1 - Introduction: “The Noble Hart”

Summary

Edmund Spenser summed up the aspirations of a class and an age when he described, in the Faerie Queene (I, v, 1, 1–4), the state of mind of the Redcrosse Knight on the eve of a great tournament:

The noble hart, that harbours vertuous thought,

And is with child of glorious great intent,

Can never rest, untill it forth have brought

Th' eternal brood of glorie excellent …

This image of nobility – as something pure, unmediated, even innocent – is one which late Renaissance nobility liked to hold of itself, at a time when the possibility of artless, unconstrained public self-presentation seemed as if it were rapidly being foreclosed. The historical position and identity of the nobility were being threatened by the rise of the modern nation-state and the new power and importance of the princely court. A nostalgic yearning for a Golden Age of artless self-presentation thus formed an important part of the ideology of nobility in this period. Spenser's text itself executes a double movement of optimism and despair; even as these lines enunciate the idealized image of the “noble hart,” they simultaneously suggest the impossibility of its realization.