Interesting. There is another complexity here, which is that the placement
of the stanza as well as its context suggests, I think, that Spenser has
read the Catholic Sarum Missal (the default Missal for England, although
not the only one, and I assume for Ireland) and its marriage service.
There's reason on other grounds to think he read it (see an essay by Hal
Weatherby on the end of Book I); there must have been an awful lot of them
hanging around, althought Tom Herron has sent me a wonderful quotation
from Barnaby Googe about the anger of the locals when the English
authorities tried to remove the old Catholic prayerbooks). In the Catholic
service of the time, then, there's a marvelous prayer in which the priest
blesses the bed and prays that, among other things, it be free from
fantasy, from "demonibus illsionis"--Spenser must have enjoyed thinking
about how good a prayer this is. The demons of illusion have hurt many a
marriage! Whether the demons and/or illusions are local Irish ones or
English imports is another question, but the threat to marital happiness
by being frayed by things that be not is worldwide. Anne Prescott.
> Thomas Herron:
> Their argument gains some support from Sp's late use of the word in
> "Epith"
> among Munster things that "sing" with "drery accents" (351):
>
> Ne let hob goblins, names whose sense we see not,
> Fray us with things that be not. (343-4)
>
> It would be interesting to think of these lines as a rejoinder to Harvey's
> earlier criticism of Sp's own poetry... for as Sp makes clear, his is the
> type that, like Apollo and Orpheus, can shine light on his love and make
> the woods ring in Co. Cork.
>
> Me:
> I'm not too sure about the Irish nature of the hob-goblin - it seems a
> fairly unequivocally English word. Harvey's distinction between Hobgoblin
> and Apollo has always appeared to me to be one between learned classical
> and
> oral English culture, primarily. Spenser's reply was, in effect, to make
> one
> of his projects in FQ the reclamation of 'soiled' or *infra dig* English
> symbols for the causes he held dear. Thus St George ceases to be a dubious
> May-game figure (of the kind condemned by Piers in the May Eclogue) and
> comes into his full inheritance as England's Christian saint. All those
> Belle Dame Sans Merci-type ballads about the Queen of Fairies seducing
> hapless young men are reworked to become Prince Arthur's vision of a
> wholly
> admirable Glory(ana). And so on.
>
> The lines from Epith. quoted above are amusing though when considered in
> the
> light of the philosophical principles of Thomas Hobbes, a man who made
> much
> play of not being frayd by 'things that be not', but whose name
> nevertheless
> became the occasion of a hobgoblin pun in Seth Ward and John Wilkins's
> *Vindiciae Academiarum* (1654), where they comment on his arguments
> against
> the establshed university curriculum: "The Hobbe-goblins spightfull and
> mischeivous in their Friskings".
>
> Charlie Butler
>
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