The Relics of Hippolytus in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Abstract

This essay argues that Edmund Spenser makes a major intervention in the Renaissance reception of the Hippolytus myth: he joins the classical imitation of humanist poetics with the theological arguments of the post-Reformation Church. Spenser forms his Hippolytus story from familiar sources, including Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium. But he also owes, as we show, a significant, underestimated debt to Seneca’s Phaedra. Spenser derives from it a language of fragmentation and tragedy relevant for both the inset narrative in Faerie Queene I.v.37–40, as well as the book’s larger representation of Redcrosse’s spiritual renewal. Spenser develops his revision of Seneca, we suggest, through the mediation of Prudentius, who in Peristephanon XI had already combined Hippolytus’ classical with his Christian significance. Prudentius adapts Seneca’s Phaedra to narrate the dismemberment of St. Hippolytus, a third-century martyr whose bodily reliquiae were enshrined in Rome’s catacombs. Like Prudentius for a late antique Spenser rewrites the Hippolytus story for the Reformed Church, representing a second Hippolytus no longer worthy of veneration. The result is a Spenserian myth more capacious in its classicism and theology than scholarship has acknowledged previously. Revising Senecan tragedy and Prudentian martyrology, Spenser extends his imitation beyond the familiar sources of Augustan poetry, his critique beyond the familiar target of Roman Catholic works. [J.E., D.A.]