ABSTRACT
The proem to The Brides Ornaments I provides a thin narrative framework for the meditations. The narrator sets up a Protestant pattern of spiritual regeneration based on Spenser’s house of Holiness (Padelford 1936:5). A bevy of allegorical ladies cures and educates the speaker much as Caelia and her daughters tend Redcrosse in FQ I x. They make him spiritually fit to enter the Court of Heavenly Love and redirect his sexual energies in accord with the doctrines expressed in Spenser’s Hymne of Heavenly Love. The narrator ignores Spenser’s Hymne in the first stanzas of the proem, suggesting that ‘Homer, Virgil, Spencer’ never ‘waited on the glorious Court/Of Heavenly Love’; but most of the narrative is more closely related to this hymn than to The Faerie Queene. Aylett’s argument to the Song of Solomon (‘My Muse, that whilome, swaid by lust… Now viewes her vanity’) echoes Spenser’s ‘Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske’ (FQ I proem 1), but it is closer to the retraction of ‘lewd layes’ in Heavenly Love (8-14). Much of what follows in the meditations of The Brides Ornaments is likewise paralleled in Heavenly Love.
