THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Neither history nor the image of the perfected earthly kingdom presented in the poem can be held in permanent
fixity. In a sense, the contradictions within the allegorical and lexical structure of The Faerie Queene seem ultimately
to claim an equal status with the poem’s representations of harmony and its shadowings of perfection. Some
commentators have sought an explanation of this troubling awareness of corruption in Spenser’s growing disquiet
with the state of Ireland (he had acted as secretary to the Lord Deputy and as one of the ‘undertakers’ for the English
settlement of Munster but he was abruptly driven out in 1598 by the sacking of his country house during the rebellion
of the O’Neills). If his View of the Present State of Ireland (published posthumously in 1633) proclaims the
superiority of modern English government, society, and enterprise over the older patterns of Irish clan loyalty, it also
suggests an imperial incomprehension of otherness typical enough of the ‘civilized’ European colonizer of his time
(for W. B. Yeats, writing in 1902, Spenser ‘never pictured the true countenance of Irish scenery ... nor did he ever
understand the people he lived among or the historical events that were changing all things about him’). Unsubdued,
feudal, rebellious Ireland may well have presented a challenge to any extended idealization of the moral virtues of an
imagined chivalric past, but it is also possible that the root of Spenser’s disquiet lay in England in the court of the
ageing Elizabeth. In Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale, a couplet satire in the Chaucerian manner, probably
written in the late 1570s, he had expressed an old-fashioned distaste for the ‘newfangleness’, the affectation, and the
‘inconstant mutabilitie’ of court manners. After the successful publication of the first three books of The Faerie
Queene, however, Spenser had revisited London under the friendly patronage of Ralegh. His reaction to his visit is
most clearly indicated in the allegorical pastoral he wrote when he returned to Ireland, Colin Clouts come home again
(1595). Although the poetic swain, Colin, adulates the `presence faultlesse' of the great ‘shepheardesse, that Cynthia
hight’ (yet another virginal stand-in for the Queen) and although he admires Cynthia’s beauty, power, mercy, and
divinity, when he is asked why he has abandoned the court of this paragon he is forced to admit that he has witnessed
‘enormities’ during his stay:
Where each one seeks with malice and with strife,
To thrust downe other into foule disgrace,
Himselfe to raise: and he doth soonest rise
That best can handle his deceitfull wit,
In subtil shifts, and finest sleights devise,
Either by slaundring his well deemed name,
Through Ieasings lewd, and fained forgerie.
This is the culture of the Blatant Beast rather than of Arthurian gentility and under its dire influence even the chastely
wise Cynthia seems to falter and lapse into misjudgement.
[p. 132]
Late Sixteenth-Century Verse
Some readers, predisposed by a post-Romantic preference for lyric poetry, have tended to regard the epic ambitions of
The FaerieQueene as something of a distraction from the miscellaneous body of verse that Spenser might have written
if he had so chosen. As the thirty-third sonnet of the Amoretti (printed 1595) suggests, however, Spenser himself
thought the reverse. ‘Great wrong I doe, I can it not deny | To that most sacred Empresse my dear dred’, he announces
by way of apology to his Queen rather than to his Muse, for ‘not finishing her Queene of faery’. Both the love-affair
that occasioned the sonnets, and the writing of the poems themselves, are later referred to in sonnet 80 as a ‘pleasant
... sport’ and as an opportunity to take ‘new breath’ before returning to a higher vocation. If, as is probable, he began
work on his epic in c. 1579, most of his poetry in other forms seems to have struck Spenser as an intrusion between
his grand idea and the proper fulfilment of his project. His earlier work, most notably the twelve eclogues which make
up The Shepheardes Calender (published in 1579), reveals a poet experimenting with Virgilian pastoral conventions
and with a variety of metrical forms, subjects, and voices (ten of the poems are presented as dialogues). It was,
however, with the eighty-nine Amoretti and the marriage hymn Epithalamion which was printed with them that
Spenser’s lyrical distinction became most evident. The sonnets substantially readjust the Petrarchan model by seeing
the mistress not as an unattainable image of perfection, but as a creature reflecting, and sometimes clouding, the glory
of her Divine Creator. The sonnets chart the passage of time from the spring of one year to the Lent and Easter of the
next (sonnet 68 opens with a direct address to the risen Christ and ends with a pious reminder to the beloved that
‘love is the lesson which the Lord us taught’). In some senses Epithalamion can be seen as the climactic celebration of