Faerie Queene Research Articles

Fluidity and ‘Animalism’ in Preparing Purcell

In the Clark Library at the University of California Los Angeles, there is a 1691 copy of the printed playbook for Dryden's An Evening's Love: or, The Mock-Astrologer (London: Henry Herringman), which was used as a promptbook in revivals of the play at Drury Lane between 1705 and 1717 (Edward A. Langhans, Eighteenth[-]Century British and Irish Promptbooks: A Descriptive Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 44–45). Amongst other alterations in it, songs are excised and musical flourishes are added (a digitized version is available at https://archive.org/details/dryden_mock_astr_clarklib; see, for example, page 20). It is a comforting object that – when reassessing the recordings made in 2019 by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort of Purcell's dramatick operas King Arthur (Winged Lion SIGCD 589, 2019) and The Fairy Queen (Winged Lion SIGCD 615, 2020), for which I performed as a bass violinist and prepared the editions – reassures me that our processes were well grounded.

Faerie Queene Reads Best Fast

Faerie Queene Reads Best Fast

The British Royals in Australia

The British Royals in Australia

Spenser with Bruegel: Authority and Punishment in The Faerie Queene, Book V

Spenser with Bruegel: Authority and Punishment in <i>The Faerie Queene</i>, Book V

Evolutionary Science, Empire, and Disenchantment in May Kendall’s That Very Mab

Abstract One of the more remarkable satires of English society and thought of the 1880s came in the guise of a fairy story, That Very Mab (1885), in which the eponymous fairy queen is driven out of Samoa by imperialists and on her return to England finds it overrun by evolutionists and the proponents of modern material progress. Written by the satirist and popular Punch contributor May Kendall, That Very Mab excoriates Victorian England by satirizing its passion for explanatory frameworks, including scientific materialism, philistinism, nihilism, novel metaphysics, evolutionary progress, and imperialism, all subjects that Kendall also attacked in her comic verse (published between 1885 and 1894). Kendall has recently received critical attention for her satiric poems about evolutionary science, materialism, and modern disenchantment. While That Very Mab’s satiric concerns in many ways dovetail with those of these poems, the wider scope of its fantastic narrative allows Kendall to enact a more sustained assault on the concept of empire and its justifications from evolutionary anthropology. Highly skeptical of teleologies that promote a belief in the evolutionary progress of humankind, her fairy fantasy links evolutionary anthropology to the dishonest blandishments, corruption, and violence of imperial adventures.

The Contingency of Form in Renaissance Poetics

AbstractMetaphrasis is an exercise of the English humanist schoolroom that harbors both a theory of form and a method of reading. From the perspective of metaphrasis, the central question one asks of a form is not what it is. Metaphrasis encourages us to ask, instead: What is the range of this poem's formal possibilities? What variety of forms might this poem take? What variety of forms should this poem take? Or what variety of forms would this poem take under a specific set of alternative conditions, whether we conceive of those conditions along historical, aesthetic, or ethical axes? In this essay, I take up a single stanza from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), and I argue that where form establishes the parameters of possibility for a poem, the critical activity of metaphrasis permits us to imagine the world of the poem otherwise.

Edmund Spenser’s Sense of an Ending

Abstract Throughout his Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser depicts himself as a “poet magus” who can peer behind the veil of Nature in order to discover a “secret teaching” of ethical and political virtue that he will impart to his readers. His readers are thus tasked with the chore of reforming the fallen world through the creation of an empire under Elizabeth. However, in “The Two Cantos of Mutabilitie,” Spenser seems to relinquish this vision. Indeed, Mutabilitie, on one level serves as a mirroring figure of Spenser’s own ambitions. Mutabilitie’s claims for the fragility and mutability of (temporal) existence are prefigured throughout The Faerie Queene, but in “The Two Cantos,” they take center stage. Spenser’s depiction of Nature’s triumph over Mutabilitie provides a lesson for Spenser himself, and he appears to reject his bombastic claims of knowledge as well as his projected imperial vision for a position of humble supplication before God, whose Providence is the ultimately the most powerful force in The Faerie Queene.

Handling Islamophobia in Edmund Spenser’s Poem The Faerie Queen

Being a growing religion throughout the world, Islam isincreasingly becoming the ghost which threatens to shatter the establishednorms of the Western thinking. Islamophobia, hence, grew as a doctrine whichdesignates fear and antagonisms towards Islam as a religion and a system ofcultural behavior. It has been widely represented in English literaturethroughout various literary ages. This paper is concerned with Islamophobia inEdmund Spenser‟s epic poem The Faerie Queene (1595), which is rankedamong the greatest works in the history of English literature. Spenser employsthis work to represent his biased attitude to Christianity and to portray thetyrannous reign of Muslims. The paper argues that Islamophobia, as a concept,is recently conjured; however it is very old as an ideology in the history of thehuman race since it represents the Western mindset which is based on theprejudice and hatred of the „other.‟ The faerie Queen, which is set in themedieval ages, reflects a religious antagonism towards Muslims who achievedgreat victories over the Crusaders in Jerusalem. The paper, for this reason,questions whether the term of Islamophobia which is a modern one is fit todescribe the prejudiced tone against Muslims in a sixteenth century work. Itemploys Edward Said‟s discourse of the binary opposition, which has beentackled in his outstanding book Orientalism, as a theoretical framework. It alsocomes across his book covering Islam in order to argue that Islam has beenportrayed as a „form of heresy‟, synonymous with terrorism and religioushysteria.

‘Triumph, victorious Love’: Le Triomphe de l’Amour (1681) and English dramatic opera

Abstract The French entertainment Le Triomphe de l’Amour was premiered at Louis XIV’s court in January 1681. A revised version was staged at the Paris Opéra in May 1681 with additional music and new scenic effects. Thomas Betterton modelled the final masque from his dramatic opera The Prophetess (1690) on the Paris version of the work, borrowing its theme and spectacular multi-stage machine effects, and some lyrics. Roger Savage has shown that the sleep scene from The Fairy Queen (1692) has ideas and text in common with Le Triomphe de l’Amour. A scenic effect in The Fairy Queen is also derived from the work. Given the literary and scenic borrowings from Le Triomphe de l’Amour in both dramatic operas, and Betterton’s role in adapting The Prophetess, he was almost certainly responsible for the Fairy Queen adaptation too. Some of Purcell’s music for The Fairy Queen emulates Lully’s music for the French work. Purcell borrows instrumental effects, stylistic features, and melodic and harmonic material. He may also have taken inspiration from the work in his treatment of the instruments in The Prophetess, though the influence of Grabu is more strongly apparent in this work. These borrowings provide further evidence that aemulatio remained core to both musical and literary composition—and was also applicable to theatrical staging—in late 17th-century London. Le Triomphe de l’Amour is an important work in the history of French musical theatre. Part of its legacy, in addition, is its substantial influence on English dramatic opera.

The Audiences of Francis Beaumont’s THE KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE

This essay sets out to examine critically Beaumont’s representation of different audiences in his play The Knight of the Burning Pestle. The dominant critical tradition has it that the play is even-handed in its criticism of audiences, but the argument here is that different audience tastes are pitted against each other. The dominant motif is that treated seriously in, for example, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and it is this tradition and its various deployments by different social groups that is placed under scrutiny in the play. As a result it is an established dramatic form that is placed under scrutiny as different audiences seek to appropriate it for their own purposes.

Colonial Cacophony and Early Modern Trans Studies: Spenser with Julia Serano

This essay reads Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) in conversation with Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl (2007). I examine the imperial objective that shapes dynastic destiny in The Faerie Queene, locating it within Spenser’s chronicles of British history and prophesies of British empire and Britomart’s rescue of Artegall from Radigund and restoration of male rule. What Spenser’s racial and colonial project shares with Serano’s theorization of transmisogyny is that both seek to transmute cacophony into ordered hierarchy, whether of innocence or injury. Putting a sixteenth-century Protestant colonial administrator and a twenty-first-century trans writer and activist into transhistorical conversation, I propose, yields new insights into the practices of early modern trans studies. How can we as scholars respond to a record of European violence while remaining cognizant that our own critical practices may inadvertently reproduce the colonial mindsets and racial erasures we consciously repudiate?

“Inwardly Dismayde”: Spenser with Gilles Deleuze

This article considers Spenserian allegory in light of the ontology and epistemology of the post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Drawing on Deleuze’s interpretation of Baruch Spinoza, I compare the characters of Spenser’s poem to Deleuzean affects, differential intensities that come into being through their varying relations on a “plane of immanence.” Where influential recent arguments have characterized allegorical materiality in The Faerie Queene in terms of deadness and aesthetic emptiness, I will instead emphasize the immanent vitality and generativity of matter in Spenser’s poem. Entering into Deleuzean Becomings as they encounter other bodies in the differential field Spenser calls “Faerie land,” the denizens of Spenser’s Faerie, I will argue, produce affective significance in excess of the delimiting violence of allegorical abstraction. This excess, finally, opens the possibility for our own divergent encounters with the poem—for readings that bring Spenser into differential relation with thinkers of our own historical era.

“But were it not … ”: Spenser with Kwame Anthony Appiah

Edmund Spenser was a foundational apologist for European colonialism, while Kwame Anthony Appiah is among the most forceful anticolonialist thinkers of our present era. The ethical theories offered by these ideological and intellectual antitheses converge, however, on the notion that counterfactual representations play a crucial role in imagining and actively shaping our moral and political lives. Reading Spenser’s ethical poetics through the taxonomy of counterfactual thought described in Appiah’s As If: Idealizations and Ideals (2017) clarifies the various forms and functions assumed by what Appiah would call “strategic untruths” in The Faerie Queene’s moral allegory. The centrality of counterfactual thinking to Spenser’s writing is evident in the poet’s use of it in the Gardens of Adonis, which is the cosmogonic apex of the 1590 Faerie Queene, and in his representations of slander, the paradigmatic social ill in Spenser’s ethical imagination. For both Spenser and Appiah, counterfactual reasoning and representation are crucial tools for moral self-formation and, more largely, for articulating moral societies in a mutable world marked by historical and cultural transformations.

“But wisht, that with that shepheard he mote dwelling share”: Spenser with Jacques Rancière

Drawing on The Faerie Queene and Aisthesis, this essay brings Spenser and Rancière together to demonstrate a scenographic style they share. The scenographic style starts with an idea and interweaves that idea with the interpretive network that gives it meaning. Both writers engage concepts at work in ways that cannot be appreciated in advance of the context they appear in. Writing in this descriptive style requires attending to dispositions—how things are arranged in relation to other things. Despite their differences on how to best imagine such dispositions, each author overwhelms and refigures any available criteria for forming normative critical judgments by positioning together objects that typically don’t belong alongside each other. I propose Rancière’s word “reverie” for moments in Spenser’s poetry where the plot relaxes in favor of a daydream-like entertaining of new dispositional arrangements. The unlikely alliance of these two authors is itself a scene of missed understanding (“la mésentente”) opening up new forms of belonging.

“Lyke a faire Lady, but did fowle Duessa hyde”: Spenser with Val Plumwood

Scholarship on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene often attends to Duessa in her villainous dimensions, such as her part in the moral of Book I and alignment with Mary Queen of Scots. But what of the Duessa who is later stripped and shown to be partially nonhuman, with her eagle’s talons, fox’s tail, and bark-like skin? How does her amalgamative identity affect Faerieland’s knights, such as Fradubio’s translation into a tree and Redcrosse into a liquid body? This article reads Duessa alongside ecofeminist scholar Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, particularly her concept of continuity, to address these questions. In so doing, it conceptualizes how, when read as companionate texts, Plumwood’s work allows readers to consider Duessa as an agent of continuity—or interconnection with nature—who creates this change in others. Further, it considers how, in the current moment of climate crises, she offers contemporary readers a template for relating to the environment.

“What art thou man, (if man at all thou art)”: Spenser with Sylvia Wynter

This essay reaches toward thinking Spenser with Sylvia Wynter in two stages. In the first stage, I read Spenser’s use of the terms “inhumanitie” and “humanity” in The Faerie Queene in relation to Briana, Crudor, and the “salvage man.” Spenser’s use of these terms, I suggest, enacts and illustrates Wynter’s theory of the overrepresentation of Man as the human. In the second stage, thinking alongside Wynter’s emancipatory thrust toward, in David Scott’s terms, the “re-enchantment of humanism,” I reconsider what it might mean to be deposited on the edges of the poem’s allegorical scheme. If figures like the “bear-baby” and Gryll can be thought of as human but not on Man’s terms, they not only reveal the limits of Man’s imaginary but also demand an alternative poetry of the human.

Thinking through Symbionts: Spenser with Donna Haraway

In Staying with the Trouble (2016), the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway argues for a practice of speculative, collective fabulation, or sympoiesis, allied to cross-species relation, generation, and continuity, as our only means of survival on a devastated planet. Placing her trust in the intricate knots of biological relationality and mutual dependence that persist in earth’s muddy soil, or compost, she offers, in the story of the symbiont Camille, a fable of symbiogenesis, or “becoming-with-others for a habitable, flourishing world.” This essay argues that The Faerie Queene, a poem centrally concerned with the opposition of waste and fertility, is an open, unfinished, sympoietic work deeply interested in soil and its generative admixtures, producing its own version of what Haraway describes as material-semiotic composting, or theory in the mud. Denying privilege to the human, Spenser employs speculative, interlaced fictions to argue for the persistence of life-forms emerging from earth’s damaged soil.

Knights-Destinerrant: Spenser with Jacques Derrida

This coauthored article approaches Spenser’s The Faerie Queene via Derrida’s The Post Card. Derrida’s text, in which he sends out increasingly errant and ill-directed calls, signals, and communications with the frustrated expectation of response, provides an apposite framework by which to address the digressive and wandering narrative strategies of Spenser’s comparably “destinerrant,” aspirational yet abjectly apostrophizing text.

Planes, Plateaus, and The Faerie Queene: Spenser with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Planes, Plateaus, and <i>The Faerie Queene</i>: Spenser with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

On Dissonance and Late Style: Spenser with Theodor W. Adorno

This essay makes a case for a reassessment of The Faerie Queene in light of Adorno’s philosophical thinking about dissonance. Focusing on Book II, I analyze Spenser’s productive use of dissonant elements at the different levels of narrative and style, which produce a similar effect to the alienating techniques that Adorno praises in literary and musical forms of expression. I then consider Adorno’s discussion of dissonance as an essential aspect of late style and bring it to bear on Spenser’s poetic practice in the conclusive Mutabilitie Cantos of the epic. I suggest that this comparative analysis may not only open up new avenues for interpreting Spenser’s epic but also help us to reassess the significance of Adorno’s more neglected discussions of dissonance in his minor works of literary criticism, which gesture toward the importance of this concept as a tool for textual analysis.