DOCSLIB.ORG

Spenser's Narrative Figuration of Women in the Faerie Queene / Judith H

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Spenser's Narrative Figuration of Women in the Faerie Queene / Judith H Western Michigan University Medieval Institute Publications/Arc Humanities Press Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture Medieval Institute Publications 3-31-2018 Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene Judith H. Anderson Indiana University - Bloomington, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_rmemc Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Modern Languages Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Anderson, Judith H., "Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene" (2018). Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. 1. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_rmemc/1 This Monograph is brought to you for free and open access by the Medieval Institute Publications at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene RESEARCH IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Medieval Institute Publications is a program of The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene Judith H. Anderson Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS Western Michigan University Kalamazoo Copyright © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Anderson, Judith H., author. Title: Spenser's narrative figuration of women in the Faerie Queene / Judith H. Anderson. Description: Kalamazoo : Medieval Institute Publications, 2018. | Series: Research in medieval and early modern culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017046483 | ISBN 9781580443173 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–1599. Faerie queene. | Women in literature. Classification: LCC PR2358 .A924 2018 | DDC 821/.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046483 ISBN: 9781580443173 eISBN: 9781580443180 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. in memory of A. C. Hamilton “This page intentionally left blank” Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women 1 1 Parody and Perfection: Spenser’s Una 13 2 Belphoebe’s “mirrours more then one”: History’s Interlude 49 3 Britomart: Inside and Outside the Armor 75 4 Phantasies, Pains, and Punishments: A Still-Moving Coda 121 Notes 149 Index 189 “This page intentionally left blank” Acknowledgments his book has Grown out of my teaching, writing, and talk- Ting about Spenser over many years. Its debts are numerous, among them to the scholar and friend to whom it is dedicated, A. C. Hamilton. I regret that he did not live to see this effort, since he once challenged me to write it. Every student of Spenser has benefitted from Bert Hamilton’s many scholarly achievements, including his pioneering book The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene,” his collection of Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, his editorship of The Spenser Encyclopedia, and his indispensable, annotated edition of The Faerie Queene. His encourage- ment, out of the blue, meant a great deal to me. It came early, the time when encouragement is most needed. With respect to the project at hand, I want to thank Tamara Goeglein for reading and thoughtfully responding to the evolving project in manuscript form, and William Oram for his invaluable comments first on the initial chapter and later on the whole manuscript once it was fin- ished, or, as it turned out, nearly so. Earlier, I also had the benefit of a convivial and provocative conversation with my colleague Kathy Smith about chapter 1. A grant from the Office of the Vice-Provost of Research at Indiana University funded the final stage of my project. With the permission of the original presses, three essays pub- lished earlier have been revised and recontextualized for inclusion in this book: “‘In liuing colours and right hew’: The Queen of Spenser’s Central Books,” in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, edited by Maynard Mack and George deforest Lord (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 47–66; “Busirane’s Place: The House of Rhetoric,” Spenser Studies 17 (2003): 133–50; and “Britomart’s Armor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Reopening Cultural Matters of Gender and Figuration,” English Literary Renaissance 39 (2009): 74–96. These essays have been repurposed, expanded, and greatly revised to become parts of chapters 2 and 3. “This page intentionally left blank” Introduction: Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women he focus of this book is the figuration of women within TSpenser’s narratives in The Faerie Queene. Its introduction addresses my reason for using “figuration” in the title and begins to show why “nar- rative” is also featured—begins, because the proof of this pudding is in the showing, the demonstrable effect of the moving, temporal dimension of narrative on meaning as each chapter explores it. My use of “women” in the title is lexical, the designation of an initial, recognizable grouping. Within Elizabethan society and culture, including poetry and drama, women was a functioning term, however much diversity it masked, ena- bled, or suppressed. I use the term in this historical, yet still open, still moving, sense.1 In Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies, Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez observe that a key issue in early feminist criticism and theory—and one currently “far from settled”—was “how to define ‘woman,’” to which I would add, “and especially how to respect and account for a multitude of differences betweenwomen .”2 Each chapter that follows contributes to the significance of these terms in Spenser’s cultur- ally encyclopedic text, refining and modifying what they encompass. In this way, each illuminates women’s plights and possibilities in the age of Elizabeth. In emphasizing an unsettled use of language in its plural form, however—women, not woman—I am implicitly privileging history, ana- lytics, and difference over universalization, psychosociology, and theory, although I am not excluding the latter trio, and in fact will bring it into discussion when productive, clarifying, or in some other way helpful for my purpose to do so.3 Simply, if not too simply, put, my allegiance is more Aristotelian than Platonic in this study. One entailment of such prioritiz- ing is my commitment to textual detail and specifics, and this means close reading. *** 2 Introduction: Spenser’S Narrative FIGuration of Women Spenser’s figuration of women in The Faerie Queene is widely various, with figures ranging from static to mobile, from mono- to multidimensional, from monstrous to idealized, from purely fictive to strongly historicized, with many a variant in between. Like the figures of men, they develop with respect to the thematic focus of each book, some crossing from book to book. Metaphorically and analogously, that is rhetorically, they also relate to one another in interwoven, textual ways that resemble a network or web and resonate with social and cultural structures, past and present. Political and religious connections of this sort, together with gendered ones, have been in evidence for decades, as have legal ones more recently. Spenser’s richly figured text is a cross section of all these, and all further resonate with my own longstanding interests in rhetoric and figuration, which, accompa- nied by a heightened attention to narrative, this book engages. The ancient roots of rhetoric and law, for example, are thoroughly intertwined, as a number of studies have emphasized with respect to intention, probability, inference, equity, and character.4 To these, I would add the suggestive rela- tion to the Spenserian text of the accumulative, comparative role of pre- cedents in English common law and of the case-based reasoning of casuistry in ethics and religion.5 My central concern, however, is with the interwo- ven, resonating, paralleling, developing Spenserian text itself—a text that is variously parodic, analogous, allegorical, and intertextual. This concern accords with other broad structural phenomena, even as it connects the figures of women in Spenser’s more epic narratives in The Faerie Queene with those in his more romantic ones—Una with Florimell, for instance. Renewed interest in character in the past two decades and the con- troversies it has spawned and continues to spawn, especially in Shakespeare criticism, have also generated additional angles from which to view Spenserian figuration, and vice versa, and I have incorporated them. Perhaps above all, these developments, together with others mentioned, have further highlighted the critical function played by the lenses we choose through which to examine early modern writings. This critical function will be salient throughout my argument, as will
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Genesis and the New Testament in the Faerie Queene Books I & II
    Proceedings of GREAT Day Volume 2012 Article 5 2013 Genesis and the New Testament in The Faerie Queene Books I & II Christine O’Neill SUNY Geneseo Follow this and additional works at: https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/proceedings-of-great-day Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Recommended Citation O’Neill, Christine (2013) "Genesis and the New Testament in The Faerie Queene Books I & II," Proceedings of GREAT Day: Vol. 2012 , Article 5. Available at: https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/proceedings-of-great-day/vol2012/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the GREAT Day at KnightScholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Proceedings of GREAT Day by an authorized editor of KnightScholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. O’Neill: Genesis and the New Testament in <i>The Faerie Queene</i> Books I 46 Genesis and the New Testament in The Faerie Queene Book I & II Christine O’Neill Introduction It is impossible to quantify the collective impact that the Holy Bible1 has had on literature since its creation thousands of years ago. A slightly less ambitious task for scholars would be tracing the influence the Bible had on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a monstrously long and sophisticated poem from which many Elizabethan playwrights and poets drew heavily. In much the same way the Bible is a compendium of religious narratives, records, epistles, and laws, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is the result of many years of work and clearly benefitted from a great number of sources.
    [Show full text]
  • The Function of Forest in the Faerie Queene: Seeing the Woods for the Trees
    The Function of Forest in The Faerie Queene: Seeing the Woods for the Trees Nicholas Randell April 1987 The Function o£ Forest in The Faerie Queene: Seeing the Woods £or the Trees Nicholas Randell April 1987 Generally, the mention of place in\regard to/The Faerie Queene summons up the image of Alma's House of Temperance, the Bower of Bliss, or Isis' Temple. These settings are highly stagey: the narrative comes to a halt) and the reader is expected to interpret the composite images of the scene. The crocodile at Isis' feet enJoys the same relationship to her as Justice does to equity. Equity, its allegorical representative embodied in Isis, exercises a restraining influence over the "cruel doome" of Justice, i.e., the crocodile that Isis stands on. These places smack of the unreal; they and their set pieces exist primarily to illustrate a moral orientation or philosophical position. In Acrasia's Bower of Bliss, of course, unreality is Just the point. With its "painted flowres" it caters to the whims of the men it hopes to ensnare. The Bower exists for them. It is made to please: "The dales for shade, the hills for breathing space"! (The Faerie Queene. II, xii,5S) But what of place when The Faerie Queen's narrative rolls right along? What about the landscape that doesn't make man happy or remind him of one or another truth? All the symbolic places of The Faerie Queen are, in a very real sense, interludes of a larger piece, brief moments in a landscape that undulates about them.
    [Show full text]
  • Boy Toys and Liquid Joys: Pleasure and Power in the Bower of Bliss
    Boy Toys and Liquid Joys: Pleasure and Power in the Bower of Bliss JOSEPH CAMPANA Rice University Early in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590), the Redcrosse Knight, just having departed the House of Pride, rests by a fountain “Disarmed all of yron-coted Plate” (1.7.2).1 The duplicitous Duessa will soon discover him in this vulnerable state, as will the giant Orgoglio, who defeats Redcrosse largely as a result of his separation from Una. Although his companion dwarf has warned him away from the House of Pride, with its parading vices and rotting foundations, Redcrosse’s moral and psychic states justify his defeat at the hands of the giant, who finds him “Pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd” (1.7.7). Spenser, however, takes extra time to explain Redcrosse’s lassitude. The fountain from which he drinks bubbles up from a mythic sub- strate. In these waters dwells a nymph suffering from Phoebe’s curse who, having wearied during a hunt and rested, was fixed to the spot: “her waters wexed dull and slow / And all that drinke thereof, do faint and feeble grow” (1.7.5). After Redcrosse drinks, his “chearefull bloud in fayntnes chill did melt” (1.7.6). It would be easy to read this upwelling mythographic moment as a concretization and a condemnation of Redcrosse’s moral situation. However, the fountain remains, as either a narrative or allegorical detail, superfluous. Superfluity is precisely its point, inasmuch as these episodes are concerned with the excess and scarcity of flows of pleasure and energy.
    [Show full text]
  • The Faerie Queene Study Guide
    The Faerie Queene Study Guide © 2018 eNotes.com, Inc. or its Licensors. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher. Summary The Faerie Queene is a long epic poem that begins and ends with Christian affirmations. In it, Edmund Spenser draws on both Christian and classical themes, integrating the two traditions with references to contemporary politics and religion. The poem begins with a representation of holiness in book 1, and the Mutabilitie Cantos (first printed with the poem in 1609 after Spenser’s death) conclude with a prayer. Book 1 is identified as the Legend of the Knight of the Red Cross (or Saint George) in canto 2, verses 11-12. Red Cross, as an individual, is the Protestant Everyman, but as Saint George, historically England’s patron saint, he also represents the collective people of England. He is a pilgrim who hopes to achieve the virtue holiness, and for the reader his adventures illustrate the path to holiness. Red Cross’s overarching quest, as an individual, is to behold a vision of the New Jerusalem, but he also is engaged in a holy quest involving the lady Una, who represents the one true faith. To liberate Una’s parents, the king and queen, Adam and Eve, Red Cross must slay the dragon, who holds them prisoner. The dragon represents sin, the Spanish Armada, and the Beast of the Apocalypse, and when Red Cross defeats the dragon he is in effect restoring Eden.
    [Show full text]
  • Spenser's Goodly Frame of Temperance: Secret Design in the Faerie Queene, Book II
    SPENSER'S GOODLY FRAME OF TEMPERANCE SPENSER'S GOODLY FRAME OF TEMPERANCE: SECRET DESIGN IN THE FAERIE QUEENE, BOOK II By CHERYL DAWNAN CALVER, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University (May) 1979 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (l979) McMASTER UNIVERSITY (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Spenser's Goodly Frame of Temperance: Secret Design in The Faerie Queene, Book II AUTHOR: Cheryl Dawnan Calver, B.A. (University of Saskatchewan) M.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Professor T. H. Cain NUMBER OF PAGES: xiii, 271 ii ABSTRACT Spenser's design for the second book of The Faerie Queene involves hidden parallel and synnnetrical patterns, previously undetected, that have serious hermeneutic significance for the study of that poem and other literature of the Renaissance. My study is of form. The first chapter considers the structural approach to literature of the Renaissance and discusses my methodology. Chapter II reveals the simultaneous existence of a parallel and a symmetrical pattern of the stanzas of Book II as a whole. Chapters III and IV explore the simultaneous operation of five patterns--three parallel and two synnnetrical--for numerous pairs of cantos. Chapter V demonstrates the simultaneous existence of parallel and symmetrical patterns within each canto of Book II. What is presented is a demonstration of intricate construction along consistently predictable parallel and symmetrical lines. Such patterned composition has been detected previously in shorter Spenser poems, Epithalamion and "Aprill," in particular. My discoveries result from applying a method which, from shorter Spenser poems, one has an expectation will work.
    [Show full text]
  • Elizabethan Architecture and the Faerie Queene
    Judith Dundas ELIZABETHAN ARCHITECTURE AND THE FAERIE QUEENE: SOME STRUCTUR.A.L ANALOGIES IF ONE rs SEEKIKG TO LEAR:-; something of the aesthetic of an age, it seems that making analogies between two of the ans is one of the most useful approaches to this abstraction called an aesthetic. Panofsky's Go thic Architecture and Scholasticism is a sufficient example of an approach to the history of ideas through parallels drawn between co ntemporaneous creations of the human mind. Analogies between arts of any period, if these analogies have validity, will almost certainly suggest general qualities of tas te or habits of mind. For the Elizabethan Age, additional knowledge of artistic assumptions and aims can be gained from a comparison of one of the fine arts with the elaborate structure and imagery of Spenser's Faerie Queene. 1 Architecture was chosen because it happens to be more distinctively English than any of the other Elizabethan fine arts, w;,th the exception of miniatures. Miniatures, however, scarcely lend themselves to comparison with a work of such magnitude as The Faerie Queene, whereas architecture is a particularly good field for in­ vestigation. Indeed, Spenser's poem is itself designed architecturally; the am­ bitious plan of illustrating the virtues in twelve hooks and linking them into a whole by the inclusive virtue of magnanimity recalls the great houses of the day, such as Burghley. It was essentially a secular architecture that the Renaissance brought to England, since the patrons were not the Church-which accounts for much of the magnificent architecture of Renaissance Italy-but the landed gentry.
    [Show full text]
  • Religious Persecution in Edmund Spenser's the Faerie Queene
    Eastern Illinois University The Keep Undergraduate Honors Theses Honors College 2019 Religious Persecution in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene Ashlee Burton Follow this and additional works at: https://thekeep.eiu.edu/honors_theses Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons BY Ash U �vrtnn UNDERGRADUATE THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF UNDERGRADUATE DEPARTMENTAL HONORS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, ALONG WITH THE HONORS COLLEGE, EASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY CHARLESTON, ILLINOIS 2D[� YEA I HEREBY RECOMMEND THIS UNDERGRADUATE THESIS BE ACCEPTED AS FULFILLING THE THESIS REQUIREMENT FOR UNDERGRADUATE DEPARTMENTAL HONORS rI J>o /..<()I 7' DATE ADVISOR Lj/Ja/.:2_€J/<;' DATE HONORS COORDINATOR Lff3D/Lt DATE I MENT CHAIR Burton 1 Religious Persecution in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene In recent years , some scholars have moved away from using the term "Renaissance" to describe the literary period in England that begins in the early 16th century, includes the 171h, and concludes in the mid-18th century. Their work now favors the label, "Early Modem." As the preferred termsugg ests, looking to the Early Modem period, we see that many modem concepts and processes find their beginnings in this critical period of history. For example, this is the period of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who argued the need for an empirical, inductive approach to science that refuted status quo Aristotelian methods and ushered in use of the modem scientific method. It is also the period of the Protestant Reformation, a series of events that dramatically and indelibly shifted the landscape of the Western religious world as Protestant sects divided themselves from the Roman Catholic church.
    [Show full text]
  • Violent Masculinities of the Faerie Queene Violent Masculinities of the Faerie Queene
    VIOLENT MASCULINITIES OF THE FAERIE QUEENE VIOLENT MASCULINITIES OF THE FAERIE QUEENE By SAGE HYDEN, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts McMaster University © Copyright by Sage Hyden, September 2013 McMaster University MASTER OF ARTS (2013) Hamilton, Ontario (English and Cultural Studies) Title: Violent Masculinities of The Faerie Queene. AUTHOR: Sage Hyden, B.A. (Laurentian University). SUPERVISOR: Professor Cathy Grisé. NUMBER OF PAGES: v, 98. ii Utilizing the strategies of feminist criticism, this study seeks to define masculinity and the issues confronting it as presented in Books III and IV of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The thesis analyzes the means by which Spenser’s poem challenges conventional notions of violence as inherent to masculinity. This includes examining the tropological use of rape to represent masculine lust as animalistic, as seen in the various male pursuers and aggressors of Florimell and Amoret, and the metaphorical conceptualization of love as a violent conquest as a means of contributing to homosocial status elevation.Thus this study contributes to the understanding of the didacticism of Spenser’s allegory concerning the fashioning of a proper gentleman. iii Acknowledgements: I would like to thank three special women for the completion of this thesis. The first of which is my mother, Betty Hyden, who has read, proofread and reread every word I have ever written. My undergraduate professor, Sylvia Hunt, deserves special mention for first instilling in me a love of Spenser and The Faerie Queene. Of course, no project of this length is possible without the guidance of an advisor with a deft critical pen and that is absolutely what I am lucky to have in Professor Cathy Grisé.
    [Show full text]
  • “And Dearest Loue”: Virgilian Half-Lines in Spenser's Faerie Queene
    “And dearest loue”: Virgilian half-lines in Spenser’s Faerie Queene Revised from a paper given to the Virgil Society on 25 January 2014* Brown This paper is concerned with errors and incompletions: to use an Elizabethan term, “vnper- fections”, of which my original title fortuitously included one.1 The half-line I intended to use as a title is in fact “And dearest loue”, not “And sweetest loue”, but my memory inadvertently slipped to the final line of the stanza in question and transposed the epithets: And all about grew euery sort of flowre, To which sad louers were transformd of yore; Fresh Hyacinthus, Phoebus paramoure, And dearest loue, Foolish Narcisse, that likes the watry shore, Sad Amaranthus, made a flowre but late, Sad Amaranthus, in whose purple gore Me seemes I see Amintas wretched fate, To whom sweet Poets verse hath giuen endlesse date. (III.vi.45)2 My confused epithets communicate something important about Spenser’s poetic idiom, as well as his debt to Virgil, and, in this case, to Ovid.3 To a significant extent, it doesn’t seem important who is “sweet” or what is “deare” in this stanza: Spenser’s poetic language does not * My thanks go to Syrithe Pugh and to David Lee Miller for illuminating comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 1 See ‘unperfection, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2016. 2 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 20012, Harlow, 349. All quotations from The Faerie Queene are from this edition, unless otherwise stated. After this note, as is customary in quoting Spenser, I give in text references to book, canto and stanza number.
    [Show full text]
  • The Faerie Queene</Italic>, Books 6 and 7
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by St Andrews Research Repository %HWZHHQ&RXUWHV\DQG&RQVWDQF\7KH)DHULH4XHHQH%RRNVDQG $OH['DYLV (/+9ROXPH1XPEHU)DOOSS $UWLFOH 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV '2,HOK )RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH Access provided by University of St. Andrews Library (13 Sep 2016 11:05 GMT) BETWEEN COURTESY AND CONSTANCY: THE FAERIE QUEENE, BOOKS 6 AND 7 BY ALEX DAVIS Toward the end of book 6 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Calidore, the knight of courtesy, finds himself in a community of shepherds. There he falls in love with the beautiful Pastorella and begins to think about abandoning his quest for the Blatant Beast. In conversation with Pastorella’s father, the aged Meliboe, Calidore denounces “Lordship and ambition,” praises the rural lifestyle, and wishes that “th’heauens so much had graced mee, / As graunt me liue in like condition.”1 Meliboe is unimpressed by these wistful yearnings for a simpler existence. “Fittest is,” he declares, “that all contented rest / With that they hold” (6.9.29.8–9): It is the mynd, that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happie, rich or poore: For some, that hath abundance at his will, Hath not enough, but wants in greatest store; And other, that hath little, askes no more, But in that little is both rich and wise. For wisedome is most riches; fooles therefore They are, which fortunes doe by vowes deuize, Sith each vnto himself his life may fortunize. (6.9.30.1–9) Fortune cannot touch the wise.
    [Show full text]
  • The Self-Destructive Nature of Evil in Edmund
    Grand Valley State University ScholarWorks@GVSU Masters Theses Graduate Research and Creative Practice 2008 The irC cle and the Cross: The elS f-Destructive Nature of Evil in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene Scott eD Young Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/theses Recommended Citation De Young, Scott, "The irC cle and the Cross: The eS lf-Destructive Nature of Evil in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene" (2008). Masters Theses. 675. http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/theses/675 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Research and Creative Practice at ScholarWorks@GVSU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Masters Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@GVSU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Circle and the Cross: The Self-Destructive Nature of Evil in E dm und Sp en ser’s Faerie Queene Scott De Young 2008 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English at Grand Valley State University © Scott De Young 2008 A bstract The theme of good and evil is at the forefront of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene', can virtue survive and overcome vice? Because this theme is widely prevalent in The Faerie Q ueene, it is fittingly prevalent in the existing scholarship on The Faerie Queene. W hen commenting on the workings of evil in The Faerie Queene, most scholars tend to focus on either the historical or literary influences on Spenser’s evil characters, or they focus on the manner in which evil poses a threat to good.
    [Show full text]
  • The Personification of the Human Subject in Spenser's the Faerie
    chapter 4 The Personification of the Human Subject in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Brenda Machosky With three voluminous books as the first installment, The Faerie Queene was proposed as a grand epic indeed when Spenser published them in 1590, with introductory dedicatory verses and an appended Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh explaining the purpose and structure of the poem. He alluded to plans for twelve books depicting the twelve priuate morall virtues of Aristotle,1 intermin- gled with his own version of the Arthurian legend; all in honor and celebra- tion of his sovereign, Queen Elizabeth. He contemplated another twelve books (for a total of 24), focused on the polliticke vertues.2 The second installment appeared in 1596 with the publication of Books 4–6. In the mode of Homer, Vergil, Ariosto, and Tasso, all of whom he names, and arguably Dante (whom he does not mention), Spenser seemed intent on writing the great English epic, and securing his place as England’s Poet Laureate—an honor he earned only unofficially, after his death and burial in Westminster Abbey, near the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer. He set the work in England’s mythical Arthurian past, an appropriate move given the Tudor claims of descent from Arthur. As he put it in the “Letter to Raleigh”, by being coloured with an historicall fiction the poem would not only be a delight to read but also kept itself furthest from the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time.3 While Arthur served as the work’s consistent epic hero and intervened in each of the six published books, the moral virtues that constitute a ‘noble per- son’ were each to be represented by particular adventures, often by a relevant quest, that would eventually reveal the ideal of that virtue.
    [Show full text]