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"Changing all that forme of common weale": Genre and the Repeal of Queenship in "The Faerie Queene," Book 5
Ist Teil von
English literary renaissance, 1996-04, Vol.26 (2), p.259-290
Ort / Verlag
Amherst, Mass: Department of English, University of Massachusetts
Erscheinungsjahr
1996
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
In Book 5, Cantos 7-8 of The Faerie Queene female rule is ostentatiously repealed, as the Amazon Queen Radigund is beheaded by the female knight Britomart, who then disappears from the poem. Simultaneously Book 5 abandons lush Ariostan romance for a new Spenserian poetic experiment, an austere and unattractive allegory of recent historical events. Book 5's historical cantos thus seem to resolve The Faerie Queene earlier associations between feminine authority, poetic seduction, and masculine enervation by purging the poem of its rich figurative language and narrative inconclusiveness as well as its sexual queens. However, the historical cantos of Book 5 fail at substituting masculine achievement for feminine stasis: they project English military triumphs in Europe and Ireland that were unlikely given Elizabeth I's refusal to support radical Protestant expansionism, and they portray the hero Artegall as recalled to Gloriana's court before he can finish his task. Although an unsuccessful poetic experiment, Book 5 is allowed to stand as self-critique; it enacts the futility of imagining that a male-gendered mode of either monarchy or poetry will bring about wishedfor conclusions. Further, the failure of Book 5's stripped-down historical allegory unsettles the impulse toward transcendent closure that is also the impulse toward allegory itself.