(H)eroic Disarmament: Spenser’s Unarmed Cupid, Platonized Heroism, and The Faerie Queene’s Poetics

Abstract

In The Faerie Queene’s first proem, which introduces the whole text as well as Book I, Spenser specifically invokes the creative assistance of unarmed Cupid, who also appears in the poem thereafter. Spenserians have much debated whether his disarmament means anything, and whether Platonism has any relevance. Yet previous studies have overlooked formerly well-known literary, iconographical, and hermeneutic precedents that show he thus signifies the heavenly love of virtue or amor virtutis in a Platonizing way. And they have missed the poet’s association of Cupid in this particular aspect with the Ideas. Whereas the most recent biography of Spenser calls his explicitly Christian Platonist Fowre Hymnes “anomalous” in his canon, his representation of unarmed Cupid in The Faerie Queene, we find, anticipates various features of them. As Plato had derived “hero” from “Eros” so that heroism became born of love, and attributed high accomplishments in valor, virtue, and intellect to this amorous inspiration that he especially defines in the Phaedrus and Symposium, so this poet broadly refashions heroic form by making it (h)eroic and relatively unwarlike. The Faerie Queene’s motif of the unarmed Cupid imagistically focuses these principles of Spenser’s poetics, and this study’s findings demonstrate Platonism’s importance, currently underappreciated, to the poet’s representations of love and heroism and to his whole creative enterprise.