Praise in The Faerie Queene

"Scholar invoked such formulas as "mere flattery" or "fulsome rhetoric" to dismiss the encomiastic literature or earlier periods as a subject for serious investigation. Recent work on the funeral elegy, the court masque, and the royal entry, however, recognizes the pervasive role of official praise in Renaissance culture. In the case of The Faerie Queene, its encomiastic intention is well known by remains uninvestigated. This study shows how the greatest Elizabethan poems operates, in one of its many functions, as a poem of praise. By analyzing Spenser's often freewheeling adaptation of this epideictic topoi, as well as his inventive use of Tudor political mythology, Renaissance iconology, and imitations of other poets, Mr. Cain demonstrates how the poet has managed a romantic epic to make it function as encomium. Concurrent with the study of praise is the study of the poet in the poem, for wherever encomium is prominent, Spenser reminds us of the encomiast, often in terms that paradoxically assert authorship and disclaim ability. Because Spenser's praise of Elizabeth develops in three stages, this work follows a chronological organization based on three dates: 1579, when The Shepheardes Calender announces a neo-Virgilian poet whose offering of pastoral praise is a pledge of heroic praise to come; 1590, when the first three books of The Faerie Queene fulfill that promise; and 1596, when the last books of the poem show signs of the foundering of praise and the frustration of the poet. The first two chapters explore Spenser's epideictic theory of literature and his advertisement of The Faerie Queene. Three chapters investigate his sanguine, idealistic realization of praise in the poem of 1590 where encomiastic intention motivates each quest, colors the thematic virtue of each book, and peoples the narrative with cult figures of Elizabeth, like Una and Belphoebe, and royal ancestors, like Britomart and Arthur. Two chapters, on the books of 1596, show how Spenser at last obfuscates his poem's encomiastic program, either subverting the queen's praise or diverting encomium to such figures as Essex. By focusing on Elizabeth's praise, this book implicitly rehabilitates the study of political allegory and illuminates a major example of the epideictic phenomena that occur in Renaissance culture when literature and government impinge. It explains on entirely new grounds the changes in the poem between 1590 and 1596. Finally, it examines one of the poem's best-known roles: its declared intention to glorify Elizabeth and her realm." -Publisher.