‘A place pickt out by choyce of best alyue,/That natures worke by art can imitate’: the Bowre of Blisse and Armida’s garden revisited

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Faerie Queene

The second chapter focuses on the best-known and most extensive imitation of Tasso’s poem in all of English literature, Spenser’s re-imagining and re-working of Armida’s enchanted garden in cantos 15 and 16 as the Bowre of Blisse in the final canto of Book 2 of The Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser’s almost immediate engagement with Gerusalemme liberata in his own romantic epic has long seen him acknowledged as ‘the arbiter of Tasso’s glory in the first half century of his life in England’. However, despite the voluminous critical work on Spenser’s episode and its sources, the profound indebtedness to Tasso throughout has, surprisingly, still not been fully appreciated and acknowledged. The second chapter of this study therefore offers a detailed re-appraisal of the complex relationship between the two episodes, to try to underline the sustained imitative virtuosity of Spenser’s emulation of his principal Italian source. The chapter also includes a brief consideration of Milton’s indebtedness to Tasso’s episode, and Spenser’s earlier imitation of it, in the poetic evocation of Eden in Book 4 of Paradise Lost.

Christians and Adversaries in the Evolving Norton Anthology of English Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne Glausser
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Christian Beliefs

This chapter examines fifty years of evolving annotations in the influential Norton Anthology of English Literature. As editors provide information about canonical works that aim to present Christian truth—like The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost—they find themselves entangled with an increasingly secular literary world. Notes from earlier editions tend to reflect the perspective of a Christian insider; later editions gradually revise these notes to reflect a more secular literary landscape and to attract the broadest possible audience. The chapter studies these effects by focusing on three “adversaries” to Christianity (as seen by many traditional Christians): Milton’s Satan, Islam, and queer sexuality. Later editions of Norton secularize the anthology by excising or revising notes that endorse or privilege Christian beliefs, but the new notes are not belief-neutral in any simple sense.

scholarly journals "The Wombe's Burden": The Undermining of Female Agency within Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Delane Just
Keyword(s):  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Ultimate Purpose

Through their depictions of Eve and Britomart, Milton and Spenser undermine the agency of their female characters and perpetuate and preserve patriarchal values and hierarchy. Britomart, at once a strong martial knight, is undermined by Spenser’s tying of her ultimate purpose and goal to her ability to birth a noble lineage into existence. Milton’s Eve, while being a more positive depiction than her predecessors, is intended to be subservient to Adam and her purpose lies in copulation and procreation. Ultimately, while both texts do give their characters some agency beyond procreation, it is imperative to recognize the historical degradation of women to wombs, and how this still affects women to the modern-day.

Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
Early Modern English Literature ◽  
Narrative Temporality ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Though the Renaissance map—made newly accurate and newly ubiquitous by the Cartographic Revolution—delighted, inspired, and fascinated, it also unsettled, upset, and disturbed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety is the first monograph to demonstrate how early modern anxieties about maps and map logics accompanied an early modern poetics of representational crisis. The book first considers the manifold ways that the cartographic provoked suspicion, unease, and even hostility in early modern Britain, and it highlights literature’s sensitivity to the map’s representational deceptions and politically menacing implications. Second, it explores how Renaissance English literature, and specifically epic poetry, mounted a sustained critique of cartographic materials, of their strategies of representation, and of their often realpolitik, strategically distortive uses. In considering the ways epic poetry channels anxieties about cartographic technologies into a critique of early modern literature’s own protocols of representation, the bookpursues an early modern poetics of anxiety, one that productively complicates concepts of allegory, description, personification, bibliographic materiality, narrative, temporality, analogy and other elements of literary representation. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety reads three major poems of the period—Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674)—in terms of their vexed and vexing relationships with cartographic materials, and shows how the productive protest staged by these texts inflects early modern and contemporary accounts of representation itself.

Henry viii and the “Bewhoring” of the Petrarchan Beloved in Sixteenth-Century English Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-16
Author(s):  
Susan Dunn-Hensley
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Sacred Feminine ◽  
Male Control ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Female Power

This article examines the ways in which changes in Marian theology and the defaming and execution of two of Henry viii’s queens affected early modern literary representations of female power. It argues that, through the translations of Thomas Wyatt, Petrarchan poetry entered into a world of state-sponsored iconoclasm, a world where images of the sacred feminine, once revered, could be destroyed, and queens, once exalted as beloveds, could quickly be reduced to “whores” and executed. The first part of the article considers Wyatt’s “Whoso list to hunt,” a translation of Petrarch’s “Rime 190,” as a lens for examining the female body as both object of desire and site of violent destruction. The second part of the article considers English Petrarchism late in the reign of Elizabeth i, examining how John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (Book ii) construct violent fantasies of male control over the powerful female.

scholarly journals National Poets, the Status of the Epic and the Strange Case of Master William Shakespeare

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (28) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Paul Innes
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
William Shakespeare ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
High Status ◽  
The Status ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Faerie Queene

This essay contextualises Shakespeare as product of a field of forces encapsulating national identity and relative cultural status. It begins by historicising the production of national poets in Romantic and Nationalist terms. Lefevere’s conceptual grid is then used to characterise the system that underpins the production of Shakespeare as British national poet, and his place within the canon of world literature. The article defines this context first before moving onto the figure of Shakespeare, by referring to various high status texts such as the Kalevala, the Aeneid, The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. The position accorded Shakespeare at the apex is therefore contingent upon a series of prior operations on other texts, and their writers. Shakespeare is not conceived as attaining pre-eminence because of his own innate literary qualities. Rather, a process of elimination occurs by which the common ascription of the position of national poet to a writer of epic is shown to be a cultural impossibility for the British. Instead, via Aristotle’s privileging of tragedy over epic, the rise of Shakespeare is seen as almost a second choice because of the inappropriateness of Spenser and Milton for the position.

The Faerie Queene

1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Faerie Queene ◽  
The Faerie Queene

Of Reformed Versifying

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Native Form ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
English Verse ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Faerie Queene ◽  
Stylistic Ideal

This chapter examines how the development of English poetry in the second half of the sixteenth century is characterized by the search for an appropriate style. In this context, ‘reformed versifying’ may be understood as a reconciliation of high and low in which the common is reconfigured as a stylistic ideal of the mean. That development can be traced in debates about prosody where an alternative sense of ‘reformed versifying’ as adapting classical metres to English verse is rejected in favour of native form. At the same time Sidney recuperates poetry by reforming it as an agent of virtue. Reformation and Renaissance finally come together in Spenser, who realizes Erasmus’ aim of harmonizing the values of classical literature with Christian doctrine, and reconciles the foreign and the ‘homewrought’. The Faerie Queene of 1590 represents the triumph of the mean in both style and, through its celebration of marriage, in substance.

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