Mutability and the Literary Life

Abstract

The Faerie Queene — along with the mysterious Cantos of Mutability, which were published twelve years after Spenser’s death — is often seen as the most significant poetic document of its age. This assessment has been based on the poem’s celebration of the apparent glories of the ‘golden’ Elizabethan age. But as we have surveyed Spenser’s career, it can be seen that The Faerie Queene’s significance may lie rather in its depiction of the crumbling of an archaic world and the opening up of what, for want of a better word, we can term the modern. It is especially crucial to our understanding of the transition in English cultural life, and not only in poetry, between the death of Sidney in 1586 and the outbreak of the Civil War over fifty years later. In part deliberately (and as it grew, increasingly) nostalgic, retrogressive, and disillusioned, The Faerie Queene opens for our view the emerging forces which were eventually to shatter the world it celebrates and from which it traced its origins and inspiration. Spenser criticism has rarely confronted this contradiction, preferring to explain away the frustrations, dislocations, and disruptions by searching — probably as desperately as Spenser himself might have — for principles of unity, harmony, and authority that somehow lie ‘behind’ the shifting intentions and unpredictabilities of the poem and behind the changing shape of his own life.