Patrick Cheney compares the similarities and differences between Spenser's Dance of the Graces and Tasso's Dance of the Sylvan Nymphs.

The two major annotated editions of The Faerie Queene both overlook Tasso's Dance of the Sylvan Nymphs in the Gerusalemme Liberata as a source for Spenser's Dance of the Graces. Yet the similarities between the two Dances are striking. The scenes for both Dances, Mount Acidale and the Enchanted Forest, are Venusian paradises. Both scenes depict music, dancing nymphs who are really conjured spirits, an artist figure animating the Dance, and dancers who vanish through a hero's action. More speci.cally, both feature Dances animated by a magician in which one hundred spirit-nymphs move around a figure of beauty in the center.

In Book VI, canto x, of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's hero Calidore stumbles upon Mount Acidale, a paradise sacred to Venus. Mount Acidale features a...