'Lyke as we ought': Edmund Spenser's case for marriage

Abstract

Critics disagree about Edmund Spenser's respective views on marriage and celibacy. Nevertheless, Spenser—an epithalamiast and self-identified patriot—has come to be popularly celebrated as a 'marriage poet' and 'Protestant poet'. Because the married state took on new significance with the Reformation (English clergy being free to marry from 1549 onward), these titles have been regarded as complementary. Recent scholarship, however, has served to undermine the claim that Protestantism heralded a substantial change for the married state. The evidence of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century domestic discourse, for example, would indicate that a deep ambivalence about sexuality—married sexuality included—survived the Reformation. And, as the cult of the Virgin Queen attests, a traditional or quasi-Catholic elevation of virginity over marriage was still current long after marriage had been declared acceptable for priests. To what extent, then, can Spenser's popularly designated titles 'Protestant poet' and 'marriage poet' be said to coincide? My answer, which focuses on Books I, III and IV of The Faerie Queene, is two-fold. First, I argue that Spenser's positive philosophy of marriage distances him, in several important respects, from mainstream as well as from radical Protestantism. His reconciliation of sexual love with religious devotion, I contend, has no precedent in Protestant domestic discourse or in the official publications of the Church. Second, I argue that Spenser's aversion to clerical celibacy (albeit an aversion contested by some critics) accords with mainstream Protestantism but also amounts to a critique of the personal position of Elizabeth herself—the Supreme Governor and 'face' of the English Church. Reading between the lines of Spenser's panegyric endorsement of the Virgin Queen, I identify, in Books I and IV respectively, two major satirical sequences. My contention is that these episodes satirise not only clerical celibacy but also the ideal of virginity per se, even as it is specifically embodied by the Queen. Thus Spenser can be seen to distance himself from both Elizabeth and mainstream Protestantism, for even clerical apologists for marriage who were frustrated by Elizabeth's stance on clerical celibacy tended to uphold the special status of virginity. Spenser's response to the age-old conflict between celibacy and marriage is more provocative, and certainly less ambivalent, than has been generally acknowledged.