Articles

Bahr, Stephanie. ‘“Ne spared they to strip her naked all”: Reading, Rape, and Reformation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’. Studies in Philology 117: 2 (2020), pp. 285-312.

In book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Archimago and Duessa accuse the Redcross Knight of rape. Although both Spenser and his critics have long treated their accusation as false, this essay argues that it has three layers of truth: Duessa’s stripping in book 1 is a literal sexual assault; it is a metaphorical rape; and, due to the accusation’s use of metaphor and ellipsis, it mirrors Spenser’s own narration with surprising accuracy. This third sense of the accusation’s truth illustrates the representational challenges of rape and the fissures between literal and figurative meanings—hermeneutic concerns violently at issue in the Reformation. Duessa’s stripping and dismissed rape accusation illuminate the complex interrelation of three things: shifting early modern attitudes toward rape, the Protestant turn to inwardness both hermeneutically and soteriologically, and the interpretive and moral problems of allegory after the Reformation. Thus, the disturbingly gendered interpretive violence of Faerie Queene reflects not only the grim misogyny of the sixteenth century but also a broader hermeneutic and epistemological crisis.

Borris, Kenneth. ‘Spenser’s Pantheon and Lucian’s: Elizabeth, Gloriana and The Faerie Queene’s Protocols of Encomium. English Literary Renaissance 50: 3 (2020), pp. 359-90.

Spenser and his friend Gabriel Harvey enjoyed reading Lucian, and at that time this ancient writer’s two dialogues celebrating Panthea were prominent exemplars of encomium for an exalted woman. Although the name Panthea also appears in The Faerie Queene, explicitly linked with Cleopolis and Gloriana, its Lucianic implications there have been hitherto unnoticed. Spenser thereby strategically invites comparison of his epic’s panegyrical enterprise with Lucian’s in those dialogues, as well as with their assessments of appropriate encomiastic expression that avoids mere flattery. Hence The Faerie Queene incorporates means of evaluating its own celebratory project, limits its praise of Elizabeth I, and ensures that its homage to her is definitively provisional. This new perspective on Spenser’s major text clarifies the significance of its fundamental conceit, Elizabeth’s idealization as Gloriana, illuminates the distinction between these two queens, and confirms the advisory and critical functions of Spenserian encomium. So as to ensure that England’s Queen remains open to instructive critique and that his own depiction of faery’s indicates a far higher standard, the poet significantly distances his actual Queen from her “true glorious type” manifested in Gloriana (I.pr.4). [K.B.]

Buffey, Emily. ‘Use Your Allusion: Echoes of Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, and Kyd in an Early Jacobean Poem’. Studies in Philology 117: 2 (2020), pp. 337-64.

This article offers a critical reassessment of a much-neglected early Jacobean poem: Thomas Andrewe’s The Unmasking of a Feminine Machiavel, a 904-line dream vision poem published in December 1604 at the end of King James I’s first full year in power. The poem is modeled on a number of earlier works, including Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, John Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight, and the Mirror for Magistrates, and offers what scholars have tended to see as an autobiographical account of Andrewe’s youth and misfortunes in love, as well as the part he played in the Battle of Newport (July 2, 1600). Though some of The Unmasking‘s intertextual features have been acknowledged before, this article seeks to fill a void in contemporary scholarship by addressing several other literary sources for Andrewe’s poem and considering some of their more specific, political resonances. In so doing, this article shows that Andrewe echoes a number of contemporary authors—from Michael Drayton and Edmund Spenser to William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd—to articulate wider tensions and anxieties over the recent peace settlement with Spain. By providing new insight into the politics behind Andrewe’s appropriation of these authors, this article also aims to bring Thomas Andrewe himself into sharper focus, using his relationship to key playwrights and poets of the period (in particular, the “Jacobean Spenserians”) in order to illustrate the close textual and thematic connections between dramatic and nondramatic materials and between the canon’s major and minor authors and to argue for the poem’s status as topical allegory published under the guise of personal complaint.

Cheney, Evan. “Thou hast a free passeporte”: Poetic Personation and Literary Patronage in Spenser’s Prosopopoia, Or Mother Hubberds Tale and The Shepheardes Calender’. Studies in Philology 118: 3 (2021), pp. 538-64.

The forged passports in Prosopopoia, Or Mother Hubberds Tale and the “free passe-porte” in The Shepheardes Calender reveal Edmund Spenser’s recurring interest in passport documents. This article examines how authorities in early modern England used passports to control the movement, poverty, labor, property, and allegiance of subjects, despite widespread abuse by rogues. I argue that, by connecting the ambivalent license of passport documents with the ethical tensions of personation, or imitation, Spenser creates a “device” for negotiating the traditional pressures of patronage, on the one hand, and authorship, on the other. The Shepheardes Calender’s “free passport” imitates not only Geoffrey Chaucer’s envoi to Troilus and Criseyde but also the “franke pasporte” from Thomas Drant’s 1567 translation of Horace’s Epistles. Spenser’s “free passeporte,” therefore, should not be read as inherently deceitful and roguish but as a legitimate and time- honored literary strategy for achieving poetic renown.

Curran, John. ‘Despaire and Briton Moniments: Moments of Protestant Clarity in The Faerie Queene’. Reformation 25:2 (2020), pp. 175-191.

Two moments in The Faerie Queene, the Redcrosse Knight’s rescue from suicide in the cave of Despaire and Arthur’s rapture at reading the truncated chronicle of the Britons, are strangely similar. In each case, the hermeneutic openness that seems to be developing is halted and closed in favor of a unified, simplified, syllogistic certitude. Though both Despaire’s speeches and Briton Moniments are ripe for interrogation, Redcrosse is saved by the Practical Syllogism, and Arthur reacts with an outpouring of patriotic fervor. With some matters, proliferation of thought and feeling though ordinarily salutary must be suspended. Protestantism’s simplifying strain did make an impression on Spenser. Returning to known truths of special and general providence is periodically necessary for maintaining an overall openness to ambiguity, intricacy, and dialogue. With a focus on these parallel episodes, this discussion both contributes to our understanding of The Faerie Queene’s hermeneutic fluidity by looking closely at exceptions in it, and thereby proposes how a major current of Protestant thought inflects Spenserian poetics.

Hadfield, Andrew. ‘Mardi and Spenser’s Wandering Allegory’. Textual Practice 34:7 (2020), pp. 1207-1225.

In this essay I want to make the case that Edmund Spenser had a crucial impact on Melville’s career, one that has been acknowledged – most significantly by Carole Moses – but never fully developed. Melville read, re-read and thought about Spenser over a number of years as the surviving copies of his work attest with their extensive markings. Like his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose mother adapted Spenser for children and who named his daughter, Una, after the heroine of Book I of The Faerie Queene, Melville turned to Spenser when he needed to think about allegory and romance. Furthermore, as Hershel Baker points out in his biography when Melville set down to write Mardi, he was acutely conscious of the change in his status, and he now had proper time to assemble his sources and make use of them. Accordingly he employed Spenser to help him make the work he had completed in Typee and Omoo more literary. In many ways, Melville is too much in thrall to Spenser and fails to escape from his influence, an influence filtered through the image of Spenser as the gothic poet of dreams, ruined castles, dark sexuality, and a landscape hovering between good and evil, beauty and barely hidden ugliness, motifs which are translated to the wandering islands in the south seas. Mardi is, in Bloomian terms, a weak reading that had to be made for the strong misreading which established the writer’s identity to follow. Moby Dick has a number of Spenserian references and motifs, but it is not a Spenserian work like its predecessor. In this essay, I want to make the case that the elaborate gothic allegories and complex ornate style of Melville’s mature work could only have developed after he worked out how he was to make use of the literary canon he devoured on his sea voyages. Moby Dick may be only intermittently Spenserian in style and substance but it was only possible because of the allegorically Spenserian Mardi, which paved the way for Melville’s mature work.

Hillier, Russell M. ‘The Flitting Phantoms of Iniquity’: A Spenserian Source for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Fancy’s Show Box: A Morality’ in the Ninth Canto of Book Two of The Faerie Queene’. Notes & Queries. Published online August 2021.

The note surveys the substantial debt to Spenser throughout Hawthorne’s fiction before exploring Hawthorne’s dependence on the Elizabethan allegorist for his sketch, “Fancy’s Show Box: A Morality.” Hawthorne’s choice of naming Mr. Smith’s friend Edward Spencer is a playful clue to Spenserian artistry, and specifically to the influence of the three figures dwelling in the “stately turret” of Alma’s House of Temperance, Phantastes, Philosophy or Judgment, and Eumnestes or Good-Memory, upon Hawthorne’s allegorical triad. Fancy with her picture-box resembles Phantastes in his chamber of whirling visions, Memory with her vast volume mirrors Eumnestes with his parchment rolls and scrolls, and pricking Conscience plays the same corrective role as Philosophy or Judgment with his meditated moral examples amassed from human knowledge and experience. Hawthorne’s concluding moral warns against the perils of intemperate Fancy in terms that evoke the unstable, flitting phantoms of Phantastes’s wild chamber. In both Hawthorne’s sketch and Spenser’s poem, the wanton fantasies of the imagination, without the guidance of philosophical judgment and conscience, can become unrestrained, false, deceptive, and potentially harmful.

Lockey, Brian C. ‘Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser on Transnational Governance and the Future of Christendom’. Renaissance Quarterly 74: 2 (2021), pp. 369-411.

This article considers the writings of Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser within the context of European religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, amid the perceived Ottoman threat to Christendom. In their fictional works, these authors imagine an overarching authority that might replace the traditional papal power of oversight and deposing in order to regulate temporal sovereigns and foster a unity of Christian princes within Europe. Even as they can be read as reimagining Christendom, their fictional works reflect what Charles Taylor has called the “disenchantment” of sacred spaces within his philosophical history of the emergence of secularity within European cultures.

Loney, Emily L. ‘Preposterous Glossing: Queer Editing and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’. The Sixteenth Century Journal 51: 4 (2020), pp. 1033-58.

This article examines the paratexts of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) to discuss the queer potential of textual editing in early modern literary culture. The verse of The Shepheardes Calender is framed by an elaborate set of glosses, compiled by an editor called “E. K.” As an anti-normative editorial presence, E. K. reframes the meaning of the text and exposes the impossibility of a stable, controlled, and controllable editorial voice. Although the content of The Shepheardes Calender is legibly homoerotic, this article argues that the Calender positions editing itself as queer and “preposterous,” a term suggesting spatiotemporal disorder and unruly sexuality and homoeroticism. The Shepheardes Calender ultimately provides a model for the intersection between book history and sexuality studies, as the article positions books and their making as a framework through which to explore early modern homoerotic representations, anti-normative possibilities, and imaginings of other ways of being in the world.

Méndez, Sigmund. ‘The Faerie Queene’s Three Sages and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’. Notes & Queries 67: 2 (2020), pp. 214-17.

The article proposes that for the allegorical representation of the three sages that inhabit the Turret of the brain in the Castle of Alma (2.9.47 ff.), Spenser very probably relied on an analogous passage in Francesco Colonna’s enigmatic work Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, in which three women embody the inward wits according to the Galenic tradition. A comparative analysis of specific similarities between both texts allows us to presume that Colonna’s original figuration served as model for the personifications in The Faerie Queene. This evidence substantiates the hypothesis already suggested but not entirely proven that Spenser must have used Colonna’s romance, and specifically the Italian original in its first or second edition (and not the English version). Likewise, other lines from Piers Plowman and Folengo’s Baldo are shown as likely sources for the figure of Phantases that also illustrate the rich intertextuality of Spenserian allegories.

Packard, Bethany. ‘The Game Prisoner’s Base in Early Modern English Literature’. Notes & Queries. Published online February 2021.

The team capturing game prisoner’s base was well known in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. It appears across literary genres and is referenced by early modern writers including Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, and William Shakespeare. Explanatory notes for these references frequently generalize the game’s rules and leave out its most characteristic feature: each player chases a single member of the opposing team while themselves being chased by a different opponent. Spenser depicts this aspect of the game multiple times in The Faerie Queene, and notes on his uses of prisoner’s base address it. This approach should be followed more widely. Recognition of players as both pursuer and pursued is consistently productive for understanding and interpreting the passages and plots in which the game appears, even when references do not directly describe this fundamental rule.

Peterson, Brice. ‘“Pricking on the plaine”: Romance and Recursive Regeneration in The Faerie Queene, Book 1’. Studies in Philology 118: 1 (2021), pp. 43-69.

Scholars have spent considerable time grappling with the erratic sequence of events that comprise Redcrosse’s regeneration or spiritual rebirth in book 1 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. While they have recognized the ecumenical dynamics of the knight’s spiritual progression, they have not accounted for the way in which his rebirth includes pitfalls and setbacks that disrupt its order. This article turns to early modern Protestant regeneration treatises—religious works that center on the topic of rebirth— to find a discourse that characterizes regeneration as an uneven process, which includes false starts and stops along the way to salvation. Reading through the lens of that discourse, we can see how Redcrosse’s peripatetic pricking through Faeryland depicts a recursive rebirth punctuated by episodes of false regeneration that erroneously start and stop his spiritual growth. Ultimately, Spenser demonstrates romance’s compatibility with Protestant allegory by using the circuitous narrative structure of the knight’s quest to metaphorize the recursive nature of rebirth. Indeed, the haphazard movement of the knight “pricking on the plaine” deftly allegorizes the backsliding, digression, and delay associated with regeneration.

Pugh, Syrithe. ‘“Gods that faine to be”: Political Euhemerism in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos’. English Literary Renaissance 49: 1 (2018), pp. 28-73

By referring to an elder brother of Saturn named “Titan,” Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos diverge from the Hesiodic account of the war between the Titans and the Olympians, to follow a lesser-known version originating in Euhemerus’ Sacred History and preserved because of the pivotal role it plays in Lactantius’ Divine Institutes. Spenser places his own sequel to the Titanomachy myth in the euhemerist tradition, which presents the Greek and Roman gods as mortal kings and queens, worshipped by their subjects, in order to satirize Hellenistic and imperial ruler-cults. Identifying Jupiter’s self-deification as the moment when the inseparable twins idolatry and tyranny were born, the Divine Institutes expound a Christianized version of Cicero’s law of nature to convict the Roman Empire of both impiety and inhumanity. Inspired by Lactantius, Spenser stages a trial in which the absolutist tendencies of Elizabeth and her probable successor are judged by the law of nature, embodied in the God-like Dame Nature. Holding the conflation of politics and theology up to skeptical scrutiny, Spenser uses Euhemerism to critique civil idolatry, in a way which counters the Eusebian currents in Elizabethan literature and influences Milton’s Paradise Lost. [S.P.]

Rao, Namratha. “Fearful Symmetry in Spenser’s Muiopotmos.” Essays in Criticism, vol. 69, no. 2, 2019, pp. 136–156.

This essay focuses on Edmund Spenser’s ‘Muiopotmos, Or the Fate of the Butterflie’ (1591), an elusive poem that has bred diverse and mutually contradictory interpretations. Most of these tend to find the protagonist, Clarion, culpable to varying degrees, in order to make moral sense of the poem. Paying close attention to the poem’s form (structure, rhetoric, aetiology, imagery), this essay argues that the powerfully sustained symmetries between spider and butterfly undercut any simple moral message by evoking discordant classical representations of fate and divine will from such sources as Homer, Virgil and Ovid. The protagonists emerge as prisoners of genealogy and circumstance, although their self-knowledge is crucially, unevenly distributed. In this way, the finely wrought symmetries that constitute ‘Muiopotmos’ perplex the boundaries between destiny and agency, and impede interpretation of the poem as parable, while simultaneously revealing an ambivalence towards epic that raises questions about Spenser’s relation to that fraught genre.

Reid, Robert Lanier. ‘The Harvest of Mysticism in English Renaissance Literature: Ascesis in Spenser and Shakespeare— “silencing the tumult of the flesh”. Renaissance Papers 2019 [published 2020], pp. 49-57.

This essay, after noting recent theological conferences elaborately exploring asceticism, and noting the climactic oration of Augustine’s Confessions with its massive inspiration of monastic life, examines the continuing impact of asceticism in the English Renaissance. “The Aggressive, Comprehensive Ascesis of Spenser’s Reformation Epic” is fully displayed in the initial Legend of Holiness, then in parallel subordinate forms in subsequent legends. The essay then examines, in striking contrast, the “Resisting of Ascesis in Shakespeare’s Theater,” notably in the early plays, before the profound grappling with ascesis as he turns to tragedy in Measure for Measure and King Lear.

Russell, Jesse. ‘Edmund Spenser as Promethean poet: critical issues and the role of magic and Platonism in The Faerie Queene’. Cahiers Élisabéthains. Published online September 2021.

One of the key points at which Platonism and magic or what could be called ‘Platonic magic’ is found in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is in his use of the image of the classical Titan Prometheus. Examining Spenser’s text in light of Renaissance Platonist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s writings on magic, we can see that Prometheus serves as a model for Spenser’s tremendous creative ability as a ‘poet magus’. However, an examination of the Promethean qualities of ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ also reveals that in the final sections of The Faerie Queene Spenser appears to lose hope in the Promethean power of the poet.

Ramachandran, Ayesha. ‘Allegories of Influence: Spenser, Chaucer, and Italian Romance’. Modern Language Notes 135: 5 (2020), pp. 1094-1107

This essay reflects upon Renaissance writers’ self-reflexive meditations on literary genealogy, by examining Edmund Spenser’s allusive interrogation of his relationship to Chaucer on the one hand, and to Boiardo and Ariosto, on the other in Book IV of The Faerie Queene. Focusing on the emblematic tale of Cambell and Triamond, and its striking resolution by the introduction of Cambina, a romance enchantress in bono, it argues that Spenser strategically moves away from metaphors of patrilineal descent and erotic triangulation to re-imagine literary imitation and influence in terms of friendship, symbolized by the tetrad. In the process, it reconsiders models for describing literary originality, inheritance, canon formation, and cross-linguistic influence.

Smith, Sarah. ‘An Unyielding Past: Holy Wells and Historical Narrative in The Faerie Queene 1–2’. Studies in Philology 118: 2 (2021), pp. 284-307.

This article examines the wells found in 1.7, 1.11, and 2.1–2 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and reads them alongside the long and syncretic history of holy well ritual practices in England. The essay borrows Jonathan Gil Harris’s notion of “polychronic objects” to argue that holy wells, which were used by pagans, Catholics, and Protestants on the British Isles, are multivalent symbols that collate various moments in England’s history. In the three episodes explored here, Spenser exploits this feature of holy wells in order to stage a conflict between the nation’s Catholic and pagan past and its Protestant future. The episodes thus reveal the power of the polychronic landscape to recall the nation’s past and complicate narratives about its future.

Tipton, Alzada J. ‘The Acidale test: Spenser’s jettisoning of Sidney as poetic authoriser’. Cahiers Élisabéthains. Published online September 2021.

This article questions the commonplace that Edmund Spenser always depicted Philip Sidney as his poetic authoriser by finding undercurrents in works through 1595 and by reading the Mount Acidale scene in the 1596 Faerie Queene as jettisoning Sidney. This study calls into question the accepted version of Spenser’s role in the historical development of Sidney’s image. It demonstrates that Spenser rethought his relationship to Sidney and reimagined himself as a poet. This study also resolves the disjunction between earlier depictions of Sidney as poet and the Sidney-like qualities of the unpoetical Calidore.

Van der Laan, Sarah. ‘Making Sense of an Ending: Camões’s Odyssean Epic’. Modern Language Notes 135: 5 (2020), pp. 1078-93.

Both Luís de Camões’ Os Lusíadas and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene subvert epic convention in their endings. Spenser’s truncation of Guyon’s quest illuminates Camões’ uses of the Odyssey and the legend that Odysseus founded Lisbon on his travels. Folding a Virgilian founding myth into an Odyssean epic paradigm, Camões constructs Portuguese epic heroism from Odyssean materials. But his choice of an Odyssean paradigm also reveals the dangers and limitations of the contingent, liminal Portuguese imperial project. The Odyssey serves as the submerged counterpoint to Os Lusíadas, the tale against which that poem repeatedly measures its hero, its values, and itself.

Walkden, Andrea. ‘Scales and Tails: The Spenserian Design of Waller’s “The Battle of the Summer Islands”’. Modern Language Notes 135: 5 (2020), pp. 1108-1123.

The poet Edmund Waller (1606-87) is well known as a practitioner of the heroic couplet and forerunner of the Augustan age. This essay reverses the forward trajectory of typical literary historical treatments of the poet in order to consider instead how Waller, early in his career, looks back to the verse of Edmund Spenser. It begins by examining the Spenserian allusions in Waller’s maritime epyllion, “The Battle of the Summer Islands,” before offering a more expansive account of the political and literary ties that connect not only Waller to Spenser, but the epyllion to the romance epic.

Williamson, Arthur. ‘Roman Past, Jewish Future:Prophecy, Poetry, and the End of Empire’. Huntington Library Quarterly 83: 3 (2020), pp. 567-89.

Although classical political values and their Latin sources continuously informed Elizabethan and Jacobean public culture, assessment of the Roman experience itself became sharply contested. By the 1590s reformist Protestants in both England and Scotland discounted the Roman Empire and ultimately the entire arc of Roman history. Instead, they looked to the Hebrew commonwealth, Jewish learning, and, increasingly, contemporary Jews. These developments issued in a preoccupation with Judeocentric prophecy and piety. In stark contrast, anti-reform Protestantism constructed a competing Christocentric piety linked with a resolutely imperial vision. At the center of this emergent push-pull within late sixteenth-century Anglophone spirituality lay conflicted readings of the Roman past.

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