Reading, Death and the Ethics of Enjoyment in Spenser and Milton

Abstract

Whatever else it might entail, thinking about Spenser, Milton, and death is a literary historical exercise: Literary because these thoughts will deal with verbal forms — genres, tropes, schemes. Historical because changes in literary forms disclose traces of history embedded in the context of the work, and because literary innovation — the disposition of old and new facts into new configurations, both figural and narrative — is itself a historical event. The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost are implicitly joined by commonality of sources and models — most notably The Aeneid, the Gerusulemme Liberata and Tasso’s accompanying discussion of allegory — and by their bardic ambitions. They are explicitly joined by Milton’s explicit refusal ‘to dissect / With long and tedious havoc fabled knights / In battles feigned […]’ (9, 29–31).¹ One literary historical event that transpires between them is a troping of narrative form from allegory in Spenser to what might be called a narrative of historical causation in Milton, and a consequent shift from exemplary to dialectical presentations of character — that is, from characters whose history grows out of what they are, to characters whose history accounts for what they have become.² In even broader terms, I think this shift in narration signals or incorporates a shift from mimetic verisimilitude to expressive authenticity as the governing criterion of poetic truth.