Braggadocchio and Spenser's Golden World Concept: The Function of Unregenerative Comedy

Abstract

'For the phrase Nature Redeemed I am indebted to Eric LaGuardia's Nature Redeemed: The Imitation of Order in Three Renaissance Poems (London, 1966). By focusing on Renaissance conception of universal harmony which involves suppressing the demonic and releasing the divine in nature, LaGuardia points to thematic interest in the problem of having nature resemble the divine order without letting the heavenly take the place of the earthly. (See his introductory chapter.) He sees the Garden of Adonis as defining a natural order perfected by harmony of the divine principle of eternal order and the natural principle of generation, growth, and mutability. The problem is to conceive of natural, human world untainted by corruption in either its physical, moral or ethical order. By Golden World I do not wish to indicate putative world wholly contained within the poem-though I think the poem manifests thematic concern to figure forth related concept (see LaGuardia's emphasis on natural order). Paul J. Alpers in The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (Princeton, 1967) has adequately decried the notion of the poem as literal world, or as the container of one. However, he has not paid sufficient attention to the poem's meaningfulness, let alone whatever thematic intent it may embody. Alpers only tells us that Spenser's concern is with human experience seen under the aspect of man's relation to God, p. 9. After the word experience, however, his statement fails to be very sensible. He has neglected to provide adequate definitions and relationships. So I find LaGuaxdia's rendition considerably more satisfying; nor has Alpers clearly invalidated it or caused it to be incompatible with his basic rhetorical emphasis. As I see it, Spenser's concern for the Golden World becomes complex