Spenser’s Hovercraft

Abstract

Spenser’s hovercraft is a distinctive cluster of formal effects that suspend on any number of thresholds both the moment of reading and the scene being read. In the Amoretti these effects allow Spenser to finesse the impasses bequeathed to Elizabethan love poetry by Petrarch. In this essay I start by showing how the opening sonnet offers a preview of the courtship plot in which these impasses appear. The first stage of this plot abjects the poet-lover, reflexively installing the lady as a triumphal dominatrix; the second stage withdraws the speaker into his own heart while idealizing the lady, who is thereby rendered inaccessible; stage three hails the lady as angelic while tacitly acknowledging the poet’s role in creating her as an idol to be worshipped. These stages, introduced in the corresponding stanzas of Amoretti 1, give way in the sequence to a new dynamic in which the poet addresses not his poems but the lady herself, who can then respond. When the speaker accepts her as his “maker,” they begin the reciprocal process of fashioning themselves as a couple. Crucial to this process is the speaker’s successful effort to defuse both the sharp edge of his sexual desire and the panic such “lust” triggers in him. It will be Spenser’s delicately nuanced hovercraft, present from the first sonnet on, that emerges late in the sequence as a poetic technique for managing these threats to the courtship, enabling its resolution, although not its consummation, in Amoretti 67. This fine-tuned art of suspension then becomes the basis of the visionary union of the lovers in Epithalamion, as well as, later, of the poet’s quiet resignation in the mourning undercurrents of Prothalamion.