ABSTRACT
A characteristic theme of literature and the main theme of Spenser’s poetry. While fiction need not be about time and change, it must draw plot and character against a background of advancing time and changeable settings. Sixteenth-century Petrarchan lyrics place the natural world and human relations in similar relief, not as a line of action or character development, but as hypostatized images of a continuing process of growth and decay. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, Time personifies a preoccupation with mortality: it is the destroyer of beauty and the limiter of eternal values. Spenser’s, by contrast, has no such personality. It is an interval, ‘an almost mathematical statement of the Katabolic/metabolic process, to be concluded at a time, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump. Nature and her works and rhythms are straitened to an almanac in the Calendar; the Amoretti celebrates a year of love; and the Epithalamion twenty-four hours of marriage’ (MacLure 1966:556). The legendary aspect of The Faerie Queene adverts to a time which cannot be measured against chronicles of historical events or fame, and the drama of human process in the work is heightened by fabulous characters and incidents in such emblematic settings as the Wandering Wood of Book I and Phaedria’s floating island of Book II. The Red Cross Knight and Guyon must pass through a protean world and remain uncorrupted though altered by it.
