Constancy, Tristram, and the “Parcell” of The Faerie Queene Book VII

Journal Article The Faerie Queene; The Faerie Queene; Spenser's Images of Life; The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’; Spenser's ‘Faerie Queene’: A critical commentary on Books I and II Get access The Faerie Queene. By Edmund Spenser. Edited By A. C. Hamilton. Longman. £25.00.The Faerie Queene. By Edmund Spenser. Edited By Thomas P. Roche. Penguin. £4.95 paper.Spenser's Images of Life. By C. S. Lewis. Edited By Alistair Fowler. Cambridge. £1.95 paper.The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’. By James Nohrnberg. Princeton. £32.20.Spenser's ‘Faerie Queene’: A critical commentary on Books I and II. By Douglas Brooks-Davies. Manchester U.P. £5.75 cased; £1.80 paper. Martin Dodsworth Martin Dodsworth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 28, Issue 130, Spring 1979, Pages 43–51, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/28.130.43 Published: 01 March 1979

MLR, 100.3, 2005 763 Andy Orchard's sample edition of Wulfstan, which combines user-friendliness (in itself a radical departure from the practice of many editors of Old English) with a recognition of the 'practical and theoretical difficulty' (p. 314) of editing Wulfstan's work, accepting its characteristic variance and offeringa workable editorial solution to the problems raised by ongoing textual modification. The more traditional virtues of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, however, are well re? presented in this Festschrift: first-hand research, well-informed close argument, and meticulous editorial technique. It is thematically unified (unlike many Festschriften), the editing is scrupulous throughout, and an index is provided. Its high quality is a credit to its editors and its dedicatee. University of Southampton Bella Millett Fairy in 'The Faerie Queene': Renaissance Elf-Fashioning and Elizabethan MythMaking . By Matthew Woodcock. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2004. ix+162 pp. ?35; $59.95. ISBN 0-7546-3639-6. The Faerie Queene remains a kind of fantasy text. As Matthew Woodcock observes in a disconcerted footnote, McNeir and Provost's Edmund Spenser: An Annotated Bibliography ig3j-igy2,2nd edn (Pittsburgh, NJ: Duquesne University Press, 1975) comes with a 'rather Tolkeinesque [. . .] fold-out chart' as an illustrative map of fairyland. The McNeir-Provost chart is piece of fashionable paraphernalia: it looks like a prog-rock album cover (a movement in its heyday in 1975) where the House of Holiness nestles in the midst of tapering, needle-sharp mountain tops. Though Woodcock's title suggests a residual Tolkeinesque agenda, his concerns are more ambitious: Fairy in 'The Faerie Queene' attempts to relocate the study of Spenser's fairy in the light of changing ideas about the past and ways of reading The Faerie Queene itself. As its subtitle indicates, Woodcock's book faces in two directions at once. Though it is the firstsustained treatment ofthe fairymaterial since the late 1930s, itpositions the study of fairy in relation to more recent critical fashions. This is the book's central dilemma: does it face back to previous generations of Spenser scholarship (which energetically debated the provenance of fairyland) or does it draw on more recent criticism (which largely ignores the issue, but which is more attentive to disjunctions in Spenser's text)? Woodcock negotiates a way out of this by challenging the conclusions of earlier scholars like Rathborne and Greenlaw. Firstly,he enriches and complicates the context of the fairy lore available to Spenser by introducing recent work on early modern witchcraft, which provides a model for reading fairies. As witchcraft has become 'a site of textual controversy' (p. 11), so the study of fairy should be attentive 'to the context and form ofthe texts in which fairies are represented'. In the case of Arthur's narrative of his encounter with the Fairy Queen, Woodcock considers Spenser's reading of Chaucer's 'Sir Thopas', suggesting that he 'may well have taken up and treated Chaucer's parodic story of fairy as a consciously polysemic narrative' (p. 93), which in turn contributes to the Queen's 'potentially problematic presence' (p. 94) in Spenser's poem. Secondly, Woodcock suggests that The Faerie Queene's fairies are invariably more complex figures than their folkloric antecedents: 'Spenser shows no concern with establishing the fairies [.. .] as adistinct and rigidly defined ontological category' (p. 81). Fairies and fairyland should never be read literally; rather,they are deliberately am? biguous and provocative poetic signs which demand the reader's active engagement in the interpretation and?frequently?deconstruction of Spenser's poem: 'By deconstructing several of the characters that are frequently referred to as being fairy 764 Reviews knights Spenser forces his readers to continually question what they are reading, to remain alert for suggestions that the likes of Guyon, Satyrane, Marinell, or Calidore might be more than they at firstappear' (p. 87). 'Deconstructing' is a characteristic touch: on the one hand, Woodcock ascribes agency to Spenser as the writer of the poem; on the other, the word seems to betoken theoretical ambitions which the study does not completely fulfil. A deeper concern is Woodcock's overall conceptualization of The Faerie Queene. He relies throughout on the 'Letter to Raleigh', yet only seldom does its problematic status emerge. Though...

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's <i>New Arcadia</i>

Nathan field and 'the Faerie Queene' Get access Glenn H. Blayney Glenn H. Blayney Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume CC, Issue feb, 1 February 1955, Pages 59–60, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/CC.feb.59 Published: 01 February 1955

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” Patricia B. Phillippy Approaches to Teaching Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” edited by David Lee Miller and Alexander Dunlop; ix & 207 pp. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994, $37.50. In many respects, the teaching of Spenser’s Faerie Queene is an experience that most completely encapsulates both the challenges and the rewards of introducing students to the literature of the early modern period. As a work whose length, complex narratives, substantial cast of characters, and polyvocal allegories are often daunting to undergraduates, Spenser’s epic can easily appear as a riddle to be solved rather than a work to be appreciated, let alone enjoyed. Too frequently the constraints of the syllabus and the resistance of students result in a one-dimensional rendering of the text, which permits students to feel that they have “learned something” about Spenser, and about literature generally, by seeing simple, point-by-point allegorizations (Archimago as the Pope, Duessa as Catholicism) as the work’s whole meaning. However, if these difficulties can be surmounted, few other works can equal the great opportunities available in The Faerie Queene to enrich students’ understanding of Elizabethan aesthetic, ethical, social, and political climates, and, perhaps more significantly, to impress upon them the fact that literature, as the most self-conscious of written works, seeks to elicit a multiplicity of meanings from its readers. Thus the task of critical reading appropriately moves toward expansiveness rather than inclusiveness, toward calling forth a plethora of meanings rather than eliminating all but the one “right” reading. Valuable help in overcoming the problems posed by Spenser’s work in the classroom is found in Approaches to Teaching Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.” The collection includes six essays that suggest various strategies for introducing the text to students, and nine essays devoted to more advanced study of the poem. The majority of essays in the former group concentrate on Book 1, and negotiate the practical difficulties of incorporating The Faerie Queene into undergraduate survey courses by suggesting methods to help students to bridge the gap between the work’s cultural context and their own, while also stressing the need to appreciate the text’s distinctiveness. The “special topics” essays treat individual books and themes within a variety of methodological frameworks and in light of cultural touchstones, such as the Renaissance association of painting and poetry (aided by the volume’s eight illustrations), Elizabethan colonial and imperial attitudes about Ireland, and early modern treatises and conduct books describing women’s character. A “Materials” section includes a descriptive bibliography of texts for classroom use and for students’ assigned readings, a wonderfully inclusive bibliography describing editions, reference works, background reading, and critical interpretations for the instructor’s use, and an outline of aids to teaching, such as portraits, films, and music. Even the experienced teacher of Spenser will find this a useful summary of the available materials. [End Page 278] While rooted in practical pedagogy, the essays in this collection also, for the most part, offer provocative comments on Spenser’s poem that are of scholarly interest beyond the classroom as well. Julia M. Walker’s discussion of Britomart alongside Elizabethan portraiture and Dorothy Stephens’ reading of the “feminine” in Book 4 are abridgments of longer articles from Modern Philology and ELH, respectively, and Theresa M. Krier’s provocative comments on the gendering of Spenserian symbol and allegory point toward her work in progress. Overall, the collection recommends numerous innovative techniques to energize and enliven one’s teaching of the poem and to enhance students’ experiences of it. While teachers’ awareness of the demographics and dynamics of their own students may preclude the adoption of specific approaches suggested in this volume, its essays dramatically illustrate the need to avoid reductive readings of The Faerie Queene and, at the same time, offer worthwhile guidance to prevent students from wandering endlessly through the woods of semiotic indeterminacy, error, and despair. Patricia B. Phillippy Texas A&M University Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press

clash between the beauty-loving Renaissance and the he [Spenser] was quickly swept overboard because of moral Reformation. In the light of the medieval reli-his inability to write like Donne, Eliot, and Allen gious tradition examined by Tuve, Guyon destroys Tate’ (1968:2). His extended interpretation of Book the Bower because he ‘looks at the kind of complete II, The Allegorical Temper

Linking 'The Faerie Queen' with early modern conduct manuals, romances, dedicatory epistles, and devotional literature, McManus examines the poem's depiction of women's interpretative strategies and argues that female readers were expected to exercise considerable autonomy as they endorsed, adapted, or resisted the texts that sought to fashion them as chaste, silent and obedient.

764 Reviews knights Spenser forces his readers to continually question what they are reading, to remain alert for suggestions that the likes of Guyon, Satyrane, Marinell, or Calidore might be more than they at firstappear' (p. 87). 'Deconstructing' is a characteristic touch: on the one hand, Woodcock ascribes agency to Spenser as the writer of the poem; on the other, the word seems to betoken theoretical ambitions which the study does not completely fulfil. A deeper concern is Woodcock's overall conceptualization of The Faerie Queene. He relies throughout on the 'Letter to Raleigh', yet only seldom does its problematic status emerge. Though Woodcock wisely eschews conjecture about what a twelvebook Faerie Queene might have looked like, it is equally hazardous to ground the excavation of Spenser's intention on a document which at best represents a sketchy outline written at the time of the publication of the first quarter of the projected poem. Though Woodcock writes illuminatingly about the complexity of Spensersian allegory, it is puzzling that he never uses the most suggestive phrase in the 'Letter', which describes the poem as a 'darke conceit'. Though this image has been considered by older scholars like Edwin Honig, it nevertheless remains crucial to understanding what Woodcock rightlycalls 'The inchoate nature of the poem as a whole' (p. 82). In this context, I suggest, the difficultyof reading Spenser's fairy is also a difficultyin reading the poem as we have it and in coming to terms with the readerly implications of its unfinished condition and the factthat the poem, like its readers, never ultimately arrives at the fairycity of Cleopolis. Though the 'Letter' is not a clear enough guide to Spenser's intentions, 'darke conceit' continues to be the most pithy and suggestive way of describing the poem's effects. Fairy in 'The Faerie Queene' is an intriguing addition to Spenser studies. Through its detailed contextualization of early modern fairy lore and its valiant reconceptualization of how we should read that lore in The Faerie Queene, it offers new and generous ways into the poem. Inevitably, it fails to answer every question about the ways in which Spenser adapted his sources, and does not fullyengage with the poem's murkyprofile as fantasywriting. Yet itis a readable way into the poem, which, through its informed sense of the reception history of fairyland, insists both on its folkloric contexts and on its literary and rhetorical grounding. The Open University Richard Danson Brown Marlowe'sEmpery: Expandinghis Critical Contexts. Ed. by Sara Munson DEATSand Robert A. Logan. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 210 pp. $40; ?20.93. ISBN 0-87413-787-x. These nine essays originated at the fourth international Marlowe Society of America Conference at Cambridge University in 1998. They reflecta good deal of the openness and diversity that characterize those convivial events, held every five years. As I discovered in 1998 and again in 2003, the poet continues to attract a wide variety of admirers to his alma mater, from celebrity scholars to secondary-school teachers, under the care ofdedicated and congenial organizers such as the editors ofthis volume. The firstpart features three essays on performance. Roslyn L. Knutson's 'Marlowe Reruns: Repertorial Commerce and Marlowe's Plays in Revival' examines perfor? mance dates between 1592 and 1597, when Marlowe's plays were in almost constant production. Orchestrating a welter of information with her usual blend of caution and insight, Knutson hypothesizes that The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, and Dr Faustus were at the core of marketing strategies that spawned the production of a series of imitative or responsive plays. All the companies sought to benefit from producing and scheduling plays to complement or compete MLRy 100.3, 2005 765 with Marlowe's Machiavel, revenger, weak king surrounded by turmoil, irresistible warrior, magician, balcony scene, ete. Knutson's account thereby comprises a par? tial checklist of Marlowe's influence on his contemporaries, especially Shakespeare. David Bevington in 'Staging the A- and B-Texts of Doctor Faustus' also emphasizes commercial considerations, ones that led to the B-text's later, more elaborate pro? duction. Insightfully inferringthe staging requirements for each version, Bevington...

Music, Text, Stuttering: An Intermedial Approach to Dramatick Opera in The Fairy Queen Sharon J. Harris Critics, from the Restoration to the near past, have not always accorded much respect to Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare plays, nor to the partially overlapping genre of Restoration dramatick opera. From Samuel Pepys—for whom a 1662 adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was “the most insipid ridiculous play that I saw in my life”—to George C. D. Odell—who wrote in 1920 that George Granville’s adaptation of Merchant of Venice was “a gross vulgarisation” —and beyond, many critics have treated these adaptations as, at best, having “a certain charm and interest” but have dismissed or decried them as “imitative and derivative.”1 In recent decades we have come to better understand the social, legal, political, and cultural contexts of Restoration playmaking, including how the eventual elevation of Shakespeare as The Bard has conditioned our assessments of his Restoration adapters.2 Appreciation for the artistry of these adaptations as plays remains scarce, however. In this special issue, Amanda Eubanks Winkler shows how scholars have failed to engage Restoration dramatic art in general and makes a persuasive case for an intermedial approach to dramatick opera in particular. As she notes, the biases of bardolatry and theoretical traditions that privilege text, along with “anxieties about intermediality and the supposed subordination of the poet have been transmuted into a critical revulsion toward the writers and adapters who produced dramatick operas’ texts.”3 An intermedial approach to Restoration drama helps us see, feel, and analyze that drama better. In this essay I examine how three media—music, text, and stuttering—interact and draw on each other in the scene of the Drunken Poets in the dramatick opera, The Fairy Queen, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Following the stage directions and final lyrics in the scene, I refer to this scene as the plural Drunken Poets [End Page 65] rather than the singular Drunken Poet.) The various media and their interactions in this scene interrogate the function and identity of the poet figure and of Restoration poetics, revealing the dynamic and complementary expressions of interacting media. My analysis proceeds in four parts. First, a review of the origins of The Fairy Queen and its Drunken Poets scene establishes the intermedial nature of the dramatick opera, and a survey of discipline-specific critical responses illustrates the need for a more interdisciplinary approach. Music, text, and stuttering are then discussed in turn as media forms. Throughout this essay I consider mediation not as the act of disbursing messages or specific content but, as Richard Grusin describes, “as the process, action, or event that generates or provides the conditions for the emergence of subjects and objects.”4 As Grusin goes on to say, and as this essay illustrates, mediation—a relational, generative, and ontological process—scales large and small and is closely tied to creation, whether that be the broader creation of a Restoration aesthetic or the creativity of producing a specific Restoration dramatick opera such as The Fairy Queen.5 I approach three types of mediation—music, text, and stuttering—as different and intertwined processes and actions within the dramatick opera. My sections on each medium take the form, respectively, of a musical analysis, a recovery of historical intertextuality, and an interpretation guided by disability and media studies. My mixture of methodological approaches thus mirrors the assortment and fragmentation that characterized the aesthetics of Restoration performance, especially dramatick opera, toward the end of revealing the pleasures of this aesthetic that have escaped many commentators. I show that, although The Fairy Queen may seem a failure as a textual work and may be merely passable as a musical work, it is a success as an intermedia work. In so doing, I hope to encourage future intermedial analysis of Restoration dramatick opera. Historical Origins and Critical Responses Explaining how the The Fairy Queen was conceived and received sets up the discussion of the different media that will follow. This dramatick opera premiered at the Dorset Garden Theater in May 1692 as an altered and heavily cut version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream interspersed...

Mercy and its close kin, pity, make numerous appearances in The Faerie Queene: many a fallen knight or distressed lady pleads for mercy in the course of the story; virtuous characters frequently feel compassion for others, and the narrator sometimes describes his own intense feelings of pity as he observes the plight of victimized women. The virtue of mercy is personified in two allegorical figures: Mercy in Book I's House of Holiness and Mercilla in Book V. Like most qualities explored in The Faerie Queene, mercy and pity are complex and nuanced, making Spenser's treatment of them at times seem contradictory: he shows both the efficacy and the danger of human acts of mercy; he characterizes pity as both a sign of nobility and a fatal weakness. As always in The Faerie Queene, context is important. Mercy means one thing in the context of holiness and something different in the context of justice. But throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser's exploration of earthly mercy reflects many of the issues discussed in Chapter One: the concern that mercy renders the giver vulnerable, and the anxiety that a queen's mercy, though the hallmark of a Christian monarch, might be an expression of effeminate weakness; the Protestant demand for more rigor, especially in matters of religion; the desire to praise mercy as a Christian virtue and avoid offending a queen who cherishes her reputation for clemency; and finally, the tension over whether a corporate masculine entity or the person of the female sovereign should be empowered to pardon or to punish.KeywordsEmotional DisplayVirtuous CharacterBook VersusTrue NobilityGreat CompassionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In at least one important respect, Spenser's critics have not been kind to him. Although they have extolled his pictorial imagination, explored energetically the allegorical dimension of his work, agreed (usually) that there was some kind of story that might be interesting, and most recently placed a major emphasis upon the imagistic texture of the poetry, critics have never taken seriously Spenser's use of narrative time in The Faerie Queene. Unlike the problem of time sequence in the plays of Shakespeare, where complex disparities have generated a long, and still continuing, critical debate, Spenser's peculiar narrative-time schemes have either caused no concern among his critics or have elicited a rather cursory dismissal as essentially 'vague' or somehow the kind of thing one would expect in reading a 'romance' such as The Faerie Queene. No critic has attempted to deal adequately with the problem – or even, for that matter, seen clearly its nature and scope. A typical critical response to the problem of narrative time in The Faerie Queene is that of C.S. Lewis, who observes that there 'is no situation in The Faerie Queene, no when or where. Similar remarks can be found in other critics. Northrop Frye, for example, concludes that the time-scheme of The Faerie Queene is 'curiously foreshortened' suggesting, therefore, a 'world of dream and wishfullment, like the fairy lands of Shakespeare's comedies.' W.B.C. Watkins' and Graham Hough' have made similar points. A striking instance of critical neglect occurs in Arnold Williams' study of the sixth book of The Faerie Queene. Nowhere in his study does Williams deal with the radically disparate time-schemes of the sixth book although these are among the most puzzling in the entire work. Only Hough has made an effort to think through the implications of equating the 'vague' time-schemes of The Faerie Queene to those of dreams, and his analysis, as I shall try to indicate, is far from satisfactory.

The Outlaw-KnightLaw's Violence in The Faerie Queene, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Dark Knight Rises Cynthia Nazarian (bio) In Christopher Nolan's 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises, the hero begins as an outlaw, and an outlaw masquerades as a hero. Their names, Wayne and Bane, rhyme; they belong to the same secret martial order; both wear masks and love the same woman. As the plot unfolds these figures move between the same spaces, appropriating each other's weapons and motivations. Although the film embeds them in an allegorical discourse in which one represents justice and the other uncontrolled violence, their differences are often surprisingly minor. Legal and political theorists as varied as Walter Benjamin, Robert Cover, and Giorgio Agamben have asserted the inseparability of law and violence. In the modern state, Benjamin claims, "all violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving" (287). How, then, does the state's violence distinguish itself from others, and how does it come to legitimize its own vision of law as "justice"? The problem is far older than Nolan's film. This essay explores a figure I term the "outlaw-knight," a curious hybrid who reappears from the early days of modern statehood to uncover a fundamental indeterminacy at the heart of state-sanctioned law and violence. The outlaw-knight is a fantasy of political nostalgia, one that reifies the processes and problems of modern state formation by turning to an idealized form of feudalism. This figure marks periods of political change with a backward-looking critique of modern statehood through the figure of the individual aristocratic hero. It appears in the early modern period notably as the Knight of Justice in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), written at a pivotal point of nostalgia for a feudal aristocratic past amid the centralization of the sixteenth-century Tudor monarchy. The outlaw-knight persists in modern cultural forms like the [End Page 204] American Western and superhero films, reifying the conflicts between violence and the law in the modern democratic state. A look at Book 5 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) will illustrate how, in varied historical and political circumstances, the outlaw-knight returns to mediate clashes between rival laws, rival forms of violence, and rival symbolic interpretations, asserting the hybridity and indeterminacy of the state's means for dealing with threats to its sovereignty. As an early modernist, I want to argue for the importance of addressing precursors and histories of both political concepts and aesthetic figurations in modern cultural forms. Parsing their politics without also examining the past that these works call up and strategically idealize or misrepresent provides only a partial view of their artistry and political maneuvering. Although there are other examples of the outlaw-knight, I have chosen these three very different texts because of fundamental similarities in their genre and mode. First, all three of these works politicize nostalgia, idealizing a premodern past in order to criticize their contemporary politics. Furthermore, they romanticize the same past, the European chivalric Middle Ages. Second, these three works rely on fundamental similarities in genre and narrative technique, which they derive from that premodernity. They are nostalgic not only in their themes and figures but, much more intrinsically, at the level of their form. The epic-romance genre of The Faerie Queene, shared by the two films, particularly suits reflection on statehood in transition or under threat. Combining the wandering narratives, amorous escapades, aristocratic subjects, and heroic ascendancies of romance1 with the nation-building, collectivizing concerns of epic, The Faerie Queene's mixed genre is inherently backward looking.2 The heroism of the aristocratic individual is the central drama of all three works considered here, told in the form of quest narratives that deliberately project modern political concerns onto medievalized but equally politically freighted narrative landscapes. Third, all three of these works write epic-romance in the allegorical mode: their narratives follow emblematic dynamics in which characters are clearly referential, figuring larger social and political ideas.3 I propose that Ford's and...

Reviewed by: Spenserian Moments by Gordon Teskey Paul J. Hecht Spenserian Moments. By Gordon Teskey. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2019. xiii+529 pp. $45; £36.95. ISBN 978–0–674–98844–6. Spenserian Moments collects essays from a thirty-year period, many substantially revised, into a volume that also contains approximately five chapters of entirely new material. The opening section of the book, where the new writing is concentrated, gives us a chance to see this esteemed critic of Milton and Spenser approach topics that we have not seen him approach before. Because many of the collected and revised essays have stood the test of time and deserve to be better known, the volume will therefore be valuable to Spenser scholars, to scholars relatively new to Spenser, and also to teachers and students. The last two kinds of reader may be drawn to Gordon Teskey because he is an extremely resourceful analogist, who supplies a great quantity of ways of framing and conceptualizing the workings of, especially, The Faerie Queene. Some of the best of these analogies—mountains with 'plenty of weather' (p. 12), or a chemical quincunx with freely floating electrons (p. 4)—are born of comparisons with Paradise Lost, the poem that has been the other steady focus of Teskeyʼs career. The centrality and power of his analogies show off Teskeyʼs devotion to teaching, which also explains the care and quality of his writing, learned but generous. Innovative analogy also shows off an approach to criticism that has much in common with the poetry he writes about. Since Teskey sees The Faerie Queene as a poem fundamentally and brilliantly resistant to scheme, he has allowed himself to use an approach built on 'moments', gathering a constellation of analyses and thought rather than a strict argumentative sequence. The result is consistently satisfying, [End Page 279] often surprising, and at times provoking. A couple of highlights of the former two: an essay on 'thinking moments' shows Teskey in dazzling form, taking energy from Romantic views of Spenser, and aesthetic theory that extends from Plato to Hegel, Heidegger, and Adorno; an essay on death and allegory contains an unforgettable reading of the near-death of the Knight of Temperance in Book ii of 'The Faerie Queene. Where there is provocation, for me it comes from places where Teskey has allowed things to get either a little loose or a little too strict. Teskey can be brilliant about the sexual dynamics of Spenser, using gender as a large-scale structuring analogy for 'The Faerie Queene early in the book. However gender and sexuality do not reside in his work on Spenser in the same way that, say, Irish studies does—which has given us an excellent chapter in which he engages with this major area of new Spenser scholarship of the last few decades. So some remarks about women and sexuality—e.g. Acrasia, Elizabeth Boyle—are made as though there is not ongoing thinking about these topics as fierce as there is about Spenser and Ireland. Meanwhile, on the slightly too strict side of things, Teskey alludes to the sexual dynamics of the Aeneid as though that were a settled matter and not a site of ongoing debate. I will allow myself to pick one more bone: in the chapter on colonial allegories in Paris, an unexpected and delightful Spenserianʼs tour guide to the city, he disputes a manifesto made on behalf of non-Western works of art that was part of the ongoing effort by Paris to address its colonial past and its continuing status as capital of global art. Teskey is incensed by the way the manifesto conflates the rights of human beings and those of works of art, a conflation which he calls 'the height of absurdity' (p. 365). Nonetheless, I wonder: the decades Teskey has given to becoming a reader adequate to The Faerie Queene, an accomplishment so richly on display throughout this book, seem to reflect a devotion to art that is at the very least comparable to what a human being deserves. Why should not it be an appropriate task to treat works of art with...

The Queenship Re-considered: Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Queen Elizabeth

This study explores how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and Milton among many others appropriated Spenser’s long and shorter poems for creating comedy, parody, and satire. Their appropriations, which were widely influential on communities of readers, writers, and intertextual networks from 1590–1660, left an abiding impression of Spenser as a biting satirist. Spenser’s Afterlife from Shakespeare to Milton: 'The Faerie Queene' as Intertextual Environment is the first study to combine the reception history of The Faerie Queene with ecocriticism, animal studies, and posthumanist tenets of vital materialism and the power of things. This poem functions as a powerful, nonhuman agent that transforms how readers respond to their environments. The Faerie Queene and its afterlives move readers to perceive flaws in political, social, and religious figureheads and institutions to envision better ones.