Spenser’s Unarmed Cupid and the Experience of the 1590 Faerie Queene

Abstract

This paper explores Edmund Spenser’s representations of the unarmed Cupid in his 1590 Faerie Queene in order to argue that the peculiar qualities and effects associated with this Cupid are intended to illuminate and model the reading experience of Spenser’s poem itself. Developing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phenomenological description of this experience, and engaging the recent work of Michael Schoenfeldt and Jonathan Goldberg, the paper argues that Spenser’s poem is intended to produce in us a fundamentally erotic experience--one that runs counter to Spenser’s purported goal of self-discipline and self-fashioning that informs many influential New Historical accounts of his romance.