Architectonics of Imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton [1 ed.] 9781442670945, 9780802044518

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IN SPENSER, DANIEL, AND DRACTON

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Architectonics of Imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton

David Galbraith

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2000 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4451-4

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Galbraith, David Ian, 1953Architectonics of imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4451-4 1. Spenser, Edmund, 1552P-1599. Faerie queene. 2. Daniel, Samuel, 1562-1619. Civile wares betweene the howses of Lancaster and Yorke. 3. Drayton, Michael, 1563-1631. Poly-Olbion. 4. Literature and historyEngland - History - 16th century. 5. Literature and history - England History - 17th century. 6. Historical poetry, English - History and criticism. 7. Epic poetry, English - History and criticism. 8. English poetry - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism. 9. Epic poetry, Latin - History and criticism. I. Title. PR535.H5G34 2000

821'.03209358

C99-932345-8

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For Heather and Sarah.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IX

1 The Landscape of Allegory 3 Figuring Boundaries in The Faerie Queene 4 The Vision Thing': Renaissance Allegory and Its Readers 17

ENGLAND AND ROME IN THE FAERIE QUEENE 2 'All in amaze': Allegory in Book I of The Faerie Queene 31 Spenser's Two Allegories 32 'The bright and blissfull Reformation 44 3 Translatio Imperil in Book III of The Faerie Queene 52 Leaving Troy 53 Violation and Origin 65

POETRY AND HISTORY AFTER THE FAERIE QUEENE 4 'Historian in verse': Daniel's Civil Wars 77 'Our Lucari 81 Analogy and Typology in The Civil Wars 87 The Poet and the Past 101 5 'A true native Muse': Drayton's Poly-Olbion 108 'As in a glasse, this /sfesurvay': The Chorographical Tradition Poet and Historian in Poly-Olbion 121 'This strange Herculean toyle' 129

113

viii Contents NOTES 143 BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

225

193

Acknowledgments

This book had a long gestation. It began as a dissertation, which I defended in 1994. My most important debt is to my supervisor, William Blissett, whose support and criticism were indispensable. I would like to thank the examiners of the thesis, whose encouraging and helpful suggestions for revision I have almost always adopted: A.C. Hamilton, Nancy Lindheim, Ruth Harvey, and Paul Grendler. I also wish to acknowledge the SSHRCC, the University of Toronto, and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, which provided financial support during my doctoral programme. Two institutions have sustained me during all stages of this work: the English Department of the University of Toronto, where I studied as an undergraduate, returned for my doctorate, and where I began teaching in 1993; and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, in Victoria University at the University of Toronto, where I was first a Graduate Fellow and later Curator. Anyone familiar with these institutions will recognize their shaping influence on this book. Several friends and colleagues read sections of the manuscript and made very helpful suggestions: Jill Levenson, Germaine Warkentin, Konrad Eisenbichler, James Carscallen, Ian Balfour, and Will Robins. I am also very grateful to Patrick Cheney and Anne Lake Prescott, who read the manuscript at a later stage and made valuable suggestions. At the University of Toronto Press, I would like to thank Suzanne Rancourt and Miriam Skey. Finally, this book would never have been finished without the encouragement and support of Heather Murray. I have made too many jokes about the topoi of gratitude in academics' acknowledgments of their partners to be in a position to say anything more about her role in this book or in anything else.

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Figure 1 Title-page to Etienne Dolet, Commentariorum Linguae Latinae. Vol. 1.

Figure 2 Ficta Religio, in Andrea Alciati, Emblemata cum Commentariis, p. 40.

Figure 3 'Brutus killing his father,' from Raphael Holinshed, The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, p. 7.

Figure 4 'The Founding of Troynovant,' from Raphael Holinshed, The Firste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, p. 16.

Figure 5 Frontispiece to Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion. All figures reproduced courtesy of Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Victoria University in the University of Toronto.

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ARCHITECTONICS OF IMITATION IN SPENSER, DANIEL, AND DRAYTON

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ONE

The Landscape of Allegory

Truth and Calliope Slanging each other sous les lauriers ... Ezra Pound, Canto VIII

In this book I examine the treatment of the boundaries between poetry and history in Spenser's Faerie Queene, Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars, and Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion. I suggest that each poem recasts this relationship and in doing so enters into a dialogue with its classical and more recent predecessors. Crucially, then, this is an argument about the English epic tradition, and its relationship to the Latin epic from Virgil onwards. In order to bring this problem into sharper focus, I approach it from two angles: the uses that each poet makes of various aspects of the relationship between England and Rome, encompassing, for example, the legendary accounts of the founding of the British nation and the analogies between Roman and English history, particularly in their respective experiences of civil war; and the significance for each poem of the recurring spatial metaphors by which the territories of poetry and history are constituted, negotiated, and traversed. At various points in my argument, one or the other of these issues is more sharply delineated. What connects them, however, is that both engage the question of imitatio. To the extent that this is the case, my argument also therefore has implications for several fundamental problems of Renaissance poetics. One of these, which this chapter examines, is the theoretical understanding of allegory during the period. In the discussion that follows, I first examine several aspects of Spenser's allegorical techniques. I do this in order then to distinguish sixteenth-century understandings of

4 Architectonics of Imitation allegory from both their classical and medieval predecessors and from their later manifestations, and so that I can proceed to argue in subsequent chapters that Spenser articulates several crucial issues in The Faerie Queene by juxtaposing different conceptions of allegory and of the meaning and value of England and Rome. In later chapters, I argue that attempts to write epic poetry in Spenser's wake, such as those represented by The Civil Wars and Poly-Olbion, inevitably respond to Spenser's work, either directly or through techniques and choices which more obliquely register the cultural significance of his achievement. Figuring Boundaries in The Faerie Queene

Who is the muse of The Faerie Queene? In the context of contemporary criticism of the poem, the question may seem peculiarly anachronistic, although Thomas Roche, one of its most recent discussants, prefers to characterize it as 'smoldering.'1 Nonetheless, it has a long history, and one which points to the propriety of Roche's metaphor, at least inasmuch as the debate seems often to have produced more heat than light. However, the issues to which it points are also resonant for contemporary criticism of the poem, particularly for accounts of the significance of nationality and of geography in Spenser's epic. On the surface, the matter of the muses seems simple enough: when Spenser appeals to the 'holy Virgin chiefe of nine' in the Proem to Book I, does he invoke Calliope, conventionally the muse of heroic poetry, or Clio, the muse of history?2 Much of the problem seems to hinge on the interpretation of 'chiefe.' In many accounts, including Hesiod's canonical list in the Theogony, Clio is named first, and has therefore often been considered the most likely candidate.3 Even Hesiod undermines her claims to primacy, however: he goes on to refer to Calliope as 'chiefest of them all, for she attends on worshipful princes.'4 Roche argues convincingly that the case for Calliope is at least as strong, on the basis of the iconographic traditions of the late classical commentators and the Renaissance mythographers. Examples other than those he cites, such as a title-block showing Homer crowned by Calliope (see Fig. 1) could also be adduced. But there is another possibility to consider. Spenser's ambiguity may be a deliberate manipulation of the very iconography which the debate has done so much to bring to view. In the Mutabilitie Cantos, the speaker appeals, 'O Clio, lend Calliope thy quill' (VII.vi.37). He seems to evoke the possibility of an easy interaction between the two figures. The terms of

The Landscape of Allegory 5 this transaction are uncertain, however, since the syntax admits two very different interpretations. Clio may be handing over her quill to her sister; alternatively, she may herself be taking over Calliope's role for a time, and keeping her own pen firmly in hand. This ambiguity can easily be read metonymically, as suggesting adjacent and more elaborate uncertainties. To be sure, the identities of the muses were subject to complex iconographic and symbolic permutations, as Ernst Robert Curtius warned.5 Nonetheless, most accounts cited Clio's sponsorship of history and Calliope's of heroic poetry. The verses on the muses attributed to Virgil and frequently printed in Renaissance editions of his works said, 'Clio gesta canens transactis tempora reddit' ('To recreate the past is Clio's theme') and 'carmina Calliope libris heroica mandat' ('Calliope records heroic lays') .6 Their complaints in The Teares of the Muses are consistent with this scheme. Here the two muses are virtually indistinguishable. This near-identity may be yet another mark of the poem's failure, a judgment rendered by many critics, including Northrop Frye.7 But it also points to an area of uncertainty which may, in fact, have been more than simply iconographic. If the muses of history and heroic poetry are so closely linked in attributes and in rhetoric, this similarity may indicate a corresponding instability in the definition of the activities they represent. In fact, in the case of The Teares of the Muses, it is difficult to interpret this lack of distinction as suggestive of much more than an absence of clarity. In The Faerie Queene, however, the ambiguities are more scrupulously contrived, in a manner which argues for the mutual implication of the functions which Clio and Calliope represent allegorically.8 Spenser's refusal to name his muse in the Proem to Book I has already been noted; he uses the same technique again in Canto xi, in his invocation to the muse who will preside over his account of Redcrosse's battle with the dragon: Now O them sacred Muse, most learned Dame, Faire ympe of Phoebus, and his aged bride, The Nourse of time, and euerlasting fame, That warlike hands ennoblest with immortal name; O gently come into my feeble brest ...9

(I.xi.5-6)

The combination of this careful silence with his later allusion to the close relationship between the two muses registers an elaborately figured intrication of poetry and history in Spenser's epic. Spenser, of

6 Architectonics of Imitation course, identifies himself as a 'Poet historical' in the 'Letter to Raleigh' in 1590 (Hamilton ed., p. 738). In this passage, however, the status of these terms seems more complicated. I suggest that Spenser's concern for the figural organization of the relationship is a fundamental aspect of the poem, and one which had a significant impact on his contemporaries and successors. The problem of history in The Faerie Queene has itself occupied a vexed and contested position in criticism of the poem. In older Spenser scholarship the question was often conceived, particularly by early twentiethcentury critics, merely in relation to the status of historical reference in Spenser's allegory. Contemporary critics have been more sensitive to the importance of such historical allusions in the allegory, a claim which until fairly recently had been treated either with scepticism or with (in effect) pleas of diminished capacity by many of the poem's most sophisticated readers.10 The re-emergence of historicist and politically inflected criticism has reopened these issues, albeit with results which sometimes lack a correspondingly sophisticated level of literary analysis. My argument engages at several points with New Historicist accounts of Spenser's work (and of his successors), most explicitly in the context of considerations of nationality and nationalism. However, I also seek to reconnect to earlier Spenser scholarship and explicitly take up its conclusions, particularly in the areas of genre theory and historical poetics. I am primarily interested in the ways in which the relationship between poetry and history is figured within the poem, and to its wider consequences for Spenser's allegory. In the remainder of this chapter I focus on two problems: the ways in which the relationship between poetry and history is conceived in spatial terms in Renaissance poetics, and the consequences of these metaphors for Spenser's conception of fairyland; and the sometimes contradictory status of allegory in the philosophical and critical traditions on which Spenser draws. Here too, I suggest, spatial metaphors often play an important role in articulating the differing conceptions of poetic meaning which are often at issue in accounts of allegory and its strategies. Precept and Example

To speak of a boundary which divides poetry from history is to invoke a long-established spatial metaphor, by no means specific to the European Renaissance. In the nineteenth century, for example, Macaulay's essay 'History,' published in the Edinburgh Review in 1828, is explicit in its use

The Landscape of Allegory 7 of geographical metaphors to delineate the contours of the 'debatable land' between literature and history.11 Here the provocation was explicit: Macaulay was writing in the aftermath of Walter Scott, and with the stated desire to 'reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated.' The origins of the metaphor appear, however, to be classical. At the beginning of Plutarch's Lives, to cite one example, literature and the terra incognita of classical cartography are aligned metaphorically, and both situated on the boundaries of historiography: Like as historiographers describing the world (frende Sossius Senecio) doe of purpose referre to the uttermost partes of their mappes the farre distant regions whereof they be ignoraunt, with this note: these contries are by meanes of sandes and drowthes unnavigable, rude, full of venimous beastes, Scythian ise, and frosen seas. Even so may I (which in comparinge noble mens lives have already gone so farre into antiquitie, as the true and certaine historic could lead me) of the rest, being thinges past all proofe or chalenge, very well say: that beyonde this time all is full of suspicion and dout, being delivered us by Poets and Tragedy makers, sometimes without trueth and likelihoode, and alwayes without certainty.13

This geographical imagery can be understood as one instance of a more widespread tendency to conceive figurally the relationship between history and literature. In the Renaissance, many of these metaphors emerged in response to the famous discussion of poetry and history in the ninth chapter of Aristotle's Poetics: the poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse - you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.14 (1451a~b)

Several aspects of Aristotle's argument are sometimes overlooked. He bases the difference between poetry and history on their relationship to the categories of possibility and probability which he had developed in his writings on logic. The principal orientation of this distinction is

8 Architectonics of Imitation modal; there is little evidence here of the pragmatic and didactic emphasis it would acquire for many Renaissance commentators. Nor is the difference between poetry and history represented spatially. The two terms which Aristotle uses to specify poetry's relationship to history, '(jJihoao^coTspov'('more philosophic' in this translation) and 'aTTovSaioTepoi',' ('of graver import') are comparative in grammatical form; they do not in themselves imply the spatial relationship with which they would subsequently be associated. In addition, philosophy functions here as the unarticulated ground on which the two are differentiated, and not, as it would later, as one of the opposing poles between which poetry would be located. This passage received considerable attention in the sixteenth century after the publication of the Greek text of the Poetics in 1508, and particularly in the aftermath of Robortello's In Librum Aristotelis De Arte Poetica Explicationes in 1548.15 As I have suggested, Aristotle's distinction was elaborated metaphorically, and given spatial articulation. A significant example of this process, and one which underlines the importance of geographical metaphors, is found in Castelvetro's commentary on this passage in his Poetica vulgarizzata (1570). Here, Aristotle's separation of poetry from history through the logical categories of possibility and probability is redefined and transformed into an opposition which is more explicitly oriented towards both their veracity and their problematic areas of intersection: Adunque sono due campi larghissimi, 1'uno de' quali si puo domandare della certitudine e 1'altro della 'ncertitudine. Per lo campa della certitudine corre communemente i suoi arringhi 1'istoria, e '1 poeta corre i suoi communemente per quello della 'ncertitudine. Ma il campo della certitudine e alcuna volta attraversato e addogato da alcuno spazio d'incertitudine; si come, dall'altra parte, il campo della 'ncertitudine e molto piu spesso attraversato e addogato da alcuno spazio di certitudine. Let us imagine two vast fields, one of which may be called the field of fact, the other that of fiction. The field of fact is the field of history, that of fiction the field of poetry. But the field of fact contains areas of fiction and that of fiction even greater areas of fact.16

The status of philosophy in this relationship acquires greater importance in the most important English elaboration of Aristotle's distinction between poetry and history, contained in Philip Sidney's Defence of

The Landscape of Allegory 9 Poetry.1 Sidney's argument for the superiority of poetry attempts to stabilize it as the mediating term between philosophy and history. In doing so, he reverses the model proposed by Jacques Amyot in his preface to his French translation of Plutarch's Lives. Amyot had affirmed the superiority of history to 'philosophic morale, d'autant que les exemples sont plus aptes a esmouvoir et enseigner que ne sont les argumens et les preuves de raisons ny leurs imperieux preceptes' and to 'les inventions et compositions poetiques, d'autant qu'elle ne se sert jamais que de la nue verite, et la poesie ordinairement enrichit les choses qu'elle loue par dessus le merite, a cause que son but principal est de delecter ,..'18 Sidney responds through an elaborately articulated series of spatial metaphors in which poetry is located between philosophy and history.19 Sidney's definition of poetry as 'an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word /jLL/nrjatg — that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, orfiguringforth - to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture with this end, to teach and delight' is embedded in a syncretic poetics.20 Each of its sources exerts an influence on his understanding of the relationship between poetry, and history, and philosophy. Aristotle had argued that poetry dealt with 'ra KaBoXov' (universals), history with 'ra Kotd' eKaaTov' (singulars). Although Sidney cites this terminology, his concept of the poetic is more pragmatic in orientation. Poetry, for him, mediates between philosophy and history, whose ends are themselves pragmatic, and whose contending claims he summarizes in the proposition that 'the one giveth the precept, and the other the example.'21 Sidney also differs from Aristotle in his emphasis on the analogy between literary imitation and pictorial representation, of which he would 'speak metaphorically' in his definition, but would subsequently endorse with little qualification. This is most striking in the distinction he draws between the poet and the philosopher: [F]or whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he [the poet] giveth a perfect picture of it in someone by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth.22

In this passage, and in the argument which follows, literary imitation and pictorial representation are deeply implicated, as the metaphor of

10 Architectonics of Imitation the 'speaking picture' implies. The metaphor is, of course, a commonplace of Renaissance poetics, attributed by Plutarch to Simonides.23 But it also points to two important aspects of the interrelationship of language and vision for the period. One gives rise to an ambiguity in the very concept of the figure, which seems to embed the verbal in the pictorial. The second, implied in Sidney's allusion to 'the sight of the soul' draws attention to the traditional hierarchical ranking of sight above the other senses, a process which gave rise to the identification of knowledge with 'insight,' and which had a significant impact on the importance accorded the image in Renaissance literary and philosophical debates.24 The pragmatic focus of Sidney's definition of poetry is underlined in his comparison of the poet as teacher to the philosopher and the historian, a comparison which, as Geoffrey Shepherd suggests, owes much to Erasmus's technique in The Praise of Folly.,25 Each is associated with the attributes of his calling: the moral philosophers 'with books in their hands against glory, whereto they set their names, sophistically speaking against subtlety,' and the historian 'laden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing himself (for the most part) upon other histories ... In comparison to the poet, whose imitative strategies are more closely aligned with the visual, both are identified with the written texts from which they derive and assert their authority. Each is, in effect, a prosopopoeia of these texts, albeit, like Erasmus's Folly, a personification whose disruptive energy threatens to overwhelm the ars to which he stands in a figural relationship. Here, in fact, the boundaries are less stable than Sidney's assertive rhetoric would acknowledge, particularly since much of the rhetorical force of the passage is achieved through the very mimetic strategies which are identified with literary imitatio. Sidney's response to Plato's critique of mimesis is that 'of all philosophers he is the most poetical.'2 Nowhere else, however, is Sidney's relationship to Plato so complex as in this defence against his arguments in The Republic. Sidney recognizes, of course, that Plato uses the fictional techniques that he explicitly criticizes in the dialogue form itself and in the myths of the cave and 'the tale of the warrior bold, Er' (614b) which concludes the book. But the relationship between the two texts is further complicated by Sidney's adoption of the forensic oration as a model for his own defence. Rather than seeking the origins of Sidney's work in Stephen Gosson's attack on poetry in his School of Abuse, it might be better to see the text in a sequence which includes Cicero's Pro Archia, similarly a 'defence of poetry' in the form of a forensic oration,

The Landscape of Allegory 11 and The Republic itself. Speaking of the long-standing 'quarrel between philosophy and poetry' (607b), Socrates himself declares that 'if the mimetic and dulcet poetry can show any reason for her existence in a well-governed state, we would gladly admit her, since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell' (607C). He goes on to call for a defence of poetry: And we would allow her advocates who are not poets but lovers of poetry to plead her cause in prose without meter, and show that she is not only delightful but beneficial to orderly government and all the life of man. And we shall listen benevolently, for it will be clear gain for us if it can be shown that she bestows not only pleasure but benefit. (607d~e)

Sidney's work takes up this challenge, but so too does The Republic, since it is not through philosophical argument, but through the tale of Er that Socrates confirms his argument for the immortality of the soul.28 Moreover, the terms of Sidney's defence concede that the divisions he has put in place between poetry and its neighbours are more flexible than he has admitted. Plato, he recalls, had 'made mistress Philosophy very often borrow the masking raiment of poesy. In addition, as I have suggested, Sidney's most forceful demarcation of poetry from its two rivals is achieved through a strategy of visualization and fiction-making which itself combines precept and example. In his metaphorical architectonics, poetry is poised between philosophy and history, between precept and example. But if poetic imitation is also, as Sidney has argued, at the same time both a mediation and a reflection, it may also prove to be unstable in comparison to its more unambiguously defined neighbours. The poet's claims over his rivals are ultimately grounded in the superior pragmatic effect of his art. Nonetheless, neither poetry's historical priority nor its ability to improve on its models can fully insulate it from the encroaching effects of the contradictory pressures to which it is continually subjected. OQ

The Geography of Fairyland

The fields of poetry and history, to use Castelvetro's image, have (as he acknowledged) poorly defined boundaries. So too, as the example of The Republic suggests, do poetry and philosophy. The ambiguities which underwrite this metaphorical geography are echoed in The Faerie Queene in Spenser's representation of fairyland. But this claim prompts some

12 Architectonics of Imitation difficult questions. Where, after all, is fairyland? What is its relationship to Elizabeth's England, on the one hand, and the virtues tested in its landscape, on the other? And how is its geography implicated in the boundaries between poetry and history? The geography of fairyland is indeed mimetic, but it imitates the analogous relationship between poetry and its models, between (in Sidney's language) the golden and the brazen worlds.30 In doing so, it reproduces some of the elaborately figured boundaries which sixteenthcentury readers of Aristotle had so carefully put in place. It also points to the proximity of the poetic and the definition of these contending spheres. But if Spenser's geography is, in fact, mimetic, there appears to be an important paradox at the very centre of 'this delightfull land of Faery' (VI.Proem.1). As early as Coleridge, critics have observed that The Faerie Queene is detached from the specifics of place and time. Its geography is particularly striking: in comparison to The Aeneid, its most important classical model, or to such other examples of the Renaissance epic as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso or Camoens's Lusiads, Spenser's poem contains few references to places outside its fiction. To be sure, this aspect of fairyland points to the poem's indebtedness to the similarly unspecified geography of medieval vernacular romance. However, it is also contraposed to a much more sharply delineated history and geography in a manner which foregrounds the implications of these differences. The most influential formulation of the relationship between fairyland and Spenser's world was put forward by Coleridge who, in a lecture delivered in 1819, referred to The marvellous independence or true imaginative absence of all particular place & time - it is neither in the domains of History or Geography, is ignorant of all artificial boundary - truly in the Land of Faery - i.e. in mental space ...31

Coleridge's argument should be read in relation to his claims for the priority of the symbol over allegory. In effect, he wishes to save The Faerie Queene from its own allegory by aligning it with the transcendental attributes of the symbol. This account of fairyland brings it closer to the symbol by emphasizing its suppression of 'artificial boundary.' In particular, Coleridge seeks to heighten the poem's distance from 'narrative allegory,' whose meanings he compared to snakes, which 'come out of their Holes into open view at the sound of sweet music, while the

The Landscape of Allegory 13 allegoric meaning slinks off at the very first notes ,..'32 But this psychological interpretation of fairyland is implicitly contraposed by Coleridge to another almost antithetical interpretation of the 'world' of the poem: Nationality, eminent in Spenser: tho' a common characteristic of our elder poets. - To glorify their country - this was the great Object ... Illustrated in Spenser's Chronicle of British Kings ... and the marriage of the Thames to the Medway ...33

If the earlier reading removed fairyland from the coordinates of temporality and spatiality and endowed it with psychological coherence, this interpretation attaches it to the particularities of British history with comparable insistence. This apparent contradiction is striking; all the more so when it so forcefully reproduces the division between precept and example which Sidney had employed when distinguishing philosophy and history from poetry. In effect, for Coleridge, fairyland occcupies the position assigned to poetry by Sidney, a site of contradictory demands and unstable borders. The antinomies of Coleridge's reading of The Faerie Queene resurface in later critical discussion of the poem. His mental recasting of fairyland prefigures, for example, both the psychological approach to the poem for which Harry Berger's work provides the most striking examples, and Graham Hough's discussion in his Preface to The Faerie Queene of Spenser's allegory in relation to Freud's account of the dream-work, an argument which prefigures the claims of many subsequent psychoanalytic readings.34 Coleridge's emphasis on fairyland's historical specificity, on the other hand, anticipates many of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attempts to read into the poem an elaborately contrived 'historical allegory,' a body of critical work now only rarely resurrected from the appendices of the Variorum edition. What has been less frequently noted is that a set of comparable antinomies are put into play in Spenser's Proem to Book II, which offers his most sustained meditation on the status of fairyland, and which, moreover, directly engages the problem of its geographical coordinates. Here, the two contradictory sets of claims are implied by the images of the mirror and the veil, images which, of course, point to the inescapable link between these questions and the theory of allegory.35 In his proems, Spenser attempts to negotiate the relationship between his poem and its readers. Their densely allusive rhetoric sets in

14 Architectonics of Imitation place a series of precedents and contexts which operate liminally, drawing the reader into the poem, and offering instruction in its interpretation. The relationship between poet and reader is represented in the proems as an exchange between the persona of the epic poet ('the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, / As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,' according to I.Proem. 1) and his patron. Its language is shaped by the memory of Virgil and Maecenas, a precedent central to the Renaissance epic. In The Faerie Queene, however, the patron whose presence is cited, and whose reading of the poem is guided is, of course, Elizabeth. She is posited, as many critics have noted, as the ideal reader of the poem.36 This relationship has significant consequences for the poem's reader: in effect, 'he' (for so Spenser will identify him) enters the 'world' of the poem through a succession of elaborately articulated fictions of its writing and reading, fictions which put into place the personae of poet and patron as figures for the author and his reader. In the Proem to Book II, the geography of fairyland functions metaphorically, as a vehicle through which the poet explores the nature of this fiction. The first stanza incorporates a relatively straightforward opposition between the truth or falsehood of his fiction, which is figured in the contrast between 'iust memory' and forgery: Right well I wote most mighty Soueraine, That all this famous antique history Of some th'aboundance of an idle braine Will iudged be, and painted forgery, Rather then matter of iust memory ...

(II.Proem.1)

The poem's critics (like Sidney's '/ULLO-O/JLOVO-OL, poet-haters'), react to its fiction in a simple manner, dismissing it as mere lies. The inadequacy of this response is suggested by identifying this critique of fiction with a naive ignorance of fairyland's location: Sith none, that breatheth liuing aire, does know, Where is that happy land of Faery, Which I so much do vaunt, yet no where show, But vouch antiquities, which no body can know.

(II.Proem. 1)

The subsequent stanza develops this response, contraposing the poem's unsophisticated critic to 'that man with better sence' (II.Proem.2), and ironically aligning fairyland with the newly discovered Americas in a

The Landscape of Allegory 15 manner which reverses the earlier metaphor, by transforming this more literal geography into a text whose existence is 'red': Who euer heard of th'Indian Peru? Or who in venturous vessell measured The Amazons huge riuer now found trew? Or fruitfullest Virginia who did euer vew?38

(II.Proem.2)

The interpretative confusion of the 'witlesse man,' who 'so much misweene / That nothing is, but that which he hath scene' (II.Proem.3) is answered by Spenser's appeal to a geography which has 'from wisest ages hidden beene' (II.Proem.3). The force of this response is magnified by the speaker's subsequent citation of a cosmography whose existence might likewise also be concealed: What if within the Moones faire shining spheare? What if in euery other starre vnseene Of other worldes he happily should heare? He wonder would much more: yet such to some appeare.

(II.Proem.3)

Are there, however, other alternatives to this interpretative paradigm, which offers only a choice between truth and falsehood, and whose hermeneutical strategy is figured by the stark opposition between concealment and discovery? In the fourth stanza, Spenser offers a more complex model of interpretation. The figure of the more adept reader, 'that man with better sence,' reemerges in this passage, newly equipped, it seems, with a more sophisticated grasp of the techniques of allegorical exegesis: Of Faerie lond yet if he more inquire, By certaine signes here set in sundry place He may it find; ne let him then admire, But yield his sence to be too blunt and bace, That no'te without an hound fine footing trace.

(II.Proem.4)

Spenser redefines the search for fairyland, suggesting that its existence is to be glimpsed more obliquely, through the appropriate interpretation of signs. This new procedure is a metaphor for a more complex relationship between fiction and its models than had been implied in the earlier attempt to match the fiction to its corresponding referents.

16 Architectonics of Imitation But this interpretative paradigm had also been announced proleptically, in 'certaine signes' which the speaker deployed in the previous stanzas. The naming of 'fruitfullest Virginiain the imperial geography of stanza 2 and the allusion to 'the Moones faire shining spheare' in stanza 3 ought to be read in these terms, as citations of the political mythology which surrounded Elizabeth, who will be identified as the poem's most skilled reader later in this stanza.39 The fourth stanza very explicitly develops the contrast between two readers, the hunter whose 'blunt and bace' sense often requires the assistance of a hound in order to follow the carefully disguised trail, and the idealized reader, herself figured elsewhere in the poem as a huntress, but here contrasted to the man whose eyes are turned earthward: And thou, O fairest Princesse vnder sky, In this faire mirrhour maist behold thy face, And thine owne realmes in lond of Faery, And in this antique Image thy great auncestry.

(II.Proem.4)

For the man who stands for Spenser's reader, the interpretation of allegory is a complex process; the poem's ideal reader has much more direct access to its world - she sees herself reflected in its fiction. On this idealized plane, to which Frye alludes in his description of fairyland as the 'world of realized human nature,' meaning is less attenuated and difficult.40 The contrast between the 'certaine signes' which the reader must interpret and the reflections in the mirror could hardly be less ambiguous: for Elizabeth, signs correspond to their referents, a semiotic relationship signified by the certainty with which her filiations with fairyland are enumerated. For Elizabeth, the poem's fiction is a reflection in a mirror. For the reader, however, these images are presented in another, less immediately accessible form: In couert vele, and wrap in shadowes light, That feeble eyes your glory may behold, Which else could not endure those beames bright, But would be dazled with exceeding light.

(II.Proem.5)

This opposition between the mirror and the veil is deeply embedded in the history of allegory and allegorical interpretation, with consequences I shall explore in subsequent chapters. As I shall argue, the opposition is

The Landscape of Allegory 17 closely associated with a division in Renaissance attitudes towards imitation and towards allegory, a division which Spenser employs in The Faerie Queene with considerable resonance. But the meaning of the images in this passage is peculiarly doubled; although they allude to the interpretative acts performed by the poem's ideal and its less qualified readers, they can also be loosely aligned with the tripartite relationship between poetry on the one hand, and philosophy and history on the other, whose effects I discussed in my reading of Sidney's Defence. In this latter form, each represents one of the artes which flank poetry: the mirror, the particulars of historical fact, and the veil, the often obscure precepts of philosophical discourse. But the terms of this scheme have been subtly transformed. Poetic imitation occupied, for Sidney, a contested position, in spite of his forceful claims for its superior pragmatic effect. Here, though, poetry asserts emphatically its priority. The ineluctably verbal existence of the example and the precept has been (to invoke another important Renaissance metaphor for the poet's activity) alchemically transmuted into the visual images of mirror and veil, images which in turn incorporate both into the field of the poetic. This is, of course, a crucial dimension of the meaning and the geography of Spenser's fairyland. It is less a place than (to cite Heidegger's metaphor) a site - the site of mimetic activity itself, where the materials of the poetic are transformed into images which purify and exceed their models.41 'The Vision Thing': Renaissance Allegory and Its Readers

As this reading of the Proem to Book II implies, questions of allegory and its strategies are explicitly at issue in The Faerie Queene. Nonetheless, Spenser's modern readers are sometimes handicapped by understandings of allegory which are too distant from Renaissance uses of the concept. In some cases, this distance is a product of their overreliance on late classical or medieval definitions and procedures.42 More often, however, the difficulties arise because of their acceptance of modern definitions, which both significantly narrow allegory's scope and misrepresent its characteristic techniques. In this discussion, I intend to emphasize both the distinctiveness and the complex history of Renaissance theories of allegory in order to ground my subsequent discussion of TheFaerie Queene in a more sharply defined sense of the resources at Spenser's disposal. Allegory disturbs the certainty of some of the most important distinctions in critical discourse. It stands in a profoundly ambiguous relation-

18 Architectonics of Imitation ship both to interpretation and to imitation. The divisions between allegory and its interpretation, and between model and imitation, are often very unstable, particularly with reference to the Renaissance epic and to its subtle manipulation of theories of imitatio. There are several reasons for these ambiguities. One is a function of the proximity of allegory to interpretation. As Frye observed, 'all commentary, or the relating of the events of a narrative to conceptual terminology, is in one sense allegorical interpretation.'43 This unsettling closeness means that allegory has the quality of calling into question the metaphors through which textuality is represented. Thus, it unsettles the coherence of spatial metaphors of the inside and the outside and the surface and depth of the text, as well as the corporeal metaphors with which these are often closely associated. And, equally significantly, allegory is almost inevitably discussed in a language which is itself profoundly indebted to its procedures, even to its most characteristic narrative paradigms. Snakes and Ladders

Other reasons for the problematic status of allegory in discussions of Renaissance texts are more historically circumscribed. One example can illustrate some of these issues. The Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger takes up the question of allegory when he comments on the phrase 'Quae sunt per allegoriam dicta' in Galatians 4:24.44 Beginning with the 'Grammatici,' he first cites the rhetorical definition of allegory as 'perpetuam ... metaphoram,' and then refers to Quiritilian's claim that it 'aut aliud verbis aliud sensu ostendit aut etiam interim contrarium.'45 Bullinger next directs the reader to Jerome and to Augustine's De doctrina Christiana and De Trinitate. However, he notes that the definition he considers 'omnium appositissime' is found in the Life of Homer he ascribes to Plutarch: 'Allegoria est ait, qua per alterum aliud' ('Allegory is a case in which one thing is said through another'). He goes on to speak of its 'peculiar force' ('peculiare[m] ... uim'): 'non dicere modo sed hypotyposi uideatur rem oculis objicere ... per typum & figuram alterius rei' ('It seems that [the writer] not only says it but puts it before [the reader's] eyes by means of "hypotyposis" ... through the type and figure of another thing'). Bullinger's explanation illustrates the syncretic approach which was often characteristic of sixteenth-century writers. He relies extensively on classical and patristic sources. There are no allusions, however, to later medieval exegetical authorities, or to the doctrine of'levels' of allegori-

The Landscape of Allegory 19 cal meaning.46 But the materials he does draw on are subject to subtle inflections. The most crucial element of allegory's 'peculiar force' is its visual impact. This effect is defined by the term 'hypotyposis,' derived from Quintilian's discussion of 'ocular demonstration' (IX.ii.40) and associated by him with the visual aims of enargeia. Bullinger relates this rhetorical technique of visualization to the traditions of Biblical exegesis, however, by aligning its effects with the concept of the type ('typus') in a manner which returns that term to its original visual signification.47 In spite of the persistence of classical and medieval definitions, the significance of allegory in the sixteenth century differed, in certain respects quite fundamentally, from its role in earlier periods, most obviously in the significance attached to it in Protestant biblical exegesis.48 Several influential recent studies have emphasized the decline in the significance of allegory over the course of the sixteenth century. These claims are based on evidence of a heightened emphasis on the literal meaning of the text in Protestant hermeneutics, and a commitment to historicist models of intepretation among humanists.4 Developments in these fields had significant consequences for contemporary conceptions of allegory, to be sure, but with results which were neither fully predictable nor necessarily suggestive of its diminished scope. In fact, the sixteenth century witnessed a proliferation of theories of allegorical meaning and interpretation, based in some cases on the recovery of texts from antiquity and in others on the cultural syncretism which Bullinger's definition exemplies. Walter Benjamin recognized both aspects of this expansion of allegory's range in his account of the baroque Trauerspiel.50 His conception of 'the modern allegory which arose in the sixteenth century' emphasizes the importance of 'the allegorical exegesis of Egyptian hieroglyphs.'51 He goes on, however, to stress that 'Egyptian, Greek, Christian pictorial languages became intertwined,' particularly in the emblem tradition.52 Other later readers, however, have frequently approached Renaissance allegory with concepts derived from Romantic and post-Romantic literary theory. '[H]ad not allegory spoiled Edmund Spenser?' asked Yeats, recalling his own literary preferences when he was thirty.5 True, few of Spenser's modern readers would entirely concede this point. Nonetheless, the impact of modern misunderstandings of Renaissance allegory can be seen even in the work of some of Spenser's best later readers, who have often sought to rescue his allegory from its devaluation at the hands of critics influenced by the Romantic opposition between allegory and symbol. In the English Romantic tradition, here

20 Architectonics of Imitation too Coleridge provides the locus classicus of this distinction, in The Statesman's Manual. He defines allegory as 'a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses.'34 Posed in these terms, the opposition between the two is not entirely clear-cut, particularly in light of Coleridge's claim that the symbol 'always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.'55 In spite of his attempt to assert the priority of the symbol, allegory remains in fact the privileged term in the opposition, if only because the symbol is described in language which is itself so proximate to allegory and dependent on the figure or prosopopoeia. Nonetheless, the impact of the Romantic depreciation of allegory has been enormous. Moreover, many of Spenser's readers have accepted much of the force of the criticism, by arguing either that his allegory can be disregarded or that it more closely corresponds to the symbol, as defined either by Coleridge or by others whose arguments are similarly posed. Hazlitt's defence of The Faerie Queene in his Lectures on the English Poets (1818) evokes a rhetoric which (in this respect like Coleridge's) is itself allegorical, in order to argue that the allegory is of little consequence: ,,

.

Fif)

But some people will say ... that they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them: they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a pike-staff.57 In recent decades, some of Spenser's readers have tried to retrieve his allegory even while conceding the opposition between allegory and symbol. These arguments characteristically attempt to undermine the force of Coleridge's critique by denying that Spenser's allegory entails a movement from the 'phantom proxies' of his fiction to the 'principal' which lies beneath.58 The terms of this retrieval ought to be examined carefully. Most post-Romantic discussions of The Faerie Queene in fact continue to conceive the poem's meaning through spatial metaphors. These readings differ from those of the poem's Romantic critics, however, in locating its meaning on the poem's 'surface,' instead of beneath this immediately accessible level.

The Landscape of Allegory 21 This reorientation has often been salutary in compelling closer attention to the verbal textures of the text. Nevertheless, it has had some unfortunate consequences. This approach to the poem has often reinforced the occlusion of history from Spenser's allegory on the grounds that the reader should not be forced to seek the poem's meaning 'beneath' its surface.59 Moreover, some readers have accepted too uncritically the metaphors of textual surface and depth upon which this approach is predicated. In effect, these interpretations have also conceded too much to the Romantic critique. According to one influential set of metaphors, allegory hides the truth underneath its surface; for another, allegory proceeds by indirection and circuity. In the former case, a spatially conceived (and often singular) act of extraction is privileged; in the latter, the temporally articulated process of errancy. Coleridge's attack on allegory, which emphasizes its static quality, seems to apply more convincingly to the former. This apparent opposition between a unique act and a more temporally complex process is often at the heart of modern rehabilitations of Spenser's technique, particularly those which seek to bring his allegory closer to the understanding of the symbolic inspired by Romanticism. ° Adherents of this position argue, in effect, that The Faerie Queene is not susceptible to criticism on these grounds because the poem's allegory is of this latter, more complex, form. Nonetheless, the spatial metaphor and its implications should not be discarded too quickly. It seems to have underpinned at least one important theory of allegory in antiquity.61 In his essay 'How the Young Man Should Study Poetry,' Plutarch states that 'aAXrjyopia' replaced the older term 'VTTOVOIOC,'which has the literal sense of 'the meaning underneath another.'62 Moreover, Renaissance discussions of allegory continually invoke similar metaphors of uncovering or extraction. ' Erasmus's adage 'Sileni Alcibiadis,' his reflection on Alcibiades' comparison in the Symposium of Socrates to the Silenus figures, provides an example of the persistence of this imagery, as does Rabelais's 'Prologe de 1'auteur' to Gargantua, with its demand that his reader 'rompre 1'os et sugcer la substantificque mouelle.' The temptation to see temporal metaphors as merely more complex and subtle replacements for spatially oriented conceptions of allegorical meaning ought to be questioned. This practice has the effect, I shall argue later, of distorting the complex implication of spatiality and temporality in the architectonics of the allegorical epic. But temporality may also play a fundamental role in the elaboration of allegorical meanC