Renaissance psychologies

Spenser and Shakespeare

Robert Lanier Reid, J. B. Lethbridge

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526109200
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

A thorough and scholarly study of Spenser and Shakespeare and their contrary artistry, covering themes of theology, psychology, the depictions of passion and intellect, moral counsel, family hierarchy, self-love, temptation, folly, allegory, female heroism, the supernatural and much more. Renaissance psychologies examines the distinct and polarised emphasis of these two towering intellects and writers of the early modern period. It demonstrates how pervasive was the influence of Spenser on Shakespeare, as in the "playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania" in A Midsummer Night's Dream and its return from Spenser's moralizing allegory to the Ovidian spirit of Shakespeare's comedy. It will appeal to students and lecturers in Spenser studies, Renaissance poetry and the wider fields of British literature, social and cultural history, ethics and theology.

PART I

Anatomy of human nature

1

The charismatic queen and the centrality of self-love

England’s soul as a ‘fairy queen’: Gloriana or Titania?

‘I would preferre divine Master Spencer, the miracle of wit, to bandie line for line for my life, in the honor of England, gainst Spaine, France, Italie, and all the worlde.’ So boasts Nashe of his fellow-alumnus of Cambridge as The Faerie Queene appears in manuscript. Chaucer and Spenser are ‘the Homer and Virgil of England’; Spenser is ‘heavenly’, ‘immortal’.¹ During 1590–96 Nashe’s estimate is often repeated: Raleigh, Churchyard, Harvey, Peacham, Daniel, Covell, Fitzgeffrey, Harrington, Lodge canonize him among epic poets, stressing his learned ‘imitation of ancient speech’; Watson deifies him as ‘Apollo, whose sweet hunnie vaine / Amongst the Muses hath a chiefest place’; Edwards lauds his pre-eminence as England’s literary flag-bearer:

In his power all do flourish,

We are shepheards but in vaine,

There is but one tooke the charge,

By his toile we do nourish,

And by him are inlargd.

He unlockt Albions glorie.²

In 1597–98, however, a mood of malcontented mockery is abroad, making Spenser seem prophetic in his preoccupation with fables of defamation in Books 4–6 of The Faerie Queene: Ate and Sclaunder in Book 4; Clarin, Malengin, Malfont, Envy, and Detraction in Book 5; Turpine, Despetto-Decetto-Defetto, Disdain, and the Blatant Beast in Book 6. Spenser ends by anticipating the beast’s assault on his own art: ‘Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest, / Hope to escape his venemous despite’ (FQ 6.12.41).

Within a year Bishop Hall in ‘Tooth-lesse Satyrs’ (1597) records disdain for old-fashioned features of Spenserian epic:

scoure the rusted swords of Elvish knights,

Bathed in Pagan blood: or sheath them new

In misty morral Types: or tell their fights,

Who mighty Giants, or who Monsters slew.

And by some strange inchanted speare and shield,

Vanquisht their foe, and wan the doubtfull field.

In ‘Satire 4’ Hall disavows any ridicule of the great poet – ‘But let no rebell Satyre dare traduce / Th’ eternall Legends of thy Faery Muse, / Renowmed Spencer: whom no earthly wight / Dares once to emulate, much lesse dares despight’³ – but Hall’s clever jab and feint suggest that irreverent satyrs are indeed abroad. In Skialethia (1598) Edward Guilpin gingerly recalls debate over Spenser’s archaic language, ‘his grandam words’.⁴ Brushing tact and caution aside, John Marston in The Scourge of Villanie (1598) applies the satiric thongs unreservedly to those who ‘invoke good Colin Clout’, who feign depth through pretentious diction and seek authority by displacing ancient poets:

Here’s one, to get an undeserv’d repute

Of deepe deepe learning, all in fustian sute

Of ill-placd farre-fetch’d words attiereth

His period, that sence forsweareth.

Another makes old Homer, Spencer cite.

When Marston belittles those claiming fairy-inspired visions, he cheapens the central trope of Spenser’s Tudor mythography:

Another walks, is lazy, lies him down,

Thinks, reads, at length some wonted sleep doth crown

His new-falln lids, dreams; straight, ten pound to one

Out steps some fairy with quick motion,

And tells him wonders of some flow’ry vale;

Awakes, straight rubs his eyes, and prints his tale.⁵

Then an Irish uprising in the winter of 1598–99 ends Spenser’s epic and his life, dispelling all satyrs. An outpouring of funereal praise from England’s literati is summed up in Holland’s epigram: ‘Once God of Poets, now Poet of the Gods’.⁶

The cautious lampooning of Spenserian romance-epic in 1597–98, part of a fin-de-siѐcle vogue for satire, suggests fading confidence in those exalted myths which Queen Elizabeth had gathered about herself, as Montrose argues in his New Historicist critique, ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’.⁷ Yet a more specific cause of temporary impiety toward Spenser’s art can be found in the concurrence in 1595–96 of two major but antithetical literary events: one, the long-awaited publication of Books 4–6 of The Faerie Queene (registered 20 January 1596); the other, surely not anticipated, the opening performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.⁸

Shakespeare’s transfigured comic art

Whether or not one agrees with Frank Kermode that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is ‘Shakespeare’s best comedy’,⁹ it definitively moves beyond the ‘apprentice comedies’ (The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost). What caused this creative burst in 1595–96, engendering not only a more expansive comic mode but also the deepening tragic vision of Romeo and Juliet and Richard II? In the circumstances of literary history and in the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, no influence is more evident than the looming shadow of Spenser – supreme consolidator of the mythos of ‘Gloriana’ and her ‘fairyland’ – currently at fame’s summit for his epic celebration of English culture and Elizabethan rule. The other notable precursor of Shakespeare’s mingling of fairies, courtiers, and rustics is of course Lyly with his ethereal conceit of a semi-divine queen fostering earthly love while remaining steadfastly out of reach.¹⁰ But Spenser’s grandiose allegorical treatment of the ‘fairy queen’ actualized the metaphor’s fullest potential, elevating it to the status of an imago Dei. This fictive majesty could awaken Lyly’s Endymion from narcissistic detachment to engage in heroic quests, and could provoke Shakespeare to parody Spenser’s grand vision.

To some extent A Midsummer Night’s Dream builds on central themes of the previous comedies. Again romantic desire contends with a rival’s love and with self-love; again lovers become playthings of fantasy, unless they can control it through conscious play-acting; again confusions of identity raise doubts about the cohesiveness of the self which loves and is beloved. What makes the comic exploration of love, fantasy, and selfhood far more suggestive in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, first, an expansion of ontological scope, the parallel development of four levels of aberrant human desire, from the boisterous vulgarity of rustics to the enchanting sublimity of aristocratic fairies, envisioning love’s entanglements within a universal scale of being; and, second, a corresponding expansion of metaphor and fiction into mythic proportions. This comically destabilized Neoplatonic mode (to which Shakespeare finally returns, on a grand scale and in a serious vein, in The Tempest) is, in part, a reaction to Spenser’s Christian-Platonic purview of human love and identity, a consummate response to Spenser’s expansive allegory that champions a spiritual transcendence.¹¹ Indeed, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a manifesto of Shakespeare’s poetic art as antithetical to Spenser’s.¹²

What Shakespeare gleans from Spenser is not (as in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine) merely a sequence of plagiarized passages,¹³ though Shakespeare includes that flattery as well, for as van Kranendonk and Hammerle observed long ago, and as a recent Arden editor confirms, Spenserian influence (especially from The Shepheardes Calender) is pervasive in the diction and imagery of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, far more than in any other Shakespearian play.¹⁴ Camille Paglia argues that as early as 1592–94 Shakespeare responds aggressively to Spenser’s hieratic, learned, ‘Apollonian’ art – that in ‘Venus and Adonis’ he revises a central Spenserian myth into a less iconographic, more earthy and playful mode of erotic psychological probing, and that in Titus Andronicus he farcically literalizes Spenserian allegory.¹⁵

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, the rejoinder to Spenser is far more direct and thoroughgoing. Shakespeare appropriates, and adapts to his own purposes, the supernatural and mythic expanse of Spenser’s vision: the conception of England as an Edenic utopia, vitalized and blessed with semi-divine fairy spirits.¹⁶ He adopts, at least in part, Spenser’s cosmic perspective on the human soul as a hierarchic ladder of life-forms that leads up to true Being. Above all, he usurps the lodestone metaphor, the ‘fairy queen’, which Spenser treats as a Christian-Platonic Form of forms: this ‘true glorious type’, ‘Mirrour of grace and majestie divine’ (FQ 1.4), serves as touchstone of spiritual reality, endlessly revealed in epiphanic visions to each questing knight. Shakespeare appropriates this exalted conceit, then transforms it: not Gloriana but Titania.

Here we must pause to note, in Oberon’s mystic reminiscence of love’s origin (MND 2.1.148–68), Shakespeare’s cautionary flattery of Queen Elizabeth as ‘a fair vestal, throned by the west’, her beauty the cause of Cupid’s shot, herself immune to such pricking desires: she is the Unmoved Mover of Love. The topical suggestiveness of this enchanting passage¹⁷ is highly unusual (one wishes to say, highly unShakespearean): it is Shakespeare’s only direct and unsolicited flattery of Elizabeth during her lifetime:¹⁸ it augments the flattery by recalling the gala processions idolizing Elizabeth since the time of Leicester; and, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a whole, it adopts the Elizabethan idiom of grandiose myth-making and sublimating metaphor. All three characteristics show Shakespeare appropriating the Spenserian mode of poetry and royal flattery – not, however, as a means of affirming Spenser’s vision but as a means of transforming it to his own mode and idiom. Having with his lavish compliment diverted Elizabeth from identifying with the fairy queen (crucial to his strategy), Shakespeare can then proceed to the darkly joyous climax of his sublime burlesque, Titania’s love-affair with the bestial English Everyman:

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms ….

So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle

Gently entwist; the female ivy so

Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.

O how I love thee! How I dote on thee!

(4.1.39, 41–44)

Shakespeare’s fairy queen, quaintly parodying Elizabeth’s declarations of marriage to her subjects,¹⁹ consummates the unlikely match in crude but charming actuality. With what hilarity must the English audience of 1595–96 have reacted to Bottom’s encounter with this alternate fairy queen, neatly upstaging Spenser’s ‘dearest dread’.²⁰

The playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania can hardly be claimed to have shifted the laurels from Spenser’s learned allegory to Shakespeare’s more broadly populist art. Nor is displacing Spenser the sole purpose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which playfully celebrates the fantasies of English culture generally. But the occasional mockery of Spenserian epic during 1597–98²¹ must partly reflect the success of Shakespeare’s satiric strategy in this play – re-visioning the Fairy Queen, and redefining Poetry’s substance, audience, and purpose.

Shakespeare’s grounding of the fairy allure

Shakespeare’s burlesque unfolds subtly – at first sustaining, even heightening, the fairy queen’s grandeur. Titania’s attendant boasts of coursing through the entirety of elemental nature, and the opening lines of her chant actually replicate lines from the second instalment of The Faerie Queene (‘Through hils and dales, through bushes and through breres’, 6.8.32):²²

Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough briar,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire,

I do wander everywhere,

Swifter than the moon’s sphere;

And I serve the Fairy Queen,

To dew her orbs upon the green.

The cowslips tall her pensioners be,

In their gold coats spots you see;

Those be rubies, fairy favours,

In those freckles live their savours.

I must go seek some dew-drops here,

And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.

(2.1.2–15)

This introduction to fairy spirits, long acknowledged as an allusion to The Faerie Queene,²³ at first seems to magnify Spenser’s purpose, the idealization of Elizabeth and, through her dynamic spirit, of England. The fairy queen’s quasi-divine potency is heralded by her attendant’s swiftness and freedom of movement (selfmovement being the essential characteristic of spirit, both human and divine), and also by her benevolent influence on the natural order – gracing, beautifying, energizing it. Tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Anatomy of human nature
• Part II Holistic design
• Epilogue
• General index
• Index of themes and symbols