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Spenser's Theory of Friendship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In the first three books of the Faerie Queene Spenser is primarily interested in the virtue of the individual as such: his holiness, his temperance, his chastity—the harmony of the whole nature controlled by reason. Beginning with the Fourth Book he turns to a more definite study of the individual in relation to other individuals. With his classical background it was reasonable that he should put friendship next. Aristotle had upheld the thesis that all social relationships grow out of friendship, and both Plato and his Neo-Platonic followers had expounded a philosophy essentially consistent with this. In the present paper I shall endeavor to show that in the Fourth Book Spenser conceives of friendship as the operation in the world of man of a principle of cosmic love, a conception which he bases on the Hymn to Venus taken from Lucretius; and that there is a striking correspondence between the concord-discord antithesis in the Fourth Book and the conflict in Mutabilitie, a correspondence which not only throws light on the poet's interests in the Fourth Book but also helps to date Mutabilitie.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1934
References
1 Compare Laurens Joseph Mills's unpublished Chicago dissertation, The Renascence Development in England of the Classical Ideas about Friendship (1925), pp. 271–273. See Abstracts of Theses, The Univ. of Chicago, Humanistic Series, iv (1925–1926), 337–340.
2 Closely related to this passage in motive and poetical kinship is a fine chorus in Gascoigne's Jocasta (Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Cambridge, 1907), 2 vols., i, 305–306).
3 This passage also reflects the proverbial theory that friendship is based on similarity—a principle definitely echoed in Book Four.
4 The critics do not agree with this interpretation. Professor Erskine, commenting on the last two cantos of the Fourth Book, says: “One feels that he [Spenser] was running out of ideas and out of allegorical material.” See “The Virtue of Friendship in the Faerie Queene,” PMLA, xxx (1915), 850.—Compare Mr. Notcutt's decision in regard to these cantos: “The end of the book … forms a supplement to the aspects of Friendship with which the book has been concerned.” See “The Faerie Queene and Its Critics,” Essaysand Studies (Oxford, 1926), xii, 74.—Miss Evelyn May Albright says: “The entire passage on the Medway and the Thames is episodic.” See “On the Dating of Spenser's ‘Mutability’ Cantos,” SP, xxvi (1929), 486.—Compare Mills, op. cit., pp. 271–273.
5 Op. cit., pp. 63–86.
6 Compare the synopsis of the Fourth Book given above, pp. 492–493.
7 Compare Greenlaw, “Some Old Religious Cults in Spenser,” SP, xx (1923), 218–220.
8 “Spenser and Lucretius,” SP, xvii (1920), 461–462.
9 Compare De Rerum Natura, v, 828–835.
10 Compare Erskine, op. cit., p. 845.
11 Greenlaw, “Spenser and Lucretius,” SP, xvii (1920), 439–464.
12 Ibid.; also, “Some Old Religious Cults in Spenser,” SP, xx (1923), 216–243.
13 There are still other reasons for believing that Mutabilitie was written about the same time as the Fourth Book. In a study of the “Feminine Rimes in the Faerie Queene”, in JEGP, xxvi (1927), 91–95, Mr. Floyd Stovall has pointed out that in the first three books there are only two examples of feminine rhyme, whereas in the last three there are 271: Book iv contains 104; Book v, 97; Book vi, 70; Mutabilitie, 17. That Mutabilitie was meant to be a part of the Faerie Queene is supported by considerable evidence. It does not, however, so far as the period of composition is concerned, belong to the first three books, for in those books Spenser has deliberately avoided feminine rhymes. It must therefore be grouped with the last three books. The fact that Mutabilitie and the Fourth Book contain more frequent feminine rhymes than the Fifth and Sixth Books is evidence for believing that they were written about the same time. The use of feminine rhymes in the last three books is in accord with the poet's general policy of less restraint adopted in those books and in Mutabilitie. For example, in the Fourth Book and in Mutabilitie there are frequent run-on lines, whereas in the first three books there are very few. This was pointed out by Mr. J. C. Smith in his edition of the Faerie Queene; compare F. M. Padelford, “The Cantos of Mutabilitie: Further Considerations Bearing on the Date,” PMLA, xlv, 704–711.
14 Compare Erskine, op. cit., pp. 831–850; also Mills, op. cit., passim. Mr. Mills has given an excellent account of the revival of the friendship theme in the Renaissance.
15 De Rerum Natura, tr. by W. H. D. Rouse, Loeb Classical Library (1924), p. 413.
16 Compare, for example, the following: Empedocles, fragments numbered 22 and 26 by Diels, tr. by John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, 3rd. ed. (London, 1920), pp. 209 and 120 respectively; Plato, Gorgias, 507–508, Jowett, 3rd. ed., ii, 399–400; Aristotle, N. Eth., ix, vi, 1–2; Cicero, De Amicitia, vi; Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Bk. iii, stanzas, 250–252; Ficino, Commentarium in Convivium, iii, 3; Hoby, Book of the Courtier, Everyman ed., p. 321; Elyot, The Couernour, ed. by Croft, ii, 122–123; Churchyard, “ A Sparke of Friendship and Warme Good-Will,” Nichols, Elizabeth's Progresses, ii, 587–590; Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, xxiv, 114.