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.”

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

Report of the Discussion on ‘The Problem of teaching Republican History in Schools’, held on Tuesday, 10th January, 1939

1939 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-235
Keyword(s):  
Personal Interest ◽  
Human History ◽  
History Teaching ◽  
Vital Reaction ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Ideal

Professor Norman Baynes, in opening the discussion, said that he proposed to consider the subject in relation only to those at school who were studying the Classics. The teacher must, he thought, abandon two inherited views: that history could be successfully taught sine ira et studio and that it was no function of the teacher to present to students his own interpretation of the past. The ideal of impartiality in history teaching is illusory: God alone could present the history of man ‘as it actually happened’. All teaching or writing of human history is an interpretation of the facts, and that must be a reflection of personality. Interest and vital reaction in the taught can be awakened only through the personal interest and enthusiasm of the teacher. Thus there can never be finality in the presentation of history: every age must recreate its own interpretation of the past.

scholarly journals Unity of the process of creating a fine art painting: ideal and material

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Denis Nikolaevich Demenev
Keyword(s):  
Fine Art ◽  
History Of Development ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Technological Means ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Artistic Image ◽  
The Ideal

The subject of this research is the interaction of the ideal and the material, which ensures unity of the process of creating a fine art painting. The object of this research is the dynamics of this process, which gradually materializes the ideal through poetic transformation of the objective reality. In the course of creating a fine art painting, the author underlines the importance of ontological-phenomenological and socio-gnoseological aspects of human existence, which in many ways determine the technical and technological means of solution of the artistic and creative tasks. Special attention is given to contemplation of the objective world, purposive action of the artistic will, establishment of the artistic image as interrelated stages of objectification of the ideal. The novelty of this article consists in interpretation of the phenomenon of the ideal, reflected in painting via integrated will. The latter is the synthesis of artistic will and subjective will of the painter. The author describes a “shuttle principle” in objectification of the ideal in the works of art within the framework of the history of development of painting, as well as within a single process: 1) from the aesthetic form to the embodiment of universality of the content; 2) from the universal content to aesthetic embodiment. The following conclusions were made: 1) the objectively ideal in a painting is an aesthetically perceived (visually, mentally, and spiritually) boundary of beauty and beautiful depicted via perfect, absolute unity of the artistic form and content, artistically and graphically, adequate to its concept in its material outcome, in reality. It is of rare occurrence in the works of art, something to be sought for; 2) an artistic form should be correlated in the artwork with universality of its content, which results in the fusion of the ideal and the real, and forms their indifference; 3) the universal meanings, ideologically underlying the content of a fine art painting, deepen and broaden the possibilities of artistic matter for objectification of the ideal in aesthetic form.

Blatant Beasts

2020 ◽  
pp. 216-240
Author(s):  
Catherine Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
Printed Text ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter studies the final book of the 1596 edition of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Discovering the presence of other readers, whether in the archive, the critical tradition, the pages of a manuscript, or the margins of a printed text, can feel like a violation of the seemingly exclusive bond between reader and text. The realization that someone has already had the response one has to a particular poem or passage can bring a pleasing sense of community. By the same token, the discovery that someone else has read a poem or passage in an utterly different sense than oneself can yield exhilaration, amusement, delight, and fascination. Above all, the awareness that one is not alone with what one reads transforms the scene of reading into a space requiring careful displays of deference or sudden and self-preserving acts of aggression—a space, in short, much like the sixth and final book of the 1596 Faerie Queene. Dispensing both with the ideal of singular perfection and with many of its earlier anxieties about aimlessness and indirection, the final book of the 1596 Faerie Queene stages reading as an ongoing intersubjective encounter between readers, texts, and other readers: a conversation in the continual making.

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

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.

Spenser's Theory of Courtesy

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. Judson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Courtesy Literature ◽  
The Ideal

Professor H. S. V. Jones in his recently published Spenser Handbook (New York, 1930) has an interesting and valuable chapter on Book vi of The Faerie Queene. Much of his discussion is concerned with the so-called courtesy literature of the Renaissance, which offers striking parallels to Spenser's illustration of the virtue of courtesy. According to Professor Jones, Spenser's object in Book vi is “to exhibit in his allegory certain articles in that familiar creed of courtesy which had been stated and expounded in many doctrinal treatises of the Renaissance, and to oppose to the ideal of the gentleman the forces which were hostile to its realization.”

On Translating Anglo-Saxon Poetry

PMLA ◽  
1898 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-296
Author(s):  
Edward Fulton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Final Conclusion ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Verse ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early English

What verse to use in translating Anglo-Saxon poetry is a question, which, ever since Anglo-Saxon poetry has been thought worth translating, has been discussed over and over again, but unfortunately with as yet no final conclusion. The tendency, however, both among those who have written upon the subject and those who have tried their hand at translating, is decidedly in favor of a more or less close imitation of the original metre. Professor F. B. Gummere, in an article on “The Translation of Beowulf and the Relations of Ancient and Modern English Verse,” published in the American Journal of Philology, Vol. vii (1886), strongly advocates imitating the A.-S. metre. Professor J. M. Garnett, in a paper read before this Association in 1890, sides with him, recanting a previously held belief in the superiority of blank verse. Of the various translations which imitate the A.-S. metre, the most successful, undoubtedly, is the Beowulf of Dr. John Leslie Hall, which appeared in 1892. Stopford Brooke, in his History of Early English Literature, also declares his belief in imitations of the original metre, though in his translations he does not always carry out his beliefs. He lays down the rule—and a very good rule it is—that translations of poetry “should always endeavour to have the musical movement of poetry, and to obey the laws of the verse they translate.” For translating A.-S. poetry, blank verse, he thinks, is out of the question; “ it fails in the elasticity which a translation of Anglo-Saxon poetry requires, and in itself is too stately, even in its feminine dramatic forms, to represent the cantering movement of Old English verse. Moreover, it is weighted with the sound of Shakspere, Milton, or Tennyson, and this association takes the reader away from the atmosphere of Early English poetry.”

Spenser's Garden of Adonis

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Waters Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
The Universe

Spenser's conception of the organization of the universe, as it is set forth in the allegory of the garden of Adonis, and in the Mutability cantos, has recently been given considerable attention. Professor Edwin Greenlaw opened the subject with the suggestion that the poet owed part of the ideas developed in these two passages to Lucretius. Several objections have been made to his theory. M. Denis Saurat points out some inconsistencies in Professor Greenlaw's interpretation, and prefers to regard the passage on the garden of Adonis as lyrical and without serious or sustained philosophic content. Professor Ronald B. Levinson finds Spenser's theory of form and matter in Bruno's Spaccio. Miss Evelyn Albright draws attention to the inconsistency between the Platonic idealism of The Fowre Hymnes (together with certain passages in Colin Clout's Come Home A gaine) and any Lucretian materialism in The Faerie Queene. To these critics Professor Greenlaw replied, in effect, that no one had disproved his contention of Lucretian influence in the passage on the garden of Adonis, and that the well-known eclecticism of the Renaissance accounts for the mixture of Platonic and Lucretian philosophy in Spenser.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document