1. For a useful early 21st-century discussion of terminology, see David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 8. For the persistence of Burckhardtian vocabulary, see, for example, Gordon Teskey, Spenserian Moments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 46, 152, 342.
2. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980).
3. See further Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, 85–87.
4. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans. Henry Rushton Fairclough, rev. George P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 262–263; Pierre de Ronsard, Les quatre premiers liure de la Franciade (Paris: Gabriel Buon, 1572), A1v.
5. Ronsard lived between 1524 and 1585; Bruegel was born in about 1525 and died in 1569.
6. Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 277. See further Christina Currie and Dominique Allart, The Brueg[H]el Phenomenon: Paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Pieter Brueghel the Younger with a Special Focus on Technique and Copying Practice, 3 vols. (Brussels: Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, 2012).
7. See, for example, Theresa M. Krier, ed., Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998); Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, eds., Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, and Gareth Griffith, eds., Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019); and Megan L. Cook, The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
8. Frederick Garber, “Form,” in The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and Terry V. F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 420.
9. See “form, n.,” in OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Definition 9 is particularly relevant to this discussion, though the examples given in what follows more freely range through both the noun and verbal uses of the word.
10. See Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), for a related approach to key words in time.
11. Giovanni Paulo Lomazzo, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Caruinge Building, trans. Richard Haydock (Oxford: Richard Haydock, 1598), B1r. Haydocke reproduces Lomazzo’s term “la forma” precisely; see Giovanni Paulo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte della pittvra, scoltvra, et architettvra (Milan: Paulo Gottardo Pontio, 1584), B2r.
12. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 115.
13. Anne Dowriche, The French Historie (London: Thomas Orwin, 1589), A2r.
14. Robin Robbins titles this poem as “To Mr Beaupré Bell,” and prints the text given as one poem in 1633 as two separate sonnets in John Donne, The Complete Poems, ed. Robin Robbins (London: Longman, 2010), 45–49.
15. John Donne, Poems (London: John Marriott, 1633), O2r–v.
16. Sir Philip Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Katharine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 78.
17. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, rev. 2nd ed., ed. Albert C. Hamilton with Hiroshi Yamash*ta and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlow: Pearson, 2007), III.vi.37.
18. Thomas Campion, The Works, ed. Walter R. Davis (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 291.
19. See William Shakespeare, All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, ed. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 196, for a conjectural dating of this sonnet to 1598–1600.
20. William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 551.
21. See Alexander’s commentary in William Scott, The Model of Poesy, ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 95–96; see further Alexander’s introduction, l–li, for Scott’s debt to Lomazzo. In the broader context of Lomazzo’s treatise and Renaissance thinking about the visual arts, it should be noted that the root of the word in aspects of the visible appearance or aspect of a thing is relevant; see again “form, n.,” OED Online.
22. Lomazzo, A tracte, B1v.
23. See also Dowriche’s later comment, which is slightly more forceful in the assertion of the virtues of her work: “To speake truelie without vaine glorie, I thinke assuredlie, that there is not in this forme anie thing extant which is more forceable to procure comfort to the afflicted, strength to the weake, courage to the faint hearted, and patience vnto them that are persecuted, than this little worke, if it be diligentlie read and well considered” (Dowriche, The French Historie, A4r).
24. For Donne’s debt to Aristotelian biology, see Robbins’s note in Donne, The Complete Poems, 48.
25. Garber, “Form,” 420.
26. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten’s note on this passage, in Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, 189–190, stresses Sidney’s fusion of Aristotelian with Christian-Platonist traditions.
27. Richard T. Neuse, “Adonis, Gardens of,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 8–9, at 9. See again “form, n.,” OED Online. Definitions I 1.a and 4.a are paraphrased here.
28. For Spenser’s vocabulary, see Richard Danson Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 20–47. The particular challenges of the Gardens are well stated by Thomas P. Roche (writing about an earlier stanza): “The problem here is not of poetic ineptitude, but of a modern failure to hold several possible meanings or referents in mind at the same time,” in The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 121.
29. See Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 219–227 and passim.
30. Compare the glosses of Colin Burrow in Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 550; Katherine Duncan-Jones in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 280; and John Kerrigan in The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (Harmondsworth, UK: Viking, 1986), 280. All three editors worry about the implication of the pen and its possible allusions to contemporary calligraphy, but only Burrow highlights the implication that “style and substance have collapsed together in the uniform glossiness in the work of the rival poet.”
31. The quarto text of this line reads “In polisht forme of well refined pen.” See William Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets (London: T[homas] T[horpe], 1609), F2v.
32. Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, 98.
33. Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (Arden Shakespeare. Thomson: London, 2006), 262.
34. On which, see, for example, Alexander in Scott, The Model of Poesy, xlv–xlvi.
35. Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 598.
36. John Thompson, The Founding of English Metre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); originally published 1966. See also George T. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 18. See further Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 49–56.
37. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 149–159.
38. Jeff Dolven, “Spenser’s Metrics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 389.
39. Though see my caveats to this model in Richard Danson Brown, “Caring to Turn Back: Overhearing Spenser in Donne,” in Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets, ed. Yulia Ryzhik (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 13–31.
40. Emphasis added.
41. See Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 74–82, for analysis with comparative examples. See also Carlo M. Bajetta, “Ralegh’s Early Poetry in its Metrical Context,” Studies in Philology 93, no. 4 (1996): 390–411, for a contextual reading of the line in terms of the practice of Inns of Court alumni. The preference for a caesura after the fourth syllable is highlighted by George Gascoigne’s influential Certayne Notes of Instruction (1575), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols., ed. George Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 2:54.
42. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 45. Compare also Spenser’s “Doth it consume, and into nothing goe.”
43. See Thompson, The Founding of English Metre, 156, who sees Sidney as bringing “the full resources of speech” to English poetry, though see 165 for caveats about the differences between speech and metrical pattern.
44. See Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables, 188–192, for the debates between Spenser and Harvey.
45. Miroslav Holub, The Dimension of the Present Moment and Other Essays, trans. David Young (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 1–6. As an experiment, I timed myself reading these three lines a few times, producing a range from 2.96 to 4.46 seconds.
46. See Martin Duffell, ANew History of English Metre (Abingdon, UK: MHRA, 2006), 99–104, and, further, John Lydgate, Troy Book: Selections, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo, MI: TEAMs, 1998), 13. Duffell sees Lydgate as practicing a series of metrical omissions and insertions, which means that his verse is regular for roughly 80 percent of the time (103); like Hoccleve and other 15th-century writers, his understanding of metrics is as much based on French decasyllabics as the English iambic pentameter pioneered by Chaucer and Gower; see further Duffell, ANew History of English Metre, 73–92.
47. John Lydgate, The hystorye, sege and dystruccyon of Troye (London: Richard Pynson, 1513), R6v.
48. For examples with commentary see Derek Brewer, ed., Chaucer: The Critical Heritage. Vol. 1, 1385–1837 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 20–21, 76, 88, 110, 127–128, 164–165.
49. See, for example, C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 240, which prefers Lydgate’s poems in stanzas to those in couplets: “the couplet offers no obstacle to his fatal garrulity.” Work originally published 1936.
50. Lydgate, The hystorye, R6v. The demand for Troy Book is shown by the new edition printed by Thomas Marshe in 1555.
51. Stephen Hawes, The Pastime of Pleasure, ed. William E. Mead (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 56.
52. Stephen Hawes, The Minor Poems, ed. Florence W. Gluck and Alice B. Morgan (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), xxiii. See, further, Clive S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), 128, who presents Hawes as “completely medieval,” exhibiting “broken-backed metre” and a hint of some “grasping really good things beyond his reach,” the same view Lewis had earlier expressed in The Allegory of Love, 179.
53. Hawes, The Minor Poems, xxiii.
54. Hawes, The Minor Poems, 10.
55. See William E. Mead’s still useful remarks on Hawes’s stress patterning in Hawes, The Pastime of Pleasure, xcvii–xcviii, particularly on the free shifting of accent for metrical convenience.
56. Eustace M. W. Tillyard, ed., The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Selection and a Study (London: Scolartis, 1929), 17–18.
57. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, V.vii.3.
58. Some of Hawes’s work does show a more sophisticated technician at work: see The Conuercyon of Swerers, ll.113–156, an adaptation of traditional tail rhyme, which employs a pattern of incremental syllabic addition as it animates a postcard emblem of the crucified Christ, pleading with readers to give up swearing. See Hawes, The Minor Poems, xxvi–xxvii, 76–77, and, further, P. J. Frankis, “The Syllabic Value of Final ‘-es’ in English Versification about 1500,” Notes & Queries 212 (1967): 11–12.
59. See Anthony S. G. Edwards, Stephen Hawes (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 26–30, for the sources of The Pastime of Pleasure.
60. Hawes, The Pastime of Pleasure, 56; ll.1366–1372. I have preferred the reading “synne” (from the 1509 and 1555 editions) in l.1369 over “syme” given by Mead.
61. For overviews, see Manfred Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and April McMahon, “Restructuring Renaissance English,” in The Oxford History of English: Updated Edition, ed. Lynda Mugglestone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 180–218.
62. See Dolven, “Spenser’s Metrics,” 386–387, and Paul J. Hecht, “Spenser Out of His Stanza,” Style 39, no. 3 (2005): 316–335.
63. See Edwards, Stephen Hawes, 82, and Gluck and Morgan’s note on Hawes’s The Comforte of Louers, ll.890–896, which include the enigmatic phrase “I suffred well the phyppe”; Hawes, The Minor Poems, 160–162.
64. Historians of meter tend to downplay Skelton’s significance: see Thompson, The Founding of English Metre, 37–38; Susanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1984), 70, 96n4; Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 29–30; O. B. Hardison, Jr., Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 155, 156, 172; and further Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 60–63, for an overview. For Skelton and oral performance, see Elaine Spina, “Skeltonic Meter in Elynour Rummyng,” Studies in Philology 64, no. 5 (1967): 665–684. For Skelton as a figure in Elizabethan jest books, see Andrew Hadfield, “Spenser and Jokes: The 2010 Kathleen Williams Lecture,” Spenser Studies 25 (2010): 1–19.
65. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 138.
66. John Skelton, The Complete Poems, ed. John Scattergood (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983), 91–92; ll.804–818.
67. Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 173.
68. See Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 136: “A form whose only constant attribute is rhyme ought to be intolerable: it is indeed the form used by every clown scribbling on the wall in an inn yard.”
69. See Robert Starr Kinsman, “Skelton, John,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton et al., 660–661, for Spenser and Skelton; for “A Skeltoniad,” see Michael Drayton, Poems (London: John Smethwicke, 1619), 301–302.
70. See Thompson, The Founding of English Metre, 15–36; Woods, Natural Emphasis, 19–135; and Wright Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 20–37.
71. For Stanyhurst, see Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables, 165–172, and Joseph Loewenstein, “Tudor Verse Form: Rudeness, Artifice, and Display,” in A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Oxford: Blackwell, 2018), 174–176.
72. Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:49–50.
73. Hawes, The Pastime of Pleasure, 26, 35; ll.552–553, 764–766.
74. Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:51.
75. Poulter’s is an alexandrine of six stresses followed by a fourteener, and was widely used in Tottel’s Miscellany; see Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul, eds., Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (London: Penguin, 2011), 538. For a comic story of the origins of the term, see Gascoigne in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:56.
76. See Lucy Munro, Archaic Style in English Literature 1590–1674 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 218–222, for commentary.
77. Barnabe Googe, Eglogs Epytaphes, and Sonettes (London: Raffe Newbery, 1563), A4v–A5r.
78. Googe, Eglogs epytaphes, and sonettes, A6r.
79. See Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 70–74.
80. See Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance: An Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 62–63, who reprints the poem in short lines, numbered as such.
81. Phaer’s Aeneid was first published in 1558, going through a further eight editions. Golding’s Metamorphoses first appeared in 1565 (four books), before a complete edition in 1567. Chapman used the fourteener for the Iliad (first version 1598) before electing the iambic pentameter couplet for the Odyssey (1614). On translations of the Psalms, see Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008).
82. John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” l.8, in The Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), 61.
83. Danielle Clarke, ed., Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (London: Penguin, 2000), 26.
84. Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye (London: R. Jones, 1573), E7r.
85. Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme. For Dickinson’s quatrain innovations, see Helen Vendler, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
86. See, further, Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 74–79, on Thomas Churchyard’s Mirror for Magistrates poem on Wolsey.
87. Virgil, The Fourth Boke of Virgill, trans. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (London: William Awen, 1554), title page.
88. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 270.
89. Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:54.
90. George Gascoigne, The Steele Glas (London: Richard Smith, 1576), C1r.
91. Gascoigne, The Steele Glas, D2r.
92. See Certayne Notes of Instruction (1575), in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1:51, for Gascoigne’s nationalistic preference for monosyllables over polysyllables on the grounds that the former are “the most auncient English wordes.”
93. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great (London: Richard Ihones, 1590), L2v.
94. Emphases added.
95. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 269.
96. For useful overviews that take in broader intellectual background, see Alexander’s introduction to Scott, The Model of Poesy, xxviii–lxxii, and Hernández-Santano’s introduction to Webbe (2013), 1–48.
97. Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, 112. See David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 60–61, for Virgil’s use archaism as legitimating Spenser’s practice. For Chaucer as a mobile influence, not just a father figure, see Cook, The Poet and the Antiquaries, 9–16.
98. Thus the Letter to Ralegh, first printed in the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene, was omitted from both the 1596 and 1609 editions. For commentary with further bibliography, see Teskey, Spenserian Moments, 213–227.
99. See Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 61–128, and William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
100. See Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Boatman’s Call (Mute Records, 1997, 2011), for the song “Green Eyes.” Cave plays sexualized games with Labé’s text. After the first line of translation (“Kiss me again, re-kiss me, and kiss me”), the speaker lurches into a quasi-p*rnographic register: “This useless old f*cker with his twinkling c*nt/Doesn’t care if he gets hurt,” at once querying his masculine agency and attempting to rebrand the original poem as a text of male need and abjection.
101. Catullus, The Poems: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Peter Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 50–51.
102. Louise Labé, The Complete Poetry and Prose: A Bilingual Edition, ed. Deborah Lesko Baker (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 206.
103. Compare Annie Finch’s version in Labé, The Complete Poetry and Prose, 207: “Kiss me again, rekiss me, and then kiss/me again.” Though a fine version, Finch’s syntax is unLabéan throughout.
104. See Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style, 170–171. For the relationships between French and Italian meters and their influence on Chaucer, see Duffell, A New History of English Metre, 86–87.
105. A literal translation of “Jouissons nous l’un de l’autre à notre aise” would be “Enjoying ourselves, the one with the other, at our ease.” Note the syncopation of consecutive vowels toward the end of the line: the last syllable of “autre” and “à” are counted as one syllable. For further commentary on the poem in relation to Petrarchism, see Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance, 117–118.
106. See Holton and MacFaul, eds., Tottel’s Miscellany, 15–18. Tottel also includes Surrey sonnets written to more restrictive patterns, such as “The soote season, that bud and blome forth brings” (rhyming Ababababababaa), and “The fansy, which I have served too long” (rhyming Ababababacaccc); see Holton and MacFaul, eds., Tottel’s Miscellany, 7, 50, and notes.
107. Don Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary (London: Faber & Faber, 2010), is impatient throughout of Shakespeare’s couplets, often seeing them as verbiage; see e.g. 489.
108. The Ababbcbccdcdee form originates in Scottish practice, with several examples in the Bannatyne manuscript, and the practice of Alexander Montgomerie, James VI, and others. See R. D. S. Jack, “Scottish Antecedents,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton et al., 633–634.
109. Amoretti LXIIII, in Spenser, 1989, 638–39.
110. See Germaine Warkentin, “Sonnet, Sonnet Sequence,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton et al., 662–665 (664).
111. See also poems like Amoretti I, XV, XVIII, XXVI.
112. Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance, 37.
113. See Patrick Collinson, “Locke [née Vaughan; Other Married Names Dering, Prowse], Anne (c. 1530–1590x1607), Translator and Religious Activist,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
114. This sonnet repeats the a-rhyme in the third quatrain, as Locke echoes her starting point: “But render me my wonted ioyes againe”; “Restore my ioyes, and make me fele againe” (emphases added). In general, however, the English scheme predominates.
115. Anne Locke in John Calvin, Sermons of Iohn Caluin, vpon the songe that Ezechias made after he had bene sicke and afflicted by the hand of God, conteyned in the 38. chapiter of Esay (London: John Day, 1560), A6v.
116. Kimberly Anne Coles, Religion, Reform and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 114–115; and further, Femke Molekamp, “Female Piety and Religious Poetry,” in A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Bates, 438–439.
117. George Herbert, The English Poems, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 587.
118. Locke in John Calvin, Sermons of Iohn Caluin, A7r.
119. For Piers Plowman in the 16th century, see Judith A. Anderson, The Growth of a Personal Voice: Piers Plowman and The Faerie Queene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). For imitations of The Faerie Queene, see Paul J. Klemp, “Imitations and Adaptations, Renaissance (1579–1660),” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton et al., 395–396, and Richard C. Frushell, “Imitations and Adaptations, 1660–1800,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. Hamilton et al., 396–403.
120. Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style, 18–49.
121. For the origins and use of the stanza, see Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 103–191; and Teskey, Spenserian Moments, 265–342. For Spenser’s ambitions, see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 97–98; and Jean R. Brink, The Early Spenser, 1554–80: “Minde on honour fixed” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 128–129.
122. See Teskey, Spenserian Moments, 294, for a widely cited if problematic warning against close reading. I use one of Teskey’s key terms, “entanglements,” in what follows—a brilliant metaphor for the formal work done by the stanza. During the spring of 2021 (at the period this article was being written), the International Spenser Society led a monthly series of online seminars called “Spenser at Random” where a group of Spenserians would read a single stanza chosen at random for an hour. These sessions repeatedly posed the hermeneutic problem of relationship: how the single stanza is almost inevitably hinged to, and dependent on, its neighbors and fellow stanzas throughout the poem for issues of tone and meaning. Nevertheless, The Faerie Queene lends itself well to random reading precisely because it is a large whole composed of outwardly similar parts.
123. See Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 183–184.
124. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, VI.iii.49–50.
125. See Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: Books Six and Seven, ed. James G. McManaway, Dorothy E. Mason, and Brents Stirling (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938), 201, for Collier’s comments on the pronoun confusion.
126. Osgood in Spenser, The Faerie Queene Books Six and Seven, 201.
127. Emphasis added.
128. For commentary on interstanzaic devices, see Richard Danson Brown, “‘Charmed with Inchaunted Rimes’: An Introduction to The Faerie Queene Rhymes Concordance,” in A Concordance to the Rhymes of The Faerie Queene with Two Studies of Spenser’s Rhymes, ed. Richard Danson Brown and Julian B. Lethbridge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 60–63.
129. See Brown, “‘Charmed with Inchaunted Rimes,’” 38–42, and Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style, 173–176.
130. Emphases added.
131. Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 219; Theresa Krier, “Time Lords: Rhythm and Interval in Spenser’s Stanzaic Narrative,” Spenser Studies 21 (2007): 1–19, esp. 5.
132. See Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 150–177, for a detailed account of literary genetics of the Spenserian.
133. See Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 141–150.
134. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Hogarth, 1984), 33–34, originally published in 1930, remains the classic account of the syntactic movement of the Spenserian, focusing on the work done by the fifth line in particular.
135. See Sean Henry, “Getting Spenser’s Goat: Calepine, Spenser’s Goats, and the Problem of Meaning,” Spenser Studies 30 (2015): 301–316.
136. See Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene, 184–188, 274–278. See further Judith Anderson, “What Comes After Chaucer’s But in The Faerie Queene,” in Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 42–53.
137. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, IV.xii.1.
138. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 157.
139. Anne Lake Prescott, “Menippean Donne,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shani, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 160–163, notes that both poems are unfinished. See further Brown, “Caring to Turn Back,” 16–19.
140. W. Milgate, “A Difficult Allusion in Donne and Spenser,” Notes & Queries 13, no. 1 (1966): 12–14.
141. Donne, Poems, D2v.
142. See Donne, The Complete Poems, 452.
143. See Brown, “Caring to Turn Back,” 18.
144. Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 593.
145. David Scott Wilson-Okamura, “The Formalist Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. McCabe, 718.
146. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 2005), 4.
147. See Munro, Archaic Style.
