This may not be the book of which CSL was thinking, although the timing is
right. I first came to Spenser through a book called "Una and the Red
Cross Knight" that had beautiful color pictures and little or no theology.
I remember her lion particularly. Somewhere Lewis has a passage on how
when we think about sources and influences etc. etc. we forget the degree
to which many people are influenced, shaped, by books they later might not
care to mention at the dinner table or in class (I'd say conferences, but
that's new). Works for me. Something else, though: this may be way too
subjective, but I've always thought of Harvey's hobgoblin as a bit of a
rustic satyr with goatlegs etc. and hence a Marsyas-like literary or
musical inadequacy. In that sense Harvey's criticism might merge rustic
folklore with Green myth and Marsyas (am I spelling him right?) might be
hoofing it somewhere around in the allusion. Anne Prescott
> At 01:20 PM 10/9/2003 -0700, Jean Goodrich wrote:
>>I know that early on, Gabriel Harvey dismissed Spenser's "faerie project"
>>as "Hobgoblin runne away with the garland of Apollo." However, is anyone
>>familiar with a criticism that Spenser's topic was the "matter of the
>>nursery," (paraphrase) either by Harvey or a later critic (like C.S.
>> Lewis)?
>
> "Beyond all doubt it is best to have made one's first acquaintance with
> Spenser in a very large -- and, preferably, illustrated -- edition of The
> Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen; and
> if, even at that age, certain of the names aroused unidentified memories
> of
> some still earlier, some almost prehistoric, commerce with a selection of
> 'Stories from Spenser,' heard before we could read, so much the better."
>
> - C. S. Lewis, "On Reading The Faerie Queene," rpt. in idem, Studies in
> Medieval & Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (CUP, 1966), p. 146.
> Illustrations, I'm guessing, must have been the big set done by Walter
> Crane, now available from Dover; as for "Stories from Spenser," I am
> guessing that this is a reference to The Gateway to Spenser: Stories from
> the Faerie Queene, by Emily Underdown (London: Nelson, 1890).
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
> East Carolina University Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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