Spenser, Chaucer, and the Renaissance Squire’s Tale

Abstract

This essay develops existing scholarship about Spenser’s reconstruction of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale in Book IV of The Faerie Queene. I suggest, first, a new reason why Renaissance literary historians should study Spenser’s imitation of Chaucer in conjunction with the printed editions that transmitted his poetry to a Tudor audience: they present a prologue for The Squire’s Tale that differs radically from modern texts. The prologue, never before discussed in a Spenserian context, identifies the Squire as a paradoxical combination of deference and assertiveness, framing his tale as the product of an active, metafictional revision; Spenser adapts this posture and poetics as his own. I propose, second, a new reason why Spenserians might consider The Squire’s Tale alongside Anelida and Arcite and The Knight’s Tale: the poems collectively articulate a pattern of Chaucerian self-revision that Spenser appropriates to claim his place in a variously national and international tradition. Mediated by his Renaissance editions, following his own feet, Chaucer provides Spenser with poems to rewrite but also with a guide to accomplish his rewriting; Chaucer is the target of Spenser’s revision as well as the model for how to do it.