Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser (* around 1552 in London ; † January 13, 1599 ibid) was an important English poet of the Elizabethan age who, as an older contemporary, became one of the models of William Shakespeare .

William Blake : Portrait of Edmund Spenser, around 1800, in the Manchester City Gallery

Life

Spenser was born in 1552 or 1553 to the tailor John Spenser and his wife Elisabeth, who had come to London from Lincolnshire . Edmund attended Merchant Taylor's School , whose headmaster, the famous humanist Richard Mulcaster , advocated a new approach to education. Mulcaster saw not only the Latin education, but also the mother tongue, i.e. English education, as important. Spenser studied on a scholarship from 1569 to 1576 at Pembroke College of Cambridge University and earned a master's degree.

In around 1579 he was a patron of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester , and introduced him to Sir Philip Sidney . In that year Spenser married, published The Shepheardes Calender anonymously and thus achieved his first poetic success.

In 1580 he became the secretary of Lord Gray of Wilton, who had been appointed representative of Queen Elizabeth I in Ireland , and moved to Dublin . After Lord Gray was recalled to England, Spenser stayed in Ireland and served until his death.

In 1589 Sir Walter Raleigh visited Spenser. Spenser went to London, accompanied by Raleigh, and met the Queen Elizabeth I. In the next year 1590 he published the first three volumes of the verse epic The Faerie Queene with W. Ponsonby Verlag in London. He added a letter to Walter Raleigh as an appendix to this work. His wife may have died earlier this year. In 1594 he married for the second time, this time Elizabeth Boyle. In 1595 he wrote in Sonnett 60 that he had finished The Faerie Queene . The next year he published the entire work.

In the unrest over Ireland's independence in 1598, his Kilcolman Castle in Doneraile in County Cork went up in flames. One of his sons was killed. In the winter he went to London to report on the situation in Ireland. He died in Westminster in January 1599. He was buried in the Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey .

Spenser was already considered a great English poet by his contemporaries. Its influence extended into the 19th century.

Poetic work

The Shepheardes Calender , title page of the 1579 edition

Spenser's poetic oeuvre is characterized by diverse influences, motifs and forms. His first publication of The Shepheardes Calender (1789) contains a collection of twelve eclogues that, from today's perspective, mark the beginning of the heyday of English Renaissance literature. The shepherd's world in these pastoral eclogues, which are headed with the names of the months, serves Spenser as a cladding for his reflections on love, politics and above all the Anglican church politics in particular as well as on the golden age in general.

In contrast to Virgil or his Italian and Spanish imitators, however, the everyday life of the shepherds comes into its own in Spenser's poetry; the local tradition merges with the form-conscious continental pastoral poetry. The Shepheardes Calendar is linguistically extremely artful and rhetorically structured; Spenser experiments with different meters in the eclogues and also endeavors to create an independent English literary language through the deliberate use of linguistic archaisms and to give poetry a sublimity remote from everyday life. Unlike Sidney, who used the elegant language of the court in his poetry, Spenser did not only resort to the language of Geoffrey Chaucer , but also to dialects in order to expand the poetic language. With The Shepheardes Calender he also helped pastoral poetry to break through in England.

Spenser also uses the pastoral motif in the two later poems Daphnaida (1590) and Colin Clout Comes Home Again (1595), in which the background of the shepherd's world is now used as a dress for events from the realms of the nobility and the court. The shepherdess Daphne , who is lamented by the shepherd Alcyon in the Daphnaida , points to a well-to-do young woman from Spenser's circle of friends who died at the age of 19; Colin Clout Comes Home Again deals with his own trip to England and return to Ireland in 1589–91.

A latent center of this pastoral poetry by Spenser lies in the endeavor to create a mythical exaggeration of the regent Elisabeth, who was still young at the time . In the April Eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender , Elisha is raised to the rank of Astraeas , the righteous virgin, who in Virgil’s messianic fourth eclogue brings forth a Golden Age of Peace. In Colin Clout Comes Home Again , Elizabeth I is equally honored as Cynthia , "the Lady of the Sea" and thus celebrated in her dual role as ruler of England and the oceans as well as patroness of the arts in the shepherd-clad court of muses .

The Teares of the Muses , title page of the 1591 edition

In other places in his poetic work Spenser takes up vernacular models from France and Italy, for example in the poems that he published for the first time in the anthology Complaints (1591). He translated Joachim du Bellays Le premier livre des antiquités de Rome ("Book I of Roman antiquities") as well as other poems by Bellays and Petrarch and imitated du Bellay in his poem The Ruines of Time , in which he lamented the decay and fall of the Romano-British city of Verulamium linked to the lawsuit of the death of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester . In The Teares of the Muses, the nine muses lament the inadequate state of the arts and literature from Spenser's point of view.

Amoretti and Epithalamion , title page of the 1595 edition

Epithalamion , title page of the 1595 edition

The sonnet cycle Amoretti (1595, German sonnets , 1816), which Spenser published together with an Epithalamion , follows a literary fashion of the time, which was particularly characterized by the concrete model Astrophel and Stella (1591) by Sir Philip Sidney . Like Petrarch, these sonnets express love for a woman who is as virtuous as she is inaccessible. In Amoretti's 89 sonnets , Spenser addresses the story of his own love for his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle. Initially, the beloved rejects the speaker, who conventionally complains of her cruelty until she is finally heard. The Epithalamion describes the wedding day and at the same time regards the ceremony of marriage as an expression of cosmic harmony.

In a multitude of artistically designed pictures Spenser in the Amoretti praises the beauty of his lover and at the same time analyzes his own feelings. As with Sidney, Spenser sees the beauty of his lover as the embodiment of the grace of heaven and the harmony of the natural world order. Since Sidney, unlike Petrarch's and Sidney's lyrical narrator, marries his beloved in the end, however, like Shakespeare in his comedies, on the background of the Neoplatonic concepts that influenced the Elizabethan view of the world, he poetically depicts the idea of ​​a marital union based on mutual love is based.

While in Sidney the conflict between the Protestant ethos and the Petrarch ideal is still completely resolved in favor of the religious, Spenser's Anglicanism merges in the Amoretti with the Christian Neoplatonism of the Florentine Camerata . In the Amoretti, the Christian sacrament of marriage constitutes the aim of courtship from the beginning; the lovers approach him without the violent fluctuations in feelings between hope and despair or the delight and pain that are to be endured in Petrarchist love. The resistances on the lovers' path, the slander or temporary separations are the only tests for Spenser that purify and deepen mutual love. At the end of the maturation process there is no sublimation in the Amoretti , but the body and soul union of the lovers. While Sidney's Astrophel speaks excitedly from the dramatic situation, the mode of representation and the speech gestures in the Amoretti remain calm and correspond to the calm course of events, which Spenser's lover mostly describes in the cleared form of a review of past situations or events.

Spenser's Platonic or Neoplatonic conception of love is also expressed in the four hymns of the Fowre Hymnes (1596), which are dedicated to “love”, “beauty”, “heavenly love” and “heavenly beauty”. As with Plato , erotic love leads to a knowledge of cosmic connections and relationships; the various elements of the Neoplatonic world of ideas are held together in harmony by love. Physical beauty always corresponds to spiritual beauty; the love of beauty leads to spiritual perfection. In the last two hymns Spenser contrasts earthly love and beauty with the representation of heavenly love embodied by Christ and the heavenly beauty revealed in the cosmic order; These Christian hymns are also determined by Neoplatonic concepts and terminology.

Spenser's main work The Faerie Queene (1590, German The Fairy Queen , 1854 as a partial transfer) is in the tradition of the ancient epics of Homer and Virgil, but also of the Italian epics of Ariostus and Tasso .

Spenser's main work The Faerie Queene

The Faerie Queene , title page of the 1596 edition

Originally, The Faerie Queene, according to Spenser's own explanation in an explanatory letter to Raleigh, was based on the twelve books of the Aeneid or even the twenty-four of the Iliad , but remains after three books that appear in 1590 and three others that are published six years later , a fragment. Nonetheless, this work, which breaks off halfway or a quarter, is considered Spenser's most significant contribution to English poetry and is considered the most ambitious of all Elizabethan narrative poems. The Faerie Queene remains unfinished, however, not because illness or death would have prevented the author from completing it, but because Spenser's initial utopian vision of Arthurian knighthood and the fairy world of Gloriana became less and less in harmony as the work progressed at the end of the 1590s at the latest stands with the socio-political reality of the Elizabethan age and his view of the real conditions at this time is becoming increasingly pessimistic.

The template for the narrative framework of this epic chivalric romance , which, like the previous poem Spenser, also seeks the favor of Queen Elizabeth I and contains a continuous allegory of the Christian faith, is the medieval legend of the Arthurian legend. The fairy queen Gloriana sends six knights, each embodying a specific virtue , on adventures. The respective virtue supports these knights in their quest and allows them to survive their adventures victoriously.

The six books of The Faerie Queene , which with their figurative and fairytale descriptions and adventures can be interpreted as allegories on the three levels of the moral, religious and political level, each contain a subdivision into about 50 nine-line stanzas, the rhyming of which is a further development of the von the meter used by the Italian epic poets.

For The Faerie Queene designed Spenser accordingly a special verse form known as "Spenserian Stanza" ( Spenserian stanza became known): This includes every verse nine verses eight iambic Five lifters , followed by an iambic six Heber , one of Alexandria . The rhyme scheme of the Spenserstrophe is[ababbcbcc].

Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen by Johann Heinrich Füssli (around 1788)

Example from The Faerie Queene. Book iii. Canto xi. St. 54 .:

And as she lookt about, she did behold,
How over that same dore was likewise writ,
Be bold, be bold, and every where Be bold,
That much she muz'd, yet could not construe it
By any ridling skill, or commune wit.
At last she spyde at that roomes upper end,
Another yron dore, on which was writ,
Be not too bold; whereto though she did bend
Her earnest mind, yet wist not what it might intend.

When she looked around, she saw without effort,
That was written on this door,
Be bold, be bold, and everywhere: Be bold,
As far as she thought, it remained strange to her
Despite the art of riddles and the clever pair of eyes.
Then she looked at the upper side of the room,
another iron door, on this was
written: Don't be too bold, but as far
as she considered it, it remained in darkness for her.

The first three books of The Faerie Queene are the virtues Holiness (dt. "Holiness"), Temperance (dt. "Moderation") and Chastity (dt. "Chastity") dedicated and designed as a unit. The "Red Cross Knight", who is later identified with the English national saint Saint George , wins in the first book a victory against the enemies of the true Church, who are embodied by Una. In the second book, Sir Guyon wins the fight against various forms of excess such as greed, anger or gluttony and finally destroys the “Garden of Earthly Delights ”. In the third book, chastity is embodied by Britomat, a female knight. Britomat is steadfastly looking for the noble knight Artegall; At the same time, Belphoebe and Amorest, two other young women, are told who stand for different aspects of female perfection and who arouse and attract excessive but completely honorable love passions.

Mediated through the inventory of motifs in the chivalric novel, in the first three books of Faerie Queene , essentially those value systems come into play that were in competition with one another in Renaissance culture : the Christian tradition, the Aristotelian appreciation of the good mediocrity and a life-style based on reason combined with the platonic pursuit of transcendental perfection. Spenser's arrangement of the books shows how he envisaged a harmonization of these value systems: Christian faith provides the indispensable basis for further ethical endeavors; This endeavor is supplemented by a worldly reason. A continuation can be found in the cultivation of "chastity", however not as negation, but as sublimation of passion.

Books IV to VI, on the other hand, make more allegorical references to contemporary events such as the queen's rift with Raleigh, the execution of Maria Stuart or the suppression of the rebellions in Ireland.

The plan was The Faerie Queene , as Spenser's letter to Raleigh occupied, as the apotheosis of the existing political order, social harmony and religious and spiritual unity. The royal court and the monarch were originally to be praised with this narrative poem as the source of all virtue, in order to legitimize the Tudor state and the Anglican Reformation poetically in a great national epic. While the Shepheardes Calendar still reports on religious strife and corruption in all social classes, the victory of the Protestant cause over the dark machinations of papal Rome should now be conjured up by elevating Elizabethan England to the returned Arthurian Empire and thus to the second Augustan Rome. However, due to the increasing incursions of corruption and depravation as well as the chaotic and irrational, the initial glorification of the court fades more and more into the background and gives way to a criticism of the apostasy from the original courtly and chivalric norms.

The stories in The Faerie Queene lead the reader in a very wide range into a world of aventure-seeking knights, fair fairies, captive virgins, treacherous magicians , fire-breathing dragons , enchanted trees and other wonders. For twelve consecutive days, the fairy queen sends one of the knights to fight the evil in the world; Prince Arthur, who is driven around by a dream vision of the fairy kingdom, intervenes again and again in critical situations. At the end of the festival of the fairy queen with a union of Arthur and the returned knights. This colorful alternation of locations, situations and characters with lovingly decorated details in Spenser's epic poem is not an end in itself for entertainment or for the pleasure of the reader, but should, as Spenser writes to Raleigh, be understood as a continuous allegory.

The knights each personify the supposedly Aristotelian virtues, the essence and value of which are to be made clear to the reader through the confrontation with the corresponding vices or with incorrectly understood forms of these virtues. According to the virtues of Holiness , Temperance and Chastity in the first three books, the virtues of Friendship and Justice are personified by the other knights; the highlight of courtly Spenser's epic personified by Sir Calidore virtue is Courtesy (dt. "Höfischkeit" or "decency" and "courtesy") thought. Prince Arthur ultimately personifies Magnificence , most likely in the sense of magnanimity ("generosity"), which encompasses all other virtues and brings them to perfection.

In addition to the moral-philosophical allegory, Spenser in his letter to Raleigh also suggests a further reading that encompasses both a political and a national historical level of meaning. Spenser writes with regard to his fairy queen Gloriana: "In That Faery Queen I mean glory in my general intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our Sovereign the Queen."

According to the theory of the two human bodies, Elizabeth I appears not only in her public role as regent in the figure of Gloriana, but also in her private quality as an extremely virtuous and beautiful woman. For the contemporary reader, this opens up primarily political-allegorical modes of interpretation, as he has the necessary contextual knowledge and can usually easily decipher the emblematic , iconographic or pictorial ciphers in the narrative poem.

In the first book, the Redcross Knight personifies not only holiness in general, but specifically that of the Anglican state church, whose pure and one truth he defends in the figure of the Virgin Una. In contrast, Archimago embodies the Roman Pope by claiming the role of the knight as defender of divine truth in the hypocritical intrigue . The two-faced and two-faced Duessa stands for the Roman Catholic Church and assumes symbolically still pointierterer form in the fifth book of the role of Mary Stuart .

Although numerous references remain ambiguous or obscure, the fifth book, which is dedicated to the virtue of justice, suggests an interpretation as a political allegory. Behind Sir Artegall's struggle for justice are primarily the contemporary domestic and foreign policy goals of a militant Protestantism, such as that represented by Leicester, Raleigh or Sidney, Spenser's friends and mentors. Elizabeth I was repeatedly urged by them to defend the Anglican faith more militantly against the Catholic opponents, to take harder action and to intervene more decisively, for example against the rebels in Ireland or also in France or the Netherlands. At the beginning of The Faerie Queene , such concerns still had a chance of success; ten years later, after Sidney's heroic death in the Netherlands, Raleigh's rift with Elisabeth and Leicester's death, there was no longer any real basis for such a heroic vision of Elisabeth's role, not least because of her often uncertainly fluctuating and primarily compensatory nature deliberate policy.

This disillusionment can certainly be used as an explanation or interpretation for the dark, ominously open end of Book V; The expression of this disappointing disillusionment can be found in such a reading above all in the disturbing picture of two demonic witches with a hundred-tongued monster.

Accordingly, Spenser's The Faerie Queene can be interpreted both as a poetic expression of a national political vision and as a document of disillusionment. This contrast appears even more clearly in VI. Book that forms the climatic climax of the work: The change in the gloomy atmosphere that is to be expected with regard to the courtesy and the knightly gallantry does not come into play. The world of the court, in which this essentially courtly virtue should really come into its own, is in the clutches of the Blatant Beast , the embodiment of resentment , slander and intrigue. Sir Calidores fight for the virtue of courtesy is given the perversion of courtly values, ultimately without success. Significantly, Elizabeth I remains in the VI. Book without allegorical representatives, although at this point the courtyard in particular forms the thematic focus. It is equally significant that Sir Calidore does not move in the courtly world, but primarily in the pastoral idyll in the country. Spenser's narrative poem leaves the field of the courtly epic and introduces the completely different world of Greek shepherd romance. At this point, Spenser himself appears in the shepherd's costume of Colin Clout, which was well known to his contemporaries. As a poet, he is no longer sure of his own public role.

As an epic poem, The Faerie Queene differs from the later novel not only in formal aspects through its verse and stanza form; More significant differences can be seen above all in the restorative recourse to medieval conventions such as Arthurian epic, chivalric romance, fairy tales and allegory. In addition to the high status and the outstanding public status of its protagonists , The Faerie Queene shows a nostalgic shift of contemporary reality into an idealized past with constant intrusions of the wonderful, which contradict the design of a fictional world that appears empirically realistic .

Influence and reception of works history

Spenser's influence on later Anglo-Saxon authors, starting with William Shakespeare , is immense. “The strife that Spenser waged gave English poetry its astonishing complexity.” The “ chthonic demony” of romantic poetry found in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge , Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire was on Spenser Camille Paglia writes .

Spenser's unfinished main work The Faerie Queene was considered the most brilliant and greatest attempt to link the political-religious conception of Puritanism with the poetic draft of an ideal worldview and a humanistic doctrine of virtues and was featured in the poems of the so-called Spenserians in the first half of the 17th century repeatedly imitated. The later works of poetry by the Spenserians, however, were predominantly philosophically charged, mostly dark allegorical poems, which no longer came close to Spenser's unique combination of political-religious statements with the design of a colorful world of magic and fairies. During the rule of the Stuarts , the political climate changed decisively: Puritanism became politically more radical and increasingly represented anti-humanist and poetry-hostile positions, while conservative humanism retained the hierarchical conceptions of order or moved in the direction of absolutist ideas of monarchy, as theoretically represented by Jacob I. and Ben Jonson poetic in his courtly masques , the court masques were represented.

John Milton , author of Paradise Lost , and John Keats are among the writers who were heavily influenced by Spenser. Lord Byron used the Spenserian Stanza in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , John Keats in The Eve of St. Agnes , Percy Bysshe Shelley in The Revolt of Islam and Adonais .

The romantic Charles Lamb gave Spenser the honorary title of poet's poet , a poet from whom others can learn. Despite the criticism of his artificial language, as expressed by Ben Jonson, for example, his visionary inventiveness and the artistic design of theological and philosophical ideas in poetic images were praised in the reception of his work up to the modern age.

His attempt to find the most diverse literary traditions and suggestions, from ancient myths and literature to mediaeval materials and forms, to English folklore and Italian and French models , was particularly emphasized in the criticism up until the 19th century to combine to a polyphonic unity in order to give poetic expression to his Christian humanism with a Protestant-patriotic character.

literature

• Günter Ahrends : Love, beauty and virtue as structural elements in Sidney's 'Astrophel and Stella' and in Spenser's 'Amoretti'. Inaugural dissertation: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn 1966.
• Thomas Birch : Thomas Birch: The Life of Mr. Edmund Spenser . 1751 On: spenserians.cath.vt.edu. Accessed October 3, 2012.
• Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Ed.): The Works of Edmund Spenser. A Variorum Edition. Volume 11: Alexander C. Judson: The Life of Edmund Spenser. Hopkins, Baltimore MD et al., 4th edition 1981, ISBN 0-8018-0244-X .
• John N. King: Spenser's poetry and the reformation tradition. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1990, ISBN 0-691-06800-3 .
• Camille Paglia : The Faerie Queene - Spenser and Apollon. In: Camille Paglia: The masks of sexuality. Byblos-Verlag, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-929029-06-5 , pp. 215-242.
• Andrew Hadfield: Edmund Spenser: A Life , Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-959102-2 .

Web links

Commons : Edmund Spenser  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Edmund Spenser in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Edmund Spenser  in the German Digital Library
• Works by Edmund Spenser in Project Gutenberg
• Literature by and about Edmund Spenser in the Internet Archive - online
• Fovvre Hymnes by Edmund Spenser - Edition of the Fowre Hymnes on Luminarium.org
• Five songs of the fairy queen: In free metric transmission by G. Schwetschke - digitized version of the edition from 1854 in the partial transmission by Carl Gustav Schwetschke in the Bavarian State Library
• The Edmund Spenser homepage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 374. See also the entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica , accessible online at [1], on Mulcaster's new conception of education . Retrieved June 30, 2017.
2. ↑ Cf. to the biographical details so far Bernhard Fabian : Die englische Literatur. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 374.
3. ↑ See Thomas Kullmann: Spenser, Edmund . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 548. See also Bernhard for more details Fabian (ed.): The English literature. Volume 1: Epochs and Forms . Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 3rd edition Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04494-2 , p. 43f. and Bernhard Fabian: The English literature. Volume 2: Authors . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 374f. See also in more detail Walter F. Schirmer : Spenser and the Elizabethan poetry . In: Walter F. Schirmer: History of the English and American literature. From the beginning to the present . Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1968, pp. 222 f. And 229 ff.
4. ↑ Cf. Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 52. See also Bernhard Fabian (ed.): Die englische Literatur. Volume 1: Epochs and Forms . Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 3rd edition Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04494-2 , p. 43.
5. ↑ See Thomas Kullmann: Spenser, Edmund . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , pp. 548 f. See also Walter F. Schirmer : Spenser and Elizabethan Poetry . In: Walter F. Schirmer: History of the English and American literature. From the beginning to the present . Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1968, p. 224 ff.
6. ↑ Cf. Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 104 See also Walter F. Schirmer : Spenser and the Elizabethan poetry . In: Walter F. Schirmer: History of the English and American literature. From the beginning to the present . Niemmeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1968, p. 225 ff.
7. ↑ See Thomas Kullmann: Spenser, Edmund . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 549. See also Walter F Schirmer : Spenser and the epic . In: Walter F. Schirmer: History of the English and American literature. From the beginning to the present . Niemmeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1968, p. 229 f.
8. ↑ Cf. Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 114. See also Walter F. Schirmer : Spenser and the Elizabethan poetry . In: Walter F. Schirmer: History of the English and American literature. From the beginning to the present . Niemmeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1968, p. 224.
9. ↑ See Thomas Kullmann: Spenser, Edmund . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 549. See also Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 375.
10. ↑ See Walter F. Schirmer : Spenser and the epic . In: Walter F. Schirmer: History of the English and American literature. From the beginning to the present . Niemmeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1968, p. 231.
11. ↑ Edmund Spenser: Faerie Queene. Book III. Canto XI. Stanza 54. In: http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/ . Center for applied technologies in the humanities, accessed on April 13, 2018 . 
12. ↑ See Thomas Kullmann: Spenser, Edmund . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 549.
13. ↑ See Thomas Kullmann: Spenser, Edmund . In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 , p. 550. See also Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): The English literature. Volume 1: Epochs and Forms . Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-423-04494-2 , pp. 44f. and Bernhard Fabian : The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 375.
14. ↑ Cf. Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 114. See also Bernhard Fabian (ed.): Die englische Literatur. Volume 1: Epochs - Shapes. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04494-2 , p. 44 f.
15. ↑ Cf. Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 115. See also Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): Die englische Literatur. Volume 1: Epochs - Shapes. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04494-2 , p. 45 f.
16. ↑ See the reprint of the quote in Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 115.
17. ↑ Cf. Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 115. See also Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): Die englische Literatur. Volume 1: Epochs - Shapes. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04494-2 , p. 45 f.
18. ↑ Cf. Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 115 f.
19. ↑ Cf. Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 116. See also Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): Die englische Literatur. Volume 1: Epochs - Shapes . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04494-2 , p. 45 f.
20. ↑ Cf. Manfred Pfister : The early modern times from More to Milton . In: Hans Ulrich Seeber (Ed.): English literary history . 4th ext. Ed. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-476-02035-5 , pp. 46–154, here p. 116.
21. ↑ Cf. Camille Paglia: Sexuality and violence or nature and art . DTV, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-423-08333-6 , pp. 112-124.
22. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): The English literature. Volume 1: Epochs - Shapes . Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04494-2 , p. 45. and Bernhard Fabian: Die Englische Literatur. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 375.
23. ↑ See Bernhard Fabian: The English literature. Volume 2: Authors. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 3rd edition, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04495-0 , p. 375 f.