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Ralph Knevet's Supplement of the Faery Queene (1635) is a narrative and allegorical work, which weaves together a complex collection of tales and episodes, featuring knights, ladies, sorcerers, monsters, vertiginous fortresses and deadly battles – a chivalric romp in Spenser's cod medieval style. The poem shadows recent English history, and the major military and political events of the Thirty Years War. But the Supplement is also an ambitiously intertextual poem, weaving together materials from mythic, literary, historical, scientific, theological, and many other kinds of written sources. Its encyclopaedic ambitions combine with Knevet's historical focus to produce an allegorical epic poem of considerable interest and power.
This new edition of Knevet's Supplement, the first scholarly text of the poem ever published, situates it in its literary, historical, biographical, and intellectual contexts. An extensive introduction and copious critical commentary, positioned at the back of the book, will enable students and scholars alike to access Knevet's complicated and enigmatic meanings, structures, and allusions.
English but ‘fetcht from farre away’ (lines 168, 201–3). His butterfly, Clarion, spiritually independent and unwilling to accept guidance, and therefore unable to tell the flowers from the ‘weeds of glorious feature’ (l. 213), is distracted and drawn by this dizzying sensual excess towards death in a spiderweb of destructive envy. Pagan precedents and godly motivations are employed, including the myth of
comically self-assured butterfly, Clarion, who is killed by a vindictive spider, Aragnoll. The poem is, in part, an origin myth: it draws on Ovid’s story of the rivalry between Pallas and Arachne in order to explain why spiders have a grudge against butterflies. Opening with the ponderous announcement ‘I sing of deadly dolorous debate’, it is mock-epic in tone throughout but contains some especially amusing passages, such as the conversion of Clarion’s insect anatomy into a formal ‘arming of the hero’. The butterfly’s head becomes a ‘glistering Burganet’, the tiny hairs
, cannot be maintained’. 80 Coriolanus’s masters will therefore allow just enough scope to his ‘sovereignty’ to let him triumph in the public arena on their behalf: ‘he’ll be to Rome, / As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it / By sovereignty of nature’ [ 4,7,33–5 ]. Yet their recurring image for his genius is not a bird of prey but a butterfly: ‘There is a differency between a grub and a butterfly
. (III.vii.69–73) For Hieronimo, then, the torments that have led his ‘tortured soul’ to ‘the brazen gates of hell’ (while his ‘broken sighs’, ‘hovering in the air’, ‘Soliciting for justice and revenge’, have helplessly ‘Beat at the windows of the brightest heavens’ like butterflies flailing their wings against glass) appear to have
, we see the sound beginnings of a strategy in which the language of metaphor is considered not only generally influential, but also handmaid to individual response, to self-expression. Here, too, we see his first acknowledgement of the ‘winter’ that threatened to overcome his spirits throughout his life. 36 HATCHING BUTTERFLIES: THE JESUIT APPROACH TO WRITING As a result of engaging in that
: Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’th’ cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness; so we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news
show a poet with international sympathies using a modish form with originality for the purposes of complex narrative poetry. In the case of Virgils Gnat this comes with the further complication of the almost unparalleled use of a rhyming stanza form to translate dactylic hexameter. 114 Muiopotmos is probably the later of the two poems, and shows Spenser adopting aspects of the Ariostan syntax described above for an original poem with significant narrative debts to Ovid and Virgil. A sequence of three stanzas from the heart of the poem – the butterfly woven by
of the display; a harp nestles under George’s cross, but has only the same prominence as a butterfly and cock. 50 Dublin City is represented in Plate X by the mayor and eleven other councillors or officials, the mayor distinguished from his brethren only by his white staff of office. 51 The representation appears inaccurate, first, because the gowns are all identical; it would be usual on such occasions for the mayor, sheriffs, recorder (town’s legal agent), aldermen and burgesses to greet the deputy
of butterflies being projected onto moving sheets. Puck descends from a white cloth canopy onto which images of spreading ink or blood are projected. When Oberon describes the flower to Puck, a large purple flower is projected onto the background and when Puck promises to girdle the earth, he makes a ‘whooshing’ noise, does a high kick and the lights go down; a large circle (describing the girdle) is drawn on the backdrop using CGI and Puck runs towards it. Taymor also references previous stage productions. Puck's trousers seem to be stretching