Figuring the enforcement of authority against rebellion, the war between the Olympians and the earth-spawned Giants is typically read as a marker of ideology. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s abundant allusions to the Gigantomachia can seem straightforwardly ideological, aligning Olympian rule with his virtue-knights, avatars of Elizabethan hegemony, and his giants with subversion. This essay explores another significance for the Gigantomachia, reviewing a different tradition of meaning for the myth-pattern and locating it in the poem—a tradition wherein, rather than liberation in the political realm, the Giants portend the radical oversimplification and even the nullification of thought within the mind. Through conflict with giants, Spenser argues the importance of logic: investigating, idea inventing, discriminating, dialoguing. Giants help clarify the picture of the place of logic, particularly in a Ramist vein, in The Faerie Queene. The foci are the Egalitarian Giant and the correspondences between Orgoglio and Disdaine.
{"title":"Spenser and Logic: Gigantomachia and Contentlessness in The Faerie Queene","authors":"J. Curran","doi":"10.1086/717094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717094","url":null,"abstract":"Figuring the enforcement of authority against rebellion, the war between the Olympians and the earth-spawned Giants is typically read as a marker of ideology. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s abundant allusions to the Gigantomachia can seem straightforwardly ideological, aligning Olympian rule with his virtue-knights, avatars of Elizabethan hegemony, and his giants with subversion. This essay explores another significance for the Gigantomachia, reviewing a different tradition of meaning for the myth-pattern and locating it in the poem—a tradition wherein, rather than liberation in the political realm, the Giants portend the radical oversimplification and even the nullification of thought within the mind. Through conflict with giants, Spenser argues the importance of logic: investigating, idea inventing, discriminating, dialoguing. Giants help clarify the picture of the place of logic, particularly in a Ramist vein, in The Faerie Queene. The foci are the Egalitarian Giant and the correspondences between Orgoglio and Disdaine.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76060829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Spenser’s hovercraft is a distinctive cluster of formal effects that suspend on any number of thresholds both the moment of reading and the scene being read. In the Amoretti these effects allow Spenser to finesse the impasses bequeathed to Elizabethan love poetry by Petrarch. In this essay I start by showing how the opening sonnet offers a preview of the courtship plot in which these impasses appear. The first stage of this plot abjects the poet-lover, reflexively installing the lady as a triumphal dominatrix; the second stage withdraws the speaker into his own heart while idealizing the lady, who is thereby rendered inaccessible; stage three hails the lady as angelic while tacitly acknowledging the poet’s role in creating her as an idol to be worshipped. These stages, introduced in the corresponding stanzas of Amoretti 1, give way in the sequence to a new dynamic in which the poet addresses not his poems but the lady herself, who can then respond. When the speaker accepts her as his “maker,” they begin the reciprocal process of fashioning themselves as a couple. Crucial to this process is the speaker’s successful effort to defuse both the sharp edge of his sexual desire and the panic such “lust” triggers in him. It will be Spenser’s delicately nuanced hovercraft, present from the first sonnet on, that emerges late in the sequence as a poetic technique for managing these threats to the courtship, enabling its resolution, although not its consummation, in Amoretti 67. This fine-tuned art of suspension then becomes the basis of the visionary union of the lovers in Epithalamion, as well as, later, of the poet’s quiet resignation in the mourning undercurrents of Prothalamion.
{"title":"Spenser’s Hovercraft","authors":"D. L. Miller","doi":"10.1086/717091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717091","url":null,"abstract":"Spenser’s hovercraft is a distinctive cluster of formal effects that suspend on any number of thresholds both the moment of reading and the scene being read. In the Amoretti these effects allow Spenser to finesse the impasses bequeathed to Elizabethan love poetry by Petrarch. In this essay I start by showing how the opening sonnet offers a preview of the courtship plot in which these impasses appear. The first stage of this plot abjects the poet-lover, reflexively installing the lady as a triumphal dominatrix; the second stage withdraws the speaker into his own heart while idealizing the lady, who is thereby rendered inaccessible; stage three hails the lady as angelic while tacitly acknowledging the poet’s role in creating her as an idol to be worshipped. These stages, introduced in the corresponding stanzas of Amoretti 1, give way in the sequence to a new dynamic in which the poet addresses not his poems but the lady herself, who can then respond. When the speaker accepts her as his “maker,” they begin the reciprocal process of fashioning themselves as a couple. Crucial to this process is the speaker’s successful effort to defuse both the sharp edge of his sexual desire and the panic such “lust” triggers in him. It will be Spenser’s delicately nuanced hovercraft, present from the first sonnet on, that emerges late in the sequence as a poetic technique for managing these threats to the courtship, enabling its resolution, although not its consummation, in Amoretti 67. This fine-tuned art of suspension then becomes the basis of the visionary union of the lovers in Epithalamion, as well as, later, of the poet’s quiet resignation in the mourning undercurrents of Prothalamion.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80220019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
If, in The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout’s evocation of the “formall rowmes” of the honeycomb suggests Spenser’s pursuit of a rational, classical poetics, then what are we to make of their displacement by “the grieslie Todestoole growne”? This article proposes that Spenser’s usurping “Todestoole”—as a twin image to Harvey’s “Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo”—fixes in view The Faerie Queene’s deviations from honeycomb order, and specifically its proliferous alliteration. It shows how sixteenth-century censure of alliteration was grounded in the tenets of classical rhetoric; it then explores the evidence for an incipient awareness and, eventually, qualified acceptance of the role played by alliteration in vernacular meter. Having in this way demonstrated that alliteration, in the period’s own literary-critical discourse, was more vulgar “Todestoole” than Apolline honeycomb, this article offers a reading of alliteration in The Faerie Queene as generative of Spenser’s “toadstool poetics.” Reducible neither to narrative nor metric functions, Spenser’s alliterative patterns—entangled, irregular, and prone to excess—habitually overrun forms of honeycomb containment.
{"title":"Toadstool Poetics: Alliteration in The Faerie Queene","authors":"Bethany Dubow","doi":"10.1086/717092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717092","url":null,"abstract":"If, in The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout’s evocation of the “formall rowmes” of the honeycomb suggests Spenser’s pursuit of a rational, classical poetics, then what are we to make of their displacement by “the grieslie Todestoole growne”? This article proposes that Spenser’s usurping “Todestoole”—as a twin image to Harvey’s “Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo”—fixes in view The Faerie Queene’s deviations from honeycomb order, and specifically its proliferous alliteration. It shows how sixteenth-century censure of alliteration was grounded in the tenets of classical rhetoric; it then explores the evidence for an incipient awareness and, eventually, qualified acceptance of the role played by alliteration in vernacular meter. Having in this way demonstrated that alliteration, in the period’s own literary-critical discourse, was more vulgar “Todestoole” than Apolline honeycomb, this article offers a reading of alliteration in The Faerie Queene as generative of Spenser’s “toadstool poetics.” Reducible neither to narrative nor metric functions, Spenser’s alliterative patterns—entangled, irregular, and prone to excess—habitually overrun forms of honeycomb containment.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72749065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While many readers of The Faerie Queene have traced a shift from private to public virtues in the middle books of the poem, this article argues that the projects of Books III and IV run aground on the poem’s inability to make private, erotic happiness compatible with the social order it is supposed to produce. The primary tension in Books III and IV of the poem grows out of the attempt to ground public virtues in the private experience of erotic love. More specifically, the difficulty Spenser faces throughout the central books of the poem derives from his attempt to reconcile heterosexual love in a patriarchal context—that is, intimate relationships between a dominant and a subordinate party—with stable social relations. Both Books III and IV attempt to generate a form of love that is egalitarian as a way to end interpersonal violence, but in both books the project fails to the extent that The Faerie Queene cannot imagine a world in which women are full subjects rather than objects of the social order they help to generate.
{"title":"Irreconcilable Differences: Gender and the Failures of Heterosexual Love in The Faerie Queene, Books III and IV","authors":"D. St Hilaire","doi":"10.1086/717095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717095","url":null,"abstract":"While many readers of The Faerie Queene have traced a shift from private to public virtues in the middle books of the poem, this article argues that the projects of Books III and IV run aground on the poem’s inability to make private, erotic happiness compatible with the social order it is supposed to produce. The primary tension in Books III and IV of the poem grows out of the attempt to ground public virtues in the private experience of erotic love. More specifically, the difficulty Spenser faces throughout the central books of the poem derives from his attempt to reconcile heterosexual love in a patriarchal context—that is, intimate relationships between a dominant and a subordinate party—with stable social relations. Both Books III and IV attempt to generate a form of love that is egalitarian as a way to end interpersonal violence, but in both books the project fails to the extent that The Faerie Queene cannot imagine a world in which women are full subjects rather than objects of the social order they help to generate.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73180327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A New Category: Discoveries","authors":"S. Monta, W. A. Oram, A. Ramachandran","doi":"10.1086/719429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719429","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81930197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ah is a peculiar word—or, rather, a peculiar nonword word. It is an exhalation, a flow of air that seems to vibrate slightly in the back of the throat. It is imitative of a sigh or maybe a soft gasp. It is nonreferential, not entirely unlike an onomatopoeia. Although, oddly, onomatopoeic words are not the same in all languages (in Norwegian, vrinsk is the sound that a horse makes, and voff the sound that a dog makes), forms of ah exist in many other languages: Anglo-Norman, Old French, Middle French, Latin, Old Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. But unlike other onomatopoeic words (unlike, for example, quack, the sound in English that a duck makes), ah is the sound that, in a lyric poem, the narrator or speaker makes. What interests me about the word is the way that it has been used in some Renaissance lyric poems to mark the narrator’s sudden encounter with the external world and, in so doing, to interrupt an internalized and seemingly sealed-off discourse. While one might assume that such an encounter would threaten the apparent autonomy of themind’s internal world, this encounter may actually undergird the mind’s autonomy—or at least its claim to autonomy. To start to make sense of that rather abstract assertion, consider the following example, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 34 (where the ah appears in the final couplet):
{"title":"Ah!","authors":"Rachel Eisendrath","doi":"10.1086/717196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717196","url":null,"abstract":"Ah is a peculiar word—or, rather, a peculiar nonword word. It is an exhalation, a flow of air that seems to vibrate slightly in the back of the throat. It is imitative of a sigh or maybe a soft gasp. It is nonreferential, not entirely unlike an onomatopoeia. Although, oddly, onomatopoeic words are not the same in all languages (in Norwegian, vrinsk is the sound that a horse makes, and voff the sound that a dog makes), forms of ah exist in many other languages: Anglo-Norman, Old French, Middle French, Latin, Old Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. But unlike other onomatopoeic words (unlike, for example, quack, the sound in English that a duck makes), ah is the sound that, in a lyric poem, the narrator or speaker makes. What interests me about the word is the way that it has been used in some Renaissance lyric poems to mark the narrator’s sudden encounter with the external world and, in so doing, to interrupt an internalized and seemingly sealed-off discourse. While one might assume that such an encounter would threaten the apparent autonomy of themind’s internal world, this encounter may actually undergird the mind’s autonomy—or at least its claim to autonomy. To start to make sense of that rather abstract assertion, consider the following example, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 34 (where the ah appears in the final couplet):","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73280923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this essay, I offer a new interpretation of the Amidas/Bracidas episode in Book V of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. I argue two complementary points: first, that Spenser included the judgment on the strand as a direct commentary on the English admiralty jurisdiction controversy; and second, that previous critics have erred by not considering the episode within the larger context of maritime adjudication across the poem. My reading rests on two interpretive approaches. The first assumes external knowledge of the legal issues presented in the episode. The second assumes internal knowledge of The Faerie Queene’s general treatment of admiralty jurisdiction. Ultimately, I contend that this episode demonstrates Spenser’s call for compromise in the English conflicts over admiralty jurisdiction and illustrates how he creates meaning through a calculated interplay among allusions both within and beyond his allegory.
{"title":"Wrecked upon the Sands: Maritime Law in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene","authors":"H. Cotter","doi":"10.1086/717192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717192","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I offer a new interpretation of the Amidas/Bracidas episode in Book V of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. I argue two complementary points: first, that Spenser included the judgment on the strand as a direct commentary on the English admiralty jurisdiction controversy; and second, that previous critics have erred by not considering the episode within the larger context of maritime adjudication across the poem. My reading rests on two interpretive approaches. The first assumes external knowledge of the legal issues presented in the episode. The second assumes internal knowledge of The Faerie Queene’s general treatment of admiralty jurisdiction. Ultimately, I contend that this episode demonstrates Spenser’s call for compromise in the English conflicts over admiralty jurisdiction and illustrates how he creates meaning through a calculated interplay among allusions both within and beyond his allegory.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84773118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Close analysis of Spenser’s six primary “mirrours” of Queen Elizabeth I—Gloriana, Una, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, and Cynthia—suggests that they go beyond representations of the queen’s moral character to reveal traits of personality. Drawing on the Five-Factor Model that dominates current studies of personality, this essay interrogates the historical accuracy of Spenser’s composite portrait of the queen. Having served under or befriended two of Elizabeth’s most intimate favorites, one of her bishops, and a number of her chief courtiers and soldiers, he clearly had gleaned detailed knowledge of her nature. Yet on one primary trait he seems to misrepresent her, creating mirrors that oscillate between extraversion and introversion and tend to the latter. Two explanations are compelling: his views of ideal monarchy and womanly conduct and his unexpectedly subtle insights into personal psychology, particularly the behavior of neurotics. The explanation we choose depends on the Spenser we seek, whether the idealistic humanist, the shrewd political observer, or the intuitive psychologist. The fullest reading of the poem requires balancing all three, seeing the interplay involving the philosophical and theological allegory, the topical allegory focused on famous personalities of the day, and the psychological allegory intent on personality itself.
{"title":"(Mis)representing Elizabeth: Spenser, the Five-Factor Model, and the Personality of the Queen","authors":"Donald V. Stump","doi":"10.1086/717089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/717089","url":null,"abstract":"Close analysis of Spenser’s six primary “mirrours” of Queen Elizabeth I—Gloriana, Una, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla, and Cynthia—suggests that they go beyond representations of the queen’s moral character to reveal traits of personality. Drawing on the Five-Factor Model that dominates current studies of personality, this essay interrogates the historical accuracy of Spenser’s composite portrait of the queen. Having served under or befriended two of Elizabeth’s most intimate favorites, one of her bishops, and a number of her chief courtiers and soldiers, he clearly had gleaned detailed knowledge of her nature. Yet on one primary trait he seems to misrepresent her, creating mirrors that oscillate between extraversion and introversion and tend to the latter. Two explanations are compelling: his views of ideal monarchy and womanly conduct and his unexpectedly subtle insights into personal psychology, particularly the behavior of neurotics. The explanation we choose depends on the Spenser we seek, whether the idealistic humanist, the shrewd political observer, or the intuitive psychologist. The fullest reading of the poem requires balancing all three, seeing the interplay involving the philosophical and theological allegory, the topical allegory focused on famous personalities of the day, and the psychological allegory intent on personality itself.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79273444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay probes the strange relationship of allegory and race in The Faerie Queene. It takes its rise from the description of Phantastes in Book II as “swarth”: the faculty of imagination is racialized; race is thereby introduced at the very point at which an allegory of the body—the House of Alma—opens onto an allegory of the powers of the soul. Placing a racialized figure here invites some strange questions about the ontology of race, as the poem constructs it. In fact it invites us to wonder whether what racializing discourse projects or produces is primarily a “fact” about the body at all. This essay connects the question of race to histories of the ontology of body and soul. It uses the figure of Phantastes to ask what The Faerie Queene can tell us about racializing discourse in the early modern period, exploring in one small instance what it means to bring Spenser’s poem into ongoing conversations about race.
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