Spenserian Moments

Gordon Teskey

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780674988446
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674243521
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the distinguished literary scholar Gordon Teskey comes an essay collection that restores Spenser to his rightful prominence in Renaissance studies, opening up the epic of The Faerie Queene as a grand, improvisatory project on human nature, and arguing—controversially—that it is Spenser, not Milton, who is the more important and relevant poet for the modern world.

There is more adventure in The Faerie Queene than in any other major English poem. But the epic of Arthurian knights, ladies, and dragons in Faerie Land, beloved by C. S. Lewis, is often regarded as quaint and obscure, and few critics have analyzed the poem as an experiment in open thinking. In this remarkable collection, the renowned literary scholar Gordon Teskey examines the masterwork with care and imagination, explaining the theory of allegory—now and in Edmund Spenser's Elizabethan age—and illuminating the poem's improvisatory moments as it embarks upon fairy tale, myth, and enchantment.

Milton, often considered the greatest English poet after Shakespeare, called Spenser his "original." But Teskey argues that while Milton's rigid ideology in Paradise Lost has failed the test of time, Spenser's allegory invites engagement on contemporary terms ranging from power, gender, violence, and virtue ethics, to mobility, the posthuman, and the future of the planet. The Faerie Queene was unfinished when Spenser died in his forties. It is the brilliant work of a poet of youthful energy and philosophical vision who opens up new questions instead of answering old ones. The epic's grand finale, "The Mutabilitie Cantos," delivers a vision of human life as dizzyingly turbulent and constantly changing, leaving a future open to everything.

PART I

ON SPENSER

CHAPTER 1

Other Poets

THE FIRST MENTION of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is an unfavorable one in a letter addressed to the poet in April 1580, a decade before the first installment of the poem appeared. It is the last of Three Proper, and Wittie, familiar Letters: lately passed between two universitie men (1580).¹ The author is Spenser’s former Cambridge mentor and continuing friend Gabriel Harvey, a fellow poet and literary theorist and a quarrelsome popinjay but one who cared about art and knew a great artist when he saw one.² Spenser had sent Harvey a number of works, or as is more likely, ideas for works, which were in the early planning stages. Among these were nine comedies, each named after one of the nine muses, and a portion of The Faerie Queene, although how substantial this portion was at the time is impossible to determine. It was probably very slight. As to the nine comedies, which, as we shall see, attracted Harvey’s partisanship, we may suppose they existed at most in examples of verse and a sketch of some kind.³

But the total scheme of nine plays, each to be under the patronage of one of the nine muses (adopted from an ancient editor’s titles for the nine books of Herodotus’s histories, as Harvey does not fail to observe), reminds us of The Faerie Queene itself, with its principal knights serving as “patrons” of the twelve moral virtues beating down the vices and crimes against which they are ranged. At any rate, the scheme for comedies bears the poet’s telltale fascination with abstract numerological patterns and orderly ideologemes. They will be scattered liberally throughout The Faerie Queene. Here is Harvey:

I had once again nigh forgotten your Faerie Queene.… I have now sent her home at the last, neither in better nor worse case than I found her.… I am void of all judgment if your nine Comoedies, whereunto in imitation of Herodotus you give the names of the Nine Muses … come not nearer Ariosto’s comedies … than that Elvish Queene doth to his Orlando Furioso, which notwithstanding you will needs seem to emulate, and hope to overgo, as you flatly professed yourself.⁴

As Harvey testifies, testily, Spenser already intends to “emulate” (the favorable, Renaissance sense of aemulari is meant, as with Vasari’s lodevole invidia, “praiseworthy envy”) and even to “overgo” Ariosto with an aerolithic scheme for the whole, a “continued Allegory,” as Spenser will call it, eschewing Ariosto’s lighter moments and his notorious sexy ones.⁵ The overgoing probably also refers to a more sustained concentration on the person Spenser would praise under the figure of the Fairy Queen: Queen Elizabeth I.

So Harvey advises Spenser not to proceed in emulation of the greatest work of the greatest poet of the age. (Ariosto was still undisputed king because Tasso’s epic had not yet appeared in full—and in England, not at all—when this letter was written.) Spenser should instead, says Harvey, follow Ariosto in composing nine comedies to the master’s four and a half. At least one of them is bound to be good. The best modern intellects, including no less than Alberti and Machiavelli, have composed erudite comedies, and so should you, Spenser, or rather (to keep up the pseudonyms the authors adopt in this public correspondence), so should you, Immerito, so that the world can at last do justice to your talent, if not your genius.⁶ The muses are the daughters of Apollo and confer the laurel crown, sacred to that god, on the deserving. Do not let the ugly and mischievous hairy elf Hobgoblin, symbol of fairy romance, run away with the garland you deserve to wear: “If so be that your Faerye Queene be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin run away with the garland from Apollo, mark what I say, and yet I will not say that I thought, but there an end for this once, and fare you well, till God or some good angel put you in a better mind.”⁷ His prayer went unanswered: Spenser went ahead with The Faerie Queene.

Harvey’s implicit advice (aside from the vaguely unpleasant suggestion of sending the Fairy Queen back neither better nor worse for his handling) is that Spenser rein in his Pegasus and employ a safer means, preferably on foot, for his ascent of Olympus. In The Shepheardes Calender, published the previous year, our poet had already climbed above the littered lower slopes of the mount, emerging into sight, even for those who were viewing from afar, as England’s “new Poete” (as the commentator “E. K.” calls him) with the latest and most advanced climbing techniques.⁸ He is the worthy inheritor of the laurels of Chaucer, dubbed by John Lydgate (this is still E. K. speaking) “the Loadestarre of our Language.” There is every expectation that this new poet-to-be is the new lodestar.

All this was said in E. K.’s epistle to The Shepheardes Calender, which is addressed to none other than Gabriel Harvey, “orator and poet,” both of which he was. Harvey is honored highly by this epistle, as he is in The Shepheardes Calender itself, especially in the “April” eclogue, in which, under the his pseudonym Hobbinoll, he sings, at Thenot’s request, the poet Colin’s beautiful “Lay of Fair Eliza”:

Thenot.

But if hys ditties bene so trimly dight,

I pray thee Hobbinoll, record some one:

The whiles our flockes do graze about in sight,

And we close shrowded in thys shade alone

Hobbinoll.

Contented I: then will I singe his lay

Of fayre Eliza, Queene of shepheardes all:

Which once he made, as by a spring he laye,

And tuned it unto the waters fall.

The Shepheardes Calender, “April,” lines 29–36

Hobbinoll is a complicated character in all his appearances in The Shepheardes Calender. But this one is interesting for its suggestion of deeper, homosocial tensions between Spenser and his generous but overbearing and overaffectionate mentor. The eclogue opens with Thenot asking Hobbinoll why he is in such a state of woe, to which Hobbinoll replies that he is distressed at his friend the poet Colin’s emotional state, mistreated by “the Widdowes daughter of the glenn … fayre Rosalind.” Colin has foresworn all shepherds’ sports and has willfully broken his pipe (an act to which Colin is addicted): “which made us merriment.” Now, he is plunged in pain, tearing “his tressed locks”; and worse, he has foreborne “His wonted songs, wherein he all outwent” (lines 10–16). A deeper and more personal cause of distress emerges as these remarks unfold. Hobbinoll laments his abandonment by “the ladde, whome long [he] lovd so deare” (line 10), a love he has caused to grow rapidly, as in a hothouse (I suppose that to be the meaning here of force), fertilized by gifts. Now, Colin has abruptly jerked his attention away from Hobbinoll and lavishes it on the scornful Rosalind, thus changing a friend—Hobbinoll himself—for a frenne, a stranger (as E. K. glosses the word) and an enemy:

Whilome on him was all my care and joye,

Forcing with gyfts to winne his wanton heart.

But now from me bys madding mynd is starte,

And woes the Widdowes daughter of the glenne:

So nowe fayre Rosalind hath bredde hys smart,

So now his frend is chaunged for a frenne.

The Shepheardes Calender, “April,” lines 23–27

The complaint of ingratitude is not hard to discern behind Hobbinoll’s distress at his Colin’s emotional state. Moreover, Hobbinoll is himself a poet: when they first meet, Thenot asks him if his bagpipe is broken. Yet Hobbinoll is forced to acknowledge Spenser to be (as T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, and in not dissimilar circumstances, graciously inscribed Ezra Pound), il miglior fabbro, “the better maker.” In cunning architecture of song, “he all outwent.”

Given the extravagant praise of Spenser in E. K.’s epistle to The Shepheardes Calender—the equal of Virgil and lodestar of our language, indeed!—perhaps Harvey, as on other occasions, was not altogether proof against envy. It takes self-knowledge and confidence, neither of which Harvey possessed in abundance, to rejoice at a former student’s soaring higher than oneself—or worse, soaring with apparent ease above one’s own dogged and pedestrian steps. Harvey may therefore have been startled by the language of flight employed by E. K. to describe Spenser, as “a bird whose principals [i.e., the long, adult pinions of the wing] be scarce growen out, but yet as that in time shall be hable to keepe wing with the best.”⁹ Clipped wings grow back. Perhaps it is not too late to clip these ones and keep the bird grounded for now.

The resolution of these tensions comes a decade later, in the handsome and respectful praise of the commendatory poem “To the learned Shepheard,” addressed by “Hobynoll” to the author of The Faerie Queene. He does advise Spenser—Collyn, as he still calls him—not to let his usual good sense be overcome with conceit at this new and stunning accomplishment or distorted by envy and disdain, those vices of courts. But from what we see of Spenser later in his career, in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, with its condemnation of the court “Where each one seeks with malice and with strife, / To thrust downe other into fowle disgrace” (lines 690–91), and the illustration of this judgment at the conclusions to Book Five and Book Six of The Faerie Queene, not to mention the trouble the poet made for himself with Prosopopoia: or Mother Hubberds Tale, the advice is well meant and on target. Even the mention of how “Colin” no longer pipes in lowly shepherds’ strains for “Those trustie mates, that loved thee so well,” is seen in positive terms. He has advanced nobly to his higher task, taking flight in song after all, like the lark ascending:

Collyn I see by thy new taken taske,

some sacred fury hath enricht thy braynes,

That leades thy muse in haughtie verse to maske,

And loath the layes that longs to lowly swaynes,

That lifts thy notes from Shpheardes unto kings,

So like the lively Larke that mounting sings.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

So mought thy Redcrosse knight with happy hand

victorious be in that faire Ilands right

Which thou does vale in Type of Faery land

Elysas blessed field, that Albion hight.

That shieldes her friends, and warres her mightie foes,

Yet still with people, peace, and plentie flowes.

“To the learned Shepherd,” lines 1–6, 25–30

“The best” whom the poet of the Shepheardes Calender will be able to “keep wing with,” or most of them, are named by E. K.: Virgil, Mantuan (memorized by every schoolboy in Spenser’s day, and virtually translated here), Petrarch, Boccaccio, Clément Marot, Jacopo Sannazaro, “and also divers other excellent both Italian and French Poetes, whose footing this Author every where followeth, yet so as few, but they be wel sented can trace him out.”¹⁰ These were heady comparisons in Spenser’s day, putting him in a class with some of the finest poets in the world. But any list of the best would normally include, on a Parnassian eminence far from but perhaps as high as Virgil’s, Lodovico Ariosto, although not without contention by doctrinaire Aristotelians, who even now were raising their heads. Ariosto is not named here only because for some reason he did not write formal pastoral verse, even early on, when he was composing in Latin.¹¹ But he was author of the vast and complicated serio-comic romance epic Orlando furioso, completed only months before his death in 1533. Its ostensible subject—which to modern eyes is nearly lost in the network of tales in which it is happily entangled—is the furia or “noble madness” (the allusion is to Seneca’s Hercules furens) of the great Christian hero Orlando, the paladin of Charlemagne and the bane of Saracens, in particular those who were laying siege to Paris, commanded by the young and impetuous king Agramante. He is the model for the Pagan King that Spenser hoped—in vain, as it happened—to match against his Fairy Queen, she who would be aided, perhaps, by her lover Prince Arthur.¹²

The theme of militant Christian idealism had long been bound up with the character of Orlando, the hero of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on References, Texts, and Quotations
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• PART ONE: ON SPENSER
• PART TWO: ON ALLEGORY
• PART THREE: ON THINKING
• PART FOUR: ON CHANGE
• Afterword: The Colossi of Memnon
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index