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COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press
By John N. King. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 271; 21 illustrations. $39-50.
In The Allegory of Love C. S. Lewis playfully characterized Spenser's eclecticism by piling up, in Rabelaisian style, two lists of epithets. The first described the familiar Spenser, "Elfin Spenser: Renaissance Spenser: voluptuous Spenser: Italianate Spenser: decorative Spenser." The second described a more homely poet: "English Spenser: Protestant Spenser: rustic Spenser: manly Spenser: churchwardenly Spenser: domestic Spenser." John King's Spenser is, of necessity, the latter one, a poet steeped. in the religious turmoil and controversy of his age. While not denying the influence of Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso, King calls up a Spenser who was also a reader of John Bale, Stephan Bateman, Thomas Churchyard, Barnaby Googe, Robert Crowley, such Chaucerian apocrypha as the Plowman's Tale, and of course the English Bible, not omitting the contentious glosses of the Geneva Bible. It is the Spenser who fashions Duessa from contemporary woodcuts illustrating the tiara-crowned Whore of Babylon riding on the snaky-headed beast of Revelation. King is tilling ground he broke in English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (1982); his harvest will not be unfamiliar to contemporary readers of Spenser's poetry, but it is a precise and carefully elaborated one.
Throughout...
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