Rereading Chaucer and Spenser

Dan Geffrey with the New Poete

Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, Gareth Griffith, Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, Gareth Griffith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526136916
• eBook ISBN: 9781526136930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Rereading Chaucer and Spenser is a much-needed volume that brings together established and early career scholars to provide new critical approaches to the relationship between Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. By reading one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages alongside one of the greatest poets of the English Renaissance, this collection poses questions about poetic authority, influence, and the nature of intertextual relations in a more wide-ranging manner than ever before. With its dual focus on authors from periods often conceived as radically separate, the collection also responds to current interests in periodisation. This approach will engage academics, researchers and students of Medieval and Early Modern culture.

1

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Spenser’s Amoretti and The Faerie Queene: reading historically and intertextually

Judith H. Anderson

The presence of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Spenser’s Amoretti, as well as in The Faerie Queene, and the kind of presence it is in both are my major concerns in this chapter, but I will start by summoning what we already know about the relationship of this particular poem by Chaucer to Spenser’s poems more generally. The few references in the Spenser canon that indubitably involve Troilus and Criseyde include, first, the phrase ‘Uncouthe unkiste’, in E.K.’s epistle to The Shepheardes Calender, which E.K. attributes to Chaucer and which updates Pandarus’s proverb ‘Unknowe, unkist’ and thus preserves in Elizabethan English the phonic consonance of Chaucer’s hard ‘k’; and second, the Calender’s envoy, ‘Go lyttle Calender’, which has been anticipated by Immeritô’s dedicatory poem, beginning ‘Goe little booke’.¹ Beyond these, Clare Kinney has demonstrated parallels between the Petrarchan posture of Chaucer’s Troilus and that of Spenser’s Colin Clout in the Calender.² Humble as the figure of Colin might purport to be, convincing parallels are there, together with Spenserian aspirations. In The Faerie Queene, other readers have suggested memories of Chaucer’s Troilus in Arthur’s enamourment by his Fairy Queen, his complaint to night, Busirane’s pageant, the Temple of Venus, and the Mutabilitie Cantos.³ All these memories are occasional, casual and brief.

The Spenser Variorum records additional words, figures and sayings shared by Chaucer’s Troilus and Spenser’s poems, especially the Calender and The Faerie Queene. These similarities, while suggestive, are inconclusive separately or in the aggregate, however, because they are neither exact nor unique to the Troilus and Spenser.⁴ But this relative lack of evidence relating the two is actually germane to my purpose. It emphasises from the outset that intertextual relationships are not limited to the so-called ‘hard evidence’ of source study, which is useful but unimaginative in itself and, when applied restrictively, as alien to the reading of poetry as a Baconian hostility to Homer’s winged words.⁵ Intertextuality is a dynamic relationship that can range from authorial control to cultural subjection, from deliberate imitation to linguistic free-play, or from intentional allusion to the agency of the signifier. It enriches and reorients the significance and reception of texts.

The Troilus is Chaucer’s major achievement as a love poet, which is the kind of poet most Elizabethans supposed him to be, and some moderns – memorably C.S. Lewis – have thought The Faerie Queene to be focally concerned with earthly love, especially but not exclusively in its two central books, III and IV.⁶ In the six years between the publication of these books, Spenser published the Amoretti, his sonnet sequence, whose erotic discourse the central books share. Along with the first book, the central books and the sonnets also engage Chaucer’s Troilus. Simultaneously, they recall the matter of love and the matter of Troy.

Generically, the Troilus is a romance, as well as a ‘tragedye’, its narrator’s term for it, and, like the tragi-comic romance of the Knight’s Tale, it is presided over by Boethian fortune, a complex attitude towards experience that is recurrent, if underappreciated, in The Faerie Queene as well.⁷ The Troilus features a version of Boethius that is secularised in the main and, until the end of the poem, more compatible with a cyclical, fatalistic emphasis on history than with transcendent idealism.⁸ Both Chaucer and Spenser, incidentally, invoke Clio, muse of history, and Calliope, muse of epic song (and more broadly of eloquence for medieval poets), as inspiring sources for their major romances.⁹ In addition to an attraction by genre, Spenser’s romance epic shares with the Troilus not only a pronounced engagement with the story of Troy, Petrarchism and complaint, but more generally with antiquity and memory. Both authors, moreover, deploy the aphoristic mode conspicuously in their major poems, in which the deftness of its sustained use in argument is a shared trademark: recall, for salient examples, Pandarus’s effort to persuade Troilus to confide in him or the lovers’ last night, in which they debate whether Criseyde should leave Troy, or Troilus take action against their separation; in Spenser’s epic, concentrated instances include Una and Arthur’s dialogic exchange over the fallen Redcrosse’s armour, Redcrosse’s temptation by Despair, and Melibee’s aphoristic wisdom. So conspicuous a display of simultaneously disparate proverbs in the Troilus and The Faerie Queene signals an exploratory questioning of received wisdom – the cracking of cultural nuggets, whether comically, in deadly seriousness or with the in-betweenness of irony. Small wonder, given these many similarities, that readers should recall Chaucer’s major tragi-comic romance when reading Spenser’s romance epic, along with the sonnet sequence Spenser published between its two instalments.

As another, more theoretical frame for discussing this Chaucerian presence in Spenser’s epic and sonnets, I want to consider some of the metaphors we use for intertextual relations – intertext (or weaving: > Latin intertextere), influence (or flowing: > Latin influere) and allusion (or playing: > Latin alludere) – these being just three general forms of intertextuality. A more specific variant for the Chaucer/Spenser relationship that I have previously highlighted is Spenser’s own figure of the ‘euerlasting scryne’ that contains the ‘antique rolles’ out of which The Faerie Queene is fashioned (I.Pro.2).¹⁰ The scrine, a treasure chest, represents both written and mnemonic sources, indeed, the whole cultural archive available for imaginative poiesis, or ‘making’. As a figure, it belongs to the mnemonic tradition, and, not surprisingly, it reappears in Book II within the chamber of Eumnestes, ‘remembering well’, or Memory. In this chamber of memory within Alma’s brain turret, Arthur and Guyon find, respectively, a book of British history and a book of mythic history. If the antique rolls within Eumnestes’ scrine suggest the external sources of history, the mnemonic tradition also suggests internal ones.

Recently, Rebeca Helfer, likewise identifying the mnemonic tradition as the source of Spenser’s poetics, has highlighted the importance for Chaucer and Spenser of houses as topoi of the past with metaphorical potential for edification (a pun). Such edifices, though ruined, are not to be abandoned but instead to be reconstructed creatively in the present. Helfer founds this tradition in Cicero’s De Oratore and in Chaucer’s House of Fame, which includes literary tradition but on its lowest level, consisting of twigs woven, text-like, together, further includes the noisy stuff of life, rumours arising from conversation, or social life. For Lee Patterson, these same materials more specifically belong to the historian; they are ‘history verbalized’.¹¹

Both metaphors, the scrine and the edifice, emphasise not only memory but also writing and location. There is something artefactual and also visual about them – an object, a chamber, a building, a graphic image. Such metaphors bear on the nature of the relationships envisioned through them. Like a phantasm, a memory can derive from any of the senses, but there is nonetheless a notable cultural tendency – needlessly limiting – to ground it mainly in sight and things seen, especially material ones.

Another of my own metaphors for the Chaucer/Spenser relationship has involved reflection and refraction, optical phenomena of pronounced interest both to the Middle Ages and to the early modern period. Poetic self-reflection and self-refraction likewise attach to this two-sided optical metaphor, which originates in the physics of light. Both derive from the throwing back or bending of light: reflection indicates a mirroring effect, refraction a deflected, reoriented or otherwise modified one. I found refraction especially useful in discussing Spenser’s Temple of Venus in the fourth book of The Faerie Queene in relation to Chaucer’s Temple of Venus in the Parliament of Fowls, one of three such Chaucerian temples and also one instance of a Court of Love tradition so rich yet so reiterative as to have been the object of book-length study.¹² When many instances in the cultural archive compete for attention or when common texts, such as the Bible, Ovid or Petrarch, mediate intertextuality, this relationship is at once less certain and more suggestive than it is precise and more cumulative than it is punctual. With a form as traditional and culturally overdetermined as a Temple of Venus, refraction is a useful conception. A metaphor of refraction enables recognition of the degrees to which the original is present, in the instance of Spenser’s Temple, especially in a veiled Venus.¹³ In contrast to a vegetable metaphor like the rhizome, refraction can be further useful in recognising an element of human control, whether instrumental, teleological or otherwise: refraction is readily manipulated by context or medium. Whereas Spenser’s scrine pertains to sources, materials and origins, refraction, while including these, also addresses intertextual relationships more directly and with greater discrimination.

Unlike the mnemonic and optical metaphors I’ve treated or the more abstract conception of parallelism between textual components, others frequently used for the Chaucer/Spenser relationship are auditory rather than visual. Probably ‘echo’ is the commonest, invoked so often and so casually that its metaphoricity gets forgotten and incongruously applied to gestures, shapes, landscapes and the like that are primarily visual. The notion of an echo remains useful in its very breadth, however. The Faerie Queene is rightly described as a vast echo chamber; this is one of its outstanding and defining characteristics, which its highly, even endlessly, figurative surface enables.

Finally, ‘resonance’ is another metaphor that some of us have employed, as does Helen Barr in the present volume, and I was especially drawn to it in thinking about the poems for this chapter. Resonance is associated by definition with the prolongation of sound and therefore, like scrine, with memory and imagination; like refraction, moreover, resonance suggests degrees of presence. Yet it also implies an experience that is affective, subtle, suggestive and, probably for some readers, at times too elusive to accept. They don’t hear it for any number of reasons, including the resources familiar within their own textual and cultural archives. This is not the place to do more than mention that medieval and Renaissance pedagogy, mnemonic training, greater orality and other ingrained cultural practices also ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in Spenser’s Amoretti and The Faerie Queene: reading historically and intertextually
• 2 ‘Litle herd gromes piping in the wind’: The Shepheardes Calender, The House of Fame and ‘La Compleynt’
• 3 Diverse pageants: normative arrays of sexuality
• 4 The source of poetry: Pernaso, Paradise and Spenser’s Chaucerian craft
• 5 Chaucer in Ireland: archaism, etymology and the idea of development
• 6 Wise wights in privy places: rhyme and stanza form in Spenser and Chaucer
• 7 Romancing Geoffrey: Chaucer and romance in the manuscript tradition
• 8 Cultivating Chaucerian antiquity in The Shepheardes Calender
• 9 Worthy friends: Speght’s Chaucer and Speght’s Spenser
• 10 Chaucer’s ‘beast group’ and ‘Mother Hubberds Tale’
• 11 Propagating authority: poetic tradition in The Parliament of Fowls and the Mutabilitie Cantos
• 12 ‘New matter framed upon the old’: Chaucer, Spenser and Luke Shepherd’s ‘New Poet’
• Select bibliography of books and essays on Chaucer and Spenser
• Index