Reports of the “death of the author” in the closing decades of the twentieth century nowadays appear to have been greatly exaggerated. His (sometimes her) presumed demise, to be sure, was strategically useful, not merely in renewing the formalist critique of the intentional fallacy, but also in laying to rest the naive assumption of a unified, autonomous self essentially apart from history and in full control of the unconscious. Arguably, however, it was also misleading and even dangerous, since it tended to trivialize agency, accountability, and any responsibility to history that really matters. In its stead, I have preferred to...

The bearing of an article by Talbot Donaldson called “Adventures with the Adversative Conjunction inThe General ProloguetoThe Canterbury Tales; or, What’s Before theBut?” on the Proem to Book VI ofThe Faerie Queeneis unlikely, indirect, and illuminating. Donaldson’s article examines how the illogical use ofbutin Chaucer’sPrologueindicates the pressures of a mind “made nervous by the complexities of its own discourse, worried by subtle implications dimly perceived but not openly recognized, or harassed by emotional responses to the material it is trying to order.” Familiar examples of such subjective usage occur in...

The opening line of the first canto of the first Book ofThe Faerie Queene, “A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,” introduces the Chaucerian intertext and does so problematically.¹ I doubt the Spenserian exists who has not heard some medievalist declare, “I could never get over, or never forgive Spenser, his opening line.” Yet for years Spenserians themselves, as if conspiring to accept the poet’s insensitivity to his own words, totally ignored the “hard begin” of Spenser’s best-known Book. By recalling Chaucer’s comicTale of Sir Thopas, knight prickant, this remarkably bold and witty beginning serves notice of...

In the following chapter about allegory, irony, and despair inThe Pardoner’s Taleand Book I ofThe Faerie Queeneand inThe Franklin’s Taleand Book III, I start with verbal echoes as a way of suggesting the plausibility of an interpretive context, but concentrate instead on intertextual relations between Chaucerian and Spenserian texts that are broader—more imaginative and conceptual—than local and explicitly verbal. Whether in art or life, readers and writers register, remember, and imitate much else in literary models besides the odd word or phrase, as I have noted in my introduction.¹ Both subtler and...

Like Chaucer, Spenser often finds or pretends to find in earlier books the enabling source of his own poetry, and for this reason, among others, he describes Chaucer’s writing as the wellhead of his own. A number of Spenser’s interpreters have sought the meaning of his deliberate reliance on a written tradition in pure textuality or in its effect on a community of readers.¹ While not rejecting their many valid perceptions, I want to suggest that this reliance also be referred to the claim the Spenserian poet made for it, particularly inThe Faerie Queene. In Spenser’s most massively allusive...

In an important article on the relation of Spenser’s late lyrics toThe Faerie Queene, Paul Alpers is especially concerned to defend Spenser’s Melibee, the kindly old shepherd destroyed in the sixth book by marauding brigands, from other readers’ charges of laziness, carelessness, or blindness. In terms of traditional morality, Alpers seeks to defend Melibee from the charge of imprudence in the style of his life. To this end he asserts Melibee’s “parity” in Book VI with Colin Clout, Spenser’s own pastoral persona, who invokes the celebrated vision of the Muses on Mount Acidale.¹ By “parity,” Alpers means that both...

Most readers would probably agree with the editors of the SpenserVariorumthat “in writingMuiopotmos[: or The Fate of the Butterflie] Spenser could hardly have been unconscious of Chaucer’s mock-heroic poems, but that he was not engaged in a studied imitation of them.”¹ As evidenced inMuiopotmos, Spenser’s specific interest inThe Nun’s Priest’s Talelies somewhere between sustained allusion and incidental reminiscence; it is persistent but elusive. The relationship between these poems includes but extends beyond general similarities of genre, theme, and plot and the odd detail, such as the name of Clarion, which is likely motivated by...

One of the more luridly colorful figures inThe Faerie Queeneis Argante, the aggressively lustful giantess of Book III. She first appears bearing the Squire of Dames “athwart her horse,” bound fast “with cords of wire, / Whom she did meane to make the thrall of her desire.”¹ Within stanzas, she has discarded the Squire, replacing him with the mightier Sir Satyrane, whom she plucks by the collar right out of his saddle and evidently hopes to subject to her service, for “ouer all the countrey she did raunge, / To seeke young men, to quench her flaming thrust.”...

The lack of weight most criticism has accorded the relationship betweenThe Faerie Queeneand Chaucer’sParliament of Fowlsis surprising: for Spenser, Chaucer was a poet of love, an acknowledged poetic model who “well couth … wayle hys woes,” and theParliamentis Chaucer’s formative consideration of the various kinds of love.¹ Recurrently, from the initial canto of Book I through the Mutability Cantos,The Faerie Queenerecalls Chaucer’s poem. TheParliamentis a text that bears unmistakably, crucially, and complexly on the Spenserian conception of eros and on the broader question of the Renaissance poet’s use of the...

In our century the wordsantiqueandantiquitynormally have a resonance different from what they had for late sixteenth-century readers of Spenser’sFaerie Queene. For us, these words suggest not only age but also antiquation. They signal both the distance of time and that of obsolescence: while something “antique” might be valuable or quaint or interesting, it is not essentially practical or even very useful. This sense of antiquation, which registers a lack of functional relevance, is not unknown to the late sixteenth century or to Spenser, but it is novel and rare rather than usual and standard. It...

The phrase “saiyng self” (sic) in my title comes from Nicholas Udall’s introduction to Erasmus’Apophthegmesand refers to the individual apophthegm, or, as we would say, to “the saying itself.”¹ To a modern ear, Udall’s phrasing also suggests both the self or subject who speaks an apophthegm and the one who is culturally spoken by it, thereby expressing its mixed, unstable ownership and agency. The particular “saiyng self” of Spenser that I intend, “Better a mischiefe then an Inconvenience,” occurs strikingly twice in the first half ofA View of the Present State of Ireland.²

This saying, whose glossing...

Despite an established but controversial alignment ofKing Learwith Beckett’s absurdist dramas or, at the alternative extreme, with Dante’sPurgatorio, the relation ofKing Learto allegory has remained an elusive topic. The interpretive extremes of this pendulum’s swing are thus conspicuous, but the nature of the pendulum itself seems under taboo. Those aligning a Dantesque or absurdist work withLearhave been interested in such analogous texts primarily as statements of meaning rather than as allegorical forms, that is, as content alone rather than as informed content or as the content of form. Even older critics like A....

In Shakespeare’sVenus and Adonis, the switch from Venus as manhandler to Venus as the pathetic—some would say tragic—mourner over the body of dead Adonis has always been problematical. Although passion and grief are twinned conditions of want(ing), the shift in this poem from an aggressive, comic mode to a helpless, pathetic one proves larger than life and challenges credible mimesis and, otherwise put, human credibility. Or perhaps I should say balanced human credibility, since Venus’ behavior makes sense as an obsessive fixation transferred from hunger to loss. Yes, Venus is a goddess and a figure of myth...

My story starts with two recent classroom experiences: the first concerns a class of Honors undergraduates whom I was trying to persuade to read and think more figuratively and mythically. After receiving a set of papers on sex and gender in Spenser’s third book, I took a leaf, as well as a tusk, from my own past and posed for discussion the difference between an analysis of Book III in terms of male and female attributes and in terms of the flower and the boar, two symbolic referents that variously weave through the fabric of this book.¹ The students were...

Harry Berger’s “Wring out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001” will be a major critical statement on the Bower of Bliss for years to come, and serious work on the Bower needs to engage its generously annotated, tightly argued analysis of the structural discourse that constitutes this site.¹ In “Squeezing the Text” (is the trope laundry or lemon juice?), Berger exposes the workings of misogyny as a target, and emphatically not a given, of the Bower. He reads the Spenserian narrative as an instance of “specular tautology,” or self-reflection, which he also understands as an inversion of cause and...

Shakespeare’sAntony and Cleopatra, like his earlierVenus and Adonis, is known to be generically mixed and even anomalous in the extent and degree to which it combines tragedy, comedy, and romance with lyric, allegory, myth, and history.¹ This is the first of several analogies I would draw between Shakespeare’s play and Spenser’sFaerie Queene, that hobgoblin’s garland of epic, romance, lyric, allegory, myth, history, and more. The breaking of formal conventions beyond their generic variousness also connects these works. In Ania Loomba’s view, for example, the nonteleological form ofAntony and Cleopatraresists closure, and in Margot Heinemann’s, this...

InKing LearandOthello, when Shakespeare’s anguished protagonists memorably invoke patience, they do so with an unwitting irony that plays on the linguistic genealogy of this virtue, on its combination of passion and passivity. More than a half century later, Milton’s poetry recalls the centrality and complexity of Shakespeare’s engagement with patience but goes beyond it to render the traditional significance of this virtue dynamic and revisionary. In the unifying insight of the blind poet, patience becomes action, rather than simply giving way to action or being replaced by it. The traditional binarism of passive endurance and assertive action...

In the fourth Book ofParadise Regained, Satan tempts the Son with the intellectual splendors of ancient Greece, and these having been rejected, asks him in scornful frustration, “What dost thou in this World?”: what connects you to history and humanity? Satan adds that his reading of heaven portends a kingdom for the Son, “but what Kingdom, / Real or Allegoric I discern not.” With an irony approaching sarcasm, he goes on to say that he fails to see when the Son’s kingdom will ever be at hand, since it is “eternal sure, as without end, / Without beginning.”¹ By...

Of relatively recent studies of Milton’s poetics, Mindele Anne Treip’sAllegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to “Paradise Lost”remains, for my purpose, the most historically significant.¹ In the Renaissance, Treip explains, Salutati’s theoretical discussions of poetry anticipate “a practical paradigm of epic allegory of the kind Tasso would evolve, suggesting how the poet may weave together the entire linguistic surface of a poem, along with its narrative substructure, so that ‘all’ in it (‘deeds’, ‘figures’, ‘things’) will hang together in one subtle system as forms of ‘translated’ discourse, together signalling the presence of an underlying Idea or...