Abstract
This chapter plumbs Spenser’s representations of the sea and sea-life in the context of mounting anxiety about the decline of Britain’s fisheries. It reads the fisherman’s attempted rape of Florimell in Book 3 as a barbed critique of unsustainable fishing practices. The Faerie Queene contrasts Lucretian views of the ocean as the site par excellence of ecological instability with a Neoplatonic vision of the ‘fruitful’ ocean as a nursery of immeasurable fecundity and inexhaustible biodiversity. The crash of Britain’s fish stocks seemed to support Lucretius’ troubling theory that species could go extinct, but Spenser’s Neoplatonism spawns hope for the fisheries’ recovery. The chapter then turns to Guyon’s encounters with fish-devouring sea-birds on the Rock of Vile Reproach (based on ‘Ireland’s Eye’) and the armada of sea monsters inspired by the drawings of Olaus Magnus. The episode both reinforces and debunks early modern notions of the monstrous alterity of marine life in ways that could alternately deter or encourage Britain’s incipient whaling industry and the expansion of fishing into the North Atlantic. Despite his recoiling from the idea of extinction, Spenser’s willingness to confront environmental problems and to navigate between stable-state and post-equilibrium ecologies makes him an important poet for eco-theory.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Ortelius, Correspondence 164 (15 May 1589), 393–95, qtd. in Harkness (2007, 41).
- 3.
For more on Gesner, see Rudwick (1985, 1–48).
- 4.
- 5.
See Williams (1952).
- 6.
- 7.
All references to The Faerie Queene are from Spenser (2013).
- 8.
Hadfield suggests that Drayton first intuited the ‘need to think about fish in ecological terms’ (2020, 131). Inklings of this idea may be found in Spenser, albeit expressed in allegory.
- 9.
- 10.
On Jefferson and extinction, see Barrow (2009).
- 11.
However, even Darwinians had difficulty accepting that fisheries might collapse. In the 1880s, T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s Bulldog, repeatedly asserted that fish stocks were inexhaustible, such was the faith in their prolific breeding (Kurlansky 1999, 121–22).
- 12.
See, for instance, John Davis’ report of his 1586 voyage: ‘We found great abundance of cod so that the hook was no sooner overboard but presently a fish was taken. It was the largest and best-fed fish that ever I saw, and divers fishermen that were with me said that they never saw a [. . .] better school of fish in their lives, yet had they seen great abundance’ (Hakluyt 1981, 349).
- 13.
See Sgroi (2003).
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
Pliny notes ammonites were named in honour of the horned Egyptian god Ammon (37.40.167). In the 1640s, Thomas Browne would debunk the equivalence of land/sea animals as a fallacy, observing ‘we restrain the hand of God, and abridge the variety of the creation; making the creatures of one Element, but an acting over those of another’ (1672, 187–88). Browne’s logic is Neoplatonic in that it glosses the diversity of life as evidence of divine creativity.
- 17.
After considering these possibilities, Read (2000, 94–97) suggests that Guyon’s sea voyage borrows from accounts of explorers from North America and their reports of exotic marine fauna.
- 18.
On Spenser and Magnus, see Woodcock (2006).
- 19.
However, a Swedish vessel from Gothenburg is also attacked, which qualifies Anna’s argument and suggests the map contrasts the monstrosity of Norwegian/Arctic fisheries vs. ordinary Swedish fishing (Sandmo 2020, 242).
- 20.
See Reeploeg (2015).
- 21.
See Kurlansky (1999) and Kowaleski (2003).
- 22.
On Protestant natural history, see Harrison (1998). Tellingly, some woodcuts of sea beasts based on those of the Carta marina appear in Gesner’s Historia Animalium, but with text that downplays their monstrosity. Zlatar (2017) elucidates how Gesner’s whale and Protestant natural history complicate Milton’s comparison of Satan to Leviathan. For an ecocritical discussion of the Brendan legend, see Lewis (2021).
- 23.
Chris Barrett (2018) argues that Spenser distrusted maps for providing a misleading impression of the orderliness of English rule in Ireland.
- 24.
For more on the trope of the devouring ocean, see Brayton: ‘if the ocean is hungry, it is so because we see in it a mirror of our hungry selves’ (2013, 162).
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Borlik, T.A. (2024). Spenser, Marine Life, and the Metaphysics of Extinction: Overfishing and the True Monsters of the Deep. In: Stenner, R., Shinn, A. (eds) Edmund Spenser and Animal Life . Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4_3
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