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History in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene Book V and his View of the Present State of Ireland reflects the basic assumptions and characteristics of Elizabethan territorial history, a form observed in the geographic basis of chorography, in the metaphoric expression of the British past, and in the contemporary English enthusiasm for state, county, and city histories. William Lambarde's A Perambulation of Kent, the earliest English model for Spenser's territorial history, employs the antiquary's tentative empirical methodology in a study of sources newly freed of myth, legend, and unreliable antiquity. Accepting the developmental historical perspective of the territorial historians, Spenser in his View discusses the susceptibility of certain positive laws to the ravages of time and circumstance and argues for a reformation of those laws and their administration in Ireland. Similarly, justice in book V is a virtue of reformation that requires a "physician" who diagnoses, cures, and prescribes a diet of new, well-ordered laws for the patient-state, the primary danger to "recural" existing in laws abrogated or perverted since their inception. While accepting the workings of divine and natural law in history, Spenser focuses on the justiciar's secular role in terms of political more than providential causation, legal more than moral justice, and practical more than theoretical law. As England's first justiciar Artegall presents a righteous response to original tyranny in a prelegal society and acquits himself on the charges of "unmanly guile" and "reproachful cruelty" by representing human justice based on laws responsive to season. In the historical domains of Book V Arthur's presence exemplifies providence in human justice, Artegall's actions man's secular control over responsive lawmaking and territorial rebellion, and Radigund's tale the imposition of natural law on justice. The legal and topical content of Book V's poetic journeys suggest the territorial historian's "perambulation" in which Spenser's heroes learn the history of each canto's territory before a reforming justice can operate. As feigned antique history merges with topical event, the Legend of Justice becomes an innovative, optimistic, and uniquely Elizabethan glimpse of new territory.

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This dissertation is a literary-historical study of Edmund Spenser’s under-rated sonnet sequence, Amoretti (1595), focusing on the poet’s playful manipulation of conventional imagery (largely Petrarchan) to reflect the progression of the poet/lover’s relationship with his beloved from the solipsistic to the interpersonal: that is, a relationship represented by variations on fixed erotic configurations to fluid, interactive conversations involving attitudes, understanding and emotion. Without denying the ultimately serious purpose of the sonnets, the study concentrates on the light-heartedness of the presentation, advertised as a “sporting” interlude in the midst of the composition of Spenser’s major work, The Faerie Queene. Not primarily ideological in focus, but rather of a critical evaluative kind, the work entails a systematic and comprehensive analysis of imagery concerning weaving, captivity and eyes within the Amoretti in three contexts: the genre of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence, Spenser’s other works and the Renaissance propensity for experiment or play of mind.

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<bold><p>Seasons and Sovereigns:<br></p><p>Succession in the Greenworld, 1579 - 1621<br></p></bold><p><p></p><p> Current scholarship on months, seasons, and climates in Renaissance aesthetics has developed along the two-dimensional axis of pastoral and georgic, leaving critics unable to develop an overarching theory of how or why early modern subjects charted environmental stability over time. <bold>Seasons and Sovereigns</bold> addresses this occlusion by studying the course of nature as it pertains to sudden dissolution, long periods of stability, or constant change in volatile Elizabethan and early Stuart greenworlds.</p><p><p> </p><p>While environmental stability occupies a central role in two theories of sovereignty - the classical Golden Age, which experienced eternal Spring, and the two-bodied King, where a King's body politic transcends the vicissitude signified by seasonal change - succession crises required rapid changes. By focusing on exceptions to temperate climates, <bold>Seasons and Sovereigns </bold> argues that many writers of the English Renaissance challenged the prescriptive accounts of innocuous socio-political climates or constant natural spaces by exploring the reasons behind floods, wonders, seasonal usurpation, and other perversions of nature's course found along the fringes of literary greenworlds. </p><p><p> </p><p>The project begins by examining Queen Elizabeth's cult of <i>ver perpetuum</i> to justify a more capacious interpretation of the theory of the King's Two Bodies as it pertains to the body politic's exemption from the passage of time, including seasonal change. It contextualizes these issues by delineating how genre studies have responded to the presence of calendars and months in literary texts. Chapter 2 argues that a remarkable number of late sixteenth-century texts flood (or threaten to flood) a greenworld to reflect anxiety over succession. The epic-scale dissolution evoked by sea grottos, Parnassus, and the lost city of Atlantis level social distinctions as unequivocal signs of nature's lethal heterogeneity in Lyly's <italic>Gallathea,</italic> Boboli garden, and <italic>Cymbeline.</italic> </p><p> <p>Chapter 3 argues that Shakespeare replaces an Arcadian landscape with a theater of green wonders and Macduff's knowledge of seasonal decorum in <italic>Macbeth.</italic> The chapter begins in the "wake" of the Golden Age with Thomas Dekker's decision to revive pastoral in his account of the Queen's funeral in <italic>The Wonder-full Yeare,</italic> 1603. Chapter 4 shifts the Arcadian impulse inward by exploring resistance to constancy (a pastoral value) in <italic>The Changeling</italic>, where I juxtapose three normative views of human nature that were active in 1621. Rather than advocate one perspective on constancy, Chapter 5 suggests that Mary Wroth's heroines in the <i>Urania</i> dissolve contracts and engage in post-Golden Age political jurisprudence by promoting duplicity and metamorphosis.</p> / Dissertation

Texte remanié de : doctoral dissertation : ? : Cambridge University : 2003. / Bibliogr. p. 223-245. Index.

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