Spenser and The Limits of Neo-Platonic Poetry
The Hugh MacLean Lecture 2018
Andrew Hadfield
University of Sussex
I’m deeply honoured to be here and it is such a great pleasure to receive this award. It’s always nice to be invited to these events and to speak among friends and colleagues: I hope I can say some words which might stimulate thoughts and debate about Spenserian issues which we should probably pay attention to. Of course, just because you have invited me here today to lecture you does not mean you have to agree with me. Something we might like to think about is the nature and scope of Spenser’s writing career, a topic which has been considered by many distinguished and lively critics over the years. I would like to approach this subject from what I hope might be a slightly different angle from that normally taken, one that may prove productive even if, as I suspect, many of you whom I like and admire, will see matters differently.
Words come back to haunt you. In the introduction to the 2009 edition of Spenser Studies I am cited as a stimulus to the volume, but not in a wholly admiring way. Rather, a casual remark I made to the late Carol Kaske at, I think, The MLA Conference here in New York in 2002, that there had been a dearth of interest in Spenser and Neo-Platonism, which was why there was not much of it in the Cambridge Companion that I edited, helped to spur on the editors of the journal as they produced their impressive double-issue, ‘Spenser and Platonism.’ And, indeed, many critics and scholars have made the case once more that Spenser was a Platonist, most fully in Kenneth Borris’s learned monograph Visionary Spenser, published a few months ago. When I was a student the Spenser section of most university libraries was well-stocked with works on Spenser and Platonism, but the advent of New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism and Gender Studies, pushed such works aside so that the subject became a more specialised interest. Now that Spenser has become, like so many authors, densely contextualized and historicized, there is a need to turn to some new subjects and back to some others.
Spenser clearly cites Neo-Platonic and Platonic works and ideas in his work, and, assuming he did translate the pseudo-Platonic dialogue, Axiochus, we might well see a keen interest which exists from his earliest works to his last, in particular, The Fowre Hymns. If so, then the wheel has indeed come full circle. The first two hymns to love and beauty were written, according to the dedicatory epistle, ‘in the greener times of my youth’, but were then revised and reshaped to fit with the last two, the hymns to heavenly love and heavenly beauty to make a satisfying collection. For those who read these poems as Spenser’s late testament of faith they are either a sign that he renounced what might seem like his earlier interest in more worldly matters or, more frequently, a sign that Platonic ideas were there all along and that if we had been better critics we would have seen them enshrined in all his works. For some this means that Spenser had a career plan all along and it is entirely fitting that he should conclude with works that meld classical and Christian ideas and forms, the Orphic and the heavenly, as he articulates his poetic testament of faith. Others argue that what we have in the hymns is what we might think of as ‘late style’, a more pointed and spare testimony of faith, which shows how one should concentrate on the afterlife as one reaches the end of life’s journey. Spenser either always was already or became a Neo-Platonist when these poems were published, announcing his creed to the world. As Kenneth Borris puts it, ‘His desire to publicize these aspects [i.e., the central importance of acknowledging divine glory] of his thought and shape the reception of his canon accordingly’. Therefore (Borris again), ‘Although the relationship of these hymns to his other poems, and especially The Faerie Queene, remains relatively unexplored, it has nonetheless great importance for Spenser studies’. Surely that is right, but different readers may well provide strikingly different answers to this question.
And yet – with Spenser, it is always ‘and yet’, I feel, which, in a nutshell, is my problem with a belief in this late life certainty which critics want to see – the Hymns actually generate uncertainty in their readers. To take a few comments from their critical history. The editors of the Yale Shorter Poems open their introduction with the sentence ‘Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes deals with the philosophy of love without being, in any real sense, a philosophical work’ (p. 683). That is surely a problem, assuming this judgement is right, of course. If the poems are not philosophical in any meaningful sense, what are they? Surely that is what many readers want them to be, but if the philosophy is not serious, are they then to be read as poetry and, if so, what sort of poetry? English writers certainly knew some Neo-Platonic writing, mainly derived directly or indirectly from Ficino, but it is a point of considerable debate how seriously they took it. Are the Fowre Hymnes like Sir John Davies’ Orchestra: A Poem of Dancing, published in the same year as the Hymns, in which love is written about as a mystical mixture of earthly matter and ‘quintessence divine’, finding sympathy with beauty making them companions as close as the elm and the vine? Certainly Orchestra sounds like the Hymns, and the latter may have influenced the former. But, on the other hand, perhaps Spenser’s interest in Neo-Platonism was more metaphysical, in the poetic sense of the word, than philosophical; playful rather than profound. After all, we have the example of Sir Philip Sidney, who clearly knew his Plato well, as the Apology for Poetry demonstrates, but who could also be very cheeky about Neo-Platonism in Astrophil and Stella. Sonnet 71 lists Stella’s virtues in familiar Neo-Platonic mode before undercutting the argument with a reminder that the flesh is not so easy to cast aside, in the final line:
Who will in fairest booke of Nature know
How vertue may best lodg’d in Beautie be,
Let him but learne of Loue to reade in thee,
Stella, those faire lines which true goodnesse show.
There shall he find all vices ouerthrow,
Not by rude force, but sweetest soueraigntie
Of reason, from whose light those night-birds flie,
That inward sunne in thine eyes shineth so.
And, not content to be Perfections heire
Thy selfe, doest striue all minds that way to moue,
Who marke in thee what is in thee most faire:
So while thy beautie drawes the heart to loue,
As fast thy vertue bends that loue to good:
But, ah, Desire still cries, Giue me some food.
The same poetic joke is made in John Donne’s great seduction poem, ‘The Ecstasy’, where a philosophical edifice is used for significantly less edifying purposes. If we read Spenser’s Hymns in terms of philosophy or philosophical poetry then they might mean one thing; if we read them in terms of other poetry they might mean something else entirely. The trouble is that, for my money, the poetic might actually be more philosophical and the philosophical rather less so, a neat Spenserian paradox (if it is right).
Some other editors are less cautious than the Yale team, one asserting that the poems ‘are … significant expressions of Spenser’s philosophy of love, human and divine’. However, the same editor has to argue a particular line to make his point, claiming that ‘scholars now generally dismiss as largely fictional Spenser’s statement in the dedicatory epistle that the first pair were merely the product of a youthful exuberance which he had tried, and failed, to withdraw from publication’ (Douglas Brook-Davies). An awful lot of work is undertaken here by that adjective ‘largely’ qualifying the noun ‘fictional’. Edith Welsford’s edition and introduction, which in adapting and qualifying Robert Ellrodt’s study, set the tone for so many modern readings of the poems, is much less sure and she argues that she finds it hard ‘to believe that Spenser would have dared to publish a completely false statement about the attitude and behaviour of the noble ladies to whom his work was dedicated’, so she suggests that the work must have been revised. Of course, this is plausible, but we are getting into difficult and uncertain territory: if we were discussing Shakespeare our colleagues would already have written several articles and books denouncing the idiocies of their opponents’ assumptions and questioning their scholarly credentials. Fortunately the Spenser world is more balanced and reasonable. But you see my point: an awful lot hangs on what was revised; why; and how, when we have no real evidence. You have to read the poetry to understand the career which you can then reconstruct depending on your understanding of the poetry, a familiar circular argument. There is no appeal to outside authorities.
So we need to read the epistle prefacing the Hymnes carefully to see what it actually says and, here, I would like to argue, the waters become even muddier. Spenser says to the two ladies to whom the poems are dedicated, Margaret and Anne, daughters of Francis Russell, earl of Bedford, two powerful patrons of English writers who appear to have helped Spenser a great deal in this period, that
Having in the greener times of my youth, composed these former two Hymnes in the praise of Loue and beautie, and finding that the same too much pleased those of like age & disposition, which being too vehemently caried with that kind of affection, do rather sucke out pyson to their strong passion, than hony to their honest delight, I was moued by the one of you two most excellent Ladies, to call in the same. But being vnable so to doe, by reason that many copies thereof were formerly scattered abroad, I resolued at least to amend, and by way of retractation to reforme them, making in stead of those two Hymnes of earthly or naturall loue and beautie, two others of heauenly and celestiall.
The dedication has a familiar and intimate tone, resembling that of Spenser’s published correspondence with Harvey and dropping hints about his life beyond the page. There is a clear joke in the use of the phrase, ‘call in’, the term for a work being seized by the authorities and subjected to post-publication censorship, as this is exactly what had happened to Mother Hubberds Tale five years earlier. Here, one of the ladies is humorously equated – in print – with the team of state censors led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose task it was to oversee published work and remove offensive and dangerous material from general circulation. Of course, far from being designed to insult the lady in question, the reference expresses a shared joke, one that appears to be at the poet’s expense. The dedicatory letter deliberately hints at shared knowledge between the three interlocutors: that they all read events in the same way, a characteristic strategy of Spenser, who lets the reader understand that he is a man in the know, without saying what he knows. The reader outside their intimate circle is left to try and work out how serious Spenser is here: is he really ashamed of the first two hymns? Is he still smarting about the post-publication censorship of his collection? Does he really know the two ladies as well as he suggests? The point seems to be that we are left to guess, which is probably what Spenser had hoped to achieve by publishing the letter. He may also be trying to show that he could make rather cheeky allusions to the harsh treatment of his work by the authorities, showing that, despite hostile attention, he was not to be silenced.
However, we read this epistle it does not sound quite like that written by a man who was about to publish his testament of faith, unless, of course, that is part of the joke. Richard McCabe in his edition of the poems and in his essay in the special issue of Spenser Studies on Platonism, is characteristically astute, arguing that the poems draw attention to their formal experimentalism, and the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the spiritual represented in rather more mundane terms: ‘formal resolution is somewhat undercut by the persistence of irresolute imagery, the spiritual appetite is remarkably sensual’ – yet again, a familiar Spenserian paradox. Indeed in the same volume Gordon Teskey argues that the best way to read the Hymns is backwards, from the spiritual to the earthly, where we are more likely to find answers to the questions the poems pose. McCabe makes the further point that in joking about poems being ‘called in’ after they have ranged widely abroad, he is now publishing them, reinforcing his understanding that it is and should be the poet who authorises his work and not the political authorities, continuing his war with Lord Burghley.
If the Fowre Hymns do provide a key to Spenser’s writing and his career – and I am in full agreement with those who suggest that they do – then it is proving remarkably elusive. Perhaps we should look at a few examples and see what we think.
Now, I am of the opinion that some of the verse of the first two hymns does look more like juvenilia than late style. Consider these lines from the Hymn in honour of beauty:
And then conforming it vnto the light,
Which in it selfe hath remaining still
Of that first Sunne, yet sparckling in his sight,
Thereof he fashions in his higher skill,
An heauenly beautie to his fancies will,
And it embracing in his mind entyre,
The mirrour of his owne thought doth admyre.Which seeing now so inly faire to be,
As outward it appeareth to the eye,
And with his spirits proportion to agree,
He thereon fixeth all his fantasie,
And fully setteth his felicitie,
Counting it fairer, then it is indeede,
And yet indeede her fairenesse doth exceede.
I’m going to have to be a bit Leavis-like in my assertions given the lecture format. But, with its quibbles and straightened line-endings, this does not sound to me like the mature verse of The Faerie Queene, Book 6 or ‘Two Cantos of Mutability’ (assuming these are actually mature: a case is sometimes made that they are early pieces), or even, the complicated literary pyrotechnics of The Shepheardes Calender (published when he was 29 if you follow received chronology or 27 if you follow mine, so he was no spring chicken). They sound more like ‘The Visions of Petrarch’, published in the Complaints volume of 1591, but originally in the youthful translations as part of Jan Van Der Noot’s A Theatre for Worldlings:
Then heauenly branches did I see arise,
Out of a fresh and lusty Laurell tree
Amidde the yong grene wood. Of Paradise
Some noble plant I thought my selfe to see,
Suche store of birdes therein yshrouded were,
Chaunting in shade their sundry melodie.
My sprites were rauisht with these pleasures there
While on this Laurell fixed was mine eye,
The Skie gan euery where to ouercast,
And darkned was the welkin all aboute,
When sodaine flash of heauens fire outbrast,
And rent this royall tree quite by the roote.
Which makes me much and euer to complaine.
For no such shadow shal be had againe.
This is epigram number three. There’s a similar mixture of Latin and English words in both poems; the same mixture of masculine and feminine rhymes; the same epigrammatic style of moral conclusions which are left ambiguous and hanging. Furthermore, the epigram was reprinted verbatim from the earlier text providing some contextual evidence that Spenser did republish earlier work without revising it, a warning that we should be careful to assume that he habitually changed what he had written before.
More significantly perhaps, consider the strange progress of the sequence, especially when read in terms of other Spenser poems. The Hymn in honour of love imagines a thoroughly sexualised heaven in which loves are placed side by side in ivory beds with lilies and roses ‘over them displayed’:
There with thy daughter Pleasure they doe play
Their hurtlesse sports, without rebuke or blame,
And in her snowy bosome boldly lay
Their quiet heads, deuoyd of guilty shame:
After full ioyance of their gentle game,
Then her they crowne their Goddesse and their Queene,
And Decke with floures thy altars well beseene.
It sounds rather like a vision inspired by that famous American philosopher, Hugh Hefner, who, much as I am loath to criticise the United States, is not, I understand, universally admired. Certainly this vision of heaven is transformed in the final two poems where we read that celestial love serves to ‘clense the guilt of that infected cryme, / Which was enrooted in all fleshly slyme’, and that reflected on heavenly beauty is purifying so that
Ne from thenceforth doth any fleshly sense,
Or idle thought of earthly things remaine,
But all that earst seemd sweet, seemes now offense,
And all that pleased earst, now seemes to paine,
Their ioy, their comfort, their desire, their gaine,
Is fixed all on that which now they see,
All other sights but fayned shadowes bee.
Now this does, I think, sound a bit more like ‘Two Cantos of Mutability’, especially the words of Nature judging the warring contestants, or the narrator reflecting on the meaning of Nature’s judgement.
But surely the question we now have to ask is whether this narrator can be taken any more seriously than the narrator of that section of The Faerie Queene. This is not to ask a rhetorical question because I think that I already know what is going on, merely to suggest that the answer is, as so often in Spenser, not clear. The Mutability Cantos may suggest that there is an obvious order unpinning the universe and change shall in the end change thus affirming that principle of order; or they may well express the fear that everything is subject to change after all and that there is no straightforward means of establishing what principles of rule and hierarchy there are in the universe, however much we might want to believe in them. In the Hymns we hear a voice asserting that we need to abandon our belief in the value of the corporeal, the ending sounding a lot like Troilus’s recantation at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde when he renounces the world:
Euen the loue of God, which loathing brings
Of this vile world, and these gay seeming things;
With whose sweete pleasures being so possest,
Thy straying thoughts henceforth for euer rest.
Of course, one might well respond that it is easy to renounce the world and its pleasures when you are dead like Troilus, or, here, presumably ascetic and old like the speaker. What I am getting at is that the Hymnes might be better read as a sequence about the different states of the body and soul or, less plausibly perhaps, the progress of life, not an absolute judgement about what is what. I just don’t think Spenser does that; or, at least, not in the straightforward way that some readers of the Hymnes imagine.
Moreover, how might we read the Hymnes against the Amoretti and Epithalamion, the works which helped to cement C. S. Lewis’s judgement that Spenser was the great English poet of marriage? They certainly do not shy away from the sexual side of that mode of union, and it would surely be an irony if the poet who imagined Cynthia peeping through his windows on his wedding night declared that sex was not even an empty pleasure two years later? Assuming this was not her plan or belief, how might the second Mrs Spenser have reacted? Perhaps she was cross on both occasions.
And what about the first edition of The Faerie Queene? Doesn’t that tell a story of the need to control and channel sexual desire, not to imagine that it can be obliterated easily and painlessly? As generations of critics have pointed out, the Red-Cross Knight simply does not understand that he might need to rein in his desires or he will end up in bed with Duessa, as well as the Madonna. Sex and religion go hand-in-hand: few of us can renounce sexuality so we need to get married, a central Christian message which, as you all know, came to the fore after the Reformation and the abolition of the separate status of the religious as those who were holy enough to renounce the pleasures of the flesh. Hence the allegory moves from religion itself to the need to order and control the body, temperance and chastity, which, Spenser implies, have to be understood before the true Christian is ready to explore the mysteries of the faith. Was Spenser really retracting one of the central intellectual planks of his whole career in publishing the Hymnes, the recognition that what you possess, i.e., a body, needs to imagined, ordered, channelled, and celebrated, not dismissed?
I think we should be cautious and we need to debate all these issues further, thinking about the meaning and significance of the Hymnes and their place in Spenser’s career. At present it is too easy to join one camp or the other. Critics seem to imagine that you are either for Platonism or against it, which does not seem right to me. Spenser was clearly interested in Platonic ideas and images, and, perhaps, thought, even though the Letter to Raleigh following The Faerie Queene seems to argue that Xenophon was the more important ancient Greek thinker. The Hymnes are informed by Platonic ideas, but how might we read them and if they really provide the key to Spenser’s thinking, how exactly do they do this?
I’ll conclude with a few pointers. The problem with the Hymnes, I think, is that they are made to bear too heavy an interpretative burden: critics, I sometimes feel, explain the context and then make the Hymnes fit it, reading the poems as they want them to be read not as they might really be, a familiar problem when literature has to stand for far too much. (Is Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan, actually as good a poet as Yeats? In all honesty, is Infinite Jest one of the top one hundred English language novels of all time?). As a result they are either celebrated or dismissed and we need to find some way of including them in the Spenser canon which understands what they are. If they are to be read as testimonies of faith then we probably need to acknowledge that they stand as a watershed in Spenser’s writing rather than a continuity and so cannot easily be used to decipher his earlier work (how can we relate them to The Shepheardes Calender, for example?). If not, then we probably need to read them in relation to Spenser’s other poetry with its nuances, paradoxes, surprising changes and unsettling nature, which makes them seem really quite different to how they are often read: do we really finish them believing that we should renounce the world, its dangers and pleasures? I haven’t had time to explore this in the lecture but it is also possible that we need to think about whether they were written as part of a plan to secure patronage and perhaps escape Ireland for a few months, as I argued in my biography. But, however we decide that they should be understood we ought to open up a debate between admirers and detractors, Neo-Platonists and sceptics, Spenser-career analysts and historicists who read for context. My words will surely come back to haunt me but it is time for some more sustained critical debate.
48.2.1
Comments
You must log in to comment.