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The Puritan Argument in Spenser

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Jefferson B. Fletcher
Jefferson B. Fletcher*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

In 1911 Edwin Greenlaw offered the following interpretation of the fable in the February eclogue of Spenser's Shepheards Calendar:

The Oak stands for the ancient religion, once good and great, but brought by superstition to ruin, ‘pitied of none.’ The Briar, cause of the Oak's downfall,… ‘puffed up with pryde and vaine pleasaunce,’ is the proud Anglican church, and also comes to ruin when deprived of the support afforded by the sturdy elements in the old religion, elements which taken away leave nothing but the pride and ambition that lead to destruction.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , September 1943 , pp. 634 - 648
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1943

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References

1 “The Shepheards Calender,” PMLA, xxvi, 428–429.

2 “The Shepheards Calender, ii, ” SP, xi (1913), 24.

3 Facsimile ed. (N. Y., 1939), p. 18v. Spenser may have drawn upon the Theatre for some of the Puritan arguments of the Calender. For its probable influence on the Faerie Queene see below.

4 Cf. F. M. Padelford, “Spenser and the Puritan Propaganda,” MP, xi (1913), 85–106.

5 Letter-Book, ed. J. L. Scott (London, 1884), pp. 82–83.

6 This pessimism was not merely literary. For its epidemic character see H. Golder, “Bunyan's Giant Despair,” JEGP, xxx (1931), 361–378.

7 Cf. Dante's analogous exaltation of the primitive church in Par., xxvii, 40 ff., concluding:

“O excellent beginning,
To what base ending art thou bound to fall!“
And he promises return to first best.

8 A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism, 1535–1603 (Cambridge, Eng., 1925), p. 26.

9 “The Puritan Art of Love,” Huntington Library Quarterly, v (1942), 239.

10 DNB.

11 J. J. Higginson, Spenser's Shepherd's Calender in relation to Contemporary Affairs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), pp. 6–7.

12 Op. cit., pp. 188–189.

13 Cf. the illuminating article, “Spenser and the Bishop of Rochester,” by P. W. Long in PMLA, xxxi (1916), pp. 713–735.

14 M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: a Chapter in the History of Idealism (University of Chicago Press, 1938).

15 Pearson, op. cit., p. 343.

16 PMLA, xxv (1910), pp. 535–561, or Studies, chap. 3.

17 Harold Stein, Studies in Spenser's Complaints (New York, 1934). In the article already cited Long anticipates many of Stein's arguments.

18 The Development of Religious Toleration in England (Harvard University Press, 1932), p. 98. Cf. also pp. 88–89.

19 That enigmatic sonnet prefixed to Virgils Gnat is apologetic, not hostile. It may mean much or little.

20 Cf. my “Areopagus and Pléiade,” JGP, ii (1899), 429–453.

21 i. xii. 22. Cf. Rev. xix. 7–8.

22 James E. Phillips in “The Background of Spenser's Attitude towards Women Rulers” and “The Woman Ruler in Spenser's ‘Faerie Queene’,” Huntington Libr. Quarterly, v (1941), 5–32; and (1943), pp. 211–234.

23 Nichomach. Ethics, ii, ix. Cf. F. Q., ii. vi. 1.

24 Grosart, Works of Spenser (1882–84), ix, 136.