusant, exile, physician. Second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, Lord Mayor of London (1562), he served in the household of Henry Stanley, fourth Earl of Derby, attended Merchant Taylors’ School (1571–3) while Mulcaster served as headmaster (but after Spenser) and Trinity College, Oxford (BA 1577). He was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1578 and was still signing himself ‘of’ the Inn as late as 1595. His literary career proper lasted from about 1579 until 1597, when, having publicly avowed his Catholic allegiance, he left England to study medicine in Avignon. He remained abroad, practicing medicine in France and the Low Countries, for most of the next fifteen years; he then returned to England and, being exempted from prosecution for recusancy, established a successful practice in London's Catholic community. Appointed plague physician in 1625, he died in September of that year. Writing remained an avocation in later life; he produced medical treatises, devotional works, and monumental translations of Josephus (1602), Seneca (1614), and French Calvinist Simon Goulart's commentary on du Bartas (1621).

Lodge was a confirmed pastoralist, employing the mode variously in several prose romances, in his sonnet sequence Phillis (1593), and in a number of lyrics and eclogues scattered through other works and in anthologies. He was the principal contributor to The Phoenix Nest (1593), a partly pastoral collection; and evidence of his standing is his prominence in the best of the Elizabethan miscellanies, Englands Helicon (1600).

Spenser had the seminal influence on late Elizabethan pastoral, as Lodge bears witness explicitly and implicitly. His few direct references to Spenser are mainly in a pastoral connection. In the ‘Induction’ to Phillis, he addresses his verses, ‘If so you come where learned Colin feedes/His lovely flocke, packe thence and quickly haste you;/ You are but mistes before so bright a sunne,/Who hath the Palme for deepe invention wunne’ (Sp All p 33). The first eclogue of A Fig for Momus (1595, the first collection in English of verse satires, epistles, and eclogues) is addressed ‘To reverend Colin’; it is a dialogue between a young shepherd, Ergasto, and an old one, Damian (Sp All p 43), who sings a song ascribed to an absent musician, Ringde. The general model is SC, Aprill, though the subject, the decline of poetry, is nearer that of October; and Damian's song is a mythical fable vaguely reminiscent in theme of Thenot's tale of the Oak and the Briar in Februarie. The other three eclogues in the volume are on similar topics: poetry, patronage, youth and age. They are addressed to ‘Menalcus’ (?), ‘Rowland’ (Drayton), and Daniel; ‘Golde’ is Lodge. In the preface ‘To the Gentlemen Readers,’ he is no doubt alluding to E.K.’s glosses (and tacitly recognizing Spenser's preeminence in the genre) when he writes, ‘For my Eclogues, I commend them to men of approved judgement, whose margents though I fill not with quotations, yet their matter, and handling, will show my diligence’ (in ed 1883, 3).

Other eclogues show even more clearly the heritage of The Shepheardes Calender. In Rosalynde (1590), Lodge's best-known work, the old shepherd Coridon and his young companion Montanus speak ‘a pleasant Eglog,’ the older man chiding the younger for being in love, in the manner of Februarie. Coridon speaks in the Shepheardes Calender idiom: ‘Say shepheards boy, what makes thee greet so sore?/Why leaves thy pipe his pleasure and delight?’ and ‘Ah Lorrell lad, what makes thee Herry love?’ ‘Coridons Song,’ near the end of the tale, imitates August in its ‘Heigh ho’ echo refrain, and generally recalls The Shepheardes Calender in such lines as ‘A smicker boy, a lyther Swaine,’ ‘she simpred smooth like bonny bell,’ and ‘Alas said he what garres thy griefe?’ Lodge may allude to Spenser when he promises in the epilogue, ‘assoon as I have overlookt my labors, expect the Sailers Kalender.’ Phillis contains ‘Egloga Prima Demades Damon,’ a dialogue, also on the theme of age versus youth (Sp All p 15). Demades, the elder, admonishes Damon, ‘For shame cast off these discontented lookes,/For griefe doth waight one life, tho never sought,/(So Thenot wrote admir'd for Pipe and bookes)’—an allusion to Februarie 11–16. In the Ovidian narrative poem Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), the procession of ‘Furie and Rage, Wan-hope, Dispaire, and Woe’ is comparable to the descriptions of the seven deadly sins in FQ I iv and of Despair in I ix; both come from a long tradition of similar descriptions. Other so-called allusions appear to be no more than general resemblances due to both poets’ use of conventional topoi and imagery (Sp All pp 12–13).

Lodge mentions Spenser once by name. In Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse (1596), calling upon ‘divine wits’ to join forces in resisting detractors, he includes ‘SPENCER, best read in ancient Poetry’ (Sp All p 50); the others are Lyly, Daniel, Drayton, and Nashe. Spenser may allude to Lodge as ‘Alcon’ in Colin Clout 394–5 (see Paradise 1931:110–11).

While Lodge's familiarity with and admiration for Spenser is evident, it would be misleading to classify him as a Spenserian. Some of his pastoral romances and lyrics are inspired by others: Sidney, Montemayor, the French Pléiade, and the Italian Petrarchists. His other works suggest yet other contemporary influences: Golding, Marlowe, Greene, Nashe, Lyly, and Daniel. Lodge was an eclectic assimilator, a borrower, an imitator, but also frequently an experimenter and innovator. He has been attacked for unoriginality and plagiarism because he translated and adapted French and Italian poems without always naming his sources. His debt to Spenser was modest but significant, and he generously acknowledged it.

CHARLES WALTERS WHITWORTH, JR

Lodge ed 1883, still the only collected edition. Many of the literary works are available in separate editions. A standard study is N.Burton Paradise 1931 Thomas Lodge: The History of an Elizabethan (New Haven), but see also Helgerson 1976:105–23 for the pattern of Lodge's career; Wesley D.Rae 1967 Thomas Lodge (New York); and Charles W.Whitworth 1973 ‘Thomas Lodge, Elizabethan Pioneer’ CahiersE 3:5–15. The most recent and thorough study is Eliane Cuvelier 1984 Thomas Lodge: Témoin de son temps (c. 1558–1625) (Paris).

logic

Logic in Tudor England was central to education, and Spenser would have spent at least one of his years at Cambridge studying the standard texts of the art. Literary men often took more than a passing interest in the subject: both Abraham Fraunce and Milton, for instance, published logic texts of their own. Conversely, late sixteenthcentury logics routinely illustrate their procedures with examples drawn from literary figures ranging from Virgil, Homer, Cicero, and Ovid to du Bellay, Ronsard, and Spenser. This relation between logic and literature may seem surprising today since the modern discipline called logic differs markedly from Tudor ‘logic’ or ‘dialectic’ (the terms were interchangeable). Modern logic is associated with the specialized and formally precise notation appropriate to science and mathematics, so that ‘logical’ and ‘poetic’ modes of thought may even be taken as antithetical, but sixteenth-century logicians declared their art to be nothing less than a general theory of discourse. John Seton, for example, author of a text widely used in the mid-Tudor period, defines his subject as ‘the art of discoursing convincingly on any theme whatever’; and the French logician Peter Ramus defines logic even more simply as ars bene disserendi, ‘the art of discoursing well.’ Throughout these and other texts, the words used to describe logical procedures include teaching, explaining, inventing, judging, organizing, and analyzing, as well as what might seem to be the more likely terms, such as disputing or arguing.

Logic's concern with discourse developed in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as part of a general reaction against what humanist scholars took to be the excesses of their medieval predecessors. Rejecting medieval logics as too narrowly directed towards abstruse philosophical problems, the humanists simplified the traditional logic course to make it more easily applied to the tasks of ordinary life. In practice, this meant that in addition to its traditional role as an art of disputation, logic also became the basis for teaching analytic reading and writing.

In this reorientation, perhaps the most important change was the emphasis on ‘the places of invention.’ Long part of both the rhetorical and logical traditions, these places in essence comprise a set of conceptual categories such as definition, genus, cause, or effect, each of which names a particular kind of relationship which can hold between the subject and the predicate of a statement. For example, in the statement ‘Man is a reasonable creature,’ since the predicate defines the subject, the sentence would be said to have been taken from the ‘place of definition.’ Similarly, in the statement ‘Man is an animal,’ the predicate names the genus of the subject and therefore comes from the ‘place of genus.’ Rudolph Agricola's De inventione dialectica (1523) sets out 24 of these places, which collectively are supposed to provide for every possible relationship between any subject and any predicate.

In practice, the places helped to develop discourse by enabling a process of conceptual analysis whereby one's entire stock of knowledge on a given subject could be inventoried and applied. Typically, such an analysis began with a student's being given a ‘question’ to be thought through by means of the places. In The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke (1st ed 1530, 2nd ed 1532), Leonard Cox gives ‘What is Justice?’ as an example and shows his readers how to answer it through the logical places of definition, cause, effect, and division by parts. Students should ‘visit’ each place in turn, Cox advises, to search out appropriate statements which would develop the original question into a progressively more complex theme. The places thus provide a means of inventing subject matter sufficient to an entire discourse. Moreover, because questions often dealt with moral issues, a further result of such training was an analytic habit of mind whereby simple moral terms such as justice could be seen as conceptually complex entities whose full implications required a step-by-step unpacking into definitions, characteristics, opposites, causes, effects, and the like. This process mirrors the analysis of moral concepts in The Faerie Queene; when in the Letter to Raleigh Spenser promises a ‘pleasing Analysis’ of the moral virtues, his word analysis refers to precisely this kind of analytic thinking.

Beyond analysis, logic's interest in the places also extended to expository discourse, for once a student had surveyed the places appropriate to a given topic, and had thereby invented a range of subordinate statements, it was but a short step to writing them down. To move from analysis to discourse, however, an organizational theory was needed that would allow one to find a subject's clearest and most complete presentation. Rhetoric, of course, had long dealt with principles of oratorical organization; but its three traditional orders (judicial, deliberative, and demonstrative) were essentially audience-oriented. Each generally included an exordium, sections of proof and refutation, one or more digressions, and a peroration, none of which was appropriate to the relatively straightforward explication of concept which expository discourse required. In response, early sixteenth-century logics introduced to organizational theory the ‘didascholic method,’ an explicitly subject-oriented order. By midcentury, ‘method,’ as it came to be called, had become a usual logical concern; indeed, in Ramist logics, it subsumed all control of disposition, whether logical or rhetorical.

Of interest for Spenser studies are the discussions the logics developed concerning methods appropriate to different kinds of writing. For most discourse there was but one proper order, the so-called natural method of beginning a discourse with the most general statements and proceeding to those which were increasingly particular—that is, from issues of definition, through division, to specific examples. Though this natural method was generally regarded as the clearest of all expositional orders, some writers, poets among them, had license to use other orders. Historians, for example, substitute temporal in place of natural order; and poets often invert orders, subverting readers’ expectations in order to surprise or to please. Spenser makes technical use of the term method in the Letter: the ‘Methode of a Poet historical,’ he explains, is not that of either the philosopher (‘good discipline delivered plainly’) or the historiographer (‘affayres [presented] orderly as they were donne’), for ‘a Poet thrusteth into the middest, even where it most concerneth him.’ Here as for other organizational strategies in The Faerie Queene, Tudor logics provide useful contemporary glosses.

Finally, in addition to helping with the invention and disposition of discourse, the analytic procedures of Renaissance logic were also used to teach students the skills of close critical reading. Just as the places of invention could be used analytically to generate extended discourse from a single simple question, so the places could also be used as guides for parsing an extant discursive text into simpler parts. The explicit purpose of such parsings was to clarify an author's line of thought by isolating the elements of the argument in order to judge them for truth or falsity, but since such parsings required a close, word-by-word attention to the text, and the texts analyzed were often those which humanist educators took to be crucial elements of a liberal arts education, logical analysis became in practice a prototypical literary criticism. Such analyses were often classroom exercises; Gabriel Harvey's Ciceronianus provides an inspiring description of their ends and means.

Not many of these exercises survive, but of those which do, perhaps the most interesting is the analysis of Sidney's Defence of Poetry by William Temple, a Cambridgetrained logician who became Sidney's secretary in 1584. His 66-page Analysis systematically paraphrases Sidney's text in terms of its argumentative structure, it questions what Temple takes to be false or misleading statements, and it concludes with an evaluation of Sidney's method. Throughout, analyses like Temple's show Tudor readers actually responding to texts; and for this reason they make it possible to imagine, if only indirectly, what critical expectations readers and writers alike might have brought to literary works.

The humanist logics which dominated the sixteenth century lost influence in the seventeenth. The new science increasingly reclaimed logic for more technical purposes, and rhetoric absorbed those responsibilities for discourse which humanist logics had borne for almost two hundred years. Milton's Artis logicae plenior institutio (1672) was among the very last of the purely humanist texts; in this as in much else, Milton marks the end of an era.

JOHN WEBSTER

Rudolph Agricola 1523 De inventione dialectica (Cologne, rpt Frankfurt am Main 1967); Cox ed 1899; Abraham Fraunce 1588 The Lawiers Logike (London; rpt Menston, Yorks 1969); Harvey ed 1945; Pierre de La Ramée 1964 Dialectique (1555) ed Michel Dassonville (Geneva); Milton A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic Conformed to the Method of Peter Ramus tr and ed Walter J.Ong and Carles Ermatinger, in ed 1953–82, 8:139–407; John Seton 1545 Dialectica (London); William Temple 1984 William Temple's ‘Analysis’ of Sir Philip Sidney's ‘Apology for Poetry’ tr and ed John Webster (Binghamton, NY); T.Wilson 1560; Wilson ed 1972.
    In addition to introductions in the Harvey, de la Ramée, and Temple editions, the following are useful general studies of Renaissance logic: Neal W.Gilbert 1960 Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York); Howell 1956; Jardine 1974a; Jardine 1974b; Reichert 1963; Wilhelm Risse 1964 Die Logik der Neuzeit vol 1:1500–1640 (Stuttgart); Cesare Vasoli 1968 La dialettica e la retorica dell'Umanesimo (Milan); John Webster 1981–2 ‘Oration and Method in Sidney's Apology: A Contemporary's Account’ MP 79:1–15. Tuve 1947 considers the relation of logic and poetic imagery.