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Sir Walter Raleigh's literary legacy consists of a highly fragmented oeuvre including many unprinted or pirated poems and works of disputed authorship. No collection of Raleigh's poetry produced under his own direction or that of a contemporary, either in print or in manuscript, exists. This book is a collection of essays by scholars from Great Britain, the United States, Canada and Taiwan that covers a wide range of topics about Raleigh's diversified career and achievements. Some essays shed light on less familiar facets such as Raleigh as a father and as he is represented in paintings, statues, and in movies. Others re-examine him as poet, historian, as a controversial figure in Ireland during Elizabeth's reign, and looks at his complex relationship with and patronage of Edmund Spenser. The theme of Raleigh's poem is a mutability that is political: i.e., the precariousness of the ageing courtier's estate, as revealed by his fall from eminence and the loss of his privileged position in court. The Cynthia holograph engages in complex ways with idealistic pastoral, a genre predicated upon the pursuit of otium (a longing for the ideal and an escape from the actual). The Nymph's reply offers a reminder of the power of time and death to ensure the failure of that attempt. There were patrilineal imperatives that might have shaped Raleigh's views of sovereignty. Raleigh's story is an actor's story, one crafted by its own maker for the world-as-stage.
irrational substance from which we ourselves are wrought, a substance whose very irrational energies paradoxically give our lives and actions their necessary definition and purpose? A key part of the answer to this question can be found in the posthumously published fragment with which The Faerie Queene concludes, the ‘Two Cantos of Mutability’, which relocate the metaphysical terrain of the Gardens of
between those secular cravings and his providentially ordained imperatives. The structure of these links is revealed to Redcrosse at the House of Holiness, where he receives a paradoxical lesson in the moral necessity of the mutable body and its secular life. ‘What man is he’, asks Spenser rhetorically as he leads us into this space, ‘that boasts of fleshly might, / And vaine assurance of
, headbands, bonnets, earrings, nose jewels, veils, wimples, and 9 J. B. Lethbridge, “Spenser’s Last Days: Ireland, Career, Mutability, Allegory,” in Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions, ed. J. B. Lethbridge (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson, 2006), 302–36, provides an overview of the debate over the cantos’ relation to the rest of The Faerie Queene. 10 Thomas Drant, Two sermons preached, the one at S. Maries Spital on Tuesday in Easter weeke 1570 and the other at the court at Windsor for the Sonday after twelfth day, … 1569 (London, 1570?), sig. I5v, STC (2nd
iconography but is in fact built into it. This apparent contradiction is accounted for within iconography itself as a methodology, the two aspects of which are stability and mutability. Since a type is only type because of recognisable motifs, certain motifs must be established which have both universal, and particular or historical validity. The universality of the type appears through an accumulation of its particulars, and this is primarily why there is such slippage between the concept of la Parisienne and its associated categories, and her physical embodiment in the
time in processes of forward-seeking and outward-expanding generation. In form, function, and action, her embodied life is construed as a self- and society-constituting act of poesis. As Spenser seeks to render a paradigm of moral action within the order of mutability, that persistent coordination of poetic making, self-fashioning, and imperial expansion within which he pursues that question finds its
of the boundaries between audience and stage was not habitual, the entry by Boulton and Park into the play as male actors, assumed to be women, alongside Duval, a woman employed to play-act a man, highlighted the mutability of the appearance of genders in a context in which mutability itself was usual, expected and monetised. On stage, a large part of Duval's job was to deliver and exploit her audiences’ expectations of the excitement and pleasure gained from witnessing visualisations of female men and masculinised women visualising femininity. That was an expected
bodies within the order of mutability might become instrumentalized as moral agents. It is a vision of the formal transactions between being itself and moral agency most explicitly rendered in the cycles of material becoming which find their iconic myth in the closing vision of Adonis, the ‘father of all forms’. The Gardens of Adonis offer an idiosyncratic and enigmatic rehearsal of the locus amoenus
.3.34–5). During the early modern period, Luther was described approvingly as ‘that sonne of thunder’, and condemned as one who ‘hath stered a mighty storme and tempest in the chirche’. 6 As we have seen, Shakespeare’s attention to the contradictions and mutability of weather interpretation is evident in all of his storm plays, and particularly in Julius Caesar . The relationship
lives because it is contingent and mutable, because it is changing and transforming rather than fading in response to alterations in the material conditions under which we live, which are themselves articulations of a social totality. Fredric Jameson argued that the cultural object, ‘as though for the first time, brings into being that very situation to which it is also at one and the same time, a reaction’ (Jameson, 1981: 82). It is thus socially symbolic, the bearer of the time in which it was made. Narrative, a continuous reaction to information and its