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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Despaire And Briton Moniments: Moments Of Protestant Clarity In The Faerie Queene, John E. Curran Jr.
Despaire And Briton Moniments: Moments Of Protestant Clarity In The Faerie Queene, John E. Curran Jr.
English Faculty Research and Publications
Two moments in The Faerie Queene, the Redcrosse Knight's rescue from suicide in the cave of Despaire and Arthur's rapture at reading the truncated chronicle of the Britons, are strangely similar. In each case, the hermeneutic openness that seems to be developing is halted and closed in favor of a unified, simplified, syllogistic certitude. Though both Despaire's speeches and Briton Moniments are ripe for interrogation, Redcrosse is saved by the Practical Syllogism, and Arthur reacts with an outpouring of patriotic fervor. With some matters, proliferation of thought and feeling though ordinarily salutary must be suspended. Protestantism's simplifying strain did …
That Suggestion: Catholic Casuistry, Complexity, And Macbeth, John E. Curran Jr.
That Suggestion: Catholic Casuistry, Complexity, And Macbeth, John E. Curran Jr.
English Faculty Research and Publications
In a keeping with the view that Shakespeare harbored a sympathetic attitude to Catholic ways of seeing, this essay argues that Macbeth is a study in the dangers of oversimplification and certainty. In contradistinction to how Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight escapes the Cave of Despaire, Macbeth would benefit greatly from probing, questioning, nuancing, and sifting through ambiguity. He needs to examine the particular attenuation of his own moral thinking, and needs to engage equivocation, in the forms of both amphibology and mental reservation.