Edmund Spenser, Amoretti and
"Epithalamion"
Genre: The Amoretti is a sonnet cycle
or sequence composed of 89 sonnets. By Spenser's time, the collection of sonnets loosely
organized around a poet's love for a lady was becoming a commonplace achievement. Sidney's
example, Astrophil and Stella, was published in 1591, five years after the poet's death,
and even before that time it had been circulating unofficially among the poet's friends
and relatives in manuscript form. Other sonnet cycle poets were Samuel Daniel (Delia,
1592), Michael Drayton (Idea, 1594 and 1619), Fulke Greville (Caelica, 1633), and,
of course, William Shakespeare (Sonnets, 1609).
The "Epithalamion" is a wedding song derived from Latin originals (e.g.,
Catullus #62) which, in the earliest days of the empire, actually were sung by choirs of
young men and women who accompanied the bride and groom from her parents' house to her
future husband's family's house where they would spend the wedding night. The name, a
Greek loan word incorporated into Latin, means "at the bridal chamber," from
"thalamos" or bridal chamber).
Form: Spenser wrote in a sonnet which varied interestingly
from Sidney's in its rhyme scheme. Sidney, striking away from Wyatt's and Surreys' closer
adherence to the Petrarchan octave and sestet, usually produced sonnets in the
three-quatrain-and-couplet pattern, though he delighted in deceiving his readers by
occasionally delaying the stanza break. The rhyme scheme, which usually plays in harmony
with the stanza structure, followed a wide variety of patterns other than the typical
English scheme of abab cdcd efef gg or Wyatt's more
traditional, concatenated Petrarchan octave and sestet scheme of abbaabba
cdccdc. (The "aa" rhyme in the middle of the
octave and the "cc" in the middle of the sestet
form two internal links in a "chain" [Latin, catena] of rhyme.)
Spenser, looking back over these alternatives, decided that concatenation offered the
best rhyme scheme, but also that the quatrain-couplet strategy gave him the most
flexibility to tell a complex poetic "story" within each poem. So most of the
Amoretti sonnets rhyme in this stanza form: ababbcbccdcd
ee. The chained linkage of his quatrains allowed them either to evolve
logically from one another, or to suddenly wheel logically against the previous quatrain
while turning on the "axle" of the concatenated rhyme.
For an example of the cumulative logical development strategy, see the first sonnet in
the sequence, especially its couplet's restatement of the three
quatrains' keywords: "leaves, lines and rhymes." For an example of the
opposition or reversal strategy, see number seventy-five, especially the couplet's
opposition of "subdew" (with its outrageously spelled pun on the waters that
submerged the poets beach combing words) and "renew" (with its implied linkage
of the lovers' souls via the wedding sacrament to their resurrection at the last
judgment).
The epithalamion is composed in 24 immensely complex 18-line stanzas whose rhyme
schemes vary but use Spenser's typical concatenation strategy to link each stage of the
stanza together. A. Kent Hieatt's Short time's Endless Monument (1960) demonstrated
that each of the 24 stanzas corresponds to an hour of Midsummer's Day, very nearly the day
on which Spenser married Elizabeth Boyle (6/11/1594). Thus, the wedding poem is a
compressed version of the larger cyclic view of the love we see in Amoretti. Each
stanza but the last ends with some form of the phrase "your/our/theyre Eccho
ring," a repeated refrain that enacts the process of echoing which it describes, but
as the echo changes from early morning through mid-day and into the night, the echoes fade
into "not your/our/theyre Eccho ring" and "Ne...nor your/our/theyre Eccho
ring." At the poem's "midnight," in stanza 24, the speaker
apologizes for
"ornaments" (presents?) that should have arrived but that this poem substitutes
for making "for short time an endlesse moniment" (433).
Characters: The poet's persona (very closely linked to Edmund Spenser,
himself) and the poet's beloved (very closely linked to Elizabeth Boyle, who married
Spenser in 1594, the year before these poems were published.
Summary: He wooed her, she wooed back, and they were married. Hold on to your
hat, Astrophil!
Issues and Research Sources:
- The sonnets retrace many of the same themes familiar to us from Sidney's and Wyatt's
description of the suitor's struggle with love and with the beloved. Notice the
repetitions of familiar motifs of the lovers' debate (65, 75), the lover as a ship at sea
(34), love as a hunt (67), the beloved as a jeweled trap (37) or an assemblage of all
Nature's beauties (64). Note, too, that each time Spenser picks up the traditional device
he is aware that his readers know what he is up to and inventively modifies the old
devices to suit his own conception as a poet and lover. Most astonishing of all his
changes, perhaps, is his gift of sensible voice to his beloved (though the Norton editors
give you only one good example of direct speech in #75). He also, perhaps like Wyatt but
differently, views the beloved as something capable of her own motives and desires--see
#67 and compare it with "They Flee from Me."
- What might this have to do with the social situation in which a clothmaker's son finds
himself, when compared with that of a Kentish knight or the son of the Lord Governor of
Ireland?
- How might it be affected by the outcome which this lover seeks, when contrasted with
those sought by Wyatt and Sidney?
- Sometimes even fleeting references in the sonnets could conjure up
important Medieval or Renaissance visual or philosophical traditions for
Spenser's readers because of their awareness of the context in which they
lived and read. For instance, in Sonnet 1, line 8, the speaker
refers to lines written "in harts close bleeding book."
For a medieval MS illustration of a
real heart-shaped book, click here. The image is often used in
Medieval and Early Modern literature until the rectangular bound book becomes a
commodity after the advent of printing. How does this sonnet cycle play
with the notion that the poet's "heart/hart" is written within it?
- One of Spenser's major influences appears to have been Virgil, since
he followed the Roman poet in writing pastoral eclogues, as well as epic
(Faerie Queene). Not so often remarked in criticism is
Spenser's significant adaptation of lyric themes from Julius Caesar's
contemporary, Catullus. The most often-noted is the
"Epithalamion," which was a form Catullus wrote in on three
occasions. The "writing on
the sand" motif of #75 of the Amoretti also bears an
interesting relationship with Catullus' #70. Assuming Spenser knew
his Catullus well, how has he adapted the Roman poet's setting and the
distribution of dialogue to his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle?
- If you want to develop a paper on one of Spenser's sonnets, one
analytical strategy would be to compare his treatment of a traditional
theme with the way one of his predecessors treated it. As you read
the sonnets, look for themes that previously occurred in the works of
Wyatt, Surrey, or Sidney, all of whose works would have been
available to Spenser while he was writing. Spenser's scholarly
training would have enabled him to acquire manuscript copies of important
poets' work while he was composing the sonnets in 1594, prior to
publishing them in 1595, but Tottel's printed edition of Wyatt's and
Surrey's works (1557) and the first printing of Astrophil and Stella
(1591) made those works widely available to English readers. Pay
special attention to Spenser's handling of Petrarchan conceits like the
lover as a storm-tossed ship, love as a hunt for a "heart/hart"
representing the Beloved, the Lover's metaphorical praise of
the Beloved, etc. He would have known those conceits or comparisons
directly from Petrarch's Italian poems, and he would have known his
predecessor poets' handling of them in English. This creates a
challenge for his creativity, to simultaneously use the motifs, as one who
is "playing the game" of sonnet-writing, and transforming the motifs into
something new and peculiarly Spenserian. He also appears to allude
to new sonnet strategies invented by Sidney, based on elements of C16
English life unknown to Petrarch, like the lover-as-poet meditating on how
to write (#1 in both collections) and the lover as an actor on the
Elizabethan stage (ES #54 and PS #45).
- Spenser's ability to write poetry at all, and his knowledge of the classics, can be
explained only by his education at the Merchant Taylors' School, founded in 1561 for the
children of tradesmen. Who are these "tradesmen"? You saw them
riding far back in the line of Canterbury Pilgrims ("General Prologue" ll.
364-380) between the Franklin and the guildsmen's cook. They probably supported with
their donations the church funds that produced the morality, Everyman, with its
leveling message that kinship and riches won't save you, but only your good deeds in this
life and confession. Their "trade," both within England and with Europe
and the new American colonies were making them and their nation rich. So the first
thing they did is to give their children the education formerly available only to the
children of aristocrats. Those children are the ancestors of you and me. The
headmaster, Richard Mulcaster (1530-1611) believed in the education of women (though only
to the age of 13 or 14), and the training of tradesmen's children in such non-businesslike
subjects as music, English literature, and the making of poems.
- What effects would you expect to arise from the entry of literate tradesmen's children
into the world of English literature, formerly the province of knights and earls and
kings?
- How does it relate to Chaucer's social position, somewhat between the two worlds since
he was sent to court when a young boy and rose through the courtier system almost all the
way to nobility? (His children married dukes and noble heiresses, through the de la
Pole line came too close to the throne, and their children and relatives were executed by
Henry VIII.)
- The final stanza of "Epithalamion"'s last line, which refers to the poem's
being "for short time an endlesse moniment," sounds a theme that Spenser derived
from the immensely popular French poet, Joachim du Bellay, whose Les Antiquitez de Rome
(c. 1557) Spenser paraphrased in 1591. Scholars call this the "ruins of time" or
"devouring time" motif, and it usually combines a rumination on the destruction
of human monuments by time's relentless passage with assertions about the immortality
offered in verse. He also has referred to it in sonnet #75,
which challenges the permanence of writing, itself, and answers that challenge
with a boast that Shakespeare's sonnets will adopt and develop.
- Consider the Rome du Bellay, Sidney, or any other young poet of the late 1500s would
have seen after it was sacked and pillaged by the imperial soldiers of Charles V in 1527.
Wolves roamed the streets where the caesars had ruled, and the columns against which
Virgil and Horace had leaned were lying in piles of rubble. Beside the old imperial
capital, in the Vatican, papal wealth and the influence of the Medici family enabled
artists like Michelangelo to create a new system of glorious structures which rose beside
the ruins of the old. The contrast must have been devastating. The fashion for musing upon
ruins and for melancholy thoughts on the brevity of life become commonplaces in the
Renaissance literature of England. But beside this sad and destructive vision grew
another, of poems in the English language rising to take their place beside the works of
Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, in a literary pantheon that would outlive mere physical
empires (even like the one England was building while the poets wrote).
- How does Spenser represent time and the threats to poetic creation in the sonnets and
the "Epithalamion"?
- Can you find traces of this in Sidney's sonnets? (You will be well
rewarded if you seek them
in Shakespeare's sonnets, where these figures provide him with some of his most
memorable images and observations. Of course, as in so many things poetic, Chaucer had
been there before them all in his Troilus and Criseyde, c. 1385--see the palinode
of Book V and the proem of Book II.)
- After the Elizabethan period, as you would expect, the "ruins of
time" motif fell out of favor for centuries. However,
England, itself, had its own ruins from the medieval past, especially
its monasteries which were broken into and nearly destroyed by
Protestant mobs in the reign of Henry VIII. One of them inspired a
Romantic poet of the nineteenth century to rediscover this motif in a
new way: Tintern Abbey.
- What is a wedding, and how may things be "married"? The metaphor is used in
the soleras in which successive vintages of sherry are mixed and remixed until the wines
of a hundred years ago mingle seamlessly with those of later generations. Blends of
varietal grapes which combine to make "bourdeau" or "burgundy" also
must be properly "married" before the resulting wine will be drinkable.
Corporations which merge must solve this problem and so must kingdoms joined by marriage
(e.g., Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine). The Wife of Bath had an answer to
how it might be done. So did the Miller and the Franklin.
- What is Spenser's position in this dialogue over the centuries?
