A 'goodlie bridge' between the Old and the New:

1. Spenser's The Ruines of Time has been unjustly neglected. 1 Ostensibly an elegy for Leicester and Sidney, the poem uses their deaths much as Milton was to use the death of Edward King in Lycidas -- as an opportunity to discuss poetry and the rôle of the poet. Though Spenser uses complaint to bewail the death of Sidney, his poem is not a conventional lament for great men despite his claims in the Dedication to the Countess of Pembroke that it was 'speciallie intended to the renowming' of the Dudley family 'and to the eternizing of some of the chiefe of them late deceased'.

2. The differences between Spenser's treatment of Sidney's death and that of his contemporaries can be illustrated by 'The Funeral Songs of that honourable gentleman, Sir Philip Sidney, Knight' set by Byrd and published in his Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety (1588). Though this poem's quantitative metre is unusual, its lament is stylised and relatively predictable. It aims to amplify our sense of the loss of Sidney by the staccato iteration of its lament: 'SIDNEY is dead!'; 'SIDNEY, the sprite heroic!'; 'Come to me grief, for ever!' (Bullen n.d., 22-23) The poet's grief leads directly to the plaintive text whose goal is simply to move its listener to acknowledge the justice of its 'plaint'.

3. By contrast, The Ruines of Time uses the complaint mode in a much more complex way. I argue that it is a transitional blend of traditional genres and tropes, best understood as a meeting point between tradition and novelty. Spenser transforms traditional didactic and elegiac complaint by using them to discuss the philosophical implications of literary memorialisation. Unlike the writer of 'The Funeral Songs', Spenser extends lament for Sidney into an exploration of the literary immortality offered by humanist poetry and the conflict which arises between this and apocalyptic world-contempt. The Ruines of Time is Spenser's attempt to reconcile these oppositions through the mythologised figure of the redeemed Sidney.

4. But the poem is more than a bridge between humanist ideas of literary 'eternizing' and Christian eschatology. In the context of the Complaints volume as a whole, its transformation of complaint bridges Spenser's practice as a translator and his practice as an original poet, for whom the values and forms of the past must be reinterpreted and written anew if they are to remain viable. 2 So in addition to being the first poem in the 1591 volume, 3 The Ruines of Time is also the key text for understanding the major original Complaints. Its transitional form and use of the complaint mode reveal how Spenser creates a new poetry in these poems: by self-consciously revitalising traditional complaint to explore problems in poetics, he questions traditional poetry and constructs innovative poetic texts.

   A 'curious macedoine'? 4 The integrity of The Ruines of Time

5. Though in recent years The Ruines of Time has been recognised as an important embodiment of Spenser's concern with poetry, critics have generally followed Renwick's theory that the poem is a fragmentary text, hurriedly put together from disparate working poems to serve as a belated elegy for Sidney and Leicester. 5 Renwick argues that there are no proper transitions between the poem's different parts: Verlame has no connection with Leicester; the elegy for Sidney emerges abruptly from the lament for the Dudleys; and the final 'Pageants' are 'a relic of the Dreames and Pageants mentioned by Spenser and Harvey in their letters' (Spenser 1928, 189-90). Because Renwick fails to see any organising principle -- beyond imitation of Les Antiquitez -- the poem appears as a collage of fragments written at different points in time. 6

6. This image of The Ruines of Time as a piece of 'ingenious carpentry' (Spenser 1928, 190) has dominated discussion ever since: few scholars have offered alternative accounts of its structure. Yet it is highly misleading. Renwick and his successors have not considered whether the poem can legitimately be read as a coherent whole. That it uses a variety of genres and tropes does not preclude it from having an overall coherence. To render the composition of this 'macedoine' less opaque, we need a systematic description (in the absence of an authorial recipe) of the different poetic ingredients which Spenser blends into a unity. This article therefore has a two part structure. Firstly I outline briefly how the poem can be read as a meaningful unity in terms of its argument and genre; then I demonstrate this reading in practice.

   Argument and Genre

7. As Spenser himself points out, the poem's central concern is to memorialise the Dudley family, especially Leicester and Sidney. To do this, Spenser uses the dream image of the 'Genius' of Verulamium who links her own ruin and the neglect of her history with the decimation in the late 1580s of the Dudley family. By means of the ubi sunt trope, Verlame illustrates the futility of the 'vaine worlds glorie' (43) through a catalogue of historical disasters culminating with the deaths of Leicester and Sidney. But Verlame also recognises that literature can create an enduring record of the past: she functions as a choric figure, whose protracted ubi sunt develops into an assertion of the power of 'eternizing' poetry. Though cities and human beings are transient, poetry can immortalise them.

8. Hence the lament for Sidney identifies him as the perfection of the Dudley line both as man and poet. Having completed her lament for the Dudleys, Verlame now comprehensively asserts the power of poetry to preserve the glory of great men, and to transcend mortality. The assertion of the benefits of literary 'eternizing' develops from Verlame's earlier enthusiasm for Camden and commemoration of the Dudleys into the radical claim that poetry can keep its patrons alive. The immortality embodied in poetry becomes Verlame's panacea for the tragic limitations of mortal life.

9. The poem concludes with two sets of visionary 'ur-sonnets' (Van Dorsten 1981, 205), or 'tragicke Pageants' (490), which appear to the narrator after his bewildered reaction to the main complaint (472-87). These 'Pageants' are emblematic glosses on the poem's first 490 lines. While the first series validates Verlame's world-contempt but corrects her interpretation of mortality, the second series accommodates the conflicting absolutes of Christian salvation and poetry through Sidney's apotheosis.

10. So the poem can be read as a coherent argument. To memorialise Sidney and Leicester, Spenser uses the figure of Verlame to initiate a complex exploration of literary immortality and the conflict between this humanist idea and the Christian notion of the ultimate 'vanitie' of terrestrial comforts. Nevertheless the thematic and generic complexity of the text can be confusing. It evokes a variety of traditional tropes in unfamiliar contexts, while the speaker of the main complaint can seem inconsistent. As well as understanding its argument, we need to isolate the ingredients in its 'macedoine' of genres, since generic diversity is the means by which Spenser makes The Ruines of Time into a poem about poetry.

11. As the first poem in the Complaints volume, The Ruines of Time appropriately makes extensive use of the complaint mode. But it is not simply (in Ponsonby's words) a meditation 'of the worlds vanitie; verie grave and profitable.' In contrast with those critics who stress the poem's dependence on Les Antiquitez (and hence its failure to reproduce the lucid structure of the sonnet sequence) 7 I suggest that the poem should primarily be viewed as a dream vision. 8 Within the overall form of a dream vision, however, Spenser self-consciously adapts traditional complaint to discuss literary immortality.

12. Though dream vision is not separately classified in Sidney's Defence of Poetry, 9 Elizabethan readers would have been familiar with a wide range of such texts. Indeed, dream vision is a pervasive literary mode which encompasses a vast body of writings from the Bible and classical Rome through to medieval Europe. A brief conspectus of dream vision literature readily available to Elizabethans would include Ezekiel, Daniel 7 and Revelation; Aeneid VI and Cicero's 'Somnium Scipionis'; Dante's Commedia, the Hous of Fame and Piers Plowman. Spenser's familiarity with the medieval mode is aptly demonstrated by his reworking of Chaucer's Book of the Duchess for Daphnaïda (Harris and Steffen 1978).

13. But the most immediate visionary source for The Ruines of Time is Du Bellay's Les Antiquitez and 'Songe'. This sequence progresses from a terrestrial perspective, in which Du Bellay contemplates the fall of Imperial Rome, to a divine perspective which symbolically demonstrates that 'onely God surmounts all times decay'. 10 Renwick argued that in The Ruines of Time Spenser adopts Du Bellay's 'device of a double structure, a series of direct assertions followed by a series of allegorical restatements of the same motives' (Spenser 1928, 189). Though the English poem contains 'a double structure', it is over simplistic to equate the paradoxical structure of Du Bellay's sonnet sequences with Spenser's cumulative stanzas. Spenser's debt to Du Bellay is more generic than structural: he uses the motif of the visionary 'Pageant' he had already translated in The Visions of Bellay as a symbolic gloss to the dream encounter between the narrator and Verlame. Moreover, by incorporating this Du Bellayan device into his own poem, Spenser illustrates both his understanding of, and his desire to 'overgo', his model, itself a novel amalgam of the amatory sonnet with dream vision and innovatory complaint.

14. Spenser therefore would have been familiar with both medieval and humanist dream visions. The Ruines of Time should be read as a series of contrasting visions, progressively developing the narrator's understanding of mortality and the place of poetry in this world.

15. Though Spenser does not explicitly state at the beginning of the poem that his 'travailer' is dreaming, the opening stanzas imply that he is experiencing a vision of some kind. He walks by the Thames, 'Nigh where the goodly Verlame stood of yore,' (3) although Camden's Britannia, which ironically Verlame will praise, demolishes this myth. 11

16. Verlame herself appears as an iconic embodiment of Verulamium: 'Rending her yeolow locks, like wyrie golde,/About her shoulders careleslie downe trailing... In her right hand a broken rod she held,/Which towards heaven she seemd on high to weld' (9-13). As most commentators have observed, Spenser here embellishes his version of 'Songe' X (Bender 1972, 156-57), describing the Genius of Rome 'Hard by a rivers side' lamenting her 'great glorie' and 'auncient praise' (The Visions of Bellay 127, 132). He is rewriting a visionary image. Hence after seeing her rod, the narrator does not return to the idea that Verlame could be just 'A Woman' (8). The 'broken rod' convinces him that he is seeing a symbolic image which he must interpret: in the next stanza he identifies her as 'th'auncient Genius of that Citie brent' (19). Like a tableau-vivant, the visionary and symbolic origins of Verlame are highlighted before she even speaks.

17. The dream encounter with Verlame is supplemented by the series of visionary 'Pageants' which close the poem. Spenser shows, in accordance with the traditional literary depiction of the psychological impact of visions, the bewilderment and spiritual anguish that Verlame's 'doubtfull speach' causes the narrator (485). Like the seer in Daniel 7.15, the narrator is troubled by 'the visions of his head'; also like Daniel, the narrator is granted further visionary glosses which aim to explain his original vision. Thus the 'Pageants' function as a necessary coda to the narrator's vision of Verlame, which modify her 'doubtfull' assertions and try to reconcile the reader to mortality. In this way, the overall form of The Ruines of Time can be seen as an internally congruent adaptation of the visionary tradition.

18. This account of the poem also clarifies the problems of its transitions. Following Renwick, scholars have argued Spenser 'begins to lose sight of' Verlame after line 238 (Spenser 1928, 195), betraying an 'inability to maintain a consistent speaking voice'(DeNeef 1982, 30). Such objections may appear well-founded. Can Spenser simultaneously expect his readers to accept Verlame as the tutelary spirit of a ruined city and as a self-conscious poet who incidentally presents herself as a mortal being? Yet there are strong connections between the different stages of the main complaint. The ubi sunt unites Verlame's sense of civic loss with the deaths of Leicester and Sidney, while her panegyric of Camden anticipates the defence of 'eternizing' poetry. At one level the problem of the speaker is a red-herring: Spenser organises The Ruines of Time through related ideas and rhetorical tropes. To be an effective lament for Sidney, the poem does not need to characterise Verlame consistently.

19. Moreover, since the poem is a dream vision, Verlame need not be a 'consistent speaking voice' for the text to be a valid expression of the psychology of dreams, as exhibited especially in Chaucerian dream visions. In these texts, linked ideas and images are of more importance than the exhaustive exploration of imagined characters and situations. The Hous of Fame, for example, relates three outwardly unconnected segments of 'Geffrey''s dream (Chaucer 1957, 289) ultimately linked by his intellectual and physical progress towards the Palace of Fame. Even though it is unfinished, these is no sense that such abruptness is aesthetically clumsy. Rather, the best dream visions imitate the random shifts of voice and environment characteristic of actual dreams. Against such a template, The Ruines of Time is a coherent dream vision.

20. In traditional poetry, dream vision and complaint are frequently complimentary: in the Mirror for Magistrates for example, the complainants are ghosts whose narratives the text records. Similarly, a poem like the Book of the Duchess uses its dream scenario as a means of artfully contextualising the Black Knight's lament for his lady. But in The Ruines of Time, the relationship between dream vision and complaint is more problematic both because of the density of the poem's structure and because Spenser does not use traditional complaint passively. His manipulation of the different literary modes within the poem indicates that it will not be contained by the normative expectations of either dream vision or traditional complaint.

21. For example, the didactic complaints of the Mirror would seem to offer a compelling analogy to Verlame's. 12 Verlame twice alludes to this tradition: in her view that Rome's fall is an image of her own 'fatall overthrowe' (78-79); and in her adjuration that the wise should 'behold the piteous fall of mee:/And in my case their owne ensample see' (459-60). Spenser phrasing recalls that of the Mirror poets. Churchyard's 'Shores Wife', for example, instructs other women to make 'A myrrour... of my great overthrowe' and hence to 'Defye this world, and all his wanton wayes' (Campbell 1938, 386). Such rhetorical continuity may suggest that The Ruines of Time is merely a conventional recycling of the tradition of didactic complaint.

22. However, texts like 'Shores Wife' have few ambitions beyond the articulation of formulaic exemplars; The Ruines of Time uses complaint to introduce its lament for the Dudleys and its discussion of the motif of 'eternizing' poetry. So Verlame's complaint only partly approximates to the paradigm of didactic complaint exhibited by the Mirror. The apparently traditional cast of her final recapitulation does not highlight (as it does in 'Shores Wife') the moral the reader is to extract from the text as a whole. Rather, Verlame's world-contempt (454-69), though traditional in itself, bewilders the narrator: he cannot understand such conventional moralism after the literary discussion of the previous 100 lines. Far from reduplicating the values of traditional complaint, Verlame's monologue problematises them by transforming complaint into a debate about poetry.

23. In sum, The Ruines of Time is a dream vision which incorporates Spenser's transformation of traditional complaint into a medium for the discussion of poetics. However, though this description clarifies the poem's genre and structure, allowing us to read it as a serious embodiment of Spenser's intellectual concerns rather than as insipid public verse, it should not altogether erase the reader's sense that the poem's form is unfixed. In its use of traditional genres and tropes, The Ruines of Time is designedly heterodox. The reader is exposed in quick succession to a wide range of contrasting poetic modes: we sample exemplary complaint, pastoral elegy, an encomium of 'eternizing' poetry, and visionary 'Pageant' in just under 700 lines.

24. But the remaining question is why Spenser evolved this unorthodox form for the purpose of an apparently routine public poem. I suggest that The Ruines of Time's transitional form allows Spenser self-consciously to raise the aesthetic problems which are the focal concern of this text: the relationship poets and their patrons, and from this the relationship between poetry and mortality. The poem's formal ambiguities are necessitated by its dynamic progression of ideas. Spenser adopts this form because he is not writing a conventional public elegy: unlike Astrophel, The Ruines of Time is complicated by the aesthetic issues its lament for the Dudleys provokes.

25. So we can suggest a reading of the poem in which its form fluctuates as its argument develops. Spenser begins with the dream image of Verlame, whose exemplary complaint of her 'fatall overthrowe' (79) mirrors the ruin of the Dudley family in the late 1580s. But as he makes this transition, Spenser modifies exemplary complaint by raising the notion of literary immortality. This idea conditions his pastoral elegies for Leicester and Sidney: as a poet, Spenser has a vocational responsibility to 'eternise' his patrons. These self-conscious elegies logically give way to a defence of 'eternizing' poetry as a humanist ideal which guarantees the fame of its subjects.

26. But since this defence shades into the near-idolatry that poetry alone can 'mount' its subjects 'to heaven' (426), Spenser returns to the dream-frame to introduce the corrective 'Pageants'. These aim to counter Verlame's argument by symbolically revealing that 'all is vanitie and griefe of minde' (583). Yet even this moralising form is forced to concede a place for poetry through the closing images of the redeemed Sidney.

27. The Ruines of Time is therefore written in a deliberately transitional form. While the 'macedoine' may seem to be a unique recipe, Spenser's procedure in making a text in which form and content interpenetrate to underline a central concern with the morality of art, is repeated elsewhere in the Complaints volume (Mother Hubberds Tale and Muiopotmos), and arguably in The Faerie Queene itself.

    The Ruines of Time on Poetry

28. This discussion of The Ruines of Time's argument and form suggests that it is both a coherent progression of ideas and a designedly novel cocktail of traditional genres and tropes. I will now argue that it can be read as a 'goodlie bridge' (557) between the traditional poetry Spenser inherited and the new poetry he was in the process of creating.

    (1) Lament and 'eternizing'

29. The connection between literature and the survival of the ruined past -- and so the case for literary 'eternizing' -- arises when Verlame has reached complete despair. Since both her city and inhabitants no longer exist, as Verulamium's tutelary spirit 13 she has become useless. But she remembers the emotive truism that

    ...it is comfort in great languishment

    To be bemoned with compassion kinde,

    And mitigates the anguish of the minde. (159-61)

    Verlame's 'comfort' is that her existence is confirmed through compassionate complaint: if she is mourned her purpose as the spirit of Verulamium is at least poetically maintained. Literature -- specifically Camden's antiquarian 'record' of Verulamium in Britannia -- performs this function for her:

    Cambden the nourice of antiquitie,

    And lanterne unto late succeeding age,

    To see the light of simple veritie,

    Buried in ruines, through the great outrage

    Of her owne people, led with warlike rage,

    Cambden, though time all moniments obscure,

    Yet thy just labours ever shall endure. (169-175)

    Though Camden is an historian, Verlame describes his 'just labours' in terms which anticipate her subsequent praise of poetry as a means of escape from mortality. Camden has seen 'the light of simple veritie,/Buried in ruines'; despite the destruction of the city by 'her owne people', his textual recovery of the past evades the decay of 'all moniments'. Figuratively Camden's work makes him into a modern counterpart of Amphion, the poet-builder of Thebes. 14 Though 'Amphions instrument' has the power in Ruines of Rome, 'To quicken with his vitall notes accord,/The stonie joynts of these old walls now rent' (Ruines of Rome 341-43), at this stage in The Ruines of Time, the modern antiquarian-cum-poet simply produces a text in which ruins are historically recreated. Camden does not rebuild Verulamium, he catalogues it.

30. Nonetheless, Verlame believes (however erroneously) that the Britannia confirms both her historic importance and the grounds of her complaint. Historical literature 'sees' beyond the 'ruins' through to the 'veritie' of what once was. As in Horace's 'Exegi monumentum' (Odes III.30), 'eternizing' literature creates a textual monument more enduring than the physical 'moniments' of the Pyramids or Roman Britain.

31. This confidence in the power of literature precipitates the lament for Leicester as a victim of human forgetfulness and hypocrisy. Spenser intensifies the 'eternizing' topos through Verlame's attack on Colin Clout. As well as its lament for Leicester, this passage asserts the duties of poets to their patrons. Leicester was one of England's 'greatest ones' (186-87), yet was cheated of proper commemoration from his 'Poets' after his death. The poets prove Verlame's contention that in this world 'All is but fained, and with oaker dide' (204) by their negligence of Leicester's reputation:

    He now is dead, and all his glorie gone,

    And all his greatnes vapoured to nought,

    That as a glasse upon the water shone,

    Which vanished quite, so soone as it was sought:

    His name is worne alreadie out of thought,

    Ne anie Poet seekes him to revive;

    Yet manie Poets honourd him alive. (218-24)

    The hypocrisy of the poets not only symbolises the duplicity of the 'courting masker' (202); it exhibits -- in the light of Camden's example -- the neglect of a higher calling. Leicester's 'glorie' and 'greatnes' disappear because of the poets' neglect of his posthumous reputation. Again, the implication is that poetry has the power to preserve human life. So it's the poet's urgent duty 'to revive' Leicester in order to save his 'name' from oblivion:

    Ne doth his Colin, careless Colin Cloute,

    Care now his idle bagpipe up to raise,

    Ne tell his sorrow to the listning rout

    Of shepherd groomes, which wont his songs to praise:

    Praise who so list, yet will I him dispraise,

    Untill he quite him of this guiltie blame:

    Wake shepheards boy, at length awake for shame.

    And who so els did goodnes by him gaine,

    And who so els his bounteous minde did trie,

    Whether he shepheard be, or shepheards swaine,

    (For manie did, which doo it now denie)

    Awake, and to his Song a part applie:

    And I, the whilst you mourne for his decease,

    Will with my mourning plaints your plaint increase. (225-38)

    These stanzas evoke the troubled relationship between Spenser and Leicester underlined by the Dedicatory sonnet of Virgils Gnat (Brown 1995, 60-65). The indictment of Colin Clout alone among Leicester's poets is an intensely self-conscious poetic artifice through which Spenser furthers the idea of literature as an enduring 'record' of the past. The first stanza denounces Colin Clout for having wilfully abandoned his duty to Leicester. The 'praise' Verlame has lavished on Camden is withheld from Colin: 'Untill he quite him of this guiltie blame', he does not properly function as the 'eternizing' poet Spenser claims to be in the dedication to the Countess of Pembroke.

32. In the second stanza, Verlame provides a text for Colin's lament while also indicating the severity with which she views his 'guiltie blame'. The insistent parallelism and anaphora characteristic of this passage subtly convey the shift in emphasis from the initial reproach of line 231 -- 'Wake... at length for shame' -- to the rallying cry of line 236 -- 'Awake, and to his Song a part applie' -- which has the force of a command that is being carried out by the text itself. 15 In lines 236-38, Spenser creates a 'part' song or elegy for Leicester, through the mouthpiece of Verlame, to which all the Earl's former protégés can 'a part applie'.

33. The communal pressure to 'eternise' is given further emphasis by the implication of line 235 that the poets' abandonment of Leicester mirrors Peter's denial of Christ: 'manie' received patronage from Leicester 'which doo it now denie', as Peter 'denied' his association with Jesus after his arrest. 16 The human frailty of Peter's betrayal is repeated in the poets' forsaking of Leicester when he can no longer reward their labours. For Verlame, the writing of 'eternizing' poetry is a responsibility which cannot be shirked without sin. The pious action of Colin, the poets and Verlame, atones for the lapsarian sin of hypocrisy in a 'plaint' for the fallen condition of the world imaged in the death of Leicester.

34. Verlame advances the case for 'eternizing' poetry through the self-conscious introduction of Spenser's persona, and the consequent implication -- supported by the Dedication -- that Spenser himself shares Verlame's poetic idealism. But this dual self-consciousness is also a prelude to Verlame's revealing presentation of her 'Song' as a form of communal wish-fulfilment. Like Dedicatory sonnet to Virgils Gnat, this passage dramatises Spenser's sense that his relationship with Leicester was profoundly troubled. 17

35. Yet Verlame wants to believe that Colin's 'guiltie blame' -- in effect the Fall of man itself since Leicester's death is inextricably linked to the mutability of civilisations occasioned by human cupidity -- can be entirely wiped clean by the harmonious unison of 'Song'. Poetry can transcend death and ameliorate all wrongs. But Spenser's text leaves no doubt that this belief is a form of wish-fulfilment: ultimate amelioration is not within the gift of 'eternizing' poets or indeed their patrons. As the 'Pageants' will make clear, human vanity and incapacity undermine all our constructions, in spite of Verlame's fantasy.

36. The lament for Sidney is the first place where the tension between Christian and poetic transcendence is suggested. Unlike the majority of his family, Sidney was himself a poet. So in the lament, Spenser balances idealised images of Sidney as a perfect Christian soldier and as a perfect English poet. Though Spenser's lament has been dismissed as containing 'but one fit phrase', (Bradbrook 1960, 106) it is a complex piece of writing in which Sidney is successively praised as a type of Christ and a type of Orpheus. The correlations between these two mythic archetypes anticipate the poem's final accommodation of poetry and Christianity.

37. Sidney's condensed biography follows that of Christ from conception onwards: Marie Dudley Sidney brings forth 'of her happie womb... The sacred brood of learning and all honour;/In whom the heavens powrde all their gifts upon her' (278-80). Sidney's birth mirrors Christ's in the text's perception of him as a nonpareil of human virtue: though not born of a virgin, nonetheless Sidney is a 'sacred brood' blessed with heavenly gifts. 18 Thus the first image of Sidney as a soldier metaphorically presents him as an imitator of Christ, who becomes a national hero by virtue of his 'blessed spirite full of power divine' (288):

    Yet ere his happie soule to heaven went

    Out of this fleshlie goale, he did devise

    Unto his heavenlie maker to present

    His bodie, as a spotles sacrifise;

    And chose, that guiltie hands of enemies

    Should powre forth th'offring of his guiltles blood:

    So life exchanging for his countries good. (295-301)

    Sidney's deliberate 'devis[ing]' of his death marks it as peculiarly Christ-like. This typological connection between Christ and Sidney is reinforced by Verlame's mythologising of the skirmishes in the Netherlands; 19 Sidney 'chooses' 'that guiltie hands of enemies' should kill him in the same way that Christ foresees and sanctions the pattern of his death in the Gospels. 20 The symbolic function of Sidney's death is highlighted typologically: Spenser builds a dualistic image of Sidney/England being 'sacrificed' by 'enemies'/Spain, itself a development of Verlame's opposition of spirit and matter at lines 288-94.

38. This metaphorical account of Sidney's death encourages emotional extremity and reinforces Verlame's awareness of the 'wretchedness' of the material world (293) in comparison with the 'celestiall grace' (289) enjoyed by Sidney's soul. His life is unequivocally that of a national hero and true Christian. The final couplet of this stanza presents his 'sacrifise' as a national sacrament: 'his guiltles blood' offered 'for his countries good'. Yet while such patriotic heroism is analogous to Christ's crucifixion, it does not ransom the sins of the human race; Christ's 'deare blood clene washt [us] from sin'; 21 Sidney's death on the other hand encourages only the emulation of his virtuous example.

39. The second half of the lament presents Sidney as the new Orpheus, who excels his mythic prototype. Sidney is appropriately described as a pastoralist:

    Yet will I sing, but who can better sing,

    Than thou thy selfe, thine owne selfes valiance,

    That whilest thou livedst, madest the forrests ring,

    And fields resownd, and flockes to leap and daunce,

    And shepheards leave their lambs unto mischaunce,

    To runne thy shrill Arcadian Pipe to heare. (323-28)

    While this may appear an unremarkable assemblage of pastoral conventions, the accumulation of detail recalls the impact of Orpheus's music on the inanimate world of 'forrests' and 'fields'. For example, Spenser's version of the myth in Virgils Gnat typifies classical descriptions of the impact of 'Orpheus musicke' on 'swift running rivers', 'wilde beasts', and especially 'the shrill woods' (Virgils Gnat 450-56). Texts like Culex evoke a half-magical poet, whose skill is shown by the impact of his art on the hitherto impassive natural world. Sidney's 'shrill Arcadian Pipe' has an analogous effect: the sheer delight his art has for its audience compels them to abandon their normal tasks almost against their will. 22

40. But what is most intriguing about this allusion is its disregard of what Thomas H. Cain calls the 'Renaissance' interpretation of the Orpheus myth (Cain 1971). Following on from Horace's Ars Poetica, 23 humanists viewed Orpheus's mastery over the natural world as a metaphor for primitive poetry's suasive linguistic codification of laws and rules of conduct to control what Sidney wittily calls 'stony and beastly people' (Sidney 1973, 74). Yet neither at this point, or in the direct allusion in line 332, is this humanist interpretation invoked, despite its wide currency. So what does the alignment of Sidney and Orpheus signify in The Ruines of Time? On the surface, the allusion functions as an encomiastic demonstration of Sidney's poetic singularity:

    ...thou now in Elisian fields as free,

    With Orpheus, and with Linus, and the choice

    Of all that ever did in rhymes rejoyce,

    Conversest, and doost heare their heavenlie layes,

    And they heare thine, and thine do better praise. (332-36)

    Sidney has the virtue of not just being a poet: he is 'now mongst that blessed throng/Of heavenlie Poets and Heroes strong' (340-41). As such, he is both poet and hero. Orpheus and Linus implicitly concede that Sidney's 'heavenlie layes' are 'better' than theirs because he possesses an 'excellent' heroic 'desart' (343) which they do not. As Sidney recognised that Orpheus, Amphion and 'Homer in his Hymns' were vatic or religious poets -- albeit in the service of 'a full wrong divinity' (Sidney 1973, 80) -- so Spenser implies that Sidney betters these mythic poets because he is also a Christian hero. In The Ruines of Time, Sidney is presented as both a national hero, living and dying in imitation of Christ, and a poet of Orpheus-like abilities, superior to his model because of his heroic virtue:

    So thou both here and there immortall art,

    And everie where through excellent desart. (342-43)

    In this formulation, literary immortality and Christian transcendence are neatly balanced. Sidney is 'immortall' both 'here' on earth and 'there' in heaven as a result of his excellence as a man and a poet.

41. Yet the allusions to Orpheus can also be seen to exploit more ancient associations, rather than distinctions, between Orpheus and Christ. Since the lament for Sidney typologically compares his heroism with Christ's and his poetry with Orpheus's, we should be aware of the early Christian reading of the myth which persisted into the medieval period (Friedman 1970). This equates Orpheus's rescue of Eurydice with Christ's harrowing of hell, allegorising Orpheus as a type of Christ. For example, Friedman cites Pierre Bersuire's reading of the Metamorphoses in his Reductorium Morale (c. 1325-37), in which Orpheus represents 'Christ the son of God the Father, who from the beginning led Eurydice, that is the human soul [to himself?]'

42. While such allegories seem a long way from The Ruines of Time, it is intriguing that Bersuire goes on to argue that 'Christ-Orpheus wished to descend to the lower world, and thus he retook his wife, that is, human nature, ripping her from the hands of the ruler of Hell himself; and he led her with him to the upper world, saying this verse from Canticles 2.10, "Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away."' (Friedman 1970, 126-28).

43. This passage indicates Spenser's awareness of the traditional parallel between Orpheus and Christ. 24 But instead of repeating Bersuire, Spenser amalgamates aspects of both Christ and Orpheus in the figure of Sidney, the 'spotles sacrifise' and Orphic poet. In the context of the wider debate in The Ruines of Time about the value of poetry, this is more than just an epideictic strategy. The notion that the mythic poet can be associated with the Christ allows Spenser to present Sidney as a metaphorical bridge between poetry and Christianity.

44. So in the second set of 'Pageants', which present Sidney as Orpheus, Spenser also includes the apocalyptic vision of the 'virgine' and 'her Bridegroome' (631-44), paraphrasing the same verse from the Song of Songs quoted by Bersuire. Although the lament for Sidney ignores the 'Renaissance' Orpheus, its adaptation of what we might call the 'medieval' Orpheus creates an initial rapprochement between Christian salvation and 'eternizing' poetry.

    (2) In defence of 'eternizing' poetry

45. However, the next section's praise of 'eternizing' poetry effectively abandons the possibility of a counterpoise between humanism and Christianity. Though Schell notes that 'The death of the poet-knight Sidney leads naturally into the third section of the poem, a defense of poetry and the secular immortality that poetry can give' (Spenser 1989, 247), the transition is more complex than this would suggest. Although the connection between Sidney and poetry is 'natural', we must ask whether the claims made for 'eternizing' poetry square with either the subsequent 'Pageants' or the image of Sidney as both a Christian hero and Orphic poet.

46. Reading the lament for Sidney as part of Verlame's continuous utterance establishes greater coherence between it and the praise of poetry. In the lament, Verlame insists on the 'wretchedness' of mortal life (290-305). This is not surprising, since Sidney's transcendence of 'this sinfull earth' (290) intensifies Verlame's awareness of this 'cumbrous world anoy' (305; 43-56). It is only the remembered aesthetic pleasure of Sidney's pastoral poetry which affords her any respite from her sense that this world is tragically imperfect (323-28). In this context of world-contempt, poetry embodies an artistic order which is felt to be absent from 'this wretched world' (294):

    For deeds doe die, how ever noblie donne,

    And thoughts of men do as themselves decay,

    But wise wordes taught in numbers for to runne,

    Recorded by the Muses, live for ay; (400-03)

    Poetry not only lasts longer than the 'thoughts of men'; these lines state that it lasts because it is 'wordes taught in numbers for to runne' -- the metrical order of verse ensures that it can preserve 'deeds... noblie done'. Where death is 'obscure oblivion' and 'rustie darknes' (346-49), poetry is an ordered form of remembrance. Like Polyhymnia's complaint in The Teares of the Muses, these lines assert the value of poetry as the intellectual arrangement of 'winged words' into a 'tunefull Diapase of pleasures' (The Teares of the Muses 548-49). But Verlame pursues this idea into an exaggeration of what poetry can 'eternise'.

47. At first, she seems to amplify the notion that poetry metaphorically preserves the transient (365-71). But gradually, Verlame's conception of how poetry achieves this preservation becomes less metaphorical and more literal:

    The seven fold yron gates of grislie Hell

    And horrid house of sad Proserpina,

    They [the Muses] able are with power of mightie spell

    To breake, and thence the soules to bring awaie

    Out of dread darknesse, to eternall day,

    And them immortall make, which els would die

    In foule forgetfulnesse, and nameles lie. (372-78)

    This passage is ambiguous about the nature of the resurrection achieved by the Muses. While on the one hand, this stanza suggests a Christian resurrection in which 'soules' are brought 'Out of dread darknesse, to eternall day', it also recalls the figurative immortality Verlame promised Lord and Lady Warwick (253-59). The Muses make the dead 'immortall', 'which els would die/In foule forgetfulnesse'. In this case, the 'death' referred to by the verb 'to die' seems metaphorical -- the death of the name as opposed to the death of the body. Poetry ensures that its subjects will not perish 'in obscure oblivion, as the thing/Which never was' (346-47) through its record of the past. As in Verlame's catalogue of the Dudleys (183-280), poetry preserves the reputations of the great and the good from historical anonymity.

48. Nonetheless, this stanza does not make clear whether the Muses will literally 'breake' the 'yron gates of grislie Hell' and resurrect those chosen 'soules', or whether this is an elaborate periphrasis for literary immortality. As the praise of poetry develops, so the sense of ambiguity deepens. The humanist heaven progressively becomes, instead of a metaphor for literary immortality, an actual place beyond the grave which is accessible to those 'Whom the Pierian sacred sisters love' (394). In this idealised environment, the elect are 'freed from bands of impacable fate' and share their meals of 'Nectar and Ambrosia' with the Gods 'for former vertues meede' (395-99). 25

49. This conception of a humanist transcendence, accessed by good deeds and wealth, is in tension with orthodox Protestant soteriology. Articles XI and XII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571) state that 'We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings', and further that 'Good works... cannot put away our sins, and endure the severity of God's Judgement'.

50. As a representative statement of Protestant doctrinal orthodoxy, 26 the Articles allow that 'Good works' may be the fruits of Faith, but reject the idea that such works have a determining impact on the destiny of the human soul. The Elizabethan Protestant cannot presume on any investment of good deeds and must rely wholly on Faith for his or her justification. The first 'voyce' of the 'Pageants' expresses the essence of this view: 'Ne other comfort in this world can be,/But hope of heaven, and heart to God inclinde' (584-85). Yet Verlame insists that heaven can be stormed by the importunate humanist on the strength of 'vertuous deeds':

    But fame with golden wings aloft doth flie

    Above the reach of ruinous decay,

    And with brave plumes doth beate the azure skie,

    Admir'd of base-borne men from farre away:

    Then who so will with vertuous deeds assay

    To mount to heaven, on Pegasus must ride,

    And with sweete Poets verse be glorifide. (421-27)

    This stanza states that poetry can evade the universal impact of original sin, categorically described by the Articles as 'the fault and corruption of every man... and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God's wrath and damnation' (Article IX). The phrase 'ruinous decay' means the decay which is attendant on the fallen condition of the world, since 'ruinous' means 'falling', as in Donne's bitter pun, 'We are borne ruinous'. 27 Poetry, apparently, is able to avoid the taint of original sin: it will 'never tast deaths woe' (Donne 1985, 331), and neither will the subject of poetic 'fame'. 'Eternizing' poetry allows the virtuous (and wealthy) individual 'To mount to heaven' on 'Pegasus' through 'sweete Poets verse'. 28 This is the poem's cumulative statement of the power of 'eternizing' and as such deliberately contradicts the corrective view asserted in the first 'Pageants'. 29

51. However, The Ruines of Time is not a bland juxtaposition of simple choices: poetry doesn't cancel Christianity, or vice versa. As has been frequently recognised, this defence of 'eternizing' has substantial correlations with the rest of Spenser's oeuvre, and the humanist belief in the power of literature (Spenser 1928, 196-98). The figure of Verlame is not simply good or evil: as a poetic mouthpiece she exaggerates, but this fact does not mean that she cannot also 'speak for' Spenser.

52. Her complaint reaches a climax with the satiric comparison of Walsingham and Burghley as patrons (435-55). In praising Walsingham at Burghley's expense, Verlame voices Spenser's own grievance that the Lord High Treasurer had a poor estimation of poetry (Judson 1945, 153-55). Burghley's inhibition of literary and political patronage (449-53) demonstrates why poetry has needed defending. Unlike the dead Leicester, whose 'bounteous minde' sustained 'manie Poets' (224, 233), the aged, but still living, Burghley 'Scorns' poetry 'in his deeper skill' (448). The hard-up poet therefore has no option but to return this scorn with interest: 'O let the man, of whom the Muse is scorned,/Nor alive, nor dead be of the Muse adorned.' (454-55). 30 The hyperbolical Verlame allows Spenser to make explicit his criticism of Burghley. 31

53. As a whole, Verlame's complaint maintains that 'eternizing' significantly ameliorates the tragedy of human mortality. As the poem sets about its task of memorialising the Dudleys, it formulates a progressive conception of literary memorialisation developed out of traditional defences of poetry. 32 This conception defines 'eternizing' through the clarification of the reciprocal duties of poets and patrons and the idealisation of poetic transcendence. Yet from a Christian perspective, the mortal artifice of poetry cannot arrogate to itself the resurrection of the dead. So it is unsurprising that this vision should bewilder the narrator: Verlame's complaint cannot provide a single cogent moralitas both because of its generic diversity and its central concern with poetry.

    (3) The 'Pageants': reconciling poetry with Christianity

54. Since Verlame's complaint does not resolve the philosophical issues it raises, in the final 200 lines of the poem, Spenser adopts a different strategy: the symbolic visions of the 'tragicke Pageants'. The first series (491-588) demonstrates the frailty, and consequent futility, of every human construction, including poetry. Wholly in the style of the 'Songe', or Spenser's own Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, 33 these six texts symmetrically link descriptions of 'greatest things' with their inherent propensity to ruin. The first stanza of each 'ur-sonnet' describes the doomed object, while the second (linked to its partner by a shared rhyme) moralises its fall. So for example, the fourth vision describes the Colossus of Rhodes in its first stanza as 'a Giaunt... Of wondrous power and of exceeding stature' (533-39). In the second stanza, his fall 'into the deepe Abisse' exhibits 'the end and pompe of fleshlie pride' (540-46). As in the 'Songe', the symbolic image reveals 'this worlds inconstancies' and allows the poet to advance a moralising commentary (The Visions of Bellay 11-12).

55. The third vision is most directly pertinent to The Ruines of Time's debate on poetry. It describes the destruction of 'a pleasant Paradize' (519), and implies a connection between this garden and Spenser's own poetry:

    Such as on earth man could not more devize,

    With pleasures choyce to feed his cheerefull sprights;

    Not that, which Merlin by his Magicke slights

    Made for the gentle squire, to entertaine

    His fayre Belphoebe, could this gardine staine. (521-25)

    Renwick suggests that this simile derives from 'an episode apparently designed for The Faerie Queene' -- Spenser expected his readers to recognise Merlin, and especially Belphoebe and 'the gentle squire' (Timias), as figures from the epic (Spenser 1928, 201). Yet the origins of the image are of less interest than its function. I suggest that such off-cuts from The Faerie Queene serve to inculpate poetry along the other 'vaine labours of terrestrial wit'. Lines 521-25 make clear that the 'Paradize' is an artificial environment through the comparison of it with 'that, which Merlin by his magicke slights/Made'. Like the poetry Spenser expects his reader to recall, the garden is 'Made' through artifice, or more disquietingly, 'magicke'. The vision implies that all such artifice is ultimately pointless: the 'short pleasure' of aesthetic enjoyment is 'bought' with the 'lasting paine' (526) which attends the realisation that art is itself transitory. The implication is that the dissolution of this poetic garden undercuts Verlame's confidence in the power of poetry to transcend death.

56. Yet the second stanza is not a bald repudiation of art. The narrator stresses his receptivity to aesthetic experience: the fate of the garden brings home to him the frailty of his 'pleasure' and 'delight/In earthlie blis', so that in the couplet he must confess 'That I, which once that beautie did beholde,/Could not from teares my melting eyes with-holde.' (526-32) Though the moral of the vision is clear, the narrator's response to it is not. The destruction of aesthetic 'beautie' prompts -- in suitably beautiful poetry -- the 'teares' of his 'melting eyes'. While the narrator understands intellectually that art is transitory, emotionally he is still attached to its 'pleasures'.

57. Nonetheless, the first set of visions ostensibly demonstrates that all works of art, whether these take the form of poetic gardens or golden bridges, are 'brickle' (499) and therefore made in vain. This position is stated explicitly by the 'voyce' (580) which calls to the narrator at the end of the first set of visions:

    Behold... and by ensample see

    That all is vanitie and griefe of minde,

    Ne other comfort in this world can be,

    But hope of heaven, and heart to God inclinde;

    For all the rest must needs be left behinde: (582-86)

    The 'voyce' instructs the narrator in the lapsarian moral he should draw from the first 'Pageants'. In the face of the 'vanitie' of mortal endeavour, he should embrace the distant 'hope of heaven', as the Protestant is ultimately saved 'only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith'. Yet despite the apparent authority of this instruction, the first 'Pageants' do not close The Ruines of Time. As throughout the poem, hyperbolical assertions are modified by what follows them. So the first set of visions, which problematises Verlame's view of poetry, is in its turn adjusted by the second set.

58. The second series of visions (lines 589-686) is both more formally and thematically complex than the first. Spenser is forced to alter the form because these 'Pageants' are all in different ways concerned with Sidney's death. Instead of presenting exemplary symbols of the frailty of mortal constructions, these visions symbolically convey an idea of Sidney's transcendence. 34 So in contrast with the first series, this set of 'Pageants' does not use the double stanza form to moralise the visionary symbol, but rather to develop the image. By transforming the hitherto didactic form into something more symbolic, Spenser effects an accommodation between Christian and humanist ideas of immortality through images of the transcendent Sidney.

59. These visions intersperse eschatological images of the soul's redemption with mythic images of Orpheus-Sidney's transformation into 'an heavenly signe' (601). Through manipulation of the Orpheus myth, Spenser makes Sidney into a mediator between the competing priorities of Christianity and poetry. So in the second vision Spenser rephrases the earlier alignment of Orpheus with Sidney. The narrator sees 'an Harpe' descending 'the Lee', which reminds him of 'The harpe, on which Dan Orpheus was seene/Wylde beasts and forrests after him to lead' (603-08). But in this case, Sidney replaces 'Dan Orpheus':

    [It] was th'Harpe of Philisides now dead.

    At length out of the River it was reard

    And borne above the cloudes to be divin'd,

    Whilst all the way most heavenly noyse was heard

    Of the strings, stirred with the warbling wind,

    That wrought both joy and sorrow in my mind:

    So now in heaven a signe it doth appeare,

    The Harpe well knowne beside the Northerne Beare. (609-16)

    Spenser's focus on the harp draws on a mythographic tradition that is not present in his main classical sources. 35 Boccaccio records this aspect of the myth and initiates its 'Renaissance' interpretation: the harp is the oratorical faculty through which 'Orpheus alone moved the most fixed and firmly rooted trees, that is, men of obstinate opinions, who cannot be moved from their obstinacy except through men of eloquence' (Friedman 1970, 140).

60. This would suggest that all roads lead to Rome: Spenser's apparent omission of the 'Renaissance' Orpheus in the lament for Sidney conceals its presence in the image of 'The Harpe'. But Spenser's Orpheus is not a replica of Boccaccio's. Where Boccaccio interprets Orpheus as a symbol of eloquence, Spenser equates his 'Harpe' with the aesthetic value embodied in Sidney, the 'most heavenly noyse' which 'wrought both joy and sorrow' in the narrator's mind. This is a symbolic evocation of Sidney's poetry, balancing a sense of the validity of aesthetic experience with a sober recognition of human mortality. Such a Christian poetry suggests that the art over endorsed by Verlame can be reconciled with an awareness of the limitations of mortal life. It recognises with 'sorrow' the fact of Sidney's death, yet evokes the joys of redemption through the experience it describes and creates.

61. Sidney's transfiguration also ensures that even the two Dudley bears, destroyed in the first series (561-74), are amalgamated into the poetic image of 'The Harpe' resting 'beside the Northern Beare'. This suggests that the conflict between 'eternizing' and Christianity has been overcome: the visionary symbol of Philisides's harp allows Spenser covertly to immortalise the Dudley family. 36

62. The 'strife' between poetry and Christianity is finally 'appease[d]' in the sixth vision through the figure of Mercury (659-72). As the arbiter in the dispute between 'the heavens and the earth' about the custody of Sidney's 'ashes' (664-67), Mercury works on a number of levels. 37 Firstly, he performs his traditional pagan rôle as the conductor of souls into Elysium, carrying Sidney's ashes to their 'second life' in heaven (668-70). 38 Mercury parallels Sidney as a divine poet and orator: as Sidney's poetry points to the soul's redemption in lines 610-16, so Mercury effects Sidney's transcendence through his judgement in favour of heaven (668-70).

63. The association of Mercury with Sidney further recalls the myth recorded by Boccaccio that Mercury originally gave Orpheus his lyre or harp (Boccaccio 1976, Bk V ch. VIII). This detail is suggestive of the amazing syncretism of Spenser's thought in the second 'Pageants'. Sidney is firstly equated with Orpheus and Christ and then with other figures like the heroic Perseus (645-51) and Mercury. Through the by now thoroughly mythologised figure of Sidney, Spenser can appease the strife not only between 'eternizing' poetry and Christian transcendence, but also between pagan and Christian religious imagery. Though the association between Orpheus and Christ was traditional, Spenser stretches these mythographic associations by using Sidney as a mediating figure whose literary and military careers are paralleled by an impressive array of figures. In short, The Ruines of Time synthesises conflicting imagery and tropes into a heterodox, but brilliantly coherent, whole. It is a humanist text.

64. The poem is therefore an intriguing amalgam of conflicting forms and ideas about poetry: a 'goodlie bridge' between uncritical confidence in 'eternizing', and the need to make a more intellectually strenuous defence of poetry in the light of the Protestant suspicion that art is a mortal 'vanitie'. This poetic self-consciousness is also evident in the form of the text. As a blend of dream vision and exemplary complaint, The Ruines of Time shows itself repeatedly as a text in which old formal priorities are transformed as a consequence of its self-conscious argument. Spenser does not end the poem with a conventional moralitas, but extends its debate on poetry through the densely compacted symbolism of the 'tragicke Pageants'. These mythic images replace the didactic strategies of traditional complaint. Unlike the Mirror for Magistrates, the poem's point cannot be made by the simple expedient of a generalising summary; rather, as in The Faerie Queene, sense must be made of complex images by further complex images. The didactic tradition of the Mirror is strained to breaking point in The Ruines of Time as it inaugurates a new poetry of complaint.

Notes

1. This article derives from my D. Phil thesis, 'The new Poete': Novelty and Tradition in Spenser's Complaints (Brown 1995). All quotations from Spenser are from Spenser 1989 unless otherwise stated; The Ruines of Time is on pages 230-61.

   

2. See Brown 1995, 49-126 for detailed discussion of the translations Virgils Gnat and Ruines of Rome.

   

3. Brown 1995, 38-41 discusses the ordering of the 1591 volume.

   

4. Renwick in Spenser 1928, 204.

   

5. Renwick in Spenser, 189-90. Renwick's view of the text is supported by Bradbrook 1960, 106-07; Satterthwaite, 1960, 93-94; Maclure, 1973, 15-16; and, most thoughtfully, by DeNeef 1982, 28-40. Only Rasmussen 1981, 159-81 offers a significantly different view, arguing that Verlame's complaint is 'a perverse consolatio' and that she is a type of the Whore of Babylon. See Ferguson 1982, 33-39 for an analogous perspective. The poem's most perceptive recent critic is Van Dorsten 1981, 205, who sees it as a record of Spenser's early emulation of Du Bellay; so the 'Pageants' are 'quaint, Anglo-Saxon ur-sonnets'. Van Dorsten's conclusion is that 'the 1591 Ruines recapture the earliest attempts to evolve, within an English tradition, a new, visionary poetry.'

   

6. All datings other than c.1590-91 depend on the kind of textual disintegration practised by Renwick. Lines 435-39 unequivocally date the finished poem after the death of Sir Francis Walsingham on 6 April 1590, while the rest of the poem (if indeed it was composed in fragments) must be dated at least after the deaths of Sidney (1586) and Leicester (1588). In addition to Renwick in Spenser 1928, 180, 188-90, see Schell in Spenser 1989, 225 and the full commentary in Spenser 1932-49, VIII, 526-29.

   

7. See Renwick in Spenser 1928, 189; Satterthwaite 1960, 93; Manley 1982, 213-14 sees the poem as Spenser's independent response to 'the Continental mode of ruins poetry.'

   

8. This approach has some affinities with that of Rasmussen 1981, inasmuch as Boethius's Consolation is itself a dream-vision. However, Rasmussen's essay does not prove that the Consolation is the determining influence on The Ruines of Time.

   

9. Nonetheless, he mentions specific dream-visions with approval; see Sidney 1973, 81, 89.

   

10. The Visions of Bellay 13. See also Brown 1995, 97-98, 108-10. The other major European visionary work which contains a similar progress and dichotomy of values is Petrarch's Trionfi; Spenser may have been familiar with the Countess of Pembroke's own translation of 'The Triumph of Death' in manuscript. See Brown 1995, 138-39 and Hannay 1990, 107-09.

    

11. Renwick, in Spenser 1928, 194, notes that Camden's account of Verulamium expressly corrects the idea '"that the river Tamis sometimes had his course and chanell this way."'

    

12. See Roe's discussion of this genre in Shakespeare 1992, 38-41, 64-65. See also Smith 1952, 102-26 for a discussion of the 1590s 'revival of the complaint form' in texts like Daniel's The Complaint of Rosamond. See Brown 1995, 33-35, n.84 for the influence of The Ruines of Time on Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint.

    

13. Compare OED's first definition of 'genius'. Since Verlame is clearly related to the Virgilian lares et penates, it is surely perverse to gloss 'Genius' as demon or goblin, like Rasmussen 1981, 162-64.

    

14. See Cartmell 1986/87, 39-43 for the view that Spenser uses Amphion as a symbol of poetic rebuilding; and Brown 1995, 114-16.

    

15. My italics.

    

16. See for example Matthew 26.69-75. The Synoptic Gospels all have the same basic story, with its stress on Peter's verbal 'denials' of Christ.

    

17. See Greenlaw 1932, 104-32 and Rosenberg 1955, 336-48 for historical speculation on the quarrel.

    

18. This explains why Spenser omits any mention of Sir Henry Sidney, which puzzled Renwick (Spenser 1928, 196) and possibly led him to overstate the 'clumsiness' of this passage. But see also Hannay 1990, 79, who suggests that Sir Henry lacked his Dudley wife's financial power, and so was not a fruitful source of literary patronage.

    

19. The Ruines of Time is at the forefront of the Elizabethan mythologising of Sidney's death. Duncan-Jones 1991, 296 makes it clear that the engagement at Zutphen which resulted in Sidney's mortal wound was a 'skirmish' and not a battle as has been argued from 1586 onwards.

    

20. For Christ's anticipation of his death, see for example Matthew 20.17-19.

    

21. Amoretti, LXVIII, 7. Compare also An Hymne of Heavenly Love 166-68, which expresses the Pauline view that Christ's sacrifice cleanses original sin: 'To heale the sores of sinfull soules unsound/And cleanse the guilt of that infected cryme,/Which was enrooted in all fleshly slyme.'

    

22. These passages possibly bear the marks of some influence on each other. For example, the adjective 'shrill' is appropriate for Sidney's Arcadia Pipe', but seems rather strained for the 'shrill woods'. Perhaps Spenser had the word lodged in his mind in connection with Sidney and Orpheus.

    

23. See Shepherd in Sidney 1965 / 1973, 147.

    

24. Bersuire's work was, as Friedman 1970, 126-28, notes 'popular and influential'; Fowler 1964, 65, 85 assumes that Spenser was familiar with 'Bersuire's influential exegesis'.

    

25. Spenser's humanist heaven derives from Du Bellay's image of the reward he imagines for the writer of a vernacular epic -- 'la gloire, seule échelle par laquelle les mortels d'un pied léger montent au ciel et se font compagnons des dieux'. See Du Bellay 1967, 243.

    

26. Collinson 1967 / 1990, 117 notes that puritan radicals wanted to use 'the more strictly doctrinal of the Articles... as a searching test of lay as well as clerical orthodoxy', though they were less enthusiastic about the more political of the Articles.

    

27. See Schell's note in Spenser 1989, 232. See also Patrides's comment on this pun in Donne 1985, 331.

    

28. On the image of Pegasus in relation to poetry, see Lascelles 1972.

    

29. Compare Cheney 1993, 14-15, who claims that this stanza should be read allegorically as a Christianisation of poetic fame. Like his comparable argument about The Teares of the Muses 457-63, Cheney's reading is highly schematic: because Spenser was a Christian does not mean that we should Christianise every ambiguous passage he wrote!

    

30. DeNeef 1982, 38 sees this couplet as a humourless paraphrase of Sidney's closing peroration to the Defence of Poetry. Though the parallel is undeniable, DeNeef's reading dilutes our sense of the satirical dimension of this passage.

    

31. Though like Mother Hubberds Tale, this passage was omitted from the 1611 Folio of Spenser's works. See Spenser 1989, 251 and Stein 1934, 37.

    

32. Compare DeNeef 1982, 28-40, who views the poem as an embodiment of Sidney's Defence. DeNeef sees Sidney's theory of imitation in the main complaint's catalogue of social interrelationships, which 'define the conceit "Sidney"' (32). While DeNeef's approach is analogous to the one adopted here, I am cautious of seeing The Ruines of Time as a poetic representation of a critical theory. While Spenser undoubtedly makes use of broadly Sidneyan ideas and images, his central concern with the morality of art is not best understood as a practical demonstration of 'the principal theorems of the Apology'. Rather, poetic practice raises theoretical issues which are in fact external to the concerns of Sidney's Defence.

    

33. Hence the view of Van Dorsten 1981, 205 of the 'Pageants' as already 'quaint' for the reader of the 1590s, since they embody Sidney and Spenser's 'earliest attempts to evolve, within an English tradition, a new, visionary poetry'. This view does not do justice to the synthetic innovation of the second series.

    

34. Renwick, in Spenser 1928, 201-03, traces the cosmological progression of the transcendent Sidney across the heavens.

    

35. Compare Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI.44-60 and Virgil, Georgics IV.514-27.

    

36. See also the fourth vision (631-44) describing the apocalyptic marriage of the virgin and the bridegroom as another example of Spenser's syncretism here.

    

37. But observe his much more ambivalent rôle in Mother Hubberds Tale, discussed by Brown 1995, 289-91.

    

38. See Horace, Odes I.X, 17-20 in Horace 1966, 39 and Graves 1955, I, 65-66.

    

List of Works Cited

Bender, John B. 1972. Spenser and Literary Pictorialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. 1976. Genealogie: Paris 1531. Repr. of the 1531 edition published by P. Le Noir. Edited by Stephen

Orgel. New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc.

The Book of Common Prayer. 1571; repr.1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bradbrook, M. C. 1960. 'No Room at the Top: Spenser's Pursuit of Fame.' In Elizabethan Poetry, edited by J. R. Brown

and Bernard Harris. Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 2. London: Edmund Arnold.

Brown, Richard Danson. 1995. 'The new Poete': Novelty and Tradition in Spenser's Complaints. University of York

D. Phil thesis.

Bullen, A. H. Ed. No date. Shorter Elizabethan Poems. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.

Cain, Thomas H. 1971. 'Spenser and the Renaissance Orpheus.' University of Toronto Quarterly 41:24-47.

Cartmell, Deborah. 1985. '"Beside the shore of siluer streaming Thamesis": Spenser's Ruines of Time.' Spenser Studies

6:77-82.

Cartmell, Deborah. 1986/87. Edmund Spenser and the Literary Uses of Architecture in the English Renaissance.

Unpublished D. Phil thesis. University of York.

Campbell, Lily B. Ed. 1938; repr.1960. The Mirror for Magistrates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. 1957. The Works, edited by F. N. Robinson. London: Oxford University Press.

Cheney, Patrick. 1993. Spenser's Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career. Toronto: University of

Toronto Press.

Collinson, Patrick. 1967; repr.1990. The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

DeNeef, A. Leigh. 1979. '"The Ruines of Time": Spenser's Apology for Poetry.' Studies in Philology 76:262-71.

DeNeef, A. Leigh. 1982. Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press.

Donne, John. 1985. The Complete English Poems, edited by C. A. Patrides. Everyman's Library. London and Melbourne:

Dent.

Du Bellay, Joachim. 1967. Les Regrets, Les Antiquités de Rome et La Défense et Illustration de la Langue française.

Édition établie par S. De Sacy. Paris: Gallimard.

Duncan-Jones, Katherine. 1991. Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Ferguson, Margaret W. 1982. '"The Afflatus of Ruin": Meditations on Rome by Du Bellay, Spenser, and Stevens.' In Roman

Images. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New Series, No. 8, edited by Annabel Patterson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 23-52.

Fowler, Alistair. 1964. Spenser and the Numbers of Time. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Friedman, John Block. 1970. Orpheus in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Graves, Robert. 1955. The Greek Myths. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Greenlaw, Edwin A. 1932; repr.1967. Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory. London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd.

Hamilton, A. C. et al. 1990. The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press and

Routledge.

Hannay, Margaret P. 1990. Philip's Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. New York and Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Harris, Duncan, and Steffen, Nancy L. 1978. 'The Other Side of the Garden: An Interpretive Comparison of Chaucer's Book

of the Duchess and Spenser's Daphnaïda.' Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8:17-36.

Horace. 1966. Odes, trans. James Michie. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.

Judson, Alexander C. 1945. The Life of Edmund Spenser. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lascelles, Mary. 1972. 'The Rider on the Winged Horse (1959).' In Notions and Facts: Collected Criticism and Research.

Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1-28.

MacLure, Millar. 1973. 'Spenser and the ruins of time.' In A Theatre for Spenserians, edited by Judith M. Kennedy

and James A. Reither. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1-16.

Manley, Lawrence. 1982. 'Spenser and the City: the Minor Poems.' Modern Language Quarterly 43:203-27.

Rasmussen, Carl J. 1981. '"How Weak Be the Passions of Woefulness": Spenser's Ruines of Time.' Spenser Studies

4:159-81.

Rosenberg, Eleanor. 1955. Leicester, Patron of Letters. New York: Columbia University Press.

Satterthwaite, Alfred W. 1960. Spenser, Ronsard and Du Bellay: a Renaissance Comparison. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Shakespeare, William. 1992. The Poems. New Cambridge Shakespeare edn, edited by John Roe. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke. 1977. The Triumph of Death and Other Unpublished and Uncollected Poems,

edited by Gary F. Waller. Salzburg Studies in English Literature. Salzburg: Universität Salzburg.

Sidney, Sir Philip. 1965; repr.1973. An Apology for Poetry. Old and Middle English Texts edn, edited by Geoffrey

Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press,

Sidney, Sir Philip. 1973. Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten.

Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Smith, Hallet. 1952 Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning and Expression. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press.

Spenser, Edmund. 1928. Complaints, edited by W. R. Renwick. London: Scholartis.

Spenser, Edmund. 1932-49. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition. 10 vols, edited by E. A. Greenlaw et al.

Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press and the Oxford University Press.

Spenser, Edmund. 1989. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, edited by William A. Oram et al.

New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Stein, Harold. 1934. Studies in Spenser's Complaints. New York: Oxford University Press.

Van Dorsten, J. A. 1981. 'Literary Patronage in Elizabethan England: The Early Phase.' In Patronage in the Renaissance,

edited by Guy F. Lytle and Stephen Orgel. Princeton: Princeton University Press.