Edmund Spenser (1552-99)
Spenser is an example of a courtier from relatively humble origins.
1552/53born
1561Went to the new humanist Merchant Taylor’s School as a ‘poor scholar’.
1569Went to Pembroke College, Cambridge as a sizar[1].
1573Earned his BA.
1576 Earned his MA.
1579published The Shepherds’ Calendar to positive reviews.
married Machabyas Childe (1560-1588?); we don’t know when she died (except that it was before 1594) but they had two children.
1580Went to Ireland to work in the colonial administration.
1590 began The Faerie Queene; published the first 3 Books
1594married Elizabeth Boyle; published Amoretti and Epithalamion
1596published the first six books of The Faerie Queene
1598Spenser was driven from Ireland by Irish rebels
1599died in London aged 46.
- Ben Jonson says he died of hunger, which is ironic because he supported a scorched-earth policy in Ireland (and the destruction of the Irish language and culture).
An example of humanist Renaissance man.
He studied rhetoric, logic and philosophy at Cambridge.
He was fluent in Ancient Greek and highly knowledgeable about philosophy, according to contemporary comments.
All his life Spenser was an ardent Protestant Nationalist.
“Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet”
- Karl Marx comment on Spenser
However, modern scholars believe that Spenser’s work, even The Fairie Queene, is much more critical of Elizabeth than previously thought.
Spenser was less successful at court than he could have been because his political views clashed with[2] those of Lord Burghley, the Queen’s secretary.
Amoretti(= Cupids)
Amoretti is Spenser’s sequence of 89 sonnets (written 1593-94)
- They are unusual in describing a real courtship[3] which ends in marriage.
The Amorettiwere written in a rush[4] because there were meant to be 90 (Sonnets 35 and 83 are identical!).
As elsewhere[5] in his published poetry, Spenser appears to hint at[6] what he saw as the inadequacies of Queen Elizabeth.
Sonnet 74 compares his love for Elizabeth Boyle with that for his queen.
An important motif is that of predator and prey.
There is a range of emotions from despair to angry.
The Petrarchan fire-and-ice trope is important.
Another important motif is that of battle
- But here she is the aggressor and he is under siege, even though it is actually[7] he who is pursuing her.
- Similarly, he takes the hunter/hunted trope from Wyatt but portrays her as a ferocious hunting beast, while he is the helpless[8]prey[9].
Near the end of the sequence Spenser inverts the roles, so that he becomes the hunter and the conqueror and she is the vanquished[10] prey, a submissive captive.
Spenser connects pleasure and pain
- love and harm are linked[11].
Although Amoretti follows the conventions of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence – the fruitless pursuit of a cold, cruel, superior beloved, etc. – each of these conventions is undermined[12] in some way.
For example, in Sonnet 15, in describing her superiority to precious commodities such as rubies, pearls, and ivory – and to the merchants who seek them – Spenser also derides the merchants’ useless efforts, thereby[13] lowering both the value of his object of comparison and the goods to which he compares her.
While he pays lip service to[14] the ‘cruel fair’ convention, Spenser also suggests a confidence in the ultimate[15] success.
Elizabeth’s pride is emphasized and it causes her to scorn[16] his advances
- but it is also a mark of her distinction and individuality.
- It implies a superior social position to the speaker (borrowed from Dante and Laura) even though this was not exactly true in real life.
More conventionally, Spenser uses his sonnets to suggest the use of poetry to counteract the mutability of life.
- Shakespeare does the same.
Epithalamion /,epiθə’leimiən/
Epithalamion (= at the bridal chamber) is an ode which describes the wedding day and culminates Amoretti.
This is an unusualhappy ending to a sonnet sequence.
Spenser shows a great interest in time – Epithalamion has 365 lines.
Importantly, there is a subjective sense of time (cf. AYLI).
Epithalamion may be a political statement prescribing the proper relationship between governing England (the husband) and subject Ireland (the wife).
Amoretti and Epithalamion were published together and were an immediate success.
Background to The Fairie Queene
Very conveniently Tudor literature starts and finishes with King Arthur.
The day before Henry Tudor laid claim to[17] the English throne (01/08/1485), Caxton finished printing Le Morte Darthur (yes, Malory’s book) in London.
When Henry landed[18] a week later in Milford Haven (in Wales) he rode under the red dragon flag of King Arthur so that his fellow Welshmen would see him as the ‘once-and-future’ king.
Henry VII called his first son, Arthur.
A century later the last Tudor, Elizabeth I is Gloriana in Spenser’s Arthurian TheFaerie Queene.
This was part of official propaganda:
Arthur represents the realm, Britain, and on more than one public occasion Elizabeth stated[19] that she was married to the nation.
For Malory Arthur is old, his death is an enigma and his return is uncertain.
For Spenser Arthur is young and the never-dying prince has become part of state mystery.
Malory’s Arthurian stories centre of questing and chivalry.
By Spenser’s time chivalry had been reduced to a ridiculous court pageant on Ascension Day
- it was no good charging out chivalrously when your adversary had cannons and muskets.
Sex and the Single Queen
The Faerie Queene is much more interested in sex – both romantic and sordid– than Le Morte Darthur had been:
e.g. the giantess copulating with her brother in the womb[20] before birth or
e.g. Hellenore being ridden nine times a night by men-goats that she delights to stroke and handle).
Indeed[21], sex is central to the story in the quested-for Gloriana, the virgin queen.
- Although The Faerie Queene is unfinished Spenser was clearly going to have Arthur marry Gloriana (= the virgin, fairy queen).
Of course, Spenser’s tale[22] had to take place in fairyland:
- toothless, yellow-skinned Elizabeth at 60 was not really about to provide Arthurian descendants.
A Protestant Epic
Spenser lived his life on cursus Virgilii (= Virgil’s course)
- i.e. he consciously modelled himself after Virgil.
- indeed[23], his contemporaries knew him as ‘the English Virgil’.
Virgil said that immature poets should start with pastoral themes (in his case Eclogues) and only take on martial/epic themes (in his case The Aeneid) when they were mature poets.
- So, Spenser first won fame as a poet with the pastoral Shepherds’ Calendar (1579)
- before embarking on[24] his great nationalist Protestant epic, The Faerie Queene.
The Faerie Queene uses a number of epic conventions
- each of the poem’s six books states a different epic theme,
- there is a catalogue of the descendants and exploits of Brutus (the ostensible founder of Britain), and
- the lady Duessa descends into hell.
However, The FQ has too many questing knights fighting for the honour of a lady and too much allegory to be an epic strictly speaking.
- it is better categorized as a romantic epic.
Spenser’s stated his aim in writing the FQ in a letter to Raleigh:
“The general end[25] therefore of all the book is to fashion[26] a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
- it is a rulebook for courtiers, just as[27]Beowulf was a manual for warriors and Piers Plowman was a manual for Christians.
Each book presents an untested knight who needs to learn to distinguish appearance from reality, good from evil.
Spenser’s Style
Notice that Spenser is famous for his bad spelling, which is weird and inconsistent – even by Elizabethan standards!
You have to use your imagination if you want to understand his words.
To give you some idea, Spenser tends to interchange y and i,u and w, and u and v.
Modern scholars believe that Spenser’s style uses pseudo-archaic diction and spelling consisting of English that looks back to a past that never existed.
He invented the ‘Spenserian stanza’ – longer and more complex than what went before.
It consisted on 9 iambic lines (1-8 pentameters, 9th a hexameter).
The rhyme scheme was ababbcbcc.
The first eight lines in terms of meter and rhyme equate to what is called “the Monk’s Tale stanza” (from Chaucer’s use of it, obviously).
He wrote more than 4000 (= 35,000 lines) such stanzas of almost uniform perfection for The Faerie Queene.
Spenser owed a lot to Chaucer:
- Book IV of The Fairie Queene includes a rewriting of The Squire’s Tale.
- His archaic language also imitates Chaucer.
Spenser was also interested in Langland’s Piers Plowman.
He also invented the Spenserian sonnet (abab bcbc cdcd ee)
- it is often rather mannered[28].
The Faerie Queen is by far[29] the longest important poem in English lit.
- it is longer than Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered and Milton’s Paradise Lost put together!
- it is over 10 times longer than Beowulf.
The story is so complex that Spenser himself appears to forget the elaborate plot[30] at times
- at III.2 he confuses Guyon with the Red Cross Knight; in Book VI Calidore is confused with Calepine)
“First I thought (Chaucer’s) Troilus and Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know The FaerieQueene is the dullest[31] thing out[32]. Blast it[33].”
future Poet Laureate, Philip Larkin
(written in a copy of The Faerie Queene
in St. John’s College library).
It is always graceful and mostly tedious.
- “The great unread classic of English literature”
Spenser started work on The Faerie Queene (according to letters) as early as 1579 and left it unfinished at his death.
Early versions of the FQ had begun to circulate by 1588 when Marlowe borrowed a simile from I.vii.32 in the second part of Tamburlaine.
Each book of the FQ presents a virtue:
1. holiness,
2. temperance,
3. chastity,
4. friendship,
5. justice and
6. courtesy.
- and each virtue is assigned a knight to be patron of the virtue and defend it.
Spenser’s manichaeism is marked:
- There is the strife of light against dark,
- Holiness against Antichrist,
- Temperance against pervertedwill,
- Chastity against lust,
- Friendship against strifeandseparation,
- Justice against anarchyandtyranny, and
- Courtesy against basenessofheart and mind
Spenser’s Fairyland has some reminiscences of Ireland but it cannot be mapped like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth because Spenser’s vision is made up of[34] a series of set mental stages for his manichaeistic conflicts.
Like the Gawain-poet, Spenser places his poem squarely in the tradition of translatio studii et imperii – the westward transferral of heroic culture from Troy to Troynovant by the Thames.
The FQ mixes
- allegorical figures of a mediaeval type (e.g. Archimago[35], Duessa[36], Una[37], Speranza, Despair or the Blatant Beast Slander) with
- figures of legend (e.g. Arthur) and
- allegorical figuresrepresentingcontemporaries (e.g. Elizabeth as the Faerie Queen)
in allegories of contemporary events.
Spenser showed how the pastoral convention could be adapted to a variety of subjects – moral, amatory, or heroic – in a diction consistently eloquent, recalling both Chaucer and Virgil;
and he showed how the rules of ‘decorum’, or fitness of style to subject, could be applied, through variations in the diction and the metrical scheme.
Other themes in the FQ include a preoccupation
- with wars of religion,
- with the achievement of nationality,
- with the civilizing of the new rich,
- with the didactic function of art, and
- with the creation of a new idiom (= form of expression) in poetry.
The FQ, like Utopia, has elements derived from the discovery of the New World.
In Book III Serena gets separated from Sir Calepine and is captured by a tribe of wild men in a forest.
The cannibalistic tribe cannot decide what to do first: sacrifice her blood to their gods, rape her or eat her.
- A scene borrowed by Tolkien in The Hobbit.
This is an Elizabethan erotic fantasy based on the three ceremonies that were central to their civilization: the Eucharist, sex and feasts
- expressions of holiness, bed-delights and victory.
The comparison of heart and hart – gentle, fearful and sacrificial
- is one of the constant elements of renaissance poetry.
You will be pleased to hear that while they are arguing Sir Calepine appears, kills all the ‘savages’ and frees Serena.
If one central principle can unite the disparate elements of The Fairie Queene, it is perhaps the poem’s staging of the battle between Orpheus and Proteus,
- the contest between the poet who can transform the wilderness into civilization and the god who embodies the principle of ceaseless mutation.
It is no accident that most of the poem was written in Ireland, where Spenser lived for virtually all his adult life.
For him, Ireland and the Irish represent figures of unending change, threatening the stable civilization of England.
This interpretation of the situation in Ireland is, of course, very convenient if you are an Englishman living on a vast estate in Cork that has been confiscated from the Irish and face local resistance from ‘ceaselessly mutable’ locals.
Summary: ToThe Bower of Bliss
Book II takes the humanist position that education is the path to human perfection.
- it is the tale of a knight who needs to be schooled in the chivalric virtue of temperance.
Guyon[38](the Knight of Temperance[39]) and the Palmer[40](the personification of human reason) go in search of the sorceress Acrasia[41] to take revenge for the death of Amavia[42]’s husband, Mordant (both killed by Acrasia[43] passing on an STD[44] to Mordant).
Guyon and Palmer take a ferry across the lake to Acrasia’s island.
They have to find a safe route between the Gulf of Greediness and the Rock of Vile Reproach (i.e. Homer’s ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ in The Odyssey).
They manage to pass the Wandering Islands, mermaids, the quicksand of Unthriftiness, the Whirlpool of Decay, singing mermaids (i.e. Homer’s sirenes), blinding fog and angry birds.
Always the expert guide, Palmer leads them safely through these dangers.
On the island, the two are beset[45] by wild beasts,
- which Palmer drives off with his magic staff.
Summary: In The Bower of Bliss
Guyon and Palmer find the Bower[46] of Bliss and force their way in past the guard, Genius.
They meet Excess, who offers Guyon wine she has made,
- but Guyon refuses and destroys her cup.
The men discover two naked women playing in a fountain and Guyon’s temperance is further tested when he stops to watch
- the Palmer – the more experienced Christian of the two – pulls Guyon away and helps him to stay on his path.
- That he is tempted, however, reminds the reader of Guyon’s half-Fay nature and the mixture of natural and spiritual that takes place within his being.
Finally, they find Acrasia with her lover, Verdant;
- Guyon and Palmer catch them in a net then chain Acrasia.
With Acrasia helpless, Guyon destroys the Bower of Bliss.
Guyon and Palmer make their way back to the ferry,
- and they are again attacked by the wild beasts.
This time, however, Guyon finds out that the beasts are actually enchanted men
- so he has Palmer change them back to their true forms.
Yet one of the men, Grill, prefers life as a pig and Guyon agrees to let him remain in his bestial form.
- you can’t save somebody who doesn’t want to be saved.
Interpretation of the Bower of Bliss Episode
The Bower of Bliss embodies everything temperance is not.
- it is full or erotic, gustatory and visual temptations that invite excess rather than moderation, consumption rather than abstinence.
- it is a false, perverse version of the Garden of Eden.
- it is none too different from any faerie ring or woodland revel,
- but Guyon must not give in to his Faerie (or pagan) nature.
The three-day ferry ride to Acrasia’s island is easily associated with the three-day interval between the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.
- Crossing a water barrier is standard practice when entering the land of the dead (cf. the Styx).
Acrasia represents the illusory pleasures of instant gratification,
- Guyon the value of delayed gratification (the very Protestant pleasure of self-denial).
In the end, Guyon holds on to his spiritual/Christian side and destroys the Bower.
- which frees human nature and the senses from the excesses of lust[47] and indolence.
The final scene wherein[48] Palmer turns the beasts back into men serves to accentuate Guyon’s choice
- he is a man, not a creature of the forest, and his actions haveled to[49] the restoration of these men’s humanity as well[50].
Remembering again that novelty was frowned upon[51], we can see the transmission of a similar story from
The Odyssey,12 (Scylla and Charybdis, the Wandering Islands, the Sirens and Circe).[52]
→ Alcina’s island in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516)
→ Trissino’s l'Italia liberata dai Goti (1547–1548)
→ Rinaldo on Armida’s island in
Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, 15-16 (1581)
→ The Faerie Queene