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Spenser's Daphnaïda, and Chaucer's Book of Tee Duchess

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Extract

No editor of Spenser has failed to remark on certain poems and passages which reflect the influence of Chaucer. Attention has not hitherto been called, however, to what not only seems to be the most marked example of this influence, but to what is also an unusually clear case of literary borrowing. The purpose of this study is to show that in Daphnaïda, Spenser has followed Chaucer's Booh of the Duchess, in general form and outline, in manner of treatment, and in style and subject matter; that he has taken from the Duchess certain stanzas almost entire, has borrowed from it whole sections of eulogistic ideas and elegiac conceits, and has adopted Chaucer's phraseology itself, with a freedom at once both striking and convincing.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1908

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References

page 647 note 1 That Spenser knew Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, can be established on grounds quite independent of Daphnaïda. (Cf. Faerie Queene, i, 1, 39-43.)

page 647 note 2 In Chaucer's case it may be explained as a purely poetic convention. Reasons will later appear for believing that Spenser has followed Chaucer in this, and that his lines, also, have no autobiographical significance.

page 647 note 3 Chaucer, of course, in his dream (see below, p. 648).

page 648 note 1 It is worth while to observe, also, that in both poems, the “man in black” gives to his lady a pseudonym which has a very definite connection with her real name.

page 648 note 2 See below, p. 657.

page 648 note 3 In the Duchess, this plaint comes at the beginning of the narrative. In Daphnaïda, it comes at the end.

page 649 note 1 I find that Skeat has observed the imitation in this line and in line 184 (Cf. Skeat's Chaucer, i, 476 and 494). He notes no further resemblance between the two poems.

page 650 note 1 “So called from the white lion in the arms of the Duke of Norfolk, the head of the family to which Lady Douglas Howard belonged.” Child's Spenser, v, 219, note.

page 651 note 1 The knight relates the early story of his love only after he has told how fortune had robbed him. Alcyon gives his chronologically. Barring this unimportant change in order the two accounts are close parallels.

page 655 note 1 It is true, as Prof. W. A. Neilson has pointed out to me, that Spenser's lines are after the fashion of the conventional paradoxes and contrarieties of the sorrowing lover. Elizabethan literature abounds in such, (cf. Watson's Passionate Centurie of Love, xviii and XL; Borneo and Juliet, i, 1, 168), and their mere presence in Spenser need argue no dependence on Chaucer. There is an additional contextual significance here, however, which clearly does argue such dependence.

page 656 note 1 The idea of these passages is found in I Cor. 15: 31. It is not hard to believe, however, that on this occasion Spenser's Chaucer was probably as near at hand as his Bible.

page 656 note 2 It is true that Alcyon does not here use the word “ fortune.” But the fact that he has already twice before (11. 151, 153), applied the feminine pronoun to the “worlds ficklenesse,” indicates clearly that he has “Dame Fortune” in mind.

page 659 note 1 Professor J. B. Fletcher tells me that he has never met with this name in pastoral literature, and adds, “One may safely call it uncommon.”

page 659 note 2 Spenser so uses it once afterwards (Colin Clout, 1. 384), where he refers to this same Arthur Gorges as “sad Alcyon.”

page 659 note 3 Alcyone occurs but five times in the proem of Skeat's edition. In Thynne's edition of 1532, however (the edition which Spenser most likely used) it occurs six times, appearing also in line 76.

page 660 note 1 Ct. Grosart's Spenser, iv, p. lxivii.

page 660 note 2 June 11, 1594, is the date generally accepted.

page 661 note 1 “In two prominent characteristics, more or less external, Chaucer's influence upon the Calender, is, of course, generally admitted.” Professor Dodge (Spenser, Cambridge edition, p. 4).

“The Mother Hubberds Tale is a satire in the manner of Chaucer.” Professor Child (Spenser, i, p. xxxiv).

page 661 note 2 A poem, too, of which Professor Dodge says, “few of Spenser's poems are more thoroughly characteristic.” Todd and Craik both refer to it as very beautiful, and Palgrave sees in it “ the sustained ideal loftiness of diction and manner” which marks all of Spenser's “maturer poetry.”