A study of the musical references in Spenser's The Faerie Queene

Much of the musical quality and meaning of Edmund Spenser's poetry is directly related to the state of poetry and music in England during the late sixteenth century. At the same time that the great Elizabethan efflorescence of literature was occurring, music in England was also attaining its greatest magnificence. The diffusion of musical knowledge throughout England received encouragement from the schools established for the education of the rising middle class, where Spenser received a rather thorough musical training under the direction of Richard Mulcaster. Poetry and music remained closely allied in Elizabethan England. As a mature poet, Spenser demonstrated a concern for the union of English poetry and music, especially through his interest in the musical humanism of the French Pleiade and its outgrowth, the Academie de Poe's et de Musique. Similarly, English literary critics, several of them associated with Spenser, frequently expressed their ideas in musical terms, applying them metaphorically to literature. Spenser also adopted this metaphorical application of musical expressions in The Faerie Queene, where his musical terminology reveals extensive knowledge of the musical thought of late sixteenth-century England. Because he considered The Faerie Queene a patriotic poem, Spenser united many of his musical references in the poem to ideas of order, which he conveys musically in terms of "harmony."English, Department o