Period, Course, and Rest in <i>The Faerie Queene</i>

This essay describes Spenser’s engagement with periodicity in The Faerie Queene. It argues that Spenser combines periodic units of onward movement with moments of punctuative stillness—course and rest—in order to achieve what E.K. identifies in The Shepheardes Calender as a vital effect of Spenserian authorship: that “what in most English wryters vseth to be loose” is rather “finely framed, and strongly trussed vp together.” It shows how periodic form was articulated by Aristotle, rhetoricians Demetrius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Renaissance theorists George Puttenham and Samuel Daniel, and it uses Paul Ricoeur’s work to confirm the stakes of this critical tradition as the “followability” of the text, its capacity for sustained literary efficacy across manifold narrative elements. This capacity is illustrated with reference to two major examples from Book IV: the reunification of Timias and Belphoebe, and Scudamour’s account of his circuitous journey through the Temple of Venus.