Following the bumper issue of creative responses to Spenser in Autumn 2019 (which attracted our largest readership yet), we return to more traditional territory in the present issue with a range of subjects. Read more…
The writings of Lucius Annaeus Seneca seem to have been, to exaggerate only a little, everywhere in early modern Europe: widely printed, read, translated, cited, imitated, and, in the case of Seneca’s tragedies, even occasionally performed. It is therefore surprising that relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to Spenser’s engagements with this most prolific and various of classical authors. Read more…
The opening lines of Homer’s Odyssey introduce us to the hero and his story and conclude with a request to the Muse: τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν (1.10: ‘From some point in this, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak to us too’.) The words ‘us too’ seem to convey the poet-narrator’s request to be allowed a turn at retelling, or to tell the story for yet another audience, but in two of the most distinguished and widely read recent translations (as also in Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version) we find a rendering that marks poet and audience as belonging to a new historical moment and thus evokes not only the epic’s ancient audiences but the translator’s own: ‘Sing for our time too’ (Robert Fagles 1996); ‘And tell the tale once more in our time’ (Stanley Lombardo 2000). Read more…
In this paper, I will be looking at the classical schema of the tripartite soul, familiar to readers of The Faerie Queene, focusing in particular on the vegetal or vegetative soul. Spenser’s portrayal of the tripartite soul has been recently discussed in some detail by Garrett Sullivan, Jr., in his excellent study Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment, where he draws out the competing tendencies operating in discussions of this psychological model: one tendency is the vertical, which insists that we must rise above our vegetal and animal natures in the familiar gesture of human exceptionalism, and the other is the horizontal tendency, which insists on our connectedness with our fellow beings. Read more…
What happens when we think about race in the works of Edmund Spenser? In spite of the growing body of scholarship now devoted to early modern racial formation, few scholars have explored Edmund Spenser’s treatment of race outside of his treatment of the Irish. Of course, Spenser is important to the study of race precisely because he is implicated in the English colonial project in Ireland. Scholarship on The View of the Present State of Ireland has played an important role in inaugurating Spenser as an early modern producer of race thinking; examining Spenser’s Irish project sheds light on the ways in which race in the early modern period was invested in asserting absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, maintaining the noble quality of English blood and justifying colonial domination. Read more…
Bas relief from the exterior of the Scuola San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice. Photo courtesy of Roger Kuin.
- Lara M. Crowley, Manuscript Matters: Reading John Donne’s Poetry and Prose in Early Modern England —
- Katarzyna Lecky, Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance —
- Angelika Zirker, William Shakespeare and John Donne: Stages of the Soul in Early Modern English Poetry —
- Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life —
- Russ Leo, Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World —
- Elizabeth Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist —
- Lindsay Ann Reid, Shakespeare’s Ovid and the Spectre of the Medieval —
- William A. Oram, Andrew Escobedo, and Susannah Brietz Monta, eds., Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual —