Bob Dylan's date with The Faerie Queene (1596)

While comparisons between Bob Dylan and Shakespeare are commonplace, and Dylan’s lyrics have been profitably read alongside Petrarch, Rimbaud, and others in recent work, this article advances the first sustained analysis of potential Spenserian echoes in Dylan’s oeuvre. Rereading Dylan and Jacques Levy’s southwestern quest ballad “Isis” (Desire, 1976) alongside the “Isis Church” episode in The Faerie Queene (1596), it argues that attention to the song’s resonances with Edmund Spenser’s reworking of the Egyptian Isis Osiris myth sheds light on how both texts engage and subvert the romance mode to theorize historical mimesis and allusion. The texts are understood as parallel articulations of their authors’ analogous archaeological poetics, which foreground their shared responses to intertextuality and colonial encounter.