Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Conventions
- 1 Introduction: Reading Spenser's Language
- 2 ‘Pleasing Analysis’: Renaissance Hermeneutics, Poetry, and the Law
- 3 Results: A Survey of Spenser's Legal Diction
- 4 Property and Contract in the Quests of Florimell and Amoret
- 5 Justice, Equity and Mercy in The Legend of Artegall
- 6 Courtesy and Prerogative in The Legend of Sir Calidore
- 7 The Composition of the World: Managing Power in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie
- 8 Lyric Opposition in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne
- 9 After Words
- Glossary of Selected Legal Diction in The Faerie Queene
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
9 - After Words
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Conventions
- 1 Introduction: Reading Spenser's Language
- 2 ‘Pleasing Analysis’: Renaissance Hermeneutics, Poetry, and the Law
- 3 Results: A Survey of Spenser's Legal Diction
- 4 Property and Contract in the Quests of Florimell and Amoret
- 5 Justice, Equity and Mercy in The Legend of Artegall
- 6 Courtesy and Prerogative in The Legend of Sir Calidore
- 7 The Composition of the World: Managing Power in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie
- 8 Lyric Opposition in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne
- 9 After Words
- Glossary of Selected Legal Diction in The Faerie Queene
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
Now all resistance is impossible, and to love is beautiful only as long as resistance is present; as soon as it ceases, to love is weakness and habit.
Søren Kierkegaard, ‘The Seducer's Diary’, from Either/OrTHIS STUDY has sought to achieve a double aim: to restore to our reading of early modern English poetry the kinds of word-based interpretative strategies that characterized the theory and practice of humanist hermeneutics in the period; and to recover in the poetry of Spenser and some of his closest contemporaries an innovative and significant strain of legal expression, thought, and argument. In modern criticism of the works of Spenser, the breadth and depth of his legal interest have gone almost entirely unremarked; readers have engaged productively with the political theory of Book V of The Faerie Queene, and have lately taken up isolated issues with legal connections – such as complaint and conveyance – but the pervasive and consistent influence of legal language and thought on Spenser's allegorical project in The Faerie Queene, and in the poems that immediately followed its ‘completion’ in 1595, has till now remained, as E. K. feared, passed ‘in the speedy course of reading’. I hope that the recognition and exploration of Spenser's meticulous verbal artistry, on the one hand, and his committed political engagement, on the other, will help to restore a properly historical basis to our understanding of this pioneer of a literary English, and of the influence he exerted on his first readers.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Spenser's Legal LanguageLaw and Poetry in Early Modern England, pp. 232 - 238Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007