Chapter 1 Introduction: Playfulness in the Amoretti

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: PLAYFULNESS IN THE AMORETTI

A Survey of Criticism

Regarded as “one of the four founding fathers of modern English literature, along with Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton” (Hadfield 1), Edmund Spenser has enjoyed a good deal of scholarly interest over the years and “there is no English poet of the period on whom more extended comment would be available” (Cummings blurb). However, the present state of scholarship indicates that Spenser’s sonnet sequence, Amoretti, has not attracted an enthusiastic following. Since its first appearance in 1595, the sequence has been branded as inferior to the sonnet sequences produced by Shakespeare, Sidney, Daniel and Drayton, the other great sonneteers of the Elizabethan era, and Spenser’s reputation as “the most important non-dramatic English Renaissance poet” (Hadfield [i]) has in the past rested largely on his achievement in The Faerie Queene. The Critical Heritage volume on Spenser, which includes a comprehensive collection of Spenser criticism until 1715, has only three references to the Amoretti. In his Conversations with Ben Jonson, William Drummond of Hawthornden described the Amoretti as childish and expressed his belief that they were not written by Spenser at all.

As to that which Spenser calleth his Amoretti [sic], I am not of their opinion, who think them his; for they are so childish, that it were not well to give them so honourable a father. (Cummings 140)

John Hughes, “the first critic to consider the sum of Spenser’s work and not merely fragments of it” (Mueller 1), devotes a few sentences to the Amoretti in his introduction to the 1715 edition of Spenser’s Works, entitled “An Essay in Allegorical Poetry”. He commences by pointing out that the sonnet was by then “a Species of Poetry so entirely disus’d, that it seems to be scarce known amongst us at this time”, but nonetheless acknowledges that most of Spenser’s sonnets have qualities of “natural Tenderness, Simplicity and Correctness” (Cummings 276). The impact of this compliment, however, is somewhat negated by the fact that he uses Sonnet 15 of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella to illustrate those qualities that he admires in the Amoretti. 1

The lack of critical commentary during this early period is further emphasized by Jewel Wurtsbaugh’s Two Centuries of Spenserian Scholarship: 1609–1805, which does not include any critical commentary on the sonnet sequence. The only references to the sonnets concern publication dates or matters of autobiographical interest. What most of the critics of the time seemed to agree upon, was that “the course of the poet’s successful love and marriage [could be] traced in the Amoretti and Epithalamion” (111). Critical commentary continued to be mainly confined to incidental remarks in discussion of Spenser’s work as a whole during the nineteenth century. The few comments that were made about the sequence tended to be negative, as critics such as J. R. Lowell complained about Spenser’s “somewhat artificial Amoretti” (31). R. W. Church, who conceded that the sonnets had “grace and sweetness”, expressed the view of many other critics of the time when he condemned the Amoretti for lacking “the power and fire, as well as the mystery of those of the greater masters” (168). A new collection of Elizabethan sonnet sequences, edited by Sidney Lee and published in two volumes, made its appearance at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although not entirely dismissive of the Amoretti, Lee considered the sequence largely unimaginative and imitative in its use of image and convention, and felt that most of the sonnets exemplified “the fashionable vein of artifice” (II: xciii–iv). Lee’s rather negative view of the Amoretti was upheld by a number of critics during the first half of the century. In his article entitled “An Apology for Spenser’s Amoretti”, Waldo McNeir cites Emile Legouis’ opinion that Spenser’s sonnets lack “la brusquerie dramatique et la flamme” of Sidney’s. He also quotes William L. Renwick’s conclusion that Spenser “never wrote an outstanding sonnet to rank with Drayton’s masterpiece or Sidney’s best”, and that he was without “Shakespeare’s compression and magical phrasing, Ronsard’s solidity and Petrarch’s subtlety”. Renwick then softens his criticism by conceding that Spenser “kept a better level than most, and if he never wrote a great sonnet, he never wrote a bad one” (525). J. W. Lever, one of the most influential of the critics of Spenser’s Amoretti during the 1950s, was particularly harsh in his condemnation of the sonnets. Whilst he acknowledged the beauty and delicacy of the sonnets, he found Spenser’s “imagery diction, and verse form distinctive but not admirable, and the Amoretti as a whole undramatic” (McNeir 525). In his own words,

the imagery [had] lost the complex values of personification and conceit; the scope of metaphor was restricted; and similes, though sometimes of remarkable beauty, forfeited a wide range of sensual appeal. Finally we may add the archaisms of diction and the merely decorative or sonorous effects of verse form. (136–37)

In addition, he pointed to “disproportion” in events before and after the courtship, and the “indecisiveness of the ending”. Lever was also of the opinion that the sequence was “structurally defective” and that eighteen of the sonnets should be eliminated and others rearranged in order to avoid what he termed “irreconcilable inconsistencies in the presentation of the heroine” (92–138). Even C. S. Lewis, an ardent admirer of The Faerie Queene, had only qualified praise for the Amoretti. Describing his style as “devout, quiet and harmonious”, he concluded that “Spenser was not one of the great sonneteers” (372). During the 1960s, critical commentary on Spenser’s work was characterized by a range of approaches including “the rhetorical, the allegorical, the numerological, the iconographic, and the archetypal (or mythological)” (Berger 1). As in the past, most critical analysis during this period concentrated on The Faerie Queene, but some favourable attention was also paid to the minor poems. The publication of Louis Martz’s “The Amoretti: ‘Most Goodly Temperature’” signalled a turning point in the direction of criticism of the Amoretti. In his article, Martz challenged some of Lever’s assertions regarding inconsistencies in the characterization of the lady, and stressed the importance of parody, wit and humour as part of the tone of the sequence. Despite his rather tentative use of the terms—“good humoured, yes, even humorous, in our sense of the word” (154), “close to mock heroic” (156); it would be too much to call it parody” (157)—he drew attention to and initiated interest in these previously unexplored aspects of the Amoretti. Since the 1960s, the scope of criticism with regard to the Amoretti has broadened considerably. One of the preoccupations of more recent times is the search for an explanation of the Amoretti in terms of its different structures and critics such as Alexander Dunlop and Alistair Fowler have discovered various kinds of numerological and

3 calendrical patterning in the sequence. Reaction against autobiographical criticism, as well as the revival of interest in the allegorical aspects of The Faerie Queene has led to studies of the Amoretti as a sequence suited to allegorical interpretation. One such critic is Robert Kellogg, who asserts that the “fictional poet-lover-worshipper’s actual experience is close to ideal experience: The technique of the Amoretti with their wealth of Petrarchan conceits, is in many ways analogous to that of The Faerie Queene, a continued allegory or dark conceit” (145). Whilst idealising is not allegorizing, there is the possibility that the states represented in Amoretti are somehow paradigmatic of perfectible Petrarchan love. The relation of ideas in Spenser’s poetry to Neo–Platonic thought has been the subject of much commentary. To a large extent, this commentary has tended to be focused on questions relating to the extent of Neo-Platonic influence and the origin of Neo-Platonic ideas within the poetry, rather than on the ways in which Spenser treats Neo-Platonic themes. Robert Ellrodt, who expressed reservations about the degree of Platonic influence which had been claimed for some of Spenser’s poetry, argued that while the Amoretti “offered the first instance of the poet’s aquaintance with the Platonic ladder, the steps could not be traced” (212), and suggested that the Amoretti be placed somewhere between “the soft haze of Platonism in The Faerie Queene” and “the hard glare of the Neo–Platonic theory of love in the hymnes” (40). The imagery in Spenser’s Amoretti has been dealt with rather intermittently. In the few instances where comment has been made, this has tended to be negative. However, Myron Turner’s more recent article entitled “The Imagery of Spenser’s Amoretti” presents a more positive view. Turner, who claims that “love for Spenser is a mode of self- realization” which necessitates inward change, discusses the imagery in the sonnets in relation to what he perceives as the poet/lover’s “desire for the mutually fulfilling and reciprocal self-transcendence which exists within and makes possible the love relationship”. According to Turner, it is both the need for, and the fear of change, which become “important sources of imagery and poetic energy” in the Amoretti (286). During the 1980s, critics turned their attention to politics and sexuality. In his book entitled Edmund Spenser: A Literary Life, Gary Waller examines Spenser’s career in terms of both the material conditions of his poetry’s production (race, gender, class) and the places of its production (court, church, nation). Waller, who sees the Amoretti as providing a critique of Petrarchan love poetry, describes it as “atypically moralistic, espousing a view

4 of the relationship between poet/lover and his beloved that unambiguously advocates a Christian hierarchy of male control and female subordination” (170). In recent years, most critics, while accepting that the event presumably celebrated in the Amoretti is Spenser’s courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, appear to be in agreement with William Johnson who asserts that “there is more to the Amoretti and to this ‘romance’ than seems at first evident” (“Spenser’s ‘Amoretti’ and the Art of the Liturgy” 47). According to Johnson, love in the abstract as indicated by the title of the sequence, is Spenser’s focus, and in the sonnets, Spenser presents a variety of ‘loves’. However, the sequence is not only about ‘loves’. Central to the Amoretti is the theological concept of Christian love. Another critic who maintains that Spenser is “trying to accomplish much more in the Amoretti than depict his own courtship” is Reed Way Dasenbrock. In his article entitled “The Petrarchan Context of Spenser’s Amoretti”, Dasenbrock discusses Spenser’s non- Petrarchan handling of the sonnet and the sonnet sequence and points out that “Spenser, in the Amoretti, runs deliberately counter to the values expressed in and by that form”. One of the ways in which he achieves this is by “transforming and challenging ‘the conventions of Petrarchanism’” (38). A similar view is upheld by S. K. Heninger, Jr, who states:

The amorous voice of Amoretti carefully iterates the tired conventions and thereby activates the Petrarchist system; but at the same time, the accentuated conventionality calls attention to the literariness of the work and alerts us to a sophisticated poet who is manipulating the system for personal ends. (“Sequences, Systems, Models” 84)

Heninger directs attention towards the wit and humour evident in the sequence, which he describes as “a sportive action in a serious cause, a play of wit and the sort of self- conscious joking with the sonnet tradition that has led to anti-Petrarchanism…. While Astrophil and Stella is a critique of the sonnet sequence as genre, Amoretti becomes a fond parody of it” (86). Waldo McNeir, who asserts that the sonnets in Spenser’s sequence “are original in conception, well organized collectively and individually, metrically dexterous” (525), recognizes the dramatic qualities of the Amoretti.

His sonnets, like many of Sidney’s, have the immediacy of dramatic method; that is, they are spoken by one person to another, speech employed in direct address…. Fully three fourths of Spenser’s sonnets are inherently narrative, or drama, or both, because of their narrative basis in physical events and their dramatic method of presentation. (531– 33)

His views were later reiterated by Michael Spiller who claims that Spenser produced one of “the most coherent and highly developed sonnet sequences of all his contemporaries” (144). Like McNeir, Spiller stresses the dramatic qualities of the Amoretti, and suggests that the sequence might be approached as

today we would approach a sophisticated dinner-party conversation: in both there are speakers and hearers….And constantly, in both sonnet and table talk, one is performing for an audience, moving in and out of a series of poses, and watching one’s own performance as one gives it. (147–48)

Critical accounts of Spenser’s sonnets, such as those of Johnson, Dasenbrock, Spiller and Heninger, have done much to counteract the negative views of earlier critics. The increasing number of articles written about the Amoretti and the diversity of theories with regard to Spenser’s intentions in the sequence reflect not only a growing interest in the sonnets, but also bear witness to Waldo McNeir’s view that

these sonnets have been misjudged and under-rated—more so, in my opinion, than any other of Spenser’s works. No one would disturb Shakespeare’s position as the most eminent of the Elizabethan sonnet writers: it is deserved and unchallengeable. Spenser, his peer as a poet in many respects, belongs only a little below him as a maker of sonnets. (532)

Nevertheless, there are still many aspects of the Amoretti which need to be explored, or developed, before Spenser’s achievement in the sequence is fully appreciated. With this in

6 mind, my dissertation will follow the line initiated by Martz, and later developed by Heninger, and will centre on the sonnets as a sportive dimension of Spenser’s output. By focusing on specific groups of imagery in a comprehensive and systematic way, my intention is to present the Amoretti as a striking example of Spenser’s artistic and ludic virtuosity.

“A sportive action in a serious cause”

The qualities of wit and humour in Spenser’s poetry have been recognized by critics such as William Nelson, who, in his article entitled “Spenser Ludens”, draws attention to the poet’s playfulness:

To Drayton’s ‘grave moral’ and Milton’s ‘sage and serious’ Spenser, I would add, not altogether as a footnote, a playful one. (83)

In support of this view, he cites R. W. Church’s response to those critics who assert that “Spenser never smiles”:

he not only smiles with amusement or sly irony; he wrote what he must have laughed at as he wrote; and meant us to laugh at (84).

Recognition of these qualities in the Amoretti is evinced by its description as “above all, a smiling sequence” in which “certain conventions are being lightly mocked”. (Spenser Encyclopaedia 32) Louis Martz maintains that the lady, possessed of “deep wit” (Am. 43), “is certainly one of the most smiling and ‘chearefull’ ladies to appear in any English sequence” and points out that sonnets 39 and 40, which are “wholly devoted to her smiling and her ‘amiable cheare’, are only the most sustained of many indications of her ‘sweet eye-glances’ and her ‘charming smiles’ (Am. 17)” (154–5). Anne Lake Prescott, who notes that the lady’s “high spirits frustrate yet amuse her suitor”, expresses her belief that the sequence “makes better poetry when read with an ear for its quiet humour” (“Spenser’s Shorter Poems” 152).

Martz, Heninger and Spiller comment on the playfulness of the sonnets. According to Martz, the poet/lover uses “many various modes” in the Amoretti , which he identifies as “exalted, solemn, tender, touched with the edge of a smile, tinged with a hint of wit, or broadly comic” (161). Heninger, who regards the sequence as “a knowing and witty game played for the mutual amusement of Spenser and his future bride” (87), describes the Amoretti as “a studied gesture of praise and affection, not as a simple expression of true- felt emotion” and views the sonnets as “Spenser’s turn at playing the game of sonneteering, with Sidney’s rules bent even further” (“Sequences, Systems, Models” 86). Spiller defines the sonnet sequence as “a kind of petition for emotional recognition” (145), the aim of which is “not truth, but delight” (148). While Spenser’s Amoretti are serious in purpose, their presentation is light-hearted, “a sportive action in a serious cause, the pleasing of the bride” (“Sequences, Systems, Models” 86). The playful nature of the sonnets is suggested in Am. 80 where the poet/lover asks leave to “sport [his] muse and sing [his] loves sweet praise”. I decided to adapt this phrase in my title because the idea of play and playfulness pervades the entire sonnet sequence.

After so long a race as I have run Through Faery land, which those six books compile, give leave to rest me being halfe fordonne, and gather to my selfe new breath awhile. Then as a steed refreshed after toyle, 5 Out of my prison I will breake anew: and stoutly will that second worke assoyle, with strong endevour and attention dew. Till then give leave to me in pleasant mew to sport my muse and sing my loves sweet praise: 10 the contemplation of whose heavenly hew, my spirit to an higher pitch will rayse. But let her prayses yet be low and meane, fit for the handmayd of the Faery Queene. [Am. 80]

In the context of this poem, “sport” refers to “race” (line 1) and the “steed” of line 5. However, sport also alludes to play, to disport and to exercise as suggested by its use in the concluding couplet in Am. 10 where the poet/lover, disheartened by the lady’s laughter at his efforts, appeals to the Lord of love “her proud hart…a little [to] shake”, so that he “may laugh at her in equall sort, / as she doth laugh at [him] and makes [his] pain her sport”. In Am. 80, the poet/lover’s use of the word “sport” implies that he will playfully exercise his poetic activity in order to produce those “leaves, lines, and rymes” (Am. 1) for his lady- muse, who in turn, will inspire him to further productivity. Although he, making a distinction between the serious task of the epic and the pleasing play of the sonnets, regards his sonnet writing as “sport” in “pleasant mew”, Spiller points out that “for the courtier…there was no distinction between play and work, in a culture where ritualized play could be intensely serious and consequential” (147). This view is reiterated by Johan Huizinga, who, in his book entitled Homo Ludens, asserts that “poetry was born in play and nourished in play” and maintains that the function of the poet…remains in the play-sphere where it was born” (198). In keeping with the viewpoints of both Heninger and Spiller, he emphasizes that

play does not exclude seriousness. The spirit of the Renaissance was very far from being frivolous….The game of living in imitation of Antiquity was pursued in holy earnest. Devotion to the ideals of the past in the matter of plastic creation and intellectual discovery was of a violence, depth and purity surpassing anything we can imagine….And yet the whole mental attitude of the Renaissance was one of play. This striving, at once sophisticated and spontaneous, for beauty and nobility of form is an instance of culture at play. (206)

Harry Berger expands on this idea in his discussion of what he describes as the Renaissance imagination. One of the aspects of the Renaissance imagination concerns “fiction and make-believe, the new interest in the ability of the poet or artist to create a relatively autonomous, yet explicitly artificial and imaginary world” (3–4). This world, which emphasised “serious make-believe and meaningful play”, was known as the “second world” because “it was set over against the first world of actuality in which men found

9 themselves, the world created by God”. “Rigorously bounded off from actuality”, it served as “a place where the mind [could] project its revised and corrected images of experience and where the soul [could] test and enlarge itself” (4). It also provided “a means of counteracting, and often of ironically portraying, impulses to despair, escape, or wish- fulfillment” (4) that may have been perceived in themselves, their fellow men or in cultural tendencies. This duality of playfulness and seriousness is evident in the Amoretti as the poet/lover, who clearly desires one thing only, “marriage to his lady”, performs “eloquently from various angles and in various voices and registers, within the range conventional to the sonnet discourse” (Spiller 148).The Amoretti represents a seeing process of reform or a metamorphosis, but it is presented through the medium of linguistic play with convention, sets of ideas, values and attitudes. Throughout the sequence, patterns of imagery are inflected by a fundamental shift from convention to self-discovery through playfulness. At the beginning of the sequence, convention is in a manner of speaking, the poet/lover’s master. By the end of the sequence, however, the situation is reversed and he is master of convention through playfulness. Initially, the Amoretti start with a power game. According to Barbara Everett, “most Elizabethan sonnets have two people in them, the lover and the beloved, locked in a courtship that is a struggle for power” (14). At the beginning of the sequence, the poet/ lover is trapped in a power struggle and bound by convention. He breaks free of that by turning the struggle into a game. In addition to the word “sport” (Am. 10 and 80), the notion of play is also conveyed by the poet/lover’s use of the word “entertaine” (Am. 4, 12 and 68), and the references to role-playing (Am. 18 and 54). “Entertain”, which comes from the Latin tenure meaning to hold, has etymological connections with the captivity motif found in the sequence. However, the word is used ambiguously in the individual sonnets and there is clear play on the idea of the poems as both entertainment (giving pleasure) and as a form of negotiation, suggesting in turn that negotiation is a kind of game or an interlude. “Entertaine” is first used in Am. 4, the sonnet which “date[s] the beginning of the courtship” (King 163), when the poet/lover calls upon the lady to “prepare [her] selfe new love to entertaine”, that is, to welcome or to receive his love. In addition, the word “entertaine” also conveys the idea of pleasure given by art, reminding the reader that right

10 from the outset, the poems, with their “termes” (leaves, lines, and rymes) have been sent to “please”, that is, “entertaine” the lady. Eight sonnets later, the poet/lover seeks “with her hart-thrilling eies / to make a truce and termes to entertaine” (Am. 12) suggesting both his desire to enter into negotiation with the lady, as well as the terms that he intends to use. In this sonnet, the phrase “termes to entertaine” means to consider conditions for peace’. This conveys the idea of verbal art as negotiation, as the poet/lover and the lady negotiate their terms throughout the sonnet sequence, he with his poems and she with her minimal reactions. At this point, the idea of playfulness is subordinated to the power struggle between the poet/lover and the lady. Because the power struggle can be reduced to the level of words, it gives the poet/lover the opportunity to start turning it into a game. The word appears for the third time in the third quatrain of Am. 68,

And that thy love we weighing worthily, may likewise love thee for the same againe: and for thy sake that all lyke deare didst buy, with love may one another entertayne.

While the connections with the captivity motif are again in evidence, the word needs to be considered in its new context. In this sonnet, which “celebrates the betrothal as the initiation of a movement that will lead to the union of worldly and divine love in the closing marriage poem [Epithalamion]” (King 164), the poet/lover and the lady’s new love is synchronized with the divine love of Christ in the final outcome of reconciliation of opposites. Just as in Am. 67, the betrothal sonnet, the lady is “with her owne goodwill fyrmely tyde” in a bond that is not really bondage, so in Am. 68, man’s captivity to Christ does not represent real captivity, but should be viewed as a triumph. Having been “washt from [the] sin” of the past, the time has now come to prepare for the future which promises the hope of “live[ing] for ever in felicity”. In the sonnets preceding Am. 68, the poet/lover is seen to be “trying-on, as it were, the various loves, playing the Petrarchan lover, the Neo-Platonic idealist, the rhetorician- humanist” (Johnson, “Amor and Spenser’s Amoretti” 224). Explicit reference to this role- playing is made in Am. 18 and 54 which both employ theatre imagery. Commenting on Am. 54, Spiller asserts that the theatrical metaphor used by Spenser in this sonnet

“emphasises that what is transacted between [the poet/lover and the lady] is the performance of feeling” and that the “expressions of that feeling are masks, the tragic corresponding to the rhetoric of passion, and the comic to the playful mode associated with Anacreontic rhetoric” (146).

Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay, My love lyke the Spectator ydly sits beholding me that all the pageants play, disguysing diversly my troubled wits. Sometimes I joy when glad occasion fits, 5 and mask in myrth lyke to a Comedy: soone after when my joy to sorrow flits, I waile and make my woes a Tragedy. Yet she beholding me with constant eye, delights not in my merth nor rues my smart: 10 but when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry she laughes, and hardens evermore her hart. What then can move her? if nor merth nor mone, she is no woman, but a senceless stone. [Am. 54]

The playfulness conveyed by this sonnet is also noted by A. Bartlett Giamatti, who states that “through the image of the theater, and in the writing of pageants-pages, we catch the sense of ‘play,’ of pretense and illusion that animates the whole poem.” (699) According to Louis Martz, Am. 54 confirms the “presence of mirth and comedy” in the Amoretti and is “perhaps more important than any other individual sonnet for an understanding of the sequence” (162), as it reveals a conscious awareness of the ‘game’ element in the sequence:

this sonnet indicates the complete recognition of the lover that he is deliberately playing many parts, staging “all the pageants” in an ancient festival of courtship, adopting all the masks that may catch his lady’s eye and prove his

devotion (168).

The image of the theatre that is used in this sonnet is significant because of its Renaissance representation of the world as a stage on which the self is created by the playing of parts. For the first time in the sequence, the poet/lover sees and comes close to understanding his true relationship with the lady and recognizes his own game-playing in the courtship. Although the lady is presented as “the Spectator [who] ydly sits”, passively watching the poet/lover perform, it soon becomes evident, as she counters his theatrical expressions with opposite ones, that she is as much a part of the “pageant” as he is. Like the poet/lover, she too “knows that Petrarchan mood swings are often theatre”, and her “laughter at both comic and tragic performances” in this sonnet “shows her poised scepticism” (Prescott, “Spenser’s Shorter Poems” 153). In the sonnets preceding Am. 54, both the poet/lover and the lady have demonstrated a conscious awareness of their role-playing, and the lady has shown herself to be a willing and active participant in the courtship-game. This is particularly pertinent in Am. 18, the first of the two sonnets that employ theatre imagery. Discouraged by the lady’s alleged failure to respond to his various poses, the poet/lover contrasts the hardness of her heart, which remains unyielding, to the “hardest steele” and “firmest flint” which eventually do show signs of being worn down in the first two quatrains of Am. 18.

The rolling wheele that runneth often round, The hardest steele in tract of time doth teare: and drizling drops that often doe redound, the firmest flint doth in continuance weare. Yet cannot I, with many a dropping teare, 5 and long intreaty, soften her hard hart: that she will once vouchsafe my plaint to heare, or looke with pitty on my payneful smart.

Contrary to his claim that the lady’s “hard hart” makes her unreceptive to his entreaties, however, the third quatrain reveals that she does in fact react, even if her response is not the one for which he was hoping.

But when I pleade, she bids me play my part, and when I weep, she sayes teares are but water: 10 and when I sigh, she sayes I know the art, And when I waile, she turnes hir selfe to laughter.

In line 11, which is deliberately ambiguous, it is not clear whether the words represent the lady’s comment that “the lover knows the art of wooing with sighs”, or if the words impart her observation that she “herself sees this art for what it is” (Maclean and Prescott 594). In either case, the fact remains that the lady recognizes what the poet/lover is trying to do, and as Ilona Bell points out, “there is serious critique embedded in these lines”. The lady

says, “I know the art,” or “Go on, play the part of the Petrarchan lover,” not because she wants him to be a Petrarchan lover, but because she, like Isabella Whitney, wants him to know that she knows “Some [men] use the teares of crocodiles, / contrary to their hart: / And if they cannot alwaeys weep: /they wet their Cheekes by Art.” (161)

The sonnet, which offers no mitigation, ends with the rather pessimistic lines

So doe I weepe, and wayle, and pleade in vaine, whiles she as steele and flint doth still remayne.

At this point in the sequence, the lady, who in line 9 “bid[s]” the poet/lover “play [his] part”, is clearly in control and it is she who determines the boundaries. By playing his part, the poet/lover can start to break free and transcend the boundaries. As Douglas Brooks-Davies points out, while “flint” in the final line serves as a symbol of the lady’s hard heart, “fire (=love) can also be struck from it” (231). Thus there is a hint of hope, as long as the poet/lover relies on an art that is self-enclosed and lacks the ability to engage, there is no chance of success. Real playfulness, in the Renaissance sense of the word, constitutes a way of engaging, not trivializing reality. Just as the “rolling wheele” that engages, eventually “teares”, so the poet/lover, through playfulness, will come to realize

14 that the lady is not the hard mistress who is separate. Although the story of the Amoretti, which is one of a change of heart, is a serious matter, wit and verbal play can be accommodated because it is a process of breaking free from entrapment.

Playful Structures

Playfulness is also inherent in the structure of the book as it was first presented. Entered in the Stationer’s register on the 19th of November 1594, a small octavo volume entitled Amoretti and Epithalamion. Written Not Long Since By Edmund Spenser.[sic] was published in the author’s absence by William Ponsonby in 1595. The book comprised four sections: a dedicatory letter from Ponsonby to Sir Robert Needham and two dedicatory sonnets to Spenser; the sonnet sequence, Amoretti; four untitled, light-hearted poems that have been named Anacreontics by modern editors and the marriage song, Epithalamion. Each section of the book represents a different genre, with different conventions, and sets up different expectations. For the sonnet sequence, the expectation would have been one of disappointment. A fairly cynical and slightly detached view of love would have been anticipated for the Anacreontics and the expectancy for Epithalamion would have been celebration and fulfilment. The dedicatory sonnets, which precede the three poems, belong to the world of patronage and can perhaps be regarded as a reminder that the poet is part of a cultural world and that the works are for consumption, and not merely expressions of personal feeling. While the Amoretti, Epithalamion and Anacreontics are linked by their common theme of love, the volume, described by Heather Dubrow as “the most complex instance of interrelated texts” (76), has generated considerable scholarly debate. The discussion centres on the relationship between the poems and whether these texts are to be read as separate works or as an integrated collection since there is evidence which seems to support both views. The problem is compounded by the fact that critics cannot say for certain if it was Spenser’s intention that the three works be combined in a single volume, or if the decision to do so was made by William Ponsonby who, as the dedicatory letter indicates, published them in the author’s absence.

An impression of unity is created by the use of a full stop after the title (Amoretti and Epithalamion.), as well as the printing of each sonnet in the sequence and each stanza of the marriage song on a separate page decorated with virtually identical borders at the top and the bottom. A further connection between the two works is established by the fact that the sonnet form of the Amoretti has “Italian roots” and the Epithalamion “looks like an extended Italian canzone” (Yale 585). However, disparity is suggested, not only by Epithalamion’s separate title page and its different type size, but also by its Greek title. H. S. V. Jones, who emphasises the significance of the separate title page, notes that while the dedicatory letter refers to the “sweete conceited sonnets”, no mention is made of the Epithalamion, leading her to conclude that the Amoretti and Epithalamion “were at first intended for separate publication” (332). This is in direct contrast to critics, such as John King, who, rejecting claims that the separate title page for Epithalamion suggests disjunction, draws attention to “the tight thematic and quasinarrative links between the two works” (161) and asserts that “this leaf simply indicates that Spenser’s canzone on marriage differs in genre from the love sonnets” (161). In support of this assertion, he cites A. Kent Hieatt’s argument that

Spenser may have decided, not least as a non-Catholic poet and a ‘Christian Humanist,’ to crown his sequence with a canzone for an earthly marriage and for the beloved with whom he saw love as a part of Christian charity, just at the point where the great Catholic had crowned his sequence with a canzone to the Virgin. (161–62)

Whilst “the Amoretti volume has long been interpreted as commemorating Spenser’s marriage to his second wife, first identified in 1882 by A. B. Grosart as Elizabeth Boyle” (McCabe 179), the role of the four poems that have come to be known as Anacreontics, so-called because they are written in the manner of the sixth century B.C. poet, Anacreon, is not as clear. Distinct in form from both Amoretti and Epithalamion, these four light-hearted, amatory verses were bound, untitled and unnumbered, between the sonnets and the marriage poem in the 1595 volume. The first two stanzas were printed together on one page and the remaining stanzas were assigned a page each. Modern editors generally regard the Anacreontics as four separate poems, indicated by bracket headings.

Baffled by their immunity to “obvious psychological or (auto) biographical readings” (Brooks-Davies 205) some critics have questioned the validity of these poems within the volume and opinions regarding the function of the Anacreontics are varied. According to Richard McCabe, the Anacreontics “seem to be designed to explore the nature of the relationship between love and desire through the medium of mythology, reflecting back over the problems of the sonnets and looking forward to the joy of the Epithalamion” (180). John Lee sees the playful tone of these verses about Cupid’s delights and woes as providing relief from the more serious business of the courtship and the complex exploration of love in the sonnets before the celebration in Epithalamion of “the complexities of human love which is properly God-like in its interrelationship with the divine” (223). It has also been suggested that the purpose of the Anacreontics, which “recount the same story as the Amoretti and Epithalamion that they link, though in a new key and in a voice quite different from that of the poet-lover in the former and the bridegroom in the latter” (Kennedy 276), is perhaps to “show off Spenser’s ability to write in this fashionably elegant manner” (Prescott, “Spenser’s Shorter Poems” 154). In his article entitled “Spenser’s ‘Greener’ Hymnes and Amoretti: Retraction and Reform”, William Johnson refers to the notion that “Spenser wrote but one poem, and that it extended from his earliest works to his last” (431). He identifies love as the major theme and explains how, by changing the form, Spenser has worked and reworked it by “allegoriz[ing] the topic in The Faerie Queene, dramatis[ing] it in a human setting in Amoretti and Epithalamion, and then analys[ing] it philosophically in the Fowre Hymnes” (431). Although Johnson does not mention the Anacreontics, the idea would also apply to these poems which “revise, in a mythological mode, the preceding sonnets’ bitter- sweetness and the Venerean/Dianan beauty of the beloved, as well as offering a light- hearted interlude between Amoretti’s desolate end and Epithalamion’s dark and solitary beginning” (Brooks-Davies 205). Attention has also been focused on structural patterns and numerological symbolism in the Anacreontics following A. Kent Hieatt’s discovery of a symbolic relationship between the twenty-four stanzas of Epithalamion and the twenty-four hours in Spenser’s wedding day. This prompted critics to take notice of similar structural patterns in his other works. In the case of the Amoretti, the pioneer was Alexander Dunlop, who

17 determined that the sonnet sequence follows a highly symmetrical scheme derived from the liturgical calendar for 1594. Douglas Brooks-Davies summarises the scheme as follows:

Am. 62 marks the new year beginning on 25 March; each sonnet following signifies a day leading to the Easter Day sonnet, 68 (Easter Sunday was on 31 March in 1594). Counting backwards (one day per sonnet) to 22 (‘This holy season, fit to fast and pray’) we reach 13 February, the day on which Ash Wednesday was celebrated in 1594. (205)

These forty-six sonnets (Am. 22–68), which make up the Lenten sequence, are preceded by twenty-one sonnets (Am. 1–21) and followed by a second group of twenty-one sonnets (Am. 69–89). He also suggested that “the temporal proximity of Amoretti and Epithalamion indicates that the Anacreontics serve to fill the time until June 11” (18), Spenser’s wedding day. While Dunlop restricted his study to the structure of the Amoretti alone, critics such A. Fowler have extended and modified the structural scheme to include the Anacreontics and Epithalamion:

34 + 1 (Am. 1–35) 47 (Am. 36–82) 1 (Am. 83) + 34 (Am. 84–89, 4 Anacreontics, 24 stanzas of Epith.).

Brooks-Davies cites Fowler’s observation that

Am’s total of 89 sonnets represents the winter quarter of the year (89 days according to Renaissance authorities); a total which, when the 4 Anacreontics are added, becomes 93, the number of days in the spring quarter. Epithalamion, naturally enough, encodes summer, its stanzas being subdivided by short lines into a total of 92 long-line sections, 92 being the number of days in the summer quarter. (204)

Although these findings may bring us closer to uncovering the game that it appears is being played by combining the three works in a single publication, the calculations involved are both complex and controversial. Spenser’s first readers, however, would not have found the heterogeneity of the 1595 volume as puzzling as modern critics do, as they had a framework for reading it. According to Anne Lake Prescott, it was not uncommon for English love poets to publish their sonnets, “followed first by something light, and then by a long poem in a different tone” (“Spenser’s Shorter Poems” 154)1 and Heather Dubrow points out that “Petrarchan poets frequently practice[d] both diacritical desire and genre criticism by playing different types of literary types against one another” (75). In his introduction to Shakespeare: The Sonnets and A lover’s complaint, John Kerrigan stresses the coherence of the different works contained in these early volumes and shows how Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592) had initiated in England the convention of a tripartite structure: a sonnet sequence followed by a lyric interlude—made up of a short poem or poems in the manner of Anacreon—followed by a long poem (13–15). Referring specifically to Shakespeare’s 1609 volume, he asserts that the first readers would have

found something perfectly familiar…and could never have thought the pair of Cupid poems [that follow the sonnet sequence] “irrelevant”, “inexplicable”, or “non-Shakespearian” as most recent scholars have. Nor would they have shunned A lover’s complaint for the sake of the hundred and fifty-four short poems. (14)

He also points out that there is a distinct relationship between the various works contained in the collection and that regardless of the diversity of the content of the individual poems, early readers would have had “a strong expectation of connectedness” (15) and their “sense of the parts would have been modified by the whole” (14). The playfulness that is inherent in the publication and presentation of the 1595 volume extends into the Amoretti where Spenser, while writing within the sonnet tradition,

1 Daniel’s sonnet sequence, Delia, which was published together with a short ode and The Complaint of Rosamund in 1592, follows this tradition. The pattern is also evident in Thomas Lodge’s Phillis and Giles Fletcher’s Licia, which appeared in the following year, and the 1609 volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 19 stretches the limits of the genre and draws the reader into his game. Play occurs in both the structure of the sequence, and within the individual sonnets. As noted earlier, the sonnet sequence has a symmetrical tripartite structure with twenty-one sonnets preceding, and twenty-one following the central so-called Lenten section.2 However, further patterns within the two groups of twenty-one sonnets can also be discerned. The sequence begins with three introductory sonnets (Am. 1–3), which parallel the three concluding sonnets (Am. 87–89). Am. 4 and Am. 86, both transitional poems, are seventeen sonnets away from the two ‘holy days’, Ash Wednesday (Am. 22) and Easter Sunday (Am. 68). Twenty-six sonnets after the beginning of the sequence, a blazon featuring flowers appears (Am. 26). Twenty-six sonnets from the end of the sequence, there is another blazon using floral imagery. The two spring sonnets (Am. 19 and Am. 70) are also in balanced positions. The numerous calendrical correspondences are another means by which Spenser provides some of the clues to his game. According to William C. Johnson, it is the allusions to the church calendar, in particular, that reveal “the real concern of the poems…that the love of which the poet writes is not only that of a man for a woman but is, concomitantly, a metaphoric presentation of the Christian’s love for Christ” (“Spenser’s Amoretti and the Art of the Liturgy” 50). The story of the penitent Christian, seeking by various means to obtain grace, appears in the central panel of the triptych and it is these forty-six sonnets, the Lenten sequence, that are said to represent the structural key to the Amoretti. The introduction of a religious motif into a Petrarchan love sonnet sequence is slightly incongruous and can be regarded as being a bit mischievous. Interwoven into this structure are many other smaller patterns created by recurring words, images and motifs in different contexts. Sometimes these repetitions occur in individual sonnets, at other times they extend into two or more poems. Whole poems or parts of poems are repeated with minor modifications and traditional tales are playfully adapted to suit the poet/lover’s purpose. Concern with both his art (writing) and his heart (the courtship) develops into an important theme within the sequence and ‘art’ and ‘heart’, auditorily close homophones, provide one example of the wordplay that abounds.

2 For a full discussion of the structure see Alexander Dunlop, The Concept of Structure in Three Renaissance Sonnet Sequences (Chapel Hill, 1976) and William C. Johnson, “Spenser’s Amoretti and the Art of the Liturgy”, Studies in English Literature 14 (1974): 47–62. 20

The word ‘fayre’, both in the sense of beauty and justice, is associated with the lady’s image throughout the sequence and play on the word occurs in a number of sonnets. Particularly in the earlier sonnets, the lady is presented as the cruel/fair and in Am. 56, “Spenser’s delight in rhetorical elaboration” (Rix 67) is demonstrated as he plays with the idea of this double aspect.

Fayre ye be sure, but cruell and unkind, As is a Tygre that with greedinesse hunts after bloud, when he by chance doth find a feeble beast, doth felly him oppresse. Fayre be ye sure but proud and pitilesse, as is a storme, that all things doth prostrate: 5 finding a tree alone all comfortlesse, beats on it strongly it to ruinate. Fayre be ye sure, but hard and obstinate, as is a rock amidst the raging floods: gaynst which a ship of succour desolate, 10 doth suffer wreck both of her selfe and goods. That ship, that tree, and that same beast am I, whom ye doe wreck, doe ruine, and destroy.

At first glance, the poet/lover merely seems to be recollecting his previous complaints, but the distinctive pattern in the poem suggests that there might be more going on here than at first appears. “Fayre ye be sure” (line 1) and the slightly modified “Fayre be ye sure” (lines 5 and 9) appear at the beginning of each quatrain, which develops a different simile. Each of the “fayre[s]” is qualified by a pair of adjectives that link the lady to the particular object with which she is being compared, emphasising her heartlessness. Thus, in the opening quatrain, she is a cruel and unkind tiger, in the second, a proud and pitiless storm, and in the third, a hard and obstinate rock. The concluding couplet picks up all the ‘victims’ in the similes (the feeble beast from the first quatrain, the tree from the second and the ship from the third) and, reassembling them in reverse order, compares them to the poet/lover. This forms a strong

21 contrast with the forceful verbs, “wreck”, “ruine” and “destroy”, to which the lady’s actions are compared in the final line. Despite the seriousness of Am. 79, as indicated by the absence of verbal wit and humour, this sonnet is the first of a trio of poems that play on the word ‘fayre’. Play occurs at three levels; the form of the word, its grammatical function and the sense. Following his separation from the lady in Am. 78, the poet/lover turns inwards in Am. 79 to the “ymage” of her which he carries “fresh in mynd” and reconsiders the idea of ‘fairness’. “Fayre” is repeated seven times in this sonnet and a different idea is developed in each quatrain.

Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it, For that your selfe ye dayly such doe see: but the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit, and virtuous mind, is much more praysed of me. For all the rest, how ever fayre it be, 5 shall turne to nought and loose that glorious hew: but onely that is permanent and free from frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew. That is true beautie: that doth argue you to be divine and borne of heavenly seed: 10 deriv’d from that fayre Sprit, from whom al true and perfect beauty did at first proceed.

In the opening quatrain, the poet/lover draws two contrasts, the first between what “Men” say and what he says, and the second between “fayre” and “trew fayre”. While “fayre” in line 1 refers to the physical beauty that can be seen in a reflection and that “men” see, the “trew fayre”, based on her “gentle wit / and virtuous mind”, has to do with inner beauty. In Am. 74 the poet/lover claimed that his “spirit out of dust was raysed” and it is this transformation that now distinguishes him from other men and enables him to see beyond physical appearance. In the second quatrain, he introduces the notion of impermanence into his deliberation. His use of the noun “nought” in line 6 and the reductive reference to “flesh”

22 in line 8 effectively undermines the positive connotations of “that glorious hew” (line 6), that is, physical beauty. “Trew fayre”, on the other hand, is elevated, not only by the phrases, “permanent” and “free / from fraile corruption”, but also by its association with the religious words, “divine”, “heavenly seed” and “fayre Sprit”, reinforcing his first premise that external beauty is less important than inner beauty. The poet/lover’s increasing focus on “the spiritual beauty of Elizabeth and their love” is reflected in the couplet where, in accordance with “the Neoplatonic concept that “true beauty derives from God” (Yale 648), he states:

He onely fayre, and what he fayre hath made, all other fayre lyke flowers untimely fade.

The image of the transient flowers has connections with the “heavenly seed” of line 10, but unlike the latter, which will grow (“proceed”), the former will fade, losing their ‘glorious hew”. In Am. 80 the poet/lover plays on the sound of the word “fayre” when he breaks the sequence framework with the second direct reference to Spenser’s epic, The Faerie Queene. The way in which Faerie Queene is lifted out draws attention to the poet as the maker of these poems and strongly reinforces the reference to Spenser in his poetic career. His use of the word “sport’ in the third quatrain,

Till then give leave to me in pleasant mew, to sport my muse and sing my loves sweet praise: the contemplation of whose heavenly hew, my spirit to an higher pitch will rayse, not only suggests that he is taking time off from his greater work to write the sonnets, indicating that they are playful interludes, but also reinforces play at other levels in the sequence. Appropriately, in Am. 81, the poet/lover “sports [his] muse” and “sings [his] loves sweet praise”. Once again, there is a clear pattern and the word “fayre” plays a prominent

23 part as the poet/lover draws attention to different aspects of the lady’s fairness. Each aspect is also associated with an action, which results in the fairness. In the first quatrain, he describes three features, namely her golden hair, her rosy cheeks and her eyes. The second praises two in more detail, her breast and her smile. The third concentrates on her mouth through which “the message of her gentle spright” is imparted. The poet/lover’s appreciation of this particular quality is conveyed by his use of the superlative, “fairest” in line 9.

Fayre is my love, when her fayre golden heares, with the loose wynd ye waving chance to marke: fayre when the rose in her red cheeks appears, or in her eyes the fyre of love does sparke. Fayre when her brest lyke a rich laden barke, 5 with pretious merchandize she forth doth lay: fayre when that cloud of pryde, which oft doth dark her goodly light with smiles she drives away. But fayrest she, when so she doth display the gate with pearles and rubyes richly dight: 10 through which her words so wise do make their way to beare the message of her gentle spright. The rest be works of natures wonderment, but this the worke of harts astonishment. [Am. 81]

The final line of the sonnet recalls Am. 3 when the poet/lover was “stopped with thoughts astonishment”. In Am. 81 it is his heart that is astonished. For a large part of the sequence, the poet/lover has had difficulty expressing the strong feeling in his heart and having accomplished the sacrifice of his heart promised in Am. 22, “balance is being restored” (Dunlop 98). This sonnet, which is related to the three previous ones, Am. 78, 79 and 80, and completes the sequence of four, represents “the culmination in Amor of the theme of self-expression” (Yale 649).

The four sonnets that I have selected for my discussion provide just one example of the intricate pattering of verbal repetition within the sequence as a whole, in groups of poems and within single poems, as one game (a power game) is replaced by another (a wedding game). While we cannot be certain whether the Amoretti are working towards transformation, or whether transformation is part of a game that is being played, the playful dimension is always present. Playfulness is both a theme of the Amoretti and a feature of the poet/lover’s treatment of love. As the poet/lover moves from solipsism to the interpersonal, one game is replaced by another. The transformation that occurs in the sequence pre-figures the marriage celebrated in the far more solemn Epithalamion and the poems that make up the Amoretti, “a sportive action in a serious cause”, are “what he has to offer his bride” (Heninger, “Sequences, Systems, Models” 86). By emphasising the playfulness of the sonnets, the poet achieves a witty detachment from the work and gives it a kind of provisional quality.