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representation of the lover's dilemma, by contrast with Jonson's account of his "conscious fears"every bit as realistic psychologically as "my mountain belly" is physically.
"Realism," of course, can be a tricky criterion. Although Sidney's rhetoric is more obviously artifical than Jonson's, it is the "feeling skill" of his poem that conveys the power of love as an emotion (for example, in the alliterated and half-rhymed phrase, "while I breathe will bleed," which makes the single wound of love the stuff of life). But one can see why two great moralist-critics of our time, F. R. Leavis and Yvor Winters, championed Jonson's verse for correcting and going beyond the decorativenessboth the frank rhetoricity and the dependence on poetic machineryof Elizabethan verse. "My Picture Left in Scotland" well exemplifies Jonson's combination of "urbane grace,'' "native sinew," and "lively toughness" (Leavis's phrases, which adapt T. S. Eliot's definition of seventeenth-century wit as "a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace"). For Winters, Jonson was the culminating practitioner of an English "plain style," in which verbal skill is not displayed for its own sake, but is devoted to making language convey "an exact correlation between motive and feeling." Winters would connect the effect of truthful acknowledgment of feeling in Jonson's second stanza with the lucid relation of phrase to line of verse, the focused vividness of "fly," and the minimal personification of "tell me."
Jonson's difference from his Elizabethan predecessors strikes us most forcibly when we are reading individual poems. But if we develop our idea of these poets from their works taken as wholes, we shall see that their individual characteristics arise within a common endeavor. Our present notion of what counts as a poem obscures the degree to which Spenser, Sidney, and Jonson shared a single idea of poetryone in which the epic is considered the definitive type of poem and is characterized by moral and political purposes. Spenser is the only one of the three who wrote what we would today call an epic poem. But Sidney made heroic poetry the centerpiece of his
Defence of Poesy
, and he revised his prose romance
Arcadia
to give it epic scope, stylistic dignity, and moral weight. Verse in the
Arcadia
consists solely of love complaints and pastoral eclogues, and these are all that will come under consideration in a modern "history of English poetry." But Sidney had declared in the
Defence
that "it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet" but "the feigning notable images of virtues, vices, and what
 
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else," and that two ancient prose worksXenophon's idealized history
The Education of Cyrus
and Heliodorus's romance
The Aethiopian History
were absolute heroical poem[s]."
So if it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the
New
(i.e., revised)
Arcadia
, we must keep in mind its centrality to Sidney's idea of writing poetry. Jonson's critical statements and works similarly display his commitment to the ideals of heroic poetry. In his early play
Poetaster
, as in
Timber
, his late compendium of "discoveries made upon men and manners," "the incomparable Virgil" is the king of poets. Similarly, even though
Timber
does not treat the epic as uniquely definitive of poetry, its ideology of the heroic statesman and of oratory as the foundation of writing is precisely what gave the epic its cultural authority in the Renaissance.
As for his works, Jonson wrote in none of the genres identified with Virgil, although he did write a short, rambunctious mock-epic, "The Famous Voyage." But the epic endeavor is evident throughout his works. One genre he made distinctly his own, the court masque, is founded on pagan mythologies and an ideology of royal and aristocratic heroism. Although Jonson was the English master of prose comedy, one of the plays he set most store by,
Sejanus
, is a tragedy (the one genre that rivaled epic for moral weight and literary dignity), and two of his greatest comedies,
Volpone
and
The Alchemist
, are in blank verse.
As with Sidney, to understand Jonson the poet we must be aware of writings that do not count as "poetry" in a volume like the present one. Beyond their exemplifying a larger idea of poetry than ours, his works can lay claim to the scope and adequacy to life that is associated with the epic. Just as Henry Fielding, trying to establish the dignity of the novel as a literary type, called it "a comic epic poem in prose," so we can say that Jonson's works, taken as a whole, are a comic epic poem in prose and verse.
Let us then turn to the great epic of Elizabethan England,
The Faerie Queene
, and ask how it defined poetry for its age. Like other Renaissance epics, it is a celebration of the nation and of the reigning monarch, who was literally thought to embody her realm. The poem is dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, who is represented by several figures. One, the Fairy Queen herself, never actually appears, although the knights who embody the virtues celebrated by the poem come from her court and are dedicated to her service. It is as if she represents an ideal
 
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realm, a kind of secularized heavenly courtthe goal of action in this world but above its difficulties and doings. This dimension of her symbolism appears most fully in the story of Prince Arthur, who is said to have fallen in love with her in a dream and who seeks her in vain throughout the worldalong the way serving as the arch-rescuer and associate of the poem's main figures and hence as a formal means of unifying its several books.
In addition to having an offstage presence, Queen Elizabeth is represented by two important figures within the poem. They are the demigoddess Belphebe, whose name suggests (in a commonplace of royal symbolism) the pagan goddess of chastity, and Britomart, whose name (recalling both her nation and the pagan god of war) indicates her role as the warrior maiden, who not only embodies the valor and political-sexual authority of the queen but is also said to be her historical ancestor. Beyond these characters, who are explicitly related to Elizabeth,
The Faerie Queene
is filled with female figures of authority, who rule a wide range of allegorical locales in the earlier books of the poem and various political realms and romance castles in the later books. If
The Faerie Queene
shares with other Renaissance epics the celebration of the poet's monarch, its particular character is largely determined by the fact that Spenser's monarch was a woman.
The rationale of the Renaissance epic was not only political, but also moral and allegorical. Sidney represents the
Aeneid
not as the epic narration of the founding of Rome, but as a series of moral exempla: "Only let Aeneas be worn in the tablet of your memory, how he governeth himself in the ruin of his country; in the preserving his old father, and carrying away his religous ceremonies; in obeying the god's commandment to leave Dido; . . . how in storms, how in sports, how in war, how in peace, how a fugitive, how victorious, . . . lastly, how in his inward self, and how in his outward government." In the explanatory Letter to Sir Walter Ralegh appended to the first edition of
The Faerie Queene
(Books IIII, 1590), Spenser said that "the general end of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." This could obviously include political virtues, to whichif we are to believe what Spenser says in the Lettertwelve concluding books (never written) were to be devoted.
But the books we have, the author says, present "the virtues of a private man," and their titles bear this out. They are, in order, the Books of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy;
 
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only the next to last is an apparent exception. On its moral and allegorical side, Spenser's epic can seem quite removed from matters of royal authority and political control. What his great modern apologist, C. S. Lewis, called the poem's "allegorical cores" concern, in Books IIII, the experience of religious despair and recovery from it (I.ixx); the temptations to the temperate soul of idleness (II.vi), avarice (II.vii), and sensuality (II.xii); the nature of sexuality as a power of nature (III.vi) and as a cause of emotional enslavement (III.xixii). In the second installment of the poem (Books IVVI, published in 1596), the treatment is less allegoricalthat is, it less seeks to represent the fundamental character of the human soul or psyche and the relation of that soul or psyche to the fundamental character of the cosmos itself. (One should add, even in the midst of these necessary simplifications, that
The Faerie Queene
, as opposed to
The Divine Comedy
, does not give a single view of these matters. Rather, Books I, II, and III consciously play out three different "fundamental" views: the Christian account of the errant soul and its salvation, the classical view of reason maintaining the balance among psychological forces, and the partly Neoplatonic, partly Petrarchan, and partly Christian sense of eros as the force that drives human affairs.)
In the last three books of the poem the dominant mode is romance, rather than allegory. In Book IV, which concerns the social virtue of friendship, there is sometimes a quite novelistic feeling, as characters multiply and are often rather mixed in their motives and behavior, less clearly identified than in Books IIII as "good" and "bad." Dwelling within their secular fictional worlds, these latter books come to engage more immediately the real world of their author and audience. Book VI, most explicitly in its famous pastoral episode (cantos ix and x), seems to recoil from the difficult actualities of the court and public affairs, as they emerge at the end of Book V. By the end of
The Faerie Queene
, the ideal of the courtierthat the cultivated individual is also the best public servantis deeply troubled. The poem's final installment, "Two Cantos of Mutabilitie" (a fragment of an apparent seventh book, published posthumously in 1609), takes place in a spot withdrawn from human action and concerns not the world of human affairs but the structure of the cosmos itself.
The differing accounts of
The Faerie Queene
in the preceding paragraphs reflect Renaissance writers' double idea of the epicpolitical and nationalistic, on the one hand, and moral and allegorical, on the
 
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other. They also suggest the difference between mid-century critics and scholars, who reawakened interest in
The Faerie Queene
by accepting and defending its moral and allegorical purposes, and recent interpreters, who view the poem more critically as grounded in the power relations of Elizabethan politics, the unequal relations of men and women in sixteenth-century society, and England's colonial and imperial endeavors in Ireland and the New World. Without seeking to impose a misleading homogeneity, one can say that ideas of mastery and dominance are the common element in these motives and interests. They are clearly at the heart of political ideas and political reality in the sixteenth century, and equally central to imperialist and colonial endeavors. Among Spenser's "private" virtues they are most immediately evident in Temperance, in which the ideal mean between emotional extremes is conceived as reason's active control of the passions. Hence Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, must literally bind some of his foes and must exercise self-control in the presence of temptation; hence, too, the tendency to identify spiritual realms (allegorical castles, islands, territories) with the figures who rule them. Other titular virtues of
The Faerie Queene
are not directly defined by (self-) mastery or "governance." But right relation to a lord or master is central not only to Holiness, where the lord is God himself, but also to Chastity, even though the latter virtue, in Spenser's treatment, goes beyond virginity (represented by Belphebe, the imperious huntress) and centers on the monogamous desire experienced and represented by Britomart. It is not simply that in Book I "all the good is Gods, both power and eke will" (I.x.1) and that Britomart's falling in love is represented as the way
                                   in the gentlest harts
Imperious Loue hath highest set his throne,
And tyrannizeth in the bitter smarts
Of them, that to him buxome are and prone.
                                                        (III.i.23)
Just as importantly, the hero's right relation to these dominant powers is figured as the capacity to defeat foes, control others, or take decisive actionand negatively as imprisonment or inaction through dissipated energies. There is, in other words, a deep sense in which the virtues of
The Faerie Queene
are imagined as heroic. If an allegory represents the consonance of the human soul and the cosmos, a heroic allegory represents the soul as acting in consonance with the cosmos seen in

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