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Spenser's Garden of Adonis and Britomart's Quest

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Humphrey Tonkin
Humphrey Tonkin*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
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Abstract

Two allegorical movements dominate the central books of the Faerie Queene, the generative cycle and Britomart's quest for Artegall. Britomart's assumption of her role as mother of the British line depends on the reconciliation of these two movements, the one natural, the other historical. The Garden of Adonis presents an emblem of the generative cycle, the desire of Venus for Adonis mirroring the desire of Form for union with Matter. This search of the Female for the Male is presented sequentially in the story of Florimell and Marinell, whose adventures are juxtaposed with those of Britomart and therefore form a bridge between the emblem of the Garden and the sequence of Britomart's quest. We see the coalescence of the two in Isis Church, where Britomart's dream has both sexual and historical significance, and in her resumption of femininity after her rescue of Artegall from Radigund.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , May 1973 , pp. 408 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

Notes

1 William Blissett, “Florimell and Marinell,” SEL, 5 (1965), 87–104.

2 See Mary Adelaide Grellner's perceptive article, “Britomart's Quest for Maturity,” SEL, 8 (1968), 35–43.

3 Kathleen Williams, Spenser's Faerie Queene: The World of Glass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 99–100; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, in association with Faber, 1967), pp. 91–96; Maurice Evans, “Platonic Allegory in The Faerie Queene” RES, 12(1961), 132–43.

4 Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (Geneva: Droz, 1960); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 67–89. See also C. S. Lewis' review of Ellrodt, EA, 14 (1961), 107–16; rpt. in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 149–63; and William Nelson's valuable observations (with which I nonetheless do not entirely agree), The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 207–25.

5 For a summary of the scholarship and commentary on the Garden, see Ellrodt. Recent studies not mentioned in the notes below include Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 335–41; and Graham Hough, A Preface to The Faerie Queene (London: Duckworth, 1962), pp. 176–79.

6 F.Q. iii.vi.12. All quotations are from The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin A. Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932–49).

7 Thomas P. Roche, Jr., The Kindly Flame (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), p. 125.

8 Sense of an Ending, pp. 68–74. See also Nelson, pp. 210–12; Ellrodt, pp. 77–80. On aevum, see Kermode, pp. 70–73; and Albert Cirillo, “Noon-Midnight and the Temporal Structure of Paradise Lost,” ELH, 29 (1962), 372–95.

9 On this dichotomy, see Donald Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), p. 6.

10 On ArtegalPs character, see Judith H. Anderson, “ ‘Nor Man It Is’: The Knight of Justice in Book v of Spenser's Faerie Queene,” PMLA, 85 (1970), 65–77. Cf. T. K. Dunseath, Spenser's Allegory of Justice in Book Five of The Faerie Queene (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), esp. pp. 86–140; Clifford Davidson, “The Idol of Isis Church,” SP, 66 (1969), 70–86 (whose reading makessome of the same observations).

11 See, e.g., Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932); J. F. Kermode, “The Faerie Queene, I and V,” BJRL, 47 (1964), 123–50; rpt. in his Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 33–59; Mark Rose, Heroic Love (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 99–100; Harry Berger, Jr., The Allegorical Temper (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 89–114.

12 On the nature of Faeryland, see Roche's valuable introductory chapter, pp. 3–50; Isabel F. Rathborne, The Meaning of Spenser's Faeryland (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1937); and Humphrey Tonkin, Spenser's Courteous Pastoral (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), pp. 1–29.

13 On the enclosed garden, see A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966); Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1966).

14 Josephine Waters Bennett, “Spenser's Garden of Adonis,” PMLA, 47 (1932), 46–78.

15 For another interpretation, see Judith C. Ramsay, “The Garden of Adonis and the Garden of Forms,” UTQ, 35 (1965–66), 188–206.

16 See, e.g., Ramsay. Cheney makes a somewhat similar assumption, p. 129. The theory began with Thomas P. Harrison, Jr., “Divinity in Spenser's Garden of Adonis,” Texas Studies in English, 19 (1939), 48–73.

17 “Spenser's Garden of Adonis”; “Spenser's Garden of Adonis Revisited,” JEGP, 41 (1942), 53–78.

18 See also Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 134–38.

19 It is true that in the canto on the Garden of Adonis the term “substance” is generally used rather than “matter” (there are two exceptions, in sts. 9 and 37), but this may well be a consequence of Spenser's wish to avoid the mater I materia identification.

20 The Venus and Adonis myth was also sometimes given a seasonal interpretation in the Renaissance. See Ellrodt, pp. 87–88.

21 See Blissett; Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt, 1963), p. 83.

22 Harry Berger, Jr., “Two Spenserian Retrospects: The Antique Temple of Venus and the Primitive Marriage of Rivers,” TSLL, 10 (1968), 5–25.

23 Cf. F.Q. v.i.2.

24 See, e.g., Dunseath, p. 143; A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), p. 171.

25 See Jane Aptekar's Ch. “Snakes and Snares,” Icons of Justice (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 125–39.

26 For other readings, see Variorum, v, 211–12, 314, 316, and Elizabeth Bieman, “Britomart in Book v of The Faerie Queene,” UTQ, 32(1968), 156–74.

27 Richard A. Lanham, “The Literal Britomart,” MLQ, 28 (1967), 426–45, seems strangely reluctant to acknowledgethe force of such passages, preferring to read Britomart as a kind of sexless freak.

28 Harry Berger, Jr., “The Mutabilitie Cantos: Archaism and Evolution in Retrospect,” in Spenser: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Berger (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 146–76.

29 Sense of an Ending, pp. 78–79. On time in the Mutabilitie Cantos see also Sherman Hawkins, “Mutabilitie and the Cycle of the Months,” in Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Nelson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 76–102.