Abstract
A perfect example in Spenser of what I mean by “the ecology of the passions” occurs in the long February eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender. The eclogue proceeds through an extended commonplace comparison of the human life span to the seasons, with the fatalistic old shepherd Thenot having to endure Cuddie’s glib boasting of his springlike youth and vigor, a boast that includes an implied self-comparison to a young bullock:
Seest, howe brag yond Bullocke beares,
So smirke, so smoothe his pricked eares?
His homes bene as broade, as Rainbowe bent,
His dewelap as lythe, as lasse of Kent.
See how he venteth into the wynd.
Weenest of loue is not his mynd? (71–76)1
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Notes
Quotations from The Shepheardes Calender follow Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999).
See Nicolas Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, trans. Edward Grimeston (London, 1621), 31.
See Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 241, 235.
Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2.
See Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions on the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 9–10, 42–43.
The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), 3: 42.
Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 165.
“Experiment solitary touching appetite of union in bodies” in Sylva Sylvarum [III.293] in Philosophical Works, Vol. II in The Works of Francis Bacon, 7 vols, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longmans, et al., 1876), II: 438.
James Carscallen also sees the cosmological implications in Book II but places a greater emphasis than I do on the architecture of order; see “The Goodly Frame of Temperance: The Metaphor of Cosmos in The Faerie Queene, Book II” in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972), 349–350.
On the meaning of the colors of blood, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplinies of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 71–74.
See Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rosemary Morris (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 163; her appendix is a useful metaphorical table which lists features of the body and their commonplace metaphorical—or I would say, analogical—equivalents (207–217).
See Robert A. Erickson, The Language of the Heart, 1600–1750 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 11–15, esp. 11.
See Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Creature Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 1–23, esp. 3.
N. Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives (1671), 93–94.
O. Nicoli, “‘Menstruum Quasi Monstruum’: Monstrous Births and Menstrual Taboo in the Sixteenth Century,” Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 5.
I follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
See Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 469.
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, ed. Thomas O. Sloan (1604; repr. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 8.
Kathleen Williams, Spenser’s World of Glass: A Reading of “The Faerie Queene” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 43.
Thomas Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humours (1631; repr. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles Reprints, 1981), 104.
The Spenser Encyclopedia, A.C. Hamilton, gen. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990),
H. Crooke, Microcosmographia (London, 1615), 276.
Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1997), 163.
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Paster, G.K. (2007). Becoming the Landscape: The Ecology of the Passions in the Legend of Temperance. In: Floyd-Wilson, M., Sullivan, G.A. (eds) Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593022_9
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