The Specter of Dido

This pathbreaking book dismantles the stereotype of Spenser as one who blurs earlier epic traditions. John Watkins's examinations of Spenser's major poetry reveal a poet keenly attuned to dissonances among his classical, medieval, and early modern sources. By bringing Virgil into an intertextual dialogue with Chaucer, Ariosto, and Tasso, and several Neo-Latin commentators, Spenser transformed the most patriarchal of genres into a vehicle for praising the Virgin Queen.

In an opening survey of the epic's descent from Homer, Watkins redefines epic as a genre that earns its prestige by stigmatizing other literary forms. In recounting Aeneas's abandonment of Dido, Virgil commemorated his own rejection of Homeric romance. Later poets retold Dido's story as a fictional account of their own poetic genesis and thus entered the Virgilian epic succession. Spenser joins their ranks by organizing his major poetry around multiple revisions of Dido's tragedy. But unlike his continental precursors, Spenser never commits himself to a single interpretation of Dido's moral, political, or aesthetic significance. By undertaking an unresolvable quest for Virgilian authority, Spenser transforms epic into a form that embraces alternative views of its own generic nature.