“Against the Brydale Day”: Envy and the Meanings of Spenserian Marriage

Marriage has served generations of Spenser critics as the preeminent figure of the poet’s spiritual, aesthetic, and authorial ambition. But to see Spenserian marriage as a purely positive symbol of, in Kathleen Williams’ words, “the necessary concord of opposites on which the world depends, and individual human welfare also,” is to miss half its meaning: both as a narrative event and as a figure of authorial propriety, Spenserian marriage secures the welfare of certain individuals at the direct expense of others. This essay reads Spenserian marriage from the perspective of those disappointed outsiders, as a forced departure from the norms of friendship, hospitality, and literary community. Far from signaling the poet’s blissful entitlement to the fruits of his imaginative labors, I argue, marriage constellates his anxieties about the disavowals on which sexual fidelity, narrative form, and poetic authority all depend.