The Bower of Bliss and Armida's Palace

Abstract

SINCE Koeppel in 1889 called attention to the fact that the Bower of Bliss (The Faerie Queene, II, xii) owes much to Armida's palace (Gerusalemme liberata, xv-xvi),l it has been customary to assume that Spenser merely imitated Tasso in this instance, and not always very skillfully.2 Ernest de Selincourt remarked in 1912 that, when Spenser borrowed from the Italian poet, as in his description of the Bower of Bliss... he had no need to change the spirit of his model.3 In 1936 Alberto Castelli went even further; Spenser, he wrote, seppe copiare il suo modello.4 Such facile generalizations seem to have had two principal causes. One of the obstacles to a correct understanding of Spenser's methods has been the wide acceptance of the notion that he was at heart of Acrasia's party; one wishes that Mr. C. S. Lewis' admirable discussion of the Bower in the Allegory of Love5 had laid that ghost. The other source of difficulty has been the fact that no one seems to have undertaken a close analysis of the differences between the Bower and Armida's palace. This paper attempts such an analysis; I shall examine certain salient changes which Spenser introduced into the material he borrowed from Tasso in the Bower of Bliss. My discussion will be concerned with three principal topics-structure, the treatment of the nature of sensuality and of its cure, and the theme of art versus nature.6