Poetics in Spenser's time was less a coherent or systematic theory than an assortment of catch phrases and authorities. Notions of imitation, speaking picture, instruction and delight, feigning and counterfeiting, decorum, levels of style, and literary kinds or species all gathered around privileged names: Plato and Aristotle, Horace and Cicero, Scaliger and Sidney. To fix a pattern to this assortment would betray both the excitement and the urgency with which poets and critics tried to think seriously about their art. For this reason, it is better to consider Elizabethan poetics as a scene of competing claims and sometimes conflicting opinions.
At the center of this scene are three consistently repeated doctrines: that the poet's principal activity is imitation, that the poem is a speaking picture, and that the purpose of literature is to instruct and delight.
When Sidney asserts in A Defence of Poetry (1595) that ‘poesy therefore is an art of imitation’ (ed 1973b:79), he invokes a venerable formula susceptible of at least four interpretations. Imitation appears in Elizabethan treatises to explain the relations between the ‘world’ of the poem and the realm of nature, between the poet's formal idea of the work and the work itself, between the poet and his predecessors or between the poem and its literary genre, between the poetic model and its effect upon the reader. The first and third of these relations may be called external, for they situate the objects of artistic mimesis outside the poem itself. The second and fourth are internal insofar as they describe the origin and end of the poetic act.
Aristotle establishes the main tradition of poetic mimesis when he argues that poetry imitates actions, with agents who are necessarily either good men or bad (Poetics 2). So Ascham in The Scholemaster (1570) affirms that ‘all the workes of nature in a maner be examples for arte to folow,’ and that ‘the whole doctrine of Comedies and Tragedies is a perfite imitation, or faire livelie painted picture of the life of everie degree of man’ (ed 1904:264, 266). The same concept of art mirroring nature is repeated in William Webbe's Discourse of English Poetrie (1586): verse is said to originate ‘in exercises of immitating some vertuous and wise man’ (in G.G.Smith 1904, 1:248). Although the terms of these assertions are Aristotelian, Renaissance mimesis is heavily influenced by Neoplatonic assumptions that nature itself is a work of art, an ‘image’ of God's ideas. Poetry, therefore, imitates not only human actions but universal principles of divine creation. Its ‘second nature,’ the mimetic world of the poem itself, teaches the correspondences that obtain in God's poem, the world of nature. Elizabethan poetics thus develops two criteria for judging the mimetic success of a given poem according to its Aristotelian or Platonic bases: either the poem is subject to standards of natural probability (what is or could be) or to standards of ethical possibility (what should be or ought ideally to be).
The fullest elaboration of the ethical argument is Sidney's more radical theory of a mimetic relation between the poet's internal idea and the actual words of his text. The excellence of the poet, he claims, ‘standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself’ (p 79). Prior to Xenophon's Cyropaedia, for example, is an idea of right rule. In the work itself, Cyrus is not the historical founder of the Persian empire or any other ‘natural’ ruler, but the ‘figuring forth’ of this idea in words and plot is an imitation of the idea of what the right ruler should be. Although Sidney is here using Plato's terminology, his more likely source, as the argument continues, is Scaliger; but he revises Scaliger in order to emphasize that the poet is a maker comparable to ‘the heavenly Maker.’ The poet's imitation, therefore, is not limited to what he finds in nature, for he is free to create in a ‘substantial’ form anything he is capable of imagining. Such a thesis allows Sidney to internalize the doctrine of mimesis and to assert that poetry's principal lesson is the art of imitation itself—the process by which an abstract idea can be ‘bodied forth’ in particular human action.
At the end of the Defence, Sidney exhorts his contemporaries to study and imitate the ancients, thereby invoking a third sense of literary mimesis (see *imitation of authors). His scheme probably derives from Renaissance Ciceronians in general and Horace and Scaliger in particular. In his Poetices, Scaliger provocatively literalizes Aristotelian mimesis by arguing that poetry originates in verbal imitation of repeated human actions. Since weddings, for example, always follow the same formal patterns, they give rise to the mimetic genre of epithalamium; funerals, again following repeatable patterns, are imitated in literary epicedia. Once the ‘natural’ mimesis establishes the poetic kind, subsequent poets can copy that. They learned to write epithalamia not by observing or even conceptualizing weddings, but by mastering the conventions of the literary genre as manifested in the canonical works of Theocritus, Ovid, Catullus, and Claudian. In turn, this method of poetic ‘invention’ occasioned numerous commonplace books, lists of formal topics, even the kinds of structural models found in sundry rhetorical manuals which detail both the matter and the manner of various generic conventions. Mimesis, therefore, became a practical matter of the literary system itself, defining the obligations and options of a poet who chose to write in a particular poetic kind and ensuring him a place in that system if his poem fulfilled the conventions. This understanding of poetic imitation is explored most fully in Ascham's Scholemaster.
Elizabethan theory also extends the idea of generic mimesis in two directions. One is evident in the various hierarchic taxonomies of genre, while the other can be seen in the broader notion of the literary career. Although these are distinct emphases, they are related. The hierarchies of genre popular in Elizabethan treatises regulate correlative notions of subject, manner, and style. As Puttenham explains in his Arte of English Poesie (1589, 1.11, 1.19), the heroic poem, as the noblest of the genres, treats the noblest characters in the grandest style. This ‘decorous’ relation of style to subject or of kind of character to literary species is a consequence of appropriate imitation. Similarly, one may treat the mimetic character of a literary career by observing how laureate poets like Spenser and Milton consciously fashioned their poetic progress on Virgil. In the imitation of Virgil's career, there is a crossing of categories, for the mimetic progress forward (from poems of youth to those of maturity) is simultaneously upward (from pastoral, the lowest genre, to heroic, the highest). One final consequence of generic mimesis is that Renaissance emphasis on the tradition of literary kinds establishes not so much a rigid set of prescriptive rules as a horizon of reader expectations. Elizabethan authors could imitate their predecessors’ conventions to frustrate, surprise, or gratify those expectations. Indeed, we might say that much of the ‘wit’ and excited urgency of Elizabethan poetry lies precisely in this kind of dialogue with the generic tradition (see Greene 1982). In order to appreciate such mimesis, the modern reader must become familiar with the commonly received generic codes.
The final mimetic relation, for which Sidney is perhaps the clearest spokesman, is between a poetic model and its effect on the reader. Xenophon's Cyropaedia was constructed ‘not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they [the readers] will learn aright why and how that maker made him’ (p 79). The reader, in short, imitates the model of the literary image in refashioning his own moral actions. Behind this sense of ethical imitation lies the Renaissance insistence on poetry's didactic and moving faculties, but its center is the reader's ability to copy the poetic copy. Thus Spenser, in fashioning Arthur as ‘the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues,’ can expect in turn ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’ (Letter to Raleigh).
Spenser's description of Arthur as ‘the image of a brave knight’ also introduces the Renaissance notion of ut pictura poesis, or, as Sidney translates, ‘a speaking picture.’ Elizabethan use of the dictum emphasizes the sensory impression necessary both to delight and to affect the reader. In arguing the difference between the philosopher and the poet, Sidney constantly reverts to the claim that ‘the philosopher…replenisheth the memory with many infallible grounds of wisdom, which, notwithstanding, lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy’ (p 86); or again, ‘a perfect picture I say, for [the poet] yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth’ (p 85). Here again we see how, in theory, ut pictura poesis buttresses Renaissance assumptions of ethical mimesis, for as the poetic picture ‘speaks’ through the image in the reader's mind, it shapes and directs moral action. Sidney draws this conclusion: ‘as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind, so the lofty image of [heroical] worthies most inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be worthy. Only let Aeneas be worn in the tablet of your memory’ and he will become an internal, imaginative ‘speaking picture’ of virtue in action (p 98).
While this theoretical understanding of ut pictura poesis is important in Elizabethan poetics, most allusions to the formula refer more narrowly to the ‘ornaments’ of poetry, such as notable images, visual analogies, emblems, conceits, and moral exempla. Yet this emphasis must not be taken as implying a separation of an essential idea from its purely decorative dress, but rather as attempting to articulate the graphic liveliness (energeia in Sidney's vocabulary) necessary to engage and involve the reader. It reminds us, therefore, that Elizabethan poetry is primarily visual and that at the heart of its tasks is the problem of how to make a conceptual idea substantially manifest to the senses.
The last of the three catch phrases is utile et dulce, a notion whose Renaissance locus is in Sidney's famous definition linking all three: ‘Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis—that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight’ (pp 79–80). The formula itself is Horatian, and the frequency with which it appears in Renaissance texts reminds us that both proponents and antagonists of secular literature presupposed a didactic function. This fact frequently puts Elizabethan poetry on the defensive: almost all its major critical texts are apologies for poetry or defenses against Puritan attacks that poetry is lewd and blasphemous at worst, antisocial and frivolous at best. Poetic theory, in reaction, continually argued that moral instruction was the primary end of literature.
Other subsidiary themes or strategies of Elizabethan theory are also conditioned by this defensive posture. The persistent search for sanctioned poetic origin (eg, the myths of Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, and Amphion) is one such effect; constant citation of classical authorities (whether poetic, as Homer and Virgil, or philosophical, as Plato and Aristotle) is another. An extension of both is the broader argument that competing fields of knowledge like philosophy, history, and theology actually originated, as disciplines, in poetry. Poetry, therefore, can be seen as the foundation of all human sciences and as the ‘fountaine,’ as Elyot argues, from which ‘proceded all eloquence and lernyng’ (Boke Named the Governour ed 1883, 1:58). Charges that poetry misleads untrained minds or licenses the immoral acts it sometimes portrays were usually met by the argument that its literal sense was but a veil hiding various allegorical or mystical truths—historical, philosophical, political, moral, and theological (see *allegory). In works like Harington's ‘Brief Apology for Poetry’ (1591), this argument assumes descriptive rather than defensive form, but we can still recognize its apologetic urgency (in G.G.Smith 1904, 2:194–222). Other conventional arguments about the esteem in which poetry has always been held, about how contemporary attacks reveal more about the corrupt nature of present society than about poetry, even calls for poetic reform or a coherent poetic theory were shaped by the fact that Elizabethan poets were on the defensive. They had to convince the reader that poetry was not a sportive pastime of a few would-be prodigals, but an enterprise at the very center of all human discourse.
Perhaps for this reason, Sidney extends the function of poetry beyond teaching and delighting to moving the reader to virtuous action: poets ‘do merely [entirely] make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach; and delight, to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach, to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved’ (p 81). So Spenser argues in the Letter to Raleigh that poetry must be not only plausible and pleasing but also profitable. Its ‘ending end,’ for both authors, is action not knowledge, well doing not just proper understanding. To this extent, Renaissance didacticism is put to work in a broader context of humanistic reform, ‘to lead and draw us,’ as Sidney expresses it, ‘to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of’ (p 82).
Sidney also extends the function of poetry to include moving the reader to virtuous action because of his fear, shared by others, that poetry will be misread. In the Defence, this fear occasions his worry over tyrants like Alexander Pheraeus, faultfinders like the mysomousoi, and naive literalists. Spenser, too, begins the Letter by acknowledging ‘how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed’ and misconceived. Such consciousness of the problems of poetic reading significantly affects poetic theorizing, and the implied reader becomes a frequent character in both literary criticism and in poetry. Here, too, we see a system on the defensive, although in this case the antagonist is not so much an active or disputative agent as an unaffected misuser.
Elizabethan poetic theory was related to other disciplines: to grammar, with its emphasis on methods of varying words and syntax; to logic, with its structures of development and argument; and to rhetoric, with its focus on embellishment, ornament, and other methods of persuasion. Although these three disciplines are frequently used to elaborate the poetic tasks of delighting, instructing, and moving, the extensive lists of grammatical variations (as in Erasmus's De copia), logical or illogical syllogisms (as in Richard Sherry's Treatise of Schemes and Tropes), and figures of rhetoric (as in Puttenham's third book, ‘Of Ornament’), often overwhelm the modern reader with seemingly endless and pointless detail. But such lists testify to the seriousness with which Elizabethan theorizers and practitioners set about trying to articulate both the principles and the practice of poetry.
If, then, there is no coherent or systematic poetic available by the end of the sixteenth century, there is a concerted effort to erect such a doctrine and to explore the various implications of the literary system. The energy that drives this effort puts Elizabethan poetic theory in line with Renaissance thinking in general: an attempt to rediscover and to use the past—whether the classical past of Aristotle, Horace, Cicero, and Quintilian, or the more modern past of Vida, Minturno, Cintio, and Scaliger—in such a way as to inform and reform the present.
A.LEIGH DENEEF
Renaissance texts are cited from Ascham ed 1904; Elyot ed 1883; Puttenham ed 1936; Sidney ed 1973b; and G.G.Smith 1904. See also Margaret W.Ferguson 1983 Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven); Greene 1982; Tuve 1947; and humanist *poetics.
Tudor poetics arising from humanist study—the conceptualization, function, and techniques of poetry, the concerns laid down in Aristotle's Poetics—grew directly out of the humanist trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic which Spenser studied at Merchant Taylors’ School and at Cambridge. Although humanist poetics made some use of grammar, which taught the parsing and translating of Latin with some attention to prosody, the study of metrics and versification, and of logic, which taught syllogistic reasoning, it was primarily rooted in humanist rhetoric. This in turn derived from classical rhetoric: Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric (in Latin and English redactions), Cicero's De inventione, Orator, De oratore, and Brutus, and, the most popular of all handbooks, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, also thought to be Cicero's. Often the rules found in such manuals were reinforced by Quintilian, whose Institutio oratoria gained in authority throughout the sixteenth century. Humanist training promoted the close relationship of such rhetoric and what we think of as poetics so that it is often difficult to separate the orator from the poet, a distinction most Tudor writers did not make as clearly or decisively as did later writers. Indeed, for such Tudor schoolmasters as Colet and Mulcaster, poetry remained a branch of rhetoric and was rarely studied for its own sake.
As taught in Tudor schools and universities, rhetoric had three major concerns: invention (or ‘finding places of argument,’ often following rules of definition by genus, species, properties, adjuncts, or contrarieties), organization (or disposition of facts, illustrations, and arguments), and style. Each of these divisions brought to Tudor humanist poetics distinctive habits of thought and forms of writing.
Invention, for instance, made considerable use of endless varying of words and word patterns, as in Erasmus’ De copia, to show art by the fertility of a writer's presentation (see *copia). Consequently, works of art proceeded at a leisurely pace, characterized by self-conscious ornamentation and complexity of expression.
Rhetoric also taught two primary means of presentation: the classical oration (used in descriptions and reports) and the disputation or debate (which encouraged, through training in writing colloquies, the use of dialogue). For Aristotle, orations had four basic parts (exordium or introduction, narration, proof, and conclusion); Cicero added division and refutation (and later digression); and in 1553 Thomas Wilson, in The Arte of Rhetorique, added an eighth part (the proposition). These parts always formed a paradigmatic pattern which assured definition, clarity, cogency, and persuasive power, whether an arrangement of parts (introduction, definition or proposition, division into issues, confirmation, dispensing of negative arguments, digression, conclusion, and often peroration) was immediately apparent or not. Variation was furthered by applying this organization to all three kinds of orations (judicial, deliberative, and demonstrative) depending on whether the purpose was accusation or defense, support or denial, or praise or blame. Nor were rhetoricians limited to formal speeches or descriptions; all acts of writing (narratives, reports, even letters) followed the rhetorical outline, the creativity coming in the choice and arrangement of commonplaces and illustrations within each major division of the work.
Students of humanism learned not only from rule books and from endless practice but also by imitatio, the close imitation of models such as those collected by Richard Rainolde in his Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), where orations take the form of fable, narration or tale, chria or biography, or character portrayal (see also *imitation of authors). Such short (or occasionally long) exercises, employing ‘artificial’ arguments (traditional places intrinsic to rhetoric) or ‘extrinsic’ arguments (drawing on experience) show how orations, even when keeping to form, could vary sufficiently to allow for individual maneuvering and voice. The disposition of statements in Fowre Hymnes, the arguments of Archimago (FQ I i 30–3), and the description of Britomart (II iii 21–31) all derive from this pattern, as does the arrangement of entire episodes and books of The Faerie Queene, such as Book I, which first states the Red Cross Knight's mission (to free Una's parents and gain the grace of the Fairy Queen), and then presents definition, analysis, support, denial (through temptations and obstructions), and final success in both tasks.
Style was also a primary concern of humanist rhetoric; and later, under Ramus (whose reorganization of studies into logic dealing with matter and rhetoric dealing with manner was strongly advocated by Gabriel Harvey), style became its only subject. In the course of the sixteenth century, humanists developed their use of copia by ‘figures,’ clearly defined tropes and schemes of syntactic and metaphoric expression. Figurative rhetoric by Abraham Fraunce and Henry Peacham became immensely popular in Spenser's time (as seen in the descriptions of Mount Acidale and Colin Clout). Also increasingly popular among humanist rhetoricians (and so humanist poets) were emblem books in which gnomic sayings (brief sententiae or apothegms such as those collected by Erasmus) were paired with symbolic pictures, as in Daniel's translation of Alciati's Emblemata (1585, by way of Paolo Giovio) and Geoffrey Whitney's collections of words and pithy sayings (1586). The pictorial quality of Spenser's poetry thus also derives from humanist lessons by which rhetoric served as both basis and agent of poetry.
Interest in style is illustrated in Richard Sherry's Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550?), which taught ‘effiguration’ or the techniques of prosopographia and prosopopoeia, the description of feigned events or persons or the art of feigning (we would say ‘imagining’ or ‘creating’) to make a point. (Spenser uses this rhetorical concept as the title and underlying idea of Mother Hubberds Tale.) Such practices led to a concentration on examples further to define and persuade particular positions, as Spenser advocates in the Letter to Raleigh when he prefers Xenophon's Cyropaedia to Plato's Republic: ‘So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule.’ It is Spenser's particular emphasis on concrete details which also elicits Milton's praise in Areopagitica for ‘describing true temperance under the person of Guion, bring[ing] him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bowr of earthly blisse that he might see and know, and yet abstain’ (ed 1953–82, 5:16).
The second of the two primary means of presentation taught by rhetoric is the disputation, which consists of opposed orations, by which students were tested and for which they were awarded university degrees; it led also to the practice of eristics, in which winning debates was the chief objective and any clever means was desirable if it led to victory. Logic and syllogistic reasoning were thus handmaidens not of truth but of persuasion. Archimago, Spenser's arch-magus, depends on such an understanding of rhetoric and logic which he abuses because his ends (and means) are evil; at the same time, his arguments are easily recognized and even initially attractive to Redcrosse and Una because of their form and conventions. The abuse of rhetoric led to wary skepticism as much as to dogged tradition. Like poetry, or like our concept of fiction, rhetoric by its very nature promoted possibilities, but not necessarily fact or truth. Thus, for Leonard Cox, rhetoric is ‘right pleasaunt’ but as ‘a persuasible art.’ ‘We hold many doctrines as probable which we can easily act upon but can scarcely advance as certain,’ Cicero notes (Lucullus 2.3.7–8). Renaissance writers including Spenser show repeatedly their awareness that persuasion may rest not with the truth of statements but with the ability of speakers to make good impressions or play on the emotions, presuppositions, or desires of their audiences by the use of Aristotelian ethos or pathos, a contrived persona or situation. Aristotle was aware of such possibilities, and Cicero in the De oratore teaches students how to practice what we would call deception.
In this more abusive sense of rhetoric, the search for topics and images by which to build seductive or compelling arguments depended on ingenuity and resourcefulness; and eloquence came to be defined either as that golden language of a good and wise man, as Quintilian proposes, or as the deceitful manipulation of words if it misused the principles or models of rhetoric. Sophists, such as Gorgias, who told the classical world that he could prove anything he wished, traded on such practices. But Tudor humanists made it clear that such sophists as those described by Plato and defended by Sextus Empiricus were resorting to euchéreia (dexterity) and agchinoia (sharp-wittedness) rather than to reason and logic, practices which only seemed to align sophia, ‘wisedome,’ to sophistry, ‘a craftye and deceytefull sentence, an Oracyon or invention, whiche seemeth to be trewe, whan it is false,’ as Thomas Elyot defines these terms in 1538 in the first Tudor dictionary. Thus the age of rhetoric that taught the Tudors poetry also taught them to read closely and shrewdly, while pointing out the dangers of hasty reactions and judgments. Archimago in his evil feigning and Redcrosse in his quick acceptance of Archimago's statements show the twin dangers of the abuse of language in a rhetorically oriented culture—how the poet who should be Bonfont may become Malfont (FQ V ix 26).
In advancing rhetoric as the basis of learning, humanist study thus produced for Spenser's day a culture in which the poet and orator used similar or identical means for similar or identical ends—ends involving the definition of the perfectibility of man (the chief subject of humanist philosophy) and the beauty of language. Humanists believed that human reason was trained by the use of words, as Sidney says in the Defence of Poetry, and that the right use of language honed the mind while focusing on higher concerns. In Tudor England, humanist poetics was the property of orator and poet alike, for the difference between Cato's vir bonus dlcendi peritus (the good man, skilled at speaking) and Coluccio Salutati's vir optimus laudandi vituperandique peritus (the best man, skilled at praising and censuring) was largely a matter of emphasis. Both, according to Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), meant to teach, and by teaching, to civilize. This too is both the purpose and achievement of Spenser's work.
With this historical understanding of the basically verbal culture of the Tudors, we can appreciate the qualities of their art: their delight in words and wordplay; their interest in experimentation in form, vocabulary, and variation; and their endless parades of illustrations, similes, metaphors, analogies, and even syllogisms, some quite extravagant. There is genuine joy in varying traditions, too, as Spenser draws on and away from pastoral conventions for The Shepheardes Calender, philosophic concerns for Fowre Hymnes, and heroic conventions for The Faerie Queene.
ARTHUR F.KINNEY
Donald Lemen Clark 1957 Rhetoric in GrecoRoman Education (New York); Greenblatt 1980; Greenfield 1981; O.B.Hardison, Jr 1971 ‘The Orator and the Poet: The Dilemma of Humanist Literature’ JMRS 1:33– 44, rpt in his Toward Freedom and Dignity: The Humanities and the Idea of Humanity pp 59–83 (Baltimore 1972); Howell 1956; Javitch 1978; G.A.Kennedy 1980; W.J.Kennedy 1978; Arthur F.Kinney 1976 ‘Rhetoric as Poetic: Humanist Fiction in the Renaissance’ ELH 43:413–43; Kinney 1986 Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst, Mass); Kinney 1989 Continental Humanist Poetics (Amherst, Mass); Walter J.Ong, SJ 1968 ‘Tudor Writings on Rhetoric’ SRen 15:39–69; Vickers 1988.
(c 1547–1604) A London stationer, described as ‘the most important publisher of the Elizabethan period’ (McKerrow 1910:217–18); remarkable chiefly for publishing most of Spenser's and Sidney's works during the 1590s. Ponsonby's imprint is found on the 1590 and 1596 editions of The Faerie Queene, and on Complaints, Daphnaïda, Amoretti and Epithalamion, Colin Clout, Fowre Hymnes, and Prothalamion. He established a close and lasting professional relationship with Spenser, beginning with their collaboration in the production of The Faerie Queene (1590) and Complaints (1591). He added his own preface to Complaints in which he promised to publish several of Spenser's lost works, ‘disperst abroad in sundrie hands, and not easie to bee come by, by himselfe.’ He also dedicated Amoretti to Sir Robert Needham of Shropshire when Spenser was in Ireland. Ponsonby was one of a rare breed of Elizabethan stationers who blended their commercial instincts with genuine literary discrimination. In his publications, the chance of a quick financial return was secondary to a perceptive selection of volumes calculated to advance his own reputation. He limited himself almost exclusively to belles-lettres and politically motivated texts which were connected with influential court circles, particularly that of the Dudley and Sidney families.
Ponsonby traded throughout his career at the Bishop's Head, St Paul's Churchyard, and entered his first book in the Stationers’ Register in 1577. During the early 1580s, he published two prose romances by Greene, but most of his other books were staunchly Protestant tracts which seem closely allied to the political interests of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. In 1586, he made the most important business contact of his career. The death of Sidney in October had stunned the whole nation and aroused the commercial instincts of several members of the Stationers’ Company. In November 1586, Ponsonby informed Sidney's trusted friend Fulke Greville that an unnamed stationer was planning a pirated edition of the Old Arcadia. Greville describes the meeting: ‘one ponsonby a booke bynder in poles church yard, came to me, and told me that ther was one in hand to print, Sir philip sydneys old arcadia asking me yf it were done, with yor honors co[n]s[ent] or any other of his frends’ (Sidney ed 1962:530). In August 1588, Ponsonby was rewarded with a commission to publish the authorized version of 1590. Sidney's friends and his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, continued to place their trust in him, and he became their recognized stationer. He published the 1593 Arcadia, the Countess’ own translations of Mornay and Garnier, the authorized Defence of Poetry (1595), and the first collected edition of Sidney's works (1598). Ponsonby played an important role in suppressing various pirated editions of Sidney's compositions and also published volumes dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke by Fraunce and Watson.
Ponsonby held high office in the Stationers’ Company and was elected a Warden (the Master's deputy) in 1598. He continued publishing high quality editions of various authors (including Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Plutarch) until his death in 1604. He never owned a printing press himself but used those of such noted printers as Field, Windet, Orwin, Wolfe, and Creede. He was best known by Elizabethans as a bookseller. John Ramsey, an enthusiastic collector of Spenser's works, was one of his regular customers in the 1590s and left a fascinating description of his bookshop (Strathmann 1931). Ponsonby's career demonstrates how essential it was for a bookseller who wished to succeed to be associated through his publications with some of the influential political, religious, and literary groups of the day. However, the key to his preeminence in the trade lay in his virtual monopoly over the publication and selling of the works of Spenser and Sidney.
MICHAEL G.BRENNAN
Michael G.Brennan 1984 ‘William Ponsonby: Elizabethan Stationer’ AEB 7:91–110; R.B. McKerrow, ed 1910 A Dictionary Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers…1557–1640 (London); Paul G. Morrison 1950 Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers…1475–1640 (Charlottesville, Va) p 58; Sidney ed 1973a:xl; Strathmann 1931.
(1688–1744) ‘’Tis easy to mark out the general course of our poetry. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Dryden are the great landmarks for it’ (Spence Anecdotes 410 in ed 1966, 1:178). This judgment by Pope in 1736 drew on an affectionate familiarity with Spenser's poems which lasted from his childhood to the end of his life. ‘Spenser has ever been a favourite poet to me,’ he wrote to John Hughes on 7 October 1715; ‘he is like a mistress whose faults we see, but love her with ’em all’ (ed 1956, 1:316). Spenser was for him a landmark in a tradition running through the Renaissance from the Ancients.
Before he was twelve, Pope's favorite poets were Waller, Spenser, and Dryden. A little after, his juvenile epic Alcander sought to blend—Pope smiled to recall—‘the beauties of the great epic writers’ and the styles of Spenser, Cowley, and Milton (Anecdotes 43, 36–40 in 1:18–19).
Pope's edition of Spenser was the 1611 Folio; on the title page he wrote, ‘E Musaeo Jo. Drydeni’ and ‘Alex: Pope./Pret: 7ss.’ His annotations may belong to 1700–10. He liked FQ I i 8, saying ‘This fine Description of the Trees is imitated from Chaucer's Assembly of Foules.’ At I iii 21 he wrote, ‘Ulysses with Calypso,’ and at IV x 44 ‘This Mr. Dryden has copy'd in Palamon and Arcite. book 2. pag.’ His comment on The Shepheardes Calender (otherwise insignificant) shows knowledge of other editions. At Time 281–7, Pope recognized the object of Spenser's tribute: ‘Sr. Philip Sidney.’ This book is preserved at Hartlebury Castle, Worcester, UK (Mack 1982:441–2).
Praising Pope's yet unpublished Pastorals, on 9 September 1706, William Walsh said he had compared Pope with Virgil and Spenser and thought he stood up to the test (Pope ed 1956, 1:21). The intimacy of the Pastorals with Spenser is seen in their adaptation of the refrains from Prothalamion and Epithalamion (Spring 3, Summer 16) and their bow to Januarye 1–2 at the beginning of Summer. In his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry (1717), Pope sets Spenser with Tasso as the best modern writers of pastoral but is inclined to question his use of lyric measure, allegory, blend of antique and rural diction, and the length and repetition entailed by the calendar concept. Yet he praises the latter innovation as ‘very beautiful,’ and in his blend of Virgil's Eclogue 10.69 with FQ VII vii 47 to give ‘Time conquers All, and We must Time obey’ (Winter 88) he helps us hear a note which sounds repeatedly in his work: the eternal note of sadness at the mutability of earthly things (Pope ed 1939–69, 1:59, 73, 71, 30–2, 95).
A more complex response is suggested by ‘The Alley: An Imitation of Spenser’ (1727; written before 1709). Its comedy lies chiefly in a deployment of the Faerie Queene stanza and idiom to mock the antique diction and the incidence of the low, lewd, and ludicrous in Spenser's heroic poem. Obloquy is described as follows: ‘Her Dugs were mark'd by ev'ry Collier's Hand,/Her Mouth was black as Bull-Dogs at the Stall:/She scratched, bit, and spar'd ne Lace ne Band,/ And Bitch and Rogue her Answer was to all’ (37–40). But the poem rises to a noble prospect at the end: ‘All up the silver Thames, or all a down;/Ne Richmond's self, from whose tall Front are ey'd/Vales, Spires, meandring Streams, and Windsor's tow'ry Pride’ (52–4; ed 1939–69, 6:44). Pope's mixed response to Spenser found expression in a poem whose mingling of low and lofty, and Thames-side setting, point forward to Dunciad 2.
When Pope came to compose The Dunciad, it was a stanza from The Faerie Queene that he considered as an epigraph: I i 23. Spence recalled seeing it ‘writ down in this first manuscript copy for the Dunciad’ and judged that it hit ‘the little impertinent poets that were brushed away by that poem very well’ but was less apt in giving Pope ‘clownish hands.’ Pope may also have rejected it as too long (Anecdotes 420 and n in 1:182).
In the mid-1730s, Pope planned ‘a discourse on the rise and progress of English poetry’ considering the nondramatic poets only. He divided English poetry into six schools: of Provence (ie, Old French); of Chaucer; of Petrarch; of Dante; of Spenser, the Italian sonneteers and other translators from the Italian; and of Donne. In the School of Spenser he included Browne's pastorals, Phineas Fletcher, Alabaster, Daniel, Raleigh, Milton's juvenilia, Robert Heath, and William Habington (Ruffhead 1769:328–9). Earlier, Pope had also named Drayton and Fairfax as imitators of Spenser (Anecdotes 433 in 1:187).
Pope's interest in the history of English poetry found expression in his Epistle To Augustus (Horace Epistle 2.1 imitated) of 1737. Spenser is twice mentioned in relation to the taste of the time, first to illustrate oldfashioned and defective judgment: ‘One likes no language but the Faery Queen,’ later as the object of impartial modern criticism: ‘Spenser himself affects the obsolete’ (39, 97). In the same year Pope, imitating part of Horace's Odes 4.9, celebrated Spenser, Milton, Waller, and Cowley as poets of Britain who had conferred fame (ed 1939–69, 4:197, 203, 159).
This detached and consciously modern view of Spenser was not to the fore in Pope's later thought. In the last year of Pope's life, Spence reported that, on his having read part of The Faerie Queene to his old mother, ‘she said that I had been showing her a collection of pictures.’ ‘She said very right,’ Pope replied, ‘and I don't know how it is but there's something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read the Faerie Queene when I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight, and I think it gave me as much when I read it over about a year or two ago’ (Anecdotes 419 in 1:182). The casual phrase ‘about a year or two’ perhaps allows Pope's rereading of The Faerie Queene to coincide with his composition of The New Dunciad (pub March 1742), later Dunciad 4, which contains several Spenserian allusions. These are concerned with the linked ideals of epic heroism, humanist adventure, and political rectitude.
Among the ‘lazy, lolling sort,’ the poet discerns one he holds in ‘great affection’: ‘Thee too, my Paridel! she [Dulness] mark'd thee there,/Stretch'd on the rack of a too easy chair’ (337–46). Pope's note specifies the ‘wandering Courtly “Squire”’ from The Faerie Queene but the exact reference is defective (‘Lib. Can. 9’). The Twickenham editor plausibly proposes in ix, where as guest of the inhospitable Malbecco Paridell tells Britomart the story of the transfer of empire through the refugees from fallen Troy. This would be consistent with the broad allusion of The Dunciad to the Aeneid. It refers also to Brutus, mythological founder of Britain and hero of the blank verse epic which was the project of Pope's last months. Pope's Paridell has not so far been satisfactorily identified.
In the beautiful satire on the butterflycourtier and butterfly collector (421–36), the note directs us to Muiopotmos 17–18. By contrast with Pope's ‘child of Heat and Air,’ Spenser's Clarion is an emblem of vigor and adventure; like the bee in Swift's Battle of the Books, he tastes every flower. He does not destroy but meets destruction. Pope's butterfly is collected and preserved, ‘Fair ev'n in death!’
Finally, in a note to the great, ‘truly Homerical’ yawn which ends The Dunciad, it is remarked that such an ending is not ‘without Authority, the incomparable Spencer having ended one of the most considerable of his works with a Roar, but then it is the Roar of a Lion, the effects whereof are described as the Catastrophe of his Poem’ (4.606n). This reference to Mother Hubberds Tale 1337–84 also stresses contrast: at the end of Spenser's poem a kingly beast (Leicester-Elizabeth) punishes the knavery and injustice of the cunning Fox and usurping Ape. Here the Goddess Dulness concludes with a song which sends the whole of creation to sleep. It is not surprising that Pope should have admired Mother Hubberd (admitting as much through his comic notes), and if Spenser's political allegory may be thought to have been redirected by Pope, Walpole is the Fox, George II the Ape, and the Lion the Patriot King (ed 1939–69, 5:376–7 and II, 383–4, 403).
These moments in The Dunciad are marks of a broader affinity with Spenser deserving of critical exploration. It involves the evolution of a poetic mode highly mobile between the comic and the sublime, capable of remarkable visual and aural beauty, especially in the setting forth of temptation and danger, reaching often towards the emblematic and allegorical, using marvels and metamorphoses for strongly moral and religious ends.
HOWARD ERSKINE-HILL
Alexander Pope 1939–69 Poems ed John Butt, et al II vols (London); Pope 1956 Correspondence ed George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford). Owen Ruffhead 1769 Life of Alexander Pope, Esq (London; rpt New York 1974); Spence ed 1966; Maynard Mack 1982 Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of His Contemporaries (Newark, Del). On Pope's division of English poetry into schools, see James M.Osborn 1949 ‘The First History of English Poetry’ in Pope and His Contemporaries ed James L.Clifford and Louis A.Landa (Oxford) pp 230–50, and Austin Warren 1929 Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist (Princeton). See also Kathleen Williams 1974 ‘The Moralized Song: Some Renaissance Themes in Pope’ ELH 41:578– 601.
In the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, Article 17 says that predestination ‘is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) He hath constantly decreed by His counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation.’ In one form or another, this now unfashionable doctrine was held in Spenser's time by all branches of the Church. Augustine and even Thomas Aquinas had taught it, but the Protestant reformers gave it new emphasis.
The English Articles, however, avoided extreme formulations, such as reprobation (predestination to damnation). Though logically predestination seems to preclude human choice (and radical predestinarians flatly deny free will), it is a case of paradox, not contradiction. In practice all Christian writers on this topic, even the most extreme, recognize human responsibility for choices—as does St Paul, whose letter to the Ephesians, for example, proclaims predestination (1.5, II) yet abounds in exhortations. Spenser's contemporaries saw predestination not as an eccentric theory (although they gradually realized how divisive it could be), but as a practical and biblical teaching ‘full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort’ (Article 17), giving believers strength, confidence, and perspective in the face of difficulties.
It was natural that Spenser should involve the doctrine of predestination in the climax of FQ I ix and imply it elsewhere. When Redcrosse is led by Despair to consider the ‘eternall booke of fate’ (42), he is heedless of the church's warning against ‘curious and carnal’ thoughts on this subject, and is ‘thrust…into desperation’ (Article 17). But then Una, echoing language elsewhere in the same Article, declares that he is ‘chosen.’ Her intervention is an actual instance of deliverance ‘from curse and damnation’ and of the calling ‘in due season’ of which the Article speaks.
As in the Scriptures, so in FQ I, predestination is not a constant topic. Instead, it is implied by the hero's Christian armor and hinted at by references to ‘grace’ (vii 12, viii 1) before being explicitly recognized under difficult and challenging conditions (as in Rom 8, Eph 1, 2, and 6, and 1 Pet 1), where the assurance it gives is most needed. Knowing he is chosen gives Redcrosse a glimpse into the spiritual dimension of life (cf Herbert's ‘Coloss. 3.3. Our Life Is Hid with Christ in God’), and by calling attention to God's initiative helps him pursue a middle way between the two extremes of undue selfpreoccupation with which he has been tempted—first pride, and then despair. ‘All the good,’ says the narrator, ‘is Gods’ (x 1). In keeping with both the Scriptures and Article 17, knowledge of election does not paralyze Redcrosse or make him smug but helps prepare him for ‘good workes, which God hathe ordeined, that we shulde walke in them’ (Eph 2.10).
Elsewhere in Spenser (eg, FQ II viii 1 and Heavenly Love 214, 257), allusions to ‘grace’ or ‘mercy’ can be taken to imply predestination, but the poet seems to have reserved for FQ I his fullest use of this mysterious doctrine ‘hard to be understood’ (x 13, 19).
DANIEL W.DOERKSEN
Daniel W.Doerksen 1983 “‘All the Good is God's”: Predestination in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book I’ C&L 32.3:11–18; Lewalski 1979; Whitaker 1952.
Occasionally in Spenser's poetry, pride denotes something commendable, as a proper sense of one's own worth (eg, Amoretti 5) or a display of excellence or natural splendor (FQ VII vii 34), but usually it is a sin. In traditional Christian doctrine, inordinate self-esteem is a major offense, for all human beings are fallen and have no claim to personal merit: ‘If any strength we have, it is to ill,/But all the good is Gods, both power and eke will’ (I x 1). Accordingly, pride of even the most innocuous kind compounds a number of faults: ignorance of one's true nature, lack of proper humility toward fellow sinners, failure to rely on divine grace, and ingratitude toward God. It also encourages tyranny over subordinates and rebelliousness toward superiors. Traditionally, pride is the first sin of Satan and the source of disobedience in Adam and Eve and in mankind generally.
In The Faerie Queene, the paradigm of the vice is Lucifera. Following a tradition established by Gregory the Great in his Moralia in Job, Spenser separates pride from other offenses, treating it as the root of all evil and the queen of the seven deadly sins (see Bloomfield 1952). Lucifera's name suggests that Pride is the first daughter of the Devil (see Deguileville Pilgrimage of the Life of Man 14,030). The ‘foggy mist’ and the ‘sculs and bones of men’ that lie about her palace (I iv 36) depict the traditional consequences of pride: spiritual blindness and death (see Crossett and Stump 1984:210). That she is dazzlingly beautiful, though the other sins are ugly, indicates that pride is especially tempting: the Red Cross Knight scorns the others but kneels to her.
In Lucifera, Spenser also embodies several of the traditional ‘daughters’ of pride: vanity, ambition, arrogance, and presumption. Vanity appears, for example, in Lucifera's usher (13) and elsewhere in the poem in Braggadocchio (II iii), ambition in Philotime (II vii 44–9) and in the Giant with the scales (V ii 30–50), arrogance in Disdain (II vii 40–2), and presumption in Orgoglio, who relies on his own merit rather than on the grace of God (I vii 8–10). Although Redcrosse escapes the house of Pride, he later falls into the presumption represented by Orgoglio and ultimately into despair, a sin traditionally allied with pride (see Blythe 1972).
The dangers of pride are a major theme in the Complaints, where many of the ‘tragicke Pageants’ (Time 490) of decay and human loss seem designed to illustrate the proverb ‘pride goeth before a fall.’ One example is ancient Rome, which Spenser treats as an embodiment of ‘all this worlds pride,’ concluding that it attained greatness only that it might ‘fall more horriblie’ (Rome 421–34). The vanity of worldly achievements and the delusory nature of pride are also central concerns in the Cantos of Mutabilitie. In FQ VII viii 1, Spenser dismisses all things that are not of heaven as mere ‘flowring pride.’
DONALD V.STUMP
Since the term may refer to a complex range of perspectives and attitudes in Spenser's poetry, it is useful to begin by distinguishing between chronological primitivism, the celebration of an original or much earlier historical period, and cultural primitivism, the celebration of what are assumed to be simpler, less sophisticated, less advanced conditions of human life. These two modes of primitivism may overlap, for both imply a contrast between uncivilized vitality and present circumstances.
Chronological primitivism, a belief that human culture has declined from an ideal order established in antiquity, is fundamental to the Renaissance and represents the dark underside of Renaissance confidence in and optimism about present achievements. With the Reformation in northern Europe, this belief was reinforced by the Protestant emphasis on returning to earlier and simpler forms of Christian worship. Such primitivism is an organizing principle in The Faerie Queene: it underlies Spenser's elaborate archaizing diction and is evident in the way each of the six proems initiates a process of measuring the Elizabethan present against values conveyed through ‘this famous antique history’ (II proem I). Yet Spenser's primitivism is complicated, shifting, and anything but straightforward. His poem praises Elizabeth and her age even as it holds them to the standards of an idealized mythic past. Spenser's perspective is simultaneously ‘retrospective’ and ‘evolutionary’ (Berger 1968b); he matches ‘primitivism with historical destiny, a perfect past with the promise of a second Golden Age’ (Tonkin 1972:5–6). The myth of the Golden Age is the most persistent expression of chronological primitivism, and Spenser's evocation of it in the proem to FQ V may signal his pessimism about the restoration of Astraea's ancient justice to the world; but the identification of Astraea with the astrological Virgo (V i II) holds forth the prospect that the goddess has indeed returned to earth in the idealized potential of England's Virgin Queen.
For Spenser, ‘antiquity is a state of mind; a symbol of the Ideal as it exists before passing through the distorting lens of the Actual’ (Cheney 1966:150). Chronological primitivism is a self-consciously manipulated artistic stance in Spenser's poetry, and this is even more conspicuously the case with cultural primitivism. Satyrs and wild (‘salvage’) men appear throughout The Faerie Queene as evidence of his familiarity with classical and medieval images of primitive life and with reports in sixteenth-century voyage literature of encounters with savage people (Pearce 1945). But his approach to these figures is shifting and ambivalent. The satyrs who rescue Una from Sansloy display a spontaneous capacity to respond to her beauty, but their worship quickly descends into idolatry (I vi). While the satyrs who welcome Hellenore as their ‘housewife’ and ‘May-lady’ appear as figures of healthy sexual vitality in contrast to Malbecco's twisted obsession (III x), their sexuality is clearly limited within the context of the entire book. Both these images of primitive passion are grimly parodied in VI viii, where Serena is held captive by a ‘salvage nation’ of cannibals whose idolatrous desire for her body is viewed from a perspective characterized as ‘anti-primitivism and anti-Petrarchanism’ (Cheney 1966:98–116). A related but reversed shift in the handling of primitivistic conventions appears when we compare the ‘wilde and salvage man’ who captures Amoret to the ‘salvage man’ who rescues Calepine and Serena from Turpine (IV vii, VI iv). The former is a predatory rapist and cannibal, but the latter shows himself capable of pity and gentleness—not surprisingly, since we learn at the beginning of the next canto that ‘certes he was borne of noble blood’ (see *Salvage Man). Nowhere are the limits and strategic function of Spenser's interest in cultural primitivism more apparent.
Chronological and cultural primitivism converge in pastoral, which offers a fiction of innocence and simplicity that was presumably universal during the Golden Age and may still be imagined to survive among rustic people uncontaminated by decadent civilization. Spenser's approach to the range and complexity of pastoral is consistent with his attitude towards other forms and traditions of primitivism.
WILLIAM KEACH
Don Cameron Allen 1938 ‘The Degeneration of Man and Renaissance Pessimism’ SP 35:202–27; Berger 1968b; Lovejoy and Boas 1935; G.Ant. Borgese 1934 ‘Primitivism’ in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences ed Edwin R.A.Seligman, et al (New York) 12:398–402; Cheney 1966; Giamatti 1984:89–100, 158–61; Thomas Perrin Harrison, Jr 1940 ‘Aspects of Primitivism in Shakespeare and Spenser’ TexSE 20:39–71; Levin 1969; Pearce 1945; Tonkin 1972; H.White 1972.
(1664–1721) An important diplomat and a stylish and highly influential occasional poet. His work was praised by Congreve, Pope, and Lady Winchelsea, and the subscription list to his Poems on Several Occasions (1718) reads like a ‘social register’ of the period (Eves 1939:370). Yet this quintessentially Augustan poet was a great enthusiast for Spenser. His copy of the 1679 Works is full of his underlinings and admiring comments and contains his own index of favorite passages such as the Temple of Venus and the masque of Cupid. The evidence of the handwriting shows that he used the edition throughout his youth and maturity (Godshalk 1967), and this confirms what Prior says of himself in Colin's Mistakes: ‘And much he lov'd and much by heart he said/What Father Spenser sung in British Verse’ (Prior ed 1959, 1:545).
In his Ode, Humbly Inscrib'd to the Queen, on the Glorious Success of Her Majesty's Arms, 1706, Prior inaugurated the eighteenth-century vogue for imitating Spenser. He uses his own version of the Spenserian stanza (ababcdcdee, with the last line still alexandrine), adding one verse to make ‘the Number more Harmonious.’ The imitation is not very thorough, however, for Prior avoids ‘such of his Words, as I found too obsolete,’ and merely includes a few Spenserisms such as I ween and whilom. He says patronizingly, ‘I hope the Ladies will pardon me, and not judge my MUSE less handsome, though for once she appears in a farthingal’ (1:231). Yet his poem had an immediate influence, and he wrote in a letter that same year, ‘As to Spencer, my Lord, I think we have gained our point, every body acknowledges him to have been a fine Poet, thô three Months since not one in 50 had read him: Upon my Soul, tis true, the Wits have sent for the Book, the Fairy Queen is on their Toilette table, and some of our Ducal acquaintance will be deep in that Mythologico-Poetical way of thinking’ (2:896).
The real significance of his imitation lies not in its minor Spenserian trappings but in the fact that Prior is attempting to write high public verse and links Spenser with Horace as a model in this respect. ‘Both have a Height of Imagination, and a Majesty of Expression in describing the Sublime… Both have equally That agreeable Manner of mixing Morality with their Story’ (1:231–2). His attitude shows how misleading is the conventional notion of an opposition between Augustan neglect of Spenser and ‘pre-Romantic’ admiration. Addison's appreciation of Spenser as an exponent of the ‘Fairie way of Writing’ (Spectator 419) in fact represents a divergence from the high public Renaissance tradition that still survives in Prior, though Prior's political situation made meaningful use of it impossible.
In the later imitation Colin's Mistakes (1721), Prior presents himself as the poet Colin; but the piece turns into little more than a compliment to Lady Cavendish-Holles-Harley, who is compared to Britomart and Belphoebe. Even here, however, he conveys a very genuine admiration for Spenser and the sense that to imitate him is not a superficial thing: ‘Who reads that Bard desires like Him to write,/Still fearful of Success, still tempted by Delight’ (1:545). In the Welbeck Abbey manuscripts, he writes in a similar vein: ‘But when Thou bidest me Imitate Spencer I drop my Pen./ As well I might go out with Arthurs Sheild or Edwards Sword’ (2:990). Prior was buried at his own request at Spenser's feet in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey, and this was obviously no mere whim but the fitting end to a lifetime of devotion.
THOMAS M.WOODMAN
Matthew Prior 1959 Literary Works ed H.Bunker Wright and Monroe K.Spears, 2 vols (Oxford). Charles Kenneth Eves 1939 Matthew Prior: Poet and Diplomatist (New York); William Leigh Godshalk 1967 ‘Prior's Copy of Spenser's “Works” (1679)’ PBSA 61:52–5; Frances Mayhew Rippy 1986 Matthew Prior (Boston).
The Titan of Greek mythology who stole fire from the sun and gave it to man in defiance of Zeus. For this crime, Zeus chained him to a peak in the Caucasus and sent an eagle to torment him by devouring his liver. (Some Renaissance authorities, however, say the heart, eg, Thomas Cooper 1565; cf FQ II x 70.) For accepting fire, man, too, was punished: Pandora, the first woman, was sent to Epimetheus and opened a mysterious jar from which sprang all evils, only hope remaining within (cf Harvey's ‘New Yeeres Gift’ 14, Three Letters 3; Var Prose p 465).
The earliest versions of the myth (especially Hesiod, Theogony 507–616 and Works and Days 47–105) depict Prometheus as a foolish trickster whose name (Gr ‘forethought’) is ironic and whose fate is justly deserved. Ancient redactors, notably Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound, interpret the gift of fire as a symbol of human progress, and Prometheus’ punishment as a tragic apotheosis. Later mythographers suggest that Prometheus was vir prudentissimus (Estienne 1561) and allegorize his torment, ‘by the whiche is signified, that he was studious, and a great astronomer’ (T.Cooper 1565).
E.K.’s gloss on Maye 142 identifies Spenser's ‘Geaunte’ as Atlas, the brother of ‘Prometheus who…did first fynd out the hidden courses of the starres, by an excellent imagination.’ This confused interpretation, which euhemerizes both Titans and associates Atlas (Theogony 517–20) with his brother, is found almost verbatim in Cooper, from whom E.K. appears to have borrowed it.
Spenser refers once to a trickster Prometheus, when Jove mentions Procrustes, Typhon, Ixion, and ‘great Prometheus, tasting of our ire’ as types of the hubris of Mutabilitie (FQ VII vi 29). By including him among other justly punished overreachers, Spenser may be alluding indirectly to the figure of Tityos in Homer (Odyssey 11.576–81) or Virgil (Aeneid 6.595–600). Horace seems even closer to Spenser's practice: in Odes 1.3.25–40, a bon-voyage salute to Virgil, the poet condemns sailing (cf Works and Days 236–47), a technological advance that he blames on such excessive pride as Prometheus’. Horace's figure, however, is presented ambivalently (he somewhat resembles the Aeschylean culture hero), whereas the Titan punished by Spenser's Jove has no redeeming features and seems cast in an essentially Hesiodic mold.
Spenser's fullest treatment of Prometheus occurs at FQ II x 70. At the beginning of his brief Elfin chronicle, the poet describes the Titan's creation of the eponymous ancestor Elf. This motif, analogous to the traditional notion that Prometheus made the human race, derives ultimately from Plato's Protagoras 320–2. There, the otherwise insufficiently motivated theme that Prometheus risked incurring the wrath of Zeus by giving fire to Epimetheus is explained by the Titan's partiality to a creature of his own making. Spenser's Promethean artificer has come to him through several sources: Ovid, who says that he may have made man by commingling earth and water (Metamorphoses 1.78–88); Horace, who says that the Titan adds to the new creature parts taken from every animal (Odes 1.16. 13–21); Fulgentius, who says that he steals fire from the celestial regions to animate the work he has made (Mythologiae 2.9); and Conti, who catalogues Spenser's ‘many partes from beasts derived’ (Mythologiae 4.6). Many of these details are summarized by Cooper, though Spenser seems to have invented the notion that for his offense Prometheus was ‘by Jove deprived/Of life him selfe.’ The standard Renaissance interpretation is given by Sandys (ed 1970:58): ‘But to conforme the fable to the truth: Prometheus signifies Providence, and Minetva Heavenly Wisdome: by Gods providence therefore and wisdome Man was created. The celestiall fire is his soule inspired from above.’
PHILIP J.GALLAGHER
Spenser wrote in a period in which there was no single ‘correct’ pronunciation of English. Strang (1970:154) transcribes ‘And first of the wordes to speake, I graunt they be something hard’ (SC, Epistle to Harvey) as ‘/ən(d) first əv ðə wđrdz tə spε:k, əıgraυnt ðe: bi:sυmθŋg hard/’ and comments, ‘any one transcription involves arbitrary selection between concurrent variant forms.’ We cannot for certain reconstruct Spenser's own speech any more than we can reconstruct Shakespeare's. ‘We do not even know how Shakespeare pronounced his own surname’ (Cercignani 1981:1). Though Spenser's name is a simpler phonological problem, the variant spellings Spenser/Spencer warn us to expect inconsistency in the written evidence (and that is all we have) of the pronunciation of his time. Alexander Gil, discussing English consonants in his phonetic alphabet in his important and informative Logonomia anglica (1619,1621), writes ‘we exclude c because it is an inappropriate letter’ (1621:8). Yet he chooses to illustrate his work with numerous lines from The Faerie Queene by Spencer or Spenser.
Rhymes may not be a reliable guide to Spenser's pronunciation, and are certainly not to any general pronunciation in his time. Dobson's assertion of the latter (1968:626) reflects many critics, such as John Hughes, in ‘Remarks on the Writings of Spenser’ (in Spenser ed 1715: cxi): ‘Spenser himself is irregular…and often writes the same Word differently, especially at the end of a Line; where…he frequently alters the Spelling for the sake of the Rhime, and even sometimes only to make the Rhime appear more exact to the Eye of the Reader.’ So, bin rhymes with Sarazin, but beene with greene and seene.
Special factors may enter Spenser's usage. Linguists (eg, Wyld 1923, Zachrisson 1913) note his rhyme seates/states. This /ē/ :/ā/ rhyme was in London usage unusual and argues, since fronting of ME /ā/ was earlier in the North, a Northern pronunciation. Gil (1621:16) notes that Northerners often use ‘ea for e, as meat for mët “food”; and for o, as beað for both “both”’—related to Northern ME bāþ. He thus indicates ME /ē/ and ME /ā/ in a dialectal pronunciation where in each case diphthongization develops with [ə] after the vowel.
The possibility of Northernisms in Spenser may be supported by the understanding that his family was of Northern origin, that after Cambridge he had a year in the North, and that he attended Merchant Taylors’ School, where his headmaster was the Northerner Richard Mulcaster, author of The First Part of the Elementarie (1582). The Minutes of the Court of the Merchant Taylors’ Company from 16 August 1562 record of the ushers at the school ‘that being northern men born, they had not taught the children to speak distinctly, or to pronounce their words as well as they aught’ (Dobson 1968:125).
Gil's phonetic transcriptions of The Faerie Queene are often inconsistent. This may be owing to printer's errors in 1621 from 1619, but may sometimes show Gil's local interest in expounding rhetorical figures rather than concentration on consistency of phonetic transcription. So, he cites FQ I ix 17 in his chapter ‘De figuris sententiae,’ exemplifying synchesis and hypallage, in three differing transcriptions. This rhetorical interest which at times obscures Gil's phonetics nonetheless chimes with his identification (in ch 6) of six principal dialects in English. (We should understand dialect in Suetonius’ sense of ‘a manner of speaking.’) The six are General, Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western—and Poetic. Of this last, Gil remarks, ‘because poets maintain their dialect by no license [departure from a norm] except metaplasm, enough will be said of it when we get to prosody.’ Metaplasm refers here to a figure whereby words, tone of voice, or grammatical and syntactical sequences may be altered for the sake of elegance and metrical effectiveness. Various types in Spenser include diaeresis: ‘wündes, kloudes, handes, for wündz, kloudz, handz’; antistoechon: ‘fön, ein, hond, lond, for föz, eiz, hand, land.’ As an example of ‘rhetorical accent’ that affects pronunciation, Gil gives ‘If yi bi âl thïvz, what höp hav J?’ (‘If ye be all thieves, what hope have I?’) and comments that ‘vowels long by nature are strongly distorted in yï, bï, häv, in what is stressed for need in âl, and in J’ (1621:133). Many examples of such rhetorical shortening occur in Spenser. Also relevant to his poetic is Dobson's observation (1968:152) from Gil that ‘in poetry the final syllable of a proparoxytone [word stressed on the third syllable from the end] in -i is often accented, with the result that the vowel of that syllable becomes long, as in mizerj.’ So should we read cunningly at FQ I iv 5, for example.
It is of central importance to take Gil's point that the ‘dialect of poetry’ is, in its phonology, governed by the license of rhetorical metaplasm. Because this is so, a neat and systematic account cannot and should not be proposed of the sounds of Spenser. His decorum is not that of phonological exactness but of aesthetic verisimilitude. Sir Thomas Pope Blount's comment (De re poetica 1694), that ‘Spencer has endeavour'd [Theocritus’ Dorick Dialect] in his Shepherds Calendar; but neither will it succeed in English’ (Sp All p 302), is quite true. On another level of linguistic decorum, though, Pope is poetically wise to observe the ‘unusual and elegant Manner’ of Diggon in SC, September 3–4: ‘Hur was hur while it was Day-light/ But now hur is a most wretched Wight’ (Guardian 40, 27 April 1713).
Bearing in mind the fact that Spenser's ‘dialect’ is ‘poetic,’ the following may serve as a guide to his pronunciation. For convenience, the passage is FQ IV x 24.1–8, reproduced from Gil (both 1619 and 1621) in Dobson (1968:135):
Fresh shadöuz, fit tu shroud from ∫uni rai;
Fair laundz, tu täk ðe ∫un in ∫ëzn dv;
Swït ∫pringz in wich a thouzand nimfs did plai;
Soft rumbling brüks, ðat zentl ∫lumber drv;
Hjh rëred mounts, ðe landz about tu vv;
Löu lüking dälz, disloin'd from komon gäz,
Deljtful bourz, tu ∫olas luvers trv;
Fair laberinths, fond runerz eiz tu däz.
Suggested interpretation:
Fre∫ ∫aedo:z fit tυ ∫rəυd ∫rυm sυni rai
Fεir lɔ:ndz tυ tae: k ðə sυn sε: zn dy:
Swi: t springz in h(w)it∫ ə ðəυzənd nimfs didplai
Soft rυmbliŋgbrυks ðaet slυmbər slυmbər dry:
HəI(X) rε:ridməυnts ðə laendz əbəυt tυ vy:
Lɔ: lυkiŋgdae: lz dislɔind frυm komən gae: z
Dələitfəlbəυrz tυ soləs lυv3rztry:
Fεir laebərinθsfond rυn3rz əiztυ dae: z
The readings [ae:]/tae: k, dae: lz, gae: z, dae: z/and [y:]/dy:, dry:, vy:, try:/perhaps ask for comment. Some commentators (eg, Strang) would transcribe not [ae:] but (tense) [e:]. However, Dobson shows (1968:145) that tense [e:] did not exist in Gil's speech, and the assumption is here made that Spenser too heard ME /ā/ as [ae:]. Cercignani (1981:171) judges that such rhymes in Shakespeare as brake/take (Midsummer Nights Dream III ii 15–16) and blazed/gazed/amazed (Rape of Lucrece 1353–6) ‘should be taken to rest on [late] ME ā (normally [ae:]).’
The reading [y:] which might be doubted in favour of [ju:], again follows Dobson (pp. 144–5.) That Gil meant [y:] by Roman v ‘cannot be finally proved’; that Spenser heard [y:] is an assumption, but likely. However, Cercignani would transcribe [W].
The representation həI(X) reflects Gil's h and r, though in the process of becoming untrilled [ɹ] is especially in the language of poetry, still pronounced. The final g after [ŋ] is generally judged to be preserved in Spenser's time.
AVRIL BRUTEN
Fausto Cercignani 1981 Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation (Oxford); E.J. Dobson 1968 English Pronunciation 1500– 1700 700 2nd ed, 2 vols (Oxford); Gil ed 1621; Barbara M.H.Strang 1970 A History of English (London); Henry Cecil Wyld 1923 Studies in English Rhymes from Surrey to Pope (London); R.E. Zachrisson 1913 Pronunciation of English Vowels 1400–1700 (Göteborg).
Prophecy is an important bond between the medieval and Renaissance worlds because they shared a common experience and sense of history. During the late sixteenth century, various forms of prophecy flourished—secular and sacred, pagan and Christian, astrological and apocalyptic, prophecies of doom no less than of millennial expectation. That they were ubiquitous and taken seriously, even in politics, is evidenced by the fact that during the reign of Elizabeth and at her instigation, there were edicts against prophesying. Those edicts were directed against ‘prophesying’ in both of its current senses: predicting the future by divine inspiration, and expounding the Scriptures by (usually Puritan) groups of readers claiming to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. Elizabeth herself may have commissioned from John Harvey A Discoursive Probleme Concerning Prophesies (London 1588), a work which by railing against Piers Plowmans, Merlins, and Colin Clouts seeks to discredit all forms of extrascriptural prophecy.
Spenser's use of prophecy in its various forms at once represents his age's distrust of prophecy and registers his own fascination with and allegiance to it. In donning the mantle of the prophet, he relates his poetry to a Christian paradigm of poetic development but also takes a stand different from the official position of the established church, which forbade prophesying and distrusted enthusiasm. At the same time, Spenser signals that his poetry is prophetic in a special sense: though not a conveyor of original prophecies, it is a commentary on existing ones, both secular and sacred. If not a representative of extremely conservative Protestantism, in his prophesying Spenser is at an extreme, expounding prophecy rather than enunciating it, but in this, still sustaining a tradition that was being threatened and that by some would be silenced. He clearly believed that, whatever its limitations and abuses, prophecy continued to provide an assured framework for understanding history. Prophecy was history anticipated, and history was prophecy fulfilled. Moreover, prophecy could not be fully interpreted until it had been fulfilled in history.
Spenser's posture toward prophecy is evident as early as The Shepheardes Calender, and in its crucial details illuminated by his correspondence with Harvey. The five published letters were probably a collaborative effort, written with each man looking over the other's shoulder. What Harvey says of the natural phenomenon of earthquakes is what Spenser himself would probably say of the supernatural phenomenon of prophecy. Their efficient cause is God, ‘the Creatour, and Continuer, and Corrector of Nature.’ They may themselves be ‘terrible signes… certaine manacing forerunners, and forewarners of the great latter day,’ yet they do not all signify a ‘fatall Action of God.’ As a part of God's ‘incomprehensible mysteries,’ as well as an aspect of ‘his eternall Providence,’ what they really signify may remain uncertain: no one can ‘definitively…give sentence of his…secret and inscrutable purposes’ (Three Letters 2, Var Prose pp 454–5). Indeed, what the prophecy forecasts and what the prophet would actually foment often pull oppositely.
In Ruines of Time, a snowy swan sings ‘the prophecie/Of his owne death in dolefull Elegie’ (594–5). In The Shepheardes Calender, both elegy and pastoral are rendered in a prophetic key. The poem is a gathering of prophecies: Piers’ of a time that will come; Morrell's of Algrind's restoration; Colin's of Elizabeth's, England's, and his own annihilation. Those prophecies collectively identify The Shepheardes Calender as a warning prophecy, Spenser knowing full well that the potential triumph of such a prophecy comes when it proves itself irrelevant—when impending disaster has been averted because the prophecy has been heeded. As Spenser depicts the historical situation, the Queen (Rosalind) is about to break her covenant with the people (Colin Clout). Her figurative death is the subject of the lament in November: it symbolizes the prophetic death which Elizabeth's impending marriage forebodes for England. It has been argued that in the death of Dido and the approaching death of Colin are figured the prophetic consequences of the Queen's marriage: her spiritual death, together with the death of the English church, of England, of the people; and the death of poets and of poetry as well (see McLane 1961, Wittreich 1979).
The prophetic element muted in The Shepheardes Calender is foregrounded in The Faerie Queene. Spenser's prophetic epic is framed by prophecies of the New Jerusalem (I x) and of a son being born who will dry up all the water and destroy the fiend (VI iv). More significant perhaps are the isolated prophecies scattered throughout the poem and especially those of its central books. In the castle of Alma episode, prophecies are numbered along with dreams and visions among the ‘idle thoughts and fantasies’ that encumber the mind (FQ II ix 51). Proteus appears as ‘father of false prophecis,’ foretelling that Marineli's ‘decay should happen by a mayd’ (III iv 37, IV xii 28). Yet Proteus also appears here as a foil to the true prophet Nereus, who ‘voide of guile’ teaches others to do right and ‘expert in prophecies’ unfolds ‘the ledden [speech] of the Gods,’ foretelling to Paris the fall of Troy (IV xi 18–19).
The Faerie Queene is a scanning of true and false prophecies by way of reaching toward the understanding that true prophecies rather than forecasting disaster seek to avert it, and that such prophecies are fulfilled only because they go unheeded. This lesson is driven home by Cymoent, mother of Marinell and daughter of great Nereus, who goes to Proteus, supposedly one ‘with prophecie inspir'd,’ to inquire of her son's destiny only to learn that her son will be dismayed or killed by ‘A virgin strange and stout’ (III iv 25). Yet Marinell does not die: his wound is healed, and what she really learns is that prophecies are fulfilled because wisdom comes too late.
The sharpest focusing of prophecy, and Spenser's most sustained reflection upon it, is provided by Merlin who is found ‘Deepe busied bout worke of wondrous end’ (III iii 14). Here prophecy itself is seen as a mirror on providence and history and as extending infinitely to encompass all things between heaven and earth. Merlin was traditionally thought to be blessed with special gifts of insight, wisdom, and prophecy; and during the Renaissance, his prophecies with their distinctly political hue were characteristically apocalyptic and millenarian. Instead of revealing prophecies in the moon and stars, Merlin reveals an evolutionary process within the cyclical patterns of history (III iii). Artegall, he says, not only will be the spouse of Britomart but will end his days in peace. After his time, woe will follow woe until the Britons are at last restored to rule, at which time enmities will disappear, divided nations will unite, and a reign of peace will be established: ‘Then shall a royall virgin raine’ (49). At that moment, Merlin ceases to prophesy, as one ‘overcomen of the spirites powre’ or by some ‘other ghastly spectacle dismayd’ (50). What he sees secretly he declines to divulge.
The figure who introduces apocalyptic to secular prophecy and imbues it with millenarian thought, here delivers an utterance that would dampen apocalyptic fervor and quiet millennial expectations: ‘But yet the end is not’ (50). Apocalyptic elements can be found in The Faerie Queene, most notably in Book 1; but Spenser's procedure is gradually to subdue those elements within a prophetic perspective, thereby shifting attention from future to present history and then from the history of the world to the spiritual history of a chosen nation and chosen people. Apocalyptic utterances typically claim that God rules history and will wrest from it a glorious future regardless of human agency. Yet, perhaps out of frustration with this apocalyptic promise, Spenser attributes responsibility, at least in part, to his nation and her people. Evolution displaces revolution with God and man cooperating to achieve historical progress, and with Spenser himself becoming the emanative center of a vision that, by transforming individuals, could transform an entire nation and then the world.
If God is the architect of history, God's people are his draughtsmen and construction workers. Through human agency, an upside-down world can be turned right side up again. History is ongoing, and when prophecy invades history, it is to keep history moving on a course toward the apocalyptic consummation that lies in the distant future, not to predict that the consummation is at hand. For Spenser, prophecy is an agent of reformation, not revolution; it does not predict the future but rather addresses and hopes to alter the present to ensure that a future is possible. In this way, The Faerie Queene achieves the stature of a prophetic poem radiant with vision. (See also *Apocalypse, *oracles, *visions.)
Fletcher 1971; Bernard McGinn 1979 Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York); McLane 1961; Marjorie Reeves 1969 The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford); R.W.Southern 1970–3 ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing’ TRHS 5th ser, 20:173–96, 21:159–79, 22:159–80 (‘History as Prophecy’), 23:243–63; Rupert Taylor 1911 The Political Prophecy in England (New York); Wittreich 1979.
. See Complaints: Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale
This sea god appears in two of Spenser's works: in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe 248–51, he is one of Cynthia's marine shepherds; in The Faerie Queene, he prophesies Marinell's fate and rescues Florimell from the lecherous fisherman only to abduct her to his cave, court her unavailingly, and imprison her for seven months in his rocky undersea dungeon (III iv 25–37, viii 29–42; IV xi 1–4). In FQ IV xi–xii, Proteus presides over the marriage feast of Thames and Medway. There Marinell overhears Florimell's lament that he does not love her; he falls in love and pines for her until his mother appeals to Neptune, who orders Proteus to release Florimell.
The iconography of Proteus, Neptune's herdsman and prophetic old man of the sea, derives chiefly from Homer (Odyssey 4.351–570) and Virgil (Georgics 4.387–529). Accordingly, in Colin Clout he is whitehaired and bearded, driving a herd of ‘stinking’ seals and porpoises (cf Odyssey 4.441–3). Spenser independently makes him cold and frosty (FQ III viii 35). Homer and Virgil compare him to a shepherd, and Renaissance poets and mythographers similarly call him pastor (Sannazaro Piscatory Eclogues 3.62– 5, Boccaccio Genealogia 7.9, Conti Mythologiae 8.8). In FQ III viii 30, his chariot is drawn by ‘Phocas’ or seals; this description is based on Conti's interpretation of Virgil's equi bipedes, mythical twofooted sea horses. In Virgil, Proteus dwells behind a rock in a mountain cave by the sea; in FQ III viii 37, his submarine cave is hollowed out of a rock.
Classical and Renaissance treatments give Proteus the paired attributes of shapechanging and prophecy: if pursued, he can change shape at will; but if he is captured and held securely, he will return to his own form and prophesy for his captor. His ability to change shape was proverbial. (Erasmus’ Adages [ed 1703–6, 2:473b–4a] includes Proteo mutabilior ‘more changeable than Proteus,’ which is repeated in Cooper 1565; Tilley s 285 gives the English proverb ‘As many shapes as Proteus.’) His mutability was variously interpreted in the Renaissance. Following the Hermetic Asclepius, it could represent the mutable nature of man (Pico della Mirandola Oration on the Dignity of Man 1486, Vives Fable about Man c 1518 in Kristeller, et al 1948:223–54, 387–93). His false shapes could also represent the false opinions which thwart our search for the truth (Fraunce ed 1975:57–8).
Proteus is commonly called vates ‘prophet’ (Virgil Georgics 4.387, Ovid Metamorphoses 11.249, followed by Renaissance mythographers). But his power of prophecy is linked to his capacity for deception; Augustine associates him with falsehood or the devil (City of God 10.10). More specifically, Plato connects him with the deceptive power of words (Euthydemus 288B-C compares two Sophists with Proteus; see also Euthyphro 15D, Ion 541E–2A). Spenser mentions the ‘subtile sophismes, which do play/With double senses, and with false debate,’ through which destiny, expressed in Proteus’ prophecy, works itself out in mortal life (III iv 28). Another Renaissance tradition links Proteus, vates and word manipulator, to the poet (Giamatti 1984:122–7).
As prophet in The Faerie Queene, Proteus delivers a prophecy as ambiguous as himself. He tells Cymodoce that Marinell will be harmed by a woman, but she misunderstands him and reproaches him as ‘father of false prophecis’ (III iv 37). Yet the prophecy is doubly fulfilled, for Marinell is wounded physically by Britomart and psychologically by Florimell. Towards Florimell, Proteus is the agent of a destiny he seeks to thwart and whose purpose he expresses in ‘double senses.’ (By contrast, the poem's other marine prophet, Nereus, is sincere and upright in IV xi 18–19.) Despite the ambiguity of his prophecy, Spenser's Proteus does not change shape in order to avoid prophesying; rather, the incident recalls his voluntary prophecy to the sea goddess Thetis about her son Achilles, whom Marinell resembles (Ovid Met 11.221–3, Lotspeich 1932:51). Sannazaro mentions the Nereid Cymodoce and Proteus mourning Achilles’ death (Piscatory Eclogues 1.84–90). Proteus does transform himself in wooing Florimell (III viii 29–42), but it is in order to achieve a personal desire rather than to evade his divine function.
As ‘shepherd of the seas,’ Proteus is an instrument of heaven's grace when he rescues Florimell and punishes the lustful fisherman. But soon he becomes her unwanted lover, flattering her, transforming himself into pleasing or threatening shapes, and finally imprisoning her. This episode has two prototypes. Ariosto's Orlando furioso 8.52 describes a lustful Proteus who rapes an Ebudan princess. Euripides’ Helen (drawing on Stesichorus’ variant of the Trojan myth) casts Proteus as a benevolent king of Egypt who shelters the real Helen while the Trojan war is fought over a phantom; Proteus’ son later threatens Helen's chastity. Spenser's Proteus combines the behavior of father and son; meanwhile, knights dispute over the counterfeit Florimell and Paridell's rape of Hellenore further debases the Trojan myth (III ix–x).
Spenser's Proteus resembles the enchant-er Busirane and the shape-changers Archimago (compared to Proteus at 1 ii 10) and Malengin. Malengin, or guile, flatters and deceives like Proteus, who could be a type of the hypocritical flatterer (Ovide moralisé 2.25; see also Bersuire 1509: fol 66v). Proteus was sometimes thought to be a magician (Conti 8.8), like Archimago and Busirane. Further, Busirane imprisons Amoret for seven months as Proteus does Florimell. In these episodes, the captors display the cruel, frightening, and deceptive aspects of love; but their victims pass through their trials of chastity to a more fruitful relationship. Proteus’ amorous shape-changing links him to the metamorphosed gods in Busirane's tapestry: Ovid advises the lover to be as cruel as Busiris, as versatile as Proteus (Ars amatoria 1.647–58, 755–70). Being inconstant himself, Proteus tempts Florimell to inconstancy. (The fickle lover and false friend in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona is also named Proteus.) In the psychological allegory, Florimell, like Amoret, is subjected through love of Marinell to passion and vicissitude, here symbolized by Proteus since he traditionally could signify changeable passions, especially lust (Boccaccio Genealogia 7.9, Giraldi De deis gentium 1548:228, Erasmus Enchiridion militis christiani 7). After her erotic encounter with the fisherman, Florimell's descent into the sea with Proteus may therefore represent a fall into the passions.
More satisfyingly, Proteus may symbolize an aspect of physical nature. Since Florimell is replaced by a snowy or false Florimell during her seven-month confinement by a frosty Proteus, and since images of spring attend her union with Marinell, she is allied to Adonis and Proserpine (also a flowermaiden), vegetation deities confined underground through the winter. This analogy explains the wintry appearance of Spenser's Proteus. His behavior recalls the seasonal myth of Vertumnus, god of the changing year, who courted Pomona (goddess of fruit) in various shapes; and Erasmus links Proteus to Vertumnus in his Adages.
Proteus was anciently regarded as primal matter, his transformations proceeding through the four elements (Heraclitus Homeric Allegories 66.7). In FQ III viii 41, he changes to giant (earth), fiend (fire), centaur (air), and sea storm (water), recalling the way in which Archimago (I ii 10) is like him in being able to change to bird (air), fish (water), fox (earth), and dragon (fire). Proteus’ cave and dungeon may be seen, then, as the abode of first matter, like the abyss of Chaos in the Garden of Adonis (III vi 36); his love for Florimell is the desire of matter for form, and Florimell is the Neoplatonic principle of beauty, or the soul, trapped and obscured by matter, fallen from the One into the Many. Alternatively, Proteus may be the giver of forms to matter (Orphic Hymn to Proteus; see also Conti 8.8) or the variety of those forms in nature (Giraldi 1548:228, citing Proclus). Fraunce calls him ‘a type of nature’ in Amintas Dale (ed 1975:58). In this interpretation, his love is the desire of the mutable natural world for ideal beauty. His cave parallels Homer's Cave of the Nymphs, which is allegorized by Porphyry as the world, dark because it contains matter but beautiful through its participation in forms and moist because it is generative.
At the marriage feast of the rivers (IV xi– xii), Proteus presides in his hall over the renewal of life and beauty, whereas in his dungeon he had seemed to constrain them. The feast is preeminently a symbol of concord amidst ‘the seas abundant progeny,’ the sea representing life or generation (Conti 8.1). Florimell withstands the diversity and mutability signified by Proteus, but he governs the world in which she will appear, like ‘Venus [from] the fomy sea.’ Conti (8.8) also sees Proteus as a model of civic prudence, generating friendship by his flexible adaptability. His role as host thus forms a fitting conclusion to the Legend of Friendship. In The Faerie Queene, Proteus successively symbolizes various aspects of mutability in man and nature; but his last role is the most inclusive.
SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI
Giamatti 1984:115–50; Nohrnberg 1976; Roche 1964; Wind 1958.
(See ed 1912:600–2.) The title page of the thin quarto published by Ponsonby in 1596 clearly announces that what follows is an occasional poem celebrating the double marriage of Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset, the two eldest daughters of Edward Somerset, fourth Earl of Worcester, to Henry Guildford of Hemsted Place, Kent, knighted shortly after the wedding, and William Petre, later the second Baron Petre of Writtle. The double wedding took place at Essex House on 8 November 1596. The poem was probably written to celebrate the betrothal ceremony which took place some time after the Earl of Essex’ return to court by mid-August from his victory at Cádiz and before the court left Greenwich on 1 October—the end of September seems likely. The only contemporary evidence is Rowland Whyte's report, on 26 September 1596, to Robert Sidney: ‘Tis sayd the 2 ladies of Somersett shall speedily be married to your cosen Gilford and Sir John Peters son’ (Norton 1940:48).
In itself, the event was not sufficiently important either politically or socially to warrant Spenser's exquisite praise. The immediate cause may be found in the presence, at the occasion and in the poem, of Essex, whose patronage Spenser was seeking. Essex may have been called upon to be the host because of family connections: he was related to Worcester's wife, and his wife to Henry Guildford. Spenser uses his presence to lift the poem out of the private and into the public sphere.
The poem professes, as the occasion demanded, an optimistic faith in a promising future. In spite of their clear Roman Catholic leanings, the two husbands and the father of the brides seem to have done well for themselves under Elizabeth and James. Yet history has its ironies: only four years later, Essex fell out of favor with the Queen. During his abortive rebellion, the Earl of Worcester was kept a prisoner at Essex House but later served as one of the peers who condemned him to death for high treason.
Prothalamion is one of Spenser's most harmonious and melodious creations, full of beautiful phrases and with perfect control of both imagery and rhythm. In Table Talk, Coleridge praises ‘the swan-like movement of [Spenser's] exquisite Prothalamion.’ Both thematically and technically, it represents the poet's mature talents. Each of its ten eighteen-line stanzas is rounded off with the couplet (made memorable for the modern reader by T.S. Eliot's use of it in The Waste Land): ‘Against the Brydale day, which is not long:/Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.’ The penultimate line shows some interesting variations, notably between the present and past tense, each used five times. The refrain focuses on the poem's major concern: to bring the poet's vision of the world as it ought to be into harmony with his knowledge of the world as it is. The mighty river, which has seen so much human triumph and misery, may comply with the poet's wish that it ‘runne softly’ and thus help to preserve the harmony of procession and poem. But the spell is only temporary, and the bridal day—the symbol of the harmonious union of opposites—‘which is not long,’ will it also not last long?
If Spenser's vision refers to an actual event, the procession would seem to have begun somewhere on the river Lee, moved downstream to Greenwich, and then up the Thames to Essex House, which is located just upstream from the ‘bricky towres’ of the inns of court. The meaning of Lee in stanzas 3 and 7 has been disputed, since it may refer also to a meadow or to the lee side of a river. In both instances, however, the word is personified and seems to refer to the river Lee. That river is mentioned in two of Spenser's principal sources, Leland's Cygnea cantio (1545) and William Vallans’ Tale of Two Swannes (1591); moreover, the pairing of Lee and Thames introduces the marriage of the rivers as a minor motif in the poem. An inconsistency remains, however, for the Thames is directly addressed in the refrain to every stanza; and in the transition from stanza 7 to 8, there is an abrupt jump from the Lee to London. Yet the sense of the real world in the poem is very strong: the final destination of the procession is Essex House, and stanza 8 refers to the inns of court, ‘Where now the studious Lawyers have their bowers’ (134). This line may refer to the affiliations of the two bridegrooms and their father-in-law with Inner and Middle Temples.
Although the betrothal poem can be found in classical poetry (eg, Propertius and Statius), in English poetry before Spenser (eg, Lydgate and Dunbar), and was in use in Elizabethan England as part of the betrothal celebrations, it never gained currency as a distinct genre. Spenser seems to have invented the title Prothalamion (Gr ‘before [in time or place] the bridal chamber’) for what he subtitles ‘Spousall Verse.’ It is arguable that he did so in order to deviate from the epithalamic convention. Prothalamion contains several elements which were uncommon or directly alien to the traditional marriage song, such as the poet's complaint and personal history in stanzas 1 and 8, his references to the history of the Temple and the loss of Leicester in 8, and the eulogy of Essex in 9. These deviations have led some readers to suppose that Spenser was trying to create a new genre, or a new sub-genre, by combining the traditional epithalamium with elements from the Chaucerian dream-vision (stanza 1), the river marriage (cf the union of Thames and Medway in FQ IV xi), the topographical antiquarian poem (the swan allegory and stanza 8), and the complaint (1 and 8).
Those who have complained that Spenser includes personal, historical, and political material in his beautifully phrased occasional poem, have applied too narrow a definition of that genre. Many modern readings have been directed towards a reinterpretation which allows us to see the so-called extraneous material as integral. Like much of Spenser's poetry, Prothalamion is concerned with the relationship between the poet and his vision, the actual and the ideal, the world of art and the world of time. The refrain is concerned not with the betrothal but with the poet's relationship with the river of time, which is not only potential enemy but also powerful ally. As it brings the brides to their future husbands, it also brings the poem towards its close. As the vision follows upon an escape from reality, it must eventually cease and effect a return to reality.
The betrothal described in Prothalamion clearly concerns the poet, and for this reason it concerns the reader. He is our representative, our emissary into the world of love, beauty, and nobility. As such, he could lead us on the road to envy and an intensified impression of our own failure, or to a romantic escape into the beauty and happiness of another, otherwise impenetrable world. Or he can present us with the vision as an enriching experience, leading us to accept our own situation, past, present, and future, as we move from the private sphere to the familial, social, national, and religious dimensions of marriage.
The temporary and precarious harmony of the poem is introduced by the conflicting forces of the wind and sun, Zephyrus breathing sweetly to ‘delay’ the ‘Hot… beames’ of Titan. The burning sun often represents unpleasant actuality, and as a biblical image (eg, Ps 121.5–6) it was interpreted as worldly temptations from which one needed to be protected by grace. The contrast between Zephyrus and Titan, as well as that between the poet's unpleasant social past and his happy pastoral present, constitute the first pair in a series of contrasts. Thus the two swans seem to be angels and are compared to the swans of Venus; but they are ‘bred of Somers-heat,’ with an obvious pun on the brides’ family name, Somerset, and also a reference to Titan's hot beams. With a characteristic pun, they are ‘Fowles so lovely’ (61), vulnerable to the ‘foule’ water (48) of the river of time which may soil their white purity.
Beneath the surface description of purity and chaste love are disturbing allusions to a violent sexuality. The description of the nymphs gathering flowers in the meadow in stanza 2 seems designed to recall the rapes of Proserpina and Europa and to prepare for the more direct reference to Zeus’ rape of Leda in stanza 3.
There may be several reasons why Spenser chose to present the brides as a pair of swans. The Thames was famous for its many swans (Vallans’ poem explains how they came to English rivers). The actual procession of the brides may have taken place in barges decorated to resemble swans; processions of this kind were not unusual in Elizabethan England, and to compare ships to swans was also a commonplace. Besides Leland and Vallans, Spenser may also have been influenced by Camden's ‘De connubio Tamae et Isis’ (1586), all of which refer explicitly to the classical idea—very popular in the Renaissance—of the poet as swan (see Time 589–602). In their roles as swans, the brides-to-be have therefore invaded a familiar mythical world.
John Hughes (1715) seems to have been the first to comment on the disappearance of the swans after stanza 7. When the two ladies reappear in 10, they are referred to as ‘Brides.’ The transformation is softened by the conventional and obvious pun on birds/brides (cf Cymbeline IV ii 197, Taming of the Shrew V ii 46); and by comparing the bridegrooms to the heavenly twins, Castor and Pollux, offspring of Leda, Spenser establishes a clear connection with the Leda myth in stanza 3.
If stanzas 1–7 are concerned with the private and pastoral spheres, stanzas 8–10 are concerned with the public sphere. Like stanza I, stanza 8 clarifies the poet's relationship to his setting. As 4 alludes to the origin of the brides, 8 gives us the origin of the poet. In the mythic vision of 3–5, the bridal procession is seen to compare favorably with the classical past. In stanzas 8–10, the poet turns to the ability of present time to make up for the personal, moral, and national disasters of the past: the disappointed hopes of the poet, the fall of the proud Knights Templars, and the loss of ‘that great Lord,’ Leicester, whose memory is brought to mind as the procession reaches his former residence, Leicester House, now called Essex House and the residence of the Earl of Essex. By the end of stanza 8, Spenser is able to check his complaint, for the Knights Templars have been superseded by the ‘studious Lawyers’ and by the bridegrooms, who are described as ‘Two gentle Knights of lovely face and feature/Beseeming well the bower of anie Queene,’ and the tragic loss of Leicester is made up for by Essex whose martial triumphs, combined with the Queen's good government, provide for a secure and happy future for the married couples. A special celebration of Elizabeth is indicated in stanza 9, for the refrain may be taken to contain a reference to her Accession Day, which would be celebrated shortly after the double wedding, on 17 November, traditionally described as the day of her marriage to England.
The structure of Prothalamion is similar to, yet simpler than, the structure of Epithalamion. The conventional symbols of circularity—garlands and crowns—are given new significance by the cosmic image of the zodiac (line 174). From this perspective, the line total of 180 may suggest ‘the 180 degrees of the sun's daytime course round half the circle of the heavens’ (Fowler 1975:66), and this in turn may suggest other circular and astronomical symbols.
In the overall movement of the poem from discord to harmony, Spenser employs parallels and contrasts that may have structural implications. For example, the poet's ‘discontent’ because of his ‘long fruitlesse stay/ In Princes Court’ in stanza 1 is contrasted to the ‘hearts content’ and ‘fruitfull issue’ promised to the brides in 6; the hot Titan in 1 is replaced by the radiant Hesperus of 10, even as the poet who ‘walkt forth’ to the river in his escape from ‘Princes Court’ in I is paralleled by the more stately bridegrooms ‘forth pacing to the Rivers side’ in 10. Just as the swans ‘excell/The rest’ of the river ‘foule’ (7) so the two ‘gentle Knights’ may be observed ‘Above the rest’ of the ‘great traine’ (10); and just as the swans seem ‘heavenly borne’ (4), so the bridegrooms also recall heavenly parallels. The nymphs who ‘each one had a little wicker basket,/Made of fine twigs entrayled curiously,/In which they gathered flowers to fill their flasket’ (2) are recalled in the description of Essex as ‘Faire branch of Honor, flower of Chevalrie,/That fillest England with thy triumphs fame’ (9).
Such verbal parallels and contrasts underscore the thematic movement as an escape from the actual world to a vision of the world as it should be, and, finally, to an acceptance of reality based on a renewed hope that the ideal may still blend with the real on some future ‘Brydale day, which is not long.’
EINAR BJORVAND
Harry Berger, Jr 1965 ‘Spenser's Prothalamion: An Interpretation’ EIC 15:363–80; Fowler 1975–59–86; Dan S.Norton 1940 ‘The Background of Spenser's Prothalamion’ diss Princeton Univ; Norton 1944 ‘The Bibliography of Spenser's Prothalamion’ JEGP 43:349–53; Norton 1951 ‘The Tradition of Prothalamia’ in English Studies in Honor of James Southall Wilson (UVS 4, Charlottesville, Va) pp 223–41; J.Norton Smith 1959 ‘Spenser's Prothalamion: A New Genre’ RES ns 10:173–8; Michael West 1974 ‘Prothalamia in Propertius and Spenser’ CL 26:346–53; M.L.Wine 1962 ‘Spenser's “Sweete Themmes”: Of Time and the River’ SEL 2:111–17; Daniel H.Woodward 1962 ‘Some Themes in Spenser's “Prothalamion”’ ELH 29:34–46.
In his Second Frutes (1591), John Florio remarks that proverbs are the ‘pith, the proprieties, the proofes, the purities, the elegancies, as the commonest so the commendablest phrases of a language’ (sig *2r). As Erasmus comments, however, it is one thing to praise the proverb and another to define it (Intro to Adagia 1536, pub in Opera omnia 1540). His own tentative definition uses the triad of parts in medieval logic: ‘A saying [the genus] in popular use [the species or differentia] remarkable for some shrewd and novel turn [the particular characteristic, in Erasmus’ words].’ As such, proverbs are to be distinguished from aphorisms (sententiae), fables (ainoi), quick witty sayings (apophthegmata), and facetious remarks (skômmata).
In The Shepheardes Calender, E.K. is aware of the proverb as Erasmus defines it. In his gloss to Cuddie's emblem in Februarie, he notes that Cuddie ‘doth counterbuff’ Thenot ‘with a byting and bitter proverbe,’ the Italian ‘Niuno vecchio,/Spaventa Iddio,’ spoken in contempt of old age. He also notes that Erasmus, ‘a great clerke and good old father,’ had rendered the proverb as ‘Nemo Senex metuit Jovem’ in the Adages, and had construed it favorably ‘for his own behoofe’ as ‘old men…be furre from superstition and Idolatrous regard of false Gods, as is Jupiter’ rather than as ‘old men have no feare of God.’
Spenser is less academic than E.K. in acknowledging proverbs. ‘This reede is ryfe,’ he may exclaim (Julye II), or allow that he quotes ‘an old sayd sawe’ (98). Other times he introduces a proverb with ‘Yet wisedome warnes’ (FQ I i 13), or ‘True he it said, what ever man it sayd’ (IV x 1), or ‘men use to say’ (VII vii 50). Here he is following Erasmus’ injunction on the need for ‘careful introduction of a proverb’ (Adages Intro, section 14)—‘an advance correction’ such as used by the Greeks and Romans: ‘as the old saying goes,’ ‘to use an old phrase,’ ‘as they say,’ or ‘as the adage has it.’
Spenser knew the ‘many uses [to which] a knowledge of proverbs’ could be put, such as ‘philosophy’ (the cracking open of thoughtful insights into old wisdom), persuasion and conviction, and pleasure in the decorative and structural effects proverbs can confer, for example, interest through novelty, delight by their concision and adaptability to all kinds of rhetorical figures, and conviction by their decisive power (Adages Intro, sections 6, 8). Even in the Amoretti, he shapes an entire sonnet (32) on the proverb ‘The more you beat iron (the stone of Sicilia) the harder it grows’ (Tilley 1 96). In sonnet 18, he invents plausible variations on the proverbial theme ‘Constant dropping will wear the stone’ (D 618): the first quatrain contains the proverb as a basic fact, the second converts it to the unrequited lover's plea, the third reflects the mistress’ quick perception of the rhetorical game, and the couplet reverses the original proverb in lamenting that the beloved has not been worn down. The proverb, true in inanimate nature, has been tested and found wanting in the world of human relations—a pattern of reversal which Spenser's ‘counter proverbs’ rely on with special effect.
Proof that Spenser was to the proverb born, and handled it with dexterity, daring, and complete mastery, comes in his willingness to vary the shape of a proverb (cf Adages Intro, section 12). He freely uses counter proverbs, such as ‘Oft fire is without smoke’ (FQ I i 12). Or he brilliantly reverses the proverb ‘short pleasure, long lament (repentance, pain)’ (p 419) in the sophistic speech of Despair, who seeks to persuade Redcrosse to contravene God's law against suicide: ‘Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease…?’ (I ix 40). Or he twists the proverb ‘That fish will soon be caught that nibbles at every hook (bait)’ to indicate that Redcrosse has learned his lesson: having once nibbled, he will not bite again at Archimago's bait (II i 4; F 324, but cf T 316).
So completely is Spenser at home with proverbs that he often forms a new yet still familiar utterance by pairing essential yet incomplete elements of two common proverbs. Thus, after the sententious Thomalin rebukes the proud and pretentious pastor, Morrell, with ‘an old sayd sawe,’ ‘To Kerke the narre, from God the farre’ (c 80), he underscores the warning by fusing the introductory elements of two admonitory proverbs, one against celestial climbing, the other noting terrestrial falls: ‘he that strives to touch the starres’ (s 825) oft ‘stombles at a strawe’ (s 922, Julye 97–100). Similarly, at the marriage of Thames and Medway, ‘To tell the sands’ (s 91) or ‘count the starres on hye’ (cf Whiting s 681) is an easier activity than trying ‘to reckon right’ the wedding guests (FQ IV xi 53; cf Heb 11.12). In so doing, Spenser is again following Erasmus’ counsel in De duplici copia about ‘other methods’ of varying proverbs.
The proverb's succinct form and its sense of long-shared, much-tried practical wisdom makes its use as a summary statement almost inevitable. Hence, ten ‘emblems’ for six of the months of The Shepheardes Calender are recognizably proverbial: two in English (Mar), two in Greek (a hexameter split in halves, May); three in Italian (Feb 2, Aug), and three in Latin (Jul 2, Sept). The final couplet or final line for five Amoretti are recognizably proverbial (II, 37, 42, 50, 74).
Proverbs also often appear in the summarizing or reflective alexandrine which closes the Spenserian stanza. With a skillful variant on ‘plenty makes poor,’ Spenser warns of the danger in Fidessa/Duessa's coy looks: ‘so dainty they say maketh derth’ (FQ I ii 27; cf Tilley P 427). A ‘doubled proverb’ in the alexandrine gives two reasons for Florimell's flight from the Witch's monster (III vii 26): ‘Fear [which] gives wings’ and ‘Need (Necessity) [which] may make a coward valiant’ (F 133, N 62). In his reply to Belge, ‘That is the vertue selfe, which her reward doth pay’ (V xi 17; cf Tilley v 81), Arthur uses a proverb which is a mature variation on the ‘proverbial’ claim by Redcrosse that ‘Vertue gives her selfe light, through darkenesse for to wade’ (I i 12).
In the microstructure of verse and stanza, Spenser knew how to expand the implications of a proverb, transforming it from didactic distillate to active metaphor. Thus the proverb ‘The stream (current, tide) stopped swells the higher’ is used by the Palmer to summarize his advice to Guyon on how to handle Furor through Occasion (II iv II; s 929). Expanded to four lines (in III vii 34), this proverb becomes the first term of an epic simile that shows process rather than conclusion by describing the heroic energy that Satyrane must expend to restrain and finally subdue the monster that pursues Florimell.
The quiet advice and gentle rebuke of honey-tongued Meliboe to Calidore is an example of what might be called the bravura use of proverbs—delightful in itself and befitting the situation (VI ix 29–33). Meliboe's stanzas are based on Christian commonplaces and sententiae, and on three proverbs, ‘It is the mynd, that maketh good or ill,’ ‘Wisedome is most riches,’ and ‘Every man is the architect of his own fortune’ (M 254, w 526, and M 126 as augmented with examples 1533–94, ODEP 230a). In stanza 29, Meliboe implicitly rebukes Calidore for attributing too much to Fortune in describing his state and envying the pastoral retreat: ‘each hath his fortune in his brest.’ In stanza 30, by carefully picking the meat from two proverbial shells, he establishes the positive effect of the contented mind, converting Calidore's sophisms into the realization that ‘each unto himselfe his life may fortunize.’
FQ VI vi 5 provides a fuller example of Spenser's tactics and strategy in using the proverb. Here the Hermit seeks to heal Serena and Timias of the rankling inward wounds inflicted by the Blatant Beast. Since their wounds are past help of herbs or surgery, he realizes that his patients need the counsel of ‘sad sobriety’ to rein in the stubborn rage of blind passion, a discovery underscored by Spenser's doubling proverbs in the alexandrine and varying them slightly but significantly: ‘Give salves to every sore, but counsell to the minde.’ The first half of the line is a variation of ‘There is a salve for every sore’; the second half echoes ‘(Good) counsel is (the choicest, meetest) medicine’ (cf Tilley s 84, c 683). Then the Hermit discusses at length the psychosomatic aspects of the lovers’ predicament; he finally returns to his starting point, having explained how their wounds may not be physically salved, for they need instead ‘wise read and discipline’ (13). When Timias and Serena beg him for that counsel, he offers it in a bravura variation on two complementary proverbs: ‘Avoid the occasion of (the) ill’ and ‘Take away the cause and the effect must cease’ (o 8, c 202). The basic truths are stated in the first four lines of stanza 14 and a detailed therapeutic regimen spelled out in the remaining lines. Thus the problem of psychological ‘advize’ or ‘counsell’ posited in the proverb of stanza 5 is finally rounded off.
Typically, this episode reverberates with others, differing slightly in ‘plot’ and proverbial application, but awakening echoes and arousing memories of other heroes or heroines in other books or cantos, making visible for a moment the unbroken web of humanity toughly spun behind the six books and concluding cantos of The Faerie Queene. Guyon, for example, has been encouraged by his belief that ‘goodly counsell… Is meetest med'cine’ to stir himself from stunned shock at the sight of Amavia and to offer her relief (II i 44). We sympathize, too, with the Hermit's realization of the physical limits of his pharmacopeia and his uncertainty in handling psychiatric tools when we recall Glauce's difficulties with lovestruck Britomart, smitten by the vision of Artegall (VI vi, III ii 24). Like the Hermit, the old nurse finds her medicinal cunning exhausted by her charge: nought will prevail, ‘Nor herbes, nor charmes, nor counsell, that is chiefe/ And choisest med'cine for sicke harts reliefe’ (iii 5). Similar structural parallels obtain between the poet's admonition to ‘Give salves to every sore, but counsell to the minde’ (VI vi 5), the Hermit's confession that he, like the lovers, ‘in vaine doe[s] salves …applie’ (6), and puzzled Glauce's superficially confident assertion to the fearful Britomart ‘For never sore, but might a salve obtaine’ (III ii 35).
The proverb is thus one of many ways of creating contrast and similarity, echo and recollection, and significant variation within repetition, by which Spenser generally articulates the large structure and meaning of The Faerie Queene. While not so substantial and impressive as a Bower of Bliss, a Garden of Adonis, or a Temple of Venus, the repeated proverbs weave important thematic strands into the larger tapestry of the poem.
In addition to offering various aspects of the major intellectual themes of the poem, proverbial elements contribute to characterization. The simplest proverbial materials— proverbial phrases or comparisons—quickly establish for the minor characters a minimal armature, or they rapidly convey fleeting impressions of abstract qualities. When Talus first appears, for example, he is said to be ‘strong as Lyon’ to represent enforcement of the law, but also ‘swift as swallow’ to represent the speed with which justice should be carried out (FQ V i 20; cf Tilley L 308, s 1023). Florimell is first seen on a milk-white palfrey (for gentle purity); her face is ‘as cleare as Christall’ but, through fear, as ‘white as whales bone’ (III i 15; cf c 135, w 279). At stanza 17, she is pursued by the grisly Foster who must chase her ‘through thicke and thin’ (her flight, his onrush) in hopes of attaining her ‘by hooke or crooke’ (his unrelenting lust). The spectral Maleger runs swift as the wind, his look as ‘pale and wan as ashes,’ his body ‘leane and meagre as a rake’ (II xi 20–2; cf w 411, A 339, R 22). The light and idly mirthful Phaedria sings as ‘loud as larke’; her shallow vessel slides ‘More swift, then swallow,’ while she herself is ‘more sweet, then any bird on bough,’ and careless or fearless of ‘how the wind do blow’ (II vi 3ff; cf L 70, s 1023, B 359).
Spenser also uses patterns of proverbial speech to show the inadequacy of an inexperienced hero and the seasoned, at times startling, wisdom of his counselor, as in the exchange between Calidore and old Meliboe (VI ix 29–33), and in Una's warning to Redcrosse at the dark cave-mouth in the Wandering Wood (I i 12–13). Her first comment is a sententious warning that where Danger seems to lurk it is wisdom to provide beforehand (cf Henryson's aphorism in Whiting D 18). Then she adds a counter proverb from her higher wisdom, ‘Oft fire is without smoke’ (contrast ‘There is no fire without some smoke’ Tilley F 282; see Doyle 1972), supported by the accepted observation, ‘And perill without show.’ Redcrosse, young, zealous, and overconfident, resorts to his own variant, a conventional assurance that ‘Vertue gives her selfe light, through darkenesse for to wade’ (C.G.Smith 820, citing Ashley's contemporary work Of Honour; cf Tilley 181, 81, ‘Innocency bringeth with her, her owne defence’). Redcrosse here as elsewhere has trouble differentiating between appearance and reality; as Una further urges, before he can prevail he needs to add to his force a faith tested by experience—‘the evidence of things which are not sene’ (Heb 11.1).
Una's reluctance to accept the conventional wisdom of proverbs is further shown in a marvelous stichomythic exchange of proverb and sententia between her and Arthur in I vii 39–42, 51. Brought almost to despair by Redcrosse's imprisonment by Orgoglio and the failure to free her beleaguered parents, for a while she fights off Arthur's comforting words. She is aware of the proverbial advice offered in September 12–13: ‘gall not…old griefe,’ for it rips open causes for new woe (cf FQ I vii 39); but Arthur offers another form of the proverb of counsel that the Hermit offers Timias and Serena: ‘counsell mittigates the greatest smart.’ He adds, ‘Found never helpe, who never would his hurts [griefs] impart,’ a proverbial variant on a frequent topic in the mental world of Spenser's heroes and heroines, shepherds, knights and ladies (Tilley G 447). Una counters with a variant of the proverb ‘Great griefs are silent; small sorrows speak’ (s 664). With this utterance Spenser establishes a little structure within the canto as well as launching an exchange of proverbs and sententiae of counsel-ingrief. Through reason, Arthur is able to persuade Una to tell her sad tale and impart her grief (cf Erasmus Adagia Intro, section 7, ‘Proverbs are a means to persuasion’). Una's grief subsides and she ends her account with her initial demurrer rephrased as ‘This is my cause of griefe, more great, then may be told.’ She is responsive to reason; and if at times skeptical, she does not abruptly dismiss the advice and comfort offered her. She and Arthur ultimately communicate with one another in a sort of proverbial shorthand mutually exchangeable.
It is tempting to connect Spenser's use of proverbs and sententiae with his desire to relate communal ‘authority’ and wisdom to individual apprehension (Cincotta 1980). For example, in the Error episode, readers are drawn up short with the poet's intrusion, ‘God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine’ (I i 18); we realize that we, too, are involved in error. Moreover, Una's counter-proverb, that fire indeed is often without smoke, provides salient advice along with her sententious imperative to add faith to force. Here Spenser predicates his own moral authority as a narrator upon the authority of commonly held wisdom; and, through freshly fashioned versions of that wisdom, he recreates his ‘authorities’ and manifests them as his own (Cincotta 1980).
In her conversation with Arthur, Una uses the power of the proverb to apply the intelligently sustained weight of the experience of the community to her plight. Nine closely related proverbs in three stanzas all contribute cumulatively to Arthur's ‘goodly reason, and well guided speach’ (I vii 40–2). Of equal importance is the weightiness of the alexandrine and the surprise of the counter proverbs which suggest authorial discontent with accepting ordinary proverbial lore in extraordinary circumstance. The alexandrines often emerge as proverb-like statements (when they are not actually proverbs), with their own authority and a new moral weight.
As William Baldwin observed in his Treatise of Morall Phylosophie (1547), ‘although preceptes and counsayles be the most playne and easye, yet lacke they the grace of delyte, whiche in theyr Proverbes they have supplyed’—supplied ‘so fynely and so wyttely, that they both delyte and perswade excedynglye’ (sig M7r-v). When mixed with ‘suche piththynes in wordes and sentence,’ they give us occasion to muse and study. They become an important means of supporting the structure of a long narrative poem, a major way of enlivening and confirming a ‘new’ moral teaching, and a sympathetically new yet plausible teaching voice.
ROBERT STARR KINSMAN
The principal indexes of proverbs are Tilley 1950 and Whiting 1968. Tilley tends to include commonplace wisdom as well as true proverbs and in this regard should be used with caution; otherwise, an excellent work. For corrected dates, missed examples, and newly legitimated proverbs, Tilley and Whiting should be supplemented by three recent works: The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (ODEP) 1970 3rd ed rev F.P.Wilson (Oxford); R.W.Dent 1981 Shakespeare's Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley and Los Angeles); and Dent 1984 Proverbial Language in English Drama Exclusive of Shakespeare, 1495– 1616: An Index (Berkeley and Los Angeles).
The outstanding early guide to classical proverbs (of which many English proverbs are simple translations) is Desiderius Erasmus Adagia (expanded in eds from 1509 to 1536), in ed 1703–6, 2; an English version is translated by Margaret Mann Phillips and annotated by R.A.B. Mynors in Erasmus ed 1974–, 31ff; this ed also contains Erasmus’ introduction on the rhetoric of proverbs. Many of Erasmus’ adages are cross-indexed with their English translations in Tilley and ODEP, though neither is complete. For Erasmus’ own use of proverbs, see Clarence H.Miller 1978 ‘The Logic and Rhetoric of Proverbs in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly’ in DeMolen 1978:83–98. Spenser's proverbs have been studied in detail by C.G.Smith 1970, a work that unfortunately confuses sententiae and ordinary sentiments with proverbs. See also Charles Clay Doyle 1972 ‘Smoke and Fire: Spenser's Counter Proverb’ Proverbium 18:683–5. The structural significance of proverbs in Spenser is examined by Mary Ann Cincotta 1980 ‘Community and Discourse in the “Faerie Queene”: A Study in Literary History’ (diss, Univ of California, Berkeley).
For additional background in English, see F.P.Wilson 1969 ‘The Proverbial Wisdom of Shakespeare’ in his Shakespearian and Other Studies ed Helen Gardner (Oxford) pp 143–75. For the tradition and its development, see Archer Taylor The Proverb 1931 (Cambridge, Mass); also Natalie Zemon Davis 1975 ‘Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors’ in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford) pp 227–67; and John Heywood 1963 A Dialogue of Proverbs ed Rudolph E.Habenicht (Berkeley and Los Angeles).
As the guiding force of the Christian universe, providence was distinguished at an early stage from the classical concept of fate. According to Boethius, ‘Providence is the divine reason itself which belongs to the most high ruler of all things and which governs all things; Fate, however, belongs to all mutable things and is the disposition by which Providence joins all things in their own order… Thus Providence is the unfolding of temporal events as this is present to the vision of the divine mind; but this same unfolding of events as it is worked out in time is called Fate’ (Consolation of Philosophy 4 prose 6, ed 1962).
In Spenser's time, the theory of providence received support from theologians as diverse in sympathy as John Knox and Richard Hooker and is clearly implied in the Thirty-nine Articles (17), the official profession of the Anglican church. Similarly, English historians from Foxe to Raleigh favored a providential view of human history, as did Milton (who endeavors to ‘assert eternal providence’ in Paradise Lost) and Spenser himself. In Vewe of Ireland, Irenius interprets the fall all of Rome not as a cultural disaster but as an instance of how the ‘singuler providence of god’ works to convert pagan nations (Var Prose p 92). Nevertheless, the same speaker's initially deterministic view of Irish history is rejected by Eudoxus, who attributes the present state of the country not to ‘anye suche fatall Course or appointment of god’ but to the failure of human policy (p 44). By making man responsible for his own errors, Spenser guards against an obvious abuse of the providential concept while maintaining an ordered view of history.
Throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser frequently calls attention to the providential pattern underlying an apparently fortuitous sequence of events. From a human viewpoint, for example, Redcrosse stumbles upon the Tree of Life by ‘chaunce,’ yet ‘eternall God that chaunce did guide’ (I xi 45). Similarly, ‘Eternall providence exceeding thought’ contrives a ‘wondrous way’ to rescue Una from Sansloy (vi 7). Speaking as God's viceregent, Nature informs Mutabilitie that time and fortune are merely the instruments of a grand design intended to restore creation to its original perfection. In effect, she subordinates fortune to fate but, still unsatisfied, proceeds beyond fate to a vision of a timeless and changeless state partaking of eternity (VII vii 58–9).
The poem's most striking instance of divine intervention is the dispatching of an angel to succor the fallen Guyon, an incident prefaced by one of Spenser's most explicit stateme nts of the providential outlook: heaven's care of man is manifest in the ‘exceeding grace/Of highest God’ whose boundless love charges the spiritual powers with the protection of the church ‘millitant’ (II viii 1–2). Providence is usually associated with ‘grace’ even when the agency employed is human, as in Arthur's several interventions (eg, I viii 1) and his own deliverance by Timias (II xi 30).
Romance narrative with its multiple plots, coincidences, and accidents provides a particularly good vehicle for conveying the paradoxical idea of ordered contingency (see I.G.MacCaffrey 1976:372–6). The effect is greatly enhanced when the eventual resolution is foreseen at an early stage, since the artist's foresight may then be used to suggest God's ‘wise foresight’ (Heavenly Love 109): aesthetic order reflects providential order. Thus Britomart learns the full personal and national consequences of her love for Artegall before her quest has properly begun. However, since ‘Providence heavenly passeth living thought’ (III v 27), various vatic figures need to explain the plan to those concerned. The resulting insight assists these characters to come to terms with the problems of pain and disappointment (iv II). For example, Merlin advises Britomart to ‘submit’ herself to the will of providence (iii 24), and she in turn exhorts the despairing Scudamour to ‘submit…to high providence… For who nill bide the burden of distresse,/Must not here thinke to live’ (xi 14). Difficulties encountered on the quest hereby take on the status of spiritual trials. Through ‘heavenly Contemplation,’ we may grasp the concept of providence intellectually, but in the everyday course of events, we must endure the cruel vicissitudes of fortune: pain was an essential part of Christ's earthly ministry (I x 50).
Spenser associates the idea of providence with that of election, but their exact relationship was a central problem of contemporary theology. From Una (Truth), Redcrosse learns that he is ‘chosen’ (I ix 53), and his eventual sainthood is declared before the conflict with the Dragon (x 61). The ‘Hierusalem’ he glimpses is intended only for the ‘chosen,’ though Christ died for ‘the sinnes of all the world’ (x 57). As a result, an aura of mystery surrounds the workings of grace, making it unclear to what extent Spenser identified providence with predestination. The narrative presentation is balanced between apparently free and conscious acts of will and a strong element of spiritual determinism. Britomart ‘submits’ to God's will, but her love for Artegall is initially involuntary and occasioned solely by ‘the streight course of heavenly destiny,/ Led with eternall providence’ (III iii 24). Whereas individuals remain responsible for their own failures, ‘all the good is Gods, both power and eke will’ (I x 1). The ‘sonnes of Day’ are saved, while those of Night are apparently abandoned—for ‘who can turne the streame of destinee,/Or breake the chayne of strong necessitee,/Which fast is tyde to Joves eternall seat?’ (v 25).
RICHARD A.McCABE
For the religious background, see Thomas 1971, ch 4, and Patrides 1966. The historical background is treated in Patrides and in Arthur B.Ferguson 1979 Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England (Durham, NC), and Kelly 1970. The connection between Spenser's Mutabilitie and providence is noted in Lewis J.Owen 1972 ‘Mutable in Eternity: Spenser's despair and the Multiple Forms of Mutabilitie’ JMRS 2:49–68; see also Richard A.McCabe 1989 The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Dublin).
The modern term psychology expresses a concept for which Spenser's nearest equivalent would be the doctrine of the bodily spirits; but in most medical opinion of the sixteenth century, the bodily spirits also accounted for what we would call physiology: they kept the body alive and working, accounted for the operations of the five senses, the brain, and for all movement, both physical and emotional. The elements of the doctrine derived originally from different traditions, both medical and philosophical; but by Spenser's day there was a reasonably unified and consistent body of thought.
It is important at the outset to understand that in all later medieval theory the bodily spirits within man differed fundamentally from the soul. The human soul was held to be immaterial, intellectual, and immortal; during life, it inhabited a body which was made up of the four material elements, insentient and doomed to decay. Between the two (Alma and her castle) was supposed to exist a middle term: the bodily spirit, whose substance was material but whose matter was so fine as to be imperceptible to the senses, like a gas. The spirit kept the body alive and endowed it with the powers of sensation and motion. Its departure broke the link which held soul and body together and thus caused death, but it was not itself immortal and would eventually decay into its elements.
The terms are confusing because they come from several different traditions. Paul speaks of the opposition of body and spirit (eg, Rom 8), which medieval writers would call body and soul. The notion of the bodily spirit comes from Stoic philosophy, in which pneuma (spirit) fulfills all the functions of the soul but is nonetheless a material substance. Medieval writers such as Avicenna (d 1037) accepted the Aristotelian definition of soul and body as form and matter and, at the same time, accepted from medical tradition the Stoic pneuma as a middle term between the two. Thus the term spirit may be used in religious contexts (eg, Heavenly Beautie 259) to mean the soul, but in medical and philosophical contexts, it is usually a technical term to define the soul's ‘first instrument’ and the body's subtlest part.
The theory of the bodily spirit was a necessity for medicine. Both Aristotelian philosophy and Christian belief maintained that the soul was incorporeal and the seat of reason and will; but it clearly could not be the same thing as life or the powers of sensation and motion: they may be interrupted, impaired, or lost without losing one's soul—for example, the insane were not without soul even though they seemed to be without reason. Hence it was necessary to postulate some other invisible agent—the bodily spirit—to account for the processes of life, sensation, motion, and the overt functioning of reason in man. This agent was regarded as corporeal because it could be damaged by material means—a blow on the head, for instance. Physicians did not concern themselves with the soul; but the bodily spirit—the instrument by which the soul communicated with the body and which was prone to all the mortal afflictions—was entirely within their province.
There is some dispute in the textbooks on whether the bodily spirit is essentially one or three. Avicenna holds that there is a single spirit, generated in the heart, which undergoes processes of differentiation in the brain, liver, sense organs, and genitals. Other medieval authorities, however, tend to write as if there were three different kinds of spirit, called ‘natural,’ ‘vital,’ and ‘animal,’ each one refined out of the one below. Haly Abbas (d 995), for instance, explains in detail how the food from the intestines is taken to the liver, and there converted into blood and endowed with natural spirit; the blood then takes the natural spirit through the veins to all parts of the body. The natural spirit is responsible for nourishment, growth, and the reproductive faculties. The great vein from the liver carries blood to the right ventricle of the heart. There the blood is heated, augmented by air drawn in by the lungs, and filtered through the septum of the heart into the left ventricle, where it is endowed with vital spirit. Arteries then carry vital spirit to all the organs of the body to give them warmth and life. The vital spirit in the heart is also the cause of ‘passions’: the emotions of joy and sorrow, wrath and fear. The carotid arteries carry some of the vital spirit to the base of the brain. There the spirit is again combined with air drawn in through the nostrils, filtered through the rete mirabile (a network of fine arteries), and refined until it turns into animal spirit. The animal spirit fills the ‘cells’ or ventricles of the brain and there operates the five senses and the inward wits; it passes thence down the spinal cord and through the nerves to bring sensation and motion to the various limbs and organs of the body. It was argued that the existence of animal spirit could be proved by the fact that a paralyzed limb loses sensation and motion but is still warm and alive: clearly, vital spirit can get to it but the nerve conveying animal spirit is broken or damaged. Loss of animal spirit results in what we would call a coma; loss of vital spirit means death.
Haly Abbas and Avicenna provide the clearest exposition of the theory of bodily spirit; but the theory was considered literal fact in Spenser's day, and references to it are widespread. Brief accounts may be found in popular encyclopedias (eg, Gregor Reisch Margarita philosophica, Bartholomaeus Anglicus De proprietatibus rerum) as well as in medical and quasi-medical handbooks (eg, Thomas Vicary Anatomie 1577, and seven other editions [this is in fact a reworking of a text written in 1392; see J.F.Payne British Medical Journal 1896 (25 Jan): 200–3]; Lanfranc of Milan Chirurgia parva tr J.Halle 1565; Gratarolus Castel of Memorie 1562). Shakespeare refers to the ‘nimble spirits in the arteries’ (Love's Labor's Lost IV iii 302; see also Milton Paradise Lost 5.100–13, 479–90, 8.466; quotations in OED sv ‘spirit’ 16).
The natural spirit in the liver does not have implications for what we call psychology, but the vital and animal spirits explained a great deal to Spenser which would now come under that heading. Since the spirit was made up of the four elements, it was open to the same kinds of defects of temperament as the rest of the human body. Its quantity as well as its quality could affect a man; a person could be ‘low-spirited’ in a perfectly literal sense. Since the three spirits were either fundamentally all one, or were refined in stages out of the natural spirit, the quality of one could affect the quality of the others; and all depended on the nature of the blood, of the food and drink consumed, and of the surrounding air.
The chief function of the vital spirit in the heart and arteries is to preserve life and natural warmth. If the vital spirit goes out of the body completely, the creature dies. Spenser's most frequent use of the terminology of bodily spirits is in this context: when the shepherd brushes the gnat, ‘streight the spirite out of his senses flew,/And life out of his members did depart’ (Gnat 292–3); when Belphoebe splits Lust's throat with an arrow, ‘all his vitall spirites thereby spild’ (FQ IV vii 31). Since the spirit is nourished by blood, one can die from excessive bleeding: Priamond's ‘streames of purple bloud issuing rife,/Let forth his wearie ghost’ (IV iii 12). The ‘litle rivers’ of Triamond's ‘vitall flood’ (28) stream from his wounds and enfeeble him, but since he is magically endowed with the souls and spirits of his two brothers, he takes a lot of killing. He loses one ‘living spright’ through a throat wound, and another through a wound in the armpit; he is on his last ‘spright,’ his own, when he is reprieved by Cambina. Lack of food and drink naturally lead to lack of blood and hence a potentially fatal reduction in vital spirit: the Red Cross Knight, starved in Orgoglio's dungeon, has ‘all his vitall powres/Decayd, and all his flesh shronk up like withered flowres’ (I viii 41). Air, too, is required to ‘feed’ the vital spirit. Mutabilitie exclaims, ‘O weake life! that does leane/ On thing so tickle as th'unsteady ayre’; and she points out that the quality of the air affects the vital spirit directly: ‘The faire doth it prolong; the fowle doth it impaire’ (VII vii 22). Hence perfumed, temperate, or pleasant air has an immediate effect on the spirit: the paradise of flowers in Ruines of Time 521–2 is ‘Such as on earth man could not more devize,/With pleasures choyce to feed his cheerefull sprights.’ In short, death in Spenser is ‘nought but parting of the breath’ (FQ VII vii 46), when the vital spirit is literally expired or breathed out (Hymne of Beautie 102).
The other function of the vital spirit in the heart, as some of the above quotations show, is to express, or perhaps more properly ‘suffer,’ the passions. Usually classified as wrath, joy, sorrow, and fear, the passions were held to be the physical sensations resulting from the vital spirit's reaction to pleasant or unpleasant stimuli. Wrath, for instance, is produced when an exterior occasion of wrath (which can be an image in the mind) causes the spirit and blood in the heart to rush out suddenly to the extremities. It heats and dries the body, strengthens the power of choler or yellow bile, turns the eyes of an angry man red, and makes his face and body swell. A man whose temperament is naturally choleric will be more susceptible to the stimuli of wrath, and indulging in the passion will also dispose the spirit to receive the passion more easily the next time. Avicenna explains that since wrath occurs when the spirit is plentiful, clear, and hot, a person's proclivity to it will be increased when his blood has these same qualities; hence Haly Abbas prescribes rose water, camphor, vinegar, and fish as a suitable diet for the naturally wrathful and prohibits the consumption of wine.
The other passions are produced similarly: joy occurs when the spirit rushes out of the heart plentifully, but it is cooler than wrath and therefore less dangerous. Fear and sorrow occur when the spirit shrinks back into the heart; thin watery blood tends to produce fear; thick, cloudy, hot blood produces sorrow. Haly Abbas adds verecundia (shame) and care to the list of passions; many more could be added by postulating different combinations of temperament, volume, and movement in the spirit.
Spenser presents a whole array of passions dwelling within an arrased chamber (the heart and pericardium) in Alma's castle (II ix 33–44). Shamefastnesse, with her continual blushes, clearly has a common origin with Haly Abbas’ verecundia; Prays-desire does not have a medical counterpart but is probably related to audacia (boldness). The poet's emotion in Mother Hubberds Tale 15–40 (and Ruines of Time 575) which makes his ‘spirite heavie and diseased’ is clearly tristitia (sorrow). The conflicting emotions of the ill-tempered Britomart when she first sees Marinell are compared to a sudden storm which clears the air: ‘Her former sorrow into suddein wrath,/Both coosen passions of distroubled spright,/Converting’ (in iv 12–13). The thick, hot dampness of her spirit in sorrow is converted to the clear heat of wrath, and she severely wounds Marinell. Similarly, when Pyrochles sees Arthur kill his brother, ‘the stony feare/ Ran to his hart, and all his sence dismayd’; when he rallies, ‘vile disdaine and rancour …gnaw/His hart in twaine’ (II viii 46–50). When Malbecco gives himself up to jealousy and grief, ‘all the passions, that in man may light,/Did him attonce oppresse, and vex his caytive spright’ (III x 17).
An excess of any one of the passions can kill: the spirit may burst out of the body in joy or wrath, or shrink up to nothing in fear or sorrow. Una nearly dies of grief when she blieves that Redcrosse is dead. Her dwarf has to struggle to keep her vital spirit within her body (‘So hardly he the flitted life does win,/Unto her native prison to retourne’), and then Arthur's wise counsel is needed to remove some of the ‘carefull cold’ from her heart (I vii 21, 39). Redcrosse himself has been struck down by fear in the same canto: ‘crudled cold his corage gan assaile,/And chearefull bloud in faintnesse chill did melt’ (6).
The passions are not moral states but physical ones. The disposition to one passion or another is present in all men; but indulgence in any one passion strengthens the disposition to it rather than tempering it. Medical authorities, like moral philosophers, advocated the proper checking and balancing of passions so that they would not get out of control. Spenser's Hermit in Book VI could ‘al the passions heale, which wound the weaker spright’ (vi 3), and Guyon feels passions but masters them, but Furor is an embodied passion which may only be restrained, not destroyed.
When the vital spirit turns into animal spirit in the brain, it passes through the three ventricles of the brain, operates the organs of the five senses and the inward wits, and brings about voluntary motion by means of the nerves. The spirit in the sensory nerves transmits sensations from the eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin to the front ventricle, where sensation is actually effected. It was debated whether spirits went out from the eye to the object of vision, or the spirit in the eye received an impression from a visible object. Spenser, at least in his description of Corflambo, seems to believe that the eye casts out rays (IV viii 39; cf Hymne of Beautie 232–8). The primary function of the first ventricle or ‘cell’ was to receive and combine sense impressions and to hold them until judgment was passed on them by the power in the second ventricle. The power of movement received its impulse from this judgment: if it was favorable, the appetitive or concupiscible faculty moved the creature (animal or human) to seek or grasp the object; if the verdict was hostile, the irascible faculty moved the creature to attack or flee. The nerves then carried the message to the limbs, the vital spirit in the heart reacted with a passion, and the creature moved accordingly. The last ventricle was thought to be a storehouse where the results of these mental processes were stored up and remembered.
All these powers in the brain were properly held to be part of the sensitive soul, that is, common to man and animal. The human rational soul was supposed to rule over these powers; but, lacking an organ, it could operate only through them. The complicated (and, since the Fall, disorderly) relations between the rational and sensitive souls accounted for the human moral dilemma during life.
Medical writers approached the powers of the brain from a straightforward empirical tradition going back to Galen. He had described three case histories to illustrate what happens when each ventricle is damaged: the first patient suffered from hallucinations but was otherwise reasonable; the second perceived the world around him correctly but drew irrational conclusions from his observations; the third suffered from total amnesia. From these examples, Galen deduced that the first ventricle dealt with the mind's reception of the real world, the second with judgment, and the third with memory. This simple division runs throughout the whole medieval medical tradition and clearly underlies the three chambers in the tower of Alma's castle. The anatomical researches of Vesalius in the earlier sixteenth century had confirmed the number and positions of the ventricles but not their functions. Spenser disregards Vesalius’ doubts and observes the older medical scheme, although he combines it ingeniously with other triads of the three parts of prudence and the three ages of man.
The first ventricle, the chamber of Phantastes (II ix 50–1), is the most interesting and complicated of the three. It houses the power which Aristotle calls phantasia (although he had placed it in the heart): it was the power responsible for receiving, combining, and holding sense impressions after the sense object had disappeared, and for producing the phenomena of dreams. Since for the Middle Ages Aristotle's fundamental dictum was that ‘all our knowledge comes from sense impressions/there was considerable interest in phantasia, which was frequently subdivided into a number of related powers known variously as sensus communis (the ‘common’ sense), imaginatio (imagination), fantasia (fantasy or fancy), or vis imaginativa (imaginative power; see *imagination). Physicians were less interested than philosophers in the subtleties of these distinctions and tended to talk as if there were one single imaginative power; they used a variety of names for it, but phantasia is perhaps the most common.
The first impression of Phantastes’ chamber is one of confusion: a vast multiplicity of sense impressions pours continually into the front ventricle during waking hours— impressions which, for the most part, are not sorted or recorded but simply received. This is the function philosophers called sensus communis, where the evidence of all the five senses is collected together. Next, the front ventricle stores images or impressions after the object is no longer present to the senses; this function was sometimes called imaginatio, and was often compared to a kind of memory. The third important function of the power in the first ventricle was distinguished by the philosophers under the name fantasia or vis imaginativa. This was the ability to join and divide the phantasmata or sense impressions in order to produce, out of both fresh and stored impressions, new images to express or illustrate the processes of thought. Fantasia alters and combines, inventing chimeras and golden worlds ‘such as in the world were never yit’ ix 50) by using the evidence of the actual world in a selective and creative way. Dreams were the proof of the existence of fantasia: when the senses are shut off by sleep and the control of the rational soul is lifted, some power in the brain must be responsible for the ‘reappearance’ of images in peculiar combinations and sequences. (Sleep was caused by damp vapors rising to the brain; it was necessary to refresh the spirit and restore the bodily powers; cf Daphnaïda 470–4.)
Since all knowledge enters the soul through the senses, according to medieval Aristotelianism, even visions and prophecies have to be clothed in sense impressions before they can be apprehended; on a more mundane level, ideas about the future can be expressed only in terms of imaginary projections of what is known now. Hence Phantastes ‘could things to come foresee’ (49). He seems half crazy because his realm deals with experience as it happens before being interpreted, with all the ‘creative’ aspects of imagination but without judgment or selection, with dreams, and with inspired or merely dimly apprehended visions of what will come to be.
In animals, phantasia presents no particular problem. It presents an image on which cogitatio (here ‘instinct’) in the next ventricle passes judgment and arouses the motive powers: the sheep sees the wolf and runs away; the dog remembers the image of the bone and goes to dig it up. But man cannot obey his instincts so simply; his reason may, and often ought, to countermand his instinctive judgment (as Guyon finds in II i 8–31). Hence the quality and status of the images in phantasia become a subject of great anxiety. One may move too quickly to assent to a pleasing image: Arthur finds at the trial of Duessa that ‘His former fancies ruth he gan repent’ (V ix 49). The devil can manipulate images in imagination, especially in dreams, to tempt man to assent to sin ‘And And with false shewes abuse his fantasy,’ as Archimago does (I i 46). Artegall finds he must beware of his imagination's tendency to free associate about Britomart; the severe beauty of her face ‘his ranging fancie did refraine’ (IV vi 33).
The creative activities of fantasy are dangerous in many other cases. Diseases like melancholy and disordered emotions like jealousy create disturbing images and to ‘fayning fansie represent/Sights never seene, and thousand shadowes vaine,/To breake his sleepe, and waste his ydle braine’ (Hymne of Love 254–6). This is what affects Scudamour in the house of Care and Britomart in Artegall's absence (FQ IV v 43, V vi 3–19). The sick poet in Mother Hubberd is comforted by friends ‘With talke, that might unquiet fancies reave’ (24). Poets, who dealt with the images of fantasy, were warned to beware that their images reflect something worthy, not something frivolous. The Muse Polyhymnia complains that contemporary poets ‘Have mard the face of goodly Poësie,/And made a monster of their fantasie’ (Teares 557–8); and the verses of the courtier Ape are ‘sugrie sweete’ to ‘allure/Chast Ladies eares to fantasies impure’ (MHT 819–20).
Most of Spenser's references to fantasy concern the phenomenon of falling in love. Amorous love was considered by medieval physicians to be a malady, the result of a disordered judgment on the sense impression derived from a particular woman (the textbooks consider it to be a male disease). According to Arnald of Villanova (d 1311), the spirit in the central ventricle gets overheated and falsely judges the sense object to be supremely desirable; the heat dries out the sense impression in the front ventricle so that it literally sticks to the brain, and the judgment cannot shift its attention elsewhere. Hence to ‘have a fancy’ for someone is really to have someone in mind; the insomnia, sighing, lack of appetite, and other symptoms which accompany love are all different symptoms of overheated bodily spirit.
In Spenser's poetry, this rather clinical view of love is affected by the grander Platonizing idea of love as a divine furor (madness). Yet characters as diverse as Britomart and Hellenore are guided by images in ‘feigning fancie’ (III iv 5, x 8), and Marinell's malady, ‘which afflicted his engrieved mind,’ displays all the classic symptoms of medieval love (IV xii 12–35). In the Fowre Hymnes, Spenser distinguishes the lower love or ‘Weake fancies’ felt by baseborn minds from the idealizing passion of the ‘refyned mynd’; the beauty beloved by the latter is the ‘mirrour of so heavenly light[,]/Whose image printing in his deepest wit,/He thereon feeds his hungrie fantasy,/Still full, yet never satisfyde with it’ (HHL 263, HL 19, 196–9). Here the creative power of phantasia reaches its highest point: it is able to create an image of perfection out of the imperfect images received by the senses. Such an image then becomes the main moving force in the lover's life, since his whole being, his judgment and bodily spirits, move in accord with the reflection of divine beauty. The lover, seeing this image ‘so inly faire,’ finds it ‘with his spirits proportion to agree,’ and ‘thereon fixeth all his fantasie,/ And fully setteth his felicitie,/Counting it fairer, then it is indeede’ (HB 225–30).
In the medieval scheme of things, the highest power is always cogitatio, which inhabits the central ventricle. It judges the images presented to it by phantasia, and judging is a higher faculty than combining or creating. Spenser presents cogitatio as an august ruler whose chamber is above all orderly, and full of laws and decisions. According to medieval philosophers, strictly speaking, human reason does not ‘live’ in the brain but merely acts through the power which operates instinct in animals. Physicians, however, tend to write as if reason actually dwells in the middle ventricle, just as it does in Alma's castle.
The last power, memory, inhabits the rear ventricle which slopes down, ‘somewhat… declind,’ towards the spinal cord (FQ II ix 55). The memory stores up all the decisions and actions of cogitatio. Techniques for improving one's memory range from recipes to improve the organ and its animal spirit (eg, the consumption of ginger) to the practices of the art of memory, a system of organized recollection based on a sequence of ideas (Anamnestes). The memory, like the imagination, serves cogitatio by providing examples and precedents for sequences of thought—history, instead of imagination's poetry and sense impressions. The hierarchical structure of the powers of the sensitive soul, with its intrinsic principles of tempering and controlling, is reflected chiefly in the imagery of FQ II, where the temperate hero must learn to know himself and his powers before he can bind Acrasia.
E.RUTH HARVEY
Arnald of Villanova 1585 De amore heroico in Opera (Basel); Avicenna 1564 De viribus cordis in Libri in re medica omnes 2 vols (Venice); [Costa ben Luca (d 923)] 1539 De animae et spiritus discrimine liber in Constantinus Africanus Opera (Basel); Haly Abbas (‘Alī ibn al-‘Abbās alMajāsū) 1492 [Regalis dispositio] (Venice); Christopher Langton [1550?] An Introduction into Phisycke (London; rpt Amsterdam and New York 1970).
Babb 1951, ch 1; Bamborough 1952; E.Ruth Harvey 1975 The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London); Rossky 1958.
In its literal meaning ‘soul-study’ and in its implicit allusion to the mythic figure of Psyche, the word psychology is more appropriate to medieval and Renaissance culture than to our own. From the seventeenth century to the present, psychology has shifted its focus from soul to mind and mental processes, from a transcendent conception of human nature to a materialistic physiological basis. The Elizabethans, however, still viewed the human soul essentially in mythic Christian-Platonic terms, as a transcendent entity engaged in a quest for moral and spiritual fulfillment.
In his Timaeus and Republic, Plato set the basis for Spenser's psychological model. (1) The soul, originating in an eternal realm of pure forms, has descended into the body at three levels (brain's reason, heart's irascible passions, belly's or liver's concupiscent appetites), comparable to the tripartite hierarchy of the social organism and cosmos. (2) The soul's highest power, intellect, is capable of grasping the Ideas of transcendent reality (including the Form of its own nature), dimly perceived in the shadowy appearances of sensory reality. (3) Mathematics and geometry provide special insight into the soul's essence and structural relation to the body. (4) Orphic myth and allegory, in spite of Plato's denigration of poetic fictions in Ion, contribute revealing parables of the human condition (the soul as winged, or as flying chariot, descending through the spheres into a confusing fleshly ‘cave’ or a divinely ordered ‘castle,’ and eventually reascending to the realm of pure Ideas). (5) The purpose of moral philosophy is to sustain the hierarchy of the embodied soul (ie, as ‘castle’) and ultimately to enable the rational essence to transcend its fleshly housing altogether.
The Platonic model, especially as adapted and transformed by Neoplatonic and Judeo-Christian tradition (Philo, Origen, Plotinus, Macrobius, Augustine, Boethius, 12th-c Chartrians, Bonaventura, 15th-c Italian Platonists, English Renaissance Platonists), is crucial to Spenser's allegories of the embodied soul. His characters are usually conceived in Platonic fashion, as philosophic essences more than as physiological or existential beings; they do not have distinctive physical features, except as symbolic indicators of their moral or spiritual natures. Spenser's heroes do not ‘learn from experience,’ but attain intellectual insight into the ideal human form by means of epiphanic moments when the hero is enlightened by divinely informed seers (Una, Heavenly Contemplation; the Palmer, Alma's sages; Merlin; Cambina, Concord-Venus; Isis’ priests, Mercilla; the Hermit, Colin; Dame Nature). The iconographic centers of The Faerie Queene, especially the house or garden appearing in cantos ix–x of most books, reveal the ideal human form: the neat hierarchies and polarities of the soul's powers and operations, and its reflection of divinity—as order, life, love, or light. Of particular importance is the hero's perceiving and enacting the human form as a Christian-Platonic hierarchy of powers: triadic family groups, three-layered houses and gardens, sequences of triple temptation or triple challenge. Even more than Plato, Spenser uses traditional mythic figures (Psyche, Venus, Cupid, Proteus, etc) as well as original fictions (Caelia, Alma, Agape, Pastorella, Marinell, Cambell and Triamond, Scudamour, etc) to express the nature and operations, source and destiny, of the human soul. Following the composite psychology of Plato's Republic and of much subsequent Christian-Platonic allegory, Spenser's characters are thematically related, forming types, antitypes, or components of the hero. (See *allegory, *psychomachia.) The central Platonic myth, the soul's descent and ascent, is pervasive in The Faerie Queene: the hero descends into the shadows of Error's forest and den, Night's underworld, Orgoglio's dungeon, Mammon's subterranean dwelling, Proteus’ underwater realm, Daemogorgon's lair, Lust's den, the Brigands’ caves; and contrarily, the hero ascends to a vantage point in the bodily temple or landscape which affords a glimpse of transcendent reality: Contemplation's mountain, Alma's brain-turret, Venus’ ‘stately Mount’ in the Garden of Adonis, or atop her Temple altar, Mercilla's lofty throne, Mount Acidale.
As is evident from many of these examples, Platonic features of the microcosm and the soul's moral struggle have been trans-muted into a broader Christian perspective. First, Spenser's primary model of psychology is not Alma's castle, but the house of Holiness, where each of the triadic powers is turned toward a transcendent end by the three mystic ways: purgation of belly's appetites (‘proud humors to abate’), illumination of heart's passions, and union of mind with God. Second, Plato's psychosocial organism in the Republic (philosopher as head, warriors as heart, workers as belly) is spiritually recast: Christ-like knight as head, radiant soul-maiden as heart, dwarf or child as belly or senses or ‘hands.’ Third, the Platonic symbolism of the soul's descent and ascent is subordinated to a Christian pattern of moral struggle. The carnal bondage in forests, caves, dungeons, and mutable underwater realms is caused not simply by the confusing shadows of sensory appearances but by the sinful rebellion of Adam and Eve; and Satanic powers sustain the varied effects of original sin in human psychology (Una's veil, Ruddymane's stain, Maleger's illness, Amoret's wound). The Platonic conversion of intellect (leaving its fleshly cave and turning upward to the sun of pure Ideas) is in Spenser's fable dependent not simply upon enlightenment by a philosophic sage, but upon redemption by the Christlike Arthur (and in Books III–V, Britomart), whose armory (in Britomart's case, beauty) reflects the light of divine grace and truth. Redcrosse's vision of the heavenly kingdom establishes the end which is served by all subsequent legends; and the temples and gardens of Alma, Adonis, Venus, Isis, and Mercilla display various subordinate perspectives on the principles of divine life and harmony and power which are most fully revealed in the Christian microcosm of Book I. In sum, Spenser's portraits of moral and psychological crisis as a sinful darkening of rational vision, leading to fragmentation of the soul's three powers (and to demonic duplication of them); his emphasis on the soul's heavenly origin, nature, and destiny; and his subordination of physiological factors to this transcendent perspective—all express his fundamentally Christian-Platonic view of human nature.
In England after 1580, this concept of the microcosm was complicated by a flood of writings from the medical tradition, grounding psychology more emphatically on physiology (see *psychology). Drawing from the ‘faculty psychology’ of Aristotle and from the ‘humoral psychology’ of Galen, writers viewed the soul's actions as more closely dependent on the body's ‘temperature’ of its parts (the seven ‘natural’ factors: elements, humors, spirits, complexions, members, powers, operations), and also as dependent upon external conditions (the six ‘nonnatural’ factors: climate, diet, sleep, activity, digestion, passions). Lemnius’ Touchstone of Complexions (tr 1576), Bright's Treatise of Melancholie (1586), Huarte's Examination of Mens Wits (tr 1594), Wright's Passions of the Minde (1601), Walicington's Optick Glasse of Humors (1607), Coeffeteau's Table of Humane Passions (tr 1621), Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Reynolds’ Treatise of the Passions and Faculties (1640)—all suggest a rising concern with the Aristotelian-Galenic model as a basis for moral and natural philosophy.
Aristotle rejected Plato's dominant concern with transcendent reality, with mathematics and geometrical forms, with mythic descents and ascents to express the soul's essential nature. Instead, drawing from his biological studies (Parva naturalia), he compared the soul's capacity for life, feeling, and sensation to similar potencies in plants and animals. In De anima, he repudiated Plato's three stages of rationality (concupiscent, irascible, rational) and instead described three incommensurate levels in man: vegetable, animal, rational. Aristotle's extensive empirical treatment of the ‘Vegetative’ powers (nutrition, growth, reproduction, locomotion) differs profoundly from Plato's simplistic moral treatment of the belly's fleshly appetites (carefully controlling them lest they grow into a manyheaded monster). He also treats the motive powers in more empirical and systematic fashion than Plato, placing both irascibility and concupiscence in the heart (in Spenser's terms, ‘froward’ and ‘forward’ passions), so that reason's task is to enforce the golden mean between them. Moreover, in contrast to Plato's depicting the brain as seat of divine reason, Aristotle describes the process of sensation (the five senses and the various inward wits in the brain) as ‘animal’ powers, like heart's passions. He complicates the microcosm further by locating the common sensorium (which receives the reports of the senses) in the heart, inducing the Stoics, Avicenna, and many medieval allegorists to associate the rational soul with heart rather than brain, center rather than summit (see FQ II ix 33).
In FQ II, where Spenser turns from a holistic to a temporal perspective, much Aristotelian influence is apparent in the depiction of the microcosm. In contrast to Redcrosse's fall from neglect of spirit, Guyon's faint in Mammon's house is depicted as the soul's proud neglect of its bodily needs: ‘food, and sleepe, which two upbeare,/Like mightie pillours, this fraile life of man’ (vii 65). Guyon acknowledges external circumstance (Occasion); he must act ‘whilest wether serves and wind.’ Alma's castle includes various Galenic features (the ‘Concoction’ of humors in the belly, lungs as bellows for cooling the blood, etc); and it is pervaded by Aristotle's principle of contrariety, crucial for dealing with mutable, temporal reality (see Anton 1957): in the belly, jolly Appetite versus sober Diet; in the heart, Prays-desire versus Shamefastnesse; in the brain, Phantastes’ youthful indulgences versus Eumnestes’ decrepit retentions (mediated by the middle wit of judgment). Throughout his quest, Guyon battles contrary extremes, especially of passion. The impact of bodily need, of sense, and of external circumstance (fortune) on the soul is apparent not only in Book II, but also in Book IV (where instead of Busirane's artful and spirit-infecting lust, Amoret is assaulted by a physical embodiment of Lust, shaped like the male genitals) and in Book VI (where the Hermit teaches Timias and Serena to ‘learne your outward sences to refraine/From things, that stirre up fraile affection,’ for from them ‘The seede of all this evill first doth spring’ vi 7–8).
But though Spenser gives special attention to the needs of body in II, IV, and VI, his focus is always on soul, rather than body, as moral cause. Redcrosse in despair, Britomart in love, Malbecco transformed by jealousy and Adicia by fury, show that passion is caused by moral misjudgment, or by God, rather than by humoral imbalance, which is merely a consequence. (Cf La Primaudaye French Academie 2.41–60; Wright Passions of the Minde chs 3, 8; Coeffeteau Table of Humane Passions ch 1.) Study of Spenser's love-psychology in Books in and IV has benefited from attention to humors and spirits (Busirane's tyranny causing ‘burnt blood’; or the tetradic combats of Book IV being based on humoral and elemental conflict, which Concord resolves). But to understand Spenser's psychology of chastity and friendship one must also study the subtle sequences of Romance of the Rose and other medieval allegories of love, where passion is treated less in physiological than in moral and mythic terms. Thus, even in Alma's castle Spenser stresses the Christian-Platonic primacy of soul with its mystic hierarchy of powers. In the lowest region, he emphasizes the belly's appetites (ignoring Aristotle's diverse concern for reproduction, growth, and locomotion), and he stresses the rational ‘order’ enforced by Diet and Digestion even at this base level. On the intermediate level, he deals primarily with the heart's affections as motive assistants of reason. At the summit, the sages represent no ‘animal’ powers, but the highest working of reason within the natural order. The ‘goodly frame’ of the castle thus follows Plato's geometric and moral idealism in Timaeus. At each level, Spenser integrates notable features of Aristotelian physiology (crucial to his comprehensive vision), but he avoids the slavish profusion of the physical which one finds forty years later in Fletcher's Purple Island, which loses the Platonic vision of transcendent simplicity, mathematical order, and moral hierarchy in the body-soul relationship.
Spenser's allegory thus aligns itself with the early phase of English Renaissance psychology, which emphasized the socioethical and religious concerns of the soul more than its bodily housing: Elyot's Of the Knowledge Which Maketh a Wise Man (1533), Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum (tr 1582), La Primaudaye's French Academie (tr 1586, 1594), Davies’ Nosce teipsum (1599), de Mornay's True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe (tr 1602), Charron's Of Wisdome (tr 1607). Though mingling Christian, Platonic, and Aristotelian principles in their depiction of the microcosm, these writers, like Spenser, primarily stress the soul's ability to ‘know itself’: its transcendent nature and dominion over the body, its moral and spiritual obligations, and its immortal end.
ROBERT L.REID
Ruth Leila Anderson 1927 Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare's Plays (Iowa City); John Peter Anton 1957 Aristotle's Theory of Contrariety (New York) ch 7; H.Baker 1952, chs 13–19; Bamborough 1952; Berger 1957, ch 3; Hieatt 1975a:171–214; Kocher 1953, chs II, 14; Nelson 1963:183–98; Robert L.Reid 1981a ‘Alma's Castle and the Symbolization of Reason in The Faerie Queene’ JEGP 80:512–27; Reid 19816; Reid 1981–2; P[ercy] Ansell Robin 1911 The Old Physiology in English Literature (London).
The ‘battle within the soul’ between personifications of the vices and virtues was a favorite subject of medieval allegory and a method used extensively by Spenser. It may be traced to Peter's reference to ‘fleshlie lustes, which fight against the soule’ (1 Pet 2.11). In the fourth century, the Christian poet Prudentius formalized these ‘lustes’ as specific vices in his Psychomachia, a poem which presents a series of battles between Fides and Cultura Veterum Deorum (Faith and Worship of Old Gods), Pudicitia and Libido (Chastity and Lust), Patientia and Ira (Patience and Wrath), and so on. Each pair takes the field in turn, until the Virtues finally overcome the Vices. After the battle, Discordia (also called Heresy) slyly attempts to wound Concordia. After the Virtues tear Discord apart, they unite under the direction of Concord to construct a magnificent jeweled temple in which Sapientia (Wisdom) is enthroned. The poem concludes with a recognition that the rebellious side of man's nature, the flesh, can be controlled only with the aid of Christ. Elements of the Psychomachia, such as the battlefield descriptions, look back to Virgil's Aeneid. Prudentius’ strongly Christian theme of soul warfare, however, lays a basis for a tradition of depicting allegorical conflict which descends through Martianus Capella and the scholastic epics of the twelfthcentury Chartrians to Renaissance poets such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Landino, and Tasso. It was also kept alive in morality plays, in the battles of virtues and vice found, for instance, in The Castle of Perseverance.
Spenser's allegory is very much part of this tradition, for example, in FQ I in the Red Cross Knight's fight with Orgoglio (Ital ‘pride’) and his subsequent defeat. Yet his allegory is more complex than Prudentius’ and less reliant on a single fixed scheme of personification. His figures may be read against many operative schemes such as Aristotelian psychology, Protestant doctrine, Platonic psychology, and contemporary English history. Thus Orgoglio may be interpreted specifically as the pride of the Spaniards in conflict with the English at the time and as the pride of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the general religious pride from which Redcrosse must be freed. Often it is hard to tell which scheme dominates, and usually a character's meaning is defined more by actions in the narrative than by reference to any external scheme. Sometimes in Spenser, as in Prudentius, a moral quality is split among several characters. For instance, Orgoglio is overcome not by Redcrosse but by Arthur, just as Superbia (Pride) is beaten by Mens Humilis (Humility) only with the aid of Spes (Hope).
As the tradition of the psychomachia developed, the conflict between vices and virtues was depicted as an internal struggle among the three faculties of the human soul: concupiscible, irascible, and rational. These were commonplace terms, comparable to id, ego, and superego in Freudian psychology. From the concupiscible faculty proceed the desires for food, drink, sexual satisfaction, and other sensual pleasures, which are destructive if not controlled. The rational faculty, of which conscience is a part, perceives the correct path to be followed, and is aided by an enforcer, the irascible faculty, an emotional impetus marked by generous indignation or firm determination, which holds in check the fleshly lusts of the concupiscible faculty. When the irascible faculty forgets the directions of the rational faculty, excessive or rancorous anger may itself become a cause of vicious conduct. All three faculties seek to influence the will, which finally determines a course of action.
Many characters in Spenser's allegory may be interpreted on at least two levels at once: as impulses of the soul and as exemplars of the various virtues and vices. Most of the giants, churls, beasts, and monsters may be interpreted as vices and as perturbations of the concupiscible faculty. The concupiscible faculty itself may be represented by Acrasia, and the irascible faculty by Satyrane, Una's lion, Guyon's boatman, and the Salvage Man. The rational faculty is represented by Alma. Through a sixteenthcentury interpretation of Plato's Phaedrus 246, Florimell's white palfrey (FQ III vii 2–32) and Bruncheval (Fr ‘dark horse,’ Satyrane's opponent in IV iv 17–18) may also represent the irascible and concupiscible faculties respectively. (According to Piccolomini's Universa philosophia de moribus 1583, 9.21, Plato's skittish and erratic dark horse, the concupiscible faculty, is yoked in double harness with the white horse, the irascible faculty; the two horses keep each other in line with directions of the charioteer, reason.) Figures such as these are combined with the more obvious combats of virtues and vices in Spenser's application of the warfare within the soul throughout The Faerie Queene.
JOHN E.HANKINS
On Prudentius, see Macklin Smith 1976 Prudentius’ ‘Psychomachia’: A Reexamination (Princeton). For the tradition, see Lewis 1936, MacQueen 1970, Tuve 1966, and the reading list for *allegory. For an interpretation of Platonic psychomachia in Spenser, see Reid 1981a, 1981b, 1981–2. Anderson 1970b shows how the Pslmer and Guyon's horse are psychomschic fragments of Guyon. On Spenserian allegory and psychomachia generally, see Hankins 1971.
While differing from modern practice, Elizabethan punctuation followed coherent principles, although it did allow greater freedom for individual idiosyncrasy. Following earlier traditions, it was basically concerned with indicating the length of time the reader was to pause, and with emphasizing the balance of rhetorical patterns. Punctuation of poetry was also much concerned with stressing metric and rhythmic patterns. In the century following Spenser, English punctuation developed in the direction of our modern emphasis on logical and grammatical patterns; but in the earlier Renaissance, this was a distinctly subordinate matter (Ong 1944).
Contemporary punctuation of Spenser's printed works generally follows the usage of his time. Although English printers sometimes respected the personal practice of individual writers (eg, Jonson and Donne), the somewhat varying punctuation of Spenser's poetry by different printers in his lifetime has led to the conclusion that the punctuation was likely due mainly to the compositors (Var 6:480–503).
The punctuation of Spenser's poetry is particularly aimed at reinforcing metrical and especially stanzaic patterns. The stanza is treated as the basic unit of meaning, and the punctuation is placed accordingly, although the departures from modern usage that this policy entails would not have surprised Elizabethan readers. The most important marks are the period, colon, semicolon (a recent addition to English punctuation), and comma, systematically indicating breaks of diminishing importance. When introducing subordinate clauses, these marks are chosen with considerable latitude and subtlety, according to rhetorical emphasis rather than the logical relationship of the subordinate clause to the main clause. The opening stanzas of FQ I as given in the Variorum, which reproduces the punctuation of the 1596 edition—the 1590 edition is less heavily punctuated—effectively illustrate the ways in which stops of different intensity skillfully reinforce and vary the stanzaic structure.
In other departures from modern usage, parentheses are freely used to set off material we would set off with commas, and commas are used more sparingly—or not at all—to set off vocatives. The punctuation of Spenser's poetry has been generally regarded as highly effective for reading aloud, as the poetry was certainly intended to be.
FRED J.NICHOLS
Dorothy F.Atkinson 1931 ‘A Study of the Punctuation of Spenser's Faerie Queene’ diss Univ of Washington; Walter J.Ong 1944 ‘Historical Backgrounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean Punctuation Theory’ PMLA 59:349–60; Mindele Treip 1970 Milton's Punctuation and Changing English Usage, 1582–1676 (London).