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34 Spenser and French Literature
Get accessAnne Lake Prescott is Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of English Emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University. A former president of the Sixteenth Century Society and of the Spenser Society, she is the incoming president of the John Donne Society. The author of French Poets and the English Renaissance (Yale University Press, 1978) and Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (Yale University Press, 1998), she is editing (with Andrew Hadfield) the new Norton Critical Edition of Spenser. She and Betty Travitsky co-edited an Ashgate series of texts by early modern Englishwomen. Two recent essays won prizes: ‘ “Formes of Joy and Art”: Donne, David, and the Power of Music’ (John Donne Journal, 2006) and ‘Mary Sidney's Ruins of Rome’ (Sidney Journal, 2006). Her most recent essays include two on Thomas More and one on the English Sidneys and the French Chéron siblings as interpreters of the psalms (in Psalms in the Early Modern World, ed. Linda Austern et al., Ashgate, 2011). Forthcoming essays include two on Saul in the Renaissance and another on David and upward mobility for Renaissance Quarterly, as well as work on Ronsard, jest books (for the Oxford Guide to Tudor Prose), Du Bellay and Shakespeare's sonnets, and early modern polemics’ contribution to the creation of public space.
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Published:18 September 2012
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Abstract
This article focuses on Spenser's relationship with French poetry. Spenser's most visible interest in French poetry began early, when he was asked, perhaps by his schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster, to translate a set of sonnets by Joachim Du Bellay for an English version of the Flemish poet Jan Van der Noot's anti-Catholic polemic, A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569). In his Complaints Spenser also published the Ruines of Rome, a translation of Du Bellay's haunting sonnet sequence Les Antiquitez de Rome, to which his Songe is a sort of appendix. Some years after his introduction to Du Bellay's poetry Spenser found an earlier French poet who would inspire him to imitation if not to praise: Clément Marot, chief poet at the court of Fran çois I.
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