Renaissance psychologies

Nosce teipsum, to 'know oneself': Spenser and Shakespeare both answered this dictum with a comprehensive view of human nature, an epic scope. Yet their characters and plots sprung from radically distinct psychologies. Renaissance psychologies explores this polarity, questioning how we explain these distinct but equally useful concepts and how they are related. Spenser's Christian-Platonic emphasis prioritises the soul's divine order, dogmatically and encyclopedically conceived. He looks to the past, collating classical and medieval authorities in memory-devices like the figurative house, nobly ordered in mystic numerical hierarchy to reform the ruins of time. Shakespeare's sophisticated Aristoteleanism prioritises the body's immediate experience, with no stable form for its quirky sensations, feelings and thoughts, all subjected to sceptical consciousness. He points to the future, using the witty ironies of popular stage productions to test and deconstruct authority in passional crises that disrupt identity, opening the unconscious to psychoanalysis. Individual chapters in this book address how the poets' contrary artistry produced strikingly different results, of a 'fairy queen', of humour-based passions (notably the primal passion of self-love), of intellect (divergent modes of temptation and moral resolution), of immortal soul and spirit, of holistic plot design, of readiness for final judgement. Renaissance psychologies argues that though some see Spenser's art - its psychology, social ideal, and metaphysical vision - as regressively antiquated, it actually provides an on-going complement to Shakespeare's 'early modern' creation, which achieved much of its greatness through revisionary integration of Spenser's oracular work. This book will be of interest to students and lecturers in Spenser studies, Renaissance poetry and the wider fields of British literature, social and cultural history, ethics and theology.