Page 31 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes 4.1 Writers

Spenser, an M. A. of Cambridge University, was well read in much of the ancient classical literature
which had then begun to be commonly known. He borrowed a good deal from the vast treasure of
that literature and came to be intimately influenced by a number of ancient poets and philosophers
and the writers of Renaissance Italy who themselves had been influenced by these poets and
philosophers. He modelled his most important work The Faerie Queene upon the epics of the
Greek Homer, the Roman Virgil, and the Italian Ariosto and Tasso. Theocritus and Virgil prompted
him to try his hand at the pastoral {The Shepherd’s Calendar). The first English writer of the
eclogue was Barclay (of the Ship of Fools fame) who flourished in the fifteenth century; but he had
based his five eclogues on the work of the Italian poet Mantuanus rather than the great Virgil and
Theocritus. Spenser went back to Virgil and wrote what stands in comparison with his eclogues.
Then, Spenser looked to Petrarch and his French followers while composing his sonnet sequence
Amoretti. Thus in his selection of the literary genres for his use Spenser clearly displays his debt
to the ancient Greek and Roman and the modern Italian writers. Moreover, there are some specific
echoes of these writers in his works. For instance, we have a number of Virgilian phrases which,
like a good writer, Spenser does not allow to stand out, but submerges into the context. In The
Faerie Queene Sir Guyon’s voyage to the Bower of’ Bliss is suggested most probably by a similar
voyage in Homer’s Odyssey; but Spenser means by this voyage what Homer did not. Then the
descent of the false Duessa to Hades is suggested by the sixth book of Virgil’’s Aeneid. Tasso’?
Armida gave Spenser some obvious hints for his description of Acrasy and her terrible powers.

Notes Ariosto, the writer of the first romantic epic in the history of world literature, set
before Spenser a living example of the romantic love of adventure and unbounded
activity which he was to imitate in The Faerie Queene.

4.2 Plato and Aristotle

The, great Greek philosophers, Plato and his disciple Aristotle, exerted a strong hold on Spenser’s
intellectual and moral temper. In his Four Hymns Spenser gives a poetic utterance to the Platonic
conception of Love and Beauty. Plato taught that all material beauty (such as the beauty of the
human body) is a shadow as well as a symbol” of the Ideal Beauty which is divine. A specific
embodiment of beauty should be used for ascending to the contemplation of the abstract Idea of
Beauty. The abstract Idea is divine, and the contemplation of the Idea is a religious activity.
Echoing the true Platonic spirit, Spenser observes in the Hymn in Honour of Beauty that “a comely
corpse, with beauty fair endowed” is the house of a ‘beauteous soul.”

Task Write a short note on Plato and Aristotle.

Fit to Receive the Seed of Virtue Strewed
For all that jair is, is by nature good.
Spenser well became a spokesman of the neo-Platonism of the Renaissance.
Aristotle, too, was a philosopher of abiding interest for Spenser. He seems to have effectively
taught Spenser the doctrine of the golden mean which finds an effective embodiment in Guyon
who stands for Temperance. The very ground plan of “The Faerie Queene”, which is to celebrate
twelve cardinal virtues, is perhaps suggested by Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. If it is not
Aristotle himself, it must have been some of his very numerous commentators who seems to have
enumerated the twelve virtues each of which was to be dealt within one of the twelve projected
books of “The Fairie Queene”. Spenser’s Prince Arthur is described as “the image of a brave

24 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY