"Strange Characters": Inscription and Lyric in Books 3 and 4 of The Faerie Queene

Abstract

Abstract:This essay considers the intriguing prominence of inscriptions on surfaces such as metal, wood, stone, and flesh in books 3 and 4 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. It argues that in their formal organization, rhetorical configurations, and classical genealogies, these inscriptions replicate the principal characteristics of lyric poetry. In foregrounding the conjunction of language and matter, these lyric inscriptions offer a mechanism of thinking through the nature of poetic creation out of available linguistic resources. As a result, lyric emerges as the foundational form of poetry whose affordances are indispensable to Spenser's epic undertaking.