Spenserian Free Radicals: Associative Intertextuality and the Reader’s Agency

Participants in the critical debate over the seriousness or therapeutic efficacy of Spenser’s 1591 Daphnaïda have observed occasional contiguities with Spenser’s major works, but this essay argues that Daphnaïda’s original intertextual potential lay rather in the poem’s “floating relevance” or serial complementarity with the burgeoning Spenser canon of the early 1590s. Terming such a recombinant text a “free radical,” the first section explores the ramifications of reading Daphnaïda alongside Complaints, The Shepheardes Calender, and the 1590 Faerie Queene. The second recombines Daphnaïda with an even more marginal free radical, the 1592 translation of the pseudo-Platonic Axiochus attributed to Spenser, to demonstrate that these minor texts work as counterparts, together presenting a nuanced meditation on the problem of mortality in the absence of grace. The final section reconsiders how Spenser and his publisher, William Ponsonby, attempted to guide their audiences’ intertextual choices as a means to consolidate the poet’s laureate identity.