Spenser’s Golden Age Memories: Recollecting The Ruines of Time in Prothalamion

This essay explores how Spenser’s late poem Prothalamion both reconstructs and deconstructs Golden Age myths of poetry and politics, through allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti as well as through the intertextual presence of Spenser’s early complaint The Ruines of Time. Although Golden Age memories of a time before a fall into time connect these two poems, Spenser nevertheless reveals Prothalamion to be a retrospective fiction constructed from The Ruines of Time, an intertextuality reflective of Spenser’s career-long poetics of ruin and recollection. As I argue, Spenser’s poetics relate to the art of memory, as dramatized by its origin story: the tale of the poet Simonides, who discovers locational memory by recollecting a ruined edifice. By remembering Prothalamion from The Ruines of Time, Spenser both recollects and reforms the memorial ruins of his own past and poetry, while challenging the myth of the Golden Age associated with Queen Elizabeth and his presumed role as England’s new Virgil.