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What Happens in the 'Amoretti'
by William A. Oram

What happens in the Amoretti is the serious play of an ongoing courtship between an Edmund Spenser in his early forties and an Elizabeth Boyle in her late teens. It’s a surprisingly intimate sequence, concerned, as few others are, with the relationship between wooer and wooed. Like much of Spenser’s work it’s what one might call potentially comic in form, moving toward marriage, while avoiding secure resolution. In this paper I assume that the course of the sequence describes a version of an actual courtship, in part because Spenser identifies himself with the speaker when he mentions by name his mother, his queen, his friend Lodowick Bryskett and of course his bride, as well as The Faerie Queene. Read more…

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Cite as:

William A. Oram, "What Happens in the 'Amoretti'," Spenser Review (Spring-Summer 2020). Accessed May 5th, 2024.
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