An examination of the stanzas of The Faerie Queene reveals a structural complexity that prosodists have not previously discovered. In the prosody of Spenser's epic, two formal prosodic orders function simultaneously. One is the visible structure that has long been acknowledged and studied, eight decasyllabic lines and an alexandrine bound into a coherent entity by a set meter and rhyme scheme. The second is an order made apparent by an oral reading and which involves speech stresses, syntactical groupings, caesura placements, and enjambments. In an audible reading, elements are revealed that oppose the structural integrity of the visible form. The lines cease to be iambic, because most lines contain some irregularities that are incongruent with the meter. The visible structure is further counterpointed by Spenser's free use of caesura and frequent employment of enjambment to create a constantly varying structure of different line lengths in the audible form. This study also examines precedents that Spenser could have known for the union of music and poetry. English lyric poetry written for existing melodies is analyzedand the French experiments with quantitative verse supported with musical settings are discussed. Special emphasis is given to the musical associations of the Orlando furioso, particularly its relation to the tradition of singing narrative poetry to folk melodies. Internal support for the thesis that Spenser deliberately employed musical techniques in his prosody comes from his use of the Tudor masque in the structure of the epic. Evidence is offered to show that the processional masque is the unifying foundation for the whole of The Faerie Queene, A characteristic of the sixteenth-century masque was its combination of art forms, and Spenser found a method for integrating the arts of music and literature. Spenser uses musical techniques in the prosody that he could have expected would echo musical experiences of his reader, thereby creating the accompanying music. The musical techniques not only unify the individual stanzas; they also integrate the prosody with the larger organizing plan of the epic,

À partir de définitions empruntées à la philosophie antique (Platon, Aristote), à la littérature païenne (Ovide), à la théologie chrétienne (Augustin, Thomas d’Aquin), ou encore à la médecine (de Galien à Robert Burton), cette thèse étudie les représentations du désir dans la poésie narrative élisabéthaine des années 1590, en particulier chez Shakespeare (Venus and Adonis), Marlowe et Chapman (Hero and Leander) et Spenser (The Faerie Queene, II et III). Le postulat de départ est que le désir détermine les conditions de sa représentation : il est ainsi à la fois objet poétique et principe de création littéraire. L’approche rhétorique cible les figures de style associées au mouvement : la métaphore et la métonymie, mais aussi les figures de construction qui jouent sur l’ordre des mots et les figures de pensée qui se dévoilent progressivement, comme l’allégorie. Si le désir fonctionne comme un lieu commun dans les textes de la Renaissance anglaise, le recours à une rhétorique commune et le partage d’un même lieu physique ne garantissent pas nécessairement le rapprochement des corps. C’est face à face que sont envisagés le corps désiré, caractérisé par sa fermeture et considéré comme une œuvre d’art intouchable, et le corps désirant, organisme vivant exposé à la contamination. La perméabilité gagne le poème lui-même, dans son rapport à son environnement politique et social, dans son utilisation de ses sources et dans sa composition. Parce qu’il joue un rôle en tant que mécanisme de progression du récit, notamment dans la relation entre description et narration, le désir invite à envisager la mimésis comme un processus réversible. / Starting from definitions of desire borrowed from ancient philosophers (Plato, Aristotle), classical poets (Ovid), Christian theologians (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas), and physicians (from Galen to Robert Burton), this dissertation studies the representations of desire in Elizabethan narrative poetry from the 1590s, and more particularly in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Marlowe and Chapman’s Hero and Leander, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (II and III). The guiding hypothesis is that desire determines the terms and images in which it is represented; it is therefore both a poetical object and a principle of literary creation. Using a rhetorical approach, I focus on stylistic devices linked with motion: metaphor and metonymy, but also figures of construction which play on word order, and figures such as allegory, which progressively unravel thought. Although desire does act as a commonplace in Early Modern texts, sharing the same language and the same locus does not necessarily entail physical communion for the bodies involved. The body of the beloved, enclosed upon itself and depicted as an untouchable work of art, is pitted against the lover’s organism, alive and exposed to contamination. The poem itself becomes permeable in relation to its social and political environment, in its use of sources, and in its compositional procedures. Desire articulates description and narration, leading the narrative forward but also backward, which suggests that mimesis can be a reversible process.

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Sixteenth century Elizabeth I of England has long been a figure of interest to Renaissance scholars, and their work largely focuses on how her gender impacted the power, politics, and culture of her day. Many have perceived her to be a heroine whose ingenuity and determination circumvented the limitations imposed on a female ruler in patriarchal Renaissance England. In my thesis, I examine the life and work of Elizabeth I, and the self-representations she constructed within the boundaries imposed on highborn women. In the first half of my thesis, I suggest that she embraced and utilized the female roles available to her to secure agency and a degree of safety for both herself and England. In the second half, I suggest that masculine subjects such as Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, in turn, sought to manipulate her later self-representations to negotiate their own agency and identity which was perceived to be beset with anxieties and biases stemming from the ageing Queen's seizure and redefinition of the female gender role allotted to her. A chronological examination of the self representations evident in her personal writing, commissioned portraiture, parliamentary speeches, and sonnets, as well as the poetry of two of her foremost masculine subjects, suggests a shift in gender politics and a tension roused by an ageing Queen regnant in a rigidly patriarchal society. / Graduation date: 2012

Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

Book Six of The Faerie Queene deals with the complexities of courtesy in a socially changing world. Calidore, the protagonist of Book Six, sets out to defeat the Blatant Beast, the chief enemy of courtesy, but abandons his quest midway through the book in order to live the shepherds’ life. Despite the ethical ambiguity associated with Calidore’s abandoning his quest, this pastoral setting should enable him to deepen his understanding of the nature and practice of courtesy. However, Calidore is unable to grow, and the poet essentially gives up on his own poetic quest.

<p>This dissertation argues that the 'realist' ontology implicit in Renaissance allegory is both Aristotelian and neoplatonic, stemming from the need to talk about transcendence in material terms in order to make it comprehensible to fallen human intelligence. At the same time dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century undermine 'realism' altogether, contributing to the emergence of a new meaning of 'realism' as mimesis, and with it a materialism without immanent forms. My theoretical framework is provided by Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics and Categories rather than his Poetics, because these provide a better way of translating the concerns of postmodern critics back into premodern terms. I thus avoid reducing the religious culture of premodernity to 'ideology' or 'power' and show how premodern religion can be taken seriously as a critique of secular modernity. My conclusion from readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Hooker, Perkins, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur is that Hell is conflated with History during the transition to modernity, that sin is revalorized as individualism, and that the translatability of terms argues for the continuing need for a concept of 'substance' in this post-Aristotelian age. I end with a reading of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous contemplative work from the fourteenth century that was still being read in the sixteenth century, which offers an alternative model of the sovereign individual, and helps me to argue against the view that philosophical idealism is inherently totalitarian.</p> / Dissertation

Literary histories of specific genres like tragedy or epic typically concern themselves with influence and deviation, tradition and innovation, the genealogical links between authors and the forms they make. Renaissance scholarship is particularly suited to these accounts of generic evolution; we read of the afterlife of Senecan tragedy in English drama, or of the respective influence of Virgil and Lucan on Renaissance epic. My study of epic poetry differs, though: by insisting on the primacy of material conditions, social organization and especially information technology to the production of literature, I present a discontinuous series of set pieces in which any given epic poem—the Iliad, the Aeneid, or The Faerie Queene—is structured more by local circumstances and methods than by authorial responses to distant epic predecessors. Ultimately I make arguments about how modes of literary production determine the forms of epic poems. Achilleus’ contradictory and anachronistic funerary practices in Iliad 23, for instance, are symptomatic of the accumulative transcription of disparate oral performances over time, which calls into question what, if any artistic ‘unity’ might guide scholarly readings of the Homeric texts. While classicists have conventionally opposed Virgil’s Aeneid to Lucan’s Bellum Civile on aesthetic and political grounds, I argue that both poets endorse the ethnographic-imperialist ideology ‘virtus at the frontier’ under the twin pressures of Julio-Claudian military expansion and the Principate’s instrumentalization of Roman intellectual life in its public library system. Finally, my chapter on Renaissance English epic demonstrates how Spenser and Milton grappled with humanist anxieties about the political utility of the classics and the unmanageable archive produced by print culture. It is my hope that this thesis coheres into a narrative of a particularly long-lived genre, the epic, and the mutations and adaptations it underwent in oral, manuscript, and print contexts.

My dissertation revises our assumptions about the Renaissance commonplace that poetic monuments last longer than marble ones. We tend to understand the commonplace as being about the materiality of artistic media and thus the comparative durability of text and stone. In contrast, I argue that English Renaissance poets and theorists treat the monument of verse as a space where their hopes for the poem’s future converge with broader cultural concerns about the reception of the ancient past and the place of English vernacular poetry within the hierarchy of classical and contemporary European letters. In Renaissance poetics manuals, authors appropriate a newly classicizing architectural vocabulary to communicate confidence in the lasting power of English poetic structures. Through their use of architectural metaphors, they defend their vernacular against charges of vulgar barbarism and promote the civilizing potential of English verse. Yet if lyric poets also turn to architectural metaphors to make claims about poetry’s enduring quality, they simultaneously disclose a deep unease about the perils of textual transmission. Indeed, monumentalizing conceits often appear most powerfully in poetic genres predicated on failed hopes and frustrated desires, that is, in the sonnet sequences and complaints of Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and William Shakespeare. In acknowledging the fragility of the textual and architectural remains of antiquity, lyric poets from Spenser forward consider their own textual futures with an entirely new sense of urgency. I argue, however, that their unease about the future of their art has as much to do with the genres in which they write and their suspicions about the shifting reading practices of future audiences as it does with the material vulnerability of the medium that transmits that art. In the sonnet sequence in particular, lyric poets who monumentalize their beloved partake in—and anxiously question—early modern practices of constructing funeral monuments for the living. I argue that these poets’ fantasy of entombing those who are still in the prime of their lives turns out to be less about a future rebirth than an obsessive, premature preparation for death. / text

In the sixteenth century, the cartographic revolution was rapidly changing the experience of everyday life in England. Modes of thinking and inhabiting space (such as astronomy, trigonometry, surveying, and cartography) were advanced and refined, and in England, the map went from rarity to ubiquity in less than seventy years. Navigating Time explores how literary strategies changed in response to this rapid shift in the technology of spatial representation. I consider four epics, the epic being the early modern genre most overtly invested in matters of empire (and thus, in matters of space and history). Building on the insights of the spatial turn in the humanities, I argue that the epic offers a radical critique of the technological innovations of the cartographic revolution and the menace those innovations posed. Alongside this critique, the early modern epic outlined a new poetics centered on navigation. Epics by Holinshed, Spenser, Drayton, and Milton sought to encompass the representational possibilities of the map, but also to highlight and exceed the map's narrative insufficiency. Holinshed's Chronicles reforms the topography of the city, converting its streets and alleys into historical texts and presenting historiography and mapping as competing interpretive frameworks for urban space. The Faerie Queene redefines genre as the conduct of bodies in space, making it thus impossible to fix Faeryland as a mappable terrain, and asserting the continuous interpretation required by allegory against the compression imposed by the map. Drayton's Poly-Olbion seems at first to be a verbal map of Britain, but the poem quietly insists on the power of literature not to mimic but rather to supplant the world it describes, becoming the terrain a map can only represent. Finally, Milton's Paradise Lost creates a form of navigating without a destination, by transforming history into a geographic expanse that cannot be mapped, only wandered.