Petrarch is everywhere in Spenser, though a cursory glance would suggest that he is present largely to be amended by his successor. Amoretti, appearing in 1595 at the peak of the vogue for English sonnet sequences in the mode of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, can be read as a genial rebuke to the Petrarchan valorisation of chastity over companionate marriage. The Faerie Queene critiques Petrarchan iconography in the False Florimell and the image of Amoret’s tortured heart on its silver dish, and Lauren Silberman has even suggested that we should see in the insalubrious Busirane Spenser’s representation of ‘the Petrarchan poet’.[1] In a thoughtful recent article, alert to Spenser’s attraction to Petrarch’s works, Patrick Cheney nonetheless suggests that ‘we may classify Spenser’s career as counter-Petrarchan.’[2] The signals from Spenser himself, however, are not entirely clear. The virtuous Britomart paraphrases Canzoniere 189 to bewail her love for Artegall (II. iv. 8-10), and Spenser, likewise, was given to paraphrasing and translating Petrarch throughout his career, and in contexts which do not necessarily seem to offer the texts for the reader’s disapproval. The schoolboy who rendered a collection of ultimately Petrarchan texts into English for Jan van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings in 1569 might have had little say as to the material upon which he worked; but presumably he made a deliberate choice to revisit this material in 1591 for the Complaints, and the result is a sustained engagement with a Petrarch at some remove from the love poet of snowy maidens and Cupid’s masques.

Spenser’s contemporaries were typically quite direct about their literary relationship with Petrarch, invoking his name freely, for good or ill.[3] Spenser does not allow us to get our bearings so easily, and Osgood’s monumental concordance to his verse contains no entry for the Italian poet.[4] It is significant, however, that Petrarch does appear quite prominently in the materials published alongside Spenser’s poetry. The commentary on the Theatre for Worldlings; the notes accompanying The Shepheardes Calendar; one of Walter Ralegh’s dedicatory verses on The Faerie Queene, and the title of one of the works in Complaints, all allude to Petrarch by name. Gérard Genette claimed that ‘the main issue for paratexts is not to “look nice” around the text but rather to ensure for the text a destiny consistent with the author’s purpose.’[5]  This may sound like a rash claim, when looking nice was clearly part of the reason that, for instance, Ralegh’s name is so prominent in The Faerie Queene; but as William Oram has noted in the introduction to a collection of essays on Spenser’s paratexts, he was an author much concerned with the reception of his works, and he used paratextual material to ensure they would be read correctly.[6] These paratextual references to Petrarch may not all be Spenser’s own, but they suggest a literary conversation in which he certainly took part. They gesture towards a Petrarchan tradition which is various and far-reaching, and responsive to the changing uses of Petrarch across the vernaculars of Europe, to which Spenser and his circle were demonstrably alert.

I

The elusive E.K., regardless of his true identity and intent, does not come down to us as the most subtle of commentators; however, despite his shortcomings in other respects, he presents in his notes to The Shepheardes Calendar a remarkably wide-ranging overview of Petrarchism as it plays out in early-modern writing. He acknowledges the most familiar aspect, which is the literary tradition of Petrarchan love, modelled on the lines of Petrarch’s unrequited desire for the beautiful and inaccessible Laura. In his commentary on ‘Aprill’, Colin’s beloved Rosalind is compared with ‘Lauretta, the divine Petrarches Goddesse’.[7] The poem is replete with the motifs derived from the Canzoniere, which were subsequently reproduced across the European vernaculars: Cupid’s arrow, which was once fired from the dark brows of Laura, has now struck Colin and ‘[h]im Love hath wounded with a deadly dart’ (l. 22). Similarly, the oxymoronic figure of Petrarch’s dolce nemica, the sweet enemy, is embodied here in Rosalind; ‘his friend is changed for a frenne’ [stranger, foe] (l. 29). The tradition of amatory Petrarchism in English drew heavily on only a limited number of sonnets from the Canzoniere, which were not representative of the range of the sequence as a whole, but which provided generations of writers with a compelling structure of paradox and opposition, and with a series of famous images – the icy fire, the rudderless ship, the mistress with hair like golden wire.[8] This vocabulary became so habitual that it could be easily satirized, as with the False Florimell; equally, it could be pressed into double service and made to carry multiple meanings, allowing the poet space to petition for the positions at court, or to comment discreetly on the issues of the day, as in this instance with the Alençon marriage.[9]

It is not surprising that E.K. fails to comment on the potential of Petrarchan poetry to conceal further meaning for the informed reader. It is interesting, however, to see the other aspects of early-modern Petrarchism on which he touches. In the ‘Epistle to Gabriel Harvey’ which prefaces the text, he discusses the pastoral eclogue, identifying this low mode (‘base for the matter, and homely for the manner’) as a place for the youthful poet to try his wings.[10] The reference is ostensibly to Virgil, whose progression from pastoral to epic was paradigmatic. But Petrarch is also mentioned as another poet who wrote pastorals early in his career, alongside several other moderns: Mantuan, Boccaccio, Marot, and Sannazaro. Critics have often noted that Mantuan, like Petrarch, used the pastoral form as a vehicle for satire, and that Spenser follows in their footsteps. E.K.’s list, however, hints at something more than that.

All of the modern poets mentioned were associated with radical Protestantism. Marot had spent part of the 1540s in exile in Calvin’s Geneva; the others were co-opted after their deaths for a library of proto-Protestant luminaries. François Hotman’s Brutish Thunderbolt … of Pope Sixtus the Fift, against Henrie of Navarre (1586) draws on their authority in a typical manner: ‘Petrarcha, Mantuan, Sannazarius, and many mo Italians call Rome the shop of all wickedness, Babylon, Sodom, the schoole of errors, the temple of heresies, a shamelesse strumpet.’[11] The same year, in London, John Wolfe printed François Perrot’s Aviso Piacevole, another work intended to intervene in the French Wars of Religion on the part of the Protestant Henry of Navarre.[12] Perrot’s line-up of anti-papal authorities is Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Dante, whose work he anthologises (and supplements) in the volume. Even among these great names, Petrarch was given particular prominence: for instance, although Hotman makes reference to a range of writers in the quotation above, the words he quotes are all by Petrarch.  The reference is to the so-called Babylon Sonnets, Canzoniere 136–138, which, along with Petrarch’s Liber sine nomine and Canzoniere 114, ‘De l’empia Babilonia’, circulated widely in early-modern Europe. They have become less visible over time, but by the late sixteenth century they were a commonplace of anti-Catholic writing, appended to sermons, reproduced in histories, quoted in sample conversations in text-books for English learners of Italian, and translated and imitated in printed and manuscript literary compilations.[13] Protestant Petrarchism was a model available to Spenser, as E.K. signals quietly here, and the ferocity of that tradition, as well as its focus on Rome, casts the more ambivalent and domestic nature of Spenser’s religious satire into relief.

A final reference by E.K. alludes to yet another current in Petrarchan imitation. In the notes to ‘October’, he includes a long passage about the service that poets render to their patrons, and illustrates his point by recalling the story of Alexander’s tears at the grave of Achilles, where he sighs over the hero’s good fortune in being celebrated by a poet capable of making him immortal. The story is in Cicero, but ‘is of Petrarch no lesse worthely sette forth in a sonnet’.[14] He then cites the opening lines of Canzoniere 187, ‘Giunto Alessandro a la famosa tomba’ [When Alexander came to the famous tomb]. The October eclogue introduces the idea of Elizabeth as divine source of inspiration, elevating the rustic poet to the epic strain: in that respect, as Thomas Cain notes, it ‘leads directly to the first lines of The Faerie Queene’.[15] E.K.’s reference enriches that connection in more ways than one. The Canzoniere was much concerned with the power of poetry to celebrate and memorialise, as is The Faerie Queene; but Petrarchism was also given to contemplating the tomb. Among the paratextual materials framing Spenser’s great epic romance, we find also another sonnet conflating Petrarch, issues of poetic commemoration, and the image of the grave. This transpires to be less of a coincidence than a sustained engagement among Spenser and his earliest readers with these interconnected themes as they played out on an international stage. Ideas of tombs, ruins, commemoration and power – both poetic and political – are examined repeatedly in Spenser and his paratexts, and the vocabulary for those examinations is consistently Petrarchan. 

II

‘Methought I saw the grave, where Laura lay’, the first of Walter Ralegh’s two commendatory verses on The Faerie Queene, is perhaps the most famous of Spenser’s Petrarchan paratexts. In the 1590 edition it appears directly after Spenser’s letter to Ralegh ‘expounding his whole intention’ for the work, and seems as though it might be seen to take part in that illuminating conversation; nonetheless, it remains in many ways an opaque piece of writing. On the surface, with its choice of the sonnet form, and its direct invocation of ‘the soule of Petrarke’, its frame of reference is very clear. It has certainly found some eager readers: Ralegh’s revitalisation of the medieval dream vision tradition, his rich visual devices, and even his influence on Milton’s sonnet on the death of his wife, ‘Methought I saw my late espousèd saint’, have all been noted and praised.[16] C. Q. Drummond, on the other hand, has read it, without particular enthusiasm, as a poem about poetic rivalry. ‘As far as I can see, the whole device with all its personifications, its bleeding stones, groaning ghosts, and weeping and cursing poets, reduces to the literal statement that Spenser writes better love poetry than Petrarch and better epic than Homer.’[17] Drummond does not mention that it is an uneven sort of comparison, or that in fact Homer only gets two lines at the end: it is the encounter with Petrarch which occupies the body of the text.

It is true that there was by 1590 an established tradition of poetic rivalry with Petrarch the singer of love songs, a rivalry which was often registered by writers themselves, or noted in the supportive poems provided by their friends; modified and transformed, it even underlies the Rival Poet poems in Shakespeare. Ruth Hughey speculated that Ralegh’s sonnet may have been modelled on poem 93 in the Arundel Harington Manuscript: ‘With Petrarke to compare theare may no wight’.[18] The same sonnet appears in Tottel’s Miscellany as ‘That petrarch cannot be passed but notwithstanding that Lawra is far surpassed’. The title gives the argument away: no poet can be as good as Petrarch, but there is indeed a lady more beautiful than Laura. This, or other poems like it, may have been on Ralegh’s mind, but a more recent thread in Spenser criticism has tended to read the sonnet instead as the index to Ralegh’s relationship with Spenser, both as patron and interpreter. This reading absorbs issues of rivalry and of sources, but it continues to assume that the conventions of Petrarchan love underlie the poem. William Oram contends that the praise of Spenser is purely an occasion for Ralegh’s verse, which is much more directly concerned with ‘Ralegh’s continuing courtship of his royal mistress.’[19] For Louis Montrose, in using this poem to forge an explicit connection between The Faerie Queene and Petrarch, Ralegh misreads it completely, demonstrating that he ‘does not envision [it] as an exemplary heroic poem but as the verbal courtship of an exalted female’; and this misreading by Ralegh erroneously attempts to align Spenser’s motives with his own in the Cynthia poems.[20] Ty Buckman also considers Ralegh to have misinterpreted the text he celebrates, again by reading it through the lens of the ‘Petrarchan matter of … Ocean’s Love to Cynthia, or its Spenserian analogue in Timias and Belphoebe’; and he draws particular attention to one curious quality of the poem: ‘The sonnet is dominated by loss: an odd tone for a commendatory verse, it also reverses the traditional ascription to the Renaissance poet of the power to bestow immortality.’[21] In each of these cases, the ghost of Petrarch who appears in the text is associated with the poetics of courtship; but it might be worth considering whether it was in fact Petrarch’s love poetry which Ralegh had in mind in the first place. Although it might not resolve the puzzle of Spenser and Ralegh’s relationship, the poem becomes less mysterious, less oddly uncomplimentary to Spenser, if we consider it in the context of Petrarch’s other great vernacular work, the Trionfi, or Triumphs.

For Ralegh’s reader in 1590, Petrarch’s Triumphs would have been as familiar as his sonnets. Initially, to judge by the numbers of extant manuscripts, the Triumphs were more popular than the Canzoniere; by the time Ralegh was writing, there were also numerous printed editions which presented them either bound together, or as a set in two matching volumes.[22] They had been widely translated, often in association with a royal court: Lord Morley’s version of the poems for Henry VIII (c. 1527) was a response to a still earlier translation produced for François I^er – one of three courtly French versions extant by 1538.[23] Further translations, including those by Elizabeth I and Mary Sidney, continued to circulate in English throughout the period. Perhaps even more important in terms of their recognisability, the subject proved to be an attractive one for artists – the poems have a rich tradition of illustration in both manuscript and print, and the images also moved beyond the page. They were popular as a subject for tapestry, including two sets displayed at Hampton Court from the 1520s; as miniatures, paintings, birth trays, marriage chests, majolica ware, and all the paraphernalia of domestic life in a well-appointed early-modern household.[24]

In shaping his poem, Petrarch took the concept of a Roman martial triumph – the victorious emperor in procession with supporters and a train of captives – and moralised it for a renaissance readership. Rather than describing a military victory, the Triumphs map the journey of the soul through a succession of personal conflicts. The speaker of the first poem, the ‘Triumph of Love’, is overcome by Cupid, and joins the long line of famous lovers marching in his chains; he watches in the next poem as Love is conquered by Chastity, who is embodied by Laura, and in the next, as Chastity, in turn, succumbs to Death. The ‘Triumph of Fame’ argues that poetry can reclaim victims from Death, but then Time conquers Fame; and finally, under the ensign of the Crucifixion, Eternity is victorious over Time.

Like the Triumphs, Ralegh’s poem takes the form of a dream vision; similarly, the progressive movement of power in the Triumphs, from Love to his various rivals, is echoed in the transfer of power from Laura to Ralegh’s ‘Faery Queene’. The images of Ralegh’s sonnet are also rooted in the Triumphs tradition. The graces who leave Laura to attend the new victor can be seen in the ladies who flock around her chariot in the woodcuts and tapestries. The sinister figure of Oblivion, who ‘laid him downe on Laura’s herse’, is also Petrarchan. James Bednarz, in the most comprehensive treatment we have of the poem, notes that ‘Oblivion is a common allegorical figure that haunts late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English literature as the great challenger to the cult of Fame’.[25] This is so, but we might add that the idea of Oblivion as enemy to Fame derives directly from Petrarch’s ‘Triumph of Time’. In this poem, the narrator watches Time attack the forces of ‘queenly Fame’ and hears a voice lament ‘In questi umani, a dir proprio, ligustri, / di cieca oblivïon che ’scuri abissi!’ [What dark abyss of blind oblivion / Awaits these slight and tender human flowers].[26] It is the ‘Triumph of Time’ which also gives Ralegh his central conceit, that time – here, in the form of a newly-emerging protagonist – can defeat the much-vaunted ability of even a great poet to assure the immortality of his subjects. As Buckman argues, it does reverse the usual renaissance promise that the poet can create a monument more lasting than brass; but since in Petrarch’s telling Fame’s defeat is shortly dissolved in the promise of Eternity, the tribute to Spenser is not as backhanded as Buckman suggests. Depicting Elizabeth (and by extension, her poet) as seizing victory on the field of the Triumphs is a compliment which tempers worldly glory with piety. It is also a compliment which makes more sense when the Petrarchism of the poem is read through the lens of the Triumphs rather than the Canzoniere, because this is not in fact a poem of courtship. Because Ralegh is represented in The Faerie Queene by Timias, and because Timias is involved in a very Petrarchan wooing of Belphebe, it seems obvious to read it in those terms; but this is a poem about Gloriana.

The iconography of the Triumphs, with its Christian allegory presented in classical attire, and its imagery of chariots and processions, lent itself readily to early-modern royal display. Fame sounds her trumpet as she tramples death under her feet in the Joyous Entry of Henri II into Rouen in 1550; and similar effects were seen on festive occasions throughout Europe.[27] For Elizabeth I, the image of Laura in the Triumphs – both chaste and powerful – afforded the opportunity to suggest that a queen might also wield martial power: in an important article, Heather Campbell examines a series of representations of Elizabeth to demonstrate how she aligned herself with this aspect of Laura, and how her courtiers recognised and utilised the comparison. Among these texts, Campbell cites Ralegh’s sonnet: ‘an intriguing acknowledgment of Elizabeth’s identification with the Laura of the Triumphs.’[28] Campbell provides an illuminating reading of the series of Sieve portraits, in which Elizabeth poses with the emblem of Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin who miraculously proved her chastity by carrying a sieve full of water from the Tiber back to her temple, and she notes that Tuccia also appears in Laura’s company in the Triumphs. One might build on this point by relating it to the Temple of Vesta in Ralegh’s poem. This classical emblem of chastity is a fitting place for Laura to lie; but it is also a reference to the Roman antecedents of the whole triumph tradition. The classical temple now houses only ruins; its greatness moves to Troynovant. The passage of power from Laura to Elizabeth is not merely about love, or poetic ability; it is a translatio imperii.

III

This argument for the imperial dimension of Ralegh’s poem – and hence, for Ralegh’s reading of Spenser’s poem – does not rest on its relationship with the Triumphs alone. It seems likely that he was also responding to another prominent Petrarchan poem which in its turn would have emphasised the regal ambitions already seen in the Triumphs. On September 8^th,, 1533, in a chapel of the Convent of St Francis at Avignon, the young poet Maurice Scève staged his discovery of the tomb of Laura. His timing was not accidental: in the early autumn of that year, the French court was in residence in the city, pausing as it travelled south to Marseilles. The evidence accompanying Scève’s identification of Laura’s resting place was dubious, but its courtly audience eagerly endorsed it, and the king, François I^er, composed a poem to mark the occasion.

En petit lieu compris vous pouvez veoir
Ce, qui comprend beaucoup par renomonee
Plume, labeur, la langue, et le devoir
Furent vaincuz par l’aymant de l’aymee
O gentill’Ame, estant tant estimee
Qui te pourra louer, qu’en se taisant?
Car la parole est toujours reprime
Quand le sujet surmounte le disant.

[Contained in this small space you may see / that which embodies so much fame; / pen, labour, speech, and duty / were vanquished by the lover of the beloved. /O gentle soul, being so esteemed / Who can praise you, except by keeping silence? / Because the word is always surpassed / when the subject overwhelms what may be said.]

The story of the discovery of the tomb, and François’s epitaph on Laura, were quickly absorbed into the Petrarchan canon. By 1590, when we might presume Ralegh was reaching for his pen, it was circulating widely. At that point, there were at least thirteen editions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere which included among their prefatory materials the ‘Epitaffio del Re Francesco Primo, sopra la sepoltura di Madonna Laura’. This is perhaps unsurprising in the French editions, one of which (that produced by Jean de Tournes) was dedicated to Scève and celebrated his role in the identification of Laura’s grave; but it had also appeared in five Venetian  printings, and it would continue to be reprinted into the seventeenth century.[29] It was included in editions of Scève’s work, and can be found copied by hand into editions of Petrarch which did not feature it in print.[30] The poem does not usually appear in isolation: typically, it is framed by a prose account of the opening of the tomb and of the medal and sonnet found within, and by some of the following – the text of that sonnet, ‘Qui riposan quei caste’, now generally known as the ‘Tomb Sonnet’; an epigram by Giulio Camillo purporting to be in the voice of Laura, speaking from the grave; a sonnet by Benedetto del Varchi on the grave of Petrarch; and an epigram by Luigi Alamanni, a Petrarchan poet and Florentine in exile at the French court. These were only part of a much larger French literature commemorating the discovery; and significantly, these texts tended to insist on a connection between Petrarch and the king.[31] Both men conveniently had the same name, so François could readily be presented as a successor to Francesco. Poor Scève soon dropped from the record: as Olivier Millet has argued, it rapidly became a story solely about the royal intervention in the history of Petrarch and Laura.[32]

There was no shortage of texts associating Laura with the tomb. A significant number of poems in the Canzoniere are set after her death; in one, number 333, which Patrick Cheney has suggested as a source for Ralegh’s sonnet, Petrarch mentions her grave: ‘Go, sorrowing rhymes, to the hard stone that hides in earth my dear treasure’.[33] Ralegh would not have had to seek far to find a model for a poem about her death alone. However, François’s poem offers a set of more specific parallels with ‘Methought I saw the grave.’ Both works begin with the tomb, visited by a literary tourist whose presence is announced in the title (‘the epitaph of the King François I upon the grave of Madonna Laura’) or made explicit in the text (Ralegh’s speaker is ‘passing by that way”). Both tombs contain the dust of ‘living fame’ or ‘renomonee’, and the insubstantial soul (‘gentill’Ame’) of Laura is paralleled by the ‘soul of Petrarke’. Perhaps even more significant in respect of Ralegh’s thinking, however, are the political claims encoded into the epitaph. François was an ardent Petrarchist, both in terms of his own writing and in respect of the translations he encouraged, but in 1533 he was not travelling to gratify his literary tastes. He was on his way to Marseilles for the wedding of his son, the future Henri II, to Catherine de Medici of Florence – a marriage which would be celebrated by Pope Clement VII, another Medici. The wedding contract stipulated the pope’s support in the French struggle to regain the duchies of Genoa and Milan, so territorial expansion was on François’s mind. The discovery of the tomb made a claim for a shared French and Florentine ownership of Petrarch’s greatness, appropriate in the light of the forthcoming marriage, but the language of the epitaph suggests something more than a benign interest in Petrarch’s symbolic power.

It is a commonplace of recent criticism that a suitably lofty vernacular was considered a prerequisite for national greatness. Richard Helgerson put his finger on the most telling phrase when he quoted the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija’s declaration in 1492 that ‘language has always been the companion of empire’, but the same sentiment can be found in manifestos on poetry and in book dedications across the nations of Europe.[34] Just as François’s appropriation of Petrarch was not merely an expression of literary admiration, so too the phrasing of his poem was loaded with significance. ‘[P]en, labour, speech, and duty’ is a recipe for the imperially ambitious; in particular, ‘la langue’, which I have translated as ‘speech’, also stands for the national language. The enrichment of French via the imitation of Petrarch would be formalised by Joachim du Bellay in the Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse in 1549, where he expressed his sense that the time was soon coming when France would ‘take the reins of the monarchy [of an empire], and that our language … will grow taller and greater until she can equal that of Greece and Rome’; that expansion of language would come about by the imitation of models, prominent among whom was Petrarch.[35] But du Bellay’s theory was already being played out in the 1530s: the flurry of verses about Laura’s tomb, mentioned above, were accompanied by larger-scale Petrarchan projects, like Marot’s translation of Canzoniere 323 in his ‘Chant des Visions’ (1534), in turn the source for Spenser’s work in the Theatre for Worldlings. There was another outbreak of Petrarch translations around the succession of Henri II in 1547, which continued to insist upon the French background of the texts (one edition of translations from the Canzoniere was published as Laure d’Avignon), and which continued the royal association. The 1533 verse on Laura’s grave was a focus for all of this French national and imperial ambition, channelled through the person of the king.

Ralegh’s poem deftly routs François and his claims for French greatness by depicting Laura’s grave as stranded in a forgotten past. There is no reason to think that his intentions were particularly anti-French: there is nothing in his allegorical dreamscape that suggests an interest in anything other than the pre-eminence of England. However, François’s epitaph, read in tandem with the Triumphs, may have helped tighten Ralegh’s focus on the intertwined concepts of poetic and national rivalry which are his subject. His choice of this particular cluster of Petrarchan sources – when so many other versions of Petrarch were available to him – makes clear that he was not misreading The Faerie Queene as a work about courtship. The chariots of the Triumphs and the shadows of the French court lurking in his hinterland show that Ralegh knew he was reading a poem about the fortunes of a nation. As to what this particular paratext might do, from Spenser’s point of view, to ensure his own poem was read correctly, it might be fairest to say that it works to maintain the balance. The vocabulary of Petrarchan love, and its applications among those seeking royal favour, are certainly present in The Faerie Queene, but it was more than a bid for patronage couched in the language of romance. In highlighting aspects of the Petrarchan tradition concerned with issues of empire and language, ‘Methought I saw the grave’ also emphasises that strain in Spenser’s poem, and reminds us, moreover, that Spenser saw these issues too through the lens of his Petrarchism.

IV

The Petrarchan sources of the Theatre for Worldings (1569) and the Complaints (1591) are among the most carefully documented in Spenser studies. The transmission of the Theatre’s poetic texts from Canzoniere 323, through Marot’s Chant des visions and du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome and Songe, has been painstakingly traced; the additions by Jan van der Noot noted; the journey from Italian to French to Flemish to English accounted for; the changes and elaborations in the Complaints tabulated and analysed.[36] The subtexts, as well as the sources, have been the subject of erudite discussion. The Petrarchan paratexts which are the focus of this study are, by comparison with the poems of these two collections, very slight, but are nonetheless worth some consideration.

Jan van der Noot provided a commentary to elucidate his intentions for the Theatre. The first mention he makes of Petrarch is a prose account of the visions of destruction in Canzoniere 323, which form the basis of the ‘Epigrams’ translated by Spenser on sigs. B1^v–B6^v.[37] The second reference is more interesting, if not entirely surprising in the context of a religious exile seeking shelter in Protestant England (even if he converted to Catholicism within a couple of years). Van der Noot took up the trope of Petrarch as proto-Protestant opponent to Rome, naming him among the usual suspects (Dante, Wycliffe, Savonarola, and so on) to be found in any number of polemical texts, from Catalogus Testium Veritatis (1562) to Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (from the 1570 edition onwards): ‘All whiche, the Papistes for the moste parte haue condemned for heretikes.’[38] Spenser, in other words, knew about the controversial, Protestant aspect of popular Petrarchism from the start of his career. It is even possible that his revision and expansion of the translations in the Theatre for Complaints were prompted by the proliferation of sonnet collections circulating on that theme. Bernard Garter’s short anti-papal sequence about the Donation of Constantine had been in print for over a decade, and may have been known to him.[39] More intriguing is a work like Perrot’s Aviso Piacevole, mentioned above. Perrot reproduced Petrarch’s Babylon Sonnets, but he also added to them, creating new (distinctly Protestant) sonnets around single lines of Petrarch’s verse. This work, originating in Italy, produced by a Frenchman, and printed in London, might well have reminded Spenser of the international nature of the Theatre; and since John Wolfe printed both Aviso Piacevole, and, jobbing for William Ponsonby, the 1590 Faerie Queene, it seems likely Spenser would have encountered the text. Even if he missed that volume, there were several other English translations of similar collections available.[40] What is interesting is how he resisted their example. 

In discussions of Spenser’s engagement with Petrarch, the essential incompatibility of their Protestant and Catholic worldviews has often been assumed, and in respect of a narrow definition of English Petrarchism, this is entirely justified.[41] However, as we have seen, Petrarch was not necessarily read by Spenser as reliably Catholic; and Spenser himself failed to take up the opportunity to assert a violently Protestant line in those Petrarchan texts where it might have been expected. It is the commentary rather than the poems of the Theatre which engage in controversy, and despite the extensive additions made by Spenser in 1591, neither the poems which originated in the Theatre, nor the poems which share their source and themes (‘The Ruines of Time’; ‘Ruines of Rome’; ‘Visions of the Worlds Vanitie’) demonstrate anything of the sectarian vitriol which characterised that sub-genre of Petrarchism in the period.  Spenser’s presentation of Rome, for instance, undercuts the admiration and regret which Petrarch and du Bellay felt for that city’s antique greatness with a Protestant ambivalence: the invocation in the Envoy of the Huguenot poet Salluste du Bartas acknowledges a Protestant poetic at odds with the translation which Spenser has just produced, which might be seen to render the text less stable. However, Spenser’s work does not dismiss the losses of the past, and his allegorical method allows imaginative sympathy to coexist with mental reservation. This is something very different from the approach of those readers who saw Petrarch as a proto-Protestant authority, and who used the Babylon Sonnets to sanction a more polemical approach. In around 1547 John Harington the Elder translated two of those poems, carrying over into English the lurid language and imagery of the originals (‘Vengaunce must fall on thee, thow filthie whore / Of Babilon’); but he added his own gloss to make the identification with the Catholic Church very clear: ‘Thow Pope, I meane, head of hypocrasye, /Thow and thie churche, unsaciat of desire…’.[42] A century of English imitations followed in this vein, but Spenser was never so explicit. Scholarly readings of Spenser have been moving away from a monolithic sense of his militant Protestantism, and here we have more evidence of a nuanced approach to the practice of faith.[43] Spenser’s refusal to follow a reading offered in two of the paratexts which accompanied his publications is highly suggestive of a religious position that is less than radical.

The paratexts considered in this essay are multi-faceted, and do not lend themselves to a comprehensive conclusion. If anything, they argue for the irreducibility of Petrarch in early-modern writing. Petrarch’s own works encompassed a multitude; more significantly for Spenser, Petrarchan translation and imitation was still more various. Petrarch’s poetry was remade to glorify national languages, and nations; its energies were harnessed to fight religious battles; it spoke of love, in ways that were not always about love at all. It was constantly moving, its meanings inflected as it passed through the hands, not only of poets and artists, but statesmen. It was relentlessly international. I began by noting that Osgood’s concordance contains no entry for Petrarch, but there is one mention which might have merited inclusion because it belongs to the title of a poem – not quite text, by Osgood’s definition, but perhaps not quite paratext either. In the revision of the Theatre poems for the Complaints, a title was added, which (at last) mentioned Petrarch’s name: ‘The Visions of Petrarch: formerly translated’. It may have been the addition of an editor tidying up the text for printing, but if it was Spenser, he was finally giving credit where it was due: English national ambition acknowledging its debt to a European master.

                                                                                                Deirdre Serjeantson

                                                                        Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge

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