Faerie Queene Research Articles

Melville and The Torrid Zone

In this essay, I explore Melville's "The Encantadas" as an extended engagement with the Torrid Zone, nineteenth-century geography's inheritance from an ancient geographic concept. While the nineteenth-century Spanish American contexts of the sketches have been carefully elaborated, I attend here to the many epigraphs Melville takes from Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene (1590)—enlisted to signal the historical moment of English belatedness in the hemisphere—while also examining the stunning retort to the Western category of the Torrid Zone that El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega issued in his Comentarios Reales de los Incas ["Royal Commentaries"] (1609). Like Garcilaso, I argue, Melville glosses the unstable category of the human, and in doing so suggests the rootedness of this concept in the history of New World slavery and colonialism—to shadow forth, paradoxically, the human suffering caused by anthropocentrism. Ultimately, Melville's Torrid Zone offers a space of philosophical rupture and a vantage point for meditation on the West: its enduring problem of evil, its invention of the human, and its perpetual creation of theodicies that justify the world's racial and geographical apportionment of suffering.

Allegorization and Racialization inThe Faerie Queene

Ania Loomba has suggested that we attend to two techniques of racialized governance in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England: “the creation of internal hierarchies within a population” and the increasingly reified assumption of “correspondence between the ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ of human beings.” This essay claims that The Faerie Queene produces a surprising resemblance between racialization and allegory as a literary form. Testing this hypothesis primarily in Book V’s scenes of racialized punishment, it explores how allegory produces internal hierarchies and a correspondence between the outside and inside of beings in the poem. At the same time, it suggests Spenser’s immanent critique of allegory as technique and mode might also be viewed as the poem’s own analysis of the intimacy between racialization and colonial violence, repeatedly revealing the failure of the production of difference and the instability of racialized hierarchy.

“To Giue Faire Colour”: Sexuality, Courtesy, and Whiteness inThe Faerie Queene

This essay explores the losses that Spenser studies has incurred in its neglect of the scholarship on early modern race that has compounded over the past thirty years. Much of this work has been produced by scholars of color, and particularly feminist scholars of color, who remain strikingly underrepresented in Spenser studies. If we treat this body of knowledge as central rather than peripheral to analysis of The Faerie Queene, we can expand our understanding of the multidimensional nature of Spenserian racial formations, which collaborate with White norms of gendered hierarchy and sexual innocence. Extensively, even obsessively, allegorizing female appetite and autonomy in racialized terms, Spenser’s Book of Courtesy allows us to appreciate the centrality of Whiteness to the seemingly race-neutral ideals of courtesy and civility, as well as the dependence of those ideals on the selective deployment of slander and violence.

“Gather up the reliques of thy race”: Paynim Remains in Faery-land

Placing Sansfoy’s death and the disappearance of his body alongside The Faerie Queene’s other defeated paynims—the Souldan and Pollente, Pyrochles and Cymochles—reveals that Spenser’s poem breaks from epic tradition in its treatment of the enemy dead. The corpse desecration and immoderate mourning habitually practiced by Spenser’s foreign characters makes visible early modern English anxieties about the limits placed on grief and the rites owed to the departed. In Book II, classical ideals of universal burial are gradually supplanted by treatment determined by racial and religious difference. Guyon’s evolving response to the question of burial discloses the racial stakes of paynim death in Books I and V. In its ambivalent handling of foreign mourners, however, the poem remains suspended between an emerging racialized logic of death and a human right to decent burial held in common.

Mixed Up: Race, Degeneration, and Irish “Old English” Politics in Spenser’s Castle Joyous and Bower of Bliss

This essay builds on insights into Malecasta’s wanton character to examine her politicized meaning in the allegory of The Faerie Queene Books I–III, as a discourteous and inhospitable threat to the...

In the Blood: Spenser, Race, and Identity

Notions of race based on blood and inheritance are widespread in the early modern period. Spenser uses the word “blood” on multiple occasions through the narrative of The Faerie Queene. Like other complex words in the poem—savage, justice, courtesy—it changes its meaning as the work progresses, forcing the reader to consider and evaluate what they think they know and to return to previous episodes and reread them in the light of later events and sequences of representations. Blood is the locus of identity, the essence of an individual and so possesses religious and racial significance. What is at stake in the existence and transmission of blood is complicated and problematic throughout Spenser’s works. Bloodlines may determine identity, or they may tell us very little about them. In this essay I explore Spenser’s understanding of blood, race, and identity through an examination of selected passages in A View of the Present State of Ireland and the stained hands of Ruddymane at the start of The Faerie Queene, Book II. Blood emerges as a significant factor in establishing identity, with inheritance through the blood determining legal as well as racial identities.

The Christian Lark: Spenser’s Faerie Queene I. x.51 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29

Abstract The likening of the lark to the Christian worshipper as in Herbert’s “Easter Wings” was anticipated by both Spenser and Shakespeare in references that have been overlooked to date. These stand in a tradition most richly represented by the early fourteenth- century French allegorist Guillaume de Deguileville, in his Pèlerinage de l’Ame, in which the pilgrim soul, guided towards the gate of Heaven by his guardian angel, finds himself surrounded by larks whose cruciform shapes in flying match their singing of the name “Jhesu.” Having fallen for the second time when fighting the dragon, Spenser’s Red Cross Knight rises on the third morning to find himself victorious. In his rising he is compared with the lark at dawn. The Edenic setting (which underlines the theme of the redemption of “fallen” man by the risen Christ) is also illuminated by Deguileville’s Ame; Spenser’s two trees are reminiscent of the “green and the dry” in the French allegory, according to which Christ appears as the apple pinned to the dry tree in reparation for the apple stolen by Adam. When one examines Shakespeare’s reference to the lark in Sonnet 29 in the light of the tradition represented by Deguileville (whose work not only Spenser but also Shakespeare might have read in English translation) the question arises as to whether the beloved addressed in line 10 (“thee”) could be Christ, and the speaker a Christian worshipper moving from self reproach to Christian gratitude. Such an interpretation is challenged by the standard assumption that the sonnets reflect a narrative produced by a love triangle. But from Petrarch’s Canzoniere on, sequences of love sonnets had contained poems of religious adoration.

"The Wombe's Burden": The Undermining of Female Agency within Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene

Through their depictions of Eve and Britomart, Milton and Spenser undermine the agency of their female characters and perpetuate and preserve patriarchal values and hierarchy. Britomart, at once a strong martial knight, is undermined by Spenser’s tying of her ultimate purpose and goal to her ability to birth a noble lineage into existence. Milton’s Eve, while being a more positive depiction than her predecessors, is intended to be subservient to Adam and her purpose lies in copulation and procreation. Ultimately, while both texts do give their characters some agency beyond procreation, it is imperative to recognize the historical degradation of women to wombs, and how this still affects women to the modern-day.

Lear, Land and Expropriation without Compensation

King Lear has been extensively used by Shakespearean critics in South Africa for the discussion of land ownership issues. This essay alludes to the work of Martin Orkin and Nicholas Visser, who brought postcolonial and materialistic critiques to bear upon the play in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The essay itself carries the investigation forward to present times, when the text asks to be read in relation to expropriation without compensation: a land proposal being ventilated at the highest political level. The issues which emerge are diverse and unexpected. King Lear’s gifts of land to his daughters are actually ‘deals’ requiring the compensation of their public declarations of love for him. For various reasons this strategy fails. The reader is then invited by the play’s imagery to see the body of the old king as a piece of ‘real estate’ that is incrementally expropriated by the ageing process and the onset of dementia. Spenser’s allegory of the House of Temperance in Book II of The Faerie Queene is discussed as a likely influence here. By the end of the play, Lear is divested of his own bodily health and cognitive ability by the arch expropriator, ‘time’, and its subaltern, the fallible human cell. With regard to critical reception, this essay argues that King Lear has complexity and substance enough to engage the interest of postcolonialists, materialists and universalists alike – even in relation to a topic as specific as land.

Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance. Katarzyna Lecky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. vi+277.

Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance. Katarzyna Lecky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. vi+277.

Tears for a crocodile

Tears for a crocodile

Anthony Copley and the paradoxes of parody

AbstractThis essay investigates the parodic structure of A Fig for Fortune (Anthony Copley’s 1596 parody of The Faerie Queene) and argues that greater attention to the poem’s parodic features illuminates its incongruities and expands our understanding of early modern parody at the intersection of religion and politics. Given parody’s dual commitments to both echoing and diverging from its source material, the essay highlights key examples of each, demonstrating how and why Copley imitates and deviates from Spenser as he does. While Fig’s divergence from FQ accentuates Copley’s pacifist, anti‐jesuitical, and firmly Catholic impulse, the poem’s echo of Spenser threatens to undermine this very message, which ultimately points, to the paradoxes that define both Catholic dissent and the parodic mode. It is the poem’s structure as a parody – as much as its expression of the religious and political experience of English Catholics – that makes it valuable to our understanding of early modern literature.

Volume 50 (2020)

Volume 50 (2020)

Falstaff’s Baffled “Rabbit Sucker” and “Poulter’s Hare” in 1 Henry IV

In 1 Henry IV, Falstaff enacts his histrionic mock deposition scene, only to be usurped by England’s true heir, Prince Hal. Irate at his actorly demotion, Falstaff praises his own performance skills, while suggesting that, if found lacking, he should receive a punishment befitting his knightly status. Likening Falstaff to small game hanging in a shopfront or above a market stall, Shakespeare offers the ludicrous imagery of diminutive rabbit suckers and poulters’ hares as analogous with the metaphorical baffling of his cowardly knight’s massive bulk. With its systematic reference to the multiple methodologies of close textual analysis, intertextual evidence, and cross-linguistics and substitutions, this essay argues that Shakespeare’s “rabbit sucker” and “poulter’s hare” dialogue, while superficially referencing London’s poultry tradespeople, is actually adopting and adapting an obscure Scottish punishment, recently revised and reimagined with dangerous intensity in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Shakespeare builds on this Spenserian imagery, adding his own animal-inspired evocation of rural hunting practices with culturally rich detail. Originating in Shakespeare’s obscure textual reference to an everyday marketplace image of inverted helplessness and humiliation, Falstaff’s rabbit sucker and poulter’s hare metamorphose into the standard dramatic trope for punishing violence and aggression, their newly-envisioned disemboweled carcasses displayed openly in Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King and Philaster.

Despaire and Briton Moniments: Moments of Protestant Clarity in The Faerie Queene

ABSTRACT Two moments in The Faerie Queene, the Redcrosse Knight's rescue from suicide in the cave of Despaire and Arthur's rapture at reading the truncated chronicle of the Britons, are strangely similar. In each case, the hermeneutic openness that seems to be developing is halted and closed in favor of a unified, simplified, syllogistic certitude. Though both Despaire's speeches and Briton Moniments are ripe for interrogation, Redcrosse is saved by the Practical Syllogism, and Arthur reacts with an outpouring of patriotic fervor. With some matters, proliferation of thought and feeling though ordinarily salutary must be suspended. Protestantism's simplifying strain did make an impression on Spenser. Returning to known truths of special and general providence is periodically necessary for maintaining an overall openness to ambiguity, intricacy, and dialogue. With a focus on these parallel episodes, this discussion both contributes to our understanding of The Faerie Queene's hermeneutic fluidity by looking closely at exceptions in it, and thereby proposes how a major current of Protestant thought inflects Spenserian poetics.

Henry viii and the “Bewhoring” of the Petrarchan Beloved in Sixteenth-Century English Literature

This article examines the ways in which changes in Marian theology and the defaming and execution of two of Henry viii’s queens affected early modern literary representations of female power. It argues that, through the translations of Thomas Wyatt, Petrarchan poetry entered into a world of state-sponsored iconoclasm, a world where images of the sacred feminine, once revered, could be destroyed, and queens, once exalted as beloveds, could quickly be reduced to “whores” and executed. The first part of the article considers Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” a translation of Petrarch’s “Rime 190,” as a lens for examining the female body as both object of desire and site of violent destruction. The second part of the article considers English Petrarchism late in the reign of Elizabeth i, examining how John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book ii) construct violent fantasies of male control over the powerful female.

Spenser’s Sprites: Platonic Daemons in The Faerie Queene

Throughout the twentieth century, critics of the poet Edmund Spenser wrestled with the question of the presence of Plato as well as Platonic thought in Spenser’s works. Having recently established the profound presence of Platonism in Spenser via Marsilio Ficino and other sources, the field of Spenser studies is now open to a treatment of exactly what kind of Platonism is present in Spenser. Drawing from the work done by researchers in the field of magic and Platonism, in this article I hope to demonstrate the presence of Platonic daemons in Spenser’s Faerie Queene who are found under the name of “sprites” or “sprights” in the poem. An examination of daemons in The Faerie Queene will elucidate some questions on the role of Merlin in the poem as well as Spenser’s own self fashioning as a poet-magus.

Ephemeral Spenser

This essay approaches Edmund Spenser’s Renaissance masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, through a hitherto unknown series of twenty-four vignette illustrations that the eighteenth-century painter and book illustrator, Thomas Stothard, contributed to the nowadays little-known annual, The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas, in 1794. Apart from making sense of Stothard’s visual interpretation of Spenser’s romance, the article will pay attention to how the painter creates an anthological miniature gallery of moments with which the users of the pocket diary may have been familiar. In other words, these vignettes may have conveyed mnemonically a prior reading experience of The Faerie Queene or have stimulated recall of other engagements with the moments represented. Understanding Stothard’s illustrations as iconic interventions in the reception history of Spenser’s work that, by being included in a disposable, annual pocket diary, were significantly more ephemeral than illustrations issued as part of an edition, I shall investigate how Stothard mediates the text by providing textual excerpts and how these one-line cues evoke a particular allusive experience of the text that affects the reading experience.

The travels of a tune: Purcell’s ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ and the cultural translation of 17th-century English music

Abstract The travels of a tune: Purcell’s ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ and the cultural translation of 17th-century English music This article discusses Henry Purcell’s theatre song ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ (from The Fairy Queen, 1692) and its journey into various contexts in England and abroad. The article analyses the song’s appearance in printed songbooks, broadside ballads and single-sheet engravings, and in the Dutch manuscript songbook Finspång 9096:7 (now in Norrköping, Sweden), to show how the song was adapted to various contexts and conventions. The appearance of ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ in Finspång 9096:7 further suggests that there was greater reciprocity in the exchanges between England and continental Europe than hitherto thought. I nuance this claim by arguing that such exchanges were dependent on translation and mediation by musicians such as John Abell (1653–after 1716) or translators such as Abel Boyer (?1667–1729). Boyer used ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ in his Compleat French-Master (1694) and his French lyrics appear in Finspång 9096:7. The article shows the variety of uses and adaptations of ‘If love’s a sweet passion’ in English and French-language contexts. This both challenges notions of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ music as entirely separate, and invites scholars and performers to imagine Purcell’s theatre songs performed and consumed in new ways.

"Ne spared they to strip her naked all": Reading, Rape, and Reformation in Spenser's Faerie Queene

In book 2 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Archimago and Duessa accuse the Redcross Knight of rape. Although both Spenser and his critics have long treated their accusation as false, this essay argues that it has three layers of truth: Duessa's stripping in book 1 is a literal sexual assault; it is a metaphorical rape; and, due to the accusation's use of metaphor and ellipsis, it mirrors Spenser's own narration with surprising accuracy. This third sense of the accusation's truth illustrates the representational challenges of rape and the fissures between literal and figurative meanings—hermeneutic concerns violently at issue in the Reformation. Duessa's stripping and dismissed rape accusation illuminate the complex interrelation of three things: shifting early modern attitudes toward rape, the Protestant turn to inwardness both hermeneutically and soteriologically, and the interpretive and moral problems of allegory after the Reformation. Thus, the disturbingly gendered interpretive violence of Faerie Queene reflects not only the grim misogyny of the sixteenth century but also a broader hermeneutic and epistemological crisis.