Search results
poets’ imagery, prosody, and tone. One critic even noted Donne’s ‘Spenserian sweetness’, and his grasp of Spenser’s ‘more literary style’. 2 What is altogether missing from the many comparisons between Spenser’s poem to his bride and Donne’s ‘Epithalamion Made at Lincoln’s Inn’ – and the commentary in the Donne Variorum is a virtual list of examples – is any attention to the poets’ shared invocations of sexual violence, and, specifically, the idea of the bride as fulfilling the role of sacrificial offering. The presence of sacrifice as a
captured admirably by Turberville’s ‘Of whome there scapte not one untoucht’. It is worth noting that this allegation of Herculean sexual violence is almost entirely muted in the translation that Wye Saltonstall produced in 1637, and disappears altogether from subsequent English translations throughout the seventeenth century. 16 And it is through his depictions of the women who come into the orbit of Hercules that Heywood destabilises the play’s representation of the protagonist’s inexorable progress from heroic deeds to deification. In the middle of the play, for
herd is female. Palmer reads it in the context of the sexual violence that comes with conquest. 15 But, in Plate V , the introduction of sexual lust also runs counter to the general tendency in the woodcuts for markers of sex employed to associate conquest with well-governed passions. If anything, the pairing of the mounting horse and a female severed head echoes Gaelic figures of disorderly lust, such as the ravenous dog in Plate III (also shown with genitals). Here, the inadequacy of seeing The Image as merely
case for both poets’ poetic practice as an effort to repair the cosmological rupture brought about by new science, restoring its circularity through repetition. The chapters by Elizabeth Harvey and Ramie Targoff can be considered companion pieces in that both address the issue of eroticism and sexual violence in the poetry of Spenser and Donne, albeit through vastly different lenses and points of comparison. Targoff looks to the classical tradition of the epithalamion, or marriage hymn, arguing that Spenser’s mythological allusions, just
resemble each other in that ‘[l]ike Brutus’s sons, Sidney’s princes both defend aristocratic licence and conspire against the state’. 24 At the beginning of Book Three of the Old Arcadia , before their assaults on the princesses’ virtues, Pyrocles and Musidorus, frustrated by their lack of success with Philoclea and Pamela so far, agree (on parting) to meet ‘shortly with an army’ to attack Arcadia as a whole (176). Aristocratic licence is identified with sexual violence in both cases (in Livy’s History and in Sidney’s Arcadia ), and much of Renaissance republican
so invisibility is deployed as part of an anti-Catholic association between ‘religious faith’ and ‘sexual violence’, in a play that is otherwise markedly ambiguous in its attitude to religious controversy. 11 Many allusions to invisibility in early modern plays mockingly associate this visual state with superstition and deceit. In Thomas Middleton’s The Puritan
Golding, whose ‘Preface to the Reader’ strongly condemns the lust of the pagan gods: ‘Who, seeing Jove … / In shape of eagle, bull or swan to win his foul desire … would take him for a god?’ (33–42). Anticipating Sandys, he follows Boccaccio who, in his Genealogia deorum gentilium , emphasises the sexual violence, through the verb ‘rapuisset’ – ‘cum rapuisset Iuppiter Europam’ (II, 63) 14 (when he
Here, we can find senses of storm, king and Jove in the response to the realisation of the violation that has taken place. The image of the wandering wind is resonant with the play’s themes of travel and Fortune as well as its weather patterns; the notion that it is commensurate with vice lends a meteorological aspect to the sexual violence. Many critical responses to the play focus on its
’, Criticism , 53.1 (2011), 53–82, which I quote below. 53 The ‘ghost complaint’, in which a female victim of male sexual violence is summoned from the dead to speak, was popularized in the Elizabethan era. The best known example outside of the Lucretia nexus is Samuel
sexual violence of black men towards white women that early modern Europeans loved to fantasise about, a sexual violence that disqualifies the African ambassador from marrying Stéphanie. Third, Fabrice invents the character of the African ambassador to prevent Stéphanie from marrying either Ferdinand (whom she believes to be her father at the beginning of the play) or Lazarille