Daemonic Allegory: The Elements in Late Spenser, Late Shakespeare, and Irigaray

Abstract

Luce Irigaray reactivates for postmodern philosophy terms from the presocratics on the elements and elemental motion. After considering what this move allows her to think, this essay turns to an Irigarayan notion of elemental motion in relation to Mutabilitie and Shakespeare’s Tempest—for the playwright has read the 1609 Faerie Queene closely, and responds to it. All three writers think out implications of personification allegory in relation to temporality, narrative sequence, and the theme of justice. Spenser’s mythic allegory deploys ancient Stoic allegory, by which the vitality and superabundant will of deities is transformed into a physics taking the cosmos as pervaded by divine energies; The Tempest chooses this as mythic allegory’s most attractive form of survival. It is precisely elemental motion as the daemonic that Shakespeare brings into drama from Spenser. So some allegory is daemonic, not in Angus Fletcher’s sense of representing fixity of character, but in an almost opposite sense of structu...