Introduction

Abstract

In 1973 Alastair Fowler published an essay on ‘Neoplatonic Order in The Faerie Queene’. In it, the Bower of Bliss, the deceitful garden of lust destroyed by the knight Guyon at the end of Book II of the poem, comes under discussion. ‘Everyone’, Fowler tells us, ‘has noticed the correspondence and contrast that Spenser develops between the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis’ (Fowler 1973, 70–2). Careful reading, however, can reveal more rewarding parallels. Acrasia’s pleasure garden, placed alongside others that appear later in the poem, can thus be recognised as an element within an ‘extraordinarily unified’ structure: a ‘delicate order’ in which ‘moral emblems, mythological entities, and symbolic attributes’ echo one another across the great span of the poem (70). The cultural context that informed such ‘multiplicities of dazzlingly intricate forms’ (71) was to be found in the period’s dominant philosophy: Neoplatonism. Knowledge of this tradition, Fowler explains, allows a reader to understand the Bower of Bliss as a vital component within a composition of aesthetic and moral balance.