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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
When the archetypal principles outlined by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism have been applied to The Faerie Queene, they have dangerously misrepresented its structure and meaning. The Anatomy subordinates a poet's intention in any given text to the symbolic patterns a critic can discover there; and so it arbitrarily describes Spenser's poem as a romance in six books, covering many of the six phases which make up the archetypal plot of that genre. In a later essay Frye amends his scheme to include the Mutabilitie Cantos as a completed seventh part in the unified imagery of the whole. But the reductive possibilities of his approach are far more fully realized in A. C. Hamilton's Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene. Around the poem Hamilton weaves a network of recurring “images”: puns, sexual allusions, and mythological equivalents. He also forces it into various larger molds, asserting that Book One consists of two five-act plays, a tragedy followed by a comedy; that Book One falls into four parts which outline the remaining books; and that the seven books which survive are patterned on the chronological development of human life. Thus, archetypal criticism has made Spenser over into another poet.
1. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, p. vii.
2. In “Utopian History and the Anatomy of Criticism” Angus Fletcher finds that Frye has combined the linear method of conventional history with “the ritual periodization of the poet's imaginings,” but this hardly clarifies the meaning of “historical.” See Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York, 1966), p. 73.
3. See, e.g., Anatomy, p. 215.
4. See the reviews by George Whalley in MLR, Liv (1959), 107–109, and David Daiches in MP, LVI (1958-59), 69–72.
5. “Spenser and the Allegorists,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XLVIII (1963), 261.
6. F.Q.II.X.5-68. The existence of Brutus, who plays a large part in the Chronicle, is denied in Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland {The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., ix, 86, n.).
7. Anatomy, p. 194; F.Q. i. i.4.
8. F.Q. i.i.1-2; Anatomy, pp. 195, 144. It is curious that in this case Frye is forcing the evidence for a historical interpretation.
9. Anatomy, pp. 195–196; F.Q. i.vi.21.
10. It may remind us that Murray Krieger has characterized Frye as “the poet-as-theorist or theorist-as-poet” (Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, p. 7).
11. Anatomy, p. 204. The assumption that the Cantos form a separate poem has been partly answered by Jean Macintyre in “Artegall's Sword and the Mutabilitie Cantos,” ELH, xxxiii (1966), 405–414.
12. See, e.g., Anatomy, p. 153.
13. Anatomy, p. 258; see p. 244 on opsis.
14. F.Q. ii.xii.71; Anatomy, p. 260.
15. Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1963), pp. 69–70. When Frye asserts that more “wasn't” added to The Faerie Queene, it is clear that he knows more about the history of the poem than any other scholar alive today.
16. Fables, p. 70. There is only one group of six knights who attack Britomart in F.Q. iii.i.
17. Fables, p. 80; F.Q. ii.ii.2-5.
18. Fables, p. 83; F.Q. iii.x-ii.46 (1590), iv.x.41.
19. For an unacknowledged borrowing from the Anatomy (pp. 259–260), see Hamilton's remark on the metrics of F.Q. i.ii.9.3 in The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene (Oxford, 1961), p. 211. The parallel between the wording of Hamilton's title and that of Frye's title, “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene” may be accidental.
20. “To see Book i as an image means to see its shape or structure” (Structure, p. 58).
21. At least one of his reviewers has noted the vagueness with which he uses such key words as “metaphor” and “allegory.” See Carol V. Kaske, JEGP, LXI (1962), 225.
22. See Michel Poirier's review of Hamilton's book in Etudes Anglaises, xv (1962), 73–74.
23. E.g., “the parents imprisoned in the brazen castle by the huge dragon indicates man's spiritual bondage in. the fallen world” {Structure, p. 107).
24. Structure, p. 134; F.Q. ii.vi.18.
25. Structure, p. 74; F.Q. i.vii.6.
26. Structure, p. 79; F.Q. i.vii.ll and viii.10.
27. Structure, p. 86; F.Q. i.xi.45.
28. Structure, p. 183; F.Q. iv.vi.arg.
29. Structure, p. 62; F.Q. I.i.33.
30. Structure, p. 199; F.Q. vi.viii.51.
31. Structure, pp. 153–155; F.Q. iii.i.14, iv.x.46.
32. Structure, pp. 73–74; F.Q. i.vii.2-15.
33. Structure, p. 150; F.Q. iii.vii.28.
34. Structure, pp. 86, 154, 162, 198. See reviews of Hamilton's book by Kaske, already cited; Joan Grundy, MLR, LVII (1962), 241–242; Maurice Evans, RES, N.S. xiv (1963), 191–192; and Millar MacLure, UTQ, xxxii (1962-63), 86. Numerous other mistakes and misinterpretations have been mentioned by various reviewers.
35. Structure, p. 142; F.Q. iii.ii.39.
36. Structure, p. 158, n.; F.Q. iii.x.21.
37 Structure, p. 161; F.Q. iv.vii.12, 20, 21.
38 Some of the following mistakes are mentioned by Kaske and Grundy in the reviews already cited.
39 Structure, pp. 32, 36, 93.
40 Structure, p. 120; F.Q. ii.viii.45, 52.
41 Structure, p. 187; F.Q. iv.iv.43-47.
42 Structure, p. 85. See F.Q. i.iv.8, iii.i.41, iii.xi.52, and v.ix.21, where to glister can only mean to reflect light.
43 Structure, p. 221; SC, “October,” 21–24.
44 Structure, pp. 56–57; Edmund Spenser, The Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1959), p. 407. It is only fair to add that Hamilton seems to have revised this interpretation in the introduction to Spenser's Selected Poetry (New York, 1966), p. xiv.
45 Structure, p. 149. See commentary in Variorum Spenser, in, 205 and 269.
46 Structure, pp. 162–163. See commentary in Variorum Spenser, iv, 205–208.
47 Structure, pp. 203, 220–221, 129.
48 Structure, pp. 203–204, 167, 140, 145–146, 148. These mythological equivalents are reminiscent of Frye's, who, for example, identifies Florimell and Marinell with Proserpine and Adonis (Anatomy, p. 153); and in a larger sense they reflect Frye's indulgence in what William K. Wimsatt has called archetypal “clichés” (Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, p. 95).
49 Structure, p. 60; F.Q. I.vii.26.