ABSTRACT
From the early days of 'source-study' it has been recognized that Spenser's poetry is as full of Ovidian allusion and imitation as of Virgilian, as a glance at the great Variorum edition or at Lotspeich's Classical Mythology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser reveals. The sustained attempt to read such allusive or imitative practices as constitutive of meaning in more recent intertextual approaches, however, confronts critics with a fork in the road. There has been a growing awareness that the Virgilian and Ovidian models represent widely divergent values, poetic purposes and conceptions of the role of the poet and his relation to political power, and that the two tendencies in Spenser's poetry cannot exist peaceably and on an equal footing-that the individualism, eroticism, playful irony and exilic discontent which seep into Spenser's poems through his allusions to Ovid threaten to undermine the public-minded values, imperialist politics and serious poetic stance which he seems to derive from Virgil. In response to this, critics have continually, though in a variety of ways, subordinated the Ovidian to the Virgilian in Spenser's poetry. While the allusions to Virgil have been treated as systematic, part of the overall plan (or posited authorial intention) and system of meaning in the poems, and of his self-presentation across his career, the allusions to Ovid have tended to be treated as merely local, restricted to passing significance, regarded as superficial embroidery or momentary waverings in what remains a dominantly Virgilian narrative. Such Virgilio centric reading of Spenser is influenced by, and in tum reconfirms, the role of spokesman for Elizabethan imperialism in which he was cast early on by the New Historicist movement, whose underlying Foucauldian view of literature as unable to reflect on or diverge from its constitutive ideology has helped to mute those aspects of his poetry which do not conform to the Virgilian imperialist model. I Yet recent readings of Spenser's politics have detected ambivalence towards Elizabeth's imperial monarchy and anxieties about its absolutist tendencies.2 Meanwhile in Ovidian studies there has been a developing sense that the ways in which Ovid diverges from Virgil reflect his resistance to Augustan imperial ideology, and even an anti-Augustan or counterAugustan programme of his own. 3 This book represents an attempt to read as systematic the allusions to and imitation of Ovid across Spenser's career which have previously been kept fragmentary and contained, in a study whose methods and aims are at once historicist and intertextual.4 From this altered perspective the Virgilian elements appear-as do the Virgilian elements in Ovid's own worksometimes as a veil to deflect the censor from an underlying political heterodoxy, sometimes as a citation of the imperial stance from which the work distances itself, and there emerges a profoundly coherent counter-Virgilian system of thought, embracing philosophy, politics and poetics, in which Spenser draws together various aspects of his reading of Ovid into a formidable conception of the role and
The Ovidianism of Spenser's self-presentation and poetic project has lately been acknowledged in two areas in particular, and before I outline my argument I shall say a word about the significance of these recognized Ovidian aspects, how they have been subordinated and controlled in Virgiliocentric readings, and how their implications change and develop when freed from this constraining narrative. The first is Spenser's representation of his life in Ireland as analogous to Ovid's 'exile' or relegation to Tomis. This has been noted by several critics, responding usually to the echoes of Ovid's Tristia in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, yet its implications, and its possible effect on the idea of the Virgil ian Spenser, tend to be shut down prematurely.5 Helgerson's treatment is typical. Having argued at length that Spenser's ambitions throughout his career are fundamentally Virgilian, he represents Spenser's implied comparison of himself to the exiled Ovid as a passive reflection on a set of external circumstances brought about by misfortune late in his career: 'No wonder if Spenser saw himself less as a new Virgil and more as the Ovid of the Tristia, abandoned by his friends for his carmen et error. ,6 So far from being a purposeful act, the adoption of an Ovidian stance is for Helgerson a measure of Spenser's failure to fulfil his Virgilian intentions.
