Spenser and the Epithalamic Convention

Abstract

\WS HEN Spenser wrote his in 1594, he was acutely conscious that his poem was conventional-that is, that it stood in a given relationship to certain past poems and, once published, would be assimilated with them in their relationship to future poems. His conception of past epithalamia was different from his conception, for example, of the sources of the Prothalamion, a title which he invented. He would have been aware, moreover, that not all poems for weddings were epithalamia, and that not even all the poems entitled Epithalamion fitted strictly into the convention. I shall here sketch briefly the history of the genre, describe the convention as Spenser received it, and attempt to show what in his poem is conventional and what is not, adding interpretative comments that seem relevant. Although descriptions of a wedding procession involving songs appear in Homer (Iliad, XVIII) and Hesiod (The Shield of Herakles), the ancestry of the epithalamic convention goes back to Sappho.' There is evidence that earlier Greek poets, such as Hesiod and Alcman, wrote nuptial poems; but Sappho's fragments are the earliest which have survived. Brief nuptial songs appear in Aristophanes' Peace and The Birds, and in other Greek plays, but the next true epithalamion is the eighteenth eclogue of Theocritus, written for the wedding of Helen and Menelaus.