Abstract
Renaissance anxiety about relations between body and environment is powerfully expressed in the Bower of Bliss episode at the end of Book II of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The Bower is a site of tremendous physical beauty, marked by the creation of a fundamentally false sense of harmony: “all that pleasing is to liuing eare,/Was there consorted in one harmonee,/Birdes, voices, instruments, windes, waters, all agree.”1In the Bower, both nature (birds, winds) and artifice (“instruments”) dominate an environment conducive to Acrasia’s efforts to emasculate unwary knights such as Verdant. Verdant has been seduced not only by Acrasia but also by the very landscape of the Bower, which helps to lull him asleep “in secret shade, after long wanton ioyes” (2.12.72.6). Spenser provides us with an image of the environment exercising a malign influence on the body of a knightly hero.
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Notes
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr, assisted by C. Patrick O’Donnell, Jr (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 2.12.70.7–9. Henceforth cited in the text.
Harry Berger, Jr, “Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001,” Spenser Studies 18 (2003): 81–121, esp. 88.
Gail Kern Paster, “The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being: Women’s Imperfection in the Humoral Economy,” English Literary Renaissance 28 (1998): 416–440.
On the “ecology” of early modern emotions, see Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed., Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 18
Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 42–43.
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connec-tionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Michael C. Schoen-Feldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading With Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues and Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
Timothy Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Bruce R. Smith, “Hearing Green: Logomarginality in Hamlet” Conclusion. Early Modern Literary Studies 7.1 (May, 2001): 5.1–6. Also available at http://purl.oclc.org/emls/07-1/logomarg/conclus.htm/emls/07-1/logomarg/conclus.htm.
Oswald Croll, “Treatise of Signatures,” Bazilica chymica (London, 1670), sig. E4v-E5r.
See Paster, Humoring the Body, 9. See also Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone, 1999).
Karen Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984): 213–230.
Justus Lipsius, The Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. John Stradling (London, 1595), 23 and 26.
See Sutton in this book and Evelyn B. Tribble, “Distributing Cognition in the Globe,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56.2 (2005): 135–155.
On the romance episode, see David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). “[T]he romance narrative bears a subversive relationship to the epic plot line from which it diverges, for it indicates the possibility of other perspectives, however incoherent they may ultimately be, upon the epic victors’ single-minded story of history” (Quint, 34).
C. S. Lewis (“The Faerie Queene” [1936],
Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A. C. Hamilton [Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972]: 3–12.
N. S. Brooke (“C. S. Lewis and Spenser: Nature, Art and the Bower of Bliss” [1949],
On the supernatural element of early modern environmentalism, see Floyd Wilson, “English Epicures and Scottish Witches” Shakespeare Quarterly 57.2 (2006): 131–161;
Kristen Poole, “The Devil’s in the Archive: Doctor Faustus and Ovidian Physics,” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006): 191–219.
Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2006).
Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Lorraine Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
Simon C. Estok, “Letter,” PMLA 114.5 (1999): 1095–1096.
Estok, “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: An Analysis of ‘Home’ and ‘Power’ in King Lear,” AUMLA 103 (2005): 15–41.
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© 2007 Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr
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Floyd-Wilson, M., Sullivan, G.A. (2007). Introduction: Inhabiting the Body, Inhabiting the World. In: Floyd-Wilson, M., Sullivan, G.A. (eds) Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593022_1
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