Abstract
The charge by Karl Marx and others that Spenser is a flatterer sets him at odds with the strictures of virtually all the principal ethical authorities he knew, from Aristotle and Plato to Cicero, Plutarch, and the authors of the Bible. This chapter examines the tension between the poet’s life-long project of literary self-promotion and his intense dislike of flatterers, as expressed in his Mother Hubberds Tale and The Teares of the Muses. In Astrophil and Stella, he provides a way to resolve the tension by mingling Platonic idealization of his future wife, Elizabeth Boyle, with criticism of her faults. Not only are his lofty representations of Elizabeth Tudor arguably true on Christian Humanist assumptions, but they are balanced by reproofs of her failings.
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Notes
- 1.
For Humanist ideals current in Spenser’s literary circle, see Arthur F. Kinney, “Humanist Poetics and Elizabethan Fiction,” Renaissance Papers (1978): 31–45; Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 176–80; and A.C. Hamilton, “Sidney’s Humanism,” in Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements, edited by M[ichael] J.B. Allen, Dominic Baker-Smith, Arthur F. Kinney, and Margaret Sullivan (New York: AMS, 1990), 109–16.
- 2.
On these large cultural divisions, see Hiram Haydn, The Counter Renaissance (New York: Scribner, 1950).
- 3.
Hadfield, “The Death of the Knight with the Scales and the Question of Justice in The Faerie Queene,” Essays in Criticism 65, no. 1 (2015): 13.
- 4.
Colin Clovt’s Come Home Againe, in The Works of Edmund Spenser, edited by Edwin Greenlaw et al., vol 7: The Minor Poems, Part One, edited by Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Henry Gibbons Lotspeach, and Dorothy E. Mason (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943), 149–72, lines 700–2.
- 5.
Henry Bullinger quotes the saying as a proverb. See “Sermon iv, The Ninth Precept,” in The Decades of Henry Bullinger, Minister of the Church of Zurich: The Third Decade, translated by H.I. (Cambridge: The Parker Society, Cambridge University Press, 1850), 119.
- 6.
Fulwell, The First Parte, of the Eyghth Liberal Science: Entituled, Ars Adulandi, the Arte of Flatterie with the Confutation Therof… (London: William Hoskins, 1576), sigs ¶3r–4v.
- 7.
Deut. 29:18–19.
- 8.
On the betrayal of the poor through flattery, see also Prov. 26:28, 29:5 and Rom. 16:16–18, where Paul warns against those who “cause diuision and offences, contrarie to the doctrine which ye have learned,” saying simply “auoide them. For they that are suche, serue not the Lord Iesus Christ, but their owne bellies, and with fair speache & flattering deceiue the hearts of the simple.” Paul offers his own practice as a model, saying “Neither yet did we euer vse flattering words … nor colored couetousnes, God is recorde” (1 Thes. 2:5).
- 9.
“They speake deceitfully euerie one with his neighbour, fattering with their lippes, and speake with a double heart. The Lord cut of[f] all flattering lippes, & the tongue that speaketh proude things: Which have said, With our tongue will we prevail: our lippes are our owne: who is lord ouer us?” (Ps. 12:2–4). According to a marginal note, David “meaneth the flatterers, of the court, which hurt him more with their tongues then with their weapons.” See also the Geneva headnotes to Ps. 58, 109, and 120. For the physical revulsion aroused by flattery , see also Prov. 18:8, 26:22.
- 10.
Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. III, Gorgias, translated by W.R.M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 464B–465E.
- 11.
See Aristotle, Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes, vol. 3: The “Art” of Rhetoric, translated by John Henry Freese, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), III.xiv.7–12. There, Aristotle lays out skillful ways to employ epideictic rhetoric (devoted to praise) and the exordium (useful to “excite or remove prejudice, and magnify or minimize the importance of the subject”) (12). See also his advice that lawyers appeal to juries in ways “that concern their own interests, that are astonishing, that are agreeable,” even if they are beside the point, because people pay attention to such things (7).
- 12.
Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes, vol. xix: The Nicomachean Ethics, translated by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), X.iii.11.
- 13.
See The Republic, translated by Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 537d–539a and 539d–576d.
- 14.
Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes, vol. xxi: Politics, translated by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1972), 1313b39–1314a4.
- 15.
See Philip B. Rollinson, “‘Cicero’ and Discussions of Plutarch in ‘Grill,’ ‘Heroine,’ ‘Isis, Osiris,’ and ‘Isis Church’,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A.C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 164–65, 342, 367, 407–8.
- 16.
Cicero, De Officiis, translated by Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913), I.xxvi.
- 17.
Cicero, Ethical Writings of Cicero: De Amicita, or on Friendship, translated by Andrew P. Peabody (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1887), sect. 24.
- 18.
Plutarch, How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, translated by Mr. Tullie, in Plutarch’s Morals, edited by William W. Goodwin, vol. 2 (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1878), sect. 1. Though there are more modern translations, none has the force and clarity of this one.
- 19.
See especially Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). Cheney argues that Spenser’s entire career was devoted to combining the Virgilian with the Ovidian and the Augustinian to produce what Cheney calls the “Orphic.”
- 20.
Although the pattern appears to break down when the Fox impersonates a priest and the Ape a parish clerk, the sort of illiterate, pleasure-seeking, irresponsible priest that the Fox becomes actually places him lower in Spenser’s regard than the clerk, who can at least read and write.
- 21.
See Mark Eccles, “Burgley, William Cecil, Lord,” in Hamilton, The Spenser Encyclopedia, 121–22.
- 22.
Spenser’s interest in this progression also appears in the description of Malengin, who is referred to as “Guyle” in the headnote to Canto V.ix and is characterized as a flatterer, particularly of those in need, who call on him for aid (12–13). As Artegal’s iron servant Talus approaches to slay Malengin, the poet describes the miscreant as self-deceived, having been abandoned by those he once cultivated: “Crying in vaine for helpe, when helpe was past./ So did deceipt the selfe deceiuer fayle” (19).
- 23.
I follow the text of the sonnets in Works, edited by Greenlaw et al., vol. 8, The Minor Poems, Part Two, edited by Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Henry Gibbons Lotspeich, and Dorothy E. Mason (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1947), 191–232.
- 24.
See Plato, Phaedrus, translated by Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 245A. Sidney writes of true poets that they are “so beloved of the gods that whatsoever they write proceeds of a divine fury.” See An Apology for Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy, edited by Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1973), 142.6–7. For a useful overview of late medieval and early modern appropriations of the Platonic tradition in writings about love, see Donna Gibbs, Spenser’s “Amoretti”: A Critical Study (Aldershot, England: Scholar Press, 1990), 139–74. I follow Kenneth Borris’s practice of referring to Spenser as “broadly Platonic,” since there is no conclusive evidence to distinguish particular lines of Platonic, Neo-Platonic, and Christian influence in his thought. See Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4–6. On the difficulty of disentangling that line of influence from others, notably the medieval tradition of Courtly Love as developed by Dante and Petrarch, see also Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1960), 40–45.
- 25.
The inference is confirmed in Sonnets 3 and 45, where the dazzling outward sight of the beloved “ravishes” his inward fancy, making it impossible for his “wit” to endite what only his heart can speak and write. On the likely Platonic allusions in the two sonnets, see Ellrodt, 40, 42. On the lover’s Petrarchan tendency to idolize the beloved, focusing on his own “wit” rather than of her actual nature, see William C. Johnson, Spenser’s “Amoretti”: Analogies of Love (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 35–37.
- 26.
In arguing for detailed correlations between the Amoretti and the daily readings in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer during the period of Spenser’s courtship, Kenneth Larsen points to the second lesson for morning prayer on May 13, 1594, which thanks the Lord “because Thou has hid these things from the wise and men of vnderstanding” (Matt. 11:25). The sidenote identifies “these things” with “the free election of God, that the wise and worldlings know not the Gospel.” If Spenser had that reading in mind, his beloved’s “inward worth” would rest on her election as a member of the body of Christ. See Larson, ed., Edmund Spenser’s “Amoretti” and “Epithalamion”: A Critical Edition (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Editions, 1987), 219.
- 27.
See Sonnets 10, 24, 47, 54.
- 28.
In the lover’s progress toward more mature—and more Christian—perceptions, Johnson sees escape from “bondage to his own egocentric views, Petrarchan language, and other forms of self-enclosure” and binding to a “higher will” (37, 239–41).
- 29.
In correspondence, William Oram has suggested to me that “These characterizations are from the start part of a joking relationship between the speaker and his bride-to-be, in which he treats her with rhetoric that is appropriate in an Astrophil, but not to a widower in his forties.”
- 30.
On the mingled Platonism and Christianity of the sonnet, see Larsen, Amoretti, 174–75.
- 31.
Ellrodt, 42–43; Gibbs, 150–58. Though Gibbs sees his failure to mount the ladder as evidence that the poet is simply using Platonism “as part of a rhetorical strategy to persuade his mistress to incline towards him” (152), I see it as grounded in his Christianity. As I will argue in Chapter 3, to love the divine image as it appears incarnate in another person—whether in Christ or in one of his human creations—is, for Christians, the highest rung of the ladder, higher than any mere elevation of the mind through a process of philosophical abstraction.
- 32.
On the Christian underpinnings of the sequence and its structure around the calendar of the church year, see Johnson, esp. 25–64. On the roots of the distinctly Christian form of Platonism embraced by the poet, see Elizabeth Bieman, Plato Baptized: Towards the Interpretation of Spenser’s Mimetic Fictions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 104–33.
- 33.
Larsen points out that the subject of the daily readings for the feast day corresponding with Sonnet 3 in the Book of Common Prayer is St. Paul’s conversion when he was similarly struck down and blinded by divine light on the road to Damascus.
- 34.
On the humor, here and elsewhere in the Platonic allusions, see Gibbs, 139–74.
- 35.
See 2 Tim. 3:16.
- 36.
Paul describes his beloved fellow Christians in Corinth as an “epistle of Christ” that is “written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Cor. 3:3) .
- 37.
III.iii.1–2, vi. On the heavenly origin of the seeds of life, see the myth of Chrysogone and the description of conception in III.vi.1–9.
- 38.
II.x.68 and 76.
- 39.
See Matt. 10:29. On Renaissance concepts of “special providence,” see Donald Stump, “Hamlet, Cain and Abel, and the Pattern of Divine Providence,” Renaissance Papers (1985): 27–38.
- 40.
Quoted in Sir John Harington’s account of her wariness, “From Reminiscences of the Queen from a Letter to Robert Markham (1606),” in Elizabeth I and Her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary, and Criticism, edited by Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 639.
- 41.
See the discussion in Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), and the many examples in Stump and Felch, 551–623.
- 42.
See J.E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), 128–29. On Elizabeth’s vanity , see for example, Neale, 68, 76, 267, and John Guy, Elizabeth: The Later Years (New York: Penguin, 2016), 3, 289, 398. Few of Elizabeth’s biographers make much of it.
- 43.
Herodotus, translated by A.D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 3.80. My thanks for this reference and for the translation to James A. Arieti of Hampden Sidney College.
- 44.
See “From the Twenty-First and Last Book of the Ocean to Cynthia,” in Stump and Felch, 437–52.
- 45.
Puttenham, “From the Partheniads (1579),” in Stump and Felch, 568–70.
- 46.
Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 3–4, 79–89.
- 47.
Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitan (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008), 114.
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Stump, D. (2019). Spenser, Elizabeth, and the Problem of Flattery. In: Spenser’s Heavenly Elizabeth. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27115-2_2
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