Time Lords: Rhythm and Interval in Spenser’s Stanzaic Narrative

Abstract

This paper, the Kathleen Williams Lecture for 2006, uses the katabasis motif of The Faerie Queene I to formulate functions of the stanzaic interval and its alternation with stanzas, arguing that this form, best understood as the temporal phenomenon of the sojourn, shapes readerly experience, and that it has implications for genre and literary history. The paper examines the Night episode in Faerie Queene I.v; it examines the kind of reader proposed by Jonathan Goldberg in his 1981 book Endlesse Worke; it moves to the tradition of neoplatonically-inflected allegorical fiction with its journeys among multiple regions of the cosmos; it concludes with an analysis of George Saintsbury’s famous remarks about the Spenserian rhythm.

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