Colin Clout Research Articles

Toadstool Poetics: Alliteration inThe Faerie Queene

If, in The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout’s evocation of the “formall rowmes” of the honeycomb suggests Spenser’s pursuit of a rational, classical poetics, then what are we to make of their displacement by “the grieslie Todestoole growne”? This article proposes that Spenser’s usurping “Todestoole”—as a twin image to Harvey’s “Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo”—fixes in view The Faerie Queene’s deviations from honeycomb order, and specifically its proliferous alliteration. It shows how sixteenth-century censure of alliteration was grounded in the tenets of classical rhetoric; it then explores the evidence for an incipient awareness and, eventually, qualified acceptance of the role played by alliteration in vernacular meter. Having in this way demonstrated that alliteration, in the period’s own literary-critical discourse, was more vulgar “Todestoole” than Apolline honeycomb, this article offers a reading of alliteration in The Faerie Queene as generative of Spenser’s “toadstool poetics.” Reducible neither to narrative nor metric functions, Spenser’s alliterative patterns—entangled, irregular, and prone to excess—habitually overrun forms of honeycomb containment.

Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England

Paper Monsters: Persona and Literary Culture in Elizabethan England

Colin Clout (Again)

This essay begins by asking what exactly it means to “know” Colin Clout in his several and striking appearances in Spenser’s poems. It goes on to consider the help in answering this question that a...

Why Colin Clout Came Back: English Reformation Literature and Edmund Spenser’s Late Work

Why Colin Clout Came Back: English Reformation Literature and Edmund Spenser’s Late Work

Oenone and Colin Clout

Spenser's Shepheardes Calender was still a new work, not even yet publicly acknowledged by its author, when George Peele made the rather surprising decision to co-opt its central character and reanimate Colin Clout onstage in The Araygnement of Paris. This article contends that Peele's bold importation of a well-known Elizabethan literary persona into a familiar Trojan land- and story-scape may offer fresh insight into the early reception of Spenser's pastoral work. The recent tendency has been to emphasize the Virgilian, also the Theocritean or continental Renaissance, precedents for Spenser's pastoralism, but Peele's dramatic revivification of Colin suggests that Elizabethan audiences may also have sensed pastoral patterns and precedents for Spenser's work in other sources including Ovid's Heroides. Peele's dramatic reinterpretation of Spenser's Colin, it is argued, underscores and explores the affective commonalities between this shepherd and Ovid's Oenone, thereby linking the Spenserian swain's plaintive mode with the pastoral elegaics of Heroides 5.

Uncommon tongues: eloquence and eccentricity in the English Renaissance

Introduction: Antisocial Orpheus Chapter 1. Good Space and Time: Humanist Pedagogy and the Uses of Estrangement Chapter 2. The Commonplace and the Far-Fetched: Mapping Eloquence in the English Art of Rhetoric Chapter 3. A World to See: Euphues's Wayward Style Chapter 4. Pastoral in Exile: Colin Clout and the Poetics of English Alienation Chapter 5. Conquering Feet: Tamburlaine and the Measure of English Coda: Eccentric Shakespeare Notes Index Acknowledgments

The Precarious Poet in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe

This essay argues that the structure of Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Againe is centripetal, radiating out from its central moment of devotion to Rosalind and bounded by two myths of language. The first myth is Bregog, who demonstrates the danger of too little self-declaration; the second myth is Stesichorus, who demonstrates the danger of too much speech. The poet-figure Colin Clout considers and reconsiders how best to speak and his relationship to the poetic word; along with the poet, the reader considers and reconsiders as well.

“Who Knows Not Colin Clout?”: Spenser and the Poets of the Mid-Twentieth Century

In 1954 Professor William Blissett sent out letters to a hundred living poets, mostly those represented in the Faber Book of Modern Verse and its sequel, the Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse, ...

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

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. …

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's New Arcadia

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's <i>New Arcadia</i>

Pastoral in Exile: Spenser and the Poetics of English Alienation

This essay argues that Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender invents a poetics of deliberate estrangement, capitalizing on the unpromising fact of England’s remoteness from the classical world. Although it is understood both in the Renaissance and in modern criticism as the natural starting point for a poetic career, pastoral is a singularly inhospitable genre for an English poet: in Virgil’s first eclogue Britain appears as the antithesis of pastoral contentment, a place of exile and colonial abjection. By treating English as a quasi-foreign tongue—and adopting the errant and alienated persona of Colin Clout—Spenser repeats this marginalizing gesture, discovering in distance itself a means of reinvigorating vernacular poetry. Ultimately, his insistence on the virtues of estrangement allows Spenser to find a place for pastoral and for Colin Clout in England’s own abject colonial sphere, beyond the Irish pale.

Skeltonic Anxiety and Rumination in The Shepheardes Calender

Colin Clout, the central figure in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender, is both poet and poetic subject at different points in the poem, and the anxiety of that disjunction becomes a central focus of the poem itself. The Shepheardes Calender is fascinated with and tense about the boundaries between author, character, and work. In examining these ambiguities, Spenser aligns himself closely with John Skelton who also struggles with the relationship between poetic body and physical body.

The Tyranny of Temporality: Edmund Spenser, Desire and the Already Written Text

AbstractThis paper seeks to example the temporal dissonances between acts of imagination or creation and their representation in writing. What one can imagine in its synchronic fullness resists recovery in the diachronic, word by word act of writing, leading to frustration as well as the continued attempt and continued failure to get it right in writing. The artist/scientist tries to navigate this precarious space constantly. This seems to be precisely what Edmund Spenser is getting at in Canto X of Book VI of The Faerie Queene which describes Colin Clout's Vision on Mount Acidale, its interruption and interpretation. I offer it as a model of the tyranny of temporality.

Baffling the Blatant Beast: Robert Persons' Anti-Appellant Rhetoric, 1601-1602

In Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, BookVI (published in 1596), Sir Calidore, the patron knight of courtesy, is commissioned to baffle the Blatant Beast of slander and repair the damage he has caused. In an ecclesiastical context, it appears that Spenser primarily identifies the Blatant Beast with iconoclasm: Through all estates he found that he had past, In which he many massacres had left, And to the Clergy now come at last; In which such spoile, such hauocke, and such theft He wrought, that thence all goodnesse he bereft, That endlesse were to tell. The Elfin Knight, Who now no place besides vnsought had left, At length into a Monastere did light, Where he him found despoyling all with maine and might.1 There is an allusion here to the despoiling of the monasteries by Henry VIII, in which slander-a cynical expose, as his critics maintained, of monkish corruption-played a central role. But Spenser, writing at much the same time as Richard Hooker's defense of tradition against the Puritans Walter Travers and Thomas Cartwright, is also concerned about a mean spirit of detraction, a ruthless determination to leave nothing standing of the old order.2 And behind this he detects something even more comprehensively threatening. Book VI of The Faerie Queene takes Spenser's meditation on the nature and conditions of moral virtue into new territory. It is not enough, he seems to be arguing, for a person to be righteous, for temperance to go beyond mediating between extremes; it is not enough to harness natural energies and respond to the beauty deep down things, to unite with the like-minded and resist public and private evil. Such virtues are explored with great subtlety in the first five books of the poem. Book Six implies that they are limited in their power unless recognition is super-added. The beauty of holiness needs to be respected, treated with courtesy, or it will not be able to radiate out and transform the world. That is why envy, slander, detraction, the spirit of carping and faultfinding, are so destructive. Spenser is at pains to register the fragility of his vision of goodness. Not even Calidore, approaching the dance of the Graces, is sensitive enough to prevent them vanishing. Colin Clout, the figure of the poet himself, breaks his pipe in frustration.3 Robert Persons the Jesuit not, one would think, a kindred spirit with the convinced Protestant Edmund Spenser, but he shared the horror of slander as a form of iconoclasm, the destruction of an image. Unlike Spenser, he himself a prime target of a smear campaign, so his strictures on detraction were even less disinterested,4 but his selfvindication in the fierce appellant controversy of 1598-1602 makes for a fascinating case study of engaging with the Blatant Beast. In March, 1598, the Cardinal Protector of England, Enrico Caetani, proposed that the persecuted Church of Rome in England should be placed under the authority of an archpriest. George Blackwell appointed, and the Jesuit superior, Henry Garnet, reported that there was general acceptance among the clergy. Perhaps. But a relatively small but determined group of secular priests-just how representative they were of a wider feeling it is hard to establish-protested against the imposition, as they saw it, of an unwanted and unfamiliar form of church government.5 Fundamentally, they were disaffected with the Jesuits, whom they believed to be behind the move and would stand to gain from it. That disaffection, in turn, stemmed from perceived Jesuit domination of the English seminaries, Jesuit promotion of Spanish political interest (incurring the wrath of the English authorities on all Catholics), and Jesuit involvement in the notorious Wisbech Stirs. Father William Weston, Garnet's predecessor as Jesuit superior, had entered the community of jailed Catholic clerics at Wisbech Castle in 1588; in December, 1594, he withdrew to his room in disgust over the lax behavior of some of his fellow inmates, and the community split. …

Sir Calidore, Melibee et Colin Clout : Mélancolie et émergence de la voix du poète dans The Faerie Queene d’Edmund Spenser, Livre VI, chants 9 et 10

Towards the end of the 1590s, pastoral writing as a genre is used as a humanistic medium for a metaphysical quest for salvation in this world. The descriptive and narrative pauses in cantos 9 and 10 of Book VI of The Faerie Queene are reflections of an introspective drive in the epic flow of the romance - the poet pauses to reflect on the contemporary colonial policy led in Ireland as well as on the nature of the courtly knight. Such are the « tapestries » or descriptive pauses in the storia offered to Calidore by the two shepherds Melibee and Colin Clout, which belong to what Paul Alpers described as « Spenser’s late pastorals ». In these two cantos, the narrative becomes reflexive, as the voices melt into one, that of the poet obviously torn between his life at Court and his political life in Ireland. This article will focus on the motives of the poet, both philosophical, political and aesthetic, in particular through a study of the unexpected turn of Book VI. As will be apparent, Spenser adopts here a melancholy and dramatic style, which I claim could be called effeminate. Through this mode of writing emerges his paradoxical attachment to a court-life he knows is corrupt and artificial, while his depiction of the shepherds’ rural life is tinged with a melancholy nostalgia for an Edenic life which is no more.

Marginal Presence, Lyric Resonance, Epic Absence:Troilus and Criseydeand/inThe Shepheardes Calender

The Shepheardes Calender suggests a conscious dialogue with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Immerito’s echo of the envoy of the Troilus in his dedicatory poem and Epilogue and in E.K.’s (mis)quotation of Pandarus’s admonition to Troilus (“Uncouthe, unkiste”) as he introduces the New Poet. These marginal allusions invite a larger consideration of Spenser’s relations with the Troilus. Colin Clout, as well as Immerito, is “uncouthe, unkiste,” and the Petrarchan impasse which threatens his artistic career resonates interestingly against lovelorn Troilus’s own rehearsal of the first English translation of a Petrarchan sonnet. The Shepheardes Calender provides an alternative to Colin’s narcissistic lyricism in its anticipation of a “famous flight” to epic; this enacts a telling revision of Troilus’s very different, post-mortem “flight” (which triggers Chaucer’s epilogue). Chaucer’s roman antique teases the proto-Virgilian Spenser with an English epic precursor that never was—and perhaps renders all the more significant his later enfolding and completion of another Chaucerian romance within Book IV of his “poem historicall.” The Faerie Queene’s reinvocation of the English Tityrus revises, furthermore, E.K.’s brokering of Immerito: Spenser now recanonizes an alienated, “uncouthe, unkiste” Chaucer.

Colin Clout and The Shepherd of the Ocean

Despite increased critical interest in the political and literary relations between Spenser and Ralegh, surprisingly little close attention has been paid, first, to Ralegh’s side of the picture and, second, to the vexed question of the precise intertextual relations between Colin Clout and The 11th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia. While readers have long recognized that Colin’s brief account of the “lamentable lay” sung to him by the “straunge shepherd” in lines 163–71 of Colin Clout may well refer to Ocean to Scinthia, the uncertain dating of the two poems has led most recent critics and editors to be cautious. I argue that in fact Colin does refer to Ralegh’s poem, that Ralegh’s poem in turn engages Spenser’s, and that both should be read as embodying a “dialogue” carried out over a period of time. In particular, the two poems echo each other in their handling of the Neoplatonic idea of love, and especially in the way Ocean repeatedly scrutinizes Colin’s too-easy reliance on Neoplatonic idealis...

Rereading Colin’s Broken Pipe: Spenser and the Problem of Patronage

Why does Colin Clout break his pipe in the Shepheardes Calender? Diverging from earlier answers to that vexed question, this study pieces back together the now scattered and disregarded antecedents...

Salvaging Spenser: colonialism, culture and identity

Preface - Acknowledgements - Introduction: Salvaging Spenser - 'Who knowes not Colin Clout?': The Shepheardes Calender as Colonial Text - Spenser's Irish English: Language and Identity in Early Modern Ireland - Varieties of Englishness: Planting a New Culture Beyond the Pale - 'Who knowes not Arlo-hill?': Changing Places in The Faerie Queene - 'And nought but presed gras where she had Iyen': Royal Absenteeism and Viceregal Verses - How Milton and Some Contemporaries read the View - The View from Scotland: Combing the Celtic Fringe - Spensership: a Judicial Review - Select Bibliography: Spenser and Ireland - Notes - Index

Literature, Politics, and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance

Preface Introduction: the nation and public literature in the sixteenth century 1. A Skelton in the closet: English literary identity betwixt and between 2. John Bale and the time of the nation 3. Literature and history - a mirror for magistrates 4. Towards a national form: rhetoric and literary theory from Wilson to Puttenham 5. Whose bloody country is it anyway? Sir Philip Sidney, the nation and the public 6. 'Who knowes not Colin Clout?': the permanent exile of Edmund Spenser Notes Bibliography Index.