Spenser’s sources

Edmund Spenser’s style in the Fairie Queene was odd even when he first wrote it, and Spenser scholars have long argued the whys and wherefores. David Scott Wilson-Okamura argues that, unique as it was, Spenser’s style has sources both in contemporary poetry and antiquity.

According to the TLS reviewer of Spenser’s International Style, “For Wilson-Okamura, many of the reasons for Spenser’s apparent idiosyncrasies can be found in his immersion in European literature, and particularly in epics such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Gabriel Harvey, after all, referred to Spenser as ‘my young Italianate Signor and French Monsieur.’ Spenser’s style may be highly personal, but it is also, crucially, a ‘period style,’ with connections to the works of other writers who were struggling with the same task of reconstructing epic in the vernacular.” 

Wilson-Okamura also points to the influence of the Aeneid: “Noting that late Roman, medieval and early modern critics often viewed the Aeneid as a compendium of Homeric styles – the first six books broadly comic in formal terms, like the Odyssey; the following six tragic, like the Iliad – he argues that Spenser aimed to follow a similar pattern.”

This suggests to Wilson-Okamura where Spenser might have gone if he had lived to complete his poem: “Were Spenser to complete more books,” he writes, “there would, of course, be new episodes, but also, we suspect, a new style; and that style would be modeled on tragedy.”