The Styles of Spenser's The Faerie Queene

The Styles of Spenser's The Faerie Queene

(At present, this site is certified viewable only via Microsoft Internet Explorer.)

Designs of Early Modern Country Houses & the Design of Spenser's Poem--A Vital Analogy

Exterior of Penshurst Place, 1552, home of the Sidney family Rear exterior of Penshurst Place

http://www.penshurstplace.com/

In his book Robert Smythson & the Elizabethan Country House (Yale University Press, 1983), architectural and social historian Mark Girouard alludes to how one can understand the three main design themes of Elizabethan English country houses--the classical, the mock-chivalric/heroic (Romance), and the fantastical/gothic--by comparing them to the literary styles of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Reading Girouard's book, it struck me that a person reading Spenser's Romantic epic for the first time might well benefit from this comparison--and therefore better understand the poetic styles of the poem by seeing their visual "equivalents" in pictures of various country houses of the period (including a number of country houses that mix two or more of the styles. Hence, this website.

Here are rough, but I hope useful, descriptors for how the classical, the chivalric/heroic (Romance), and the fantastic/gothic elements of the early modern English country houses and of Spenser's poem are expressed, in architecture and in words.

Click on the headings of each chart to go to thumbnail pictures of houses more or less in each style. Each such page begins with "purer" examples and then presents pictures of country houses that mix two or more of these styles. Click on the thumbnails for full-size pictures of the houses. All but one or two of the pictures have been taken (by digital camera) from Girouard's Robert Smythson & the Elizabethan Country House or from Girouard's earlier Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (Yale University Press, 1978).

(This site is for educational use only by my classes at the University of Portland, or by classes at other academic institutions. All commercial rights to the pictures are owned by Mr. Girouard and Yale University Press.)

CLASSICAL

Early Modern English Country House Design The Faerie Queene--Spenser's Romantic Epic

· symmetry and balance

· allusions [columns, features] to the architecture

of Greece and Rome

· high windows/much light

· floor plans based on careful, symmetrical design

· Classical Epic forms: invocation of the muses, epic

catalogues [lists], beginning in medias res, epic

[extended] similes, epic hero, huge scope and thematic

ambition

· symmetry in form [e.g., parallels between characters such as Arthur & Lucifer, Una & Duessa, etc., and between settings--the House of Pride & the House of Holiness, etc.]

· allusions in content to the classical epics [Homer's Iliad & Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid] and to earlier Renaissance epics, religious and Romantic [Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso]

· clarity of imagery

*Courtly Love: an idealized and often illicit form of love celebrated in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in which a knight or courtier devotes himself to a noblewoman who is usually married and feigns indifference to preserve her reputation.