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Among Spenser's varied poems, the Fowre Hymnes have unique interest for readers of his allegorical romance-epic because they most openly express his interests in theology and Platonism. They may thus illuminate some of the "dark conceits" of his Faery, yet have had little such consideration to date. Contrary to Robert Ellrodt's view that all four hymns in their present form as well as their Platonic learning postdate The Faerie Queene, the origins of at least the first pair and their erudition should be dated considerably earlier than 1595/96. The socalled Critias crux of The Faerie Queene does not, as Ellrodt supposed, show that the clearly learned Platonism of Spenser's Hymnes postdated his heroic poem, but rather shows the reverse, by evincing much Platonic knowledge and acuity. The Platonic contents of his hymnic and heroic poems overlap in various ways. A range of examples demonstrates the heuristic value of the Hymnes for exploring the prospects of Spenser's faery allegorism: particularly its representations of eros, beauty, the soul, the Ideas, and Gloriana.
AMONG SPENSER'S SURVIVING writings, the Fowre Hymnes are his most discursive philosophical and theological reflections. Hence their position in his canon is analogous to De Doctrina Christiana's in Milton's, and yet they may well have more broad interpretive value for Spenserians than that treatise does for Miltonists. Since Paradise Lost is an explicitly biblical narrative about the Fall, the topics of its allegories are relatively clear. But in Spenser's romantic epic, even basic access to its allegorism is much more encoded. There, a knight's encounter with an infant whose hands are stained and whose mother has just committed suicide expresses theological implications of concupiscence, and so subtly that the first recorded notices of this allegory, though now widely accepted, date from around I960.' Likewise the Beige episode's allegorical engagements with Protestant apocalyptic historiography began to receive comment only around 1991.2 Spenser's relatively explicit writings have great interest for the hermeneutics of his Faery, and the publication of the Hymnes in 1596 closely attended that of The Faerie Queene's expansion, as if both may have some correlative significance. Yet the relationship of his hymnic and heroic texts remains relatively unexplored.
The energetic debates in Milton studies about De Doctrina and its relation to Milton's major...