Reassessing Ellrodt: Critias and the Fowre Hymnes in The Faerie Queene

Abstract

AMONG SPENSER'S SURVIVING writings, Fowre Hymnes are his most discursive philosophical and theological reflections. Hence their position his canon is analogous to De Doctrina Christiana's Milton's, and yet they may well have more broad interpretive value for Spenserians than that treatise does for Miltonists. Since Paradise Lost is an explicitly biblical narrative about Fall, topics of its allegories are relatively clear. But romantic epic, even basic access to its allegorism is much more encoded. There, a knight's encounter with an infant whose hands are stained and whose mother has just committed suicide expresses theological implications of concupiscence, and so subtly that first recorded notices of this allegory, though now widely accepted, date from around I960.' Likewise Beige episode's allegorical engagements with Protestant apocalyptic historiography began to receive comment only around 1991.2 relatively explicit writings have great interest for hermeneutics of his Faery, and publication of Hymnes 1596 closely attended that of The Faerie Queene's expansion, as if both may have some correlative significance. Yet relationship of his hymnic and heroic texts remains relatively unexplored.The energetic debates Milton studies about De Doctrina and its relation to Milton's major poems indicate magnitude of this Spenserian lacuna, for relatively few studies of The Faerie Queene mention Hymnes, and fewer still explore their possibilities of interpretive comparison.2 Yet Hymnes could help clarify faery allegorism by indicating potential philosophical and theological subjects and illuminating doctrinal resonances of his diction, tropes, and imagery. They have particular value for study of conceptions of love and beauty, Platonism, and poetic theology.The chief deterrent to such investigation has been Robert Ellrodt's Neoplatonism Poetry of Spenser, for its general argument dissociates Hymnes from The Faerie Queene to advance an interdependent enterprise of belittling . . . Platonic influence on all poetry published before his hymnic tetralogy.4 I am not concerned here with Ellrodt's account of former relations between Christianity and Platonism, nor with his categories for assessing them, nor with his reading of hymns themselves-all of which others have contested.3 Nor do I address his recent essay involving Platonism (2005), for it does not change his book's positions at issue here.1.Whereas Spenser attributes first two hymns to the greener times of my youth his dedicatory epistle, Ellrodt's Neoplatonism claims poet wrote all four in their present shape . . . some time after publication of Colin Clout 1595, and, all likelihood, after The Faerie Queene I-VI had been entered Stationer's Register 1596: hence after 20 January that year.8 Spenser's most distinctly Platonic poems, as Ellrodt considers Hymnes, thus all belong to later years of his life (23). Though conceding that initial pair evince direct knowledge of learned Renaissance Platonists such as Marsilio Ficino (e.g., 23, 118), Ellrodt assumes that is a new acquisition for Spenser, largely gained after completing his heroic poem's second installment.v Until then, that critic's view, poet's notions of Platonism were basically medieval, with vague infusions of Renaissance Platonic esthetics derived from such so-called popularizers as Castiglione, Pietro Bembo, Louis Le Roy, and Pierre de la Primaudaye.1 This theory requires Spenser to have shunned almost all Plato's dialogues, because nearly any direct knowledge of them beyond first third of Timaeus counts as learned Renaissance Platonism. Accordingly, Ellrodt doubts whether [Spenser] had any first hand acquaintance with them, even Latin translation (115; my emphasis).12 From his standpoint, Hymnes' interpretive relevance to previously published poems can only be dubious at best, and so is that of virtually all Plato's dialogues, all ancient Neoplatonic texts, and all their learned Renaissance elaborations. …