The Courtier
ENGL 514
Dr. Fike
Sprezzatura
• Page 116: “Recklessness” is a poor translation.
See page 233 for a good definition: “‘courtly
grace which conceals a sober purpose and is,
indeed, the mark of consummate artistry.’”
• Cf. Sidney’s Apology.
Our Plan
• Consider the text as being like a bike wheel: it
is an interesting hub in itself and puts out
spokes in various directions that will help us 1)
understand the text and 2) make connections
to texts that we have previously studied (and
will study).
Plato’s Ladder of Love (Symposium)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
(Neo-Platonism: Love of God)
Love of the Form of Beauty [Courtier 126: “beauty is bodiless”]
Love of the Beauty of philosophy
Love of the Beauty of knowledge
Love of the Beauty of laws and institutions
Love of the Beauty of the soul (even in an unlovely body)
Love of the Beauty of all bodies
Love of the Beauty of an individual body
LOL Is What Bembo Is Talking About
• Page 121: “the lowermost step of the stairs, by
which a man may ascend to true love”
• Page 129: “a stair, as it were, to climb up to
another far higher than it”
Notes on the LOL
• When you move up the latter, you move
toward virtue and away from physicality.
• This movement is like getting out of Plato’s
famous cave.
– Pages 130-31: “shadows of beauty” and “the
shadow of sensual beauty”
The nature of man: Hamlet 2.2.294-311
• “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and
moving how express and admirable, in action
how like a angel, in apprehension how like a god!
The beauty of the world, the paragon of
animals!”
• Three types of souls on page 131: vegetable,
sensible, rational.
What does Hamlet tell us about the human
condition? Do you see a parallel in The Courtier?
See page 119, line 5.
More: Hamlet 1.2.150-51
“O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourned longer. . . .”
Note the similar language in The Courtier: page 120,
lines 31-32; and page 130, line 32.
What seems to be the point that is being made
about the human condition?
Shakespeare and the LOL
• Sonnet 129: Lust is “Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, /
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, / Past reason hunted, and
no sooner had / Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait / On
purpose laid to make the taker mad; / Mad in pursuit, and in
possession so; / Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme,” etc.
• Sonnet 147: “My love is as a fever . . . My reason, the physician to
my love . . . Hath left me . . . Desire is death . . . Past cure I am, now
reason is past care.”
• The Courtier, page 125, line 14: “it is unpossible for love to stand
with reason.”
• Shakespeare, MSND 3.1.138-39: Bottom says that “reason and love
keep little company together nowadays.”
What is the complicating factor in the human condition? Do you
see a parallel in The Courtier on page 120, lines 5 and 15ff.?
MSND and The Courtier
• The Courtier, page 124: “so the sight is deceived
and judgeth a face beautiful which indeed is not
beautiful. And because in the eyes and in the
whole countenance of some woman a man
beholdeth otherwile a certain lavish wantonness
painted, with dishonest flickerings . . . Call it
beauty; but indeed it is a cloaked
unshamefastness [immodesty], unworthy of so
honorable and holy a name.”
• The parallel in FQ is__________. See top of page
125.
Political Analogy:
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 1.3.75ff.
• “The heavens themselves, the planets, and this center /
Observe degree, priority, and place, / Insisture [steady
continuance on a path], course, proportion, season, form, /
Office, and custom, in all line of order.”
• “O, when degree is shaked, / Which is the ladder of all high
designs, / The enterprise is sick. . . . Take but degree away,
untune that string, / And hark what discord follows.”
In The Courtier, what corresponding point do you find on
page 123, esp. in lines 10-25. Note the key word: “order.”
The Psyche
• Ulysses, of course, is talking about politics and
the state, but the psyche must also be
properly ruled:
– Reason
– Will
– Passion
• Page 123, line 24: microcosm: “man, which
may be called a little world.”
Lowest Rung
• The Courtier, pages 119-20: How does Bembo
describe sensual love here?
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Turmoil
Eros/lust
Projection
Cathexis
Abandonment
Sex addiction
Okay for a young man but not for an older man
Spenser’s FQ
• How does Redcrosse illustrate this stage? See
especially The Courtier, page 132.
– I.i.10-11: “But wander too and fro in wayes
unknowne”; “That path they take, that beaten
seemd most bare, / And like to lead the labyrinth
about” (emphases added).
• How about Guyon as a counterpoint? See
“temperance” in The Courtier, page 126, line
27.
Need To Move up on the LOL
• Middle rung: Love of the soul—sight and
hearing are active (page 126), but reason
dominates. Reason > the senses. Virtue is one
of the byproducts. Kissing is a way of
becoming united in soul and body with a
woman (page 127).
Kissing
• V&A, stanza 90: “Her arms do lend his neck a sweet
embrace; / Incorporate then they seem; face grows to
face,” etc. “Incorporate” = united into one body.
• DF, scene 12, line 83-84: “Sweet Helen, make me
immortal with a kiss: / Her lips sucks forth my soul, see
where it flies!”
• Amoretti, Sonnet 64: “Comming to kisse her lyps, (such
grace I found) / Me seemd I smelt a gardin of sweet
flowres,” etc.
• Are Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Spenser talking
about the same thing that Bembo has in mind?
Bembo on Beauty: The Courtier, page 122
• “[B]eauty is always good.” Goodness is the
center. Beauty is the circle around it. (One
suspects here that goodness = God.)
– 119: senses
– 122 and 131: circle
– 122: colocagathia or kalokagathia
Spenser, FQ I.viii.46-48
• Duessa is described: “That her misshapéd parts
did them appall, / A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill
favoured, old, / Whose secret filth good manners
biddeth not be told.”
• She is bald, filthy. Her gums are rotting. She
smells. Her skin is wrinkled and scabby. She has a
fox’s tail. Etc.
• The Courtier, page 123: “The foul, therefore, for
the most part be also evil, and the beautiful
good.”
Sonnets We Have Read
• Spenser, Amoretti 79, re. the “vertuous mind”: “That is true
beautie: that doth argue you / To be divine and borne of
heavenly seed: / Derived from that fayre Spirit, from whom
al true / And perfect beauty did at first proceed.”
• Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, no. 5:
True, that true beautie virtue is indeed,
Whereof this beautie can be but a shade,
Which, elements with mortal mixture breed.
True, that on earth we are but pilgrims made,
And should in soule up to our countrey moue:
True, and yet true that I must Stella loue.
Where would you place this statement on the LOL?
Highest Rung on the LOL
• Understanding enables access to heavenly
beauty.
• Page 132: “the beginning and end of all
goodness.”
• Beauty = goodness.
• Being less rigorous of body and more refined of
spirit (because reason restrains sense, as on 120),
old men can love “without slander” and “more
happily than young men” (118).
• Heavenly love is described on 131 as “this most
holy fire in souls.”
Imagination Helps Us up the Ladder
• See pages 128-29: Imagination helps us climb the stairs
toward “universal beauty.” It helps the courtier to recapture
the beloved’s image and enjoy it despite her physical absence.
But on 129 it allows one to “fashion within himself that
beauty much more fair than it is indeed.”
• Theseus in Shakespeare’s MSND 5.1.12-17:
The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
………………………………………………………..
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
• Are Shakespeare and Bembo talking about the same thing?
An Even Higher Type of Experience
• The Courtier, page 133: Saint Paul. See lines 21 and 31.
– 1 Cor. 2.9: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, / nor the heart of
man conceived, / what God has prepared for those who love him.”
– 1 Cor. 15.40, 44: “There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial
bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the
terrestrial is another. . . . It is sown a physical body, it is raised a
spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.”
– 2 Cor. 12.2: “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was
caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the
body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught
up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not
know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which
man may not utter.”
– Shakespeare, MSND 4.1.209-12: “The eye of man hath not heard, the
ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue
to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”
Chart (see pages 118-19)
LOL
Type of Experience
Example
Something higher
Transcendent experience
Paul’s experience (133)
Understanding (130)
Elevates us above human
station—will on 119 top
Angels
Reason
Rational love (sight and
hearing on 126 bottom)
Older men as lovers
Senses/appetite
Sensual love (touch)
Young men as lovers
Spenser’s “An Hymne in Honovr of
Beavtie” (GH, page 351ff.)
• The poem begins with mention of “thy raging fyre” for
“Mother deare,” Beauty, who is addressed. See The
Courtier, page 132: “heavenly beauty” and “the holy fury of
love.” Cf. Sidney 308: “a divine fury.” Also, Spenser SC,
“October,” headnote (page 524): “Enthousiasmos.”
• “[E]uery earthy thing partakes” in “perfect Beautie.”
• Earthly beauty, however, “shall quickly fade / And passe
away.”
• “That Beautie is not, as fond men misdeeme, / An outward
shew of things, that onely seeme.”
• “But that faire lampe, from whose celestiall ray / That light
proceedes, which kindleth louers fire, / Shall neuer be
extinguisht nor decay.”

More of Spenser’s “Hymne”
Thereof it comes, that these faire soules, which
haue
The most resemblance of that heauenly light,
Frame to themselues most beautiful and braue
Their fleshly bowre, most fit for their delight,
And the grosse matter by a soueraine might
Tempers so trim, that it may well be seene,
A pallace fit for such a virgin Queene. END