Iterations of the epic topos of the night raid (Doloneia) deriving from book 10 of the Iliad intersect with the motif of puberty in significant ways. For an Elizabethan author interested in the formation of sexual identity, this intersection triggers a range of literary transformations and modes of literary self-consciousness that can inform any given reference to sexual awakening. Erotic desire as a theme is not an intrinsic aspect of the epic topos but a variation introduced to it by Virgil in order to differentiate the emotional bonds of personal loyalty from the claims of duty the individual owes a collective entity. Subsequent epic poets Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser shape a tradition as each reworks elements of the Virgilian paradigm to explore the formation of gender and social identity in relation to structures of political power and cultural heritage.
{"title":"Growing Up in Epic: Transformations of the Doloneia","authors":"L. Silberman","doi":"10.1086/706538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/706538","url":null,"abstract":"Iterations of the epic topos of the night raid (Doloneia) deriving from book 10 of the Iliad intersect with the motif of puberty in significant ways. For an Elizabethan author interested in the formation of sexual identity, this intersection triggers a range of literary transformations and modes of literary self-consciousness that can inform any given reference to sexual awakening. Erotic desire as a theme is not an intrinsic aspect of the epic topos but a variation introduced to it by Virgil in order to differentiate the emotional bonds of personal loyalty from the claims of duty the individual owes a collective entity. Subsequent epic poets Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser shape a tradition as each reworks elements of the Virgilian paradigm to explore the formation of gender and social identity in relation to structures of political power and cultural heritage.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83732262","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 argues that the prominent Elizabethan pedagogue Richard Mulcaster exerted a considerable influence on the narrative strategies of his pupil Edmund Spenser, especially as seen in Book I of The Faerie Queene. Where recent scholars such as Jeff Dolven and Andrew Wallace have maintained that Spenser was critical of many of the humanist practices they deem prevalent in the Elizabethan classroom, this study shows that such critique of humanism was already a basic part of the reformed curriculum at Merchant Taylors’ School, where Spenser received his early training under Mulcaster. The essay first provides a reading of Mulcaster’s main pedagogical text, Positions (1581), and then applies its key concepts to a reading of Book I of Spenser’s poem with a double emphasis on the hero of the poem, Redcrosse, and on the reader’s interaction with the text. The most important of these concepts is the seemingly innocuous term “circumstance.” Aside from being a key concept within forensic oratory, to “maister the circumstance” is for Mulcaster a shorthand for a cautious approach to the classical text studied in his classroom. The same strategy, this essay argues, is implemented in the poem. The reader must pay attention to the circumstances, with their rhetorical, pedagogical, and theological connotations, triggered in large part by the apparent inability of Redcrosse, the putative hero of the book, to do so. Additionally, as a subcategory of the rhetorical connotations, there is also the need to assess the use of names in the poem.
{"title":"To “maister the circumstance”: Mulcaster’s Positions and Spenser’s Faerie Queene","authors":"Åke Bergvall","doi":"10.1086/706175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/706175","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that the prominent Elizabethan pedagogue Richard Mulcaster exerted a considerable influence on the narrative strategies of his pupil Edmund Spenser, especially as seen in Book I of The Faerie Queene. Where recent scholars such as Jeff Dolven and Andrew Wallace have maintained that Spenser was critical of many of the humanist practices they deem prevalent in the Elizabethan classroom, this study shows that such critique of humanism was already a basic part of the reformed curriculum at Merchant Taylors’ School, where Spenser received his early training under Mulcaster. The essay first provides a reading of Mulcaster’s main pedagogical text, Positions (1581), and then applies its key concepts to a reading of Book I of Spenser’s poem with a double emphasis on the hero of the poem, Redcrosse, and on the reader’s interaction with the text. The most important of these concepts is the seemingly innocuous term “circumstance.” Aside from being a key concept within forensic oratory, to “maister the circumstance” is for Mulcaster a shorthand for a cautious approach to the classical text studied in his classroom. The same strategy, this essay argues, is implemented in the poem. The reader must pay attention to the circumstances, with their rhetorical, pedagogical, and theological connotations, triggered in large part by the apparent inability of Redcrosse, the putative hero of the book, to do so. Additionally, as a subcategory of the rhetorical connotations, there is also the need to assess the use of names in the poem.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79070155","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 1579 Queen Elizabeth appeared about to marry the Roman Catholic duc d’Anjou, the French king’s brother and heir apparent. Recalling the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1572 in Paris, many English Protestants feared this match, and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) satirizes it to stoke resistance. Although the twelve eclogues are illustrated, previous accounts of this satire address only its verbal aspects and focus on “Februarye,” “Aprill,” and “November.” But the picture for “Maye” presents the spurious triumph of a mock-royal couple juxtaposed with a fable of disastrous carelessness while heraldically relating them to the English monarchy. This eclogue climaxes the anti-Anjou satire both visually and verbally and pointedly interacts with the picture and poem for “Aprill” wherein Elizabeth triumphs as England’s virgin queen. As these two eclogues constitute a mutually definitive pair, so consideration of each should be informed by its counterpart. To fulfill the felt responsibilities of his poetic vocation amid acute political and religious challenges, yet elude reprisals, Spenser artfully exploited illustrated poetry’s greater potential for indirect expression, as in emblematics. Yet his intervention was still hazardous as well as potentially rewarding.
{"title":"Open Secrets: The Verbal-Visual Satire of the Anjou Match in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender","authors":"Kenneth Borris","doi":"10.1086/706176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/706176","url":null,"abstract":"In 1579 Queen Elizabeth appeared about to marry the Roman Catholic duc d’Anjou, the French king’s brother and heir apparent. Recalling the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1572 in Paris, many English Protestants feared this match, and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) satirizes it to stoke resistance. Although the twelve eclogues are illustrated, previous accounts of this satire address only its verbal aspects and focus on “Februarye,” “Aprill,” and “November.” But the picture for “Maye” presents the spurious triumph of a mock-royal couple juxtaposed with a fable of disastrous carelessness while heraldically relating them to the English monarchy. This eclogue climaxes the anti-Anjou satire both visually and verbally and pointedly interacts with the picture and poem for “Aprill” wherein Elizabeth triumphs as England’s virgin queen. As these two eclogues constitute a mutually definitive pair, so consideration of each should be informed by its counterpart. To fulfill the felt responsibilities of his poetic vocation amid acute political and religious challenges, yet elude reprisals, Spenser artfully exploited illustrated poetry’s greater potential for indirect expression, as in emblematics. Yet his intervention was still hazardous as well as potentially rewarding.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88836298","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 explores how Spenser’s late poem Prothalamion both reconstructs and deconstructs Golden Age myths of poetry and politics, through allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti as well as through the intertextual presence of Spenser’s early complaint The Ruines of Time. Although Golden Age memories of a time before a fall into time connect these two poems, Spenser nevertheless reveals Prothalamion to be a retrospective fiction constructed from The Ruines of Time, an intertextuality reflective of Spenser’s career-long poetics of ruin and recollection. As I argue, Spenser’s poetics relate to the art of memory, as dramatized by its origin story: the tale of the poet Simonides, who discovers locational memory by recollecting a ruined edifice. By remembering Prothalamion from The Ruines of Time, Spenser both recollects and reforms the memorial ruins of his own past and poetry, while challenging the myth of the Golden Age associated with Queen Elizabeth and his presumed role as England’s new Virgil.
{"title":"Spenser’s Golden Age Memories: Recollecting The Ruines of Time in Prothalamion","authors":"R. Helfer","doi":"10.1086/706178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/706178","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores how Spenser’s late poem Prothalamion both reconstructs and deconstructs Golden Age myths of poetry and politics, through allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti as well as through the intertextual presence of Spenser’s early complaint The Ruines of Time. Although Golden Age memories of a time before a fall into time connect these two poems, Spenser nevertheless reveals Prothalamion to be a retrospective fiction constructed from The Ruines of Time, an intertextuality reflective of Spenser’s career-long poetics of ruin and recollection. As I argue, Spenser’s poetics relate to the art of memory, as dramatized by its origin story: the tale of the poet Simonides, who discovers locational memory by recollecting a ruined edifice. By remembering Prothalamion from The Ruines of Time, Spenser both recollects and reforms the memorial ruins of his own past and poetry, while challenging the myth of the Golden Age associated with Queen Elizabeth and his presumed role as England’s new Virgil.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82884269","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}
The so-called “Spenser-Harvey letters” (1580) are generally studied only for the biographical and bibliographical information they contain, though they are an unreliable source for both. This article proposes that instead of being treated as a corrupted version of Spenser’s personal correspondence with Harvey that found its way into print, the letters should be read as a collaboratively authored literary work that aims to give its readers a glimpse of the fictionalized (or fictional) collaborative relationship between two authors called “G.H.” and “Immerito.” The pseudonym “Immerito” in particular is highlighted in the book, suggesting that one of its goals was to supplement The Shepheardes Calender (which was due to be reprinted for the first time) and generate further interest in its author.
{"title":"Collaborative Spenser? Reading the “Spenser-Harvey Letters”","authors":"Elisabeth Chaghafi","doi":"10.1086/699646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699646","url":null,"abstract":"The so-called “Spenser-Harvey letters” (1580) are generally studied only for the biographical and bibliographical information they contain, though they are an unreliable source for both. This article proposes that instead of being treated as a corrupted version of Spenser’s personal correspondence with Harvey that found its way into print, the letters should be read as a collaboratively authored literary work that aims to give its readers a glimpse of the fictionalized (or fictional) collaborative relationship between two authors called “G.H.” and “Immerito.” The pseudonym “Immerito” in particular is highlighted in the book, suggesting that one of its goals was to supplement The Shepheardes Calender (which was due to be reprinted for the first time) and generate further interest in its author.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85621786","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 article examines word-image relationships within A Theatre for Worldlings (1569) and The Shepheardes Calender (1579). Both printed texts contain illustrations with continuous narrative in which the implied three-dimensional space in the picture plane expresses temporality on a continuum that reaches back to the horizon. Spenser’s translations of Marot and Du Bellay in A Theatre reconnect the pictured scenes as a series of events, but the continuous narrative in A Theatre changes readers’ perceptions of narrative time and complicates deixis within the lyric poems. In the Calender, a different word-image relationship occurs. Spenser’s poetry, when paired with continuous-narrative designs, emphasizes the power of storytelling by illustrating imaginary or fable worlds on the landscape. Scholars often focus on how Spenser’s early translations influence his later poetry, but this essay argues that, in particular, the continuous narrative illustration techniques in A Theatre inform the ways in which visual images and narrative time operate in the Calender.
{"title":"The Persistence of Vision: Continuous Narrative and Spenser’s Illustrated Poetry","authors":"T. Clement","doi":"10.1086/699649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699649","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines word-image relationships within A Theatre for Worldlings (1569) and The Shepheardes Calender (1579). Both printed texts contain illustrations with continuous narrative in which the implied three-dimensional space in the picture plane expresses temporality on a continuum that reaches back to the horizon. Spenser’s translations of Marot and Du Bellay in A Theatre reconnect the pictured scenes as a series of events, but the continuous narrative in A Theatre changes readers’ perceptions of narrative time and complicates deixis within the lyric poems. In the Calender, a different word-image relationship occurs. Spenser’s poetry, when paired with continuous-narrative designs, emphasizes the power of storytelling by illustrating imaginary or fable worlds on the landscape. Scholars often focus on how Spenser’s early translations influence his later poetry, but this essay argues that, in particular, the continuous narrative illustration techniques in A Theatre inform the ways in which visual images and narrative time operate in the Calender.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78678083","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 article discusses an annotation that John Dryden made in one of his copies of Spenser’s poems. In it, Dryden expressed surprise at the sudden emergence of the gifts that Britomart gives to the priests of Isis in Book V of The Faerie Queene. This annotation is used to explore the tendency of objects suddenly to emerge in Spenser’s poem, with varying degrees of explanation for their origins. This tendency is part of what grants the literal surface of the narrative its perennial capacity to surprise and delight.
{"title":"“Whence had she all this wealth?”: Dryden’s Note on The Faerie Queene V.vii.24 and the Gifts of Literal Reading","authors":"Joe Moshenska","doi":"10.1086/699650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699650","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses an annotation that John Dryden made in one of his copies of Spenser’s poems. In it, Dryden expressed surprise at the sudden emergence of the gifts that Britomart gives to the priests of Isis in Book V of The Faerie Queene. This annotation is used to explore the tendency of objects suddenly to emerge in Spenser’s poem, with varying degrees of explanation for their origins. This tendency is part of what grants the literal surface of the narrative its perennial capacity to surprise and delight.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86024821","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 argues for the essential importance of myth and parody to Renaissance writing and connects them with still movement, a punning paradox that both Spenser and Shakespeare engage. Still movement simultaneously opposes motion to stillness and conjoins them. Parody heightens the play of still movement, and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis offers an exemplary instance of it that parodies Spenser’s many refractions of the same myth in his epic. Shakespeare’s epyllion also serves as a transition to a historicized treatment of parody that is inclusive enough to pertain to both Spenser and Shakespeare. Properly understood, the parodic still movement of myth broadens and deepens the Spenser-Shakespeare connection and significantly affects a reading of sacred, or biblical, myth at the end of King Lear and the myths operative at the end of The Winter’s Tale, which are variously biblical and classical and bear on the troubling death of Mamillius.
{"title":"Mythic Still Movement and Parodic Myth in Spenser and Shakespeare","authors":"Judith H. Anderson","doi":"10.1086/699643","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699643","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues for the essential importance of myth and parody to Renaissance writing and connects them with still movement, a punning paradox that both Spenser and Shakespeare engage. Still movement simultaneously opposes motion to stillness and conjoins them. Parody heightens the play of still movement, and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis offers an exemplary instance of it that parodies Spenser’s many refractions of the same myth in his epic. Shakespeare’s epyllion also serves as a transition to a historicized treatment of parody that is inclusive enough to pertain to both Spenser and Shakespeare. Properly understood, the parodic still movement of myth broadens and deepens the Spenser-Shakespeare connection and significantly affects a reading of sacred, or biblical, myth at the end of King Lear and the myths operative at the end of The Winter’s Tale, which are variously biblical and classical and bear on the troubling death of Mamillius.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84911990","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 reads Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice through the lens of Erich Auerbach and Jacques Rancière to argue that the nineteenth-century term “Renaissance” names a link, never secure, between art, history, and collectivity—which is to say, a continual rebirth of historical life. Reading Ruskin makes clear that since the nineteenth century Renaissance has never meant, despite the efforts of many from a variety of political positions to make it mean, an abstract concept of beauty manifesting itself as the informing spirit of works of art. It has never meant a majestic subject standing athwart from history and imposing his masculine will upon yielding, feminine materials. It has never meant a Eurocentric imposition of universal values upon the peripheral world. Instead, a Renaissance by definition violates epistemes by insisting upon a link between disparate times, places, and peoples. Thus the term that demarcates the cinquecento as a unique historical moment also is the term that demarcates a nineteenth-century aesthetic.
{"title":"The Pleasure of Hating the Renaissance","authors":"Christopher Warley","doi":"10.1086/699647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699647","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reads Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice through the lens of Erich Auerbach and Jacques Rancière to argue that the nineteenth-century term “Renaissance” names a link, never secure, between art, history, and collectivity—which is to say, a continual rebirth of historical life. Reading Ruskin makes clear that since the nineteenth century Renaissance has never meant, despite the efforts of many from a variety of political positions to make it mean, an abstract concept of beauty manifesting itself as the informing spirit of works of art. It has never meant a majestic subject standing athwart from history and imposing his masculine will upon yielding, feminine materials. It has never meant a Eurocentric imposition of universal values upon the peripheral world. Instead, a Renaissance by definition violates epistemes by insisting upon a link between disparate times, places, and peoples. Thus the term that demarcates the cinquecento as a unique historical moment also is the term that demarcates a nineteenth-century aesthetic.","PeriodicalId":39606,"journal":{"name":"Spenser Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82062843","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}
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