Page 151 - Costellazioni 5

DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

many distractions, a reader, like the knight Redcrosse lost in the first
canto of Book 1 in the Wandering Wood, might well stray from the es-
tablished path of the narrative. Why, one might ask, would an author
contrive such narrative thickets, seemingly to encourage readers’ for-
ge ing and confusion? Why and how would one expect a reader to
remember narrative threads across hundreds and thousands of lines
of verse? Such questions hover over the Faerie Queene and many other
works, from the Odyssey and Aeneid to Orlando Furioso, Joyce’s Ulysses
and the Harry Po er series – and they form a backdrop to this study.
The dominant aesthetic of late Elizabethan England favored
lush, richly-textured narratives. Elizabethan romances wove diverse
strands of chivalric, especially Arthurian, romance together with the
plots of the Greek romances of the first to third centuries CE, such as
Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, which modeled interlaced narratives tracing
the trials, separations, and ultimate reunion of its protagonists, eroti-
cizing and forming a symmetry of gendered experience based on the
protagonists of Homeric, Xenophonic, Virgilian, and Ovidian prece-
2
dents. In England, with the exception of writers like Robert Greene,
who aimed at a growing popular market, most Elizabethan writers of
early modern romances presumed educated readers familiar with
many of the staple classical and domestic romance narratives. Many
took as their immediate model Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, widely avail-
3
able in print since 1593 as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. This
work deployed all the fore-named complications to a dominant story,

Syrithe Pugh (“Spenser and Classical Literature,” 503-19), Jason Lawrence
(“Spenser and Italian Literature,” 602-19), and Anne Lake Presco (“Spenser
and French Literature,” 620-34). Throughout, references to The Faerie Queene
will be cited parenthetically in text by book, canto, and stanza, usually with
line numbers; they are to the A.C. Hamilton 2nd edition (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2013).
2 Victor Skretkowicz, European Erotic Romance: Philhellene Protestantism, Ren-
aissance Translation, and English Literary Politics (Manchester: University of
Manchester Press, 2010), 111-14.
3 Vincent Casaregola, “Unstable Elements: The Explosion of the ‘Arcadia Proj-
ect,’” Narrative Strategies in Early English Fiction, ed. Wolfgang Görtschacher
and Holgger Klein (Berlin: Mellen Press, 1995), 147-65.

150