Ewan Fernie is the editor of our new
book Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today's World – a new form of liturgy based on Spenser's epic poem The
Faerie Queen. In the following extract from the Introduction to the book, Ewan talks about how powerful The Faerie Queen is today, and how Spenser's early modern story can still speak to us if read with imaginative intensity and engagement.
'Spenser was born around 1552, his life contemporaneous with what has been called the Elizabethan settlement. Indeed, he dedicated The Faerie Queene to Elizabeth: ‘To the most high, mightie and magnificent empresse renovvmed for pietie, vertve and all gratiovs government Elizabeth by the grace of God Qveene of England Fravnce and Ireland and of Virginia, Defendovr of the Faith.’ Et cetra, et cetra: the Queen paid him a pension, and some centuries later Karl Marx called him her ‘arse-licking poet’. We might more positively see Spenser as the epic poet of Anglicanism. And if the Church of England is now all too often associated with fetes, conventional weddings and backward sexual politics, under Elizabeth the First it was a new church militant, hard-won and sometimes bloodily maintained. Everything was at stake. Church and state were united in the supremacy of the monarch. Spenser, for his part, believed that under Elizabeth a new form of poetry could be attempted which aimed at nothing less than forging a new mode of human existence. He expressly wrote The Faerie Queene to fashion a new man.
His own life was fomented in violence. Its salient and (at least in recent years) most notorious feature was his involvement in a brutal chapter of English colonialism. He arrived in Dublin in 1580, in the wake of the suppressed Desmond rebellion. Ninety per cent of the male inhabitants of Munster had died and the survivors, Spenser observed, looked like ‘anatomies of death’. And yet, in A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser actually recommended starvation as a way of bringing them to heel more permanently. Nor is his poetry any refuge from such shocking violence. In 1586, Spenser acquired the manor of Kilcoman, former seat of the Desmonds. But by 1598 his Irish enemies had burnt him out and, according to Ben Jonson, he lost an infant son in the blaze. Spenser returned, destitute, to England in 1599. He is buried in Westminster Abbey and his fellow poets paid tributes at his grave.
But if death thereby installed Spenser in England’s Parnassus, his star has somewhat waned in recent years. The Faerie Queene is typically seen as too big, incoherent and remote to be read or taught effectively, and Spenser’s establishment affiliations and Irish record have been major turn-offs. He’s an epitome of vanishing English literature, of literature which is going from courses and becoming a more or less exclusively antiquarian interest.
Yes this poem is still so relevant. Spenser invented his own stanza: it has nine iambic lines which rhyme ababbcbcc, the first eight being pentameters while the final, ninth line is a hexameter. It is intricate and capable of elaborate emblematic effects, which are often exquisitely beautiful but equally extend to impressively ugly moments. And yet, the Spenserian stanza also moves with limpid fluency and authority, partly as it tips from a and b to c and spills into its long last line, which also marks a break and pause before the next stanza. In other words, Spenser’s stanza fuses lyric intensity with mesmerising story-telling momentum. It seems to be discovering its own story as it goes along. For all their seriousness and ambition, Spenser’s lines are at the same time poetry disporting in and as itself. And that makes for an exciting indeterminacy. You’re never really sure what the new life and self Spenser is aiming at is actually going to be like. The Faerie Queene is a truly and profoundly experimental poem. In the end, it does seem to reveal some kind of potential for poetry to remake life.
So this superannuated English poet actually presents the present with a tremendous and exciting aesthetic, ethical, political and religious challenge. And since we wanted to create a challenging rather than a conservative and self-securing liturgy, a questing liturgy, Spenser was a perfect fit.
Allegory has been a particular problem for Spenser in the recent, wilderness years, when, in his own country, his poetry has slipped into all but terminal obscurity – Salley Vickers and Sarah Apetrei testify in this book as to how difficult they found it actually to buy a copy of The Faerie Queene – but even allegory didn’t phase us. We moderns tend to think ourselves too sophisticated for allegory. It’s at the same time too fanciful and too earnest and judgmental, too cut and dried. But Spenser expressly calls his allegory a ‘dark conceit’, a thing shaded in mystery and perhaps irony which veils as much as it reveals. The modern British poet Elizabeth Jennings describes the expressive potential of just such allegorical mysteriousness in ‘The Counterpart’: ‘The intellect no crystal is but swarming/Darkness on darkness’.10 If a formal image, far from being too clear and neat, keeps best faith with such darkness, because it is not excessively realised and so remains permeable to fundamental obscurity and mystery, then there may yet be life – even a life that we neglect to our own impoverishment and peril – in the knight with the symbol on his shield. Allegory, in the end, seemed promising to us because it communicates with mystery; and, given our liturgical purposes, because it is abstract enough to be co-owned by a large group of people – by anybody and everybody willing to go on a quest. Especially because such abstraction in The Faerie Queene is richly communicative with life as we know it. For Spenser’s legend of The Redcrosse Knight is not an escapist fairy tale; it really gets into the vein of things: into sexuality, extending to erotic dreams, infidelity, even the threat of gang rape; into depression (which Spenser calls despair), going so far as an extended representation of suicide, which it later provocatively relates to the temptations of transcendence. So The Faerie Queene seemed to us to offer exciting potential for retelling the story of St George, now, for today’s world. Much of this is to do with ambiguity, but much of it is also due to the mysteriousness of allegory married with a kind of ordinariness.
Allegory in Spenser operates in a flickering, intermittent, multifarious fashion of what is always ultimately a dark conceit, one which is elegantly resonant with and expressive of just such an unsecured and experimental – now anguished, now joyously creative – spirituality as ours might be in our own doubtful, globalised and diverse present.
Spenser’s Redcrosse is pellucidly etched as the Redcrosse Knight or Holiness. But he is a Christian, hopefully fighting his own demons; he is equally an insufficiently mortified man under the sign of the cross which may be morbidly scored into his very breast; a sinner whose every breath and deed stains him further with sin. He is also a gallant knight in the service of the Faerie Queene; and he is the (renegade) lover of the semi-divine Una and the (renegade) lover of the very profane Duessa. And he is St George! an avatar of specifically English saintliness; and he is a crusader. And even the returned Christ who defeats Satan and regains paradise. He is various as any human person in short, and the various things he is arise from the number of different quests he is embarked on. And these are but aspects of or turns within the ONE quest which is the deeper, hungry thing that drives him. Because sometimes he is looking for a woman. But for love or for sex? The sacred Una or the profane Duessa? And then, suddenly, all the life force just drains out of him or turns against itself. Is it that, in his restlessness, he was really always just looking for death? Or then again is death just the necessary door to transcendence, with the New Jerusalem gleaming in its aperture? Or is it finally some more wordly, some specifically English apotheosis that Redcrosse is after? We find out as we go and the answers are contradictory and unexpected and, as a result, engaging to the extent that the experience of the quest may provoke us into our own analogous, necessarily treacherous search for meaning and value.
What I have been trying to do in the introduction to this book is convey something of the richly ambiguous material Spenser contributed to our project of creating a new poetic liturgy for St George’s Day, and how powerfully his early modern story can still speak to us, if we read it with sufficient imaginative intensity and engagement. Spenser’s poem reconceives the meaning and purpose of the red cross and St George in a questing narrative where a repentant Redcrosse only realises, and in a sense becomes, England’s patron saint, after a whole series of errors and failures of a notably unheroic character.'
- by Ewan Fernie, editor of Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today's World.
On the evening of Saturday the 17th of November the RSC will be performing Redcrosse at Coventry Cathedral - the new poetic liturgy talked about above which Ewan Fernie (Shakespeare Institute) wrote with the major poets Jo Shapcott, Michael Symmons Roberts and Andrew Motion, and the theologian Andrew Shanks, as part of a multi-grant-winning Religion and Society project. You can find out more here or visit the website to buy tickets here. We will also be launching the book after this performance and you are invited! Click on the image below to view the invitation.
Aw, this was an incredibly nice post. Taking the time and actual effort to make a great article… but what can I say… I put things off a lot and never manage to get anything done.
Posted by: genfx | 11/09/2013 at 08:43 AM