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Virgilian Allegory and The Faerie Queene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Merritt Y. Hughes
Merritt Y. Hughes*
Affiliation:
University of California
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Extract

The suggestion which this paper has to make will remain only a suggestion when the argument is complete. Perhaps I should disarm criticism in advance by admitting that the plausibility of my final and boldest point consists partly in its seductiveness. I should, in short, like to persuade the reader that the character of Belphoebe in The Faerie Queene owes something not only to the Venus of the Æneid but also to the allegorical interpretations of the Virgilian Venus which Spenser inherited from Italy.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 1929 , pp. 696 - 705
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1929

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References

Note 1 in page 696 PMLA, XII, 184-5.

Note 2 in page 696 F. Q., II, iii, 29.

Note 3 in page 696 Book XI, 573-9.

Note 4 in page 696 Book I, 498-9.

Note 5 in page 696 F. Q., II, iii, 31.

Note 6 in page 697 Book I, 314-328.

Note 7 in page 697 F. Q., II, iii, 2-3.

Note 8 in page 698 F. Q., III, v, 32-33.

Note 9 in page 698 Orlando Furioso, XIX, 22.

Note 10 in page 698 PMLA, XLIII, 635-644.

Note 11 in page 699 Elizabeth Nitchie, Virgil and the English Poets, Columbia Univ. Press, 1919, p. 17.

Note 12 in page 699 De liberorum educatione, tr. W. H. Woodward in Vittorino da Feltre and other humanist educators, Camb. Univ. Press, 1897.

Note 13 in page 699 Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, Oxford, 1904. I, passim, pp. 150-178.

Note 14 in page 699 Susannah J. McMurphy. Spenser's Use of Ariosto for Allegory. Univ. of Washington Press, Seattle, 1924, pp. 14-18.

Note 15 in page 700 Christophorus Landinus. Allegorie Platonicae in XII lib. Æneidos Basileae. Ex Off. Henriceptrina, 1577, p. 16.

Note 16 in page 701 The four-fold division of the perturbations which underlies Spenser's Second Book is widespread in the writings of the Italian Neo-Platonists. As simple a statement of it as I know occurs in Mario Equicola's chapter on Cardinal Bembo in the first book of his Libro de Amore. He resumes Bembo's discussion of the subject in the Diologhi Asolani thus: “Pone le quatro perturbationi de l'animo. desiderio, allegreza, timore, dolore, soverchi: Il desio vole sia origine d'ogni nostro male, perche ne sospinge a seguire, & primo perdemo la lena che la caccia ne venga imboccata: Possessori devenuti de la cosa amata, per desiderio de mantenerne semo in la riccheza mendici: Allegreza di amanti e ventoso confiamento che d'ogni cosa se fanno dimentichi, la felicita magiore mutata, piu grave miseria ne pare, come ad Arthemisia, Elisa, Niobe. La paura somiglia a quelli che li poeti fabulegiando dicono stare ne li obscuri abyssi, a cui pende sopral capo un saxo grossissimo retenuto da subtilissimo filo: Seque come se dogliono li amanti & causa de loro dolore, varii casi, fortune, sciagure, dipartenze, tutte senza riposo veruno & allogiamento di male: Se si adormenta e corpo, di imagine pauroso, & li sentimenti sono sgomentati. Revolgendose ad amore di lui si lamenta, & flebilmente di suo infelice stato si rimarica, con lunga querimonia piangendo fa fine al suo [i. e. of Gismondo, the principal speaker] parlare.”

Note 17 in page 701 Disputationes Camaldulenses, p. 20.

Note 18 in page 701 F. Q., II, v, 1.

Note 19 in page 701 J. C. Scaliger, Poetices. Libri septem (Editio quarta, 1607) Lib. III, Cap. 25, pp. 265-266.

Note 20 in page 701 Poetices, Lib. III, Cap. 10, p. 207.

Note 21 in page 702 Denis Saurat. Les idées philosophiques d'Edmund Spenser. Yearbook of the New Society of Letters at Lund, Dec. 1924, Vol. I.

Note 22 in page 703 F. Q., III, v, 52.

Note 23 in page 703 F. Q., II, iii, 23.

Note 24 in page 704 Torquato Tasso, Il Messagiero Dialogo di Torquato Tasso. In Venetia. Appresso Bernardo Giunti, e fratelli. MDLXXXII. p. 4.

Note 25 in page 704 Sperone Speroni, Dialoghi del Sig. Speron Speroni, Nobile Padovano, di nuovo ricorretti. In Venetia. Appresso Roberto Meietti. MDXCVI. p. 284.

Note 26 in page 704 I ought perhaps to guard against any suspicion that I intend to represent Petrarch as a “Neo-Platonist.” His adaptation of the recognition scene from the First Æneid was a tribute to Virgil and perhaps remotely to Boethius and to Dante, but not to Plato in any sense. When he came to work out a more detailed allegorical interpretation of the Mneid, Petrarch made Venus represent the voluptuous temptations from which most other commentators represented her as redeeming Æneas.