Abstract
In 1609, a decade after Spenser’s death, a folio edition of The Faerie Queene was published by a bookseller Matthew Lownes. After the six books which had been published before, were ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie: Which, both for Forme and Matter, appeare to be parcell of some following Booke of the Faerie Queene, Vnder The Legend of Constancie. Neuer before imprinted.’ Many questions surround the publication of this volume and the relationship of the Mutabilitie Cantos to the rest of the text of The Faerie Queene. How they came into Lownes’s possession, on what basis he placed and numbered them along with two last stanzas in a third ‘unperfite’ canto and why he linked them to ‘The Legend of Constancie’ must remain unknown, though it is worth noting Lownes’s own apparent uncertainty, implied in his use of the word ‘appeare’. When they were written, and how they should be interpreted, however, are matters for textual and critical analysis. Here the debate concerning their date, though hampered by a desire to romanticize the biography of the poet’s last years,1 has tended towards a view of their late composition.
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Notes
Judah L. Stampfer’s article ‘The Cantos of Mutabilitie: Spenser’s Last Testament of Faith’, University of Texas Quarterly, 21 (1951) 140–56, typifies the emotional aspect of such biographical criticism.
An informative discussion of the main critical views can be found in the introduction to S.P. Zitner’s edition of the Mutabilitie Cantos. See The Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. S.P. Zitner (London: Nelson, 1968), pp. 5–10. A survey including more recent work can be found in The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, pp. 711–13.
Northrop Frye draws attention to the link between the Mutabilitie Cantos and Book I in terms of the Pisgah-vision experienced in them both. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 204.
Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘Spenser’s Venus and the Goddess Nature of the Cantos of Mutabilitie’, Studies in Philology, 30 (1933) 160–92 (p. 160).
A Lucretian interpretation of the Mutabilitie Cantos can be found in Edwin Greenlaw, ‘Spenser’s “Mutabilitie”’, PMLA, 45 (1930) 684–703.
George Williamson, ‘Mutability, Decay, and Seventeenth Century Melancholy’, English Literary History, 2 (1935) 121–50 (p. 121). Williamson explains how the appearance of a bright star in the constellation of Cassiopeia, followed by its disappearance 16 months later, undermined Aristotle’s doctrine of the incorruptibility of the heavens generally and of the fixed stars in particular.
William Blissett discusses this relaxation of tension prior to the final pronouncement. See William Blissett, ‘Spenser’s Mutabilitie’, in Millar MacLure and F.W. Watt (eds), Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age: Presented to A.S.P. Woodhouse (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1964), pp. 26–42 (esp. pp. 38–40).
Several critics discuss ways in which the Mutabilitie Cantos are structured to undercut Mutabilitie. The pageant of the cycle of the months is dealt with in detail by Sherman Hawkins in ‘Mutabilitie and the Cycle of the Months’, in William Nelson (ed.), Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 76–102. A broader examination of the narrative pattern and the ‘ironic balance of tone’ is undertaken by Donald Cheney. See Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature, pp. 239–47.
Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, 4th edn revised by B.S. Page (London: Faber, 1969), p. 581.
Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the text of Philosophy’, New Literary History, 6 (1974) 5–74 (p. 52).
There is an interesting discussion of a visual paradox in art where a single shape represents two different images which are mutually exclusive in terms of the viewer’s perception at any one time. The effect of such ‘illusions’ may have something in common with metaphor. See Gombrich, Art and Illusion, pp. 4–6. The artist whose paintings spring to mind in this context is Giuseppe Arcimboldo. In Giancarlo Maiorino’s study of Arcimboldo he finds links between figures of eccentricity in rhetoric and Mannerism. I quote a passage in which Maiorino specifically draws attention to the ‘metaphorical effects’ which structure his portraits: Arcimboldo also made it possible for animals and vegetables to form a nose as long as their shapes were anatomically acceptable. To quote Roland Barthes, he never tired of using ‘different forms to represent the same thing. Does he want to paint a nose? His multitude of synonyms proposes a branch, a pear, a pumpkin, corn, flowers, fish.’ Interest is centered neither in the fish nor in the nose alone, but in teasing the very concept of reciprocity; every form is like and unlike other forms. Similitude became a Janus-like concept, and precedence was given to metaphorical effects. Giancarlo Maiorino, The Portrait of Eccentricity: Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), p. 34.
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© 1997 Rufus Wood
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Wood, R. (1997). Meta-Metaphors. In: Metaphor and Belief in The Faerie Queene. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379817_5
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