Laureate poetry and humanist literary pedagogy in the English Renaissance (Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Milton)

This dissertation looks at how the didactic justification for poetry was elaborated in Renaissance England as a means of legitimating the cultural role of poets. I examine why a particular kind of poet came to prominence during this period by exploring the links between the growth of formal schooling and the writing of three poets who defined the purposes of their art in explicitly pedagogical terms: Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and John Milton.; In a preliminary chapter on the way that the methods and ideals of humanist schooling shaped Renaissance ideas about the role of the poet, I discuss how the humanist pedagogy of imitation enabled poets to make large claims for the social power of their art. Because writers of this time attributed to tests the charismatic power to mold the minds of readers through imitation, it was possible for poets writing in an era of print to picture themselves as Orphic culture heroes, drawing readers to virtue through poetic eloquence. Next, I look at the influence of humanist schooling upon Edmund Spenser, and in particular at the way formal and thematic strategies employed in The Faerie Queene adapt or respond to humanist ideas about education, especially those of Richard Mulcaster, Spenser's grammar school teacher, and an important Elizabethan educational theorist. I then discuss Ben Jonson's early play, Poetaster, as a bid to use the stage as another hind of school. I focus particularly upon this play's persistent thematization of the pedagogical effects of texts upon bodies. In my final two chapters I take up John Milton's complicated engagement with humanism in his short treatise, Of Education, and then in his epic Paradise Lost. Milton's treatise wavers between an anti-rhetorical paradigm of education, which was being promoted by some of the poet's Puritan contemporaries, and a continued commitment to the cultural centrality of the eloquent poet as a maker of manners. In Paradise Lost, I argue that Milton's ambivalence concerning poetry as a form of teaching is a major thematic element in the poem's treatment of the eloquence of Satan and Eve.