Burton on Spenser

PMLA ◽  
1926 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merritt Y. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Critical Remark ◽  
The Third ◽  
Robert Burton ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Robert Burton has never been known as a commentator on The Faerie Queene and he certainly did not aspire to that honor, but it is my purpose in this article to show that unconsciously he left a valuable set of notes on Spenser's work. Burton was not a critic and his one critical remark about The Faerie Queene sounds oddly to-day, although readers of M. Jusserand's remarks in his Literary History of the English People on Spenser's borrowings from Ariosto will remember some ideas that chime with what Burton says in the passage in question. In his analysis of love-melancholy in the Third Part of The Anatomy of Melancholy he remarked casually:Our new Ariostoes, Boyards, Authors of Arcadia, Urania, Faerie Queene, &c., Marullus, Leotichius, Angerianus, Stroza, Secundus, Capellanus, &c., with the best of these facete modern poets have written in this kind, are but so many symptoms of love. Their whole books are a synopsis or breviary of love, the portuous of love, legends of lovers' lives and deaths, and of their memorable adventures, nay more, quod leguntur, quod laudantur, amori debent.

On Texts and Countertexts

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Harry Berger
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
The Faerie Queene

The publication of Resisting Allegory offers us another chance to take stock of Harry Berger’s body of work. Harry Berger, Jr., has published original and enduringly influential essays on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, Milton, Plato, Alberti, Virgil, Dante, Da Vinci, Pico della Mirandola, Vermeer, Beowulf, Erasmus, More, Theocritus, the concept of cultural change, the theory of periodization, and the poetry of Robert Frost. The third stage in Berger’s career-long engagement with Spenser was a series of seven essays published between 1991 and 2005 that revisit Books 1–3 of The Faerie Queene. Three essays on Book 1 have been revised and incorporated into the first chapter of Resisting Allegory, which now offers a full-dress reading of the Legend of Holinesse. Four more essays, two each on Books 2 and 3 of the poem, are reprinted here.

The Cross cult, King Oswald, and Elizabethan historiography

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-57
Author(s):  
Paul J. Stapleton
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Religious Controversy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Church ◽  
Made In

In Thomas Stapleton’s The History of the Church of Englande (1565), the first modern English translation of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, the cross cult is promoted as a definitive element of English religious and national identity, via the legend of the Saxon king Oswald. The version of the legend in Stapleton’s narrative, which includes textual supplements like illustrations, appears to be intended as a corrective in light of attacks upon the cross cult made in works of religious controversy by the reformists William Turner, John Jewel, and James Calfhill, but also in works of historiography such as the 1559 edition of Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle. In response to Stapleton’s expanded presentation of the Oswald legend, John Foxe reconfigures the narrative in the 1570 Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs, but in a bifurcated manner, perhaps to appease members of Matthew Parker’s circle of Saxon scholars. Surprisingly, in Book Three of The Faerie Queene (1590), Edmund Spenser carries on Stapleton’s iconodule understanding of Oswald’s cross in contrast to his reformist Protestant precursors.1

The Plot of The Faerie Queene

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Blair
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Central Image ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Ideal

Courthope, in his History of English Poetry, asks the question: “Does Spenser's work satisfy the test of Unity which must be applied to every great creation of art?” Answering this question, Courthope thinks that there is undoubtedly poetical unity in the general conception of The Shepherd's Calendar. But of the Faerie Queene, he says the following:There is undoubtedly a noble, indeed a sublime, foundation for the poem in its central design “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” There is also something eminently poetical in the intention of embodying this image in the ideal knight—a figure consecrated like that of the shepherd, by ancient literary tradition—and in the person of “Arthur before he was king.” Moreover, as the subject was to be treated allegorically, it was open to Spenser to endow his knight with the “twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised.” … No poem in existence can compare with the Faery Queen in the richness of its materials. But the question occurs: In what way is all this “variety of matter” fused with the central image of the “brave knight, perfected in all the twelve private moral virtues”? For this, we must always remember, was Spenser's professed and primary motive; he chose to convey his moral in a form of allegorical narrative, because he thought it would be “most plausible and pleasing, being covered with an historical fiction.”

clash between the beauty-loving Renaissance and the he [Spenser] was quickly swept overboard because of moral Reformation. In the light of the medieval reli-his inability to write like Donne, Eliot, and Allen gious tradition examined by Tuve, Guyon destroys Tate’ (1968:2). His extended interpretation of Book the Bower because he ‘looks at the kind of complete II, The Allegorical Temper (1957), followed by essays seduction which means the final death of the soul’ on the other books, traces the changing psycholo-(31). gical or psychic development of the poem’s major If the New Critics of the 1930s to the early 1950s characters by ‘reading the poem as a poem’ (9) rather had been interested in Spenser (few were), they than as a historical document. My own book, The would not have considered his intention in writing Structure of Allegory in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1961a), The Faerie Queene because that topic had been dis-which I regard now as the work of a historical critic missed as a fallacy. For Wimsatt and Beardsley partly rehabilitated by myth and archetypal criticism, 1954:5 (first proclaimed in 1946), ‘The poem is not examines the poem’s structure through its patterns the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached of imagery, an interest shared with Alastair Fowler, from the author at birth and goes about the world Spenser and the Numbers of Time (1964), and by beyond his power to intend about it or control it)’. Kathleen Williams, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’: The So much for any poet’s intention, conscious or World of Glass (1966). unconscious, realized or not. Not that it would have In any history of modern Spenser criticism – for a mattered much, for the arbiter of taste at that time, general account, see Hadfield 1996b – Berger may T.S. Eliot, had asked rhetorically: ‘who, except schol-serve as a key transitional figure. In a retrospective ars, and except the eccentric few who are born with glance at his essays on Spenser written from 1958 to a sympathy for such work, or others who have delib-1987, he acknowledges that ‘I still consider myself erately studied themselves into the right apprecia-a New Critic, even an old-fashioned one’ who tion, can now read through the whole of The Faerie has been ‘reconstructed’ by New Historicism Queene with delight?’ (1932:443). In Two Letters, (1989:208). In Berger 1988:453–56, he offers a per-Spenser acknowledges that the gods had given him sonal account of his change, admitting that as a New the gift to delight but never to be useful (Dii mihi, Critic he had been interested ‘in exploring complex dulce diu dederant: verùm vtile numquam), though representations of ethico-psychological patterns’ he wishes they had; and, in the Letter to Raleigh, he apart from ‘the institutional structures and discourses recognizes that the general end of his poem could be that give them historical specificity’. Even so, he had achieved only through fiction, which ‘the most part allowed that earlier historical study, which had been of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, concerned with ‘historical specificity’, was ‘solid and then for profite of the ensample’ (10). As a conse-important’. For the New Historicist Louis Adrian quence, he addresses his readers not by teaching them Montrose, however, earlier historical scholarship didactically but rather through delight. It follows that ‘merely impoverished the text’ (Berger 1988:8), and if his poem does not delight, it remains a closed book. he is almost as harsh towards Berger himself, com-Several critics who first flourished in the 1950s and plaining that his writings ‘have tended to avoid direct 1960s responded initially to Spenser’s words and confrontations of sociopolitical issues’, though he imagery rather than to his ideas, thought, or histor-blames ‘the absence of a historically specific socio-ical context. One is Donald Cheney, who, in Spenser’s political dimension’ on the time they were written – Image of Nature (1966), read The Faerie Queene a time when ‘the sociopolitical study of Spenser was ‘under the intensive scrutiny which has been applied epitomized by the pursuit of topical identifications or in recent decades to metaphysical lyrics’, seeking the cataloguing of commonplaces’ (7). In contrast, out ‘ironic, discordant impulses’, ‘rapidly shifting the New Historicism, of which he is the most elo-allusions’, and the poet’s ‘constant insistence upon quent theorist, sees a work embedded – i.e. intrins-the ambiguity of his images’ (7, 17, 20). Another is ically, inextricably fixed – not in history generally, Paul Alpers, whose The Poetry of ‘The Faerie Queene’ and certainly not in ‘cosmic politics’ that Thomas (1967) demonstrated that individual stanzas of the Greene 1963:406 claims to be the concern of all epics, poem may be subjected to very intense scrutiny. A but in a historically specific sociopolitical context. third, the most influential of all, is Harry Berger, Jr, (For further comments on their clash, see Hamilton

2014 ◽  
pp. 25-25
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
Death Of The Soul ◽  
New Critics ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Faerie Queene

The Challenge to Chastity: Britomart at the House of Busyrane

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 340-344
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Roche
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Faerie Queene

The final episode of the third book of The Faerie Queene has never received adequate interpretation. By analogy to the final episodes of the other books Busyrane should be the great enemy to chastity, and his defeat should be accomplished through the virtue of chastity. Previous interpretations have not defined the allegorical appropriateness of Busyrane and his mask of Cupid as the climactic testing of Spenser's knight of chastity. The problem for the reader is to see how Britomart's experience at the house of Busyrane solves Amoret's problem and at the same time is the final challenge to her own virtue.

The bear myth in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Reinardus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 115-134
Author(s):  
Jesse Russell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Abstract The animals in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene have been skillfully treated as allegories, but these creatures also deserve a look from a mythological perspective. Perhaps the most important animal to begin with is the bear, which French historian Michel Pastoureau recently has explored in his monumental, The Bear: History of a Fallen King. Using many of Pastoureau’s insights (and criticizing others), we can make room for an analysis of The Faerie Queene as a text in which pre-modern and even ‘prehistorical’ images of bears meet with Early Modern views of the noble creature, demonstrating that, despite Spenser’s allegorical tendencies, the bears in The Faerie Queene still speak.

Myth

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Lehman
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Cycles ◽  
Historical Past

The third chapter focuses on T. S. Eliot’s turn to the “mythical method” as a strategy of literary creation through division. Examining the delimitation in The Waste Land of the history of verse as it develops from Chaucer to Whitman, it shows that Eliot turns to myth not to forge connections with something temporally or spatially other but to cut his poem free from its literary-historical past. Within the realm of myth, broken off from the unending historical cycles that provide The Waste Land with its subject matter, Eliot attempts to place the poet’s creative act. The results are volatile: history remains, in the poem, the space of production, however fallen its products, while myth stands apart from history as a space where nothing—not history and certainly not literary history—happens.

Stephen Batman, Edmund Spenser, and Myth as an Art of Discernment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Stephen Batman’s Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (1577) was the first English Renaissance mythography. It consists of three sections on false gods: the first on pagan deities, the second on Catholic saints, and the third on Protestant sectarians. Batman calls Roman mythology a ‘straunge entermixed strategeme’, which unites two aspects of the ancient past usually seen as contradictory: exemplary Roman virtue and the worship of idols. In contrast with the pagans, the Catholic and Protestant idols become increasingly more pernicious and more difficult to identify. The most dangerous form of idolatry is that of the Family of Love, and Batman’s Golden Booke was regarded as a work aimed at their founder in the years after its publication. The final section of this chapter looks at how Spenser’s use of mythology in Book II, Canto xii of The Faerie Queene is directly analogous to Batman’s in The Golden Booke.

Ephemeral Spenser

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-110
Author(s):  
Sandro Jung
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Visual Interpretation ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Stimulated Recall ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Faerie Queene

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.

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