The Protestant movement of the sixteenth century was a revolutionary effort to change traditional practices of the Roman church considered to be incorrect or abusive. In northern Europe, the reformist movements led by Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin established various territorial churches. In England, the official Reformation extended from Henry VIII's political break with the papacy in the 1530s to the Protestant settlement under Queen Elizabeth. It centered at first on Henry's drive to impose royal authority on the church. Only during the minority of his son Edward VI (1547–53) did powerful Protestant lords collaborate with Archbishop Thomas Cranmer to introduce thoroughly Protestant doctrine and church ritual.
Born near the end of Edward's reign, Spenser was a child at the time of the Elizabethan religious settlement in 1559. He grew up knowing the doctrine and ritual of the Tudor Reformation, which were transmitted through the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, and more generally through reading and hearing the Word of God in vernacular Bible readings, sermons, common prayers, sacraments, and other ceremonies that were based firmly on the Scriptures. Despite Mary Tudor's effort at counterreformation, service books authorized under Edward VI were again used in church services during Elizabeth's reign: the Great Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the primers (see Booty, et al 1981, King 1982, and Wall 1976). The authorized sermons in the books of homilies (1547 and 1563) expounded Cranmer's ideal of ‘the life of active charity’ in the public, social world. The homilies carefully linked this ethic to Pauline doctrines shared by all Reformed churches, namely, predestination, justification by faith alone, and man's natural and pervasive corruption.
Until the end of Elizabeth's reign, the broad, inclusive doctrine of the Church of England continued to accommodate early Puritans within the spectrum of acceptable Protestant theology. (It is anachronistic, though, to try to discover in the sixteenth century the radical sectarian divisions of the middle seventeenth century.) During Spenser's lifetime, there was general agreement on a predestinarian theology of grace, which, although compatible with almost any aspect of the Genevan church except ministry and discipline, essentially reaffirmed the largely Zwinglian settlement in religion imposed under Edward VI. The views of Zwinglian and Rhineland reformers such as Martin Bucer, Pietro Martire Vermigli (Peter Martyr), and Heinrich Bullinger are at the core of the English Reformation (see D.D.Wallace 1982). Although a deep religious cleavage did exist during the 1560s and 1570s, it divided those Protestants who saw themselves as ‘godly’ adherents to the Elizabethan Settlement from the multitude of the ‘ungodly’ (Collinson 1967).
During Spenser's adulthood, all Protestant groups were united in their opposition to the Church of Rome. The doctrinal articles of the Church of England express a Protestant consensus that denies key teachings of medieval Catholicism concerning papal supremacy, clerical intercession, purgatory, pardons, adoration of images and relics, invocation of saints, justification by good works, transubstantiation, and the concept of the Mass as a sacrifice (see *sacraments). Although some Puritans came to reject the Church of England's retention of vestments, episcopal authority, and kneeling at Communion as ‘papist’ vestiges, others agreed with Melanchthon and his English followers in accepting them as ‘adiaphora,’ things indifferent to salvation. The Elizabethan Puritan movement focused on matters of church polity rather than doctrine (see King 1985, *Puritanism).
Spenser's earliest publication reflects the Reformation use of the vernacular Bible as a model for poetry and art. It appeared in Theatre for Worldlings (1569), a militantly antipapal work by Jan van der Noot, a Flemish immigrant residing in London, whose four final ‘Sonets,’ modeled upon Revelation, are an apocalyptic attack on the Roman church and a prophecy of the Protestant Reformation. Their images of the Whore of Babylon, the beast with seven heads, the man sitting on a white horse, and the New Jerusalem recur prominently in FQ I. The Flemish compiler also dedicates to Queen Elizabeth, under the guise of Astraea, millennial prophecies dating from Edward VI's reign. The commentary identifies these dualistic images with the Reformation conflict between the ‘true’ and ‘false’ churches.
Spenser's conformity to the broad Elizabethan Protestant consensus helped him gain patronage from eminent members of the religio-political establishment at all stages of his career: John Young, Bishop of Rochester; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; Sir Philip Sidney; Sir Walter Raleigh; and eventually the Queen herself, who was notoriously reluctant to reward poets. Although The Shepheardes Calender (1579) addresses fundamental Reformation concerns such as the problems of clerical greed and ignorance (by then conventional themes in pastoral literature), Spenser's service in 1578 as secretary to Young renders improbable contentions that the work endorses anti-prelatical attitudes. In all likelihood, Spenser wrote most of the Calender while serving this reform-minded cleric who is praised in September as the good shepherd Roffy. Although Spenser had planned to dedicate the work to Leicester, whose service he had entered by 1579, eventually he addressed it to Sidney, a proponent of the Protestant League and leader of a group of Protestant poets whose goal was to create a literary Renaissance in England.
The religious satires in the Calender (Februarie, Maye, Julye, and September) dramatize a problem that interested many Protestants: how to fulfill the clerical ideals of sincerity and obedience to the models for pastoral behavior set forth in the Scriptures. The work appeared in the aftermath of the earliest Puritan discontent (initially the 1560s protest over vestments and then the 1570s Admonition controversy; see *religious controversies), and it addresses issues of concern to religious purists. Nevertheless, the text itself offers little support for the seventeenth-century tradition that Spenser articulates a Puritan attack on the Elizabethan church settlement. Pastoral dialogue and disguise furnish instead a means to treat religious and ethical problems without taking sides in factional argument. The satirical fables allowed interpretation in terms of current ecclesiastical disputes, Puritan readers likely finding confirmation for their zeal in E.K.’s comment on ‘the reliques and ragges of popish superstition’ (Maye 239–40 and gloss). Yet most readers would have applied Spenser's generalized biblical paradigms to the concrete circumstances of contemporary history. The plain style and highly charged biblical imagery of the satirical eclogues were the common property of all Tudor Protestants, who agreed that sincere worship should be based upon the Scriptures and that ministerial integrity should avoid pride, avarice, and ignorance.
To label Spenser a ‘Puritan’ or a ‘Catholic’ is to ignore the antipapal concerns of The Shepheardes Calender, overlooking, for example, how Piers and Palinode dramatize the Reformation division between ‘the protestant and the Catholique’ (Maye argument), and the report that Palinode went on a pilgrimage to Rome (Julye 181–4). Even if E.K.’s reformist glosses represent Spenser's own views, both poem and commentary identify a rigorous standard of moral virtue and the clerical ideals of primitive Christianity with the good shepherd-pastors in the tradition of Piers Plowman, Chaucer's Parson, and the pseudo-Chaucerian Pilgrim and Plowman. Their probity contrasts sharply with the spiritual slackness of their companions. Spenser's choice of Piers as the name of a zealous pastor alludes to the Reformation interpretation of Langland's Piers Plowman as a proto-Protestant text (see *Plowman's Tale). Diggon Davie, another rustic speaker descended from Lang-land's blunt visionary truth-teller, similarly attacks the ‘abuses…and loose living of Popish prelates’ (Sept argument).
In their recapitulation of the biblical pattern of the Fall (eg, the fates of the Kid and Algrind), the satirical eclogues associate the conventional imagery of scriptural pastoral (shepherds, sheep, wolves, and foxes) with the reformist concern for ministerial integrity and sincere pastoral care. The account of Algrind in Julye alludes to the disgrace of Archbishop Edmund Grindal. Yet Spenser treats his fate not as a call to dissent but as an example of the political dangers of occupying high office. The commitment of Grindal, and other members of the progressive faction like Bishop Young, to continued reform of the ministry and church discipline kept alive the original Reformation ideals of thinkers like William Tyndale, Hugh Latimer, and Cranmer. Similarly, the fable of the Oak and the Briar in Februarie depicts a double tragedy that can be read not as a Puritan allegory but as a warning against both recusancy and Protestant radicalism (see King 1986).
The Faerie Queene treats central issues of the Reformation: the individual process of religious and ethical reform in Book I, and the broad public and political sweep of the European Protestant movement in Book V. While the historical element may be subordinate to the moral allegory, these books praise Elizabeth's government and its program for reforming church and state. John Dixon's 1597 marginalia in the first edition of The Faerie Queene show how Tudor Protestants could recognize Book I's allusions to Revelation and interpret the allegory in terms of Elizabeth's restoration of reformist government after the persecutions of Mary's reign. A detailed examination of FQ I would show how Spenser portrays certain essential doctrines of the Reformation. Protestant theology pervades the Legend of Holiness, where Spenser embodies in the quest of the Red Cross Knight the doctrine of salvation as derived by Protestants from the letters of St Paul. This paradigm included the categories of election, calling, justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification (see Lewalski 1979). The Letter to Raleigh indicates Redcrosse's election by stipulating that he wears the armor of God. Although original sin inherited from Adam and Eve leads him, like any Christian, repeatedly into error, the unmerited favor or grace of God manifested through election makes possible his justification and sanctification.
The primacy of individual faith in Protestant devotional life lies behind the indoctrination of Redcrosse in the house of Holiness (I x), where his tutor Fidelia (‘faith’) is older than her sisters Speranza (‘hope’) and Charissa (‘charity’). The order of their births reflects the Protestant reordering of good works (charity) and faith in accordance with Pauline texts like Romans 3.19–26, which insists that the elect are justified by faith rather than by doing works prescribed by the Law. In contrast, the Church of Rome's emphasis on good works led to an elaborate system of absolution based upon private confession, almsgiving, penance, pilgrimages, indulgences, and the intercession of the Virgin Mary and saints. The fertility of Charissa and her ‘multitude of babes’ (31) is compatible with Cranmer's insistence in the homilies on the continuing importance of good works not as agents of justification but as ‘fruits’ of faith testifying to spiritual well-being. (Cf also Caelia's ‘doing good and godly deedes’ 3.) Spenser's seven Beadmen (36–43) mirror Cranmer's cautious traditionalism by honoring the seven corporal works of mercy.
The Reformation insistence on the accessibility of vernacular translations of the Bible as the basis for spiritual education is reflected both by frequent allusion to biblical texts throughout FQ I and by the relation between the two emblematic books in cantos ix–x. Although Redcrosse presents Arthur with ‘his Saveours testament’ (evidently the New Testament) at ix 19, the illiterate knight is as yet unable to read and understand the Scriptures as a model for human action. Bearing the same ‘sacred Booke,’ Fidelia alone can provide instruction in fundamental truths ‘Of God, of grace, of justice, of free will’ (x 19). Her teaching also instills an overwhelming sense of sin which leads Redcrosse once again to despair; but, like Una, Speranza counters this failure with the promise of salvation. Only through understanding derived from faith is the knight able to ascend the Mount of Contemplation and attain the spiritual insight necessary to defeat the Dragon that imprisons the human race through sin.
Theological and historical allegory overlap in Prince Arthur, who, as the embodiment of both divine grace and Tudor dynastic claims, typifies the fusion of church and state under Elizabeth. His defeat of Redcrosse's captors—Duessa (patterned after the Whore riding her seven-headed Beast) and Orgoglio (perhaps a type of papal or imperial pride)—recapitulates the apocalyptic battle of Revelation, commonly interpreted as a prophecy of the Reformation in works like van der Noot's Theatre (see Hankins 1971).
The pervasive anti-sacerdotalism of FQ I exemplifies how the Lutheran doctrine of the priesthood of all believers led to the Reformation attack on the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy. For instance, polemical glosses in the Geneva Bible that identify Antichrist with the Pope (eg, Rev 17.1–4) underlie the portrait of Archimago as a necromancer and priest ‘in long blacke weedes yclad’ (i 29–35), as well as the satirical genealogy of Duessa as the Pope's daughter (ii 22). Roman vestments provide similar associations for Idleness: ‘Arayd in habit blacke, and amis thin,/Like to an holy Monck’ (iv 18). Although Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries during the 1530s, they remained attractive as symbols for continuing religious problems. Thus Kirkrapine personifies not simply Roman avarice but any form of ‘church robbery.’
The Reformation issues in the ecclesiastical eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender and FQ I are found in most of Spenser's works, even those predominantly concerned with forms of behavior not explicitly religious. Because FQ II, for instance, is based on classical learning, biblical allusions are rare, and the handling of Protestant topics is enigmatic at best (eg, original sin or the nature of baptism, in the Ruddymane and Maleger episodes). Spenser may expect readers to approach it as a sequel that depends upon or extends the Reformation allegory of FQ I into the ethical sphere. Similarly, the antimonastic attack linked to the final triumph of the Blatant Beast (VI xii 23–5) recalls earlier religious satire. More closely linked to FQ I is the treatment of justice in FQ V, which refers explicitly to England's involvement in the international Protestant cause in cantos x–xii. The Burbon episode, for example, fictionalizes the experience of Henri IV as a Huguenot leader who eventually renounced the Protestant faith (xi 44–65). In these and many other cases, the reader must refer back to FQ I for a fully elaborated, extended coverage of Protestant topics and ideals. In that book and the religious eclogues, Spenser is most readily accessible as a Reformation poet.
JOHN N.KING
Booty, et al 1981 (on the worship books of Edward VI and Elizabeth I); Collinson 1967 (an indispensable history); Collinson 1982 (differentiates between Elizabethan Protestantism and nineteenth-century ‘Anglican’ assumptions about the Tudor Church of England); Dickens 1964 (a definitive history); Hankins 1971 (discusses FQ I and biblical commentary tradition); Hume 1984 (argues that Spenser is a moderate Puritan); King 1982 (on Spenser and his Protestant literary predecessors); King 1985 (argues that Spenser adopts the posture of a progressive Protestant); King 1986 (on Spenser's synthesis of classical precedent with the ‘plowman’ conventions of English Protestant satire); Lewalski 1979 (on Protestant poetic theory and the devotional lyric); Wall 1976 (on the official sermons as models for moral and religious reform); Wall 1983 (on FQ I and the reform program of Edward VI); D.D.Wallace 1982 (indicates the impact of the Rhineland reformers on the Elizabethan church); Whitaker 1950 (argues that Spenser is a conservative Anglican).
Spenser's time at Merchant Taylors’ School in London roughly coincided with the first decade of the ‘religious settlement’ under Queen Elizabeth and the outbreak of religious controversy involving the newly established Church of England with the Church of Rome and with Puritanism.
The first major controversy was provoked by the new Bishop of Salisbury, John Jewel, with his ‘challenge’ sermon (1559) and his Apologie (1562), both of which were answered by the Catholic theologian Thomas Harding from his exile in Louvain. These protagonists were joined by other writers, until by 1570 the number of printed items came to over 60. The dispute served to underline the main points at issue in the religious changes of the time; it was later recalled by Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierces Supererogation (1593), as a contest between ‘two thundring and lightning Oratours in divinity,’ the English equivalents of Demosthenes and Aeschines in ancient Greece.
Spenser's poetry echoes many ideas and even phrases from the Apologie. His description of the false Fox in SC, Maye, with ‘bells, and babes, and glasses in hys packe’ (240), agrees with Jewel's scorn of the ‘superfluous ceremonies’ of Rome. In FQ V iii 24, the disappearance of the false Florimell when placed beside her true exemplar may recall Jewel's assertion that the shadows of Rome vanish ‘at the lighte of the gospell.’ Yet the ironic reference in Mother Hubberd 478 to ‘the Gospell of free libertie’ may in turn recall Harding's frequent criticism of the reformers for preaching ‘carnall liberty’ (Confutation 1565). There is even some sympathy with the ‘old faith’ in the fable of the Oak in Februarie 207–8, ‘an auncient tree,/Sacred with many a mysteree,’ as contrasted with the upstart Briar with ‘Colours meete to clothe a mayden Queene’ (132). While the poet maintains that ‘sike fancies’ as the sprinkling of the tree with holy water ‘weren foolerie,/And broughten this Oake to this miserye’ (211–12), he need not have approved E.K.’s reference to ‘the reliques and ragges of popish superstition’ (Maye 240 gloss).
Spenser's ambivalence appears above all in FQ I. He represents Archimago as a monkish hypocrite in ‘an holy Chappell,’ telling ‘of Saintes and Popes’ and strewing ‘an Ave-Mary after and before’ (i 34–5), and later introduces the false Duessa as a ‘goodly Lady clad in scarlot red’ and decked in a ‘gold and purple pall’ with a ‘triple crowne set on her head full hye’ (ii 13, vii 16; cf the Whore of Babylon of Rev 17). Yet he does not reject monks and hermits with all their ‘holy things,’ for he shows an ideal hermit, ‘heavenly Contemplation’ (x 46), as well as seven Bead-men, who stand for the seven corporal works of mercy in medieval piety (36–43). Further, when Spenser introduces Redcrosse, bearing ‘on his brest a bloudie Crosse… The deare remembrance of his dying Lord’ (i 2), he possibly recalls John Martiall's Treatyse of the Crosse (1564), which was dedicated to Elizabeth because she retained the cross in her royal chapel. When this book was attacked by Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul's, in a sermon before her, she publicly reproved him for his abusive language.
Evidently Spenser distinguished between the old Catholic customs of England, which he often views with nostalgia, and the contemporary activities of the seminary priests from Douai. In The Shepheardes Calender, he compares these priests, who returned to England from 1574 onwards, to ‘the false Foxe’ (Maye 236)—glossed by E.K. as ‘the false and faithlesse Papistes’—and to ‘ravenous Wolves’ (September 148). These comparisons have a contemporary echo in William Turner's anti-popish diatribe, The Huntyng of the Romyshe Wolfe (1555?), reissued in 1565 as The Hunting of the Fox and the Wolfe. Also, according to E.K.’s gloss, the Pope is included among those who ‘gan to gape for greedie governaunce’: this is ‘meant of the Pope, and his Antichristian prelates’ (Maye 121–2 and gloss). Spenser's antipathy to the Pope may have hardened on his arrival in Ireland in 1580, shortly after the failure of the papal expedition there in 1579, and about the same time as the arrival in England of the first Jesuits, Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion. While he was unaffected by the controversies they provoked in England, he knew the aftermath of the Spanish Armada of 1588 (supported by Rome) when many of its scattered ships were wrecked on the Irish coast. Events like these may help explain the antipapal vein in The Faerie Queene.
The first outbreak of Puritan protest, the vestiarian controversy of 1566, coincided with Spenser's schooldays. Its leader was Robert Crowley, prebendary of St Paul's, who had printed Langland's Piers Plowman in 1550 because of its criticism of popish abuses. In response to Archbishop Parker's insistence on the use of vestments in religious services, Crowley published A Briefe Discourse against the Outwarde Apparell of the Popish Church, strongly denouncing these ‘remnants of the Romishe abhomination’ and ‘reliques of Romishe Idolatrie.’ This controversy is echoed in Spenser's mention of the ‘trusse of tryfles’ carried by the false Fox (Maye 239–40), and even more clearly in E.K.’s gloss: ‘by such trifles are noted, the reliques and ragges of popish superstition.’ Yet in Mother Hubberds Tale, the poet seems nostalgic for the monks of old, ‘Their service and their holie things… besides their Anthemes sweete,’ in contrast to the ‘small devotion’ of the new ministers who officiate only ‘once a weeke upon the Sabbath day,’ with ‘free libertie’ to enjoy their ‘lovely Lasses’ (449–51, 456–7, 476–8). In this he agreed with the Queen, who preferred her ministers, especially her bishops, to be celibate.
When Spenser went up to Pembroke Hall in 1569, he found himself at the center of religious conflict, for the University of Cambridge was the nursery of Elizabethan Puritanism. Already in 1565, the Puritans, led by William Fulke, later Master of Pembroke Hall (from 1578), had protested against the use of the surplice in chapel; and now in 1569–70, the new Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Thomas Cartwright, delivered his famous lectures on the Acts of the Apostles, in which he proposed Calvin's view of the early church as a model of presbyterian discipline. Owing to the intervention of John Whitgift, Master of Trinity, Cartwright was deprived of his professor's chair and his fellowship at St John's, and was eventually forced to leave the university. The antagonism between them soon appeared in print: in 1572 Cartwright wrote in support of the Puritan Admonition to the Parliament, and Whitgift responded with An Answere to a Certen Libel. In this controversy, the Puritans moved from their original protest against vestments to an open attack on the ‘lord bishops’ whose pride they contrasted with the humility of the apostles (see *homilies). It has been argued that Medina's appearance, being ‘rich arayd… In goodly garments’ (II ii 14), reflects the Elizabethan church's approval of canonical dress (Magill 1970).
In Spenser's reaction to the issues of this controversy, we again find his characteristic ambivalence. His criticism in Julye 173–6 of those who ‘bene yclad in purple and pall’ and who ‘reigne and rulen over all,/and lord it, as they list,’ may be applied not only to ‘the Popes and Cardinalles’ identified by E.K. but also to some of the Elizabethan bishops, such as John Aylmer, Bishop of London, who may be identified as the Morrell of this eclogue. Here, too, like the Puritan authors of the Admonition, the poet looks back to a time when shepherds ‘were lowe, and lief,/and loved their flocks to feede’ (165–6). Yet he is vague about this time, which may be as well medieval as apostolic. In any case, The Shepheardes Calender bears ample testimony to the poet's good relations with many of the Elizabethan bishops. His hero is Edmund Grindal of Canterbury, who appears as ‘good Algrin’ in Julye 229. Further, John Young of Rochester, who employed the poet as secretary in 1578, is praised in September under the name of Roffy as ‘meeke, wise, and merciable,/And with his word his worke is convenable’ (174–5). John Piers of Salisbury is introduced as Piers in Maye, Richard Davies of St David's as Diggon Davie in September, and Thomas Cooper of Lincoln as Thomalin in Julye, where he is implicitly praised for remaining in ‘the lowly playne,’ in contrast to the proud Morrell on his hill. Of these bishops, only Cooper engaged in printed controversy, first (before becoming bishop) against the anonymous Catholic author of the Apologie of Private Masse (1562; STC 14615), one of the earliest responses to Jewel's challenge, and later (as Bishop of Winchester) against the tracts of Martin Marprelate, with his moderate Admonition to the People of England (1589). In Mother Hubberd 516–20, Spenser also defends the bishops and lesser clergy against the covetousness of courtiers. As he ironically remarks, at that time it was notorious that ‘The Courtier needes must recompenced bee/With a Benevolence, or have in gage/ The Primitias of your Parsonage:/Scarse can a Bishoprick forpas them by,/But that it must be gelt in privitie.’ Here, however, he was on dangerous ground, for among the chief offenders in this respect were the Queen herself and his own patron, the Earl of Leicester.
In Ireland, away from the distractions of such controversy, Spenser was free to write The Faerie Queene, as it were in a hermitage of heavenly contemplation. In this poem more than in any other, he gives ample scope to his poetic nostalgia for the Middle Ages. If he criticizes the Pope and his adherents in such allegorical figures as Archimago and Duessa, he is no less outspoken against the radical reformers. In FQ VI xii 24, after describing how the Blatant Beast breaks into the monks’ cloisters and finds ‘filth and ordure’ in them (as Cromwell's agents had claimed to have found in their visitation of the monasteries under Henry VIII), he adds that the creature himself is no less foul in the way he ransacks the cells, ‘Regarding nought religion, nor their holy heast.’ With his ‘bitter termes of shamefull infamy’ (33), the Beast recalls the portrayal of Martin Marprelate in Cooper's Admonition, as ‘he that can most bitterly inveigh against bishops and preachers, that can most boldly blaze their discredits, that can most uncharitably slander their lives and doings.’
Another theological controversy broke out in Cambridge after Spenser's time, with important effects on the English church as a whole. The official orthodoxy had been that of Calvin (as vividly recalled by Richard Bancroft in his Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline 1593); but under the influence of Peter Baro, who succeeded Cartwright as Lady Margaret professor in 1574, a more Catholic theology came to prevail, especially when the Lambeth Articles, which formulated the orthodox Calvinist theology of predestination and which had been proposed by the Regius Professor of Divinity William Whitaker and approved by Archbishop Whitgift in 1595, were refused the royal sanction. At that very time, Spenser's alma mater, Pembroke Hall, now under the mastership of Lancelot Andrewes (the poet's junior by two or three years at both Merchant Taylors’ School and Pembroke Hall), was in the forefront of this opposition to Calvin; and here, no doubt, we may see where the poet's own sympathies lay.
PETER MILWARD, SJ
W.H.Frere 1904 The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1558–1625) (London); Donald Joseph McGinn 1949 The Admonition Controversy (New Brunswick, NJ); Milward 1977; Harold Stein 1936 ‘Spenser and William Turner’ MLN 51:345–51; Whitaker 1950.
The term Renaissance (meaning ‘rebirth’ in Fr) has been applied to several periods of cultural renewal in European history, but since the nineteenth century has come to designate chiefly a resurgence of artistic, literary, and intellectual energy which began during the later fourteenth and earlier fifteenth centuries in Italy, and roughly a century later in northern and western Europe. The use of such a period term can mislead if it is taken to imply a quick, radical, historical change or to imply an identical change in several countries. The English ‘Renaissance’ in particular was a highly independent, native affair. Nonetheless England followed the continent in several significant respects.
One of the most important of these was humanism, which introduced the teaching, reading, and translation of ancient Greek texts and transformed the study of ancient Latin literature and culture. This transformation included a closer study of Latin style, as well as efforts to imitate ancient Latin works in Neo-Latin and the vernaculars, to establish more reliable texts in both ancient languages, and, aided by the development of printing, to disseminate these texts more widely. Renaissance philology was strengthened by a sharper awareness of the differences between historical epochs and thus an awareness of change itself. The complex relation to antiquity involved in varying degrees and in various stages awe for its achievements, humility before its greatness, regret for what was lost, inspiration for new endeavors, confident emulation of its modes, styles, and forms, resentment at its dominant status. There was also frequent anger at what was perceived as medieval indifference to, or even betrayal of, the ancient heritage.
The impact of rediscovered antiquity accompanied and in part produced changes in society, in government, in the arts, in values, in thought, and in religious experience. Society gradually became more secularized; the bourgeois class acquired more power; the use of money as a means of exchange increased. Government became more centralized; in Spain, France, and England, dynasties were consolidated which eventually resulted in the bureaucratic national state. Medieval precepts inculcating contempt for the world were counterpointed by voices praising life in this world. The active life in society gained ground in the minds of men and women against its traditional antithesis, the retired, contemplative life. The dignity of man was more widely perceived to stem from his activities as a creator and builder on earth. The pursuit of worldly glory was recognized as an honorable motive. (Spenser's fairy queen is named Gloriana, and her capital is Cleopolis, ‘city of glory.’) The ideal of a many-sided excellence displaying skill in a range of approved activities came to be cultivated.
The extraordinary flowering of the visual arts in Italy, especially during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, confirmed the power of human creativity, affirmed the value of beauty in itself, and raised the social status of the artist. Literature and even philosophy shared with the visual arts the values of harmony, proportion, and elegance. Of special importance for Spenser was the emergence of a Neoplatonic philosophy during the later fifteenth century in Florence. The central figure in this philosophical movement was Ficino, who translated all of Plato's works into Latin while composing original commentaries and treatises; Ficino's powerful influence spread throughout Europe and left its mark on many works, including Spenser's Fowre Hymnes, Amoretti, Epithalamion, and Faerie Queene.
Spenser rightly considered his major poem to stem from Italian epic romance, a Renaissance outgrowth of medieval chivalric narrative. The genre of romance was notable for its labyrinthine plot and large cast of characters, its dependence on chivalric adventure, its free use of the marvelous, the fantastic, and the magical, its mingling of Virgilian and Ovidian elements with medieval, and its organization by canto and ottava rima stanza. The principal poems in this tradition were Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, Ariosto's Orlando furioso (the single work most influential on the form of FQ), and Tasso's somewhat more regular epic, Gerusalemme liberata. Spenser read Ariosto in Italian editions with allegorizing commentary which presented the Furioso as more serious and moral, less ironic and skeptical, than it truly is. Still another influential current of the continental Renaissance was initiated by the French poets of the Pléiade, led by Ronsard and du Bellay. Their example of enriching the vernacular through imitation of prestigious models (see *French Renaissance literature) helped to determine Spenser's conception of his own poetic enterprise.
Although proto-Renaissance ideals can be found in England as early as the time of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1391–1447), the English Renaissance entered its first important phase at the opening of the sixteenth century with a group of humanists whose dominant members were John Colet and Thomas More and who were in direct contact with the great Dutch scholar and writer, Desiderius Erasmus. During the second quarter of the century, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, produced distinguished poetry deeply tinctured with continental conventions. A humanist flowering at Cambridge in mid-century, fostered by Sir John Cheke and Roger Ascham, preceptor to the future Queen Elizabeth, left a legacy which persisted at Cambridge through the seventies, when Spenser studied at Pembroke Hall; the influence of Ascham, for instance, can be traced in the Spenser-Harvey correspondence about quantitative meter. Despite these many anticipations, however, the English Renaissance first attained full maturity belatedly in the eighties and nineties, with the appearance of Sidney, Lyly, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Raleigh, and Spenser himself, among many others. English humanism was somewhat weaker than its continental counterparts; England's progress in painting and sculpture was slow; its considerable achievements in architecture could not match the finest work in Italy and France, but in music it did produce a superb school of native composers. The drama and poetry of the English Renaissance distinguish it as one of the supreme literary eras of human history.
Spenser exemplifies the Renaissance in many ways: his design of forming a complete gentleman (reminiscent of Castiglione's highly popular Book of the Courtier); his formal and prosodic experiments; his adaptations of Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and others; his ambitious attempt to write a national epic; his use of classical mythology weighted by interpretations from continental mythographic compilations; and his aspiration to demonstrate that the English language and English genius could emulate the masterpieces of antiquity. Unlike many other Renaissance poets, Spenser never chose to cut his close ties with the Middle Ages, but he did feel deeply the desire for cultural renewal which was a governing passion of his period.
THOMAS M.GREENE
A classic definition of the Renaissance is given in Burckhardt ed 1945 (first pub 1860). Three important later works extend and analyze Burckhardt's thesis: W.K.Ferguson 1948; Federico Chabod 1958 ‘The Concept of the Renaissance’ in his Machiavelli and the Renaissance tr David Moore (London) pp 149–200; and Erwin Panofsky 1960 Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm). The writings on the Renaissance are vast; perhaps the best introduction is in the first three volumes of The New Cambridge Modern History ed respectively by G.R.Potter, G.R.Elton, and R.B.Wernham 1957–68; although they do not cover all of the fifteenth century, they give excellent background for sixteenth-century Europe. For the continent, there is the vast study by Fernand ed Braudel 1972–3 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II tr Siân Reynolds (London; first pub 1949 in French). For philosophy, see Kristeller, et al 1948; ample further discussion of philosophy and humanism can be found also in various works by Kristeller, Eugenio Garin, R.R.Bolgar, Roberto Weiss, and Douglas Bush, the last two treating England specifically in some of their books. The standard annual bibliography is Bibliographie internationale de l'humanisme et de la Renaissance 1965– (Geneva). See also reading lists for *humanism and *Reformation.
(fl 1628–32) Almost nothing is known about Reynolds, one of the first critics to comment on Spenser, except that he wrote Torquato Tasso's Aminta Englisht (1628), contributed to Henry Lawes’ Ayres and Dialogues, imitated tales from Anguillara's version of Ovid, and was the author of Mythomystes (1632). For this last (in which he mentions Spenser), he is often recognized as the greatest English disciple of Pico della Mirandola and author of the most important Neoplatonic poetics in Stuart England.
Appropriate to an age of metaphysical poetry, the neologistic title of Mythomystes refers to myth as both the story or fable of a poetic work and the parable which attempts to verbalize it and to mists as those things ‘obscure’ or ‘hidden’ and also ‘mystical’ or ‘spiritual’; the progress of its argument, in fact, is from fable to mystery! This argument draws primarily on Pico and on Plato but also turns to philosophy and the Cabala to define the divine afflatus.
Briefly, Reynolds writes in Mythomystes that true poetry is divinely inspired, making poets into Tiresias-like prophets (p 19) so dazzled by their visions of the divine that they are blind to the mundane and earthbound. So acute are such visions that only those poets see the order of the world in such transcendent and hidden systems of meaning as the doctrine of numbers:
The hidden workings of which wise Mistresse, could wee fully in all her wayes comprehend, how much would it cleare, and how infinitely ennoble our blind and groveling conditions, by exalting our understandings to the sight…of God, or those invisible things of God…which are cleerely seene, being understood by the things that are made; and thence instructing us, not sawcily to leap, but by the linkes of that golden chaine of Homer, that reaches from the foote of Jupiters throne to the Earthe, more knowingly, and consequently more humbly climbe up to him, who ought to bee indeed the only end and period of all our knowledge, and understanding. (pp 70–1)
His other two points follow: that unlike modern writers, ancient poets preserved their special knowledge by concealing it from the vulgar and unlearned—‘high and Mysticall matters should by riddles and enigmaticall knotts be kept inviolate from the prophane Multitude’ (pp 29–30)—and that the uninitiated, in their ignorance, have no grounds to criticize such secret and inspired revelations. In this last, Reynolds is especially Hermetic, linking (through Moses) Rhea and Venus, for instance, with Eve and Noema (p 74). He joins his own versified translation of the story of Narcissus with his own prose explanation.
Reynolds praises only four English writers by name: Chaucer, Sidney, Daniel, and Spenser, of whom he writes, ‘I must approve the learned Spencer, in the rest of his Poems, no lesse then his Fairy Queene, an exact body of the Ethicke doctrine: though some good judgments have wisht (and perhaps not without cause) that he had therein beene a little freer of his fiction, and not so close rivetted to his Morall’ (p 8). Reynolds, who enjoyed mystical poetry best, would have been most comfortable with such visions as Spenser provides in the house of Holiness (FQ 1), on Mount Acidale (VI), and in Fowre Hymnes, while he would have found The Shepheardes Calender, Mother Hubberds Tale, and Muiopotmos more bluntly moral and therefore inferior. As the author of a poetics of visionary art, Reynolds might have found FQ VII most to his liking with its consistent appeal to coded systems of knowledge.
ARTHUR F.KINNEY
R[eynolds] 1632; modernized in J.E.Spingarn, ed 1908 Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century 3 vols (Oxford) 1:141–79. See also A.M. Cinquemani 1970 ‘Henry Reynolds’ Mythomystes and the Continuity of Ancient Modes of Allegoresis in Seventeenth-Century England’ PMLA 85:1041–9.
For Elizabethans, ‘rhetoric’ was defined in nearly all the contemporary manuals as an art or craft of verbal ornamentation. What we call rhetoric, namely a general theory of speaker/writer-audience interaction, was more usually dealt with under the rubric of ‘eloquence.’ Though this article also deals with rhetoric in the restricted Tudor sense, it is concerned primarily with eloquence, the end towards which both rhetoric and its sister art, logic, were directed.
Humanist rhetorical thought derived much of its force and most of its substance from classical oratory, chiefly the system, theory, and practice of Cicero. Humanists admired and emulated Cicero for several reasons: the model his life provided for the synthesis of action and contemplation, his status as a novus homo who rose (as many a humanist wished to do) above his origins, his proleptic embodiment of the humanist roles of scholar and teacher, and the stylistic range of his works. Perhaps most important, Cicero and his image of the orator were also idealized figures of the power to be gained by the scholarly and verbal tools to which the humanists alone had access. What humanists needed, and what Cicero's example supplied, was an example of how an almost exclusively verbal ability could be energized and transformed into an influential force in the world of action.
Even today's humanists, largely excluded from roles of political power but owners of a wide inventory of rhetorical and scholarly skills, can see the attractiveness of the Ciceronian ideal. ‘It is the part of the orator,’ Antonius says in Cicero's De oratore, ‘when advising on affairs of supreme importance, to unfold his opinion as a man having authority; his is the duty both to arouse a listless nation, and to curb a frenzied one; his is the art by means of which mankind's offenses are brought to destruction, and mankind's honesty is brought to reward’ (2.8.35). Here is the consummation devoutly wished by Renaissance humanists. Spenser's friend Harvey was only one of many who praised De oratore as a text crucial to the transformation of contemplative knowledge into political action.
Yet as attractive as the Ciceronian ideal was, much that the humanists valued in the life and the writings of Cicero was deeply embedded in the spoken, or performed, character of his classical art. His oratory depends for effectiveness both upon an actual physical presence before an audience and upon his being granted the authority and license with which to discourse on matters of the highest social significance. What, then, would happen when there was no central civic forum in which to perform? When, as an Italian humanist, you lived in a principate where deliberative oratory was neither profitable nor welcome?
In the long term, of course, there is no sufficient answer: modern culture does not often offer humanists the authority and occasion to address the republic on issues of great public importance. In the short term, however, Renaissance humanists found ways to retain the Ciceronian stance through what became exercises in the exegesis of Cicero's works, in which classical values were rewritten to fit Renaissance realities. The features of oratory which were irredeemably physical had to go, but the inspiring vision of what the oratorical art could accomplish was reinterpreted and preserved in other ways. For some, especially in Italy, this meant trying to achieve Ciceronian ends through imitating Cicero's style literally (see *Ciceronianism). For others, like Erasmus and Harvey, to whom stylistic imitation seemed only ‘displaying a body that is surpassingly beautiful and lovely but deprived of sense and life’ (Harvey ed 1945:87), it meant an effort to define the deeper underlying causes of Ciceronian greatness.
One significant result of these modifications of Ciceronian practice was that eloquence came to overshadow oratory as the privileged and most general term for invoking the high values of the classical system. Cicero himself had used the terms ars eloquentiae and ars oratoris synonymously; the humanists’ adjustment of terminology shows them recognizing that while the values of Ciceronian res humanae were still worth pursuit, the means could no longer be the same. Given changed contexts (eg, printed texts) in which physical presence could no longer be imagined as an essential condition, oratory and eloquence could no longer be synonymous, but had to refer to two distinct, though related, entities.
To this point, we have dealt with eloquence; what Spenser's contemporaries called rhetoric, by contrast, was almost entirely a procedural art of the parsing of speeches and the conning of formal schemes. Thus in Melanchthon's Elementorum rhetorices (1542), one of the most popular of all the humanist rhetorics, we find a modest definition of ‘the ends of rhetoric.’ Students should be able ‘to judge [when reading] of an extended speech what kind of sequence of parts it should have, what its members are, what its ornaments are; and, when speaking…to be capable of making an oration with the proper parts and setting out serious matters not briefly, as logic teaches, but with the added light of words’ (ed 1846: col 419). Nor, as he also makes clear, is a mastery of this subject by any means the equal to eloquence: ‘The wise and skilled men who first discovered this art never believed that its precepts would make men eloquent, nor that they were sufficient to attaining eloquence. For eloquence first requires the highest natural capacity for speaking, and second an understanding of all the humane arts. In addition to [this book's] common rhetorical precepts, therefore, eloquence draws on many extensive helps both from nature and from learning’ (col 417).
For Melanchthon, then, rhetoric per se is a limited art, but his view is by no means unique. His text served as a model for Leonard Cox's Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke (c 1530), England's first vernacular rhetoric, and many English writers—Sherry, Peacham, and Fraunce, for example—treat rhetoric even more narrowly, defining and sometimes exemplifying extensive lists of schemes (figures of sound) and tropes (figures of speech), but omitting such matters as the nature and ordering of parts. The major English exception to this narrowing of rhetoric is Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1553), which attempts to provide a ‘full’ rhetoric, treating all five traditional divisions of the art— invention, arrangement, ornamentation, memory, delivery. But even Wilson excludes from rhetoric the handling of ‘infinite questions,’ by which he means any general topic such as ‘whether it be best to marie.’ These discourses he treats in his parallel treatise on logic, The Rule of Reason. The fact is that no humanist rhetorician ever imagined that a rhetoric was a complete treatment of the language arts; it was but one of the set of arts whose study, together with natural gifts and practice, might produce genuine eloquence.
As we review the range of Renaissance training in the verbal arts, it becomes clear that the values which first belonged to oratory in fact split in two, so that oratory's technical aspects were classed as rhetoric and its larger and more general ends as eloquence. Rhetoric, perhaps in compensation, got to call itself an art; eloquence, by contrast, was something like a general end to which all other arts were subordinate, and humanists of various specializations worked to reform their particular arts so that each might assume to itself this overarching, higher end. This process may be termed the rhetoricization of the humanist arts, although that term confuses our rather broad modern sense of rhetoric with the humanists’ more restricted sense. A more precise (if barbarous) description would be that these arts are ‘eloquent-ized,’ or (as some have even said) ‘Ciceronianized.’ Eloquence was no longer the purview of any one art. It was, in a Sidneian word, an architectonic, and as such was something like a concept in potentia and waiting to be realized.
From the perspective of literary study, it is clear that the drift of these rhetorical events was no bad thing, for two things had happened which effectively put poetry at midstage. The first was that with eloquence no longer the property of one art, the major venue for the classical oratorical values shifted to the written page: if, in the absence of oratorical occasion, to speak eloquently in an empty room is to waste one's time, then by contrast, to write eloquently in an empty room merely allows better concentration, since books, unlike speeches, can supply their own occasions. Should a writer wish to address the state, in one place and at one time, he need only to set his mind accordingly and put pen to paper: to have books is thus to have replaced the Roman forum. Through books, literary eloquence could recover the stance of power which the culturally displaced orator had lost.
Yet if printing encouraged the oratorical values of eloquence to be relocated in literary contexts, it also helped to subordinate the otherwise independent trivium subjects (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) to whatever art could stake its claim to eloquence, and it is precisely this relegation of other arts to the role of ‘serving sciences’ that Sidney makes one of his primary tasks in the Defence. In a projection worthy of the best of alchemists, Sidney transmutes the central values which Cicero defined as those of oratory into those of poetry. Thus he begins by adopting for the poet the orator's unique and dominating position among the arts, borrowing from Cicero not just the conception of his argument, but his very terms. Further, in locating the poet's dominance in the power to move, Sidney again appropriates to the poet the chief Ciceronian office of the orator. But just as important, his argument for the special powers of poetic language is also very much the same claim which Cicero makes for the orator's special powers of actio. In Cicero, of course, these modes are primarily physical and formal; Sidney converts the idea of the orator's actual presence into the idea of the poet's putative presence, borrowing the orator's concept of energeia (the use of imagery and likeness to conjure up through mere words the sense and dimension of a fully realized experience) to argue the poet's need for ‘forcibleness.’
This has been a brief treatment of a complex subject; and, when one finally comes to the question of how knowing rhetoric makes one a better reader of Spenser, there is no simple answer. It is not just a matter of knowing what schemes and tropes Spenser uses, or of what rhetorics he might have studied. These interesting questions encompass only a small part of what the classical oratorical tradition provided him.
The humanist poet's larger, more abstract rhetorical inheritance begins from what could be called the office of the orator, in the twofold classical sense of this word, both as a defined role to be fulfilled and as a social duty to which one is morally bound. Oratory supplies the poet an office in the first sense by defining for him a stance and authority from which to speak on the highest concerns of the state. In the second sense, the classical model enjoins on him the duty of deliberative as well as of epideictic speech. From a Ciceronian point of view, it is the poet's duty, and not just his choice, to advise the state as to future action. Finally, oratory also bequeaths to the poet a sense of position with respect to the culture he serves, for it becomes the poet's role as it once had been the orator's to act as the cultural nexus through which the best thoughts from the culture's wisest store can be brought to bear upon general public issues. A favorite Renaissance commonplace was Cicero's definition of eloquence as ‘copiose loquens sapientia’ (wisdom speaking with fullness; Partitiones oratoriae 79). Such a phrase would make no poor motto for the rhetorical achievement of The Faerie Queene. (See also *copia, humanist *poetics.)
JOHN WEBSTER
Cox ed 1899; Harvey ed 1945; Philipp Melanchthon 1846 Elementorum rhetorices in Opera… omnia ed Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider, 13: cols 417–506 (Halle); T.Wilson 1560.
Don Paul Abbott 1983 ‘Renaissance’ in The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric ed Winifred Bryan Horner (Columbia, Mo) pp 75–100; Alpers 1962; Dundas 1985; Hanna H.Gray 1963 ‘Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence’ JHI 24:497–514; Howell 1956; Joseph 1947; G.A.Kennedy 1980; Lanham 1968; Murphy 1983; Rix 1940; Seigel 1968; Nancy S. Struever 1970 The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton); Tuve 1947; Vickers 1970; Vickers 1988; John Webster 1981 ‘“The Methode of a Poet”: An Inquiry into Tudor Conceptions of Poetic Sequence’ ELR 11:22–43. For bibliographies of Renaissance primary texts, see Abbot 1983, Howell 1956, Joseph 1947, and Lanham 1968. See also *logic.
Rhetorical analysis of Spenser's poetry has tended to focus primarily on identification of the tropes and schemes of elocutio (style and ornamentation), perhaps because this limited approach has the authority of long tradition. Renaissance theorists, themselves biased by tradition to stress the rhetoric of lawcourts, pulpits, and political assemblies, in their textbooks cited poets mainly as examples of style, and Spenser's first commentator, E.K., in his gloss to The Shepheardes Calender, limits his rhetorical observations to a random selection of often obscure figures. Renaissance poets, however, striving to emulate in vernacular literature the achievements of admired Latin models, also adapted the rhetorical principles of those models to their needs—adaptations involving more than devices of elocutio. Spenser's sense of occasion, audience, and subject dictates his choice not only of figures of ornament but also of topos, commonplace, method of proof, exemplum, and prosody—all according to criteria of appropriateness, or decorum. He expected his readers, schooled like himself in the disciplines of classical rhetoric, to discern his purpose by abstracting principles of decorum from details of elocutio and organization (dispositio) and to move from this base, by inference, to his conception (inventio).
In practice, however, such analytical inference proves complex and demanding. The rhetorical structure underlying Spenser's best work supports not one single network of decorous relationships but a dense mosaic derived from the poet's copia and his allegorical temper. Theorists traditionally classified allegoria as a trope, an element of elocutio, but Veltkirchius (in his commentary on an edition of Erasmus’ De copia published in London 1569) classes it among other genres as an element of inventio. Spenser evidently made the same shift of status. As a rhetorical genre, allegoria functions both as a species of narrative in which one sequence of events alludes to others, thereby inviting multiple interpretations, and as a method of exegesis for such forms as prophecies, divinations, myths, and signs. Once a poet opts to use allegoria, he is committed by the demands of decorum to the conventions of the genre: to the formal and functional characteristics abstracted from admired models of allusive narrative or exegetical exposition. Spenser's debt to this tradition is well documented. Decorum also dictates, however, that the poet not simply adhere slavishly to his sources, but select and where necessary adapt or concoct topoi appropriate to his vision, enriching the rhetorical tradition he inherits. Implicit in both the configuration of one narrative sequence evocative of others and the notion of exegetical exposition is the common concept of a unity underlying apparent diversity, a concept central to the Neoplatonic strain in Spenser's Christian humanism. This evident affinity between allegoria and a primary focus of Spenser's vision accounts for his tendency to give this genre dominant status. By merging topoi of allegoria with those of other rhetorical genres (elegia, epithalamium, fabula, heroica [epic], lyrica, pastoralia, and sonnet) he subsumes all as species of allegoria, producing mosaics which, as the history of Spenserian commentary abundantly attests, engender multiple and diverse interpretations.
The rhetorical structures produced by Spenser's merging of genre capable of generating such a diversity of readings exemplify configurations abstracted from the concept of courtship. An analysis of the rhetorical motives in Castiglione's Courtier has adduced the following useful definition: ‘By the “principle of courtship” in rhetoric we mean the use of suasive devices for the transcending of social estrangement’ (Burke 1950:208). For Spenser, as for Castiglione and many other Renaissance artists, this principle has broad ramifications. Three motives for courtship correspond to three fundamental sources of perceived estrangement: those between sexes and between orders of being (man, nature, and God), as well as those between social classes. Patently, we find these estrangements intolerable and seek to overcome them. Each generates its own dynamic of courtship (erotic, transcendent, and social), creating three analogous rhetorical structures all conforming schematically to the hierarchical pyramid we associate particularly with models of social privilege: broad at the base where the masses dwell in the lowest stratum of power, narrowing to a small elite of nobility (Castiglione's courtiers), and converging to an apex, the seat of sovereignty. This social model patterns erotic and transcendent structures. In each, highly formalized strategies exist to ascend the hierarchy and approach identification with its apex, or ‘ultimate term,’ and the erotic courtier seeking physical union with his beloved, or the Christian courting spiritual unity with God, stand in relation to their respective objects of courtship as inferior to superior in the social model, traditionally adopting a stance of humility, supplication, and servitude. Because the structures are thus both formally and functionally analogous, any one of them may stand surrogate for the others, thereby providing Spenser with a source of considerable allegorical flexibility.
His exploitation of the rhetorical potential in this configuration reveals itself most readily in The Faerie Queene, where the narrative sequence of knightly quest provides a vehicle for interwoven progressions of erotic, social, and transcendent courtship. Book I will serve as a paradigm for his method throughout the poem. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and any effort to persuade another of our point of view both acknowledges an estrangement between us (we are not of ‘the same mind’) and seeks to overcome it. Spenser, functioning as rhetorician (quite apart from his probable role as courtier seeking preferment from Elizabeth), courts a meeting of minds between poet and audience to overcome their estrangement through suasive devices. In FQ I, the subject is holiness, and the ‘Legende of the Knight of the Red Crosse’ is Spenser's instrument of persuasion, constructed to forge an identification of perspectives and attitudes on this subject between his vision and that of his reader. In effect, he asserts a concept of holiness and sets out to prove it.
Traditionally, a rhetorical assertion is termed an enthymeme to distinguish it from a premise in logic. Logical systems, such as those of mathematics and metaphysics, are closed and permit the deduction of true and certain conclusions from premises if the rules of the system are followed consistently, unaffected by anything outside the system. Logical premises are either true or false with the certainty of a priori definition. Enthymemes, by contrast, are probable, not certain, and rhetoric is the alternative to logic as a source of comprehension and order in open systems where the certainty of logic is unattainable or suspect. Indeed, Renaissance humanists championed rhetoric in part because it provided a means of opening to fresh speculation and controversy issues long closed by scholastic philosophers within the formulaic protocols of Aristotelian logic. Spenser's choosing to treat holiness as a rhetorical issue reflects this humanistic influence, and commits him to ‘alogical’ methods of proof: ethos, pathos, and logos. Proof by ethos (ethical proof) occurs when we give our consent to an enthymeme either because of the respect due its source or because we are impressed by the performance of its advocate. Proof by pathos (pathetic proof) occurs when our consent is won by appeal to emotion. Logos (logical proof), despite its designation, is not deductive but demonstrative: it relies on examples (exempla) whose persuasive power depends upon decorum, our perception of their appropriateness to the enthymeme they purport to prove. Exempla also carry varying degrees of both emotional and ethical appeal. For Spenser and his readers, scriptural exempla were more authoritative than historical or literary (fabulous) exempla, and citations from classical authors outranked later sources.
Book I, however, is a secular fable on holiness, not a treatise or sermon, and decorum forbids Spenser's directly citing the kinds of exempla suitable to formal argument. Appeals to biblical, historical, or literary authority are indirect, or allusive, achieved through a suggestive phrase or detail of description, which are techniques of elocutio (style and ornament), not elements of inventio (the selection of topoi, enthymemes, and exempla appropriate to the subject). Spenser's inventio consists of mixed topoi, both those of genre already noted, and those of subject, the aspects of holiness as he envisions it. Each aspect is either praiseworthy (eulogistic) or blameworthy (dislogistic), generating enthymemes which, stated simplistically, conform to either the pattern ‘x is holy’ or ‘x is unholy.’ To ‘prove’ such enthymemes and conform to the topoi of allegoria and heroica, Spenser incorporates each aspect in characters whose actions, words, and description represent appropriately the nature of the particular aspect of holiness each embodies, be they eulogistic (eg, Una, Arthur, Caelia and her sisters, Mercy, Contemplation) or dislogistic (eg, Error, Archimago, Duessa, Lucifera, Orgoglio, Despair). Characters, in short, are Spenser's true exempla, some of whose characteristics may evoke scriptural, historical, or literary authority.
Spenser favors three schemes of elocutio to adduce such authority: prosopographia (the description of a person by form, stature, manners, studies, activities, and affections), topothesia (the description of an imaginary place), and icon (a specialized form of description by use of multiple comparisons to other persons or things). Some uses of prosopographia are extremely simple, involving little more than a suggestive name attached to an exemplum (eg, Fidelia, Zeal, Reverence, Repentance) or a detail of appearance (eg, the initial description of Redcrosse, I i 2, with its allusion to the ‘whole armour of God’ in Eph 6). Similar economy marks the topothesia of ‘Morpheus house’ (i 39, 40) with its echo of passages from Aeneid, Odyssey and Metamorphoses. Other schemes are highly elaborate, involving both topothesia and prosopographia interwoven to produce a decorous relationship between place and person. The treacherous master of illusion, Archimago, for instance, is characterized by his monkish disguise and precious habitat, both conveying the exaggerated perfection that a stage manager might create to cater to conventional expectations of a hermit and his hermitage, and reflecting with exact decorum the hyperbolized cliché of his rhetoric: ‘He told of Saintes and Popes, and evermore/He strowd an Ave-Mary after and before’ (35). By contrast, Despair and his cave afford no disguise, but person and place (ix 33–6) reinforce each other in their appropriateness to the spiritual death they represent, ‘Darke, dolefull, drearie, like a greedie grave.’ Equally illustrative of decorum is Spenser's use of icon to depict Lucifera's counselors, the deadly sins. Their names evoke their religious significance, and every detail of description stands in appositional, sometimes synonymic, relationship to every other detail and to the abstract name. Another lengthy icon (vii 16–18) characterizes Duessa through a series of comparative identifications with the woman riding the seven-headed Beast of Revelation 17.3–4. Whether simple or elaborate, such strategies of elocutio, in their detailed copia disciplined by decorum, enrich the ethos of Spenser's exempla, enabling him to court, in his dispositio, recognition from his audience of deep moral import in this ostensibly secular fable of adventure.
Dispositio is the office of rhetorical practice concerned with the organization of the elements of inventio into their most persuasive form of argument. Spenser's argument is his plot, and its dispositio involves persuasive strategies of narration. Stripped to its fundamentals, the narrative sequence exhibits topoi of fabula, of romance, legend, and fairy tale. An untutored farmboy in borrowed armor undertakes a hazardous quest to rescue the parents of a mysterious princess whose castle is besieged by a dragon. Surviving encounters with monsters, wizards, witches, trolls, giants, and assorted other villains, he completes his mission, discovers his true identity as the patron saint of England, and is betrothed to the princess. Such tales are the stuff of daydream, self- pleasing and uncritically optimistic, and for the purpose of moral enthymemes the topoi of fairy tales are seldom effective as ethos or logos, although they exert a timeless pathetic effect, tending to captivate rather than to persuade. Like Sidney's poet, they give ‘so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it’ (ed 1973b:92). To entice the attention and sympathy of his audience is the first task of dispositio for the orator in his exordium, and the rhetorical elements of fabula allow Spenser to focus sympathetic attention on Redcrosse, who begins his quest as an exemplum, not of holiness or unholiness, but of the daydream-self in Everyman: well meaning, caught up in marvelous adventure, upward bound to success by dint of his good intentions and physical prowess alone.
Once established pathetically, Redcrosse is transmuted progressively into an instrument of ethical and logical proof. Unlike other exempla, he is not static in character but dynamic; neither saintly nor depraved, capable in potential of either holiness or unholiness, he thus attains the function of surrogate for general humanity even as, indeed because, his ethos as hero of fable is discredited by the manifest inadequacy of his good intentions and physical prowess over the first nine cantos. The narrator's epiphonema (summary moral) at x 1, drawn from these cantos, states as a discovered conclusion the enthymeme they seek to prove. Spenser's argument for the assertion in this stanza proceeds through a sequence of dramatic demonstrations in each of which the audience's surrogate exemplum, Redcrosse, ‘takes on’ a dislogistic exemplum—‘takes on’ in both the dramatic sense of encountering as antagonist and the structural sense of manifesting the unholy aspect each exemplifies. He is enmeshed in Error, deluded by Archimago, wounded in his worldly pride by Lucifera, seduced by Duessa, conquered and dungeoned in darkness by Orgoglio, persuaded to self-destruction by Despair. Equally demonstrative of the enthymeme are statements within whose syntax Redcrosse takes on the countervalent eulogistic exempla, being comforted, rescued, healed, guided, and taught by Una, Arthur, the dwarf, the stream and tree of canto xi, and the figures of canto x whose names compose a lexicon of religious terms: Caelia, Fidelia, Speranza, Charissa, Humilitá, Zeal, Reverence, Obedience, Patience, Amendment, Remorse, Repentance, Mercy, Contemplation.
These names, like other devices of elocutio, mark the incursion of allegoria into the topoi of heroica and fabula, and serve to universalize both the exempla and the syntax of their relationship with Redcrosse. As the knight takes on successive exempla, he simultaneously moves toward the end of his quest; thus the structure of narrative sequence, by its very nature, proves through logos that each exemplum is necessary to, and has a place in, the attainment of that end. Led by Redcrosse and the narrator, readers discover that to accept the inefficacy of ‘fleshly might’ against ‘spirituall foes’ is a prior necessity for the attainment of grace. Each episode in the narrative demonstration is at once dramatically a step towards the goal and logically a derivative attribute of the goal; hence, structurally, it is an intermediate level in a hierarchical model with the goal as its apex. As each exemplum accumulates, through elocutio, attributes derived from religious, historical, and literary topoi, it becomes a constituent common to more than one such hierarchy. Thus Redcrosse, in completing his fairy-tale quest by killing a dragon, simultaneously reaches the apex of erotic, social, and transcendent structures, achieving identity as the betrothed of Una, a true knight of Gloriana, the patron saint of England, and recipient of salvation through grace.
Temporal simultaneity implies structural coincidence: all ultimate terms touch at the same point of convergence. Spenser prefigures this narrative point in graphic form as the physical summit of the Mount of Contemplation, a natural analogue for hierarchical structure, described in a topothesia using elaborate paraphrase (paraphrasis) to identify the place as Sinai, the Mount of Olives, and Parnassus (x 53–4), whose summits invoke associations with Moses and the dispensation of law, Jesus and the dispensation of mercy, and the classical Muses respectively. However we may interpret this episode allegorically, its rhetorical effect is to assert the identity of three apparently diverse mountains, making them analogous manifestations of a single entity. As Redcrosse climbs the mountain towards discovery of his identity as St George and his vision of the ‘new Hierusalem’ (55), both his quest for the summit and his function as courtier to Gloriana undergo an elaboration of ethos parallel to the accumulation of significance in his narrative encounters with exempla. Similarly, the narrative sequences culminating in the Dragon's death, by virtue of their common constituent exempla, the common figure of Redcrosse as courtier, and the coincident point of their ultimate terms, become, despite their apparent diversity, analogous manifestations generated from a single hierarchical structure of courtship.
Although they exhibit principles of decorum and generic topoi markedly different from those of The Faerie Queene, works throughout Spenser's canon reveal analogous strategies of rhetorical structure and proof. The Shepheardes Calender and Amoretti offer sufficient variety to illustrate both the continuity and flexibility of his rhetorical practice.
In The Shepheardes Calender, the figure of Colin Clout, the shepherd-poet, serves rhetorical functions similar to those of Redcrosse, and the presence of topoi from allegoria, here blended with those conventional to pastoral, creates interpretive potential of the type noted in The Faerie Queene. Particular readings of the Calender depend largely on how one identifies various characters in the poem, especially Colin and his ‘faithlesse’ beloved Rosalind. For the purpose of rhetorical induction, however, who or what these characters might be matters less than how they function in a formal structure. In the plaintive eclogues, Rosalind functions formally as the object of both poetic and erotic courtship, with Colin as the doubly frustrated courtier.
The key to Spenser's elaboration of this model is October, where Piers identifies the vocations of poet and priest: to guide ‘lawlesse’ youth with moral instruction to the ‘good’ regardless of the meager worldly rewards of which Cuddie complains. Piers’ identification makes explicit the implications of rhetorical parallels between the plaintive and moral eclogues. Using a dispositio of debate in the latter, as opposed to that of complaint in the former, Spenser explores the faithlessness of shepherds who neglect their pastoral calling due to worldly corruption, a betrayal which, like Rosalind's, causes the flocks to suffer. The format of debate creates an amalgam of anti-thetical perspectives and complementary personalities. The debaters are not, in themselves, exempla of the moral alternatives for which they speak; figures designated as good or bad appear only as exempla used by the debaters: Algrind, Roffy, Tityrus, and the Oak are eulogistic, while the Briar, Fox, Wolf in sheep's clothing, and the Kid display dislogistic characteristics of folly, pride, falsehood, and neglect of duty. The debaters themselves, like Redcrosse, are neither saintly nor depraved, but median figures of equal ethical status serving as loci of conflicting moral alternatives.
In speaking for one alternative, each debater indicates a potential for good or evil, and Spenser gives all the advantage of logical proof to one of the antithetical perspectives coexisting in each eclogue. Diggon's attack on worldliness in September, for instance, uses the fabulous exemplum of Roffy and Lowder and his own experience as ample logical proof to undercut the homiletic complacency of Hobbinol (70–3, 152–3). Februarie displays a confrontation between pathetic and logical proof similar to May. Thenot cites the ethical exemplum of Tityrus and the fabulous case of the Oak and Briar to demonstrate the effects of imprudence and rash anger in refutation of Cuddie's emotional, ad hominem outbursts (51–4, 59–60). In each instance, the audience is invited to judge the issue, not the speaker, and to recognize, applying the rhetorical criteria for victory in formal debate, that one case has been proven while the other has not. The debaters, taken as a group, become an appropriate exemplum of common humanity struggling to mediate between antithetical alternatives, and Spenser's elocutio by antithesis in the moral eclogues is decorous with his combative dispositio which, in turn, reflects a Christianhumanist inventio of man balanced between conflicting moral polarities.
Piers’ identification of priestly and poetic vocations in October merges this exemplar from the moral eclogues with Colin. Piers also invokes the Neoplatonic ideal of love, the recognition that earthly beauty is only an imperfect reflection of its heavenly counterpart, in answer to Cuddie's assertion that Colin's frustrated erotic passion prevents his raising poetry to its ancient heights (88–102). Colin thus becomes a synecdoche of poet, priest, and lover suspended, in each role, at a median point between the ideal and its worldly antithesis: a median figure striving for suasive union with the highest level in analogous hierarchies, not only the erotic and social structures of the plaintive eclogues, but also by functional identification, with the aesthetic and religious. Rosalind, as the object of Colin's courtship, thereby becomes the locus of multiple functions, equivalent to the ultimate term in each structure and thus capable of sustaining, like Colin, the multiple interpretations of allegorical analysis.
Within the Neoplatonic context, however, Rosalind is also a median figure, spirit and flesh, representing potentially the ideal Eliza of Aprill and the mutable Dido of November, both of whom transcend her as objects of successful poetic courtship, of praise and lament respectively. Insofar as she is a median figure, she is functionally identical with Colin; they are loci of antithetical values, poetic and antipoetic, within the same personality. Their courtship is equivalent to the courtship of debate through complementary voices in the moral eclogues, with Colin's struggle to overcome erotic estrangement informing a dispositio of internal struggle to resolve the antithetical demands of his vocation and those of the world. Through Rosalind, within the context of Neoplatonic love, Colin must, like the debaters in the moral eclogues, choose to court the heavenly or the earthly. His despair and sense of lost congruence with nature (Jan 25–30, Dec 19–138) are both proof that he has chosen wrongly and Spenser's means of courting our perspective in evaluating the same alternative. As the figure of courting shepherd common to multiple hierarchical structures, Colin has significance decorous to each setting, but whether he functions as lover, priest, or poet, like Redcrosse, he reflects Spenser's humanistic inventio.
Although its generic topoi are largely those of the Petrarchan sonnet rather than pastoral, Amoretti displays inventio, dispositio, and a functional relationship between its poet-protagonist and his object of erotic courtship virtually identical with the major rhetorical configurations of The Shepheardes Calender. Its dramatic fable of frustrated courtship again informs an inventio using, as topoi of subject, the antithetical polarities of Neoplatonic love—sacred and profane, rational and irrational—to generate a dispositio composing a collision of antithetical exempla focused within the protagonist's mind. Thus lover and beloved again function dialectically as complementary facets of a composite psyche, with the imagistic patterns of Spenser's elocutio defining the conflicting poles of this ‘psychomachia.’
Images of tyranny and war (eg, 11, 14, 57), ‘amazed’ senses and blindness (3), storm (40, 62), nets and hooks (37, 47), sickness (50), and lost poetic power (33) are Neoplatonic commonplaces of irrational love attributed to his beloved, Elizabeth, as cause or source. She, however, is also, sometimes within the same sonnet, the locus of other, directly contrary, attributes: calm, peace, and inspiration. These contradictions within the lover's mind, epitomized by such oxymora as ‘dying live’ (14) and ‘O mighty charm which makes men love theyr bane,/ and thinck they dy with pleasure, live with payne’ (47), prove by exempla the corrupting power of passion on intellect, but equally demonstrate that Elizabeth, like Rosalind, is potentially a source of both sacred and profane volition in her lover. The choice is his.
The apotheosis of Elizabeth in sonnet 74 to equal stature with mother and queen brings to explicit focus the implications of a cumulative attribution to her by devices of elocutio throughout both cycles, epithets denoting majesty, sovereignty, and divinity, beginning with ‘soverayne beauty’ in 3. She, like Rosalind, thus becomes the ultimate term in analogous structures, and the poet's courtship, ostensibly erotic, is simultaneously both social and transcendent. The seasons of his quest terminate in winter and despair because the erotic courtship remains unconsummated. Rhetorically, physical consummation would prove that through sexual union spiritual and social identification with God and sovereign also occur simultaneously and coincidentally. Despite their timeless pathetic appeal, such fairy-tale doctrines are wholly indecorous with Spenser's inventio and the Christianhumanist perspective it embodies. The protagonist of Amoretti, like Redcrosse and Colin, stands as surrogate and exemplar of man suspended between moral alternatives.
Spenser's persuasive strategies court our understanding that in only one state, that of holiness, are all fundamental estrangements, erotic, social, and transcendent, capable of resolution, and his rhetorical structures consistently define that goal as one common to all the elemental strivings of human life.
MICHAEL F.N.DIXON
Modern rhetorical criticism attempts to understand Spenser historically in the context of an Elizabethan poetics different from both that of the classical period and our own. Classical Greece had developed an art of public speaking and a related but distinct art of poetry. Aristotle treated them separately in his Rhetoric and Poetics. Although this distinction was maintained by such Roman theorists as Cicero and Quintilian, rhetoric was later adapted to composition of all kinds: oral and written, prose and verse, public and private. By the late Middle Ages, sermons, letters, and poems all followed the rules of rhetoric.
The Renaissance inherited this fusion of rhetoric and poetics. For such Elizabethan critics as Puttenham and Sidney, the purpose of poetry, like that of the epideictic oration, was to move men to virtuous action by praising virtue and reproving vice (see humanist *poetics). To this end, poetry used the formal devices of argument, organization, and style developed for the oration. Their humanist education trained Spenser and his contemporaries both to write and to judge literature according to such rhetorical concepts as decorum, ornamentation, and imitation. Even though changes in the English language and in literary taste made Spenser's poetry increasingly remote to seventeenth—and eighteenth-century readers, they shared with him a poetics based on rhetoric.
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the Romantic movement revolutionized poetics, severing its link with rhetoric. Education, too, underwent profound changes in adapting to the Industrial Revolution. In particular, rhetorical training, the foundation of the humanist curriculum, was weakened until by now it has been almost abandoned. Misunderstanding Spenser's rhetorical poetics, twentieth-century readers have often found his work inaccessible (see *rhetoric in Spenser's poetry). Accordingly, it has been recognized during the past fifty years that a developed rhetorical criticism is needed to foster a renewed appreciation of his art.
Not distinguishing between poetics and rhetoric, Spenser's contemporaries were necessarily ‘rhetorical critics’ of his poetry. Hence their debate about his style. Cicero had reserved archaic and other uncommon diction, such as dialect words and neologisms, to ornament the high style. Renaissance theory dictated the high style for epic, the low style for pastoral. Anticipating criticism of The Shepheardes Calender, E.K. asserts the new poet's ‘dewe observing of Decorum everye where’ (Epistle to Harvey). Whether ‘Immeritô’ used archaic diction in imitation of ancient authors, or because rough and obsolete speech is most suitable to shepherds, it gives ‘great grace and… auctoritie to the verse.’ Such stylistic gravity is justified by the poet's ‘morall wisenesse’ in writing to persuade himself and others from the folly of love. ‘Immeritô’ has exceeded his predecessors in rhetorical skill: he has enriched the language by restoring good English words now out of fashion rather than by borrowing foreign words; his wellknit sentence structure has improved poetic language, which suffered from looseness; and he has avoided the excessive ornamentation of ‘the rakehellye route of our ragged rymers.’ Yet Sidney, to whom The Shepheardes Calender is dedicated, was not convinced: he criticized its ‘olde rusticke language’ because ‘neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in Italian, did affect it’ (Defence ed 1973b:112). The style of The Faerie Queene could be defended more easily on Ciceronian principles. The elder Francis Beaumont asserts that ‘Maister Spencer, following the counsaile of Tullie in de Oratore, for reviving of antient wordes, hath adorned his owne stile with that beauty and gravitie, which Tully speaks of: and his much frequenting of Chaucers antient speeches causeth many to allow farre better of him, then otherwise they would’ (‘Letter to Thomas Speght’ 1598; Sp All p 54). However, Daniel would ‘Let others sing of Knights and Palladines,/ In aged accents, and untimely words’ (Delia 1592; Sp All p 23). Edward Guilpin summarizes the Elizabethan debate over language by noting that ‘Some blame deep Spencer for his grandam words,/Others protest that, in them he records/His maisterpeece of cunning giving praise,/And gravity to his profound-prickt layes’ (Skialetheia 1598; Sp All p 58).
Spenser became accepted as a new model of poetic excellence (see *imitations and adaptations, Renaissance). E.K. glosses such rhetorical figures as epanorthosis, epiphonema, fictio, hyperbaton, icon, metaphor, paronomasia, periphrasis, proverb, syncope, and synecdoche. Logical, rhetorical, and grammatical treatises mined Spenser's poems for illustrations: Fraunce's Shepherd's Logic (ca 1585, rev as The Lawiers Logike 1588) and The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), Henry Peacham the elder's Garden of Eloquence (rev 1593), Charles Butler's Rhetoricae libri duo (1598), and Alexander Gil's Logonomia anglica (1619). For more than fifty years after his death, excerpts from Spenser's poetry appeared in such collections of poetic ‘flowers’ and commonplaces as John Bodenham's Bel-vedére, or The Garden of the Muses (1600), Robert Allott's Englands Parnassus (1600), Daniel Tuvill's Dove and the Serpent (1614), and Joshua Poole's English Parnassus (1657).
Kenelm Digby, who wrote the most extensive seventeenth-century commentary on Spenser, praises his diction (Discourse; Sp All pp 211–14). However, Jonson's objection that ‘Spencer, in affecting the Ancients writ no Language’ (Timber, or Discoveries 1640; Sp All p 206) became dogma by the Restoration, not only because English neoclassicism grew more rigid but also because Spenser's language became more remote and perhaps more obscure with time. The 1679 Folio includes ‘An Alphabetical Index of Unusual Words Explained.’ The author of Spencer Redivivus (1687; Sp All 287) may have been overstating the case for translating The Faerie Queene into Restoration English when he wrote that Spenser's ‘Stile seems no less unintelligible at this Day, than the obsoletest of our English or Saxon Dialect.’ Dryden claimed that Spenser was ‘still Intelligible, at least, after a little practice’ (tr of Juvenal 1693; ed 1956–, 4:14). Nevertheless, Spenser was accused of obscurity as well as indecorum. Some argued that he attained grandeur in spite of, not because of, his diction: ‘with all his Rustie, obsolete words, with all his rough-hewn clowterly Verses; yet take him throughout, and we shall find in him a graceful and Poetic Majesty’ (Edward Phillips Theatrum Poetarum 1675; Sp All p 268).
In the eighteenth century, as the publication of major new editions and commentaries shows, Spenser continued to be read; also, he was frequently imitated by poets, even though his un-Virgilian epic form and subject matter offended neoclassical taste (see *imitations and adaptations, 1660–1800). By classical rules, The Faerie Queene lacked unity of theme, plot, and characterization in spite of the plan he had outlined in the Letter to Raleigh. His fairy knights, wizards, magic arms, dragons, and other romance elements were improbable; and he was accused of inconsistency, absurdity, occasional ugliness, and even impiety. The complex rhyme scheme of the Spenserian stanza, critics claimed, forced him into linguistic contortions and verbosity. In defending his art, Hughes (1715), Warton (1754, rev and enl 1762), and Hurd (1762) especially initiated historical criticism of Spenser by recognizing that he had followed the Elizabethan taste for Ariosto when he wrote his epic in a ‘Gothic’ rather than a classical form. Although these defenders did not approach other aspects of his rhetoric historically, in sharing his rhetorical tradition, they were better able than the later Romantic critics to appreciate his moral purpose, his allegory, and ‘the more minute Beauties of his Epithets, his Figures, and his Similes’ (Hughes in Spenser ed 1715, 1: lxxv).
The Romantics exalted the very elements in Spenser that the previous age had dismissed as indecorous and improbable. He became the poet of rest and dream, imagination and wonder, metrical music and pictorial delight, but certainly not of moral persuasion and conscious art (see *Hunt). Readers were advised not to ‘meddle with the allegory’ (Hazlitt ‘On Chaucer and Spenser’ in Lectures on the English Poets 1818). Spenser's violation of the classical canons of epic was celebrated as the sign of his natural, untutored genius.
The nineteenth century also witnessed the development of philology (see *scholarship, 1579–1932). Impressed by the achievements of the historical and comparative study of languages, critics at the end of the century began examining Spenser's diction, especially in The Shepheardes Calender, for archaism, neologism, dialect, foreign borrowings, color words, and figures of speech. They likewise discussed the influence of continental theorists, especially the Pléiade, on Spenser's language. (Their debates, made possible by the completion of the Concordance and the OED, are summarized in Var 7:614–30.) At least one early influence study, Renwick's Edmund Spenser (1925), recognized the rhetorical tradition shared by English and continental poets. In the next decade, H.O.White (1935) and Crane (1937) pioneered the study of Elizabethan rhetoric. T.W.Baldwin (1944), Joseph (1947), Howell (1956), Ong (1971), and others have since examined English rhetorical theory, training, and practice in its European context. Thus the linguistic features catalogued by the philologists were finally recognized as products, at least in part, of a rhetorical poetics. While most post-Romantic critics still condemned them as ornamental rather than organic, Rix (1940) and Rubel (1941) conceded that Spenser's skill often made them effective.
The New Criticism of the 1930s and 1940s demanded not only an organic fusion of form and content but also that ‘direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling’ that Eliot and other poets of his generation praised in Donne. The poet of imaginative fancy, of mindless sensuous beauty, as the Romantics had defined Spenser, could not compare with one who wrote not just from the heart but also from ‘the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts’ (Eliot ed 1950:241–50). Spenser's complexity was lost on New Critics because they sought a different kind of difficulty.
Critical reevaluation of Spenser had to await critical reevaluation of Donne. Tuve (1947) provided both in the context of Renaissance rhetoric, arguing that the two poets share criteria for evaluating poetry—‘significancy’ and ‘rhetorical efficacy’—that differ from those of their twentieth-century critics. Unlike post-Romantic critics, who expect imagery to record sense impressions accurately, Renaissance critics limited their demand for ‘sensuous vividness’ to a few rhetorical figures, such as icon, prosopopoeia, and descriptio. Spenser writes in genres requiring these figures more often than Donne, but they agree in expecting images to delight not the senses by their beauty so much as the mind by their intellectual subtlety, not to express the emotions of the poet so much as to move the audience by magnifying the subject. In the Renaissance demand for decorum, Tuve saw a concern for the fusion of form and content.
Tuve's study changed criticism of Spenser in several ways. First, critics modified Romantic notions of his ‘pictorialism’ in the light of Renaissance rhetorical theory (eg, Dundas 1968). Second, Tuve's argument initiated a New Critical search for the functions of rhetorical figures in Spenser's poetry (eg, Craig 1959, 1967; Vickers 1970). Third, criticism began to consider his rhetoric of argument and organization. Several studies have analyzed the deliberative rhetoric of Despair and Una in FQ I (eg, Vickers 1970) and the judicial rhetoric of Mutabilitie and Nature in the Cantos of Mutabilitie (eg, Davidson 1982, Grimm 1986). Others have read the whole poem as epideictic in praise of Elizabeth (Cain 1978, Hardison 1962, Wells 1983).
Having seen the similarities between poetry and rhetoric, critics have begun recently to study their differences. The orator strives for clarity. The poet may assume rather a prophetic role, hiding truth behind a ‘veil of allegory’ (Murrin 1969, 1980). Or, reacting against aristocratic corruption, he may usurp the function of the ideal courtier, using the deceptions of art to teach truth by delighting (Javitch 1978). For these critics, rhetoric fails to explain the ‘darke conceit’ of The Faerie Queene.
The New Critics have been challenged in the past two decades by structuralist and post-structuralist critics who draw their inspiration from twentieth-century linguistics. The concept of a poem as a ‘well-wrought urn’ preserving in its language a meaning to be discovered by future generations is yielding to critical recognition that communication is a complex interplay of many elements. New Critics focused on the text, labeling as fallacies any interest in the poet's creation of or the reader's response to the text. Insofar as more recent movements turn critical attention to the common assumptions and values of poet and reader, they share the concerns of the traditional rhetorical critic, who recognizes that the Elizabethan considered the poet a moral teacher and judged his rhetorical efficacy by the reader's response. Thus reader-response criticism of Spenser since Alpers 1967b has often called itself rhetorical.
Much remains to be learned about the history of rhetoric and its relationship to Renaissance poetics, but by comparing current expectations of poetry with the Elizabethan, rhetorical critics today can perhaps recognize their own bias and better understand and appreciate the Prince of Poets.
JUDITH RICE HENDERSON
Herbert Ellsworth Cory 1911 ‘Spenser, Thomson, and Romanticism’ PMLA 26:51–91; R.M. Cummings 1971; Arnold E.Davidson 1982 ‘Dame Nature's Shifting Logic in Spenser's Cantos of Mutabilitie’ NM 83:451–6; Judith Dundas 1968 ‘The Rhetorical Basis of Spenser's Imagery’ SEL 8:59–75; Rudolf B.Gottfried 1975 ‘Spenser Recovered: The Poet and Historical Scholarship’ in Frushell and Vondersmith 1975:61–78; Nadine G.Grimm 1986 ‘Mutabilitie's Plea before Dame Nature's Bar’ Comitatus 17:22–34; Mueller 1959; Michael Murrin 1972–3 ‘The Varieties of Criticism’ MP 70:342–56; Tucker 1976–7; Wurtsbaugh 1936.
The articulatory-acoustic relation between stressed syllables that begin with different sounds and end with the same sound, normally from the last stressed vowel to the end of the syllable. ‘Perfect’ rhyme occurs when syllables are equally stressed, begin with a readily discernible difference, and end identically. The initial difference may be between two consonants (eg, call/ pall, FQ I iv 16) or between a syllable that begins with a vowel and one that begins with a consonant (eg, all/call, VI ii 35). A perfect rhyme at the end of a verse line is called single or masculine; if rhyme syllables are followed by the same undifferentiated syllable (eg, faces/places, SC, June 30, 32), the rhyme is said to be double or feminine. This series continues indefinitely to triple, quadruple, quintuple, and so forth, for example, dedicate/medicate, dedicated/medicated, dedicatedly/medicatedly. Most of Spenser's rhymes are perfect and single. A rare, special type of double or other multiple rhyme involves the so-called mosaic or heteromerous effect of one word rhyming with two or more (eg, encreased/cease it, SC, March 99, 102).
Besides the various sorts of perfect rhymes, there are deficient and redundant rhymes. The deficient lack one or more of the requirements of full rhyme. So-called stress promotion gives conventional stress to a normally unstressed syllable at the end of a word of three or more syllables, thereby assimilating that syllable into a rhyme-pattern (eg, daintily/hye, FQ I vii 32). The promoted syllable is normally the last of a dactyl (eg, dáintĭlў), which becomes an amphimacer (dáintĭlý). Promotion usually involves also a change of vowel quality, so that, for example, daintily gains a final vowel that sounds like lie or lee. As a rule, in most poets including Spenser, the full-grade form of the rhyme precedes the promoted syllable; otherwise, a reader may not be able to determine how the promoted vowel ought to sound. Although Spenser adheres to this pattern most of the time (eg, apply/mortality, VI iii 28), he is capable of reversing the order (eg, remedy/aby, 44) or of rhyming two promoted syllables with no full-grade form being involved (eg, medicine/discipline, vi 13).
The stress-promotion type of deficient rhyme is a matter of stress and vowel quality; the two other chief forms of deficient rhyme, called assonance and consonance, involve articulatory-acoustic considerations other than stress. In assonance, the vowel component of the rhyme is perfect but the consonant is not (eg, dreame/leane, SC, Julye 62, 64). In consonance, the consonant component is perfect but the vowel is not (eg, one/ grone/Coridon/none, FQ VI ix 10). Most socalled eye rhymes, which look as though they rhyme but do not, are instances of consonance, because vowels are more versatile than consonants and, furthermore, subject to somewhat greater variation of spelling, as can be seen in confusing groups like blood/ food/good, or tomb/bomb/comb; given shifting linguistic practices, we cannot be sure whether a pair like ground/wound (VI iii 27) represents an example of consonance wherein the vowels were never the same or one of perfect rhyme in its time that became divergent through history. Spenser's anomalous rhyme of couet/renew it (Colin Clout 37, 39) may be a perfect heteromerous rhyme (one word with two) or no rhyme at all (the stressed syllables sound not a bit alike if they are pronounced cov and new—but any reader of Spenser knows about the graphemic labyrinth of u/v/w and i/j/y).
Redundant rhyme—also called identical, homophone, or rime riche—occurs when syllables both begin and end the same but are not the same word. This phenomenon needs to be distinguished from simple repetition (eg, two/too creates a redundant rhyme, while two/two/twenty-two creates a repetition). Spenser would commonly put such a pair as do/undo in a rhyming position. The very first stanza of The Faerie Queene contains a redundant rhyme reeds/areeds. Within a page or two, we find the simple repetition of traine/traine (I i 18). The classification of such pairs as show/show (verb/ noun) is problematical; but with different parts of speech seeming to be functionally different words, it is probable that they qualify as a proper redundant rhyme that can be distinguished from outright repetition of same sound, same word, same part of speech. Interestingly, the last rhyme in three of Spenser's poems is an identical: rest/rest (noun/verb, CCCHA 953, 955); rehearse/hearse (‘Lay of Clorinda’ 107, 108); ornament/moniment (Epithalamion 432, 433). ‘Promotion identicals’ also occur freely in verse, as in the b rhyme of FQ I vii 32: diuersly/iollity/hye/daintily; of these four, only hye is a normally stressed rhyming syllable, the other three being normally unstressed syllables that have been promoted. But, whereas diuersly/hye creates a rhyme between a promoted syllable and a normal stressed syllable, and diuersly/iollity creates a rhyme between two promoted syllables, diuersly/daintily promotes the same un-stressed syllable, -ly. Multiple promotion identicals are not unknown (eg, Shakespeare's rhyming of masonry/memory along with enmity/posterity in Sonnet 55, or Spenser's impressive quartet at the beginning of FQ II: history/forgery/memory/Faery).
Since rhyme emphasizes likeness, the greatest hazard is monotony—a vice displayed by inept poets and avoided by good ones. The pattern of the Spenserian stanza permits striking variety and virtuosity while nicely preventing unwanted patness, and it achieves this range of effects by generally opposing the patterns of sense and syntax (ab ab bc bcC) to the acoustic couplings implicit in the bb lines (4 and 5), which are normally not a conspicuous semantic or grammatical couplet, as well as in the cC couplet (lines 8 and 9), which is never a metrical couplet, the last line being hexameter. Here is a typical stanza (IV ii 22) wherein the punctuation shows the zoning of thought and grammar in opposition to the zoning of acoustic patterns:
First he desir'd their cause of strife to see:
They said, it was for loue of Florimell.
Ah gentle knights (quoth he) how may that bee,
And she so farre astray, as none can tell.
Fond Squire, full angry then sayd Paridell,
Seest not the Ladie there before thy face?
He looked backe, and her aduizing well,
Weend as he said, by that her outward grace,
That fayrest Florimell was present there in place.
Spenser's most consistent reliance on double rhymes, significantly, seems to come in the pentameter couplets that wrap up his adaptation of the English sonnet (abab bcbc cdcd ee) as though he were determined to avoid the ‘pounce’ (as Keats called it) of exact rhyming couplets.
Unlike most other stanzas (rhyme royal, ottava rima, ballade, sonnets of various types), the Spenserian stanza has a known inventor and bears his name. It provides two complementary pleasures: that of constancy and that of variety, and Spenser seems to have enjoyed the challenge of adhering to a consistent pattern of rhythm, meter, and rhyme while varying a number of elements, with an effect of matchless richness. An inventory would reveal that at least half of the stanzas in The Faerie Queene satisfy the formal requirements perfectly, but a significant number depart from the pattern, particularly in the sorts of rhyme in the b lines (lines 2, 4, 5, and 7). It is here that Spenser most commonly replaces rhyme with repetition, for example, teares/teares (I i 52) and God/God (x 53); with repetition of a word in different spellings, for example, bene and beene (V x 25); of identical rhyme between words spelled differently but sounded alike, for example, knight/night (passim); of identical rhyme between words spelled and sounded alike and belonging to the same part of speech but qualifying as different words, for example, the noun well meaning both ‘source of water’ and ‘weal’ (I ii 43), and the noun rest meaning both ‘remainder’ and ‘repose’; the usual sort of identical rhyme between different parts of speech, for example, sent/sent (participle/ noun, i 43). While most of Spenser's rhymes are single, occasionally he uses a double rhyme; in one stanza (VII vi 44) the a rhyme is double (pleasure/measure) and the b rhyme is double with two mosaics (better/set her/get her/debter).
Spenser further avoids monotony by exploiting a range of lexical effects related to rhyme—effects that cover a range from rhyme of synonyms, a ‘center of indifference,’ and rhyme of antonyms. At the former extreme are rhyming words that mean the same thing or belong at any rate in the same category; in The Faerie Queene, Spenser rhymes shake/quake (I viii 23), brest/chest (II i 47), and betraid/bewraid (VII vi 51); another favorite rhyme is between forms of write and endite, such as writing/endighting (Harvey Sonnet). At the opposite extreme are the antithetical rhymes of antonyms (which seem inherently more interesting and satisfying than rhyming synonyms): these are rhymes of the sort that join womb/ tomb, hire/fire, make/break, and suchlike. The Faerie Queene rhymes stay/stray several times (eg, I x 35), with the bonus of alliteration as well as rhyme.
The genius and glory of the Spenserian stanza reside largely in the amplitude of its rhyming—three rhyme sounds in nine lines—combined with the plenitude of variety: two a rhymes, four b, three c. Given the limitations on English noun forms, Spenser seems as a rule to reserve the a rhymes for the trickier pairs (eg, length/strength, I vii 18) and to use the plentiful b rhymes for redundancy, extravagance, and experimentation.
The ababbcbcC scheme generates a fairly complex set of possibilities, since it projects a large number of possible arrays. With two a rhymes, four b rhymes, and three c rhymes, there turn out to be ten fundamental bilateral relations. Arithmetically, this results from the calculation 1+6+3. The scheme offers, that is to say, conspicuous relations between ten pairs of sounds: a1/a2, b1/b2, b1/b3, and so forth. Then, since each relation may take any of four basic forms (repetition, perfect rhyme, redundancy, deficiency), there are 40 (4×10) fundamental bilateral possibilities, to which we can add the five multilateral possibilities (b123, b124, b234, c123, and b1234), so that there is a network of 45 (40+5) fundamental possibilities. Finally, this range is further enriched by the possibility of variants (eg, feminine rhymes) in all the positions, not to mention the rare anomalies. One exemplary anomaly is the so-called poysonous rhyme in FQ III x 59, wherein the b rhymes are poysonous/rancorous/suspitious/vitious: the expectation generated at first is that the rhyme will be founded on terminal sounds like -nous and -rous (by conventional stresspromotion), but in b3 and b4 the basis of the rhyme shifts to an earlier syllable (written -pit- and vit-), with a devious—or poysonous—effect quite appropriate to the topic of the stanza. All in all, then, Spenser exploits about fifty possible permutations in his fixed-but-flexible creature. (See also *versification.)
WILLIAM HARMON
R.E.Neil Dodge 1916 ‘An Obsolete Elizabethan Mode of Rhyming’ in Shakespeare Studies by Members of the Department of English of the University of Wisconsin (Madison) pp 174–200; Fussell 1979; William Harmon 1987 ‘Rhyme in English Verse: History, Structures, Functions’ SP 84:365–93; Hollander 1975; Hollander 1981b; C.Hugh Holman and William Harmon 1986 A Handbook to Literature 5th ed (New York).
A narrow beach marking the boundary between land and sea, the ‘Rich strond’ is the location of Britomart's lament and her subsequent combat with Marinell, who guards this ‘rocky shore’ (FQ III iv 7–18). Hearing of her son's fall, the sea nymph Cymoent comes to it and in despair laments his apparent death. Later it is the setting for the three-day ‘spousals’ of Marinell and Florimell at the Castle of the Strond (V iii, iv 3). As the wedding site for these eroticized images of the land and sea, the Rich Strond again reveals its importance as a boundary, an intermediary or liminal place.
Strond is an older variant of strand (Old English, Old Norse strond ‘border, edge, or coast’; both spellings occur in Spenser). From Middle English on, strond or strand meant ‘the land bordering a sea, lake, or river; in a more restricted sense, that part of a shore which lies between the tide-marks; sometimes used vaguely for coast, shore’ (OED sv ‘strand’ sb1, 1a). All of these senses are evoked in the episodes on the Rich Strond, for Spenser stresses the action of the waves and tide which leave the sea's treasure on the beach. In II vi 19, he also uses strond for a sheet of water, Phaedria's Idle Lake. He often emphasizes the intermediary sense of strond (neither land nor sea; a rare usage—see OED 2) by using the word to refer specifically to the area on a beach washed by the waves (Amoretti 75), by describing it with epithets transferred from the sea to the land (see his comment that Florimell leaping into a boat from the beach ‘Did thrust the shallop from the floting strand’ III vii 27), and, as in the case of the Rich Strond, by using the word to focus on that part of the shore between the tidal marks.
Like much of Spenser's vocabulary, strond has an archaic flavor, with specifically Chaucerian overtones, as in the opening of the Canterbury Tales, where it refers loosely to a country or a region, especially a foreign country (OED Ie): ‘Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,/And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes.’ This sense of the exotic and the foreign also pervades Spenser's treatment of the Rich Strond and even influences Shakespeare in his slightly later use of the word in his Henry plays; see, for example, 1 Henry IV which refers to ‘stronds afar remote’ (I i 4). In 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare uses the word in a Spenserian fash-ion, describing that part of the beach or shore on which the water has left its mark: ‘so looks the strond whereon the imperious flood/Hath left a witness'd usurpation’ (I i 62–3). There is even a possibility that Spenser may have learned from Richard III ‘the glamour of jewells concealed in the secret places of the sea’; like the sea's treasure that Marinell hoards on the Rich Strond, the jewels Clarence sees in his dream come from ‘a thousand fearful wracks’ (Richard III I iv 24– 33; Treneer in Var 3:240; cf FQ III iv 23), and foreshadow the transformation of suffering into beauty that Shakespeare would later describe in the ‘sea-change’ of The Tempest.
Spenser's strond is rich because Cymoent persuaded Nereus, her father and a sea god, to give her son ‘threasure and rich store,/ Bove all the sonnes, that were of earthly wombes ybore’ (III iv 21). Under his command, the sea ‘Voluntary’ brings ‘The spoyle of all the world’ (23) to the Rich Strond. The allusion to the Golden Age in voluntary, combined with the lyrical beauty of the passages describing the ocean world and its nymphs, has led some critics to consider this episode as Spenser's version of piscatorial pastoral poetry, following Sannazaro's Piscatory Eclogues (Nohrnberg 1976:586–90, Alpers 1967b:382ff). Whether or not the episode can be described in pastoral terms, the jewels which the sea pours forth exceed human wealth and thus come to symbolize a mythical realm of abundance, perhaps the wealth of myth itself, since the sea is the home of Cymoent and her nymphs.
Spenser stresses that this mythical wealth comes from human suffering and loss: Marinell was ‘enriched through the overthrow/ And wreckes of many wretches’ (22). It is a wealth made available to him precisely because he is half man, half god, and it represents the treasure of a mythical realm which the more fully human characters, such as Britomart, do not visit. In contrast to Marinell, Britomart scorns the wealth left on the strand (18) and is therefore sometimes interpreted as resisting the temptation of riches. She may also indicate the distance between mortal experience and the world of the partly mythical or archetypal characters.
As the two perspectives on the jewels suggest, the Rich Strond also marks the boundary between the human and mythical worlds. It is a boundary Britomart does not cross: when she reaches the Rich Strond, she turns and takes her course along this border (18). The difference between the two worlds is summed up comically in Spenser's description of the ‘temed fishes’ that pull Cymoent's chariot, a passage which draws on Virgil's description of Neptune's chariot in Aeneid 5.817–26. These fish stop at the edge of the beach and swim ‘Along the margent of the fomy shore,/Least they their finnes should bruze, and surbate sore/Their tender feet upon the stony ground’ (34). The other side of this ‘margent’ is a ‘stony ground,’ a world of pain which the mythological beings can avoid or cure. Marinell, having a mortal father and an immortal mother, appropriately inhabits this middle space and finally marries Florimell here. They are boundary figures who stand between the two realms, and when they marry do so in a place where land and sea, mortal and mythical, can meet.
The Rich Strond also marks several other borders or boundaries. Here, Britomart addresses the sea which she sees as a figure for her own tempestuous inner life. Through her words, Spenser puts the sea into an allegorical scheme whereby the inner is represented by external images. The strand marks a boundary between the outer world in which she travels and her inner life, troubled but also enriched by her love. Its location also mirrors an aspect of Britomart's character when she invokes the ‘God of winds, that raignest in the seas,/That raignest also in the Continent’ (10). Her pun reinforces the allegorical sense of continent and reminds the readers that though she stands on the land she is emotionally at sea: she has lost the ability to contain herself or her emotions, so she stands neither ‘in the Continent’ nor in the sea but somewhere in between. The Rich Strond, then, represents as an external landscape Britomart's divided inner condition. It further marks the boundary between a world in which characters are less overtly allegorical and one in which they are more so. Spenserian allegory depends on these middle places to call attention to the devices which shape its meaning.
Elsewhere in Book III, Spenser uses the edge of the sea to represent similar boundaries. Florimell comes to ‘the roring shore’ (vii 27) before she, like Marinell, is subsumed by the mythical realm. Malbecco loses his human shape at the sea's edge where he is transformed into an allegorical figure: as he stares out of his cave at the billows below, he ‘Is woxen so deform'd, that he has quight/Forgot he was a man, and Gealosie is hight’ (x 60). Here too the sea's edge marks the boundary between mortal and mythic, and between a recognizably human tale and a more allegorical one. (On the land and sea as symbolic places, see Murtaugh 1973).
As Britomart reaches the Rich Strond, the narrative energy of her story subsides, and she turns to a lyric lament, commenting on her position with an allegorical conceit. Spenser does not return to her story for four-and-a-half cantos, continuing it instead on a different level of the allegory. The Rich Strond thus serves as the setting for a shift from one level of the fiction to another. This beach, a strand between land and sea, between inner and outer, between mortal and mythic, like other intermediary places, marks symbolically the place of Spenserian allegory itself, for it brings together inner and outer, mortal and mythic, story and meaning.
SUSANNE L.WOFFORD
Alpers 1967b, ch 3, esp pp 382ff; Blissett 1965, esp pp 92–4; Freeman 1970:197–202; Hankins 1971:166–7, 228–30; Nohrnberg 1976:586–92; Roche 1964:71–2, 189–94 (on the emblem Potentia amoris and the union of land and sea); Susanne Lindgren Wofford 1987 ‘Britomart's Petrarchan Lament: Allegory and Narrative in The Faerie Queene III, iv’ CL 39:28– 57.
(1542–1617) While a captain in Ireland, Rich wrote Allarme to England (1578) and Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581), which includes a prose tale of Apolonius and Silla, the immediate source for Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Spenser could have known Rich at Dublin in 1580 or later, but neither mentions the other. James VI in 1595 was ‘not well pleased’ by a story in Farewell telling how a devil possesses a King of Scots, as in 1596 he protested against Spenser's portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, as Duessa (Cranfill and Bruce 1953:124–5). Though Rich was in England from 1592 to 1608, he wrote of his ‘forty years’ observation’ of Ireland in A New Description of Ireland (1610) and in manuscript works written in 1608, 1612, and 1615. Elizabeth I granted him a pension for life in 1587, and James I gave him £100 in 1616 as ‘the eldest Captain of the Kingdom’ (Cranfill and Bruce 1953:39, 126).
Rich presented to James in 1615 a manuscript ‘Anothomy of Irelande’; but the suggestion that this dialogue ‘both in form and in content models itself, in part at any rate,’ upon Spenser's Vewe, then unpublished (Hinton 1940:81), is not convincing. Spenser proposes reforms in civil government, customs, and religion; Rich puts first of all ‘the rootynge out of popery, and the plantynge of the worde of God’ (Hinton 1940:84), blaming bishops and corrupt officials who tolerate popery for their profit. Unlike Spenser, he had no use for books written by Catholics or in Irish, in which he found nothing but ‘lies, fables, and popish fantasies’ (New Description 1610:33). His opinions ‘upon Irish affairs were those of an ardent combatant…an ultra-Protestant’ (Falkiner 1906:126).
MARK ECCLES
The standard work is Thomas M.Cranfill and Dorothy Hart Bruce 1953 Barnaby Rich: A Short Biography (Austin, Tex). Excerpts from Rich's New Description are in James P.Myers, Jr, ed 1983 Elizabethan Ireland: A Selection of Writings by Elizabethan Writers on Ireland (Hamden, Conn). Later mss are printed by C. Litton Falkiner 1906 ‘Barnaby Rich's “Remembrances of the State of Ireland, 1612,” with Notices of Other Manuscript Reports, by the Same Writer, on Ireland under James the First’ PRIA 26(sec C):125–42, and by Edward M.Hinton 1940 ‘Rych's Anothomy of Ireland, with an Account of the Author’ PMLA 55:73–101.
Like many poets, Spenser was sensitive to the personal, patriotic, and historical associations of rivers. His verse shows him to have been unusually responsive to their physical beauties and metaphysical suggestions, and this natural disposition was strengthened by literary tradition. He recognized that the local river served certain poets as a topos which was personal and at the same time literary, historical, and universal. In English and Irish rivers particularly, he found a motif that allowed him a private voice within a nationalistic setting and a European literary tradition. In cultivating the river motif throughout his career, he made it his own poetic signature, and it be-came a distinctive feature of Spenserian verse.
In adapting traditional aspects of river poetry from classical and modern literature, Spenser naturalizes the rivers and integrates them into his own work. We can see continuities in the treatment of rivers in nearly all the literary forms from Homer, Hesiod, and Theocritus, to Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, to Statius and Ausonius. For these and many other writers, the river is generally identified with the genius loci, the mens divina, or with other mysteries of nature, as well as with historical and moral themes conveyed through landscape (see *topographical description). Authors working in the vernacular and experimenting with new forms—such as Sannazaro, Montemayor, Camoens, du Bellay, and Ronsard—not only contributed to the unbroken development of the motif, but helped to define its distinctive generic qualities in a modern European literary tradition. Leland, writing in Latin and influenced by classical and continental authors, was the first to make extensive use of British rivers as a topos set in the national landscape and used as a vehicle for historic and epideictic themes. His Cygnea cantio did much to influence the form of river poetry in England and to encourage its development by Spenser, Camden, and their contemporaries. Late in the 1570s, Camden and Spenser worked apparently independently on river poems of remarkably similar form, the one writing in Latin and integrating his verse within Britannia, and the other experimenting with English meter and possibly inserting his poem or a version of it into The Faerie Queene. Both saw the river as a classical topos in which to locate the ideas of a larger work. As Leland's interpreters, they were largely responsible for the popularity of river literature in England after 1580, although eventually the river poem became associated with Spenser, as shown by his influence on Drayton's PolyOlbion, Phineas Fletcher's Piscatorie Eclogs, William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, Milton's Comus, John Denham's Cooper's Hill, and Marvell's Upon Appleton House.
Rivers of essentially two kinds often appear in symbolically strategic places in Spenser's poetry. Those which appear incidentally in his landscapes as rivers, or as fountains or wells (both of which were traditionally the offspring of rivers), usually remain nameless, and are developed in terms of the symbolic attributes of water. Those which command a more prominent place in the poetic landscape are named, and their elemental qualities acquire further significance from their cultural context. Functioning as topoi, they exert a complex influence on both the form and content of an episode; and in them we see Spenser cultivating the conventions of the genre.
The incidental rivers of the first category not only illustrate Spenser's pervasive interest in the motif but also help to define symbolic dimensions which often remain obscure in the more expansive river episodes. From them we learn that all rivers reflect one of two different aspects of human existence: one pagan, emphatically of nature's sphere and associated with fertility; the other divine and associated with redemption, Christian virtues (especially chastity), grace, and spiritual regeneration. The rivers’ role in defining these two aspects is conveniently set forth by the Palmer in FQ II ii 5–7. The first, rivers associated with nature, is amoral; their fertility works through the cycle of death and birth, and their prototype is the monster-spawning Nile (see I i 21). The second is defined as endowed with supernatural virtue by a ‘later grace’ and infused with divinity. This grace links these rivers with the redemptive capacity of fallen nature. This is the river of Christian iconography, whose cycle of spiritual death and redemption is analogous to the mythic cycle of the river of natural fertility. The ‘streame of Balme’ that regenerates the Red Cross Knight in his combat with the Dragon is such a river (I xi 48). It is implicit in Guyon's name, which is also the river of paradise, Gihon, associated with temperance; by extension, the meandering course of his story traces the course by which he fulfills the prophecy of his name and learns temperance.
Both kinds of river identified by the Palmer help to delineate Spenser's moral and natural landscapes, and each corresponds to one of the two principal contrasting concerns of his verse—for the material world of nature, and for the transcendent, spiritual world of ideas and ideal virtue. In developing a topos in which the river is at once a highly artificial literary device and a part of the descriptive natural landscape, he attempts to bring these two dimensions together, to realize the divine in nature. Thus the many highly symbolic rivers which we encounter incidentally in The Faerie Queene prepare us for the more complex river episodes and their more intricate relation to the surrounding poetic landscape. For Spenser, this more ambitious river motif is also a point of contact with a long literary and intellectual tradition which he attempts to integrate into the English landscape and into an English poetic.
Spenser's earliest work reveals his interest in the traditional ideas and forms associated with the river. In The Shepheardes Calender, rivers are merely a pastoral convention, vague decorative Theocritean echoes by which the poet-shepherd's harmony with nature is revealed in his ability to tune his song ‘unto the Waters fall’ (Aprill 36). Neither the landscape nor its rivers has a distinctive identity beyond the literary allusion.
A more important apprenticeship to conventions of river verse occurs in the paraphrases and translations in Complaints, where Spenser learned how to juxtapose river and architectural ruin, or other images of human achievement, in order to locate his ideas about the effects of mutability and time, and about human access to a timeless dimension. The ambiguous image of the tower-capped river figures both greatness and impermanence in human affairs; used frequently by Spenser, it has its locus classicus (in a strikingly literal sense of the phrase) in the scene of the Tiber flowing unceasingly past the ruins of Rome (Rome 3).
In Complaints, Spenser also develops the association between the poet and the river, for the poet's song resists the effects of time and in so doing harmonizes with the river, much as it does in other pastoral forms. The association is often explicit (Rome 31–2), although it is sometimes developed metaphorically through the genius loci (Bellay 1) the personified river nymph (Bellay 10, Time), a Muse in her river habitat (Teares, Petrarch 4), or a swan, itself a figure of the poet (Bellay II). These, however, are essentially variants on the same topos linking poet and river in an image of the transcendence of time's decay, and they derive from the identification of the Muses and the river in antiquity. In each case, the vision takes place from the vantage point of the river: rising either from the river's banks or its waters, the song outlives the poet and his subject matter. Significantly, in Spenser's Renaissance models, Petrarch and du Bellay, the link between poet and river extends also to the theme of poetry and the development of a vernacular tradition, so that, for Spenser, the river Muse whose song transcends time will sing in English on the banks of a local river.
Spenser's interest in the river embraced models other than those reflected in his earliest published verse, and early in his career he formed a clear conception of the potential of the river poem. At that time he decided to explore the possibilities of the English river poem: one year after publication of The Shepheardes Calender, in a letter to Harvey, he identified himself and his poetic aims with the form. Here he describes Epithalamion Thamesis as nearly ready for publication; although lost, it would seem to have been a poem of epic dimensions in which the theme of the river marriage was entirely naturalized: ‘whyche Booke I dare undertake wil be very profitable for the knowledge, and rare for the Invention, and manner of handling. For in setting forth the marriage of the Thames: I shewe his first beginning, and offspring, and all the Countrey, that he passeth thorough, and also describe all the Rivers throughout Englande, whyche came to this Wedding, and their righte names, and right passage, etc’ (Three Letters I, Var Prose p 17). According to Spenser, his immediate source for his information was Holinshed (properly understood to be Harrison, whose Description of Britain prefaced the Chronicles); and here we can discern, at the very least, the indirect influence of Leland's Cygnea cantio, Ausonius’ Mosella, and Virgil's Aeneid on the form and content of the work.
In writing his Epithalamion Thamesis, Spenser seems to have accepted the futility of devoting an entire work exclusively to the river topos and of attempting a comprehensive description of all the rivers of Britain. In the process, he seems also to have learned the limitations of the reformed English meter, and to have recognized that poetic patri-otism is not incompatible with rhymed iambic pentameter, for after 1580 all his rivers bear that classical yoke lightly and gracefully, just as the weathered landscape wears its Roman past. Although never published, Epithalamion Thamesis was an important landmark in Spenser's career, awaited eagerly by readers, judging from the comments by William Vallans in his Tale of Two Swannes (1590; see Sp All p 20).
After 1580, Spenser's rivers reveal the generic variety and indefinability that characterizes all of his verse, while also illustrating the method and purposefulness behind his experiments in form. In Ruines of Time, for example, he adapts the lessons he learned in his translations of Petrarch and du Bellay by ironically subverting the conventional treatment of the river nymph and genius loci in order to define the thematic and formal unity of a poem that would otherwise fall into two distinct parts. He exploits the potential ambiguity of juxtaposing river and ruin and undermines the river nymph's identity as the poetic spokesman of universal and durable truths. Unlike the nymphs of Petrarch and Bellay, his Verlame is the voice of confusion and of moral, historical, and geographic disorientation; she is an ambiguous specter from an imperfectly understood past. Her words, even her very identity, are unclear. From the opening lines of the poem, Spenser forces the reader to question and redefine the convention of the river nymph. In so doing, he initiates the central theme of the poem: the importance of the poet in defining society's moral perspective through myth and history. The nymph, a vestige of the past, is incapable of doing this herself and must rely on the help of ‘Poets historicall’ such as Sidney, Camden, and presumably Spenser himself. The poem, then, is an experiment in the form Spenser learned during his apprenticeship; it uses river conventions to establish its thematic and formal unity in terms of British poetic tradition and the need for a myth of British history set in a national landscape, and in this it looks forward to his subsequent treatments of the motif.
The culmination of Spenser's original conception of the epic river poem is the marriage of Thames and Medway (FQ IV. xi), although it is only the end of his first phase of experimenting with the topos. It presents Spenser's most expansive view of cultural history within a mythologized landscape. Characteristically, he uses patterns in nature—in this case, the descent of the Thames to the point of its confluence with the Medway—to frame social myth; thus, marriage becomes a manifestation of concordia discors. He expands the historical significance of the episode by using the names and associations of the participating rivers to adumbrate cultural evolution. In many respects, the episode is unique in The Faerie Queene: though only a wedding procession, it is the closest thing to a wedding in the poem. It is also a rare instance of the intrusion of real geography: here the mythical landscape coalesces into the recognizable, known world, the harmonious cultural center of which is defined by the Thames, whose brow is crowned by the towers of his capital, Troynovant. The naming of the participants in the procession has an epic resonance, resembling similar catalogues in the Iliad and the Aeneid; and this literary echo elevates the cultural and historical vision embodied in the British landscape.
The pageant itself has fluidity and force, conveyed by the naming of the river guests. This is countered by a stately, even restrained quality suggested by the confluence of the rivers as they arrive at Proteus’ hall, by the overriding historical and geographical sequence of their appearance, and by the structure and control of the verse. The cumulative effect supports the theme of concordia discors, and implies the existence of an invisible unmoved mover whose shaping hand is manifest in the landscape and whose influence extends into the moral, social, historical, as well as psychological and personal dimensions of Book IV.
The procession (11–52), made up almost entirely of river names and brief historical or geographical epithets, consists of three broad groups whose members are ordered more or less according to related considerations of social precedence (myths of pageantry) and the guests’ place in a cosmogonic mythical order. Culminating in the groom and his parents, the first stage in the procession begins with potentates of myth and legend, advancing in descending order from elemental deities (eg, Neptune and Amphitrite) through their descendants—mythic heroes (Phorcys and Palemon), nation founders (Albion), and the great rivers of both the Old and New Worlds (the Nile and ‘Oranochy’ [Orinoco?]). All are rivers or offspring of rivers and are related to more primitive gods of water. There is a subtle movement from myth, through legend, to history and charted geography, and back to the mythic and elemental. This evolutionary cycle is reinforced by the geographic and hydrologic cycle which links rivers to the sea, and by the familial or biological myth by which rivers are genealogical descendants of the first creative element, water. Thames, Tame, and the Ouse (or Isis) complete this first part of the procession and, by implication, fulfill the cultural evolution that it implies.
Following Thames and making up the second group are the groom's pages and attendants—rivers of Britain (loosely arranged in the geographical order set forth by Harrison and Camden) and Ireland. Then, in the third wave of the pageant, we see the bride, Medway, the last of the Thames’ major tributaries before the sea. Her entourage also joins geography and myth. She is accompanied by her riverine handmaids and the offspring of Doris and Nereus, 50 Nereids associated not only with the Muses but with rivers and water generally.
The ordered circularity, moving from myth through history (focusing on Britain) and back to myth—or from ocean to river to ocean—which we see in each of the three groups, also shapes the procession as a whole. It presents a cultural cycle, a vision of historical renewal that has its particular manifestation in Thames, his parents, and his bride. Thus, in characterizing them, Spenser uses the topos of the tower-capped river not to suggest mutability, but re-creative evolution. Ancient Thame, father of Thames, is adorned with the towers of Oxford and described as the ‘noursery/Of Arts.’ The aged couple are renewed and continued in their son, who wears the symbols of their ancient wisdom, but who ‘full fresh and jolly was.’ His ‘hundred turrets’ announce his kinship with his parents, and signify London, an heroic greatness combining strength and wisdom. This myth of renewal expressed in domestic terms is reiterated in the rivers’ names: the Isis recalls the Egyptian goddess of rebirth; her own and Thame's continuity is reflected in the name of their son. Perhaps the broadest expression of the mythic and historical vision is found in the contrast between the bride, with her celestial appearance and mythical attendants, and the groom, decked with symbols of human history and accompanied by an entourage of British rivers. Together they suggest the marriage of heaven and earth, the eventual renewal of nature which, in The Faerie Queene, is promised in the vision of the New Jerusalem in Troynovant.
The integration of the episode within Book IV is intricate and itself important: like the other river episodes, it helps define the unity of the larger work. The vast image of concordia discors in the river marriage is essential to the poem, as its only vision of universal harmony in historical geography. This symbolic significance is enhanced by the peculiarities of the Book of Friendship, in which we see the reconciliation of four pairs of lovers whose eventual union is absorbed into the marriage. Structurally, the episode functions in the book as the narrative surrogate for these couples, and is a framing device for the reconciliation of two symbolic figures, Marinell and Florimell, whose names suggest the fruitful union of opposites, water and earth. The river marriage provides the occasion for Marinell's learning ‘lovers paines to rew’ (xii 13), and thus brings the natural harmony within a moral context. Marinell personifies fear of and resistance to love and is symbolically immersed in his own element before coming to terms with love; indeed, others (most notably Britomart) make similar journeys to the destructive and recreative sea (see *Rich Strond), where they are able to understand themselves and their emotions.
In this way, then, the river marriage is literally a locus communis within the poem and has an important role in its overall structure. Moreover, in helping to define the idea of love and friendship in terms of natural harmony, it complements the other image of concordia discors in Book IV, the Temple of Venus. The abstract and allegorical image of the force of concord presented there has its manifestation in nature in the river marriage. The reader is forced to read the book in terms of these two complementary but stylistically opposite expressions of the same idea, the one abstract, the other concrete and physical in its representation. The reader must reconcile image and idea, must perform an interpretive process that parallels the central problems of The Faerie Queene, and of Spenser's art generally.
The epic river poem is not a form one works in more than once; however, Spenser's interest in the topos was not spent. Thereafter, his objective was to use the river to go to the other extreme of the epic: to realize the Renaissance ideal of concision—to contain much in small. The epyllia of Colin Clout and the Cantos of Mutabilitie, and the resonant brevity of Prothalamion’s refrain demonstrate Spenser's formal skill and his clear, consistent understanding of the river topoi. After The Faerie Queene, the British rivers no longer need to be legitimized, and Spenser turns his maturer art to the mythological history of river landscape as a way of defining the world of the poem.
In creating his two rustic Irish river nymphs in Colin Clout and the Cantos of Mutabilitie, Spenser turns away from the epic models which dominate FQ IV xi, and adopts the geographical and etiological tales that are part of the georgic tradition represented by Virgil, Ovid, and Boccaccio. The prototype for this tradition is Virgil's fourth Georgic: the story of Aristaeus and his mother, the nymph Cyrene, a river goddess and lover of Apollo. Aristaeus, unintentionally responsible for the death of Eurydice, is the victim of the vengeance of Orpheus and Proteus. His mother is privy to the mysteries of nature (an idea commonly associated with rivers), and in her underwater cave, he learns the Apollonian lore which is necessary to heal him and to enable him to subdue Proteus and restore his aviary, a symbol of his mastery over nature.
In this river episode, Virgil concentrates the central idea of the Georgics, that ‘felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ (‘blessed is he who has been able to win knowledge of the causes of things’ 2.490). As an epyllion appearing at the end of the Georgics and having a narrative coherence of its own, it forces us to analyze its relevance to the larger work, and thus instructs us in the proper reading of the whole. In FQ IV xi, Spenser adapts Virgil by having Marinell learn about himself and love while visiting a similar river cave where his mother attends the river marriage. Spenser's use of the Virgilian model is even clearer and closer in his treatment of Molanna and Mulla and their relation to the surrounding narratives. In Colin Clout, the stubborn attraction of Bregog and Mulla to each other and their resistance to any obstacle to their union (88–155) provide a succinct example in nature of the force of universal concord described in abstract terms in Colin's hymn to love (795–894). The river epyllion is the natural manifestation of that intellectual ideal. As such, it illustrates the unifying ideas of the poem: it helps us to understand Spenser's vision of human nature, the force of concord in society, the value of the love and friendship of the Irish shepherds, and the discordant and unnatural effects of the English court, which isolates its members and frustrates both poetry and love.
Identical structural and thematic use is made of the tale of the river nymph in FQ VII vi 37–55. Molanna's betrayal of Diana and the disfigurement which is her punishment add to our understanding of the allegorical character Mutabilitie. The etiological river myth describes the passing of a golden age when the gods resorted for their recreation to a landscape of ideal natural beauty; Molanna's story shows how nature and Arlo Hill were disfigured, though not ultimately changed from their first estate. Thus it defines the origin and extent of mutability in nature, and thereby provides information necessary for our understanding of Mutabilitie herself. The river tale is a more complex view of the framing allegory, and the reader is forced to revert to it to appreciate Nature's judgment.
Spenser's use of the topos in Prothalamion marks a return to the form of the river pageant which historical poets such as Leland, Camden, and Vallans adapted from Aeneid and the Mosella, and which he used in FQ IV xi. While he abandons the epyllion, he retains the other distinctive features he had experimented with during the preceding fifteen years. The use of the river to identify the world of the poem is reflected in the juxtaposition of the Lee and Thames, and the ideal of conciseness is realized in the concentration of the topos in the refrain. In presenting the confluence of the rivers in terms of the journey of the brides (as swans) down the Lee to the Thames and London, Spenser continues to let geographical nature shape his poetic myth. However, instead of describing marital union as the confluence of two rivers, Spenser has the rivers lead up to the union of the wedding couples. The image of concord in nature is, as it were, displaced by its social manifestation, and in this, Spenser's technique here inverts that used in FQ IV.
Characteristically, the rivers define Spenser's view of marital concord in terms of opposites: the pastoral otium of the wedding is viewed as a hiatus in a more threatening world of history and time, and is identified with the Lee, which brings the brides to the Thames, to London, and to their future husbands. The feminine world of the Lee is described as a locus amoenus. The Thames is distinctly masculine, and its sphere of activity is historical and public. The union of these two opposites in the wedding arrests the flow of time and is a product of the influence of concord in nature. Beyond time, it is creative and regenerative, and the poem itself participates in the quality defined by the marriage and the union of the two rivers. Through the refrain, we see that it, too, shares in the process by which time is transcended and nature renewed: ‘Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.’ As in Time, the poet and the river work in harmony to give meaning to the world of history; here the brides are delivered to the grooms as a gift of the river and the poet (see 170–80).
The river refrain gains resonance and complexity from Spenser's previous use of the motif. Here it is used more traditionally, echoing not only Spenser's own use of the motif, but also the convention as a whole. In its graceful simplicity, it flows back on the convention of the river poem and calls attention to its form, and in this way participates in the timelessness that the refrain describes. It transcends time while speaking of time, and absorbs history into nature and poetic myth, and this is the ideal presented in Time. Indeed, here history and literary myth come together, for Prothalamion was the last poem published in Spenser's life.
W.H.HERENDEEN
Berger 19686; Braden 1975; Fowler 19606; Wyman H.Herendeen 1981a; Herendeen 19816; Herendeen 1986; Herendeen 1987 ‘“Castara's Smiles…Sabrin's Tears”: Nature and Setting in Renaissance River Poems’ CL 39:289–305; Oruch 1967; C.G.Osgood 1919–20.
Any discussion of romance broad enough to suggest the many strains incorporated into The Faerie Queene must include not only works traditionally designated as ‘romances’ but also romance elements within other texts.
kinds: (a) biblical and early Christian The Faerie Queene begins with the two major quest patterns of the Bible, the model for the Red Cross Knight's quest in Book I. The first of these extends from the loss of Eden (with its Tree and Water of Life) by Adam and Eve, through the fall into the wilderness of wandering or error, to the regaining of Paradise through Christ, a ‘second Adam’ who reverses the story of the first. Within this quest pattern is the second: the exodus of Israel, led out of Egypt by Moses, wandering in the wilderness, and finally entering a Promised Land guarded, it is rumored, by giant Anakim who turn out to be bogey or threshold symbols like Spenser's Orgoglio, more terrifying in anticipation than in retrospect (see Frye 1957:191). This quest would seem to be completed when Israel enters the Promised Land under Joshua, whose name is Hebrew for Jesus. But even after his victory, the pattern of Israel's wandering from God, oppression by enemies, and deliverance by a redeemer continues. In the New Testament, this redeemer is Christ, who overcomes Satan in the wilderness (an event recalled in Guyon's temptation by Mammon in FQ II vii). The new Israel is the Church, itself now wandering in the wilderness, falling into error, beset by oppression, and anticipating triumphant entry into the New Jerusalem at the apocalyptic Second Coming of Christ.
There are also individual biblical stories with romance elements. The Joseph story in Genesis tells of a younger brother's descent into slavery in Egypt through the treachery of his brothers, his trials and triumphs there, and his final reconciliation with his family—a plot of separation and reunion which resembles that of countless other romances. The Song of Solomon provides the figure of a Bride seeking an absent Bridegroom, interpreted by Christian writers as an allego-ry of the quest for Christ in the period before Apocalypse. The Book of Esther presents the story of Israel in the romantic form of a bride gaining a king's favor for her people.
The most important single model of biblical romance for Spenser is the Book of Revelation (see *Apocalypse, Bennett 1942:108–23, Hankins 1971:99–127), which presents the final apocalyptic conflict between the forces of evil (the Great Dragon, the False Prophet, the Whore of Babylon, and Satan or Antichrist) and the forces of good (the archangel Michael, the Woman Clothed with the Sun, the New Jerusalem as the Bride of the Lamb, and a knight on a white horse who defeats the Great Dragon and restores Paradise—the source of the chivalric Christ in Langland's Piers Plowman and elsewhere). The vision in Revelation of the Church's present oppressors as already overcome is an apocalyptic technique recalled in the Dragon Redcrosse fights, which is simultaneously terrifying and comically reduced. The biblical dragon-killing motif, in which Christ overcomes the Great Dragon associated with the fallen world, saves the old Adam (whose son and successor he becomes), and gains a bride in the rescued Church, explains why in Book 1 Spenser could combine biblical romance with the structurally analogous medieval legend of St George, who defeats a dragon holding a kingdom in terror and gains the king's daughter, or with echoes of the Grail legend of the old king whose wound is related to the sterility of his land, made fertile again by the knight who asks the right question.
These biblical motifs were extended in apocryphal writings such as the fourth-century Gospel of Nicodemus, a Christian romance contemporary with the Greek romances it resembles. It relates the quest of Seth, who is told that his dying father Adam will in time be healed by a redeemer with oil from the Tree of Life, and who brings back from Eden a branch of the tree which will eventually become the Cross (the bleeding tree of the Grail romances and of Spenser's Fradubio, who recalls the fallen Adam). It also relates Christ's Harrowing of Hell, which later medieval iconography portrayed as Christ's leading Adam, Eve, and the Patriarchs out of the jaws of a defeated monster (echoed in FQ I xi 12 in the Dragon whose mouth gapes ‘like the griesly mouth of hell’). A crucial debt of Spenserian to biblical romance is the conception of evil as a false look-alike of good (eg, Archimago impersonates Redcrosse, as Satan imitates God), making the quest of both Redcrosse and the reader an education in distinguishing between parody doubles. The early Christian romance Clementine Recognitions (L tr from Gr c 400) combines the motif of the demonic double (the magician-orator Simon Magus, whose contest with Simon Peter and implantation of his own face on the hero's father provide resonances for the opposition of Archimago and Redcrosse) with the motif of reuniting a family, in what is clearly an allegory of the Last Judgment, the apocalyptic reunion of the members of God's family (Frye 1976:141). The eighth-century Christian romance of Barlaam and Josaphat (one of the most popular stories in the Middle Ages), which tells of how a hermit delivers to the hero a ‘jewel’ which turns out to be the biblical story, also contains a counterfeit double, an enemy of Christianity who poses as a defender of it.
The Book of Revelation provides the most concentrated instance of biblical typology (the application of Old Testament figures to the events of the New, and of the pattern of oppression and deliverance to the life of both individual and nation), a tradition which enables Spenser to present the quest of Redcrosse as simultaneously the spiritual biography of a second Adam (encountering a serpentine Error, falling into errancy, and finally gaining a vision of the New Jerusalem and the Edenic Water and Tree of Life), the political history of another errant Israel (his series of partial victories and defeats recalling the pattern of Israel's history), the typological repetition of the quest of Christ (his red and white recalling Christ's blood and body and the colors of the flag borne by Christ in representations of the Harrowing of Hell, his description as ‘Right faithfull true’ recalling the knight ‘Faithful and true’ of Revelation 19, and his three-day fight with the Dragon repeating Christ's three-day death and resurrection), and the trials of the St George of an England newly freed from the Church of Rome which is identified typologically with Antichrist.
Biblical romance is also important for Spenser because it envisages something ultimately beyond the romance world, just as the New Jerusalem Redcrosse yearns to enter straightway represents something higher than the earthly Cleopolis for which he still toils, a motif of supersession also found in the medieval Grail romances. The echoes of Revelation in Redcrosse's victory over the Dragon and the restoration of Una to Adam and Eve, her parents in Eden, suggest the end of the romance world of error and ambiguous look-alikes. Yet, as Israel's arrival in the Promised Land yields to a new series of errors and wanderings, or as the vision of the end in Revelation is followed by the figure of John still waiting in the wilderness of history (not unlike the speaker at the end of the Cantos of Mutabilitie), so too Redcrosse at the end of Book 1 leaves Eden to return to Fairyland, a regress from apocalypse in which Archimago is again unbound, the harlot Duessa freed to work her enchantments, and Spenser's own enchanting romance allowed to continue. Hebrews II presents all of history as a wilderness journey in quest of the Promised Land. Romance in Spenser, where Arthur continues to seek the vanished Fairy Queen and Redcrosse's victory does not remove the realm of questing, is finally, in its biblical context, linked with the threshold time before Apocalypse, with the wilderness of purgatorial wandering and trial in which the End, though promised, is still delayed.
(b) classical Greek and Latin The second romance tradition important for Spenser, that of Greek romance, begins with Homer's Odyssey (eighth century BC), whose narrative of adventures which delay but do not finally prevent Odysseus’ homecoming to Ithaca was viewed in the Renaissance as the classical prototype of romance. Though Spenser would not have known it at first hand, his indirect use of it for the sea voyage of Guyon and the Palmer to Acrasia's bower at the close of FQ II involves an identification of the end of the romance quest with the overpowering of an enchantress figure which is faithful to the Odyssey itself, where the mastering of Circe foreshadows the completion of both quest and poem. The Odyssey establishes a connection important for subsequent romance between the charms of the enchantress who delays the hero's arrival at his destination, and the charm of the romance itself, which delays its own ending as effectively as Penelope's weaving and unweaving puts off a parallel moment of truth—a linking of the poem itself with its impediments which enabled Roger Ascham to condemn Spenser's beloved Italian romances as ‘the inchantementes of Circes’ (ed G.G.Smith 1904, 1:2). Two traditions crucial for the moralized version of the Odyssean quest in FQ II are the long tradition of interpreting Odysseus’ voyage as a series of allegorical encounters or pilgrim's progress through life's hard-ships and enticements, and (given the association of Acrasia with biblical as well as with Homeric enchantresses) the Christian allegorization of Odysseus as a figure both for classical virtues (such as temperance) and for Christ.
The post-Homeric epic cycle, including the Telegony (6th century BC; see Huxley 1969:168–9), which provides the apparently concluded Odyssey with a sequel of yet more plot turns, and which, with other such poems, fed the accounts of Dares and Dictys through which the Troy story was for centuries known in Western Europe, provides a striking example of the tendency of romance stories to proliferate beyond the boundaries of a single text, expanding to fill out more limited plots with versions of what happened before and after. In this regard, the counterpart of the evasive Odysseus, Homer's ‘man of many turns,’ is the shape-changing Proteus of Odyssey 4, who prophesies only when bound and who evokes the evasiveness and changeability of romance itself. By the Renaissance, Proteus had become ambiguously associated with the curse as well as the delight of mutability, with the poet as controller of shapes and as prophet or vates but also with the potential unmanageability of his materials. In The Faerie Queene, he appears both indirectly in Archimago, the deceitful shape-changer whose threatened escape at the end of Book I makes the unbinding of both the biblical Satan and the Homeric Proteus implicit models for the slippery multiplicity of Spenser's romance, and directly in the Proteus of Books III and IV, who is significantly absent during the Marriage of Thames and Med-way in his own house, replaced perhaps by the poet who in this episode's marvelously controlled fluidity has Proteus, at least temporarily, bound.
The later, Hellenistic romance Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes (third century BC) tells of the successful voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in quest of the Golden Fleece, and of the revenge of the enchantress Medea when she is deserted by the hero she has helped, a story whose appearance on the ivory gates of the Bower of Bliss (FQ II xii 44–5) attaches the traditional association of Circe and Medea to Spenser's Acrasia, and makes Guyon's sea voyage an Argonautica as well as an Odyssey. Shorter but more episodic than the Odyssey it both imitates and departs from, in its very un-Homeric narrator's tongue-in-cheek excuses for his digressions and tall tales it anticipates the narrative asides of Ariosto and Spenser. It is filled with fabulous elements: Phrixus’ flying on the Golden Ram, armed men springing from serpents’ teeth, the Great Snakes guarding the Golden Apples, the Warden of the Fleece (who is made even more engaging in Valerius Flaccus’ unfinished Latin Argonautica of the first century AD and transformed into a dragon in William Caxton's 1477 English version of the medieval French Jason), and the Argo itself, a ship capable of traveling at its own will and providing a survey of the known and mythical worlds—a geographical impulse in romance which emerges again in the Renaissance, with the flight of Ariosto's hippogriff. Neither the Greek nor the Latin Argonautica need have been directly known to Spenser, since Argonaut lore was commonplace in the Renaissance, a fact which facilitated detaching its episodes from their context and distributing them over different characters or events; thus, in Book V, Spenser recalls the Argonautica’s bronze giant Talos (associated with the Law in Crete) both in the iron man Talus and in the details of the death of the Giant with the scales.
The latest Greek romances date from the early Christian era: the Ninus romance fragments, Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca, Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, possibly Apollonius of Tyre (assumed to belong here though known only in an influential fifth- or sixth-century translation), and Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe. Originating on the fringes of the Greek world which were subject to Persian, Egyptian, and Phoenician influences, they feature oriental settings and heroes, and plots of mysterious birth, foster parents, prophetic dreams and oracles (like the one whose predictions the hero and heroine of the Ephesiaca try to escape with no more success than Marinell's mother has in averting a prophecy of woe in FQ III iv), the separation of lovers by shipwreck or capture by pirates (a recurrent feature, one suspects, of the actual Mediterranean world), hair's-breadth escapes, attempted rape or human sacrifice (Leucippe escaping as narrowly from sacrifice on the robbers’ altar as Serena from the cannibals in FQ VI viii), confinement in caves (Chariclea's fate in Ethiopica I; Pastorella's in FQ VI x–xi), burial alive (the Ephesiaca’s drugged Anthia escapes only when awakened by grave robbers), and finally the reunion of hero and heroine in a miraculous happy ending.
A major feature of these romances is the delaying of that ending through labyrinthine plot complications, explicitly linked in the Ethiopica to the deviations of Proteus and typically involving the continued preservation of the heroine's virginity. The consummately devious Chariclea of the Ethiopica manages to guard hers through ten books of the most compromising adventures (a feat as miraculous as the supposedly preserved virginity of Ariosto's much-pursued Angelica); and in Longus, Daphnis and Chloe's consummation of their love is postponed not as in the other Greek romances by a series of mishaps but by their own very slow discovery of sex, a delaying tactic which makes the romance narrative not a ‘Who done it?’ but a ‘When will they do it?’
The Greek romances were scorned by educated Greeks, who like many of their Renaissance counterparts considered them unfit for serious reading. They were only partially rescued by Byzantine allegorizing (eg, of the Ethiopica as the soul's search for God) and by the doubtful tradition that Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius were Christian bishops. In the Renaissance, however, they came into their own. Heliodorus’ Ethiopica, the most dense and complex, was translated in the sixteenth century into Latin, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and into English in Thomas Underdowne's Aethiopian History (1569, rev ed 1587); it was recommended alongside Virgil's Aeneid as a narrative model, and used by Rabelais, Tasso, Cervantes, and by Sidney in his Arcadia (1590), through which it provided the subplot for Shakespeare's King Lear. The Apollonius story, originally translated into English prose in the eleventh century, influenced the plots of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Pericles, through versions in John Gower's Confessio Amantis and Lawrence Twine's Patterne of Painefull Adventures (entered 1576). Clitophon and Leucippe, translated by William Burton, appeared in 1597.
It is not clear whether Spenser is echoing Greek romance in FQ VI directly or through such intermediaries. Pastorella's fate at the hands of the Brigands recalls both an episode in Achilles Tatius, where pirates quarrel over whether the captured heroine should be sold to slavers and slay their commander who has fallen in love with her, and the fight in Heliodorus between a pirate captain and his subordinate over possession of Chariclea, which leads to a battle in which the pirates destroy each other. It may also recall Orlando's rescue of Isabella from a cave where slave traders are arranging to sell her in Ariosto's Orlando furioso 12–13. The adventures in FQ VI, however, and perhaps those in Books in and IV as well, owe as much in general terms to the complications of the Greek romances as they do to the digressive form of Amadis of Gaul or the Italian romances. The revived Greek romances were profoundly influential not only on Renaissance romance but also on the subsequent development of the novel.
The blending of epic and romance, Iliad and Odyssey, in Virgil's Aeneid provides the model for Renaissance epic romances such as Spenser's combining in a single hero the public (Iliadic) and the private or ethical (Odyssean) virtues; the Odyssean wanderings of Aeneas are also echoed along with the Odyssey and the Argonautica in Guyon's sea voyage in FQ II xii. On the model of the Aeneid, The Faerie Queene uses romance to convert the Odyssean quest into a labor in the service of a greater good (eg, the Herculean labor associated in both Aeneas and Artegall with establishing a government), and a simple homecoming into a quest for a more elusive goal (as when Artegall and Britomart put off present pleasures for the sake of an objective still unachieved at the poem's end). Virgil also provides many potential romance elements which Renaissance authors edged further in a romance direction: the metamorphosed tree of Aeneid 3, echoed in Dante's Piero, Ariosto's Astolfo, and Spenser's Fradubio; the phantom Aeneas echoed in Italian romance and in Spenser's false Florimell; Aeneas’ Odyssean sojourn with Dido, echoed in Artegall's with Radigund in FQ V v–vii; and the incarnation of the characteristic romance strategy of delay in Allecto, the Virgilian discord figure whose complication of the action and consequent postponement of ending is echoed in Ariosto's Discordia and Spenser's Ate, whose disruptions in FQ IV effectively postpone the possibility of an ending like the satisfying close of Book III in the original 1590 version.
Virgil's blending of epic and romance also enables Spenser to combine echoes of the Aeneid with episodes reminiscent of medieval romance; for example, the latter's characteristic vigils are combined with a recall of Aeneas’ underworld descent in Guyon's temptation by Mammon in FQ II vii. Likewise, the common pattern of questing for a delayed or far-off goal enables him to combine Virgilian and biblical resonances; Redcrosse's stopping midway with Duessa in FQ I vii provides an example of acedia, which Dante in Purgatorio 19 illustrates both by the Trojans who stopped short of the promised land of Italy and by the Israelites who did not complete their exodus through the wilderness. This assimilation of Virgilian, biblical, and romance quests was made easier not only by their analogous structures but also by allegorizations of the Aeneid such as that of the Florentine Platonist Cristoforo Landino, who interprets the journey from Troy to Italy as the upward progress of the soul to its true home, or Dante's already traditional combination of Aeneas’ quest for Rome with the Christian's quest for the Heavenly Jerusalem.
Ovid's Metamorphoses is not generically a romance; but with its seemingly endless Protean generation of story lines, it provided Renaissance romancers with a model of romance dilatoriness as a deliberate deviation from the more single-minded narrative of Virgilian epic. Ovid pointedly transforms the Sibyl's injunction to epic haste (Aeneid 6) into a deferral of the forward journey while she tells the long story of her love for Apollo (Met 14)—at the same time telescoping the entire Aeneid into a mere two books of his own very different poem. This deferral is echoed in Orlando furioso 34, for example, when Lidia's much-dilated story of love delays Astolfo's descent into a very Dantesque hell, in the midst of an episode in which Ariosto manages to telescope Dante's authoritative poem into two cantos of his much more digressive romance. In evoking Ovid's catalogue of trees, whose locus in Metamorphoses 10 is the story of the poet Orpheus, Spenser suggests at the outset of The Faerie Queene the Ovidian affinities of his own romance metamorphoses, both in the Wood of Error as an opening emblem of his poem, and more particularly in the Protean generation of diverse stories in Books III and IV. Furthermore, the medieval tradition of the Ovide moralisé offers a model for combining prolific fable and moral meaning, as does Arthur Golding's preface to his translation of the Metamorphoses (1567), in which he allies Ovid's narrative of creation, flood, and final prophetic vision with similar patterns, canonical for Renaissance culture, in the Bible.
Latin romance proper appears in the burlesque imitation of Greek romance in Petronius’ first-century Satyricon, and in Apuleius’ second-century Golden Ass. The latter tells of the author's accidental metamorphosis into an ass by the servant of an enchantress, his observation of man's follies and vices, and his final restoration to human form through the goddess Isis. In its 1566 translation by William Adlington, the work is a probable source for the identification of Britomart and Artegall with Isis and Osiris in FQ V vii, as well as for the allegory of Cupid and Psyche in III vi. Renaissance interpretations of The Golden Ass underscore the affinities between romance and allegory: Adlington, in his address to the reader, sees it as an allegory of the potential upward metamorphosis of human life: ‘this booke of Lucius is a figure of mans life, and toucheth the nature and manners of mortall men, egging them forward from their Asinall forme, to their humane and perfect shape.’
(c) medieval Of all romance forms, it is medieval chivalric romance which provides the definitive matrix for Spenser's combination of biblical and classical romance materials within the form of a knight's quest. Since the twelfth century, medieval romance had been divided into three subjects: the Matter of France, the Matter of Rome, and the Matter of Britain. The first (important for the Italian romances known to Spenser) has chiefly to do with Charlemagne, the Christian champion Roland, the traitor Ganelon, and Archbishop Turpin. These figures appear both in the Old French Chanson de Roland (twelfth century) and in the Pseudo-Turpin, a popular twelfth-century Latin prose chronicle erroneously attributed to Archbishop Turpin, one of the seven Old French translations of which provides the first mention of love and anger in the story of Roland (a recurrent theme in Boiardo and Ariosto) and provides, in a figure called Braidemunde, the ancestress of the Italians’ Bradamante and Spenser's Britomart.
The Matter of Rome recasts Greek and Roman legend in a chivalric form, reflecting a mid-twelfth-century shift in French literary taste away from the war interest of the chansons de geste to the love interest of romance. It is represented by the Roman de Thebes, a romance version of the Thebes story from Statius’ Thebaid; the Roman d'Alexandre, the chief of the romances on Alexander the Great; the anonymous Roman d'Eneas, which transforms the Aeneid into a romance of knightly deeds and an allegory of the rejection of destructive love (Dido) for true (Lavinia, a minor Virgilian character, expanded to meet the new interest in love); and, most importantly, the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, which, drawing on Ovid as well as on the influential versions of the Troy story in Dares and Dictys, applies romance codes of chivalry to the Trojan warriors (a blend still at work in Spenser's Paridell and Hellenore) and emphasizes their loves.
The Matter of Britain focuses on Arthur, a sixth-century Welsh battle leader mentioned in Nennius’ Historia Britonnum (c 800), and transformed by Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae into a conqueror rivaling Alexander and Charlemagne. Geoffrey developed the story of the treachery of Arthur's nephew Mordred, their final battle, and the bearing of the mortally wounded Arthur to Avalon. His association of legendary British with biblical events fostered the development of the Anglo-biblical parallel still visible in the simultaneously English and biblical FQ I. Also crucial for later Arthurian romance in Britain were his development of Merlin (the chief magus of FQ, whose prophecy to Britomart in III iii recalls the Historia's interpolated ‘Prophecies of Merlin’), of the popular tradition that Arthur, sleeping in Avalon, would one day restore the golden age to a strife-torn Britain (a national counterpart to the biblical Second Coming), and, from Nennius, the idea of British descent from the Trojan Brute (echoed in Spenser's Troynovant and Arthur's reading in FQ II x of a history linking him with Troy). The Historia was followed by the vernacular Roman de Brut of the Norman poet Wace, which extended knowledge of the Trojan-Arthurian lore to the French aristocracy, and by Layamon's Brut, the first English Arthurian poem, which expands Wace's story of the Round Table and adds more fairy elements (the elves present at Arthur's birth, the magic origins of his spear, and his transport to Avalon in a magic boat).
Arthurian romance develops out of the Matter of Rome, the new Arthurian lore, and the Breton lais of Marie de France (fl late-twelfth century) and other, anonymous authors. Most important, however, are the five Old French romances of Chrétien de Troyes; with the Vulgate cycle in the next century, they establish Arthur's court (like that of Gloriana in Spenser) as the center from which knights go forth in pursuit of adventure or particular quests. They also demonstrate the remarkable flexibility of romance, its capacity to absorb not just a multiplicity of stories interwoven by the technique of entrelacement into a pattern very different from the single dominant plot line of epic, but also a variety of divergent perspectives (adulterous love in Lancelot, married love in Erec and Enide and Yvain, Arthur as paragon of kings in Cligés but inglorious cuckold in Lancelot, the Grail in Perceval as figure of something beyond and even in conflict with the court itself), and a cast of often inconsistently drawn individual characters (as Spenser's Proteus can be at different times lecherous old man or awesome deity). Profoundly influential for subsequent Arthurian romance, Chrétien's works bequeath to it such staples as fights with giants and unnamed knights, tournaments, dwarfs, rings of invisibility, protecting lions, the curing of wounds, the conflicting claims of arms and love, the service of a fairy mistress (Yvain), the ‘translation’ of chivalry from Troy to the west (Cligés), and the knight's assisting others’ quests while (like Spenser's Arthur) pursuing his own.
Chivalric romance was further developed in Middle High German poems based on Chrétien: Hartmann von Aue's Erec and Iwein; Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (a source of Wagner's Parsifal), which greatly expands the Percival story in time and space to include not just Britain but the Near and Far East; and Gottfried von Strassburg's unfinished Tristan und Isolde, which retells the most popular tragic love story of the Middle Ages, already extant in the twelfth-century Old French Tristan of Béroul and the Anglo-Norman version of Thomas. Chrétien's Grail romance was extended in the early thirteenth century not only in Wolfram's Parzival but also in Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie, which links the Grail with the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper and by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood from Christ's wounds; in the prose Didot Perceval; and in Perlesvaus, a romance which, though explicitly allegorical (with its Castle of Enquiry, instructor-hermits, Christ-like hero, and presentation of Christian truth in Arthurian form), is not continuously so, but rather moves like The Faerie Queene from literal story to allegory and back, giving its characters an intermittent rather than a rigidly consistent allegorical identity.
The early-thirteenth-century linking of disparate Arthurian stories reaches its culmination in the great anonymous Vulgate Cycle of prose romances (1210–30); its opening Lestoire del Saint Graal (presenting the early history of the Grail from Joseph to its preservation in Britain until Arthur's time at the Castle of Corbenic) and Lestoire de Merlin were both added later to fill in the narrative preliminaries to its popular and often separately published three-book core. Lancelot adds to the familiar story of the adulterous Lancelot and Guinevere the role of Galahad as go-between (the source of Francesca's charge in Dante's Inferno 5 that romances and their authors are like ‘Galeotto,’ inciting to lust). It also foregrounds the romance tension between variety and controlling form in its complex entrelacement and frequent unrelated digressions, gives us an Arthur belittled and reduced (perhaps because of contemporary French hatred of England), and, in Gawain's uncomprehending observation of the masque and symbols at the enchanted Castle of Corbenic, offers a possible romance antecedent for Britomart's vigil at the house of Busirane (FQ III xi–xii).
The Queste del Saint Graal takes up without a gap where Lancelot leaves off, replacing the bumbling Percival with the impeccable Galahad as the achiever of a Grail now clearly identified with the Eucharist. By making Galahad the son of Lancelot, it suggests a progression from an impure father and an earthly love to a pure, even Christlike, son and to a divine love which reflects the influence of the great twelfth-century mystic St Bernard of Clairvaux. The Mort Artu (much of which is familiar to English readers through Malory and Tennyson) narrates the tragic end of Arthur, whose downfall through the agency of woman is echoed in details of Artegall's story in FQ V v.
The Vulgate Cycle as a whole incorporates conflicting ideals, widely divergent tones, and different conceptions of individual characters into a continuous Arthurian narrative. Along with the post-Homeric cycles and early Christian romances, it is a striking example of the tendency of romance stories both to proliferate and to attach themselves to others so as to fill out the details of a character or history, as the thirteenth-century prose Tristan de Leonois further links the Tristan romance to an Arthurian setting, and the vast fourteenth-century French Perceforest gives Arthur a prehistory stretching back to Alexander the Great. (This linking of romance quest and allegory in Perlesvaus and the Vulgate Queste also takes non-chivalric form, most influentially in the Romance of the Rose.)
The thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries also provide a number of non-Arthurian French chivalric romances important for Spenser. The popular thirteenth-century Huon de Bordeaux (likely known to Spenser through the expanded prose version of 1454 or the 1534 English translation by Lord Berners) is cited in FQ II i 6. The just rule of its Fairy King Oberon (who also appears in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream) may be a precedent for the peacefulness of Spenser's Fairyland in contrast to the relative chaos of English history as presented in FQ II x. Huon also provides a model for extending Fairyland into the East (Spenser locates it in India as well as America), and for combining the Matter of France with characters from the Matter of Britain, so that Fairyland becomes a space in which characters and episodes from several romances can meet.
The Melusine of Jean d'Arras, one possible source of Guyon's name, anticipates Spenser in its defense of Fairyland; and the discovery by Melusine's husband of her mermaid form supplies a romance antecedent for Fradubio's discovery of Duessa's real identity in FQ I ii. Another fourteenthcentury French romance, Artus de Bretagne, translated by Lord Berners as Arthur of Little Britain (1555?), contains romance models for Spenser's Acrasia episode, for the Radigund-Artegall story, and (in Arthur's vigil at the enchanted castle of Porte Noire) for Britomart's vigil at the house of Busirane. Even more importantly for Spenser (who both knew and used it), it includes Arthur's vision of a Fairy Queen whom he then seeks through a number of subsidiary adventures. Yet another French romance, known in its English translation by Henry Watson as Valentine and Orson, contains the common romance motif of the falsely accused and banished wife, as well as the figure of the child (Orson) carried off at birth by a bear, reared as a wild man, and brought back at maturity to society—a story which may lie behind the Salvage Man and bear baby of FQ VI iv–v.
The earliest English romances focus on what is called the Matter of England since the stories are at least in part localized there, although French as well as English versions often exist. The earliest extant English verse romance, King Horn (c 1250), continued in the fourteenth-century Horn Childe, follows the common romance pattern of related inner and outer cycles of exile and return (as the biblical story of Joseph is found within the larger story of Israel's descent into and exodus out of Egypt): the beautiful banished child Horn is exiled a second time but finally, after a series of trials and victories, reveals his noble birth, gains his bride, and recovers his kingdom.
Havelok the Dane (c 1300), which recalls the earlier period of Viking conquest, is a hearty Lincolnshire romance with homelier settings and audience than courtly French romance. Like the King Horn romances, it contains a hero's exile from and return to his home and kingdom, together with usurping villains, a period of servitude, a mysterious light which reveals the hero's kingly origin, a narrow escape from death, and finally his coronation as King of England. Bevis of Hampton and The Tale of Gamelyn are romances of the muscular, adventure-story variety. Bevis includes the exiled hero's imprisonment, rescue of his bride from the stake, conversion of the giant Asclopard, and single-handed battle against the citizenry of London; Gamelyn recalls the story of Robin Hood in its feats of daring rescue or escape and its band of forest outlaws. The popular Guy of Warwick details the hero's exploits (before his death as a hermit) in England and the Holy Land, against Saracens and their Soldan, the Danish giant Colbrand, the dun cow of Dunsmore, and a winged dragon in Northumberland.
There are also several non-Arthurian Middle English romances. The lay of Sir Orfeo provides another example of the medieval translation of classical subjects into romance terms in its fusion of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice with Celtic fairy elements (Pluto and Proserpine are transformed into the King and Queen of Fairyland). It makes Orpheus into a good English king and furnishes a distinctly unclassical but typically romance happy ending in the couple's successful return from the Underworld. Gower's Confessio Amantis 8.271–2008 contains a version of the Apollonius story. Floris and Blancheflor (in four versions, from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries) is an English adaptation of a popular twelfth-century French romance whose intricate tale of innocent and much-tried young love resembles the ingenious plot twists of Greek romance or the Arabian Nights.
Unlike Arthurian romance abroad, Arthurian romance in England is influenced from the beginning by the fact that Arthur was an ancestral British hero, conqueror even of the Pope. Layamon's Brut transforms Wace's Roman de Brut into the alliterative meter of native English verse and into a heroic story of Britain's warrior king. Of the Middle English Arthurian romances which survive from the period between 1300 and 1500, the most notable are Ywain and Gawain, an abridged transformation of Chrétien's Yvain into an English tale of marvel and adventure; the stanzaic Morte Arthur, a condensation of the French Vulgate Mort Artu; the alliterative Morte Arthure, which shapes the heroic life of Arthur into a medieval tragedy of rise and fall; and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Gawain, the masterpiece of English alliterative romance though not widely known until its first appearance in print in 1839, combines folktale motifs of beheading game, temptation by a hostess, and exchange of winnings into a single plot which blends the courtliness of French romance with a contemporary English court and bleak northern landscape; it suggests meanings beyond the literal which are not, however, easily categorizable (for example, its Green Knight combines aspects of the devil, the genial host, and the miraculously reborn green man of the fertility rituals); and, in its framing reference to Troy as ancestor of Britain, it conveys a sense (not unlike Spenser's) of the fragility and mutability of civilization itself.
Chaucer, Spenser's great English predecessor, inherits and transforms the long traditions of French and English romance in Troilus and Criseyde (based on a story originating in Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie) and in several of the Canterbury Tales: the Knight's tale of friends divided by love for the same lady; the Franklin's (ostensibly a Breton lai though taken from Boccaccio's Filocolo); the Wife of Bath's of young knight and aged ‘loathly lady,’ which is set in Fairyland in the days of King Arthur; and the Tale of Melibee, a tedious prose translation of a French romance begun when the parody-romance Sir Thopas breaks off unfinished. Thopas itself suggests in its circularity the potential endlessness of romance; Sir Thopas’ dream and quest for a Fairy Queen anticipate the central quest of Spenser's romance, which provides its own burlesque of chivalric romance behavior in Braggadocchio, Trompart, and the false Florimell. The unfinished Squire's Tale (which Spenser combines with the friendship story from the Knight's Tale and completes, in a tribute to Chaucer in his Legend of Friendship, FQ IV) may also have provided for Spenser a model of romance reflecting on itself. The Squire's repeated disclaimers of his ability to complete his tale delay his continuation of a story which finally does remain unfinished, a dramatization of the difficulties of completion or closure in the midst of the characteristic tarrying and evasions of conclusion in romance. Spenser provides a quick ending for Chaucer's tale, but leaves an unfinished romance of his own. Taken together, Sir Thopas and the Squire's Tale suggest that Spenser did not have to look outside the English romance tradition for an example of a writer self-consciously and ironically exposing the nature of the form he has adopted.
Malory, whose Morte Darthur is the medium through which Arthurian romance is chiefly known to English readers, borrows both from the great French prose romances, including the Vulgate Mort Artu, and from the English stanzaic and alliterative versions. From the latter, he inherits not just the tale of Arthur and the Emperor Lucius but also a more straightforward narrative ordering (in contrast to the complex French entrelacement), a reduced role for the supernatural, and a more heroic and political conception of Arthur and the Round Table in place of the French emphasis on the individual knight in search of adventure. Though Malory's influence emerges at several points in the incidents, characters, and tone of The Faerie Queene, Spenser relies on him remarkably little; the later poem is closer to French Arthurian romance in its conception of Arthur as presiding over other knightly quests, its complex interlace of stories, and its deferral of names and identities as part of a gradual discovery of meaning (in contrast to Malory's more direct clarification of identities). Arthurian romance, from Geoffrey of Monmouth through Malory to the Welsh Tudor monarchs’ politically motivated revival of the Welsh Arthurian lore, together with the tradition of combining romance with allegory, stretching from intermittent touches in Chrétien to sustained elaboration in such works as Stephen Hawes’ Pastime of Pleasure (1509), helped to create the climate for Spenser's allegorical romance, written at the height of the English Renaissance but still strikingly medieval in spirit in its celebration of the Tudor Elizabeth as the Fairy Queen sought by a British Arthur.
Two other medieval works important for Spenser's romance are the Gesta Romanorum and Amadis of Gaul. The Gesta Romanorum (first printed 1472) was an extremely popular Latin collection of saints’ legends, chivalric romances, and oriental tales. It circulated in fifteenth-century English manuscript versions (one of which was published by Wynkyn de Worde c 1524) and was used by Chaucer, Gower, Shakespeare, and others. To its tales of monsters and magicians, miraculous escapes, and damsels in distress it attached allegorical explanations: for example, a story of a knight's three-day battle to save the daughter of a king from a usurping tyrant is glossed as Christ's victory over the devil, a gloss with clear affinities to FQ I.
The vast and loosely structued Amadis of Gaul (known through the printed Spanish version of Garcia Rodríguez de Montalvo but presumed to come from earlier originals) combines the staples of medieval romance (enchanted castles, fearful dwarfs, symbolic masques, mysterious inscriptions) with plot complications and exotic settings reminiscent of Greek romance (to which it is compared unfavorably in Underdowne's preface to his English translation of Heliodorus). In the romance tradition of the ‘knight in love’ (recalled in the service of Spenser's Timias for Belphoebe, and both imitated and parodied in Cervantes’ Don Quixote), it tells of the feats and trials of the valorous and chaste Amadis for love of the British princess Oriana (associated in at least one sixteenth-century poem with Spenser's Fairy Queen). Its enchanter Arcalaus impersonates the hero by donning his arms, like Archimago in FQ I ii; and two of its adventures parallel Britomart's experience in the house of Busirane (FQ III xi–xiii), one of which compares the freeing of Amadis and others from the enchanter's castle to Christ's Harrowing of Hell. Widely popular in Spenser's time as a model of chivalrous conduct, Amadis is mentioned in Sidney's Defence of Poetry as able to move men to courtesy, liberality, and courage in spite of its literary imperfections, which Sidney tries to correct by incorporating it into his own more tightly structured romance Arcadia.
(d) Italian Although the Matter of Britain arrived in Italy through twelfth-century minstrels and was well enough known by the early fourteenth to contribute Tristram, Lancelot, and Galahad to Dante's romance figures in Inferno 5, it was the Matter of France which took greater hold in Italy—in the early Franco-Venetian Machario, the Rinaldo da Montalbano, the prose Storie de Rinaldo, Zanobi's late-fourteenth-century Spagna in Rima, and Andrea da Barberino's Reali di Francia, an immensely popular prose work on the Carolingian heroes. Italian use of the Matter of France characteristically transforms it, making the solemn into the burlesque (reducing Charlemagne, for example, to the old and foolish dupe of Ganelon), giving to the heroic Christian warrior Roland (Orlando) his separate loves and adventures in the Orient (eg, in the fourteenth-century Orlando fragment, which anticipates the alternation of scenes and plot lines in Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso), and (notably in the fourteenth-century Franco-Lombard Entree d'Espagne) increasing the role of the buffoon Estout de Langres, a mocker of chivalry who concentrates the new ironic tone, anticipating Boiardo's and Ariosto's Astolfo and Cervantes’ Sancho Panza.
The first great Italian chivalric romance is the Florentine Luigi Pulci's Morgante maggiore (1483), which anticipates the giants of Rabelais in its comically appealing giant Morgante and outrageously amoral half-giant Margutte, who finally dies laughing. Its high-spirited sendups of familiar romance staples—the conversion of Saracens, repeated digressions, and the claim to be following an authoritative source in the comically named Altamenonne (a forerunner of Ariosto's Turpin and Cervantes’ Cid Hamete Benengeli)— anticipate the later spoofing of chivalric romance in Orlando furioso and Don Quixote. It still presents a Charlemagne for the most part belittled (in spite of a patron's request for an ennobled one), but Morgante's great suffering and the poem's ending with the disaster at Roncesvalles and Charlemagne's death reveal a profound melancholy beneath the comically skeptical surface.
Boiardo's Orlando innamorato first makes self-consciously thematic the union of Carolingian and Arthurian, Holy War and love, giving us an Orlando passionately in love with an elusive Angelica (as the object of male desire, a forerunner of Spenser's fleeing Florimell), but much less, except in the case of Astolfo, of the traditional Italian mocking tone. From Virgilian epic come both its dynastic theme and its fabulous elements such as the phantom double (the phantom Aeneas pursued by Turnus recalled in Orlando's similar pursuit, as Spenser's knights pursue a false Florimell).
The poem's overwhelming debt, however, is to the Ovidian and protean metamorphoses of romance: concentrating and compounding its characteristic machinery (Christians and Saracens, enchanted armor, wizards, giants, marvelous gardens, magic rings, and not one enchantress but three), providing in its own repeated detours a sense of indefinitely postponed conclusion (in Orlando's case, the divagations of love putting off his ultimate death at Roncesvalles) and of time itself as a potentially endless series of moments to be seized (as Orlando must seize the proverbial forelock of the Fortune-figure Morgana before he can release those kept in her underwater crystal prison), and abounding in images of endlessness (the fairies and enchanted heroes who can never die, Balisardo's progressive metamorphoses, and the giant who in dying multiplies, a romance theme on which Spenser's story of Priamond, Diamond, and Triamond in FQ IV provides one among many variations). Existing in three parts, the first two published in 1483 and the last (written c 1484–94) broken off by war and, finally, by the poet's death, the Innamorato remains unfinished, unable either to face mortality and finite time within itself, or to continue in the face of the outside world (anticipating, perhaps, the intrusion of a hostile outside world into the final stanzas of FQ VI).
The enchantment of Boiardo's romance is in the constant Ovidian metamorphosis which keeps its fiction going and (like Scheherazade's storytelling in the Arabian Nights) defers the fateful moment of truth or death. In completing Boiardo in Orlando furioso (pub in different versions 1516, 1521, and 1532), Ariosto calls attention to the potential endlessness of romance by transforming precisely those elements which in Boiardo work against closure. With the help of a book given him by Logistilla, enemy of enchantments, Ariosto's Astolfo finally terminates the seemingly endless life of Orrilo, whose reassembling of his dissevered parts had repeatedly postponed his attackers’ going forward to their own deaths in France. Astolfo also undoes the enchanted palace built by the magician Atlante (a counterforce to the poet himself, like Spenser's Archimago) to postpone the death of Ruggiero, a labyrinth of illusion in which the traditional freedom of the individual questing knight becomes instead an entrapping Wood of Error within which each pursues the phantom object of his own desire. More detached perspective in Ariosto is offered by the marvelous flying hippogriff, to those knights able to master it, and by the narrator whose control over the diverse strands of the plot he weaves (and finally, like the weaver Fates, cuts off) is presented as only a temporary reprieve from the debilitating madness of love. Ariosto gives us an Orlando no longer simply in love (innamorato) but mad (furioso), in a poem where the chivalric ethos itself is both treated ironically and rendered obsolete by gunpowder, the herald of modern technological war.
Dramatizing the traditionally conflicting demands of love and war as the generic contrast between romance and epic, the Furioso is a virtual reductio ad absurdum of romance, edging towards parody its characteristic marvels (the flying horse, Astolfo's horn, Atlante's magic shield), exploiting its links between mental and geographical ‘error’ and ‘deviation,’ employing Discordia and Fortuna, techniques of narrative complication as transparently under the author's control as that authorial ‘Turpin’ who demands that he include the bawdy Canto 28. These elements are combined with echoes of the Aeneid which increasingly add an epic dimension to the poem, as Orlando is cured, the errant Ruggiero prepared through conversion for his dynastic marriage, and the chronically distractible knights finally marshaled into the single epic action of the Holy War. But Ariosto's epic exercise of closure both on Boiardo's errant romanzo and on his own playfully digressive narrative comes only after the revelation (on the Moon in Canto 34) of the mendacity or error of Homer and Virgil themselves, whose own contamination of epic with romance is subtly recalled in Ariosto's alternation between Iliadic scenes of siege in Paris and Odyssean exploits in the East. Romance in Ariosto is not only subjected to a thorough anatomy of its characteristic errancy—the sense that its potentially infinite digression and variety may be resistant to completion or authorial control; it also becomes a means of revealing the fictiveness and errancy of all literary forms, including epic and even Scripture, since Astolfo on the Moon hears the author of Revelation admit his own allegiance to a patron (Christ) who may demand a praise not unlike that required by Augustus or the Este.
In the Furioso, the interaction between epic and romance, in which epic is denied an unironically superior place, anticipates the sixteenth-century debate over the highly popular romance form as contrasted with the more aristocratic epic which Antonio Minturno (Arte poetica 1563) and others claimed to be superior in its greater truth to history and its apparent conformity to Aristotle's Poetics (tr 1536). Later Italian epic-romances influenced by this debate and by the increasingly stringent moral climate of the Counter-Reformation include Trissino's L'Italia liberata da’ Goti (1547–48), whose Acratia joins Ariosto's Alcina as a model for Spenser's Acrasia; Bernardo Tasso's Amadigi (1560), based on Amadis of Gaul; and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (1581, accompanied by the poet's own separate allegorical commentary), which anticipates Spenser's aim to overgo Ariosto, reining in both its errant knights and Ariosto's errant romance form with its plot based on the First Crusade. Such a subordination of romance errancy to Christian purpose and epic form also characterizes Camoens’ Lusiads (1572) and anticipates both The Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost.
Spenser's debt to Italian romance goes far beyond his borrowing from it the division of his poem into cantos. More deadpan in his humor than Ariosto, echoes of whose poem are subtly distributed throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser literally overgoes him by incorporating the Italian eight-line stanza (ottava rima) into his nine-line stanza and by containing within his own larger romance structure the unmistakably Ariostan digressiveness, pursuit of a fleeing female, and potentially endless deferral of resolution in Books III and IV. He similarly transforms elements from Boiardo (eg, the forelock of Morgana, which is returned to its explicitly allegorical origins in the figure of Occasion in FQ II iv), from Trissino (eg, Acratia), and from Tasso (eg, Armida's garden in the Gerusalemme, both emulated and significantly altered in his Bower of Bliss). His own, arguably more medieval and traditionally English romance continues the venerable romance tradition of eclectically borrowing from earlier models, as well as the imperialistic epic tendency to swallow and outdo them.
(e) pastoral Pastoral romance, which usually takes the form of a complicated prose narrative interspersed with verse and peopled with shepherds and shepherdesses, foregrounds not the chivalric romance activity of questing but rather the encircling retreat which shuts out, at least temporarily, this concern for end-directed pursuit, as does Calidore's sojourn with Pastorella in FQ VI. Pastoral romance begins with Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (adapted into English by Angell Day in 1587), which differs from other extant Greek romances in being placed entirely in the pastoral world, where the exploitation of the potential contrast between the noble origin of its major figures and their rural surroundings made it a valuable model for Robert Greene's Pandosto (1588), Sidney's Arcadia (1590) and Shakespeare's Winter's Tale (1610–11).
Sannazaro's Italian Arcadia (1504), the first Renaissance pastoral romance, establishes the form as a mixture of verse and prose. Its plot of unhappy love (the lover's exile from his lady and subsequent wanderings in Arcadia) owes as much to the medieval romances of Tristan and Lancelot as to Greek and Latin pastoral, and indeed creates a new genre by blending the two. This marriage is made easier by several factors: a faraway or exotic setting generally common to both, structural similarities between the interweaving of multiple plots into a single romance and the linking of poems into sets of pastoral eclogues, and the fact that medieval romances and pastourelles frequently combine romance and pastoral in the interludes in which the questing knight enjoys a temporary forest or garden retreat. Imitations of Sannazaro's Arcadia include Cervantes’ Galatea (1585) and Montemayor's Diana (1559?), whose addition to Sannazaro's form of the plot complications of Greek romance (either directly or from Amadis of Gaul), continued in Gaspar Gil Polo's Diana enamorada (1564).
The most celebrated English pastoral romance and clearly a model for Calidore's pastoral excursion is Sidney's Arcadia (1590), imitated in Greene's Menaphon (1589, rpt as Greene's Arcadia 1590), in Lodge's Rosalynde (1590) (in turn dramatized by Shakespeare in As You Like It), and in the subplot of King Lear. Influences on Sidney include Sannazaro's Arcadia, Montemayor's Diana, Gil Polo's Diana enamorada, and Amadis of Gaul (from which he takes his main plot and several episodes, tightening its looser structure as Gil Polo had that of Montemayor). Other influences include the Greek romances (chiefly Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius) with their labyrinthine plots, miraculous escapes, and prophetic oracles (particularly in Sidney's first version, known as the Old Arcadia), and the great medieval Arthurian cycles (including Malory's Morte Darthur, whose Isolde probably suggested Sidney's Gynecia) with their interwoven stories and didactic emphasis. More than any other pastoral romance, Sidney's Arcadia is filled with the tournaments and other features of knightly romance, but keeps them subordinate to the pastoral plot, thus providing a contrast (very close to that of FQ VI) between the active chivalric sphere and the contemplative and amorous pastoral sphere.
A major feature of pastoral romance is this contrast between the outside and pastoral worlds, whereby the pastoral is viewed ambivalently as the locus of both innocent simplicity and rustic rudeness (as in the pairs of ideal and thick-witted shepherds and shepherdesses in Sidney or in Shake-speare's As You Like It). By virtue of their own courtly or urban origins, its heroes bring this double perspective into Arcadia where they are always only sojourners. The pastoral retreat is typically, therefore, only a temporary prelude to the renovated hero's return to the world of city and court; and frequently the work itself ends by also moving out of pastoral into a loftier genre such as epic. Sannazaro's Arcadia, for example, includes echoes of Virgil's Aeneid when its hero returns from his pastoral retreat—a hint of the rota Virgilii or movement from pastoral to epic to which Spenser alludes at the beginning of The Faerie Queene, as his model for moving from The Shepheardes Calender.
This sense of temporariness also takes the form of a sense of the fragility of the pastoral world itself, immune neither to the conflicts nor to the invasions or mortality of the outside world (thus, the pastoral retreat of FQ VI is complicated by love-rivalry and finally invaded by slaughtering brigands); this vulnerability reflects ironically on aristocrats who think to enjoy greater happiness simply by donning shepherds’ clothes or who enter the retreat in order to escape an experience that they must undergo and that comes upon them through their very attempt to evade it (in Sidney's Arcadia, Basilius’ attempt to escape an ambiguous oracle by retreating to the country sets in motion the very events which fulfill the oracle).
This sense of the fragility of a pastoral retreat within an heroic romance is particularly strong in two instances important for Spenser. In Orlando furioso 19, the Arcadian setting in which Angelica and Medoro carve on trees mementos of their love is a pastoral oasis in the midst of the hostile world of war, and it is finally destroyed by Orlando's raging. In Gerusalemme liberata 6–7, Erminia, pursued and fleeing from disappointment in love, sojourns as a shepherdess with the family of an old shepherd who (like Spenser's Meliboe) has returned from court life to his original abode; but as with Paris’ sojourn with Oenone within the larger epic story of Troy, the idyll of Dido and Aeneas in Aeneid 4, and Dante's pausing in Eden at the top of Mount Purgatory before ascending to the New Jerusalem of Paradiso, this retreat is soon left behind.
The temporary character of the pastoral oasis is also reflected in the frequently concentric structure of the setting: an outermost circle of urban sophistication or epic warfare and death, an inner circle which may be Arcady proper, and a supernatural center (the Cave of the Nymphs in Daphnis and Chloe, the tomb of Massilia in Sannazaro's Arcadia, the valley of cypresses in Cervantes’ Galatea, or Mount Acidale in FQ VI x). The action of pastoral romance is often the hero's progress into the center and out again, renewed and ready to return to the world from which he had first retreated. Such a three-part pattern is common in Shakespeare's comedies, which start with exile from society, then retreat into a pastoral place (eg, the forests of Arden in As You Like It and the wood in Midsummer Night's Dream), and finally return to a society which is itself often transformed by the retreat.
images and motifs Romance is remarkable for the recurrences of images and motifs in texts which could not have had direct contact with each other. Indeed, the phenomenon of the detachable motif—capable of recurring independently or traveling from romance to romance—seems one of the defining features of the genre. Because of their multiplicity, only a partial and schematic review of characteristic images and motifs is possible here.