Spenser's dance of the graces and the Ptolemaic Universe

Abstract

In Spenser's version of the Dance, an external ring of maidens surrounds the Graces, who turn surround a fourth Grace. The narrator takes us in the midst of the hundred dancers only to proceed to the middest of the Graces. Additionally, Spenser inserts Colin Clout, who plays his pipe and magically animates the beautiful Dance. Readers have often wondered why Spenser would complicate his Dance by arranging one hundred dancers around the Three Graces and by placing a damsel the center, all under the control of a single artist figure (who surfaces from the pages of The Shepheardes Calender). We will argue that Spenser has complicated his Dance because he is constructing a schematic model of the Ptolemaic universe. And, because Colin Clout is generally recognized as a figure of the poet, we will suggest that Spenser uses the correspondence between the Dance and the universe to illustrate both the cosmological function and the magical operation of the art of poetry, keeping with thinking current the Renaissance.3