Renaissance psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare 9781526109194

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This book will be of interest to students and lecturers in Spenser studies, Renaissance poetry and the wider fields of British literature, social and cultural history, ethics and theology. Robert Lanier Reid is H. C. Stuart Professor Emeritus of English at Emory and Henry College

ISBN 978-1-5261-0917-0

9 781526 109170 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

REID

Individual chapters in this book address how the poets’ contrary artistry produced strikingly different results, of a ‘fairy queen’, of humour-based passions (notably the primal passion of self-love), of intellect (divergent modes of temptation and moral resolution), of immortal soul and spirit, of holistic plot design, of readiness for final judgement. Renaissance psychologies argues that though some see Spenser’s art – its psychology, social ideal, and metaphysical vision – as regressively antiquated, it actually provides an ongoing complement to Shakespeare’s ‘early modern’ creation, which achieved much of its greatness through revisionary integration of Spenser’s oracular work.

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Spenser’s Christian-Platonic emphasis prioritises the soul’s divine order, dogmatically and encyclopaedically conceived. He looks to the past, collating classical and medieval authorities in memory-devices like the figurative house, nobly ordered in mystic numerical hierarchy to reform the ruins of time. Shakespeare’s sophisticated Aristotelianism prioritises the body’s immediate experience, with no stable form for its quirky sensations, feelings and thoughts, all subjected to sceptical consciousness. He points to the future, using the witty ironies of popular stage productions to test and deconstruct authority in passional crises that disrupt identity, opening the unconscious to psychoanalysis.

Renaissance psychologies

Nosce teipsum, to ‘know oneself ’: Spenser and Shakespeare both answered this dictum with a comprehensive view of human nature, an epic scope. Yet their characters and plots sprung from radically distinct psychologies. Renaissance psychologies explores this polarity, questioning how we explain these distinct but equally useful concepts and how they are related.

Renaissance psychologies Spenser and Shakespeare

ROB E RT L A N I E R R E I D

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Renaissance psychologies Spenser and Shakespeare

st

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The Manchester Spenser is a monograph and text series devoted to historical and textual approaches to Edmund Spenser – to his life, times, places, works and ­contemporaries. A growing body of work in Spenser and Renaissance studies, fresh with confidence and curiosity and based on solid historical research, is being written in response to a general sense that our ability to interpret texts is becoming limited without the ­excavation of further knowledge. So the importance of research in nearby disciplines is quickly being recognised, and interest renewed: history, archaeology, religious or theological history, book history, translation, lexicography, commentary and glossary – these require ­treatment for and by students of Spenser. The Manchester Spenser, to feed, foster and build on these refreshed attitudes, aims to publish reference tools, critical, historical, biographical and archaeological monographs on or related to Spenser, from several disciplines, and to publish editions of primary sources and classroom texts of a more wide-ranging scope. The Manchester Spenser consists of work with stamina, high standards of ­scholarship and research, adroit handling of evidence, rigour of argument, exposition and  ­documentation. The series will encourage and assist research into, and develop the readership of, one  of the richest and most complex writers of the early modern period. General Editor  J.B. Lethbridge Associate General Editor  Joshua Reid Editorial Board Helen Cooper, Thomas Herron, James C. Nohrnberg & Brian Vickers Also available Literary Ralegh and visual Ralegh  Christopher M. Armitage (ed.) A Concordance to the Rhymes of The Faerie Queene  Richard Danson Brown & J. B. Lethbridge A Supplement of the Faery Queene: By Ralph Knevet  Christopher Burlinson & Andrew Zurcher (eds) Pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance: An anthology  Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.) Spenserian allegory and Elizabethan biblical exegesis: A context for The Faerie Queene Margaret Christian Monsters and the poetic imagination in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: ‘Most  ugly shapes and horrible aspects’  Maik Goth Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos  Jane Grogan (ed.) Castles and Colonists: An archaeology of Elizabethan Ireland  Eric Klingelhofer Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive opposites  J.B. Lethbridge (ed.) A Fig for Fortune: By Anthony Copley  Susannah Brietz Monta Spenser and Virgil: The pastoral poems  Syrithe Pugh The Burley Manuscript  Peter Redford (ed.) Renaissance erotic romance: Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance translation and English literary politics  Victor Skretkowicz God’s only daughter: Spenser’s Una as the invisible Church  Kathryn Walls

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Renaissance psychologies Spenser and Shakespeare

•

ROBERT LANIER REID

Manchester University Press

All editorial matter © Robert Reid 2017 The right of Robert Reid to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 1 5261 0917 0  hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or thirdparty internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Minion by Koinonia, Manchester

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to Suzanne

and to bright memories of Nancy Lanier Reid Ralph Connor Reid, Sr.

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Contents

page viii ix xi

List of figures and tables Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction

1 Part I  Anatomy of human nature

1 The charismatic queen and the centrality of self-love

11

2 Depicting passion

77

3 Depicting intellect: ‘Experience, though noon auctoritee’

122

4 Depicting soul and spirit: Spenser and Shakespeare

162

Part II  Holistic design 5 Hierarchic architecture in The Faerie Queene

179

6 Shakespeare’s plays as passional cycles: revealing the unconscious in chiastic symmetry

239

7 End-songs: final vistas of Spenser and Shakespeare

282

Epilogue

339

General index Index of themes and symbols

343 350

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Figures and tables

Figures 1 The temperaments as intersecting polarities (1) page 86 2 The temperaments as intersecting polarities (2) 97 3 ‘The Melancholy Man. Restat adhuc tristis Choleræ substantia nigra/ Quæ reddit pravos pertristes, pauca loquentes.’ From The School of Salernum (rpt 1920). 99 4 ‘The Choleric Man. Est humor Choleræ qui competit impetuosis’ (School of Salernum) 101 5 ‘The Phlegmatic Man. Otia non studio tradunt, sed corpora somno’ (School of Salernum) 103 6 ‘The Sanguine Man. Hoc Venus et Bacchus delectant fercula, risus’ (School of Salernum) 106 Tables 1 The four temperaments 2 Spenser’s ordered virtues, Books 1–6 3 Spenser’s ordered virtues, Books 7–12

86 288 288

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Acknowledgements

Examining the holistic design of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and contrasting Shakespeare’s complementary artistry is exhilarating and exhausting. My debt to the English faculties at Yale University and the University of Virginia is unspeakably large, especially the encouragement of Louis Martz, Arthur Kirsch, and my beloved dissertation director, the gentle Robert Kellogg. Letters of support and reaction to parts of my work were generously given by David Bevington, Ronald Horton, Mark Taylor, Judith Anderson, John Shawcross, Kent Cartwright, Darryl Gless, Anne Prescott, George Walton Williams, John Wall, and Leigh DeNeef. Also exceedingly important was permission to xerox the treasury of materials at Yale’s Medical Library, advice from Robert Denham (Northrop Frye’s alter-ego), participating in the Spenser Encyclopedia project, conversing with James Nohrnberg, and finding the volcanic editor, J.B. Lethbridge. This book grew fitfully during forty years of teaching in the mountains of south-west Virginia, especially at Emory & Henry College, where esteemed colleagues (John Lang, Robert Denham, Dan Leidig, Felicia Mitchell, Kathleen Chamberlain, Scott Boltwood, Caroline Norris) improved my teaching, research, and sanity. Every student was a blessing, though some resisted learning, and a few were special, like the commuter from 80 miles in the coal fields who avidly read and discussed twice what was assigned. Much support came from annual meetings of the Medieval-Renaissance Conference at the University of Virginia at Wise and the Southeastern Renaissance Conference: each chapter grew in those forums, always gaining attentive feedback. For financial support enabling my research I am grateful for many grants from NEH, the James Still foundation at University of Kentucky, the Appalachian College Association, the National Humanities Foundation at University of Virginia, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am also deeply grateful to many journals and university presses for permission to reprint in revised form the following essays: part of Chapter 1 from The Upstart Crow 13 (1993), 16–32; part of Chapter 1 from Shakespeare’s Christianity, ed. B. Batson (Baylor University Press, 2006); parts of Chapters 2, 6, and 7 from Comparative Drama 30:4 (1996–97), 471–502; 32:4 (1998–99), 518–40; 41:4 (2007–8), 493–513; part of Chapter 3 from the Journal of English and Germanic

x

Acknowledgements

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Philology 80:4 (October 1981), 512–27; parts of Chapters 4 and 6 from Shakespeare’s Tragic Form (University of Delaware Press, 2000), 69–108, 111–44; part of Chapter 5 from Studies in Philology 79:4 (1981), 370–90; part of Chapter 5 from Modern Philology 79:4 (1982), 359–75 (© 1982 by the University of Chicago); and parts of Chapters 6 and 7 from Renaissance Papers (1991, 1996, 2012). Deepest appreciation is owed to the muses at home: Jenny, Thea, and Robbie; Tristan, Ellen, Samson, and Alex; and my most vigilant reader and caretaker, Suzanne, who challenges imagination and makes all things possible.

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Abbreviations

ABR AI CahiersE C&L CE CL CLAJ CompD DNB EETS EIC ELH ELR ES FQ Freud

American Benedictine Review American Imago Cahiers Elisabéthains Christianity and Literature College English Comparative Literature College Language Association Journal Comparative Drama Dictionary of National Biography Early English Text Society Essays in Criticism English Literary History English Literary Renaissance English Studies The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959-74), 24 vols Geneva The Geneva Bible, facsimile of the 1560 ed. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly HTR Harvard Theological Review IJP International Journal of Psychoanalysis JAPA Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JMRS Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies JWCI Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes L&P Literature and Psychology McGinn B. McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, 7 vols (New York: Crossroads, 1990–) MLN Modern Language Notes MLQ Modern Language Quarterly

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xii

Abbreviations

MLR MP NLH NM N&Q OED PMLA PQ PsyQ PsyR PSOC RenD RenP RenQ RES SAB SAQ SAR SE

Modern Language Review Modern Philology New Literary History Neuphilologische Mitteilungen Notes and Queries Oxford English Dictionary Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Philological Quarterly Psychoanalytic Quarterly Psychoanalytic Review Psychoanalytic Study of the Child Renaissance Drama Renaissance Papers Renaissance Quarterly Review of English Studies Shakespeare Association Bulletin South Atlantic Quarterly South Atlantic Review The Spenser Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., ed. A.C. Hamilton, Donald Cheney, et al. (University of Toronto Press, 1997) SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 ShS Shakespeare Survey ShakJ Shakespeare Jahrbuch ShakS Shakespeare Studies SN Studia Neophilologica SP Studies in Philology Spec Speculum SQ Shakespeare Quarterly SR Sewanee Review SSt Spenser Studies ST The Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, rev. by Daniel J. Sullivan (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952) TSLL Texas Studies in Literature and Language UCrow The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal UTQ University of Toronto Quarterly Var Variorum Spenser Citations from Spenser’s works The Faerie Queene, 2nd ed., ed. A.C. Hamilton, with H. Yamashita, T. Suzuki, and S. Fukuda (Longman, 2007), unless otherwise noted The Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, Yale ed., ed. W. A. Oram, E. Bjorvand, R. Bond, T.H. Cain, A. Dunlop, and R. Schell (Yale University Press, 1989), unless otherwise noted

Abbreviations

xiii

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Spenser abbreviations Am Amoretti CCCHA Colin Clouts Come Home Again Epith Epithalamion FQ The Faerie Queene – cited in Hamilton’s 2007 rev. ed, unless otherwise noted FH The Fowre Hymnes – cited in Shorter Poems, Yale ed. of Oram et al., unless otherwise noted HL An Hymne in Honour of Love HHL An Hymne of Heavenly Love HB An Hymne in Honour of Beautie HHB An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie SC The Shepheardes Calender TM The Teares of the Muses Vewe A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland Citations from Shakespeare’s works Plays quoted from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, updated 7th ed. of David Bevington (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2013), unless otherwise noted. The Sonnets quoted from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. with Analytic Commentary by Stephen Booth (Yale University Press, 1977). Shakespeare abbreviations Comedies: Err, LLL, TGV, Tam, MND, MV, Ado, MWW, AYL, TN, AW, Meas, T&C Histories: 1H6, 2H6, 3H6, R3, KJ, R2, 1H4, 2H4, H5, H8 Tragedies: Titus, R&J, JC, Ham, Oth, Lear, Mac, Tim, A&C, Cor Romances: Per, Cym, WT, Tmp

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Introduction

All things from thence doe their first being fetch,   And borrow matter, whereof they are made,   Which whenas forme and feature it does ketch,   Becomes a body, and doth then inuade   The state of life, out of the grisly shade ….   For euery substaunce is conditioned   To change her hew, and sondry forms to don   Meet for her temper and complexion ….  Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 3.6.37 For of the soul the body form doth take; For soul is form, and doth the body make.  Spenser, An Hymn in Honour of Beauty, 132 unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.  Shakespeare, King Lear, 3.4.109

Many scholars have analysed the complex physiology and psychology used by Renaissance sages to gain self-knowledge, nosce teipsum. Among general studies one admires the accounts of Anderson,1 Baker,2 Bamborough,3 Barkan,4 Bullough,5 Cornelius,6 Harvey,7 Heninger,8 Hoeniger,9 Kocher,10 Lewis,11 Schoenfeldt,12 and Soellner.13 The rich field of humour-based passions is explored by Babb,14 Baskerville,15 Campbell,16 Carscallen,17 Draper,18 Filipczak,19 Lyons,20 Redwine,21 Reid,22 Riddell,23 Schafer,24 Schiesari,25 Shenk,26 Soellner,27 States,28 Temkin,29 Trevor,30 and Paster’s classics,31 and the intricacies of bodily spirits by Hankins,32 Harvey,33 and Verbeke.34 The paradoxes of passion are explored by Broaddus,35 Goldberg,36 Hieatt,37 Kirsch,38 Lewis,39 MacCary,40 Miller,41 Nohrnberg,42 Roche,43 Silberman,44 and Traub,45 and the enormous impact of self-love by Battenhouse,46 Bellamy,47 Fineman,48 Gregerson,49 O’Donovan,50 Reid,51 Robertson,52 Wiltenberg,53 and especially Zweig.54 Rivalling the insights on passion are those on thinking: Brentano,55 Berger,56 Carruthers,57 Cavell,58 Crane,59 Jorgensen,60 Klubertanz,61 Reid,62 Soellner,63 Yates,64 and notably Nuttall.65 The inner wits are ably explained by Harvey66 and Wolfson.67 A culminating aspect of Renaissance psychology is soul and spirit. Often

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2

Introduction

ignored by modern critics, the transcendent essence of human nature is a central concern for Burton,68 Frye,69 Kraye,70 Lottin,71 Reid,72 and West.73 Access to mystic thinking, epiphany, and cognitive-affective union is evaluated by Anderson,74 Collins,75 Felperin,76 Frye,77 Hunter,78 Kermode,79 Kirk,80 Knight,81 Martz,82 Reid,83 and McGinn’s encyclopaedic survey.84 But despite this wealth of commentary (in a list far from complete), we do not find a holistic and consistent form of ‘Renaissance psychology’, for, especially as it influences poetic fictions, it appears in partly incompatible schemes, with each writer producing a distinct, often garbled version of its quirky features. Only writers capable of epic scope offer fictions that suggest a holistic psychology. Spenser and Shakespeare, the best poets of Elizabeth’s celebratory post-Armada decade, do give such a comprehensive view of human nature, yet their characters and plots spring from radically distinct psychologies. Spenser’s Christianized Platonism prioritizes the soul, his art striving to mirror divine Creation, dogmatically conceived. Spenser looks to the past, collating classical and medieval authorities within memory-devices such as the figurative house in order to reform the ruins of time. Shakespeare’s sophisticated Aristotelianism prioritizes the body, highlighting physical processes and dynamic feelings of immediate experience, and subjecting them to intense, skeptical consciousness. Shakespeare points to the future, using the witty ironies of popular stage productions to test and deconstruct prior authority, opening the unconscious to psychoanalysis. Spenser and Shakespeare do not simply emulate Plato and Aristotle, who served as catalysts for an immense intellectual evolution of contrary approaches to the embodied soul. The polarity of psychologies in Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s fictions is radical and profound, resembling the complementary theories of physics, which describes the structure of things either (like Spenser) in the neatly-contained form of particle theory, or (like Shakespeare) in the everchanging rhythmic cycles of wave theory. These concepts are equally useful, but how do we explain their difference, and how are they related? Part I: Anatomy of human nature Chapter 1: We wonder at Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s quite different depictions of Elizabeth I as a ‘fairy queen’. Spenser’s epic shows her as Gloriana, a mystic figure arousing her heroic elite to realize the twelve virtues, perfecting the soul in Godlikeness. Shakespeare’s comic stage-play also evokes a magnificent mythic queen but in an utterly different realm of ‘faerie’. His charismatic ‘Titania’ is directly experienced, her bodily splendour and witty combative speeches arousing sensual desire not just in elite heroes but in rude commoners who commandeer the play’s most engaging scenes. This amazing riposte to Spenser’s epic wondrously expanded Shakespeare’s own artistry. We equally wonder at their contrary views of self-love as a touchstone of human psychology. Spenser follows Calvin and Luther in discrediting self-love as shameful, whether in a vain monarch like Lucifera or a common ‘losel’ like Braggadocchio, causing Redcrosse Knight’s wretched fall and Guyon’s helpless faint.

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Introduction

3

In contrast, Shakespeare’s characters, great and small, show a positive form of self-love, if carefully managed. His evolving treatment of an admirable self-love follows an alternative tradition, springing from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Primaudaye. Neither poet fully solves the problem of self-love. Chapter 2: The poets also diverge in portraying the four elemental humours with their passional offshoots. The diverse humoralism of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson is missed by those scholars who assume consistency in Renaissance humoralism, who exaggerate its material causation, ignoring the role of human intellect and divine providence in managing the humours. Spenser controls the humours with the ancient mnemonic device of a figurative house, spiritualising passion in the House of Holiness, and moderating it in Alma’s Castle. ­Spenser’s view of humour-based passions (as of the body generally) is quite negative, needing stern moral guidance and Christlike rescue. Shakespeare’s quite different depiction of humoral passions appears in the Henriad’s main figures – melancholic Henry IV, choleric Hotspur, phlegmatic Falstaff, sanguine Hal. Unlike Spenser’s restrictive allegorical view of humour figures (fiery Pyrochles, watery Cymochles, airy Phaedria, earthy Mammon and Maleger), Shakespeare’s humour-types are spacious and flexible, all of them gifted with self-conscious speech, some capable of witty mimicry of the others. Moreover, Shakespeare’s view of humours and passions evolves greatly, becoming nuanced, changeable, and paradoxical in the tragedies and romances. Chapter 3: The polarity of Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s renderings of the psyche is equally apparent in depicting intellect. Alma’s stately tour of her bodily castle makes a striking contrast with Lear’s impassioned self-stripping – divesting himself of housing, clothing, and sanity as he feelingly identifies with a shivering fool and demon-haunted beggar on a stormy heath. Alma’s tour shows the hierarchic harmony of moving from the belly’s humoral energies to the heart’s passions, to the brain’s three ‘sages’ (inner wits) with their ‘allegory of prudence’. Shakespeare’s impassioned experiential thinking springs from jolting exposure to natural sensations, the drives of self-love, and the dynamics of enjoying or severing bonds – as shown in Lear’s saga and the energies of Juliet’s Nurse. The two poets’ contrary view of intellect is fully evident in depicting temptation. Spenser uses the intellectual hierarchy of the ‘triple temptation’ in hexameral accounts of the Edenic fall (a device so awkwardly used by Shakespeare in Macbeth, 4.3 that the scene is often cut). Spenser’s triple temptings are complicated by allusion to all the great temptations of epic poetry and by subtle ironic paradox in the temptations by Mammon (2.7) and by Acrasia (2.12). In striking contrast to Spenser’s objective and immensely intellectualized allegory of temptation is the riveting passional power and psychoanalytic complexity of Shakespeare’s great tempters (Richard III, Iago, Edmund) and self-tempters (Proteus, the Macbeths, Leontes). The poets’ divergent portrayal of intellect is also evident in the inverse development of their depictions of moral counsel. Each Spenserian protagonist is objectively educated by wise sages in order to realize his or her virtuous power, but that moral training becomes increasingly narrow and ineffective in the six

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Introduction

legends – from authoritative intellective counsellors in Books 1 and 2, to equivocal counselors in the passional realm of Books 3 and 4, to constrained and problematic counselors in the sensate realm of Books 5 and 6. (Would Spenser invert this development in the final six legends?) Shakespeare’s moral counselors also show radical development, but in reverse: from the farcical failure of parents and friars in the early plays (culminating in Polonius), to counsellors transformed by empathic suffering in the mature tragedies, to the romances’ artfully effective counsellors, notably Prospero. Chapter 4: The most comprehensive divergence of Spenserian and Shakespearean psychology concerns ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, the human essence made in God’s image. Spenser’s initial soul-maidens (Caelia and Alma) inhabit a house made with Christianity’s and then Plato’s ideal hierarchic forms. No such structure assists Shakespeare’s protagonists (Hamlet, Timon, Antony, Prospero) as they view their identity amid changeable clouds or (Juliet and Cleopatra) amid fancies of a noble but discredited beloved. In Shakespeare’s darkest play ‘soul’ nearly vanishes. Though Hamlet and Othello refer endlessly to their soul (the word appears forty times in each play), in King Lear the word appears only three times. Equally definitive is the poets’ contrary use of ‘spirit’. For Spenser it betokens transcendence (soul, supernatural spirits), only rarely referring to bodily spirits; but Shakespeare stresses its embodiment, staging the multilevel meanings of spirit as a continual warfare between bodily and heavenly referents: ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame …’ . Part II: Holistic design Building on this radical divergence in the two poets’ depictions of psychology, the final three chapters explain how Spenserian psychology shapes the holistic design of his epic, and how Shakespearean psychology shapes the mature dramaturgical form of Macbeth and King Lear. Chapter 5: A cornerstone in Spenser’s architectural epic is the hierarchic family (man, woman, child or servant), freighted with the patriarchal allegory of Adam and Eve’s fall, but transfigured by Christ and the Church. An exciting aspect of Spenser’s epic is its radical revision of this allegory. Even in the natural and fallen family (Mortdant, Amavia, Ruddymane) the man is most blamed while the woman lovingly seeks to cure him; and in the sanctified family of Book 1 (Redcrosse, Una, Dwarf) woman as the Church is fully exalted in struggling to reform her wretched male partner into a Christlike warrior. In Books 3–5 Spenser recasts Ariosto’s armed virago, endowing Britomart with a chaste prowess that defeats all males, liberating woman from male mastery and from self-induced suffering. The patriarchal building-block is thus drawn into currents of immense social change. Books 1 and 2 present an intellective allegory in complementary modes, one reforming higher reason (mens), the other reforming lower reason (ratio), both informed by Christian-Platonic tripartism. Besides the triadic family grouping at the outset of each legend, there are three progressive stages of sin or of temptation (the Sans-brothers in 1.1–6, Orgoglio-Despair-Dragon in 1.7–12; and in Book 2

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Introduction

5

the three stages of temptation in Mammon’s Cave and in Acrasia’s Bower). Most comprehensive is the three-level growth of holiness in the spiritual body (House of Holiness), and the three analogous levels of the natural body (Alma’s Castle). The goal of each legend is shown in a hierarchic three-part image of Eden. Books 3 and 4 present a passional allegory, again in the complementary modes of transcendence and immanence. Britomart enforces female ascendancy in both legends, not only by her skill with arms, enhanced by chaste integrity and a providential dynastic goal, but also by her indifference to the men’s competitive quest for supremacy through ‘merit’. Her identity is elaborated in three heroic women (Florimell, Belphoebe, Amoret) who as her subtypes exemplify the gifts of the Graces. In these legends the males who are the four women’s counterparts (Artegall, Marinell, Timias, Scudamour) are shown as defectively flawed, so that liberation and reunion are achieved by the women’s own prowess and endurance, aided by mothers and female deities. These legends include analogues for a female theology: quests to sustain virgin integrity and to marry, Incarnation by virgin birth, Trinitarian identity, epiphanic unveilings and transfigurations (with demonic parodies), and female endurance of a Passion. Books 5 and 6 present a sensate allegory, showing the need for virtuous power in the most material conditions of life. Both Gloriana and Arthur are exposed to literal material circumstances that render all decisions suspect and subject them to sad confusion. Spenser’s figuring allegory in Books 1–6 as an ontological descent is evident in the narrowing (ever-more-specific) identity of Duessa, of Timias, and of the satyrs (or salvages). Does this narrowing symbolism show Spenser’s growing despondency about Irish terrors, or is the allegorical descent (‘dilation’) in Books 1–6 a part of his holistic design, laying a basis for reversal in Books 7–12? Chapter 6: To assess the quite different holistic design of Shakespearean dramaturgy, we first observe his exploitation of ‘epiphany’ – the apprehension of a wondrous other. Unlike Spenser’s objective education of protagonists in an intellectualized house, Shakespeare subjects his protagonist to revolutionary inner change by an epiphanic encounter at the centre of each passional cycle. Each play forms a chiastic symmetry, beginning with a two-act cycle (in which Act 2 reacts to and completes Act 1) and ending with a two-act cycle (in which Act 5 completes the arc of Act 4); between these two large cycles is an intense one-act cycle, often with no known source. These transformative encounters recall five Biblical epiphanies of the wonder of Jesus: nativity, baptism, transfiguration, resurrection/ascension, crucifixion. Shakespeare achieves meaningful epiphany only gradually, for in early plays it is sensational, farcical, laughable or horrifying, but in the mature plays the epiphanies systematically illuminate the soul’s powers. In Macbeth the chiastic sequence neatly divides into three murders in which genuine epiphany is progressively occluded: killing the king centres the opening two-act cycle, killing his best friend centres Act 3, killing a mother and children centres the final two-act cycle. The three murders suggest a Freudian ‘repetition compulsion’, but unlike many critics who see the regicide as Oedipal and as the only important slaying, I read the three murders as progressive and psychically conjoined, diminishing the Macbeths as they travesty the three great psychic

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6

Introduction

cathexes of human development – from sublimation, to projection, to introjection – methodically annihilating all capacity for bonding. King Lear provides a complementary sequence of three shamings, again forming a chiastic 2–1–2 cycle of acts, but now paradoxically enforcing psychic recovery through stripping and through Lear’s epiphanal encounters with Goneril at the centre of Acts 1-2, Poor Tom at the centre of Act 3, and Cordelia at the centre of Acts 4–5. Chapter 7: Regarding Spenser’s holistic design, do the Mutabilitie Cantos conclude his epic or point to its final half, since they discredit the pagan gods’ authority, reform the titaness Mutabilitie (unlike the demonized titanomachias of Books 1–6), and show an inconclusive pastoral pageant on Arlo Hill? Spenser’s ordering of deadly sins (FQ 1.4), when compared with Dante’s pattern of sins, of purgations, and of ascensions in the Commedia, offers a vital clue to the format of The Faerie Queene – based on the principles of Christian-Platonic psychology we have surveyed. Much evidence suggests Elizabeth I would have admired a mystic structuring of this epic that so honours her. As for Shakespeare’s attentiveness to last things, we explore the theme of ‘summoning’ in Hamlet and King Lear, both concerned – as in The Summoning of Everyman – with ‘readiness’ and ’ripeness’ in the face of death and judgment. In The Tempest’s deft collocation of all social levels and artistic genres, and its odd convergence with Spenserian allegory, we debate the insistence on Shakespeare’s secularism by examining the range of meaning in Prospero’s ‘Art’. Notes  1 R. Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays (1927; rpt New York: Haskell House, 1964).  2 H. Baker, The Image of Man (1947; rpt New York: Barnes & Noble, 1952).  3 J.B. Bamborough, The Little World of Man (London: Longmans, Green, 1952).  4 L. Barkan, Nature’s World of Art (Yale University Press, 1975).  5 G. Bullough, Mirror of Minds (University of Toronto Press, 1962).  6 R. D. Cornelius, ‘The Figurative Castle’ (diss., Bryn Mawr, 1930).  7 E.R. Harvey, ‘Psychology’, SE.  8 S.K. Heninger, Jr, Touches of Sweet Harmony (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974).  9 F. D. Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (University of Delaware Press, 1992). 10 P. H. Kocher Science and Religion in Renaissance England (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1953). 11 C.S. Lewis The Discarded Image (Cambridge University Press, 1964). 12 M. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 13 R. Soellner, Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Ohio State University Press, 1972). 14 L. Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (Michigan State College Press, 1951). 15 C.R. Baskerville, English Elements in Jonson’s Early Comedy (1911; rpt New York: Gordian Press, 1967). 16 L. B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (Cambridge University Press, 1930). 17 J. Carscallen, ‘The Goodly Frame of Temperance: The Metaphor of Cosmos in The Faerie Queene, Book II’, UTQ 37 (1967–68) 136–55. 18 J.W. Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters (Duke University Press, 1945).

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Introduction

7

19 Z.Z. Filipczak, Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western European Art 1575–1700 (New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1997). 20 B.G. Lyons, Voices of Melancholy (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971). 21 J.D. Redwine, ‘Beyond Psychology: The Moral Basis of Jonson’s Theory of Humoral Characterization’, ELH 28 (1961) 316–34. 22 R.L. Reid, ‘Humoral Psychology in Shakespeare’s Henriad’, CompD 30 (1996–97) 471–502. 23 J.A. Riddell, ‘The Evolution of the Humours Character in 17th-Century English Comedy’ (diss., University of Southern California, 1966). 24 J. Schafer, Wort und Begriff ‘Humour’ in der Elisabethanischen Komödie (Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1966). 25 J. Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia (Cornell University Press, 1992). 26 R. Shenk, ‘The Habits of Ben Jonson’s Humours’, JMRS 8 (1978), 115–36. 27 R. Soellner, ‘The Four Primary Passions: A Renaissance Theory Reflected in the Works of Shakespeare’, SP 55 (1958), 549–67. 28 B.O. States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 29 O. Temkin, Galenism (Cornell University Press, 1973). 30 D. Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 31 G.K. Paster, The Body Embarrassed (Cornell University Press, 1993), Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and many other essays. 32 J.E. Hankins, Backgrounds of Shakespeare’s Thought (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1978), and Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). 33 E.R. Harvey, ‘Psychology’, SE. 34 G. Verbeke, L’évolution de la doctrine de pneuma du Stoicisme à S. Augustin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer; Louvain: Editions de l’Institut Superieur de Philosophie, 1945). 35 J.W. Broaddus, Spenser’s Allegory of Love (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995). 36 J. Goldberg, Endlesse Worke (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). 37 A.K. Hieatt, Chaucer Spenser Milton (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975). 38 A.Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge University Press, 1981). 39 C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford University Press, 1936). 40 W.T. MacCary, Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy (Columbia University Press, 1985). 41 D.L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1988). 42 J. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1976). 43 T.P. Roche, Jr, The Kindly Flame (Princeton University Press, 1964). 44 L. Silberman, Transforming Desire (University of California Press, 1995). 45 V. Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992). 46 R.A. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises (Indiana University Press, 1969). 47 E.J. Bellamy, Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Cornell University Press, 1992). 48 J. Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (University of California Press, 1982). 49 L. Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject (Cambridge University Press, 1995). 50 O. O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in Augustine (Yale University Press, 1980). 51 R.L. Reid, ‘The Problem of Self-Love in Renaissance and Reformation Theology’, Shakespeare’s Christianity, ed. B. Batson (Baylor University Press, 2006), 35–56. 52 D. Robertson ‘My Self / Before Me’: Self-Love in the Works of John Milton (University of Tampere Press, 1992). 53 R. Wiltenberg, Ben Jonson and Self-Love (University of Missouri Press, 1990). 54 P, Zweig, The Heresy of Self-Love (New York and London: Basic Books, 1968). 55 F. Brentano, The Psychology of Aristotle, in Particular His Doctrine of the Agent Intellect (1867; trans. R. George (University of California Press, 1977).

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Introduction

56 H. Berger, Jr, The Allegorical Temper (Yale University Press, 1958); ‘Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, ShakSt 5 (1967), 153–83; ‘Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene’, ELR 21 (1991), 3–48; and many others. 57 M. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Book of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2008). 58 S. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1987). 59 M.T. Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton University Press, 2001). 60 P.A. Jorgensen, Our Naked Frailties (University of California Press, 1971}; Lear’s Self-Discovery (University of California Press, 1967); and‘“Perplex’d in the Extreme”: The Role of Thought in Othello’, SQ 15 (1964), 265–75. 61 G. Klubertanz, The Discursive Power (Modern Schoolman, 1952). 62 R.L. Reid, Shakespeare’s Tragic Form (University of Delaware Press, 2000); ‘Alma’s Castle and the Symbolization of Reason in The Faerie Queene‘, JEGP 80 (1981), 512–27. 63 R. Soellner, Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Ohio State University Press, 1972). 64 F.A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). 65 A.D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), A New Mimesis (London: Methuen, 1983), Thinking with Shakespeare (Yale University Press, 2007). 66 E.R. Harvey, The Inward Wits (London: University of London, Warburg Institute, 1975). 67 H.A. Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophical Texts’, HTR 28 (1935), 107–13. 68 E.D. Burton, Spirit, Soul, and Flesh (University of Chicago Press, 1918). 69 N. Frye, Words with Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990). 70 J. Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, The Cambridge History of Philosophy, eds C.B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 303–86. 71 O. Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux xii et xiii siècles, 2 vols (Gembloux: J. Duclot, 1957). 72 R.L. Reid, ‘Soul’, SE. 73 R.H. West, The Invisible World: A Study of Pneumatology in Elizabethan Drama (1939; rpt New York: Octagon, 1969). 74 J. Anderson, The Growth of a Personal Voice: Piers Plowman and The Faerie Queene (Yale University Press, 1976). 75 J. Collins, Christian Mysticism in the Elizabethan Age (1940; rpt New York: Octagon, 1971). 76 H. Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton University Press, 1972). 77 N. Frye, Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, ed. R. Denham (University of Toronto Press, 2002). 78 R.G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (Columbia University Press, 1965). 79 F. Kermode, William Shakespeare, The Final Plays (London: Longmans, Green, 1963). 80 K.E. Kirk, The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum (1931; rpt New York: Harper, 1967). 81 G.W. Knight, The Crown of Life (1947; rpt New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966). 82 L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (Yale University Press, 1954). 83 R.L. Reid,‘Sansloy’s Double Meaning and the Mystic Design of Spenser’s Legend of Holiness’, SSt 29 (2014), 63–74. 84 B. McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, 7 vols, 5 completed (New York: Crossroad, 1991–2012).

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PART I

Anatomy of human nature

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1

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The charismatic queen and the centrality of self-love

England’s soul as a ‘fairy queen’: Gloriana or Titania? ‘I would preferre divine Master Spencer, the miracle of wit, to bandie line for line for my life, in the honor of England, gainst Spaine, France, Italie, and all the worlde.’ So boasts Nashe of his fellow-alumnus of Cambridge as The Faerie Queene appears in manuscript. Chaucer and Spenser are ‘the Homer and Virgil of England’; Spenser is ‘heavenly’, ‘immortal’.1 During 1590–96 Nashe’s estimate is often repeated: Raleigh, Churchyard, Harvey, Peacham, Daniel, Covell, Fitz­ geffrey, Harrington, Lodge canonize him among epic poets, stressing his learned ‘imitation of ancient speech’; Watson deifies him as ‘Apollo, whose sweet hunnie vaine / Amongst the Muses hath a chiefest place’; Edwards lauds his pre-eminence as England’s literary flag-bearer: In his power all do flourish, We are shepheards but in vaine, There is but one tooke the charge, By his toile we do nourish, And by him are inlargd.   He unlockt Albions glorie.2

In 1597–98, however, a mood of malcontented mockery is abroad, making Spenser seem prophetic in his preoccupation with fables of defamation in Books 4–6 of The Faerie Queene: Ate and Sclaunder in Book 4; Clarin, Malengin, Malfont, Envy, and Detraction in Book 5; Turpine, Despetto-Decetto-Defetto, Disdain, and the Blatant Beast in Book 6. Spenser ends by anticipating the beast’s assault on his own art: ‘Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest, / Hope to escape his venemous despite’ (FQ 6.12.41). Within a year Bishop Hall in ‘Tooth-lesse Satyrs’ (1597) records disdain for old-fashioned features of Spenserian epic: scoure the rusted swords of Elvish knights, Bathed in Pagan blood: or sheath them new In misty morral Types: or tell their fights, Who mighty Giants, or who Monsters slew. And by some strange inchanted speare and shield, Vanquisht their foe, and wan the doubtfull field.

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12

Anatomy of human nature

In ‘Satire 4’ Hall disavows any ridicule of the great poet – ‘But let no rebell Satyre    dare traduce / Th’ eternall Legends of thy Faery Muse, / Renowmed Spencer: whom no earthly wight / Dares once to emulate, much lesse dares despight’3 – but Hall’s clever jab and feint suggest that irreverent satyrs are indeed abroad. In Skialethia (1598) Edward Guilpin gingerly recalls debate over Spenser’s archaic language, ‘his grandam words’.4 Brushing tact and caution aside, John Marston in The Scourge of Villanie (1598) applies the satiric thongs unreservedly to those who ‘invoke good Colin Clout’, who feign depth through pretentious diction and seek authority by displacing ancient poets: Here’s one, to get an undeserv’d repute Of deepe deepe learning, all in fustian sute Of ill-placd farre-fetch’d words attiereth His period, that sence forsweareth. Another makes old Homer, Spencer cite.

When Marston belittles those claiming fairy-inspired visions, he cheapens the central trope of Spenser’s Tudor mythography: Another walks, is lazy, lies him down, Thinks, reads, at length some wonted sleep doth crown His new-falln lids, dreams; straight, ten pound to one Out steps some fairy with quick motion, And tells him wonders of some flow’ry vale; Awakes, straight rubs his eyes, and prints his tale.5

Then an Irish uprising in the winter of 1598–99 ends Spenser’s epic and his life, dispelling all satyrs. An outpouring of funereal praise from England’s liter­ati is summed up in Holland’s epigram: ‘Once God of Poets, now Poet of the Gods’.6 The cautious lampooning of Spenserian romance-epic in 1597–98, part of a fin-de-siѐcle vogue for satire, suggests fading confidence in those exalted myths which Queen Elizabeth had gathered about herself, as Montrose argues in his New Historicist critique, ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’.7 Yet a more specific cause of temporary impiety toward Spenser’s art can be found in the concurrence in 1595–96 of two major but antithetical literary events: one, the long-awaited publication of Books 4–6 of The Faerie Queene (registered 20 January 1596); the other, surely not anticipated, the opening performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.8 Shakespeare’s transfigured comic art Whether or not one agrees with Frank Kermode that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is ‘Shakespeare’s best comedy’,9 it definitively moves beyond the ‘apprentice comedies’ (The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost). What caused this creative burst in 1595–96,

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The charismatic queen

13

engendering not only a more expansive comic mode but also the deepening tragic vision of Romeo and Juliet and Richard II? In the circumstances of literary history and in the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, no influence is more evident than the looming shadow of Spenser – supreme consolidator of the mythos of ‘Gloriana’ and her ‘fairyland’ – currently at fame’s summit for his epic celebration of English culture and Elizabethan rule. The other notable precursor of Shakespeare’s mingling of fairies, courtiers, and rustics is of course Lyly with his ethereal conceit of a semi-divine queen fostering earthly love while remaining steadfastly out of reach.10 But Spenser’s grandiose allegorical treatment of the ‘fairy queen’ actualized the metaphor’s fullest potential, elevating it to the status of an imago Dei. This fictive majesty could awaken Lyly’s Endymion from narcissistic detachment to engage in heroic quests, and could provoke Shakespeare to parody Spenser’s grand vision. To some extent A Midsummer Night’s Dream builds on central themes of the previous comedies. Again romantic desire contends with a rival’s love and with self-love; again lovers become playthings of fantasy, unless they can control it through conscious play-acting; again confusions of identity raise doubts about the cohesiveness of the self which loves and is beloved. What makes the comic exploration of love, fantasy, and selfhood far more suggestive in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, first, an expansion of ontological scope, the parallel development of four levels of aberrant human desire, from the boisterous vulgarity of rustics to the enchanting sublimity of aristocratic fairies, envisioning love’s entanglements within a universal scale of being; and, second, a corresponding expansion of metaphor and fiction into mythic proportions. This comically destabilized Neoplatonic mode (to which Shakespeare finally returns, on a grand scale and in a serious vein, in The Tempest) is, in part, a reaction to Spenser’s ­Christian-Platonic purview of human love and identity, a consummate response to Spenser’s ­ expansive allegory that champions a spiritual transcendence.11 Indeed, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a manifesto of Shakespeare’s poetic art as antithetical to Spenser’s.12 What Shakespeare gleans from Spenser is not (as in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine) merely a sequence of plagiarized passages,13 though Shakespeare includes that flattery as well, for as van Kranendonk and Hammerle obser­­ved long ago, and as a recent Arden editor confirms, Spenserian influence (especially from The Shepheardes Calender) is pervasive in the diction and imagery of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, far more than in any other ­Shakespearian play.14 Camille Paglia argues that as early as 1592–94 Shakespeare responds aggressively to Spenser’s hieratic, learned, ‘Apollonian’ art – that in ‘Venus and Adonis’ he revises a central Spenserian myth into a less iconographic, more earthy and playful mode of erotic psychological probing, and that in Titus Andronicus he farcically literalizes Spenserian allegory.15 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, the rejoinder to Spenser is far more direct and thoroughgoing. Shakespeare appropriates, and adapts to his own

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Anatomy of human nature

purposes, the supernatural and mythic expanse of Spenser’s vision: the c­ onception of England as an Edenic utopia, vitalized and blessed with semi-divine fairy spirits.16 He adopts, at least in part, Spenser’s cosmic perspective on the human soul as a hierarchic ladder of life-forms that leads up to true Being. Above all, he usurps the lodestone metaphor, the ‘fairy queen’, which Spenser treats as a Christian-Platonic Form of forms: this ‘true glorious type’, ‘Mirrour of grace and majestie divine’ (FQ 1.4), serves as touchstone of spiritual reality, endlessly revealed in epiphanic visions to each questing knight. Shakespeare appropriates this exalted conceit, then transforms it: not Gloriana but Titania. Here we must pause to note, in Oberon’s mystic reminiscence of love’s origin (MND 2.1.148–68), Shakespeare’s cautionary flattery of Queen Elizabeth as ‘a fair vestal, throned by the west’, her beauty the cause of Cupid’s shot, herself immune to such pricking desires: she is the Unmoved Mover of Love. The topical ­suggestiveness of this enchanting passage17 is highly unusual (one wishes to say, highly unShakespearean): it is Shakespeare’s only direct and unsolicited flattery of Elizabeth during her lifetime:18 it augments the flattery by recalling the gala processions idolizing Elizabeth since the time of Leicester; and, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a whole, it adopts the Elizabethan idiom of grandiose ­myth-making and sublimating metaphor. All three characteristics show Shakespeare appropriating the Spenserian mode of poetry and royal flattery – not, however, as a means of affirming Spenser’s vision but as a means of transforming it to his own mode and idiom. Having with his lavish compliment diverted Elizabeth from identifying with the fairy queen (crucial to his strategy), Shakespeare can then proceed to the darkly joyous climax of his sublime burlesque, Titania’s love-affair with the bestial English Everyman: Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms …. So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle Gently entwist; the female ivy so Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. O how I love thee! How I dote on thee!

(4.1.39, 41–44)

Shakespeare’s fairy queen, quaintly parodying Elizabeth’s declarations of marriage to her subjects,19 consummates the unlikely match in crude but charming actuality. With what hilarity must the English audience of 1595–96 have reacted to Bottom’s encounter with this alternate fairy queen, neatly upstaging Spenser’s ‘dearest dread’.20 The playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania can hardly be claimed to have shifted the laurels from Spenser’s learned allegory to Shakespeare’s more broadly populist art. Nor is displacing Spenser the sole purpose of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which playfully celebrates the fantasies of English culture generally. But the occasional mockery of S­ penserian epic during 1597– 9821 must partly reflect the success of ­Shakespeare’s satiric strategy in this play

The charismatic queen

15

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– re-visioning the Fairy Queen, and redefining Poetry’s substance, audience, and purpose. Shakespeare’s grounding of the fairy allure Shakespeare’s burlesque unfolds subtly – at first sustaining, even heightening, the fairy queen’s grandeur. Titania’s attendant boasts of coursing through the entirety of elemental nature, and the opening lines of her chant actually replicate lines from the second instalment of The Faerie Queene (‘Through hils and dales, through bushes and through breres’, 6.8.32):22 Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough briar, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon’s sphere; And I serve the Fairy Queen, To dew her orbs upon the green. The cowslips tall her pensioners be, In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours. I must go seek some dew-drops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.

(2.1.2–15)

This introduction to fairy spirits, long acknowledged as an allusion to The Faerie Queene,23 at first seems to magnify Spenser’s purpose, the idealization of E ­ lizabeth and, through her dynamic spirit, of England. The fairy queen’s quasi-divine potency is heralded by her attendant’s swiftness and freedom of movement (selfmovement being the essential characteristic of spirit, both human and divine), and also by her benevolent influence on the natural order – gracing, beautifying, energizing it. That the fairies ‘hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear’ could allude to Elizabeth’s courtly favourites affecting earrings of pearl, her favorite gem, symbolic of virgin purity. If so, it caps the sequence of sublimating imagery by which the natural world is spiritualized through her influence: ‘dew’ signifying the infusion of grace; ‘orbs’, the perfecting of nature; ‘gold coats’, the refining of human nature; ‘rubies’, the passionate ‘spots’ or ‘freckles’ that give ‘savors’ to life; ‘pearl’, the purified soul that the queen presumably evokes in all her subjects, even those of ‘cowslip’ nature.24 Such, at least, are the more benevolent possibilities for associating Titania’s prowess with Gloriana’s. But one quickly anticipates the polar contrast between Shakespeare’s fairy queen and that of his predecessor. Spenser’s recondite Gloriana is associated with the transcendent reality of God, her beatific presence revealed in prophetic dream-visions to the heroically worthy, or mirrored in righteous earthly

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Anatomy of human nature

analogues (Una, Belphoebe, Britomart, Mercilla) whose veils and armour guard their moral purity and power. In The Faerie Queene’s chastened world, Gloriana’s bodily presence is only demurely intimated in the vestigial figure of ‘pressed gras, where she had lyen’ (FQ 1.11.15).25 If Spenser moralizes Ovid (and baptizes Plato), Shakespeare reverses the perspective, returning fairy spirits to Ovid’s carnal realm. Shakespeare’s Titania exults in the sensuous, mutable realities of an earthly moonlit forest. Her name derives from the Metamorphoses, where it designates a number of female deities descended from the Titans: Diana, Latona, Hecate, Circe, Pyrrha. Since the first three are goddesses of night, the epithet titania embraces ‘in one comprehensive symbol the whole female empire of mystery and night belonging to mythology’, rich and complex associations connected with the silver bow of Diana, the magic cup of Circe, the triple crown of Hecate. Oberon’s corresponding epithet, ‘King of Shadows’ (3.2.347), is Shakespeare’s translation of umbrarum dominus and umbrarum rex, Ovid’s names for Pluto, lord of the lower world.26 Instead of ­Gloriana’s transcendent nuances, the name ‘Titania’ epitomizes the earthy values and moral dubiety of Shakespeare’s fairy monarchs: spirit power motivated by titanic pride. As an immanent and elemental spirit,27 Titania engages joyfully in the dance of the elements, the sweet blendings of earth and air, tree and flower, finding in them (not in heavenly abstractions) her source of delight: ‘on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, / By paved fountain or by rushy brook / We … dance our ringlets to the whistling wind’ (MND 2.1.82–6; cf.  2.1.140–1, 4.1.86ff). Gorgeous and loquacious, she is fully and shamelessly exposed on stage in her bodily splendour, so much a part of the sensory world that her tempestuous spirit (together with that of Oberon) is the very breath that turns Fortune’s wheel, the passion that impels worldly dissension and change:         the spring, the summer, The chiding autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original.

(2.1.111–17)

The central mystery of A Midsummer Night’s Dream resides in the moral and mythic ambivalence of these elemental spirits: is Titania the soul of great creating Nature, as implied by her attendant’s boast and the­­fecundity of her bower (2.1.1ff, 249–56; 2.2.1ff; 3.1.153–60, 164–74; 4.1.1–46, 52–5); or is she the spirit of annihilative Mutabilitie, la donna è mobile, amorous of Theseus, feuding with Oberon, doting on Bottom?28 Oberon is equally complex: does he practise benevolent magic as a simulacrum of Divine Providence, or does this ‘King of Shadows’, with

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The charismatic queen

17

his proud desire for mastery, share equally in inciting the amorous confusions of the dark forest world? Though admired as godlike ‘immortals’, Shakespeare’s fairies, like Spenser’s, also figure the most privileged level of human existence. For both poets (as for creators of Tudor processions and Stuart masques), the fairies exemplify aristocrats, whose power and privilege can exploit all gifts of nature, all earthly delights.29 The crucial difference in the two poetic visions is that Spenser’s fairy nobility, though shimmering with heroic fantasy, are always constrained by natural and moral law: torn by briars, wounded in combat, captivated by forces of evil, burned by their own passions.30 For their errant moral choices Spenser’s fairies pay a staggering price: until a supernatural redeeming power intervenes, Florimel’s beauty will remain imprisoned in Proteus’ realm of changeless change (FQ 4.12), Amoret’s heart chained and transfixed by desire and fear of mastery (FQ 3.11–12), Serena raped and wounded by the bleating beast of scandal (FQ 6.3.20–7), and their male ­counterparts – Marinell, Scudamour, Calepine – unable to liberate their lovers from the bondage which their own narcissism, jealousy, and truancy have helped to sponsor. Shakespeare’s fairy aristocrats, on the other hand, enjoy the comic fantasy of a prowess beyond natural and moral limits, remarkably free of painful consequences. Instead of providing veils and armour to protect Titania’s chaste loyalty (which she has already compromised), Oberon forces her further descent into vulgar, bestial carnality! As he goes to put the deluding drops of concupiscence into her eyes, he imagines, in a densely sensuous passage, Titania immersed in her flowery world of earth-oriented senses – smell, taste, and touch: I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.

(2.1.249–52)

Awed by the luxuriant beauty of this transient bower, Oberon judges it as causing her drowsy conscience and wilful self-delusion. Since he cannot prevent her carnal obsession (which he shares, as his overdetermined description suggests), he will fulfil it in extremis. There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight; And there the snake throws her enamell’d skin, Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in; And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes, And make her full of hateful fantasies.

(2.1.253–8)

With Titania’s fancy steeped in lulling flowers and gaudy snakeskin (nature and art together enforcing the vain self-delusions of fleshliness), Oberon subjects his

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Anatomy of human nature

mate to the consummate delusion of the wounded flower’s juice. His reason for provoking her ‘hateful’ adultery with ‘some vile thing’ remains exceedingly vague, and the limp paratactic style of his speech (‘And … And … And’) ensures that we will not ascertain Oberon’s motives or degree of insight. The indulgences of Shakespeare’s fairies (corrosive jollity, vengeful jealousy, mutual adultery – all with violent undertones) recall fears of their trickery, as well as the Celtic view of fairies as fallen angels.31 Titania does not simply yield to a beastly lover; her aroused passion ravishes him, while her moonlike conscience acknowledges her loss of self-control: The moon, me thinks, looks with a watery eye, And when she weeps, weeps every little flower, Lamenting some enforced chastity. Tie up my love’s tongue, bring him silently.

(3.1.191–4)

The lesson, presumably, is that fairy aristocrats, even the great queen of fairies, have the same capacity for robing themselves in carnal passion and self-deceit as ordinary folk; and the deeper lesson is that fairy spirits, like humankind in general, can best learn their true nature by enduring fully the descent into sensuous experience.32 As Robert Burton wryly observes, ‘The last and surest remedy [for love-melancholy], to be put in practice in the utmost place, when no other means will take effect, is to let them go together, and enjoy one another: Potissima cura est ut heros amasia potiatur.’33 In contrast to Spenser’s peremptory erasure of the deluding ‘bower of blisse’ (FQ 2.12) and his ­persistent restraint of eroticism through iconographic framing and ‘arming’ the body, Shakespeare liberally indulges bodily passion and enhances it through art. Gloriana’s influence can ‘fashion a gentleman’ out of any caste: a bear-child, a savage man, even base Braggadocchio may glimpse Belphoebe’s beauty (FQ 6.4; 2.3): yet full communion with Gloriana–Belphoebe is restricted to those who can emulate Prince Arthur’s arête. In astonishing contrast, Shakespeare focuses on the spirit-power of the rustic: Bottom’s vigorous imaginative sympathy (‘let me play the lion too’), as well as the innate moral sense which makes him ‘gentle’ and ‘courteous’, gives the lie to Oberon’s ‘some vile thing’ (2.2.33). Though Bottom (like Spenser’s Braggadocchio) is base-born, a consummate braggart, and an unlearned and unrefined ‘ass’, he is ultimately shown as worthy of Titania’s affection, and of Duke Theseus’ bounty and preference. This is Shakespeare’s cleverest comic inversion of Spenser’s art: instead of having a regal fairy refine humanity’s baseness, he humanizes the proud combative fairies and courtly lovers by means of Bottom’s crude but gentle art. Bottom’s mixed nature and fundamental benevolence typifies the play as a whole. Despite the fairies’ self-indulgences, and despite Puck’s persistent aligning of himself with cruel pranks, night-terrors, and ‘Damned spirits’

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(2.1.32–57; 3.2.378–87; 5.1.357–72), the embattled tone of A Midsummer Night’s Dream concludes amiably, overcoming traditional fears about fairies and their moonlit fantasy.34 Despite her proud wilfulness, Titania bejewels nature with dew, dispels its evils with song, strives to refine Bottom’s nature, and, instead of stealing a human child, charitably adopts the orphan of a ‘votary’. Though Bottom eats fairy food and apparently enjoys sexual intimacy with a fairy, he suffers no ill effects from Titania’s dotage and easily returns to his beloved lesser life. Finally Oberon, distinguishing his sun-loving fairies from demonic spirits of darkness,35 uses song and dance to master the natural order, and providentially blesses the newlyweds and their issue. Thus Shakespeare’s immersion of rustics, courtiers, and fairy-spirits in elemental carnal nature does not obviate their intrinsic morality, but makes moral vision evolve from within conditions of embodiment. The people’s choice Having ‘incorporated’ the fairy queen into his own sensuous, processive, morally ambivalent idiom, Shakespeare makes this artistic metastasis the basis for Theseus’ last-act choice between Spenserian and Shakespearean types of art: he will reject those entertainment proposals which devalue common earthly passion, each associated with an artist who is increasingly refined and alienated from his audience. Theseus first disposes of ‘The battle of the centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch to the harp’ (5.1.44–5). This effete image of the artist suggests a dig at university and courtly fashions, ‘Athenian’ being Lyly’s favourite epithet for Oxbridge scholars.36 Indeed, the satiric punch derives not so much from the indecorousness of centaurs disrupting the Lapiths’ wedding as from having the tale dispassionately chanted by the refined, urbane eunuch. Next Theseus discards ‘The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, / Tearing the Th ­ racian singer in their rage’ (48–9), again showing an alienated artist who exacerbates rather than resolves human passion, either showing Orpheus’ other-worldly mood after the loss of Eurydice, or that (according to Alexandrian tradition) he preferred ‘the love of tender boys’ rather than of women. Thus, even less successful than the poet as detached Athenian eunuch is the one alienated and consumed by the violent passion he sings into being.37 Though we, and Shakespeare’s own audience, may discern the inappropriate brutality of the first two entries, Theseus evades that recognition. He rejects these tales, not because the centaurs’ male furore and Bacchantes’ female frenzy are unfit for connubial feeling but because he has already experienced them with Hippolyta (‘That have I told my love, in glory of my kinsman Hercules’; ‘That is an old device; and it was played / When I came last from Thebes a conqueror’). Implicitly both tales re-enact courtship’s discord (‘I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries’, 1.1.16–17). Moreover, the tales’ complementary frenzies have been used to celebrate the patriarchal conquests of Theseus

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and Hercules. For his wedding Theseus seeks a different mood (‘I will wed thee in another key’, 1.1.18) and quickly concurs in sensuous, heartfelt experience – the ‘passion of loud laughter’ which these earnest, ignorant men have provoked in Philostrate. Even more, he values the performers’ intent, the sincere desire to please which carries the rustics’ art beyond their humble selves and beyond violent, dominating impulse: ‘Love … and tongue-tied simplicity / In least speak most, to my capacity’ (5.1.81–105). Philostrate’s least attractive entertainment is distinctly (though reductively) Spenserian: ‘The thrice-three Muses mourning for the death / Of learning, late deceased in beggary’ (52–3), which records the total and voluntary alienation of the artist. Theseus expresses his most resounding disapproval: ‘That is some satire, keen and critical, / Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony’. Bednarz speculates on patronage rivalry which might have caused this parody of Spenser’s The Teares of the Muses.38 Why has Shakespeare chosen ‘Teares’ as the final and consummately ill-conceived art offering? We note its serious intent as an artistic manifesto, its symbolically weighty subject (the nine Muses having been extensively annotated by Natalis Comes), and its ingenious Neoplatonic arrangement of the muses, which Shakespeare parodies with the archaic epithet, ‘thrice-three’.39 The poem claims a lofty theme, an audience of noble and literate patrons, and the exalted aim of refashioning human nature through the finest art: what better wedding gift? Yet it is clearly one of Spenser’s least appealing works. With little e­vocation of sensuous human experience, it pounds out a repetitious jeremiad against commoners’ insensitivity to art and against aristocrats’ neglect of the artist – a litany of wounded elitism which is the main target of Shakespeare’s satire. From the detached and impotent eunuch, harping about what he himself cannot experience, to the dismemberment of melancholic Orpheus, who having lost his own love will not cater to the rampant passions of others, we move at last to this absolute severance of the artist from his audience – not simply because they fail to appreciate his art but because he has abstracted himself out of existence.40 Displaced by the metonymy ‘learning’, mourned by the raffiné Neoplatonized chorus of ‘thrice-three Muses’, the artist has so lost himself in an archaic and elitist conception of Art, and has so preoccupied himself with self-pity because of others’ failure to appreciate that abstraction, that there is no longer any earthy, passional, substantial reality to sing about, either in his subject or in himself. Shakespeare is quickly forgiven for parodying the presumptions of courtly and of learned art when we realize that the fourth option, the marvellous misadventure of Bottom and the rustics, is a riotous burlesque of his own art: ‘A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth’. Peter Quince’s production farcically exhibits numerous earmarks of Shakespeare’s enterprise: his troupe’s catering to the Age’s thirst for youthful romantic comedy; their paradoxical conjoining of tragic and comic impulses (‘very tragical mirth’); and their earthy sensational embodiment of the irrepressible instincts of human-

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kind, both high and low. Of course, most disarming is the way this ‘palpablegross play’ (5.1.353) parodies his own company’s noble rendering of Romeo and Juliet.41 The title of this fourth offering includes no aloof and scorned image of the artist, and rightly so, since Shakespeare, as the adaptable, resourceful hack, Peter Quince, has included himself in the work of art, integrating it in the common moonshine and beastliness of everyday life. As artist-director, Quince does not abstract himself out of the picture but, like Shakespeare, intimately engages as performer with his fellow-actors and audience. In the bumbling prologue, as Quince lays his own quavering voice and repressed syntax on the line, he is far more self-conscious than the Athenian eunuch, the disintegrating Orpheus, or the self-immolating Neoplatonic artist; yet in his very self-exposure Quince contributes to this art of vulgar immanence which delightfully jumbles its ‘rare vision’ with ‘a peck of provender’. Rather than the spirited prowess of a fairy queen (beauteous, wilful, enchanting Titania, whose presence seemed destined to dominate and define the play), it is Bottom and friends who reveal themselves as the metaphoric touchstone of Shakespeare’s artistic vision, the fulfilment of his comic epiphany. In the contest between the two fairy queens, and between two contrary modes of art, Shakespeare impishly stacks the deck and alters the rules so that Bottom may proclaim, ‘the short and the long is, our play is preferred’. Self-love in Reformation theology and in Shakespeare’s plays Studies of the discourse of desire in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets have, since the 1970s, focused on two main bonds: the romance of sexual opposites and its complement, the companionate bond of sexual equals. Shakespeare’s fascination with both, and the tension between them, persists from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Two Noble Kinsmen. These bonds may form an envious rivalry or be mutually supportive; and Shakespeare’s deepening use of cross-dressed disguise opens a transference and interchange between the two. In evaluating this diverse engagement of Self with Others, scholars have not fully explored how the interplay of courtship and friendship offers each character a means of self-fulfilment. Our fascination with the complexity of gender-based relationship has caused neglect of a third mode of desire which is central to Shakespeare’s plays – namely, selflove.42 How did Shakespeare view self-love, and in what forms does it appear in his poems and plays? What were the predominant ideas about self-love among Renaissance and Reformation thinkers, whether of Catholic or Protestant sympathy, and toward which pole did Shakespeare lean in portraying the varied forms of self-love? Oscar Wilde notes this passion’s centrality – ‘Self-love is the beginning of a life-long romance’ – a maxim Shakespeare fully exploits. Increasingly he grapples with the frustration of this compelling love affair, which implies a division in the

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self. In Oneself as Another Paul Ricoeur observes how one’s own body and mind are perceived as a mysterious ‘other’, arousing a desire to possess and magnify this otherness which is so near and dear.43 This infatuation, however, gives way to a fearful wound on realizing the body-based self ’s imperfections, its degrading subjection to ugliness, weakness, mutability, mortality. As a result, one defensively seeks power, bonding, and possessions to palliate the wound of unfulfilled selflove and resultant self-estrangement. Managing this proliferation of defensive, recuperative strategies is central to the quest for self-fulfilment and identity. Thus, while romantic love fades in Shakespeare’s histories and becomes abusive in the tragedies, self-love remains central in every play and poem. In Sonnet 62 Shakespeare’s main concern is not the adoration of a handsome youth, or frustration with a dark lady, but an unfulfilled self-adulation: Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye And all my soul and all my every part; And for this sin there is no remedy, It is so grounded inward in my heart.

In the first line ‘eye’ puns on the ‘I’ as the essential self and the ‘eye’ which sees the self reflected in worldly mirrors. Self-love thus knits the outer and inner worlds. The second quatrain shifts to the self ’s aggressive fantasy of greatness as a trope of superiority: Methinks no face so gracious is as mine, No shape so true, no truth of such account, And for myself mine own worth do define, As I all others in all worths surmount.

This assertion of absolute supremacy problematizes the poet’s identity, implying an insecure envy which seeks to surmount (indeed negate) the significance of ‘all others’. This denial that anyone can mirror him adequately, that he must be sui generis, a godlike self-definer, anticipates the contemptuous exclusivity of Macbeth and Coriolanus. The sestet brings the usual reality check, when a mirror shows the poet wrinkled with age. This humbling discovery utterly inverts the experience of Narcissus, yet, in privileging material appearances (ensouled body rather than idealized soul), Shakespeare remains true to his customary worldview: But when my glass shows me myself indeed, Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity, Mine own self-love quite contrary I read; Self so self-loving were iniquity.

Here is perhaps the key to what Keats called the ‘negative capability’ of Shakespeare. Acknowledging his failure to look like Narcissus and, moreover, to realize grandiose eternal Selfhood, the playwright will resort to endless imagining of high-born and low-born characters as defensive displacements. Thus in the closing couplet Shakespeare defers to the handsome boy, lauding him as a valid

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basis for his own self-love since he identifies so completely with the boy’s youthful outward beauty:

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’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise, Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

This conclusive flattery of the beloved, a common pattern in the sonnets, here is used to reformulate the problem of self-love. Instead of deflecting our awareness of the ‘sin of self-love’, the deferential couplet actually enhances the poet’s ­admission of utmost egoism. As Anne Ferry notes in The Inward Language, Shakes­peare, unlike Sidney, fully acknowledges and explores the implications of his own self-love.44 In The Heresy of Self-Love (1968), which argues the centrality of self-love in Western culture, Paul Zweig considers it the salient motive in all Shakespeare’s sonnets, especially the 126 apparently addressed to a young man. In the adored youth, Zweig says, the poet seeks to immortalize an idealized image of himself as a defence against time’s, and life’s, ravages.45 But by asserting the power of his art to confer immortality, the poet flatters himself more than the youth. Moreover, the sonnets praise the young man’s outward beauty far more than his moral character, which increasingly appears as fickle and self-indulgent. Thus the critique of selflove in Sonnet 62 seems intended partly as a lesson for the beautiful youth: the opening line indicates the poet’s fascination with the youth’s, as well as the poet’s, ‘sin of self-love’. The young man’s consummate attractiveness (‘beauty of thy days’ suggests the allure of both youth and privilege) mirrors the poet’s self-love in identifying with him: ‘’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise’. Philosophical fictions which portray the mythos of love’s origin and of achieving identity through relationship often begin with an episode of self-mirroring – an event confirming the troubling division in the self. In Phaedrus 255D Plato emphasizes self-fulfilment by means of reflections in the beloved; in The Romance of the Rose Amant sees his reflection in Narcissus’ fountain before engaging with the rose-maiden; in Chaucer’s ‘Squire’s Tale’ the mirror of Canacee enables her to discern false love in others (132–45, 225–35, 347–75, 499–620); in The Faerie Queene Britomart envisions her ideal beloved in Merlin’s mirror (3.2.22–44); and in Paradise Lost (4.449–91) Eve transposes the glorifying of her outward image to admiring Adam as the mirroring imago Dei from which she derives.46 All these episodes imply that love grows from an idealized self-image, though each version, especially Milton’s, also implies a potential for treacherous self-betrayal in the delightful mirroring and idealizing of oneself. In these mythic fables, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 62, self-adulation anxiously merges with self-abnegation, a paradox reflected in Narcissus’ cry: ‘inopem me copia fecit’ (‘my plenty makes me poor’).47 In his study of Shakespeare’s sonnets C.L. Barber praises the ‘selfless love’ of these ‘wonderfully generous poems’ and the ‘negative capability’ which can ‘create a world resonant with the friend’s beauty’; but there is much contradiction in Barber’s praising the poet for ‘realis[ing] others with a selflessness’ that can be ‘poignant’, ‘desperate’, ‘ugly’, ‘sublime’.48 Outward or bodilybased beauty arouses a hunger that neither the eyes nor any contact with the shadowy world of senses can

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satisfy. As Calvin Edwards explains, Plato, Plotinus, and Ficino saw Narcissus ‘as a symbol of the human soul searching for its own beauty – a reflection of divine beauty – but unwittingly seduced by the reflection of that beauty in the physical body’.49 Zweig concludes his study by suggesting that Shakespeare resolved his own problem of self-love by turning from the beautiful youth of the sonnets to the multiple personae of drama.50 I believe, though, that self-love is the central motive, not only of all his sonnets but of every character in his plays. Contrary views of self-love from Antiquity to the Reformation Self-love’s centrality becomes fully apparent when we consider those leading poets, philosophers, and theologians who focus not only on its perverse corruptions but on its essentially positive form. Augustine, who returns to self-love endlessly, explores both of its extremes. In The City of God and De Genesi ad Litteram he admits self-love’s fallen debasement; but in On Christian Doctrine and On the Trinity he emphasizes the essential goodness of Creation and of the human soul, evident in its trinitarian powers.51 Shakespeare’s mature protagonists, in struggling with increasingly complex forms of self-love, reflect the influence of diverse intellectual traditions. On one side, Plotinus, Augustine, and many medieval and Reformation thinkers urge caution for Narcissus’ sad fable, lamenting the youth’s preoccupation with his fleshly body and urging that love focus on the rational and virtuous self. On the other side, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Primaudaye stress that self-love – including love for one’s body – is natural and vital to ethical well-being. Though Plato in the Laws rebukes the folk saying that ‘Every man is naturally his own friend’,52 Aristotle makes this proverbial morality his cornerstone doctrine in the Nicomachean Ethics. For him all virtues, notably magnanimity, derive from self-interest, and the crowning virtue of friendship is grounded in sensible self-love: ‘in loving a friend, men love what is good for themselves’;53 ‘he is related to his friend as to himself (for his friend is another self)’; ‘the extreme of friendship is likened to one’s love for oneself ’.54 In sum, ‘the good man should be a lover of self ’.55 Aquinas provides a still wider theoretical basis for approving of this good and natural form of self-love. In Summa Theologica he notes ‘the first movement of every [person’s] appetite towards its own good’,56 and he stresses that, in ‘loving one’s neighbor as oneself, … the model exceeds the copy’;57 ‘the self … is closer to itself than to another, and therefore constitutes a prior object of love’.58 He adds, ‘Despite the … self-transcending effect of love, the agent “does not will the good of his friend more than his own good … and does not [love] another more than himself ”.’59 In the Renaissance this positive view of self-love is recited in Shakespeare’s favourite encyclopaedic source of ideas on human nature. In Part 2 of The French Academie Pierre de la Primaudaye begins his nineteen-chapter analysis of human passions with a lengthy discourse on ‘selfe-love’, which he treats as the ‘wel-spring’ of all passions and all virtues. Like Aristotle and Aquinas, he insists that ‘We love ourselves naturally’; ‘For it is an affection which is as it were a beame of the love that God beareth towards all his creatures, and which he causeth to shine in them, so that it is not possible, that they which are capable of any affection of love,

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should not love their owne bloud and their like …. Wherefore if this love and this affection were well ruled and ordered, it is so farre from being vicious, that contrariwise the spirit of God condemneth as monsters those … that want it. And therefore God … appointeth it to be the rule of our love towards our neighbour.’ Primaudaye acknowledges the dark underside, the potential ‘unrulinesse’ of selflove: ‘when this love and affection is disordered in us, it is not only vicious, but also as it were the original and fountaine of all other vices and sins, whereas if it were wel-ordered & ruled according to the will and law of God, it would be … the originall and wel-spring of all vertues.’60 Augustine too considered good self-love as central to human nature, its norm, yet he emphasizes that original sin has distorted this primal impulse into an ambitious lust to build worldly cities of destruction. Nevertheless, Augustine maintains a belief in the possibility of true self-love, which can draw us to the City of God – if only it allies with communal well-being and if only one prays for divine grace to restore the sense of ourselves as imago Dei. In On the Trinity Augustine describes self-love as the memory of the Holy Spirit implanted in the soul at Creation, a memory mediated by Christ.61 Likewise for Aquinas, ‘proper self-love consists in love for the self “in God”.’62 as well as reciprocal ‘bond[s] of affection’ and ‘mutual indwelling’ with other souls.63 Many Protestant Reformation theologians, however, deny the possibility of good self-love without intervening grace, and Martin Luther carries this scepticism to an extreme. In Lectures on Romans he urges that we replace self-love with self-hate, and cultivate self-sacrifice: ‘true love for yourself is hatred for yourself…. Therefore he who hates himself and loves his neighbor, this person truly loves himself. For he loves himself outside of himself, thus he loves himself purely as long as he loves himself in his neighbor.’64 Only grace, Luther says, can bring true self-love when it ‘delivers’ the self from being ‘completely curved in’ on itself.65 Luther is referring to the second key scriptural text regarding self-love: not only must we follow the great summary command to love both self and neighbour as a reflection of loving God entirely, but we must live with Jesus’ harder command: ‘If any man wil come after me, let him denye him self, and take up his crosse daily, and followe me. For whosoeuer wil saue his life wil lose it: and whosoeuer wil lose his life for my sake, the same shal saue it’ (Luke 9.23–4, Geneva).66 Luther follows the harsher phrasing of John 12.25: ‘He that loueth his life, shal lose it, & he that hateth his life in this world, shal kepe it vnto life eternal.’ Aquinas does not emphasize this passage; he mentions ‘self-hate’ only as ‘the effective result of false self-love’ that undermines the self ’s true good; he never prescribes self-hate, even rhetorically (see ST I–II.29.4: ‘Whether a man can hate himself ’).67 Does Shakespeare in portraying the motives and consequences of self-love draw from Augustine’s vision of the dark side of human nature, stressed by Luther and Calvin and broadcast widely by Reformation divines, or does he favour the eudaemonist (happiness-based) tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, as well as Augustine’s brighter vision of humankind in On the Trinity, a view which recurs in Primaudaye, Montaigne, Hooker, and Donne.68 The latter group envisions good self-love as a normative quest for perfection, a self-esteem which reflects that of

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God, who (according to Calvin and the Heidelberg and Westminster catechisms), created all things ‘for his own glory’.69 This mystery of divine self-love is consummately envisioned by the pilgrim Dante at the very end of his quest: ‘O eternal light, existing in yourself alone, / Alone knowing yourself; and who, known to yourself / And knowing, love and smile upon yourself!’ (Paradiso, 33.124–6)70 Despite Reformation insistence on Original Sin, Shakespeare could find theological support for a proper, thoughtful glorying in the goodness of oneself and one’s offspring, thus appreciating Creation and imitating the Creator. Though Sonnet 62 labels self-love as ‘sin’, Shakespeare’s concept of self-love, both in this sonnet and throughout his plays, is as ambivalent as that of philosophers and theologians since Antiquity. Helen Vendler in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets reads Sonnet 62 as severe self-criticism,71 but Shakespeare’s attitude seems more playfully indulgent and flexible, an inner drama in process. Punning on ‘iniquity’ as ‘inequity’, he accepts this ‘sin’ as the ground of his being (‘grounded inward in my heart’), and he justifies self-love by his frank homage to the selfloving youth. Note the marvellous complexity of tone – and of personal identity – in the sonnet’s penultimate line, ‘’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise’: is this a mood of humble self-abasement, proud self-approval, or a disarmingly ironic blend of both? Three levels of self-love in Shakespeare’s characters Self-love is universal in Shakespeare’s characters but assumes quite distinct forms. The antics of the immature, thoughtless narcissists are comical and poignant, for they remain naively unaware in their self-dotage, even when they are publicly exposed. More fearful is the second group, the cunning, villainous egoists, whose self-aggrandizement and cruelty is intensely rational and intentional, especially in villain-protagonists like Richard III and Macbeth. It is the third group, the generous-spirited and wittily ironic protagonists (not unlike the poet’s own voice in Sonnet 62), who express self-love in an attractive manner, refined by sufferings and joys they share with friends and lovers. As Aquinas says, they establish reciprocal ‘bonds of affection’ and ‘mutual indwelling’ with other souls. In some cases these self-lovers even acknowledge support from divine providence, as in the concluding episodes of Hamlet (5.2.10, 157–61), King Lear (5.3.16–17, 160–1), and The Tempest (5.1.189, 201–13; Epi.16–18). Shakespeare’s immature, delusional egoists, marked by grandiose fantasies and cowardly defences, are mostly young male aristocrats, but the group includes older men and a few women as well. All resemble one of two Ovidian figures: either the passive Narcissus who drowns in self-contemplation and reduces an admiring maiden to an Echo, or the aggressive Phaethon, whose aspiration consumes him in fire. Self-exhibition so blinds these characters to their own flaws and to the value of others, so deprives them of empathy, humour, and wisdom, that their foibles are apparent even to friends, family, and servants. Striking examples are Proteus and Valentine in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Demetrius and Chiron in Titus Andronicus, Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, Hotspur in 1 Henry IV, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Laertes in Hamlet, Achilles and Ajax in Troilus and Cressida,

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Bertram and Parolles in All’s Well, Cloten in Cymbeline. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Valentine’s youthful egoism is initially laughable, as when Sylvia urges him to address his artful love-letters to himself, a task he greatly enjoys. But, in his boast of possessing a mistress of unmatchable worth, he evokes a darker selflove in Proteus, who deserts Julia and slanders Valentine to steal Sylvia’s affection. Proteus makes this remark about his bosom-friends, ‘If I keep them, I needs must lose myself. / … I to myself am dearer than a friend, / For love is still [i.e., always] most precious in itself ’ (2.6.21–4). Though Aquinas affirms the superiority of self-love over friendship, Proteus does not really love, or know, himself: his insecure self-promotion, like that of Bertram and Cloten, begins in parental dotage, is stunned by envy, and proceeds in cruel treachery; it is the callous narcissism of a privileged adolescent. A still deadlier self-obsession is that of bullying braggarts like Demetrius and Chiron, Tybalt, Hotspur, Laertes, Ajax, Achilles, and, in comic vein, Parolles, Malvolio, and Cloten. Their fantasies of self-importance invite others to belittle them in asides and, for the latter three, to shame them with hilarious ruses. A second type of self-lover, the opportunistic Machiavellian villain, consciously and intentionally exploits and destroys others in order to attain a sole, sterile supremacy. In these figures Shakespeare exploits what Hegel called the ‘portentous power of the negative’.72 Instead of the rash petulance of the immature egoists, the villains pursue their ends with sharp and malevolent craft. Aaron and Tamora, Richard III, Shylock, Don John, Iago, Goneril-Regan-Cornwall-Oswald-Edmund, and Antiochus combine intellectual cunning with contempt for spiritual being, lust for material goods, and reduction of human nature to bestial drives. To aggrandize themselves they slander and destroy others, even spouses and intimate friends; thus their family relationships are incestuous, tyrannical, and shortlived, a mere forum for demonstrating their cruel prowess. Centrally motivating these figures is a proud self-love that would displace God and all authority, joined with an envious exclusiveness that destroys all rivals, corrupts all innocence, and finally negates its own being. Richard III opens his play with narcissistic fury at his body’s deformity: ‘I that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty’ (1.1.16); and at the end he resists shame for his crimes in a monologue replete with self-love. Facing the angry ghosts of his victims, Richard wonders if he should fear himself: ‘No’, he replies, ‘Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I’ (5.3.183). By affirming the naturalness of his self-love, Richard likens himself to God, the ultimate ‘I am’; yet Richard’s self-assertion is strictly limited: not the universal, open-ended ‘I AM’ that participates in all being but a rigidly self-enclosed solipsism: ‘I am [only] I.’ Similar but even more Satanic is the self-love of Iago, who seems driven less by ambition than by nihilistic contempt, especially for those of magnanimous nature. In the opening he stresses his self-interest and mere pretence of service: In following him, I follow but myself – Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so for my particular end.

(1.1.60–2)

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His sneering conclusion, ‘I am not what I am’ (67), is a revelling in duplicity, but it also epitomizes the nihilism of his mode of self-love. His sinister phrasing negates the confident ‘I am I’ of Richard III, and thus further darkens the parody of divinity. God, the ‘I am’, promotes Being, creating others with similar freedom and power. In contrast, Iago’s hate annihilates all others – rivals and superiors, friends and charitable souls, and finally his own heart and voice. His final comment – ‘From this time forth I never will speak word’ (5.2.312) – thus fulfils his initial claim, ‘I am not what I am’ (1.1.67). Is all self-love so limiting as this, so bent on finding power in negation? Our third and most prominent group of Shakespearean characters refutes this derogatory conception of self-love. Shakespeare’s most admired characters show self-love’s most complex and engaging face. Audiences delight in the self-glorying pride that animates the combative courtships of Petruchio and Katharina, Titania and Oberon, Beatrice and Benedick, Antony and Cleopatra, and the comic vaunts of Juliet’s nurse, Dogberry, Mistress Quickly, and especially Falstaff and Bottom, whose limitless self-love insinuates them into every part, delightfully mimicking and mangling ‘all humours’. The charismatic protagonists in plays of 1596–99 even begin to struggle with moral correctness. While the spectacular self-vaunters of the first history tetralogy – Suffolk, Margaret, Eleanor, York, Warwick, Joan La Pucelle, the Talbots, Jack Cade, Richard – displayed a shallow, brutal, unaware self-love, in the second tetralogy the quest for personal glory deepens into wonderfully ambivalent selfawareness. Hal predicts his success in messianic terms, ‘Redeeming time when men think least I will’ (1H4 1.2.211); to his father he centrally affirms his confidence (3.2.129–59); and he finally taunts Hotspur, ‘all the budding honours on thy crest / I’ll crop to make a garland for my head’ (5.4.72–3). But the self-promotion of this ‘mirror of all Christian kings’ (H5 2.Pro.6) is shadowed by the less-restrained, hence more destructive ambitions of Falstaff, Hotspur, and Henry IV. The critics’ perplexity over whether Henry V enacts perfect kingship alerts us to the subtleties of self-love, which so easily deludes and enslaves the uncautious soul. During these years Shakespeare’s portrayal of self-love also becomes more captivating through cross-dressing that brings bi-gendered awareness and deeper moral commitment. In the great comedies and tragedies from 1597 onward, women such as Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Helena, and Cleopatra share in self-admiring wit and prowess, even as wilful women such as Goneril, Regan, and Lady Macbeth share in the ruthless appropriation of power through trickery and violence. Maturing self-love in the late tragedies Shakespeare’s portrayal of self-love’s full complexity, including its essentially positive nature, becomes apparent in the series of great tragedies beginning with Julius Caesar. In Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises (1969) Roy Battenhouse provides a severe Protestant perspective when he observes the prominence of self-love in these tragedies, not as a God-implanted motivational core but as the deadliest of burdens, a Christianized expansion, via Original Sin, of hamartia or the tragic flaw.73 This dark and self-isolating mode of self-love culminates in the Macbeths and in Coriolanus and Volumnia, who contemptuously

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assert superiority over others. Friends and foes agree that Coriolanus is ‘O’ercome with pride, ambitious, past all thinking / Self-loving’ (4.6.30–3). With his extreme bent for violence and absolutist vaunts, Coriolanus surpasses earlier portraits of vain warriors (Tybalt, Hotspur, Ajax, Achilles), providing the fullest study of antagonistic self-aggrandizement, a self-constrictive elitism that leads the hero (as in Julius Caesar) to ritual slaughter by those reduced to envy. Macbeth shows the ultimate toll on the psyche of this estranging, murderous mode of self-love: the play evokes the primitive mindset in which ‘one is either predator or prey, … master or slave’.74 Macbeth’s effort to erase all dependencies is of course selfdefeating, for in assaulting all human bonds (fatherly king, best friend, mother and child) and in attempting to void conscience, the bond with God, he loses his essential being. Other tragic protagonists, however, show that self-love need not exclude neighbour-love. The struggling egos of Brutus, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Antony, Cleopatra, and their devoted entourages, though conflicted and often misguided, are repeatedly affirmed in a network of supportive relationships. These plays increasingly exemplify the paradox noted by Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas that self-love is fulfilled in loving others, especially when the conscience of those loved reflects the will of God. Whereas Shakespeare’s early plays persistently assign privilege and dominance to self-approving males (Petruchio, Oberon, Henry V), in Julius Caesar the self-love of male authority-figures is, for the first time, complexly questioned and explored. Shakespeare displays its many errant forms as well as the attractiveness of its potential goodness, especially in the evolving persona of Brutus. All characters in Julius Caesar show the clamour of self-love, but only Brutus struggles to affirm its positive dimension. Caesar’s grandiose self-image in manoeuvring toward absolute rule is continually manifested in quotable maxims: ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once’ (2.2.32–3). He goes to the capitol believing the Senate will ‘give this day a crown to mighty Caesar’ (2.2.93–4), and he confirms his fate by boasting godlike immutability against their pleas for mercy: ‘I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fixed and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament’ (3.1.58– 73). Against such pride Cassius’ narcissistic wound seeks murderous relief as he chafes at Caesar’s celebrity: ‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a colossus, and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs and peer about / To find ourselves dishonourable graves’ (134–7). Caesar self-approvingly notes Cassius’ envy: ‘Such men as he be never at heart’s ease / Whiles they behold a greater than themselves’ (207–8). A third self-lover, Antony, attaches himself to Caesar’s rising star and skilfully plays out his own ambitions in the aftermath. His funeral oration, one of Shakespeare’s finest theatrical coups, enforces the play’s central peripety by collectively exploiting the common people’s self-love (that is, tempting them with the will), just as Caesar had done; and Antony’s adeptness in rousing the crowd (a charismatic eloquence which becomes less manipulative, more spontaneous and likable in Antony and Cleopatra) derives from his own sophisticated enjoyment of self-love. Though Antony’s closing eulogy for Brutus (like Octavius’ concluding

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praise for Antony and Cleopatra) is self-serving, his consummate encomium for this ‘noblest Roman of them all’ aptly confirms Brutus’ superior resolution of the problem of self-love. Brutus by his name, nature, and family heritage approximates Aristotle’s magnanimous man, whose virtues merit self-approval; yet he resists Cassius’ flattery partly through his proudly confident nobility and partly through a contrary impulse toward modest restraint and self-abnegation. This inner tension, unshared by the other main characters, is what makes Brutus so attractive to Shakespeare, who uses Brutus’s inner development to define the play’s structure. In Acts 1–2 high-minded Brutus is seduced into leading the assassination; in Act 3 Brutus’s bland public justification shows his naive trust that all others, including Antony and the common people, must share his virtue; in Acts 4–5 Brutus’ misjudgments in war underscore his moral idealism, and his deepening friendship with Cassius forms the basis for high-minded suicide. Brutus’ moral growth is the play’s touchstone as he undergoes a full cycle of fall and recovery in dealing with his own self-love. At the beginning of the play he answers Cassius’ charge of lessened friendship by pleading self-preoccupation: ‘If I have veiled my look, / I turn the trouble of my countenance / Merely upon myself ’ (1.2.37–9). In this celebrated temptation-scene Cassius cleverly builds on that habit of self-withdrawal by flattering Brutus, urging him to see his own virtue: ‘it is very much lamented, Brutus, / That you have no such mirrors as will turn / Your hidden worthiness into your eye / That you might see your shadow’ (55–8). In this reference to ‘mirrors’ and ‘shadow’ Cassius evokes the Narcissus story, mimicking the unhealthy dotage in Venus and Adonis, where we are told that Narcissus ‘died to kiss his shadow in the brook’ (161), and it recalls the more complex mirror-scene in Richard II, where the protagonist, like Narcissus, becomes so aware of his ruinous self-dotage that self-pity intensifies the debilitation: ‘The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy’d / The shadow of your face’ (R2 4.1.293–4). Moved by Cassius’ flattery of his nobility, family name, and public acclaim, Brutus nevertheless resists vainglory, showing his difference from the other conspirators, the starkest contrast being with Casca, whose babbling contempt for the ‘rabblement’, the ‘tag-rag people’, ‘the common herd’ with their ‘chopped hands’, ‘sweaty nightcaps’, and ‘stinking breath’ ironically displays Casca’s vulgarity as he tries to recruit Brutus to the cause. The pretentious elitism of both Casca and Cassius sharply contrasts with Brutus’s genuinely noble sensitivity in the next scene, where his inner struggle mingles with courtesy to his servant Lucius. Confident of his own worth, Brutus fears that Caesar’s self-love is becoming uncontrollable; yet he generously admits Caesar’s customary rational self-control: I know no personal cause to spurn at him But for the general. He would be crowned: How that might change his nature, there’s the question. … Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins Remorse from power; and to speak truth of Caesar I have not known when his affections swayed

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More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder.

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(2.1.10–22)

That Brutus himself resists the baser forms of self-love – Cassius’ avaricious materialism, Caesar’s overreaching ambition, Antony’s glib manipulations – is indicated not only by the universal admiration for Brutus (from conspirators, from his wife and servants, from military colleagues and opponents) but also by the respect he shows to others of every social class, notably in the tender regard for his servant Lucius and for the soldier who assists Brutus in his suicide. Brutus’ moral struggle shows the difficulty of realizing a good self-love. In the temptation-scene of Act 1 (1.2.28–322), which serves as focal point in the first two-act cycle, Cassius lures Brutus into self-adulation as a basis for resenting Caesar. Closely parallel, but with reverse outcome, is their quarrel-scene (4.3.1– 123), which serves as focal point of the final two-act cycle. The quarrel-scene inverts the facile narcissism of the temptation-scene, as Brutus criticizes Cassius’ unprincipled avarice and urges him to reclaim a virtuous basis for self-love:           What, shall one of us, That struck the foremost man of this world, … Contaminate our fingers with base bribes, And sell the mighty space of our large honours For so much trash as may be grasped thus?

(4.3.18–26)

He sternly dismisses Cassius – ‘Away, slight man!’ (37) – for his ‘proud heart’, his greedy, waspish temper, and his vaunting, urging him to associate with ‘slaves’ and ‘bondmen’ rather than with ‘noble men’ (42–54). Brutus lightly echoes Caesar’s self-righteousness when he proclaims himself ‘so armed in honesty’ that Cassius’ threats ‘pass by me as the idle wind, / Which I respect not’ (67–9); but Brutus’ frank and open criticism differs sharply from Caesar’s far-off critique of the ‘lean and hungry’ Cassius. Following this stark exposure, Cassius pitifully holds that a friend should overlook such faults, but when Brutus refuses to ‘flatter’, Cassius histrionically admits his faults and offers his proud heart for Brutus to sacrifice along with Caesar’s. Brutus again undercuts this pretentious show, and in so doing lays a basis for genuine friendship in the final episodes. In this challenging scene neither Cassius nor Brutus renounces self-love, but they amend it to meet Brutus’ high standards: Cassius’ inclination to avarice, vaunting, and self-deception is subordinated to Brutus’ stoic self-restraint, his valorous honesty, and, when exposure is complete, his forgiveness of his friend. In Julius Caesar self-love is not discredited and discarded but rather is gradually refined, culminating in a loving gesture which is both self-abnegation and self-fulfilment; hence the overdetermined meaning of the two friends’ suicides. As in the love-deaths of Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Desdemona, and Antony and Cleopatra, and even the despairful self-immolations of Ophelia and Lady Macbeth, suicide underscores both the power of self-love and the power of relationship. Brutus’ suicide partly shows pride in rationally determining his own fate,

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resisting the parade of conquest: ‘think not, thou noble Roman, / That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome. / He bears too great a mind’ (5.1.110–12). Yet, along with Cassius, his motivation also builds on their newly deepened friendship in the face of death’s mystery: ‘whether we shall meet again, I know not: / Therefore our everlasting farewell take: / For ever and for ever farewell, Cassius. / If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; / If not, why then this parting was well made’ (5.1.115–19). Brutus’ suicide does not emphasize proudly isolate self-governance but rather a consummate valuation of friendship: he asks each military colleague to assist him and receives aid only from Strato as the others plead their love for him. As Brutus works toward a basically positive self-love that culminates in lovedeath, Portia’s death by eating hot coals is a jarringly negative contrast. Her violent self-immolation symbolically emphasizes her remarkable rational prowess, selfpossession, and greatness of soul, setting for Brutus and Cassius a severe standard of noble dying. But the fire in her throat also suggests her failure to communicate with Brutus. The contrast of this lonely, brutal suicide with the tender mutuality achieved by Brutus and Cassius suggests Shakespeare’s distancing of the female bond in this play, as in Hamlet. In the great tragedies beginning with Julius Caesar Shakespeare thus alters the psychic scenario in which self-love seeks an idealized mirroring other. In the sonnets the ageing poet mirrored himself in a handsome youth whose wayward self-indulgence, especially toward the dark lady, is increasingly evident. In The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night the beloved young man (Bassanio, Sebastian) is more morally sensitive than the youth of the sonnets, especially after splitting into bisexual twins; yet this near-androgyny still does not provide an effective mirroring love-object. Neither Bassanio nor Sebastian is fully accessible to sad Antonio; nor is either youth tested and transformed by suffering. That transformation, the fullest refinement of self-love, occurs in the mature tragedies, beginning with Julius Caesar, then more radically in Hamlet, which is Shakespeare’s most mysterious and problematic meditation on this central human struggle. For Roy Battenhouse, Hamlet fails to achieve maturity because of his ‘intense subjectivism, self-dramatization, flight from reality, and specious argument’, ‘egoism and self-pity’, ‘homicidal or suicidal mania’, above all, ‘inordinate love of glory for the self ’: ‘self-centeredness is the unwitting quality of Hamlet’s idealism’, as expressed in his idolizing Ophelia and his father, and especially his apostrophes to man as ‘the paragon of animals’.75 But to Ophelia Hamlet admits his errancies: ‘I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, believe none of us’ (3.1.123–8). In Hamlet’s sceptical assault on human nature, and most pointedly woman, Shakespeare begins a series of tragedies and bitter comedies that move us far from Brutus’ confidence in his nobility. As Battenhouse maintains, Hamlet’s bent for extravagant idealization (in courting Ophelia, mourning his father, praising Horatio) – and equally for extravagant condemnation (of Claudius and Gertrude, Ophelia and her father, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) – is to some extent a defensive and immature version of

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self-love, a narcissistic wound. His hearkening to a vengeful ghost and his verbal and physical cruelty to others, especially Ophelia, do not betoken a ‘sweet prince’. Nevertheless, we sense many countervailing reasons for finding Hamlet admirable: his delay in revenging and his questioning of the ghost’s moral authority; his valid distaste for his mother’s hasty remarriage, for former friends and courtiers becoming spies, and for Ophelia’s acquiescence in serving as bait; and, more positively, his mother’s persistent dotage, Ophelia’s lavish praise, and Horatio’s faithful friendship and exalted elegy. Hamlet’s moral excellence is indicated not only by these aristocratic testimonials but also by numerous commoners who find him approachable, likable, and respectful of themselves: guards, players, pirates, and especially Yorick, whose earthy humour, love of life, and love of Hamlet is resurrected in the personality of the gravedigger. These vulgar men lack the courtly pretence and jockeying for power so evident in Claudius, Polonius, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Osric. Hamlet’s effort to be reconciled to Laertes and his voicing of providential workings suggest a softening of his earlier disgust for life; and Hamlet’s final desire for Horatio to live and to tell his story seems a significant movement toward recovering genuine self-love. Julius Caesar and Hamlet thus provide an extensive anatomy of self-love, and in the latter play its diverse extremes vie within the complex psyche of a single figure, a ‘sweet prince’ with ‘bad dreams’. Subsequent tragedies show deepening perspectives on self-love. The problems of corrupt and exclusive self-love are definitively revealed in Othello, where most characters, especially males, struggle with wounded narcissism. Iago insists on serving only his own interests, and he depicts Othello as ‘loving his own pride and purposes’ (1.1.13). Othello’s first entrance confirms that view when instead of hiding he is eager to display himself to the world: ‘My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly’ (1.2.31–2). Self-love is enmeshed in his rhetorical eloquence, the ‘Othello music’ of self-centred storytelling that makes him so attractive. Desdemona’s identification with his venturous spirit, wishing ‘That heaven had made her such a man’ (1.3.165), underscores the naturalness of his ambition and pride, properly glorying in his courageous, responsible identity. This noble self-esteem finds a foil in the shallower self-preening of Cassio. His abuse of Bianca and drunken loss of office help us to appreciate Othello’s idealizing of Desdemona and despair at no longer serving her rare virtue (3.3.361, 4.2.59–62). Othello’s ardent self-love is thus not mere hubris, not simply a ‘fatal flaw’ for Iago to exploit. Rather, in his initial tender exchanges with Desdemona, Othello shows the magnanimous blossoming of his ‘great … heart’ (5.2.361), a self-esteem so maturely managed that it draws Desdemona’s devotion: ‘My heart’s subdued / Even to the very quality of my lord’ (1.3.251–2). Certainly Othello’s self-regard offers a fertile seedbed for Iago’s slanderous insinuations, yet, no less than Brutus and Hamlet, Othello struggles to sustain a positive mode of self-love. To perceive his self-love only in a negative sense is to eviscerate the heart of this great tragedy. The most profound study of self-love occurs in King Lear, beginning with the aged sovereign’s mythic ritual of self-exaltation: ‘Which of you shall we say doth

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love us most?’ (1.1.51). (Similarly Cleopatra asks Antony at the outset, ‘If it be love indeed, tell me how much’, 1.1.14). Like Brutus, Hamlet, and Othello, Lear is centrally motivated by a self-love which deeply evolves in the course of the play, especially since his urge for affirmation is complicated by the burdensome mantle of Kingship and the anxieties of Old Age and Mortality. Lear finds the most challenging self-mirroring in his sexual and moral opposite, Cordelia. This complex handling of self-love in a privileged male carries us far beyond the paralysing pool of Narcissus – into a distraught fragmented self which in old age seeks the mirror not of a winsome lad but of a virtuous daughter, an ‘other’ whom he tries to absorb into himself, yet who is strong enough to resist the old man’s vanity yet devoted enough to sacrifice herself for him. Similarly, in each of the final romances an ageing male authority-figure is mirrored and chastened by a maiden (Marina, Imogen, Perdita, Miranda) who, despite her youth, shows high moral judgment – the magical wisdom and power of a virgin innocent who submits to suffering. Resolving self-love: Shakespeare’s magus As Zweig notes in The Heresy of Self-Love, ancient folklore offers a paradigm of self-love in the ambitious heretical magus, Doctor Faustus.76 It is intriguing that Shakespeare’s swansong, The Tempest, features Prospero as a reformed Faustus. On behalf of his daughter Miranda, who mirrors the best part of himself, Prospero uses his artful power to reshape human nature and history: a tempest, disappearing banquet, and punitive speech to expose his enemies’ sins; transformative songs, an epiphanic meeting, arduous chores, and a sublime wedding masque to guide the young lovers through courtship; and a final reunion of the disparate members of the ship of state. Prospero’s final boast suggests the playwright’s glory in having staged humankind’s wishful fantasies of controlling both the natural world and the destiny of the human soul: Ye elves … by whose aid … I have bedimm’d The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war; … graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth By my so potent art. (5.1.33, 40–4, 48–50)

In surrendering this power, Prospero seeks to control his self-love; and he concludes the play by stressing his reliance on the love of others, on his audiences, and on divine grace and forbearance: Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have ‘s mine own, Which is most faint. … [So] release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. … Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,

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And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer.

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(5.Epil.1–3, 9–10, 13–16)

The energy of this epilogue – and of The Tempest as a whole – is restrained and disarming, for it seeks to displace and contain the wilder energy that so charmed us in earlier plays. What, then, attracts us so deeply to a self-indulgent clown like Bottom or an insatiable rogue like Falstaff, to sparring lovers like Katharina and Petruchio, Oberon and Titania, Beatrice and Benedick, or to regal minds like Hal, Rosalind, Hamlet, Lear, Cleopatra, and Prospero? What else but an extraordinary impulse of self-love, often resorting to self-exhibition (plays within the play) in order to counteract the cruelty of envious rivals and in order to be loved supremely by all. In such characters, self-love achieves maturity or ‘ripeness’ in at least three ways. First, these gregarious, imaginative characters (like the actor-playwright) tend to engage with audiences of all social types, abilities, and moral natures, thus providing a mutual mirroring that resembles what Aquinas calls a reciprocal ‘bond of affection’ and ‘mutual indwelling’ with other souls. Second, some of these characters are able to perform or impersonate diverse social types within a masterfully regal identity which is, paradoxically, a self-abnegated identity, thus enacting multiple personalities in a single self: their identification with otherness demonstrates remarkable powers of self-change – either through sovereign empathy, through disguise and impersonation, or through chaotic gushings of madness which disclose the vast resources of psyche. Third, occasionally a sublimer form of self-love comes from witnessing the disintegration of life’s theatrical stagings and especially from losing an other who mirrors the best part of oneself – hence an epiphany mediated by human faces. Watching these diverse ripenings in such consummate players as Falstaff, Rosalind, Hamlet, Lear, Cleopatra, and Prospero evokes our own urge for completeness through active identification, for in their eloquent self-glorying, which so intensifies the being of others, we witness Shakespeare’s most suggestive mirroring of God: an unlimited creative and loving power that springs from self-love. Self-love in Spenser and Shakespeare: polarized approaches to psychology, poetics, and patronage Long ago Arthur Kirsch warned me not to compare Spenser and Shakespeare – ‘apples and oranges’ – their worldviews not fluidly complementary but mutually exclusive. The fictions, genres, and aesthetic modalities of these pre-eminent English Renaissance poets exemplify distinct conceptions of human nature. Though many scholars still assume a single Renaissance psychology, one that privileges Aristotelian empiricism and Aristotelian structuring of faculties (often with the express goal of explaining Shakespeare’s plays), we must cast the net elsewhere to reap the allegory of The Faerie Queene, for only a Christianized Platonic psychology that subordinates Aristotelian features can make sense of the threepart hierarchic pattern which informs Spenser’s allegory, notably in Books 1 and

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2: three rising phases of education in the House of Holiness and in Alma’s Castle, which invert the three progressive stages of temptation in Mammon’s Cave and in the Bower of Bliss; the characters grouped in hierarchic triads (RedcrosseUna-dwarf, Orgoglio-Duessa-monster, Mortdant-Amavia-Ruddymane, ArtegallBritomart-Talus, Eden’s warriors-maidens-commoners).77 Spenser depicts human identity in fixed visual iconic intellectualized epiphanies, grouped in thematic categories that sum up the literary-moral-religious authority of the past. In striking contrast, Shakespeare portrays human identity as ever-evolving in an immediate, protean, theatrical world of present experience, shaped in passional cycles around moments of self-discovery.78 A similar distinction between intellectual and emotional modes of epiphany is explored by Camille Paglia, who in Sexual Personae describes Spenser as Apollonian and Shakespeare as Dionysian,79 a division that roughly resembles how contemporaries matched them with the most admired antique poets. Many English Renaissance literati agree that ‘learned Spenser’ is the ‘English Virgil’ (e.g., Nashe, Florio, Churchyard, Barnfield, Covell, Meres, Speght, Peacham, Daniel, Lodge, Fitzgeffrey, Harrington, Burton), and Watson is one of many who associate Spenser with Apollo, who ‘Amongst the Muses hath a chiefest place’.80 Shakespeare, on the other hand, is the ‘English Ovid’, whose passional metamorphoses celebrate Dionysus’ power: ‘the sweete wittie soule of Ovid’, says Meres, ‘lives in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare’.81 Each poet, of course, explores both rational and affective modes, but they privilege opposite poles. Shakespeare favours Antony’s revelling, generous spirit over Octavius’ prudent Apollonian control; Spenser, though sympathetic to both Belphoebe and Amoret (both Diana and Venus, both chaste Britomart and Book 4’s friendly knights), always prioritizes the ‘hard’ virtue.82 Though both poets draw heavily on Ovid, Spenser’s strategy is containment: his chaste heroine is not seduced (just lightly wounded) by Malecasta’s and Busyrane’s erotic tapestries; and Spenser further contains Ovid–Bacchus by means of Neoplatonic and Christian allegory, as in the Garden of Adonis, where doctrinal logic channels passion, metamorphosis, and Mutabilitie. Spenser does not, like Shakespeare, emphasize Adonis’ sensory being and his experiential passions (though these elements are keenly evoked by implication) but rather Adonis’ intellectual function and his Godlike essence: he is ‘the Father of all formes’ (FQ 3.6.47).83 Paglia’s use of Nietzsche’s polarity is, however, simplistic – inattentive to the peculiar Christian-classical synthesis in each poet’s work. One desires a more comprehensive scheme for understanding their difference and their interplay. In Modes of Being Paul Weiss subsumes Nietzsche’s duality in a fourfold ontology – Actuality, Ideality, Existence, and God84 – a division which matches Aristotle’s four causes, Blake’s four zoas, Jung’s four psychic types. The first two, Actuality and Ideality, assume transcendent form in the latter two, Existence and God. Shakespeare’s art favours Actuality and Existence (material and efficient causes, Urthona and Luvah, Instinct and Emotion – sensory being and experiential passions), while Spenser favours Ideality and God (formal and final causes, Urizen and Tharmas, Reason and Intuition – intellectual function and Godlike essence).85

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Spenser’s emphasis of intellect and conscience (the latter a mythic intuition of divinity) is evident in The Faerie Queene’s vast systematic foreconceit that thematically and teleologically defines and places each fiction in relation to all others. This ­architectonike structures the poem – and each character-grouping and sequence of events – by an absolute and ideal order: first, the Platonic-Christian principle of tripartite hierarchy that informs humankind as an imago Dei, second, the Empedoclean-Hippocratic-Aristotelian principle of antithesis and complementarity that shapes a quaternity of elements and of passional temperaments; third, the packaging of storied language in a nine-line stanza, a twelve-canto legend, a twelvelegend epic; and fourth, the mystic numerology that informs these orderings. In contrast to this overt intellectual shaping, Shakespeare conceals his dramaturgical structure – an intricate 2–1–2 sequence of acts, built upon expanding-andcontracting cycles of action and of relationship – that appear in careful reading but not in ­performance.86 Though each poet engages all four modes of being (the full range of causes, zoas, psychic types), they privilege contrary generic scenarios, contrary modes of psychic management. As we shall see, Spenser’s art is universal and teleological: to understand each part we must intellectually ascertain the holistic end, synecdochally figured as a carefully arranged iconic templar vision. In contrast, Shakespeare’s art is particular and existential; though the end is always in doubt, characters (and audiences) are deeply engaged in each dynamic moment of the soul’s naturally unfolding, cyclic rhythm of emotive development. What we do not expect, however, is the profound degree to which Shakespeare’s art was influenced by that of his laureate peer. Envisioning Spenser’s plan To create a definitive, authoritative form for each literary genre, Spenser plunders various cultural treasuries of story and myth. The progress of love in Amoretti and Epithalamion assumes universality as it builds a Christian-Platonic ladder of awareness and fulfils a calendrical cycle with epiphanies at high holy dates. The universality is enhanced, notably in Epithalamion, by a gorgeous lyricism that blends the riches of natural and social imagery with musical and metrical harmonies.87 Spenser’s most impressive use of this systematic and sacred art is The Faerie Queene, a summa poetica that teases us with only the first half of its ambitious design. Its comprehensiveness is suggested by, first, three pairs of virtues that descend through the three Christian-Platonic levels of human consciousness and, second, division of each pair into alternating conceptual modes: ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ virtues, Briton and Fairy protagonists, allegorical centres that disclose first a transcendent Judaeo-Christian revelation and then pagan deities that signify an immanent, less fully revealed spirit-power within nature.88 This descent through the six wings of Isaiah’s seraph implies, subsequently, an inverse ascent. A tragedy of modern criticism is the now-common view that The Faerie Queene is complete as it stands (a view ably summarized by A.C. Hamilton)89 – ascribed to Spenser’s realizing the original plan’s tenuous relation to reality, or his discerning the metaphysical impossibility of closure. Some believe he intentionally narrowed

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his plan to six virtues, with the Mutabilitie Cantos as coda: thus Justice (‘Most sacred virtue she of all the rest, / Resembling God in his imperiall might’, 5.Pr.10) and Courtesy (‘Amongst them all growes not a fayrer flowre’, spreading ‘itself through all civilitie’, 6.Pr.4) provide effective closure.90 For others, Spenser in despair abandoned his Virgilian laureate quest: the endless interruptions and failed closure of Book 6 show the Gloriana dream succumbing to Mutabilitie, as Elizabeth is unable to rectify Ireland, the court, and the patronage system, and as hopes fade for an adequate ‘Arthur’ to marry or to succeed her. For others, the ‘endlesse worke’ caused by historical mutability, human sin, and linguistic slippage make the completion of Spenser’s allegory for ever elusive.91 As a result, few scholars join Tuve, Horton, and Kuin in aggressively seeking clues for the design of the final half.92 Study of classical and medieval ethical systems indicates that ‘Aristotle and the rest’ were adapted to Spenser’s own scheme, which subsumes Aristotle within Christian Platonism. But despite several superb foundational studies that give heavy attention to Platonism – Fowler’s Spenser and the Numbers of Time, Nohrnberg’s The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’, Quitslund’s Spenser’s Supreme Fiction – no one has discovered the structural principles for Spenser’s ‘twelve virtues’.93 Nor have critics fully assessed the implications of truncating the poem’s grand foreconceit. First, as central protagonist, Arthur is incomplete. His receipt from Redcrosse of ‘A booke, wherein his Saueours Testament / Was writt with golden letters rich and braue; / A worke of wondrous grace, and hable soules to saue’ (FQ 1.9.19), implies that Arthur, though wondrously empowered, is not yet fully Christian and, further, that he needs to be – needs deep refinement of his native gifts. He does not join Redcrosse in the rigorous enlightenment of the House of Holiness, though in Book 2 he does join Guyon in the tour and defence of Alma’s Castle: thus in Books 1–6 Arthur knows himself sub specie temporis, but not sub specie aeternitatis.94 Arthur’s need for further enlightenment becomes acute in Book 6 (cantos 5–8): his discomfiture at the shame of Timias and Serena, his astonishment at Turpine and Blandina’s perfidy, his inability to rescue Mirabella from Disdaine. Arthur’s confused ineffectiveness at the epic’s midpoint duplicates the situation of Redcrosse and Una in cantos 5 and 6 of Book 1, an impasse which suggests, not Spenser’s despairing abandonment of the poetic quest, but preparation for Arthur’s further growth.95 Would he undergo a humbling fall in Book 7, aid from other(s) in Book 8, rigorous enlightenment in Books 9–10 (escalating Book 2’s tour or defence of the physical body), and confrontation of ever-grander foes who figure his deepest problems – in short, features comparable to the final half of Book 1? Communion with Gloriana, the poem’s titular subject and Arthur’s goal, is equally unrealized. She is not just an Idea, an immaterial visio, but a potentially complex character who leaves vestigial traces (‘pressed gras where she had lyne’, FQ 1.9.15) and achieves incarnation indirectly. Through her subsidiary types Gloriana encounters, like Arthur, increasing challenges in her own ‘journey’ – reflected negatively in Lucifera’s vain self-mirroring and ‘progress’ but also positively in Una’s ‘errancy’ (1.2–6), in Belphoebe’s errant relation with Timias (Books 3–4) and in Florimell’s elusive flight, in Britomart’s impassioned quest (which

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transfers to Gloriana a remarkable characterological complexity, Books 3–5), in Mercilla’s quandary over costly wars and executing ‘Duessa’, and in the frustrated pastoral of Book 6, where Elizabeth is explicitly omitted from the vision on Acidale.96 Instead of diminishing her allure, these growing restraints should set the stage for Elizabeth’s own anagnorisis and gradual triumph over the enormous challenges to moral integrity which she faced throughout her reign. Equally incomplete is Spenser’s plan for the twelvefold virtues of perfect gentility. The missing cardinal virtues – Courage, Prudence – could (like Temperance and Justice) occupy the centre of each remaining triad of legends. The highest virtues of the perfect courtier – Liberality, Magnificence, Magnanimity – drawn from Aristotle and Cicero but refined by Platonic and Christian principles, could expand and perfectly contextualize the meaning of Courtesy (which, like Courage and Justice, depends on Magnificence).97 Similar escalation of moral contexts could build Temperance into Patience (elaborating the house of Holiness’s first stage of training), Chastity into Charity (elaborating the House of Holiness’s second stage), Justice into Sapience (elaborating the House of Holiness’s final stage): such additions would refine Arthur’s character and elicit Gloriana’s fuller presence. To encourage Arthur, the Palmer notes Gloriana’s honouring of Sophy and Arthegall (2..9.6), implying that Temperance and Magnificence will ally with Justice and Sapience.98 This dialogue of Guyon, Arthur, and the Palmer before touring the ‘House of Temperance’ (2.9.1–8) closely parallels that of Redcrosse, Arthur, and Una before the House of Holiness (1.9.1–19): both focus on Arthur’s search for Gloriana, the quest for glory that unites the ‘goodly golden chayne’ of virtues (1.9.1). But we note distinctions between the two episodes: Redcrosse’s nearly fatal distraction by Despair has no adequate counterpart in the parallel sequence of Book 2; and Una’s rescue (and guidance to further training) far exceeds the Palmer’s counsel. The holistic allegorical scope of Holiness systematically shrinks in subsequent legends – yet becomes pragmatically relevant to everyday life – as they descend ever deeper into material reality, a descent incorporating mind and spirit in actuality before re-ascending to fullest apprehension. This ‘dilation’ merits close study.99 Compared with Book 1, the allegory of Book 6 is oddly constrictive: Redcrosse’s dreadful fall (his wretched bondage after disarmed dalliance with Duessa) shrinks to Calidore’s ambivalent truancy with Pastorella; Arthur’s heaven-assisted redeeming of Redcrosse from Orgoglio shrinks to Arthur’s puzzled inability to rescue Mirabella from the similar but less-comprehensive giant Disdain;100 Redcrosse’s rigorous training in faith, charity, and contemplation shrinks to a simple blossoming of Calidore’s innate gifts in the pastoral; Redcrosse’s slaying the great Dragon, the abusive collective power of sin, shrinks to Calidore’s briefly muzzling a bleating beast of discourteous backbiting. Within the purview of the Virgilian epic pattern and, more important, the Christian-Platonic allegorizing of that pattern, the action of Book 6 is the opposite of closure. If Book 1 offers a microcosmic pattern for The Faerie Queene’s overall development, then the bitter aftertaste of Book 5 (Duessa’s execution, Burbon’s fickle ingratitude, the implicit persistence of England’s political foes, Envy and

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­ etraction’s assault) resembles Redcrosse’s post-victory dilemma in Book 1, canto D 5 (the illusory defeat of Sansjoy and his own residual joylessness);101 and Book 6’s inconclusive allegory similarly replays and elaborates the pastoral, half-pagan events of 1.6 (Una’s failure to enlighten fauns and satyrs, the impasse of Satyrane battling Sansloy). One must wonder if the heroes of Books 7–12 (after the insecure victories of Books 2–6) would be tested by foes of clearer, more comprehensive monstrosity (as the Sansboys gave way to Orgoglio, Despair, and the Dragon). Would the protagonists of the final legends relate more fully to Gloriana’s subtypes, and would Elizabeth realize fuller selfhood and destiny through those new mirrorings?102 The disturbing quality of Books 5 and 6 (the poignancy of a literal sensory realm that prepares for the epic’s nadir and peripety in the Legend of Constancy)103 makes us yearn to see the challenges and revelations of the poem’s second half, the missing chancel, choir, and rose window of this awesome literary cathedral. Shakespeare’s riposte Spenser’s grandiose intellectual epic, a vast moral and mythic tribute to Elizabeth and her aristocratic circle, posed an obstacle and challenge to Shakespeare’s goals. In 1595–96, as the English court awaited the second instalment of Spenser’s epic, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream reduced Spenser’s central trope to hilarious comedy: Gloriana’s recondite mystery and virginal discreteness is displaced by the bodily present emotional allure, the charismatic vanity, of Titania (titan-née), whose mating with ass-headed Bottom humorously reifies Elizabeth’s claim to be married to all her people.104 This brilliant rejoinder to Spenser’s fairy queen must in part result from Shakespeare’s reading of Book 1’s most puzzling episode, Una’s sojourn with satyrs and fauns. Spenser provocatively exposes Una (the holiest subtype of Gloriana) to the Ovidian–Dionysian energies that so attracted Shakespeare: ‘old Syluanus … wonders what them makes so glad, / Or Bacchus merry fruit they did inuent, / Or Cybeles franticke rites haue made them mad’ (1.6.15). In its richly sensual and mythic allure the episode recalls the seductive entertainments for the Virgin Queen in her early reign, such as Leicester’s pageant at Kenilworth (which Shakespeare’s Oberon wistfully recalls: MND 2.1.148–64). But the resistance to theological truth by these ‘salvage people’, their distracted focus on immediate sensory things, suggests the energetic popular response of commoners to Elizabeth’s mystique, a popular appeal that especially rivals Shakespeare’s artistic interests. The stanza that must have toppled Shakespeare from his seat with laughter concerns Una’s effort to Christianize these pagan/rustic creatures.   [She] long time with that salvage people stayd, …   During which time her gentle wit she plyes,   To teach them truth, which worshipt her in vaine,   And made her th’ image of idolatryes;   But when their bootlesse zeale she did restrayne From her own worship, they her asse would worship fayn.

(1.6.19)

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Once while teaching this episode I noted that, instead of listening to Una’s ‘truth’, the satyrs worshipped her ass. The resulting storm of hilarity was so vehement and unending, as my face reddened and authority vanished, that I dismissed the class. Since most of my lusty rustic-satyr students had not read the text, it was with great freshness that they caught both the pun105 and my pedantic stupidity in stumbling into it. Perhaps it was these lines – indeed the whole episode of taming lavish Bacchic energies (Spenser parading an arsenal of legendary erotica to prove Una-GlorianaElizabeth’s chaste ‘truth’) – that helped to inspire A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare reverses the loaded pun: the fairy queen (Una’s parodic type) worships the ass! – but now it is the complexly subversive ass of Erasmus and Apuleius, consummately ignorant and implicitly priapic.106 If Spenser is aware of the vulgar subtext, he treats it with masterful Apollonian-Christian aplomb: only the unthinking lewdness of satyrs can subvert the meaning of the lowly ass ridden to the Crucifixion, or the patristic allegory of humble clergy carrying the Word to the people.107 Shakespeare, however, exploits the satyrs’ mistake, stripping the ass of sacred allegory to reclothe it in allegory of a different sort, transforming it from a basis for holiness to base foolishness – ‘Bottom’ – utterly self-delighted, eager to play all human roles and gain universal admiration, and ingenuously good-natured before Titania and Theseus. This wonderfully complex creature inspires (via a lovewounded flower) Titania’s lusty idolatry and (via love-wounded ‘art’) Theseus’ wry approval. An astonishing inversion of Spenser’s ‘asse’. Naturally Shakespeare deflected royal displeasure by separately praising Elizabeth (his only explicit flattery during her lifetime) with Oberon’s exquisite mythic account of a beauteous virgin, impervious to Cupid’s arrows, who is the Unmoved Mover of Love (MND 2.1.148–72). Shakespeare’s comedy thus implicitly critiques Elizabeth as a wilful fairy queen but also detaches her from Spenser’s celebratory trope. The main target of the comic demiurge is not Elizabeth but Spenser’s elitist, Petrarchan aesthetic. Did Shakespeare intend simply to upstage the second instalment of Spenser’s epic, or did his parodic ‘fairy queen’ serve a deeper political agenda? Maurice Hunt elaborately reviews the possibility that Titania’s dotage on Bottom alludes to Elizabeth’s infatuation with the Duke of Alençon (later, Duke of Anjou) near the end of their decade-long marriage negotiations (1572–81).108 Many odd details invite this topical allegory: Bottom’s eleven uses of ‘monsieur’; Elizabeth’s animal names for Anjou and his emissary Simier; the ‘little Indian boy’ as covert reference to James VI, child of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth-Titania’s ‘votaress’; Oberon as Henry VIII or Leicester or Essex; the ‘wounded flower’ as Lettice Knollys Devereux Dudley, her love-wound dividing Leicester and Elizabeth, then in recompense inflicting Elizabeth’s dotage. Though such an allegory, sponsored by Essex’s circle, could support the argument of my essay, I believe Shakespeare’s glance at Elizabeth’s disturbing infatuation is swallowed up in a populist wish-fulfilment that offers a more satisfying resolution for the fairy queen’s errancy. The enthusiastic, loyal, rough-hewn artistry of Bottom and the rustics quaintly celebrates Shakespeare’s own theatre, demonstrating its salubrious, well-intended impact on Elizabeth and England, far more than it mocks the Queen’s errancy with an unworthy French

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lord. The concluding play-within-the-play allows the commonest of players to upstage all aristocratic courtiers, whether French or English. Moreover, Bottom’s good-natured crudeness provides a transition to Falstaff and other tavern idlers, who also evoke royal and universal infatuation before being invited into a brotherhood of holy warriors. Since the lyricism of A Midsummer Night’s Dream dates it with Richard II, it seems both plays were intended to set the stage for a quite different English epic – namely, the populist, male-glorifying Henriad. Its ‘all-humoured’ prince purposely associates with idling commoners as well as aspiring aristocrats, finally binding them in militant blood-brotherhood on Crispin’s Day. The Henriad, moreover, exalts a prince who, like his usurper father, claims the throne by clever self-fashioning, and (as a key element in Shakespeare’s agenda) it ends with a glowing tribute to the Earl of Essex, comparing him to Henry V in heroic leadership, popularity, and monarchic potential (Falstaff ‘s persistent ‘when thou art king’: 1H4 1.2.16, 23, 55, 58, 60). Much of Shakespeare’s idealizing of Hal seems designed to match Essex’s celebrated virtues. In meticulous detail Paul Hammer recounts how Essex, to lead the Protestant cause, subjected his armies and enemy commanders to religious services, forbade immorality and pillage of the poor, and was widely praised for combining bravery with chivalric courtesy, decorous self-restraint, and piety.109 Certainly Essex’s self-image matches Henry V as a ‘mirror of all Christian kings’ (H5 2.Pr.6) ‘redeeming time when men think least I will’ (1H4 1.2.213). The messianic-providential image of Henry V reflects an on-going Reformation debate over England’s chronicles.110 Edward Hall in The Vnion of the two noble and illustre families of Lancastre and York (1548) gave the idealizing nationalist view: Henry V is ‘the blasyng comete’, ‘the myrrour of Christendome & the glory of his country’, ‘the floure of kynges passed, and a glasse to them that should succeed’. But Holinshed, influenced by Puritans like Foxe who sought to repair Oldcastle’s reputation and to desacralize Henry V, omitted the apocalyptic ‘blasyng comete’ and the idolatrous ‘mirrour of Christendome’.111 Shakespeare restores the exalted view of Henry’s providential role, and apparently exploits Foxe’s allusion to a false slander of Oldcastle as a ‘greatpaunch glutton’. In the Henriad Shakespeare’s affirmation of Henry’s providential militarism112 perfectly served the goals of Essex, who carefully cultivated his reputation as a holy warrior after scrutinizing English and ancient Roman history. Perhaps Essex’s scholarly secretary Henry Cuffe offered the playwrights, especially Shakespeare and Daniel, this reading of Henry V and of Oldcastle, ancestor of Essex’s bitter enemy, Lord Brooke. After the miracle-victory at Agincourt, the Chorus reaffirms Henry V’s saintly image: ‘free from vainness and selfglorious pride, / Giving full trophy … / Quite from himself to God’ (5.Pr.20–2; italics mine). Such perfect humility, however, sharply differs from Essex’s vacillating behaviour at this time. At first the exemplar of chivalry and courtesy, by 1597 Essex was maddeningly frustrated by the Council’s opposition to his quest for honour, often as arrogantly self-promoting as Hotspur. Eric Mallin notes that Troilus and Cressida exemplifies Essex in moral opposites.113 This ambivalent portrayal of the quest for honour in fact occurs in each play connected with Essex: in 1 Henry IV

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he resembles both Hal and Hotspur; in Julius Caesar, both Brutus and Caesar; in Hamlet, both Hamlet and Laertes; in Troilus and Cressida, both Hector and Achilles. Wayne Rebhorn likewise observes that Julius Caesar is no simplistic piѐce à clé but a complex anatomy of Essex’s militaristic quest for honour and power, which became increasingly obsessive and self-destructive.114 Shakespeare’s depiction of Hal-Henry V as a good humoured, saintly king is thus wishfully proleptic with regard to Essex, inviting him to realize his greatness through imitating a fantasy monarch (a ‘Caesar’) which is partly Essex’s own creation. But now behold, … How London doth pour out her citizens! The Mayor and all his brethren . . . Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in; As by a lower but loving likelihood, Were now the General of our gracious Empress, As in good time he may, from Ireland coming, Bringing rebellion broached on his sword, How many would the peaceful city quit To welcome him.

(H5 5.Prol.20–34)

Thus, after A Midsummer Night’s Dream comically deconstructs the literary hegemony of Spenser’s ‘fairy queen’, Shakespeare offers his own irresistible epic, the Henriad, making Hal a populist prodigal turned holy prodigy who might be reincarnated in Essex. Shakespeare’s control of this delicate material is subtle: he evokes riotous laughter at himself and his troupe as Peter Quince and the rustics, before creating in the Henriad a thrilling socially inclusive theatrical epic to replace Spenser’s refined intellectual allegory. Instead of ‘fashioning gentlemen’ of the privileged elite, equipped to purchase and read an ever-expanding folio Faerie Queene about a magnific Arthurian-romance hero who can fulfil the dreams of both Essex and Elizabeth, Shakespeare enacts on stage a ‘mirror of all Christian kings’ who playfully imagines himself ‘of all humours’ and seriously debates his militarism.115 This self-conscious messianic hero could displace even the Christian dimension of Spenser’s epic and, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, assert magisterial male dominion over a subjugated royal consort. If, however, the éclat of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Henriad helped Shakespeare to surpass the reigning laureate in the hearts of English folk, the triumph was also Spenser’s, for the greatness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has less to do with parodic mockery than with brilliant confiscation of the noblest features of Spenser’s art: mythic allegory of a grand range of beings who quest for loving fulfilment under a fairy queen’s mesmerizing aura, all in musical, richly imaged verse (Shakespeare, at this point, omitting only Spenser’s carefully prudent morality). These elements distinctly elevate A Midsummer Night’s Dream over the earlier comedies. Though lovemaking is still farcical (as in The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost), it widens to mythic dimensions. Desire conquers all, omnia vincit amor, from base commoners to lofty aristocrats, despite quasi-deification as legendary heroes and

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fairy immortals. But whereas Spenser enforces divinely ordained social hierarchy, as in Belphoebe’s curt disposal of Braggadocchio, Shakespeare allows metamorphic desire to make momentary hash of social distinctions, pace Titania and Bottom. Their astonishing union is Shakespeare’s most daring use of ‘allegory’, which Judith Anderson shows to be the major artistic element he appropriates from Spenser,116 but this richly thematic and mythic allusiveness is transformed by Shakespeare into allegory of a different sort, celebrating the sensory particularity and commonness of experience, in contrast to Spenser’s celebration of the elite, universal, Godlike ideal. Spenser’s influence on Shakespeare does not end with a grandly comic fairy queen, nor with paralleling Henry V and Essex to appropriate Spenser’s best candidate for Prince Arthur. Shakespeare’s ‘absolute absorption of the precursor’ (as Bloom calls it)117 continues to operate, for in the year after the second instalment of The Faerie Queene Shakespeare even more radically alters and extends his comic vision by designing The Merchant of Venice with a serious dimension of moral, even religious, allegory.118 Portia, whose restrained self-mastery gradually takes over the play,119 inverts Titania, as if Gloriana’s mythic power is now seriously felt (though partly by male disguise). Portia’s mockery of many princely suitors cleverly reflects Elizabeth’s celebrated evasions of marriage. The English audience could relish her privately sharp, publicly tactful condescensions. They could likewise relish the concluding fantasy of a perfect English match, a gentleman without title but handsome, witty, and morally capable of the casket-test. An important subtext of this wish-fulfilment is its implicit resolution of succession anxiety. Portia initiates a series of great female leads, several with marked resemblance to Elizabeth I: Beatrice, Rosalind,120 Viola/Olivia,121 Helena, Cleopatra.122 The love quests of The Merchant of Venice are resolved not by the providential power of a whimsical male (Petruchio, Oberon) but by the decorous rational craft of a female magus, one who is capable of attending to serious social and economic realities and whose wisdom is repeatedly given gospel allusiveness: ‘How far that little candle throws his beams!’ (MV 5.1.90). The gleam of moral-religious allegory evolves more deeply and darkly in the tragedies and romances – not only, as Judith Anderson shows, in King Lear123 but also in Othello, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and especially The Tempest, which recasts A Midsummer Night’s Dream with elevated mythic ambience and, at last, with allegorical names and identities for central characters. Puck (a projector of Oberon’s daemonic urges) splits into ‘Ariel’ and ‘Caliban’, a division that gives ‘Prospero’ a responsible and linguistically powerful magic far beyond his prototype. If Titania evoked laughter at the fairy queen’s vanity, as well as awe at her erotic majesty and oratorical power, ‘Miranda’ exemplifies Gloriana’s innocent essence: the compelling authority of her chastity, her frank intelligence, her command of universal admiration. Spenser’s influence on The Tempest is especially evident in the play’s Virgilian124 and Christian125 subtexts, but also in Shakespeare’s recasting of Colin Clout’s breaking of pipes (FQ 6.10.18; SC, ‘January’ 72). Prospero’s ‘I’ll break my staff ‘ and ‘drown my book’ (Tmp 5.1.54–7) is a more comprehensive disavowal of artistic prowess, and his

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eloquent comment on his own anger at Caliban’s interruption of the masque is far more self-possessed than Colin’s loss of temper. Shakespeare thus internalizes and transforms the moral and mythic dimensions of Spenser’s art, a signal example of what Greenblatt calls his ‘limitless talent for entering into the consciousness of another, perceiving its deepest structures as a manipulable fiction, reinscribing it into his own narrative form’.126 As Shakespeare absorbed Spenser’s art and thereby expanded his own, widening its intellectual and spiritual scope, was Spenser similarly aware of Shakespeare’s work? Missing the final half of Spenser’s epic, we have no record of his reaction to a revamped fairy queen, provocatively and physically actualized; nor do we know if the Henriad influenced Spenser’s view of the militant quest for honour. But the dark elements at the end of The Faerie Queene’s second instalment clearly presage Shakespeare’s increased questioning of the militaristic quest for glory in the Henriad, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Macbeth, and Coriolanus. Most centrally, each poet shows deepening concern for the problem of self-love in the English court – both in complex fictive heroines who reflect Elizabeth’s powerful presence and in frustrated aspirants for honor through her recognition – notably Essex, whose patronage both poets sought during the 1590s, especially after the much-bruited enterprises at Rouen and Cadiz (1591, 1596) and before the disastrous campaigns in the Azores (1597) and Ireland (1598–99). It is instructive to trace during the English Renaissance, from The Shepheardes Calender (1579) to Samson Agonistes (1674), an increasing use of ‘self-love’ by poets, preachers, politicians, and philosophers, with growing awareness of its centrality and complexity, and in literature a growing interest in attaining proper self-love. The phrase alerts us to changing concepts of both ‘self ‘ (subjectivity, self-fashioning) and ‘love’ (desire, relationship, bonding) during the early modern period. In their romance-epics, Sidney and Spenser stress the destructive selflove of philautia, a vainglorious pride that obstructs the fashioning of virtuous ladies and gentlemen.127 Self-love also challenges Spenser’s fashioning of a laureate image since he seeks true moral authority more than celebrity and patronage. A more alluring portrayal of self-love occurs in the popular theatre, where Marlowe and Jonson exploit the primal appeal of ambitious self-interest, while Shakespeare, though at first imitating Marlovian self-assertion (in early histories, in Titus Andronicus, and in comedies through A Midsummer Night’s Dream), eventually portrays self-love as complexly life-affirming. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Stuart rule brings an exploding obsession with self-love. As James Bednarz observes, it is a key feature in the ‘Poets’ War’ of 1599–1601,128 and building on Cynthia’s Revels or The Fountain of Self-Love it figures prominently in Jonson’s court masques.129 It is a catchword in Puritan sermons and political tracts as England moves to civil war, and Milton portrays it as the central problem for both humans and angels in his final works, especially Paradise Lost, though he shifts the main burden of self-love to Eve, while giving her one special power for dealing with it.130 Here I focus simply on the polar contrast of Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s portrayal of self-love during the 1590s when their remarkable poetic achievements suggest rival laureateships.

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Spenser’s repudiation of self-love Spenser subsumes self-love within the deadly sin of pride (and the subordinate support-sins of presumption, ambition, and vanity).131 He rarely mentions ‘self-love’ (two adjectival uses, compared with 344 uses of ‘pride/proud’ and its cognates), and with pious zeal he presents self-love only negatively as philautia, a passive preening vanity that paralyses virtuous action. In 252 lines on Lucifera and her ‘progress’ with seven vices (FQ 1.4.7–12, 16–37), four lines deal with selflove:   in her hand she held a mirrhour bright,   Wherein her face she often vewed fayne,   And in her selfe-lou’d semblance tooke delight; For she was wondrous faire, as any liuing wight.

Her self-admiration, inspiring ruthless competition among courtiers, culminates in a ‘progress’ of deadly sins to exhibit herself more widely.132 Consummating her vanity by putting it on wheels (thus demonizing Ezekiel’s mobilized, enwheeled ark of the covenant), she undercuts her self-glorying by craving others’ admira­ tion. Like Phaethon, who similarly abuses the gift of light, Lucifera is ‘Proud of such glory and aduancement vaine’ (9). Her ‘Husher’ (marvellous pun) is Vanitie (13); and ‘vain’, a favourite Spenserian adjective (an easy rhyme), punctuates much of his moral terrain. The primary meaning of ‘vain’ (self-admiring) is deflated by subsidiary meanings, implying that its cause and effect are ‘in vain’ (unmerited and self-deluding; ineffective and self-destructive): ‘loose loues … are vaine, and vanish into nought’ (1.10.62). Thus self-love, when viewed as philautia, disfigures genuine selfhood by distracting from the quest for true glory. Moreover, it is utterly subordinate to pride, the ‘radical ur-sin’ (as Tuve calls it)133 which led Satan to rebel against God and to infect Adam and Eve with the same urge. Pride is the main obstacle in Spenser’s Legend of Holiness, where he traces its assault on each level of human nature. As pride is both instigator (the whipster Satan) and substance (the monarch Lucifera) of the vices’ progress in Book 1, it likewise motivates and informs foes of subsequent legends – Mammon, Maleger, and Acrasia; Malecasta, Argante, and Busyrane; Lust and Proteus; Radigund, Souldan, and Grantorto; Sanglier, Turpine, and Disdain; Mutabilitie. Defeating pride is quintessential in each quest, and to overcome it each virtue must achieve self-mortification, which then allows charitable service to others. Primary attention, especially in the legends of holiness, temperance, and chastity, is given to self-mortification, and the mirroring act of overthrowing the self-indulgent, before performing charitable service. ‘Self-love’ appears explicitly only once more in The Faerie Queene. In Book 2, a temporal parallel to Book 1’s eternal perspective, we see the clownish underside of self-love when Braggadocchio steals Guyon’s horse and spear, intimidates the peacock Trompart, and deceives even Archimago into promising to steal for him Prince Arthur’s sword, before Belphoebe exposes the base boastful commoner:

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       a losell wandring by the way,   One that to bountie neuer cast his mynd,   Ne thought of honour euer did assay   His baser brest, but in his kestrell kind   A pleasing vaine of glory he did find,   To which his flowing toung and troublous spright   Gaue him great ayd, and made him more inclind:   He, that braue steed there finding ready dight, Purloyned both steed and speare, and ran away full light. Now gan his hart all swell in jollitie,   And of him selfe great hope and helpe conceiu’d,   That puffed vp with smoke of vanitie,   And with selfe-loued personage deceiu’d,   He gan to hope of men to be receiu’d   For such, as he him thought, or faine would bee:   But for in court gay portaunce he perceiu’d   And gallant shew to be in greatest gree, Eftsoones to court he cast t’aduaunce his first degree.

(2.3.4–5)

Lucifera and Braggadocchio exemplify the upper and lower reaches of vainglorious self-love. Both are perversions of the quest for honour, derived from classical, medieval, and Italian Renaissance praise for magnanimity, the high-minded noble virtue which merits leadership roles, public acclaim, and self-approval.134 Maurice McNamee, SJ, in Honor and the Epic Hero (1960), traces the evolution of a Christian form of magnanimity from the self-interested Homeric hero (an arête defended by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics) to the nationally dutiful Virgilian hero (a pietas promoted by Cicero’s De Officiis) to the self-denying, charitable chivalry of Spenser’s heroes (a humble charity taught by Augustine’s City of God and Aquinas’s Summa Theologica – but combined with the quest for honour extolled by Italian handbooks on the perfect courtier’s service to an idealized earthly prince). In contrast, Curtis Watson in Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (1960), to explain Shakespeare’s ethos, stresses the resurgence of ancient self-assertion, transmitted by Renaissance Italians like Castiglione and Machiavelli and only mildly qualified by medieval and humanist Christianity.135 Each of these critiques leans only one way. Watson focuses on Shakespeare’s secularism and does not acknowledge the playwright’s change, the growing appearance of ‘epiphanal’ revelation in the mature comedies, tragedies, and romances.136 McNamee acknowledges Spenser’s partial approval of the quest for earthly glory (despite Augustine’s disdain for it, which is only slightly moderated by Aquinas), but McNamee is unsure how much Spenser affirms the self-approval, the self-love, implicit in the quest for fame, honour, and glory. For Linda Gregerson and James Broaddus, Britomart is centrally motivated by self-love, or, as Broaddus helpfully qualifies, ‘subordinated self-love’.137 But despite my admiration for these studies, I do not find in Spenser’s works a consciously positive view of self-love. Britomart’s viewing her ideal mate in Merlin’s mirror

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(a ‘world of glas’ showing whatever ‘to the looker appertaynd’, 3.2.19) inverts Narcissus’ self-mirroring; she laments the possible analogy between herself and ‘Cephisus foolish child’ (3.2.44). She desires neither her own physical image nor Artegall’s but rather his moral discipline, his justice based on self-restraint (the controlled Bacchus of 5.1.2). Such an image reflects her own chaste power to control (indeed to mortify) her self-love, to replace her own image with a male other who exemplifies Justice – a foreshadowing of Milton’s angel teaching Eve to replace her beauteous external image with the sexual other as an imago Dei. In contrast to Milton’s untested and unfallen Eve, Britomart is provided with symbolic arms – the lance of Will, the sword-word of Intellect, the armour of restraint – in order to shape her identity and her relationships in a fallen world.138 Thus, though Britomart actively affirms her chaste virtue, for Spenser this approval of self-abnegation is not ‘self-love’.139 Only once, at the beginning of Amoretti, does Spenser suggest that proper pride motivates virtuous gentlefolk, but he does not call it ‘self-love’ and he quickly reforms it. The narrator (representing, as Dunlop says, a naive initial stage of the poet-wooer)140 proudly defends his beloved’s ‘portly pride’ since it indicates her ‘scorn of base things’: Such pride is praise, such portlinesse is honor, that boldned innocence beares in hir eies . … Was never in this world ought worthy tride, without some spark of such self-pleasing pride.

(Sonnet 5)141

The remainder of the Amoretti, however, studiously reforms that pride, both in his beloved and in himself. (His courtship of Elizabeth Boyle apparently coincides with Mirabella’s struggle with Disdain, FQ 6.7.28–8.30.) Thus Spenser and his beloved, like Britomart, reverse Narcissus’ mirroring, struggling up the Platonic ladder of admiration: from body to soul, to an Idea drawing the soul to God (see Amoretti, 35, 45, 78, 87). Moreover, instead of viewing Narcissus’ obsession with his likeness as a crucial initiating inspiration, Spenser like Petrarch emphasizes the beloved’s sexual unlikeness, her otherness, reinforcing the body-spirit distinction and – like Gloriana, Una, and Sapience – showing the Godlikeness that fosters virtue. The same principle informs Britomart’s view of heroic virtue as male otherness in Merlin’s mirror. For Spenser, one can be proud only of serving a higher glory and, with regard to oneself, proud only of self-abnegation, implicit in the shamefast desire, chaste integrity, and self-sacrifice achieved by his heroes. They exemplify a Reformation mode of magnanimity which admits only a severely qualified victory over oneself while serving a worthy prince. Redcrosse’s defeat by Orgoglio (Italian ‘pride’) in 1.7 makes us question Guyon’s integrity at the corresponding episode in Book 2. Before meeting Mammon and without the Palmer, Guyon ‘euermore himselfe with comfort feedes / Of his owne virtues, and prayse-worthy deedes’ (2.7.2). In Aristotle’s ethics and Cicero’s Offices, cornerstone texts in Renaissance education, self-interest and desire of praise are essential motives, though (as refined by

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Aquinas and others) subordinated to humility and obedience. The heart-parlour of Alma’s Castle, where Guyon and Arthur see their complementary motives, clarifies the nature of Guyon’s comfort in ‘prays-worthy deedes’. One imagines Shamefastnesse and Prays-desire to be contraries, yet Prays-desire does not make Arthur swell with pride: like Guyon he blushes with embarrassment, following Augustine’s advice in The City of God: let the love of human praise blush and give place to the love of truth. For this is a great enemy of our faith, if the desire for glory have more room in our hearts than the fear of God; and therefore [says Christ, John 5.22]: ‘How can you believe that expect honour one from another and seek not the honour that cometh of God?’142

Like the ‘too solemn sad’ Redcrosse Knight, Arthur’s Prays-desire calls herself ‘pensiue’ and ‘sad in mind, / Through great desire of glory and of fame’: Arthur responds by ‘change of colour’, ‘Now seeming flaming whot, now stony cold’. The drama of self-abasement peaks in Guyon’s demur courtship of Shamefastnesse, who ‘answerd nought, but more abasht for shame, / Held downe her head, the whiles her louely face / The flashing bloud with blushing did inflame, / And the strong passion mard her modest grace’. On hearing that she mirrors his own heart, Guyon ‘did blush in priuitee, / And turnd his face away; but she the same / Dissembled faire, and faynd to ouersee’ (2.9.36–44). Michael Schoenfeldt stresses the pleasurable goals of Spenser’s temperate knight and the need for ‘construction’ to achieve those pleasures.143 But one must contextualize those rare, brief moments of pleasure within the far more insistent focus on a self-discipline which is less concerned with self-construction than with annihilating the prolific spawn of false selves: Spenser’s emphasis in the belly is on endless sweating labours to achieve the ‘goodly order’ of digestion, concluding with the humbling evacuation from Port Esquiline. Moving to heart and head brings the deeper ‘sadness’ of containing the higher energies of passion and will: complementary modes of embarrassed courtship in the heart, errant imagination and tragic chronicles in the brain.144 Thus Guyon’s comforting ‘deedes’ do not focus on enjoying Medina’s moderate pleasures but on heroic feats of self-restraint and self-mortification: Guyon must avoid Occasion and Furor, avoid Cymochles and Pyrochles’s extremes, resist Phaedria’s seductions, repudiate Mammon’s offers, and utterly eradicate the Bower of Bliss. Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity share this central principle of self-control that finds ‘comfort’ (but not pride) in self-abnegation rather than self-love. That heroes of odd-numbered legends (Redcrosse, Britomart, Artegall) surpass the heroes of even-numbered legends in every combat shows their superiority in exercising this self-denying principle. William Nelson saw the moral paradox governing Redcrosse’s quest: the ‘bloudie Crosse’ recalls ‘his dying Lord’, and ‘dead as liuing euer him ador’d’ (1.1.2).145 By dying-living in faith and loving service, one can glimpse the glory of eternal life, for though self-abnegation does not merit glory, it allows intense acknowledgment of gifts of grace. The rigour of Holiness brings appreciation of the view of heavenly bliss and of the momentary ‘sea of blisfull ioy’ on seeing Una unveiled. Likewise, Chastity’s self-restrained and chari-

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table rigour affords a glimpse (later withdrawn) of joyous marital union. After Book 1 each virtue is shadowed by the daunting paradox of its moral achievement (sainthood = consummate self-defeat) and of its plot (the utterly comprehensive quest for holiness is utterly unfinished): no subsequent hero attains a comparable sense of unworthiness and dependence on divine grace. We can only imagine that Arthur (perhaps in league with all the knights) will like Redcrosse finally envision the ‘chosen’ saints of ‘new Hierusalem’, ‘purg’d from sinfull guilt’ not by their own deeds but by the ‘pretious bloud … of that unspotted lam’. Such a vision, when ‘this bright Angels towre quite dims that towre of glas’ (1.10.57–8), will reorient Arthur’s blushing desire for praise in Cleopolis. Similarly Elizabeth-as-Gloriana can complete her own quest for power and wisdom by acknowledging glory’s true source. Such, I believe, was the goal of Spenser’s epic. Thus the alternating virtues of The Faerie Queene are not simply complementary; nor are they easily compatible. A deep and at times violent tension must be negotiated between them – between the rigorous spiritual restraint of Holiness, Chastity, and Justice, and the softer but deeply entrammelling engagement in natural virtue (and, as Schoenfeldt says, in natural pleasure) by the fairy heroes of Temperance, Friendship, and Courtesy. Nor are they equal: as Aquinas notes, the virtues form a hierarchy matching the powers in human nature.146 Of the six completed legends, Holiness is most exalted precisely because it is paradoxically based on humility, the conquest of pride. In its victory over self, Holiness sets the pattern and precepts for all the virtues. Though Temperance usefully seeks comfort and public approval for its self-restrained deeds, its touchstone is still self-abasement, avoiding arrogant pride with its resulting self-indulgence in power-hunger, covetousness, and cruelty. Likewise, the other ‘soft’, ‘fairy’ virtues of Friendship and Courtesy, despite their idealized access to the gifts of a natural world, are ultimately achieved by self-sacrifice, using those gifts restrainedly and eradicating self-indulgent excess in order to serve the good of others. Book 1 establishes the basis for shunning self-love as Spenser, aligning himself with the Reformation stringency of Calvin and Luther,147 stresses the rooted sinfulness of human nature: ‘If any strength we have, it is to ill, / But all the good is God’s, both power and eke will’ (1.10.1). Spenser never seriously promotes an attraction to self-love, and he never explores its allure and complexity within himself.148 He disapproves of any self-mirroring that brings obsessive regard for one’s own physical beauty and possessions, prowess, and even honour. For Redcrosse there is no proper pride or self-love. The Legend of Holiness enforces the ultimate moral scruple of the glory-quest: though service to Gloriana in Cleopolis mirrors service to God in New Jerusalem, all the glory is God’s, and Gloriana simply reflects it. This crucial revelation at the peak of Redcrosse’s training becomes increasingly less overt in Spenser’s epic. Far more coherently and emphatically than in subsequent legends (with their diverse protagonists and interlaced quests), Redcrosse’s foes mirror himself: each setting (Error’s forest and den, Lucifera’s envious court, Duessa’s lascivious fountain, Despair’s cave) mirrors his presumption, changing honour to arrogance. Thus Redcrosse must resist militant self-assertion until Una guides him to training in three stages of Holiness: humble faith in God (rather

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than personal pride), charitable works (rather than warfare), and contemplation of a spiritual goal (rather than glory in earthly conquest). In the final six cantos of Book 1 the Sansboys (and other perverse triplets) are displaced by three definitive forms of pride, which sequentially assault the soul’s three hierarchic levels: the giant Orgoglio mirrors Redcrosse’s pride in his fleshly powers; withered Despair mirrors his heart’s proud rebellion over the body’s limitations; and the Dragon mirrors a culminating pride in collective worldly power.149 For Spenser the ‘cure’ of pride (with its three lusts) requires three progressive hierarchic stages of training in the House of Holiness. To prevent Orgoglio’s assault requires purgative faith in God’s atoning self-sacrifice, rather than one’s own fleshly power. To prevent Despair’s rebellious heart requires illuminative charity, sharing God’s love with the needy rather than resorting to proud suicidal vengeance. To prevent the Dragon’s consummate, politically magnified pride requires unitive contemplation of joining an all-loving God and a communion of saints and angels in New Jerusalem, rather than pomp and fame in earthly cities. Defeating the three psychic levels of pride also requires a supernaturally gifted supporting cast. First, Arthur, blessed with Magnificence (veiled in pre-Christian symbolism), saves Redcrosse from Orgoglio’s self-assertive carnal pride. Next Una, a figural type of the Church, rescues Redcrosse from Despair’s inverse pride of self-destruction and leads him to the House of Holiness’s imitatio Christi, a lesson Arthur has not yet consciously experienced. Finally, counteracting the proud political tyranny of the Dragon that hovers over the ‘city’ of Eden requires revival by a ‘springing well’ and ‘tree of life’. Thomas Dughi convincingly explains this mysterious symbolism as Redcrosse’s internalizing (even in a half-conscious state) the ‘springing well’ of gospel promises (John 4.1–14; Rev. 22.1): this spiritual nourishment which renews the scriptural teaching in the House of Holiness is received without a priest and only figuratively affirms the sacraments of baptism and communion.150 These prototypes of Christ, Church, and Word, all implying a free gift of divine love, bring deliverance from pride. In each book of The Faerie Queene (definitively in the first) the protagonist achieves the titular virtue, first, by self-mortification, overcoming personal projections of his own monstrous pride on each level of his being, assisted by heroic/ providential rescue, religious training, and internalizing of gospel promises; and second, by seeing him/herself as an other, especially in a purified sexual other who mirrors divine beauty and glory by encouraging loving service to all. Subsequent virtues, descending ever more deeply into materiality, may seem increasingly tolerant of self-approval in the quest for glory, but this constricting perspective on virtue simply ‘dilates’ the holy goal and thereby incurs a special danger.151 In the subtle combat with pride, a major problem for Spenser – as part of Leicester, Sidney, and Essex’s Protestant party – lay in the conflict between their militancy (sometimes with Talus’ savage aid) and the harder quest for a Christlike ‘gentleness’ that extends the beadsmen’s charity to all: Irish as well as English, commoners as well as gentlefolk. In arousing the highest power of scripturally fed Intellect as a basis for faith, the Legend of Holiness uses troubling metaphors: the Pauline ‘armour of God’ (Ephesians 6) and Revelation’s apocalyptic ‘warfare’.

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If these militant tropes are taken literally (as increasingly occurs in Books 1–6 of The Faerie Queene),152 the tandem evils of Errour and Hypocrisie may be endlessly reborn. Can Spenser’s hero truly defeat self-loving pride unless like Erasmus in Enchiridion he or she fully perceives that ‘one crysten man hath not warre with an other: but with himself ‘?153 Shakespeare’s affirmation of self-love: ‘grounded inward’ Shakespeare portrays self-love as morally ambivalent but deeply attractive. This radical difference from Spenser points to an alternative tradition, more Roman Catholic than Protestant, which views self-love positively.154 Aquinas, like Aristotle, applauds self-interest as the basis of magnanimity and friendship, though questioning the desire for fame. Of the commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself, Aquinas notes that ‘the model always exceeds the copy’.155 Even angelic love, says Aquinas, is centred in self-love, which in turn is centred in God.156 Pierre de la Primaudaye, Shakespeare’s favourite analyst of human nature, treats self-love as the ‘wel-spring’ of all passions and virtues: We love ourselves naturally …. For it is an affection which is as it were a beame of the love that God beareth towards all his creatures, … so that it is not possible, that they which are capable of any affection of love, should not love their owne bloud and their like …. Wherefore if this love and this affection were well ruled and ordered, it is so farre from being vicious, that contrariwise the spirit of God condemneth as monsters those … that want it. And therefore God … appointeth it to be the rule of our love towards our neighbour.

Primaudaye acknowledges the potential ‘unrulinesse’ of self-love: ‘when this love and affection is disordered in us, it is not only vicious, but also as it were the original and fountaine of all other vices and sins, whereas if it were wel-ordered & ruled according to the will and law of God, it would be … the originall and wellspring of all vertues’.157 Augustine too considered good self-love as central to human nature, its norm, yet he emphasizes that original sin has distorted this primal impulse into an ambitious lust to build worldly cities of destruction. Nevertheless, Augustine maintains a belief in the possibility of true self-love, which can draw one to the City of God – if only it allies with communal well-being and with the sense of oneself as imago Dei. In On the Trinity Augustine describes self-love as the memory of the Holy Spirit implanted in the soul at Creation, a memory mediated by Christ.158 Likewise for Aquinas, ‘proper self-love consists in love for the self in God’ (I.6.1 ad 2; see I.20.1–4), as well as reciprocal ‘bond[s] of affection’ and ‘mutual indwelling’ with other souls (I–II.28.1–2). In two decades of playwriting Shakespeare evolves characters increasingly sophisticated in self-love, matching the growing complexity of their self-identity: ‘I am not what I am’ (TN 2.5; Oth 1.1). A crucial question is gender. How does Shakespeare designate the most confident, privileged, and efflorescent self: masculine, feminine, an androgynous combination, or an unlimited protean power of impersonation and improvisation? A similar question involves self and otherness regardless of gender. Self-love seems to imply the radical, exclusive singularity of

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Narcissus, but if ‘the marriage of true minds’ in deepest friendship can unite souls (as is increasingly implied in the Sonnets), does ‘self-love’ (and self-identity) then include the bonded other? In the still broader context of social class identity, is the self-love of aristocrats (the main interest for Sidney and Spenser) matched by the self-love of commoners, as in the compelling characters of Bottom, Juliet’s nurse, Dogberry, Mistress Quickly, Caliban? And finally if, as Aquinas says, ‘Every creature is entirely of God’ (ST 1a.60.5), then self-identity is inextricably bound to the vision of God, and ‘proper self-love consists of love for the self in God’ (1.6.1 ad 2). In Shakespeare’s earliest plays, which imitate Marlowe far more than Spenser, self-love is sinister but universally alluring as a drive for empowerment, aggrandizement, and self-display. Noting the powerful theatrical impact of amoral selflove in Marlowe’s protagonists, he spun this mesmerizing toy extravagantly and recklessly in the host of electrifying but morally shallow figures in Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, Richard III, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. This lustful, ruthless power-hunger still glimmers on the edges of The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Like Sidney and Spenser, however, Shakespeare increasingly aspired to the status, mannerly behaviour, limitless privilege and honour exemplified in Southampton and Essex’s circle, the elitist ideal of gentility that Spenser praised and emulated in The Faerie Queene. Beginning in 1596–97, just after the publication of the second instalment of The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare largely abandons farcical comedy, and he moves away from the simplistic blood-revenge principle that governed his early histories and tragedies. He treats self-love more comprehensively and seriously, disclosing its tragic potential if mismanaged, yet emphasizing its basic goodness and natural attraction. Why? One cause of radical maturing could be the death of Hamnet, but one senses other influences. Why does The Merchant of Venice introduce a new form of romantic comedy with a much more complex exploration of self-love? We observe Shakespeare’s gradual weaning from Marlowe’s influence, notably between 1597 and 1600. Though still attentive to primal narcissistic drives, he now shapes characters with a more complex form of self-love, conscience-driven figures who struggle specifically with self-love, developing a restrained awareness that sometimes allows loving mutuality. Grotesque Barabas becomes the nuanced figure of Shylock, whose wounded self-love overshadows the play’s other narcissists (Bassanio, Antonio, Portia)159 and becomes a moral touchstone in this first great drama of social difference. Tamburlaine the conqueror becomes Henry V, who questions and debates his militarism with his soldiers, giving them ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’ and rousing them on Crispin’s Day with a dream of social equality. Tamburlaine as self-appointed scourge of corruption is further reformed in Hamlet, whose scourging is long delayed and deeply reflective. A Marlovian wilfulness haunts the core of Shakespeare’s vision, but his final recensions of Tamburlaine’s power-hunger in Macbeth and Coriolanus stress its selfdestructive evisceration of life’s meaning and joy. Dido is displaced by Cleopatra, and Faustus by Prospero, who uses theatrical word-magic not to trivialize earthly authorities but to reform and reunite wayward kings, lovers, and clowns into a harmonious ship of state. Shakespeare’s protagonists still indulge in the mirroring

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of self-love, but, having learned the dangers of exclusivist narcissism, they increasingly use the mirror of others’ souls to build self-love into loving mutuality. In the ending of Hamlet (5.22.10, 157–61), King Lear (5.3.16–17, 160–1), and The Tempest (5.1.189, 201–13; Epi.16–18) each protagonist even begins to adapt selflove to the workings of divine providence. Spenser’s anxious endings of Books 5 and 6 of The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s descent into tragedy indicate growing concern with perversions of self-love and declining ability to control its outcome, but their approach to this problem is strikingly different. For Spenser self-love is pride, an apparitional ‘monster’ projected from within and assuming enough reality to imprison and disable the soul on all levels. In Book 1 (and with growing opacity in Books 3 and 5) the protagonist is aided by religious ‘arms’, by scripture, and by mirrorings of heavenly light to overthrow pride’s monstrous apparitions and make them shrivel into nothing – that is, to reveal the basic unreality of self-loving pride and keep it ‘outside the self ’.160 For Shakespeare, on the other hand, self-love forms one’s double or shadow-self, which must be acknowledged and integrated. This growing awareness of self-love’s problematic complexity partly results from both poets’ courtship of Southampton and Essex, leading literary patrons of the 1590s – a decade that brought Southampton’s near-bankruptcy and near-beheading, and the more traumatizing drama of Essex, whose marvellous gifts drew extravagant praise from Elizabeth and her court, and from Spenser and Shakespeare, but aroused in him an arrogant self-love which could not patiently bear military failure and the resulting public correction, house arrest, and withdrawal of his main income by Elizabeth – all leading to his abortive effort to usurp power in early 1601. When in 1591 Southampton neared the end of his wardship but refused to marry Lord Burghley’s granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Vere, he was assessed an enormous fine and lost favour at court. In response to this crisis, Burghley’s clerk, John Clapham, wrote the young earl a cautionary but flattering poem entitled ‘Narcissus’.161 In 1593 Shakespeare appropriates the Narcissus theme to court Southampton’s patronage in Venus and Adonis, which (along with the success of chauvinistic Henry VI) ingratiated Shakespeare in Southampton’s circle. At the same time and perhaps for the same patron, Shakespeare again uses the Narcissus theme in his opening seventeen sonnets, which urge a lovely lad to marry in order to duplicate his beauty in children. Thus Sonnet 1: From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauties Rose [Wriothesley’s name and emblem]162 might neuer die, … But thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes, Feed’st thy lights flame with selfe substantiall fewell, Making a famine where aboundance lies. [Narcissus’s ‘inopem me copia fecit’, my plenty   makes me poor]

In Sonnet 3 Shakespeare tries to resolve Narcissus’ dilemma by recommending a more expansive ‘mirroring’. Learn to admire your face not just in itself but in the imitative beauty of others (literally offspring, but perhaps figuratively any ‘other’ you influence):

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Looke in thy glasse and tell the face thou vewest, Now is the time that face should forme an other ... For who is he so fond will be the tombe Of his selfe loue to stop posterity?

As in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare in the Sonnets’ marriage-sequence (which shifts from urging marriage to stressing the power of his verse to immortalize) treats the Narcissus impulse not as an alluring deadly sin but as both natural and admirable. Even in Sonnet 62 (following sonnets of jealousy and despair), instead of lamen­­ ting the ‘Sinne of selfe-loue’ that utterly possesses his eye/I, the poet imitates the beloved youth’s narcissism by admiring (perhaps feignedly) his own imagined perfection. Sinne of selfe-loue possesseth al mine eie, And all my soule, and al my every part; And for this sinne there is no remedie, It is so grounded inward in my heart. Me thinkes no face so gratious is as mine, No shape so true, no truth of such account, And for my selfe mine owne worth do define, As I all other in all worths surmount.

The sestet reverses this narcissism in a completely opposite way from Spenser. Instead of de-emphasizing bodily and worldly pride by turning inward to reflect on soul and mind, Shakespeare uses the mirror to acknowledge his own physical and social shortcomings, while lauding these features in the youth, which the poet can enjoy by identification: But when my glasse shewes me my selfe indeed Beated and chopt with tand antiquitie, Mine owne selfe loue quite contrary I read Selfe, so selfe loving were iniquity, T’is thee (my selfe) that for my selfe I praise, Painting my age with beauty of thy daies.

Thus self-love is not sinful per se; it is only inappropriate for himself (‘iniquity’ punning on inequity). The jarring line ‘beated and chopt with tand antiquity’ recalls his father’s glove-making business. Did the poet work there, abusing and tanning his own flesh along with animal skins, a striking contrast to the leisured lifestyle and lily-white skin of the youth he idolizes? Modern readers cannot fully grasp the social-class dimension of the enchanting ‘beauty of thy daies’ – not just a comely face but days, years, of highest privilege: luxurious clothing, food, servants, horses and carriages, a London mansion and palatial country estates like Titchfield, where favoured plays like Love’s Labour’s Lost were performed. Add to these dazzling environs the youth’s well-trained mind,

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learned in the ­ classics and languages, sophisticated with travel and refined acquaintance, smoothly articulate. The crowning touch is the youth’s confidence of his worth, reinforced by rituals of social obeisance and the assumed destiny of high political office. The Narcissus motif that colours the devotion to a beauteous youth in the Sonnets and Venus and Adonis also attaches to the meteoric courtly and military career of the Earl of Essex. Seizing Occasion at every chance, he groomed himself for highest governance. In 1586 when Essex at age twenty distinguished himself for bravery at Zutphen, the dying Sidney gave him his sword. Essex then married Sidney’s widow, and for the rest of his life tried to match Sidney’s name in courteous chivalric honour. In the decade from 1586 until the celebrated victory at Cadiz in 1596, Essex confirmed his position as the Queen’s favourite, pushing himself to extremes in Accession Day tourneys and in wars against Spanish imperialism, maintaining a magnificent public image with hundreds of liveried men at extravagant cost (which Elizabeth underwrote with lavish concessions like the sweet wine monopoly), ardently attending to the Queen, and attributing his virile exploits to her godlike sponsorship. No wonder his patronage was so widely sought. In a prefatory sonnet for the 1590 Faerie Queene Spenser vows to commemorate Essex’s ‘Heroicke parts’, and in the 1596 instalment he delivers. In Book 5 Artegall’s rescue of Burbon (5.11) celebrates Essex’s defence of Henri IV of France against the Holy Catholic League (1593–94).163 Book 6 greatly extends the flattery: in ‘Essex, the Ideal Courtier’ Ray Heffner cites abundant evidence that, during 1590–96 when Book 6 was composed, Essex rather than Sidney was widely acknowledged as the main exemplar of Calidore’s traits: politeness even in crises, chivalry in tourneys and in warfare, skill in athletic sports (running, leaping, wrestling), promotion of poetry and scholarship, eloquence which (as precautions for his execution make clear) could ‘steal men’s hearts away’, intense love of pastoral retreat and dislike of courtly pretensions.164 The historical allegory fits Essex equally well: marriage to a social inferior (Walsingham’s daughter, Sidney’s widow), courtship just before the death of her father (Walsingham–Meliboe), counsel with her insightful father about dangers of court and joys of retirement, and defence of courtly friends (Southampton and Elizabeth Vernon) from scandal. For further appeal to Essex’s rising star, Spenser in Prothalamion (1596) praises Essex’s victory at Cadiz over a new Armada threat – despite efforts of Burghley and Raleigh to redirect credit for the victory and to blame Essex for not giving more plunder to her majesty. Finally, in A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland (1596) Spenser urges that Essex be given the Lord Lieutenancy in order to establish the high authority needed both to resolve the Irish troubles and to make him impregnable to the detractions showered on Lord Grey. While considerable evidence exists for Essex’s patronage of Shakespeare’s plays, especially Richard II and the Henriad, almost none indicates that Spenser won Essex’s support, despite his arduous threefold celebration of Essex in 1596. Jonson wryly notes that Spenser declined an offer that came too late, and John Lane testifies that Essex paid for the poet’s burial only under pressure. Charles

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Mounts suggests reasons for Essex’s disaffection, including unflattering allusions in Spenser’s poems to Essex’s mother, Lettice Knollys, as well as awkward references to Essex’s sister Penelope Rich and to Essex’s wife Frances Walsingham Devereux.165 To this list one might add that Spenser’s attempt to restore Raleigh’s standing with Elizabeth in the tales of Timias and Belphoebe (FQ 3.4.6) cannot have pleased Essex; and if Spenser tried to flatter Essex in Calidore’s defence of Calepine and Serena, that shameful tale cannot have been well received by Southampton and Elizabeth Vernon. Finally, Spenser’s Prothalamion complains about lack of patronage and implicitly cautions the great lord against hubris.166 During the 1590’s Essex groomed himself for the Queen’s favour and for literary glory, presenting himself as a hero of chivalric romance in Accession Day tourneys and in war, and commissioning scholars to search the chronicles for appropriate scripts for his advancement. In 1595 Essex made a special appeal for the Queen’s favour with the aid of Francis Bacon, whose device ‘Love and Self-Love’ implied that Elizabeth must adequately love and honour Essex to prevent his turning to forms of self-love. That Bacon would compose such a piece, and Essex so ardently approve it, is deeply telling.167 In the troubled closing years of the century Southampton and Essex distanced themselves from Shakespeare, and infuriated the Queen, in three ways: in 1595–97 Southampton’s affair with Elizabeth Vernon, volatile maid-in-waiting to the Queen, ended in pregnancy and secret marriage; in the Irish campaign of 1598–99, with Southampton serving as Master of Horse, Essex’s lavish expenditure for pomp and knighting of many followers did not avert administrative and military failure; and 1599–1600 brought Essex’s house arrest, financial paralysis, and near-madness as he, Southampton, and other lords brewed the ill-fated rebellion. Centrally motivating these lords was an ardent self-love, eager to attain honour, and so immured in privilege and praise that they assumed a dotage in the heart of all England. Shakespeare seems to have felt deeply implicated in Essex’s fall, for after the Henriad, which applauded Essex’s popularity and implied his royal deserving (while warning against Hotspur’s rashness), Shakespeare’s great tragedies view with deepening complexity the problem of self-love in magnanimous, great-souled leaders.168 Julius Caesar implies Shakespeare’s knowledge of the conspiracy against Elizabeth, cautioning the noblest conspirators by the tragedy of Brutus.169 Hamlet, a disturbing analogue for Essex’s philosophic quagmire during the planned and failed coup, is Shakespeare’s most compellingly unresolved brooding on self-love.170 Troilus and Cressida, showing the utter breakdown of chivalry, is Shakespeare’s darkest critique of the hypocrisies of envious emulation and selfish pride.171 In Othello Iago dismantles magnanimity more thoroughly than in Cassius’ seduction of Brutus, though, despite T.S. Eliot’s scepticism, we know Othello’s self-love is grounded in goodness. From his elaborate opening ritual Lear is impelled by royal self-love (‘Which of you shall we say doth love us most?’, 1.1.51), which results in personal and political chaos but finally in recovery of true self-love and sovereign identity. Cleopatra’s similar but playful vanity (‘If it be love indeed, tell me how much’, 1.1.14), along with Antony’s battlefield bravado and their gamy flytings, gains immeasurably with Elizabeth and Essex as subtext, a poignant reunion of

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the phoenix and turtle.172 And Coriolanus’ insistent self-exaltation offers a final trenchant commentary on Essex’s tragedy. Shakespeare’s mature tragedies do not, however, support Roy Battenhouse’s indictment of self-love as these heroes’ fatal flaw – a hubris severely compounded by Original Sin. In Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises, he explains Hamlet’s problem as ‘inordinate love of self ‘ or ‘inordinate love of glory for the self ‘.173 Though self-love is near the heart of the problem, Battenhouse’s Augustinian-Reformation rigour does not match Shakespeare’s view of human nature. Each Shakespearean tragedy (except satiric Troilus and Cressida) conveys genuine admiration for the Grandiose Self cultivated by all – male and female, aristocrat and commoner – and especially sought by the magnanimous protagonist who is thereby so vulnerable to perversion. Each tragedy ends with a tribute to the tragic hero, notably to Romeo and Juliet, Brutus, Hamlet, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. As Ernest Schanzer notes, Othello and Timon provide their own epitaphs;174 and even ruthless Macbeth evokes admiration for his sustained self-indictment and final courageous assertion of will. Deepest tribute is bestowed on the self-love that finds consummation in relationship. Hamlet’s fear for his ‘wounded name’ echoes Essex’s dying appeal for auditors to restore his reputation, and Horatio’s eulogy also echoes that magnanimous lord’s call to angels to carry him to God: ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’ (5.2.341–6).175 Julius Caesar ends by admiring ‘the noblest Roman’, who acted ‘only in a general honest thought / And common good to all’ (5.5.68–70). In each ending Shakespeare affirms human goodness not despite self-love but because of it, especially when, as with Lear, the self-approval so fully identifies with the goodness of another. Though both King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra begin with a public ritual of self-love (if you love me, tell me how much), they end with an intensely mutual love (Aquinas’s reciprocal ‘bond[s] of affection’ and ‘mutual indwelling’) that builds on persistent self-love. Even when Shakespeare escalates the waywardness of self-love, as in The Winter’s Tale (his most extreme version of the slandered innocent), he still affirms the bold self-assertion of Perdita and Hermione that restores proper selflove in Leontes. Shakespeare’s characters are most compelling when they display the truest self-love. We identify with Cleopatra’s arranging an easy and beautiful death, with her desire to reunite with generous-spirited Antony. We identify with Desdemona’s desire to be ‘great of heart’ like Othello, wishing ‘That heaven had made her such a man’ (1.3.164–5), yet also with her resistance to being slain. We identify with the eloquent voicing of self-love – the marvellous sparrings of Katherina and Petruchio, Titania and Oberon, Hal and Falstaff, Beatrice and Benedick, Antony and Cleopatra, and the captivating self-affirmation of soliloquies, whether of Hamlet or of Parolles. The centrality of self-love emerges most clearly in the response of wronged characters to evil: Hero’s silent faint and Beatrice’s outraged vow; Ophelia’s torrential release chiding those who have silenced her; Cordelia’s rebuke of sisters who pretend to love a powerful sire more than themselves, and him for eliciting that falseness; Hermione’s consistently healthy self-love (which evoked Leontes’ fear of lost power) and her magnificent self-defence.

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For the Spenserian hero such assertive self-love is never an option for either sex, their glory verified only in downcast eyes and blushing. Even when the hero is most fully celebrated, as in Redcrosse’s apocalyptic defeat of the Dragon and union with Una in Eden, the victory is decisively undercut by eleventh-hour slanders by Archimago and Duessa – slanders based on his real abandonment of Truth, his dalliance with Duplicity. Their libels underscore the knight’s vulnerability to inordinate, impure self-love, which Spenser translates as Pride: the senses’ swollen carnal pride (Orgoglio), the heart’s inverse pride of self-abuse (Despair), and arising from both, the mind’s obsessive pride in worldly power, the Dragon eternally hovering over fallen Eden. Archimago and Duessa’s slander drives home to Redcrosse, to denizens of Eden and all subsequent admirers, that he cannot boast of this remarkable victory, which was emphatically the work of divine providence: Arthur’s heaven-assisted grace, Una’s holy house of training in humility, and the ‘springing well’ and ‘goodly tree’ of gospel hope and healing. For Spenser, ‘all the good is God’s’. Instead of evoking our admiration for a heroic individual like Hamlet, Lear, or Cleopatra, the definitive first legend of The Faerie Queene persistently elides the hero’s name (george, earth-spirit) figuring humankind. The first double-mention of his name is filled with irony, implying an unworthiness to be sanctified, as Archimago displaces him: Saint George himself ye would haue deemed him to be. But he the knight, whose semblaunt he did beare,   The true Saint George was wandred far away,   Still flying from his thoughts and gealous feare;   Will was his guide, and grief led him astray.

(1.2.11-12)

His name’s final double-mention is Contemplation’s glorious enlightenment: ‘thou Saint George shalt called bee, / Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree’ (1.10.61). Yet the knight, after crying out that he is ‘Vnworthy wretch … of so great grace, … such glory’ (1.10.62), continues in the final cantos to be identified, named, simply by the central iconic red cross he bears (1.11.15, 1.12.31): his own identity is abnegated, or merged, in the definitively glorious self-sacrifice of the divine redeemer. At the ends of Books 5 and 6 moral vulnerability is compounded by the insecurity of Artegall’s and Calidore’s achievements, by literalization of demonic slander in the historical realities of Envy, Detraction, and the Blatant Beast. While Shakespeare’s epiphanic vision of human goodness is finally affirmed in the Spenserian Elizabeth-type of Miranda, Spenser’s elusive Gloriana disappears in the majestic unfinished ruin of his epic. With a longing like that of Redcrosse Knight in viewing the New Jerusalem, Spenser, tragically cut off in the midst of his race, turns from mutable, self-loving humanity toward the ‘sabbaoth sight’.

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Notes  1 ‘To the gentlemen Students of Both Universities’ [1589], The Works of Thomas Nashe, 3 vols, ed. R.B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), III, 323; Strange Newes, of the Intercepting of Certaine Letters [1592], McKerrow, I, 281–2, 299. (I normalize u and v, j and i.)  2 Watson, An Eclogue Upon the Death of the Right Honorable Sir Francis Walsingham (London, 1590), sigs C3v–C4; Edwards, Cephalus and Procris. Narcissus [1595], ed. W.E. Buckley (London: Nichols and Sons, 1882), 62. For other eulogists during 1590–96, see Spenser Allusions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. W. Wells (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 19–53; and J.C. Boswell, ‘Spenser Allusions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Addenda’, SP 109:2 (2012).  3 Virgidemiarum. Six Books … of Tooth-less Satires [1597], in The Works of Joseph Hall, 12 vols (Oxford: D.A. Talboys, 1839), ‘Defiance to Envy’, 12, 21–4, ‘Satire 4’, 12, 164. Lavish praise for Spenser’s poetry continues during 1597–98, but alludes to controversy: see Sylvester, Salusbury, Speght, Meres, Barnfield (Spenser’s ‘deepe Conceit is such, / As passing all Conceit, needs no defence’) in Spenser Allusions, 53–63.  4 Guilpin, Skialethia (London, 1598), ‘Satire 6’, sig. Er.  5 The Scourge of Villanie. Three bookes of Satyres [1598], in The Works of John Marston, 3 vols, ed. A.H. Bullen (London: John C. Immo, 1887), 3, 341.  6 Spenser Allusions, ed. Wells, 64.  7 Montrose, ‘Shaping Fantasies’, Representing the English Renaissance, ed. S. Greenblatt (University of California Press, 1988), 31–64.  8 Efforts to date A Midsummer Night’s Dream have focused on seven wedding celebrations ranging from 1590 to 1600, the two in 1595 and 1596 seeming most likely. The Stanley–Vere wedding (26 Jan. 1595) is advocated by E.K. Chambers, ‘The Occasion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, ed. I. Gollancz (Oxford University Press, 1916); J.D. Wilson, Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies (Northwestern University Press, 1962), 184–220; and J.P. Bednarz, ‘Imitations of Spenser in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, RenD 14 (1983), 79–102. The Berkeley–Carey match (19 Feb. 1596) is advocated by Harold Brooks in Arden’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (London: Methuen, 1979), lv–lvii, and S.W. May, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Carey–Berkeley Wedding’, RenP (1983), 43–52. Bednarz’s argument for satire of Spenser in the 1595 wedding, stressing Burleigh’s role and rivalry for Stanley’s patronage, is countered by rivalry for Hunsdon’s patronage in the 1596 festivity. Either date (a year before the 1596 Faerie Queene, or a month after) fits Shakespeare’s comic retort. He parodies the fairy conceit not as subliminal questioning of the myths supporting Elizabeth’s rule but as a direct absorption and ‘strong misreading’ of Spenser’s art, a major instance of what Harold Bloom calls ‘anxiety of influence’.  9 Kermode, ‘The Mature Comedies’, Early Shakespeare, eds J. R. Brown and B. Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3 (London: Arnold, 1961), 214–20. 10 For Lyly’s influence on Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, see G.K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (Harvard University Press, 1962), 298–349; L.A. Beaurline, Jonson and Elizabethan Comedy (Huntington Library, 1978), 86–102. 11 Here I do not treat Spenser’s evolving artistic intent in The Faerie Queene but the changing public view of it in the 1590s, especially after Shakespeare’s comic revision of fairyland. Spenser’s Platonic-Christian credo remains central (see C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century [Oxford: Clarendon, 1954]; F. Kermode, Spenser [London: Oxford University Press, 1965]), as does his dynastic eulogy (T.H. Cain, Praise in The Faerie Queene [University of Nebraska Press, 1978]; R. Wells, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth, [London & Canberra: Croom Helm, Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1983), but lately are complicated by psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and New Historicist readings which stress Spenser’s repressed eroticism, his increasing failure to enforce closure in plot and in moral allegory, and his struggle to sustain faith in Elizabeth as patron and imago Dei. On closure in FQ, see pp. 37–40 and 282–304 below. 12 0n A Midsummer Night’s Dream as comic metatheatre or ‘defence of poetry’, see R.W. Dent,

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‘Imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, SQ 15 (1964), 115–29; D.P. Young, Something of Great Constancy (Yale University Press, 1966); D.A. Rhoads, Shakespeare’s Defense of Poetry: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest (University Presses of America, 1985). 13 Marlowe evidently pinched twelve passages from Spenser’s circulating manuscript: see Tamburlaine the Greate [1590], in The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C.T. Brooke (Oxford University Press, 1910), Part 1: 1.2.393; 2.2.617–19; 2.3.1215–21; 5.2.1902–4, 1916–35, 1941– 54, 2036–44, 2071–9, 2083–5; Part 2: 3.5.3650–1, 4.1.3860–71, 4090–111. 14 A.G. van Kranendonk, ‘Spenserian Echoes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, ES 14 (1932), 209ff; K. Hammerle, ‘Das Laubenmotiv bei Shakespeare und Spenser und die Frage: Wer Waren Bottom und die Little Western Flower?’, Anglia 71 (1953), 310–30; ‘Das Titanialager des Sommernachtstraumes als Nachhall des topos vom Locus Amoenus’, ShakJ 90 (1954), 279–84; ‘Shakespeare’s Platonische Wende’, Anglo-Americana, ed. K. Brunner (Stuttgart: Wilhelm Braumuller, 1955) 62–71; ‘Ein Muttermal des deutschen Pyramus und die Spenserechoes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Friedrich Wild, eds K. Brunner et al. (Vienna and Stuttgart: Wilhelm Braumuller, 1958), 52–66; Brooks’s Arden ed., xxxiv–xxxix, lviii–xii; Bednarz, ‘Imitations of Spenser in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, 79–102. 15 Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press, 1991), chs 6–7. Paglia treats much of Shakespeare’s work as riposte to Spenser – the ‘Dionysian’ heroines of As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra as rejoinders to the ‘Apollonian’ conceits of Gloriana (200, 212); but Shakespeare’s most direct reaction to Spenser is his comic revision of fairyland in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which shows a deeper kinship in the tragicomic allegory of The Tempest. Paglia’s brilliant analysis is skewed by her Nietzschean categories, her focus on Spenserian psychopathy (voyeurism, rape), and her bias for the Dionysian: she disprises Spenser’s Platonic-Christian transcendentalism. 16 Before A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare rarely alludes to supernatural realities, except to demystify their power: the suspected ‘sorcery’ in The Comedy of Errors, Joan of Arc’s discredited ‘witchcraft’, Petruchio’s ‘miraculous’ taming. The only serious rendering of the supernatural in eleven plays before Midsummer Night is the brief haunting of Richard III. 17 Much topical speculation appears in Furness’s New Variorum ed. of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1895), 72–91; Brooks’s Arden edition, lxvi–lxix. Citations are from Brooks’s ed. 18 According to legend, The Merry Wives of Windsor was requested by Elizabeth I (see H.J. Oliver’s Arden ed., 1971, xlivff). The nostalgic tribute to Elizabeth in Henry VIII was composed after her death, probably co-authored with Fletcher (see R.A. Foakes’s Arden ed., 1957). 19 See J.E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments 1559–1581 (New York: St Martin’s, 1958), 49, 109. Cf. Montrose, ‘Shaping Fantasises’, 64, 87. 20 For Shakespeare’s preoccupation with this parody, cf. Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.53ff (Queen Mab): and The Merry Wives of Windsor, 5.5.38ff (Mistress Quickly playing the Fairy Queen). 21 Subsequent taunts were never again as trenchant. When Ben Jonson remarks in Timber; or, Discoveries [1640] that ‘Spencer, in affecting the Ancients writ no Language’, he hastens to add, ‘Yet I would have him read for his matter’. 22 The echo need not signify, if it is a stock phrase from folklore. Yet, when taken with the later conspicuous allusion to The Teares of the Muses (MND, 5.1.52–5), one suspects a blatant signal in Shakespeare’s using these lines to introduce his own version of English fairies: they replicate lines near the end of Spenser’s sixth legend, suggesting that Shakespeare has finished the second instalment; the fairy highlights Spenser’s title-theme (‘I serve the Fairy Queen …’); and in answer to Puck’s query about her wanderings, she allies herself not only to the fairy queen but, by means of the borrowed verses, to the text of The Faerie Queene. 23 J.O. Halliwell-Phillips, Memoranda on the Midsummer Night’s Dream (Brighton, 1879), 6–7; Spenser Allusions, ed. Wells, 79. 24 As in the human apocalypse of Revelation, where the gates of New Jerusalem are pearls, Shakespeare’s jewel imagery, besides evoking court life (Brooks, Arden ed., cxxvii), connotes

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human rarefaction through art: Titania attempts to refine Bottom (‘they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep’, MND 3.1.157); Ferdinand is ennobled through the suffering induced by Ariel’s song (‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’, Tmp 1.2.401). 25 Spenser’s Christian Platonism does not preclude shadowing Gloriana in sensuous forms, like Britomart’s sweaty radiance, or the beauties of Belphoebe and soul-maidens of many houses. These types, and many antitypes (Duessa, Lucifera, Phaedria, Acrasia, Hellenore, Radigund, etc.), provide a rich tapestry of characterization, including deeply erotic elements. But Spenser’s allegorical medium, distancing readers from sensory passion, heightens erotic power in the very refusal to ‘disarm’ intellectually and submit to it. 26 T.S. Baynes, Shakespeare Studies and Essay on English Dictionaries (London, 1894), 210–11. 27 On Shakespeare’s fairies as earthy elemental sprites of folklore (combined with nobler types from romance and myth), see the appendix to the New Cambridge Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. A.T. Quiller Couch and J.D. Wilson; M.W. Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies (Columbia University Press, 1930); K. M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959); M. Duffy, The Erotic World of Faery (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972). 28 Titania’s mutable magnificence prefigures that of Rosalind and Cleopatra, whom Paglia depicts in Sexual Personae as consummate examples of Shakespeare’s ‘Dionysian’ art. 29 See P.A. Olson, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage’, ELH 24 (1957), 95–119; E. Welsford, The Court Masque (Cambridge University Press, 1927), 324–49; A. Nicoll, Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage (London: G.G. Harrap. 1937), 72–5,177, 202–4; S. Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Columbia University Press, 1981; orig. 1967), 87–91. 30 On Spenser’s highly moralized fairies in The Faerie Queene, and his counterpointing of Fairies’ immanent spiritual power with Britons’ transcendent potential, see I. Rathborne, The Meaning of Spenser’s Fairyland (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965; orig. 1937); H. Berger, Jr, The Allegorical Temper (New Haven: Archon, 1967; orig. 1957), ch. 4; T.P. Roche, Jr, The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1964), 33–50. 31 W.Y.E. Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (Oxford University Press, 1911), 6; Duffy, The Erotic World of Faery, 13–31. On the dark undertones of the fairy amours, see J. Kott, ‘Titania and the Ass’s Head’, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. B. Taborski (London: Methuen, 1972), 171–90; D.P. Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Yale University Press, 1966), 23–9; A. Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (London and New York: Methuen, 1974), 104–6, 110; Brooks’s Arden edition, lxxv–lxxvi, cvii. 32 Shakespeare’s sensual reifying of human and fairy spirits in A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems a youthful indulgence in light of his severe chastening of human love and of imaginative fairy power in The Tempest. In both plays, however, Shakespeare promotes a bodyoriented (in contrast to Spenser’s soul-oriented) criterion of human nature and of artful fictions. Ariel, though greatly refined, still seems an immanent, elemental spirit: ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’ (5.1.88); and Prospero finally frees this dainty spirit to enjoy the elements, not transcend them. (I will later suggest a broader reading: see pp. 320–1 below.) Spenser’s fictions privilege the transcendent realm of spirit, which must frame and order the earthly bower into a mirroring analogue of divinity. 33 ‘The most effective cure is to let the lover enjoy his sweetheart’, The Anatomy of Melancholy [1621], ed. H. Jackson (New York: Random House, 1977), 228ff (3.2.5.5). Burton indulges Eros mainly in matrimony, but he notes the many extramarital amours of gods and heroes. 34 Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, 77; Duffy, The Erotic World of Faery, 82. 35 Echoing Spenser, who distinguishes ‘elvish ghosts’ and ‘frendly Faeries’ (‘June’, 23–6). 36 Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, in The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R.W. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), I, 184–5, 232, 241, 245, 257, 259, 262, 271–6, 279–80, 284–5, 288, 306–9, 313–19, 322; Euphues and His England, II, 11, 13, 81, 97, 100–1, 107, 150, 185–8, 195, 217–18, 227–8. 37 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.84; Virgil, Georgics, 4.516.

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38 On patronage rivalry see nn. 8, 14. 39 For Shakespeare’s earlier mockery of ‘thrice-three’, see Costard’s reductio ad absurdem in LLL 5.2.484–95. Costard’s confusion over how each actor playing ‘the three Worthies’ can represent three figures (for doubling and tripling roles in Elizabethan theatre) makes havoc of Neoplatonic and Christian Trinitarian doctrines, by which the trinity of powers in human nature images the emanation of divine hypostases, enabling the human self to unfold into many selves. Costard, like Bottom, will go about his business without worrying overmuch about the deeper implications of play-acting: ‘O Lord, sir, the parties themselves, the actors, sir, will show whereuntil it doth amount’. But unlike Bottom’s godlike aspiration to play every role (and to ‘be perfit’), Costard knows his limits: ‘For mine own part, I am, as they say, but to parfect one man in one poor man’. 40 The three rejected artworks might playfully pillory three rival poets: Lyly as ‘Athenian’ eunuch, Marlowe as dismembered Orpheus, Spenser as self-abnegating Neoplatonist. 41 S.B. Hemingway, ‘The Relation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Romeo and Juliet’, MLN (1911); H.A. Myers, ‘Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Tragedy and Comedy’, in Tragedy: A View of Life (Cornell University Press, 1956). If Romeo and Juliet is the earlier play, Midsummer Night’s Dream’s hilarious irony finds its capstone in burlesquing Shakespeare’s own genius. 42 A notable exception is W.T. MacCary, Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy (Columbia University Press, 1985), who stresses self-love’s centrality in the comedies (contrasting the less-conflicted narcissism of Aristophanes, Plautus, and Terence). V. Traub, however, in ‘Desire and the Difference it Makes’, The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. V. Wayne (Cornell University Press, 1991) correctly chides MacCary, along with L. Tennenhouse and J. Fineman, for debasing homoeroticism as narcissistic, for narcissism is central to all discourses of desire. 43 In Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (University of Chicago Press, 1992), Ricoeur examines this self-division (‘The Primitive Concept of Person’, 35–9), its flaws (215–18), and its remediation in friendship and justice (329–41). He affirms Bernanos’s remark in Journal d’un curé de compagne: ‘It is easier than one thinks to hate oneself. Grace means forgetting oneself. But if all pride were dead in us, the grace of graces would be to love oneself humbly, as one would any of the suffering members of Jesus Christ’ (24). 44 A. Ferry in The Inward Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (University of Chicago Press, 1994) notes that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 62 echoes Sidney’s Sonnet 27: ‘Because I oft in dark abstracted guise / Seem most alone in greatest company / With dearth of words, or answers quite awry, / To them that would make speech of speech arise. / They deem, and of their doom the rumour flies, / That poison foul of bubbling pride doth lie / So in my swelling breast that only I / Fawn on myself, and others do despise: / Yet pride I think doth not my soul possess, / Which looks too oft in his unflatt’ring glass: / But one worse fault, ambition, I confess, / That makes me oft my best friends overpass, / Unseen, unheard, while thought to highest place / Bends all his powers, even unto Stella’s grace.’ In both sonnets the unflattering mirror of self-awareness makes self-love untenable; but (as Ferry notes) Sidney, unlike Shakespeare, cannot admit his self-love, blaming gossipy courtiers for rumours of a ‘poison foul of bubbling pride’, making the poet fawn on himself and despise others; but he atttributes his ‘dark abstracted guise’ to loving Stella, his only “ambition” being to gain her favour. (The erring courtiers reappear in Sonnet 23 (‘harder judges judge ambition’s rage’); and Sidney repeats his self-defence in 61 (‘wholly hers, all selfness he forbears’) and 90 (‘think not that I by verse seek fame, / Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee; / Thine eyes my pride, thy lips my history: / If you praise not, all other praise is shame. / Nor so ambitious am I, as to frame / A nest for praise in my young laurel tree’).) In short, in his sonnets Sidney never accepts the charge of self-love, nor explores its impact on the forming of self and of relationship. Only in the fictive remove of Arcadia does Sidney extensively explore the corruptions of self-love (philautia) in courtly lovers and rulers. 45 P. Zweig, The Heresy of Self-Love: A Study of Subversive Individualism (Princeton University Press, 1980; orig. 1968), 107–8. P. Martin in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Self, Love, and Art

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(Cambridge University Press, 1972) does not explain self-love’s function in human nature, its full bearing on the sonnets’ three principals, nor its literary and intellectual history. 46 Plato in Phaedrus says, ‘He loves, but does not know whom or what; he does not understand, he cannot tell what has happened to him’; ‘as in a mirror, in his lover he beholds himself and does not know it’ (trans. W.C. Helmbold and W.G. Rabinowitz (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 40).   In Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose Amant sees in the fountain of his passions two crystal stones (his own eyes, signifying his projective self-awareness) before seeing the rose-maiden: ‘Two crystal stones within the fountain’s depths / Attentively I noted’; ‘So wonderful / Are they that by their power is all the place … / Transfigured … / Just as a mirror will reflect each thing that near is placed’; ‘The Mirror Perilous it is, where proud Narcissus saw his face and his grey eyes’; ‘Whatever thing appears before one’s eyes, / While at these stones he looks, / He straightway loves’ (trans. H.W. Robbins (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1962), 29–33).   The story of Canacee’s mirror, exposing false love in ‘gentil’ courtship, is too indirectly expressed in bird symbolism to cite concisely. See ‘The Squire’s Tale’ in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed., ed. F.N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957; orig. 1933), 128–34.   Spenser’s account of Merlin’s mirror, which shows Britomart her soulmate Artegall, clearly recalls the transfiguring crystal stones of The Romance of the Rose: ‘It vertue had to shew in perfect sight / What ever thing was in the world contaynd, / … So that it to the looker appertaynd; / … Like to the world it selfe, and seemd a world of glas.’ For Britomart’s extensive turmoil over this mirror-initiation of her love-quest, including a horrified self-comparison with Narcissus, see The Faerie Queene, 3.2.17 –– 3.3.62.  In Paradise Lost (4.449–91) Milton burdens Eve with the faulty Narcissus impulse, which must be redirected by an angel: ‘What there thou seest fair Creature is thyself, / With thee it comes and goes: but follow me, / And I will bring thee where no shadow stays / Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces, hee / Whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy / Inseparably thine’ (4.467–73). To counteract it, Raphael instructs Adam in a rational, virtuous form of self-love: ‘weigh with her thyself; / Then value: Oft-times nothing profits more / Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right / Well managed’ (8.570–3) in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. M.Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957).   For other literary permutations of Narcissus, see L. Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early Nineteenth Century, trans. R. Dewsnap (Lund: University of Lund, 1967); F. Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric (Cornell University Press, 1967); L. de Gerenday, ‘The Problem of Self-Reflective Love in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene’, L&P 26 (1976), 37–48; W.E. Rogers, ‘Narcissus in Amoretti xxxv’, American N&Q 15 (1976), 18–20; C.R. Edwards, ‘The Narcissus Myth in Spenser’s Poetry’, SP 74 (1977), 63–88; and ‘Narcissus’, SE; R. Wiltenburg, Ben Jonson and Self-Love: The Subtlest Maze of All (University of Missouri Press, 1990); V. Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); J. Guillory, ‘Milton, Narcissism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male Self-Esteem’, Critical Essays on John Milton, ed. C. Kendrick (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995), 194–233. 47 In ‘September’ (25–46 and concluding emblem), Amoretti, 35, and The Faerie Queene (1.4.29) Spenser repeats Narcissus’ despairing paradoxical cry, ‘inopem me copia fecit’, which Golding renders as ‘my plentie makes me poore’ (Shakespeare’s Ovid: Arthur Golding’s Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed. W.H.D. Rouse (New York: Norton, 1966), 3, 587. Since the fable warns against fruitless self-obsession and physical possessiveness, the same cry is repeated by Avarice (FQ 1.4.29). 48 C.L. Barber, ‘An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. H. Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 7–9, 21–5. 49 Edwards, ‘Narcissus’, in SE. 50 Zweig, The Heresy of Self-Love, 107–8. 51 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I, chs 23–7, in The Confessions, The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, trans. M. Dods and J.F. Shaw (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 630–1;

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O. O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (Yale University Press, 1981), 1–9, 37–59, 75–111, 137–59. 52 ‘There is an evil, great above all others, which most men have, implanted in their souls … saying that every man is by nature a lover of self, and that it is right that he should be such. But the truth is that the cause of all sins in every case lies in the person’s excessive love of self…. Wherefore every man must shun excessive self-love, and ever follow after him that is better than himself ’. Plato, Laws, trans. R.G. Bury (London: Heinemann, 1926), 5.1.339. 53 Ethica Nicomachea in Introduction to Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 1947), 8.5.1157b. 54 Ibid. 9.4.1166a–b. 55 Ibid. 9.8.1169a. 56 Aquinas, ST I–II.25.2. See S. Pope, ‘Expressive Individualism and True Self-Love: A Thomistic Perspective’, Journal of Religion 71 (1991), 384–99. 57 Aquinas, ST II–II.26.4. 58 Ibid. II–II.25.3, pp. 502–3. 59 Ibid. I–II.28.3 ad 3, pp. 741–2. 60 Primaudaye, The Second Part of The French Academie (London, 1618; orig. Paris, 1586), 458–61. 61 For Augustine’s intricate justification of self-love in On the Trinity, Books 8–14, see O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine, 75–111, 127–36. 62 Aquinas, ST I.6.1 ad 2, p. 28. 63 Ibid. I–II.28.1–2, pp. 740–42. 64 Luther’s Works, trans. W.G. Tillmanns and J.A.O. Preus (St Louis: Concordia, 1972), 512. 65 Ibid., 291, 313, 512–13. 66 Quotations of Luke 9.23–4 and John 12.25 are from the Geneva Bible. 67 Pope, 396, n. 56 above; on Augustine rebutting self-hatred, O’Donovan, 43, 54, 88, 109. 68 French Academie, Part 2, 458–61. Montaigne avoids cares of greatness and glory because ‘I love myself too well’: The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. D. Frame (Stanford University Press, 1958), 699; cf. ‘Of not communicating one’s glory’ (187–9) and ‘Of the disadvantage of greatness’ (699–703). Throughout his essays – e.g., ‘Of vanity’ (721–66) and ‘The Apology of Raymond Sebond’ (318–457) – he uses pragmatic irony and humour to avert ‘bad self-love’. For R. Hooker’s moderation between proper and improper self-love, see ‘A Learned Sermon on the Nature of Pride’, in Tractates and Sermons (Harvard University Press, 1990), 315–17, 328, 333–4, 652–4. For Donne’s playful brooding over self-love’s ambivalence, see ‘Self-Love’, ‘The Cross’, and ‘Devotion 17’ in The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. C.M. Coffin (New York: Random House, 1952), 55, 233–5, 440–1; and The Sermons of John Donne, eds G.R. Potter and E.M. Simpson, 10 vols (University of California Press, 1953–62), 4, 319, 330; 5, 159–60; 6, 209; 7, 273; 8, 236; 9, 373. For Donne’s effort to reform self-love through imitating Christ crucified, see P.W. Harland, ‘“A true transubstantiation”: Donne, Self-Love, and the Passion’, John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, eds R.-J. Frontain and F.M. Malpezzi (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995), 162–80. 69 The Heidelberg and Westminster catechisms, deeply influenced by Calvin’s Catechism (1537, 1560), stress that acts of Creation and Providence are for God’s own glory: ‘God has all life, glory, goodness, blessedness in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he has made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory’. The Westminster Shorter Catechism (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2003), 2.2; cf. 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, 3.3, 3.5, 3.7, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 16.2. Luther does not stress God’s self-sufficiency and self-glorying but rather his love for creatures (‘He does all this out of pure love and goodness, without our merit, as a benevolent Father’), humbling us to acknowledge such unearned gifts (The Large Catechism (1530) in Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (St Louis: Concordia, 1921), 590). 70 Paradiso, 33.124–6, in The Divine Comedy, trans. C. Sisson (Oxford University Press, 1998). 71 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Harvard University Press, 1997), 291–4. 72 ‘Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind’, Hegel Selections, ed. J. Loewenberg (New York:

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Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 28–9: ‘that an accident as such, when cut loose from its containing circumference … should get an existence all its own, gain freedom and independence on its own account – this is the portentous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of pure ego. Death … is the most terrible thing…. But the life of the mind is not one that shuns death…. It only wins to its truth when it finds itself in utter desolation; … mind is this power only by looking the negative in the face and dwelling with it. This dwelling beside it is the magical power that converts the negative into being.’ In his mature tragedies and problem plays Shakespeare’s ‘dwelling beside’ the negative is unsurpassed. 73 Battenhouse, ‘Hamartia in Aristotle, Christian Doctrine, and Hamlet’, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises (Indiana University Press, 1969), 204–66. 74 See L. Josephs, Character Structure and the Organization of the Self (Columbia University Press, 1992), ch. 5, ‘The Archaic Relational Matrix’. 75 Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, 226, 231–3. 76 Zweig, The Heresy of Self-Love: ‘the European legend of Faust descends ultimately from this “arch-heretic” of the first centuries [Simon Magus of Acts 8.5-24]. Faust’s lust for power represents one of the most constant passions of the European psyche: the longing for a final, all-powerful solitude to which the world itself must submit’ (21; see 3–21). 77 On Spenser’s subordinating Aristotelianism to Christian Platonism in his scheme of human nature, see R.L. Reid, ‘psychology, Platonic’, SE, and Chapters 2–4 below. H. Baker in The Image of Man (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1952; orig. The Dignity of Man, Harvard University Press, 1947) is almost alone in acknowledging diverse Renaissance psychologies. On Spenser’s use of Aristotle’s ethics, especially via Aquinas, see W.F. DeMoss, The Influence of Aristotle’s ‘Politics’ and ‘Ethics’ on Spenser (University of Chicago Press, 1920); E. Sirluck, ‘The Faerie Queene, Book II, and the Nicomachean Ethics’, MP 49 (1951), 73–100; G. Morgan, ‘Spenser’s Conception of Courtesy and the Design of the Faerie Queene’, RES ns 32 (1981), 17–36; ‘Holiness as the First of Spenser’s Aristotelian Moral Virtues’, MLR 81 (1986), 817–37; ‘The Idea of Temperance in the Second Book of The Faerie Queene’, RES ns 37 (1986), 11–39; ‘“Add faith vnto your force”: The Perfecting of Spenser’s Knight of Holiness in Faith and Humility’, RenS 18 (2004), 449–74; and ‘Aquinas’ in SE; R.A. Horton, ‘Aristotle and his Commentators’, SE. The Christian-Platonic hierarchy in Books 1 and 2 is complicated in Books 3–5 by Britomart’s chaste power. 78 See R.L. Reid, Shakespeare’s Tragic Form (University of Delaware Press, 2000), ch. 1: ‘The Dramaturgical and Psychological Structure of Shakespeare’s Plays’. 79 Paglia, Sexual Personae, chs 6–7; ‘The Apollonian Androgyne and The Faerie Queene’, ELR 9 (1979), 42–63. Cf. G. Tiffany, ‘Shakespeare’s Dionysian Prince: Drama, Politics, and the “Athenian” History Play’, RenQ 52 (1999), 366–83. 80 Thomas Watson, An Eglogue Upon the Death of the Right Honorable Sir Francis Walsingham (London, 1590), sigs C3v–C4, in Spenser Allusions. Contemporary literati matched Spenser with Homer (21, 28, 29, 48, 60, 116, 136) and Petrarch (19, 21, 29, 41) but mostly Virgil (28–9, 41, 48, 60, 62, 70, 85, 94, 112, 113, 116, 136). Like Watson, many allied Spenser with Apollo (20, 21, 34, 70, 145). On the ‘Virgilian career trajectory’ as Spenser’s model, building on the work of R. Helgerson, D.A. Miller, W.A. Oram, R. Rambuss, and J. Loewenstein, see P. Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (University of Toronto Press, 1993), and M.L. Donnelly, ‘The Life of Vergil and the Aspirations of the “New Poet”’, SSt 17 (2003), 1–35. Cf. M.Y. Hughes, Virgil and Spenser (University of California Press, 1929); W.S. Webb, ‘Vergil in Spenser’s Epic Theory’, ELH 4 (1937), 62–84; Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1976), 29–35; M. O’Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s ‘The Faerie Queene’ (University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 4–7, 10–11, 23–40, 71, 76–8, 83, 90, 95, 101–3, 108, 120, 126, 141, 149, 175; M. Murrin, The Allegorical Epic (University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3–25, 131–52; A. Fichter, Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 1982), 1–39, 156–206; W.J. Kennedy, ‘Virgil’, SE; and especially D. Wilson-Okamura, Virgil and Spenser (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Despite his emulation of Virgil’s moral rectitude, laureate artistry, and nationalist heroic image, Spenser no less than Dante shows

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Vergil’s limitations. Duessa carrying Sansjoy’s body to be sustained in eternal joylessness parodies Aeneas’s descent. See A.C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 70; D.J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 101–4; S. Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).   On Shakespeare’s resisting and ‘translating’ Virgil, see H. James, Shakespeare’s Troy (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 119–50. See n. 124 below for Shakespeare’s fuller view of ‘sad’ Virgil in The Tempest. For Ovid’s influence on Shakespeare, see L.P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge University Press, 1955), 406–23; D. Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (University of Minnesota Press, 1932; rev. 1964), chs 4, 5, 7; W. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespeare’s Comedy (Princeton University Press, 1985); L. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale University Press, 1986), 243–88; A.D. Nuttall, ‘Ovid’s Narcissus and Shakespeare’s Richard II: the Reflected Self ‘, Ovid Renewed, ed. C. Martindale (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 137–50; E. Truax, Metamorphosis in Shakespeare’s Plays (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1992); J. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); M.L. Stapleton, Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s ‘Amores’ from Antiquity to Shakespeare (University of Michigan Press, 1996), 134ff; Shakespeare’s Ovid, ed. A.B. Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2000); L. Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 2000). 81 Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598), in A.B. Black and R.M. Smith, Shakespeare Allusions and Parallels, 2 vols (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1931). 82 I do not minimize Spenser’s attention to passion, central to Books 3 and 4, and crucial throughout the epic. Uncontrolled it distracts each knight, makes Britomart intensely ill, leaves a knife in the heart of Amavia and Amoret, but controlled brings fruitful union. In contrast to Shakespeare, however, Spenser seeks to contain passion in rigorously prudent intellectual order. On The Faerie Queene’s ethical and theological design, see A.S.P. Woodhouse, ‘Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene’, ELH 16 (1949), 194–228; H. Berger, Jr, ‘A Secret Discipline: The Faerie Queene Book VI’ (1961), in Revisionary Play (University of California Press, 1988), 215–42; Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in ‘The Faerie Queene’, ch. 3; D. Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature (Yale University Press, 1966), 1–17; ‘Eterne in Mutabilitie’: The Unity of ‘The Faerie Queene’, ed. K.J. Atchity (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1972); J. Anderson, The Growth of a Personal Voice: ‘Piers Plowman’ and ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Yale University Press, 1976), comparing Spenser’s three pairs of legends to stages of Piers’s visio, disclosing intellectual and theological stages of both poetic ‘summas’; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 35–6, 58, 71–86, 655–733, 777–91; R.A. Horton, The Unity of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (University of Georgia Press, 1978); G. Morgan, n. 77 above; D.J. Gless, ‘Nature and Grace’, SE; S. Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory (University of Toronto Press, 1989), 3–30, 211–25. 83 Hamilton’s ed. of FQ annotates debate of this crucial line. On Spenser’s containing Ovidian mutability in Neoplatonic and Christian allegory, see D.C. Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), chs 7–10; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 84–5, 141–3, 427–651; M. Holahan, ‘Iamque opus exegi: Ovid’s Changes and Spenser’s Brief Epic of Mutability’, ELR 6 (1976), 244–70; D. Javitch, ‘Rescuing Ovid from the Allegorizers’, CompLit 30 (1978), 97–107; Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, ch. 6: ‘Fusions: Platonism and Spenser’, 231–42; C. Burrow, ‘Original Fictions: Metamorphoses in The Faerie Queene’, in Ovid Renewed, 99–119, and ‘Spenser and Classical Traditions’, The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. A. Hadfield (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 217–36; J. Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2001), chs 4–7; and in SE: S. Chaudhuri, ‘Metamorphosis’; J.L. Lepage, ‘Mutability’; Holahan, ‘Ovid’; J.L. Klein, ‘Bacchus’; M. Pincombe, ‘The Ovidian Hermaphrodite …’, Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. G.V. Stanivukovic (University of Toronto Press, 2001), 155–70; H. James, ‘Ovid and the Question of Politics in Early Modern England’, Images of Matter, ed. Y. Bruce (University of Delaware Press, 2005), 92–122; S. Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, a valuable study, overstates Spenser’s identifying with exiled Ovid more than with Virgil’s prudent support of empire.

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84 P. Weiss, Modes of Being (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). 85 The latter are transcendent versions of the former: Actuality becomes Existence, Ideality becomes God. Likewise, Instinct becomes Emotion, and Intellect becomes Intuition. And similarly, Material becomes Efficient Cause, as Formal becomes Final. In William Blake’s epics, Tharmas should be the Godlike ‘parent power’ of intuition or conscience but is in fact a formless, disabled zoa after the Fall. 86 See Reid, Shakespeare’s Tragic Form, chs. 1–2, 5–6, and see pp. 239–68 below. 87 See A.K. Hieatt, Short Time’s Endless Monument: The Symbolism of the Numbers in Edmund Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ (Columbia University Press, 1960); A. Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), and ‘Numerical Composition in The Faerie Queene’, JWCI 25 (1962), 199–239; A. Dunlop, ‘The Unity of Spenser’s Amoretti’, Silent Poetry, ed. A. Fowler (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 153–69; S.K. Heninger, Jr, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1974), 351–7, 366–78, 388–93; A. Dunlop, ‘The Drama of Amoretti’, SSt 1 (1980), 107–20; C.V. Kaske, ‘Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion of 1595: Structure, Genre, and Numerology’, ELR 8 (1978), 271–95; M.-S. Røstvig, Configurations (Scandinavian University Press, 1990), 267–370, and ‘Number Symbolism, Tradition of ’, SE; A. Dunlop, ‘Number Symbolism, Modern Studies in’, SE. 88 On pagan gods figuring Christian immanence, see Allen, Mysteriously Meant, chs 1–2, 6–10; W.J. Kennedy, ‘Paynims’, SE. On their figuring the prowess of Elizabeth and leading courtiers, see P.F. Olson, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage’, ELH 24 (1957), 95–119; E. Welsford, The Court Masque (Cambridge University Press, 1927), 324–49; A. Nicoll, Stuart Masques and the Renaissance Stage (London: George G. Harrap, 1937), 72–5, 177, 202–4; S. Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Columbia University Press, 1967), 87–91; and in SE: T.H. Cain, ‘Elizabeth, Images of ’; W.J. Kennedy, ‘Diana’. 89 Introduction to Book 6, The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton. 90 R. Neuse, ‘Book Six as Conclusion of The Faerie Queene’, ELH 35 (1968), 329–53; H. Tonkin, Spenser’s Courteous Pastoral: Book Six of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), and ‘The Faerie Queene, Book VI’, SE; S. Woods, ‘Closure in The Faerie Queene’, JEGP 76 (1977), 195–216. 91 In ‘Spenser’s Last Days: Ireland, Career, Mutability, Allegory’, in Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 302–36, J.B. Lethbridge concludes, ‘Every bit of evidence we have suggests both that The Faerie Queene is not finished and that Spenser intended to go on with it’ (303). Also on Book 6 as closure: Berger, ‘Secret Discipline’; S.L. Reames, ‘Prince Arthur and Spenser’s Changing Design’, ‘Eterne in Mutabilitie’, ed. K.J. Atchity (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1972), 180–206; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 35–6, 58, 71–86, 655–733, 777–91; D.L. Miller, ‘Abandoning the Quest’, ELH 46 (1979), 173–92; J. Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 1–30, 166–74; J.K. Kouwenhoven, Apparent Narrative as Thematic Metaphor: The Organization of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 1–71, 198; S. Stewart, ‘Sir Calidore and “Closure”‘, SEL 24 (1984), 69–86; B. Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton University Press, 1985), 44–84; Rajan, ‘Closure’, SE; R. McCabe, The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989), 15–54, 154–225; P.A. Marquis, ‘Problems of Closure in The Faerie Queene’, ES in C 16 (1990), 149–63; M.R.R. Philmus, ‘The Faerie Queene and Renaissance Poetics: Another Look at Book VI as “Conclusion” to the Poem’, ES 76 (1995), 497–519; M.F.N. Dixon, The Polliticke Courtier: Spenser’s ‘The Faerie Queene’ as a Rhetoric of Justice (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), chs 7–9; A. Hadfield, ‘“Who knowes not Colin Clout?” The Permanent Exile of Edmund Spenser’, in Politics and National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 170–201, and Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), chs 5–6. 92 R. Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton University Press, 1966), 57–143; Horton, The Unity of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (University of Georgia Press, 1978), 15–137, 177–84, and ‘Virtues’, SE; R. Kuin, ‘The Double Helix: Private and Public in

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The Faerie Queene’, SSt 16 (2002), 1–22. Cf. R. Cummings, ‘Spenser’s “Twelve Private Morall Virtues”’, SSt 8 (1990), 35–59. 93 Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time, 40–1, 51–9, 170n; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 35–6, 58, 71–86, 655–733, 777–91; Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction, 52–77, 133–83. On Spenser’s Platonism, often without evaluating its alliance with Christian doctrine, see A. Fowler, ‘Emanations of Glory: Neoplatonic Order in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, A Theatre for Spenserians, eds J.M. Kennedy and J.M. Reither (University of Toronto, 1973), 53–82; Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony, 351–7, 366–78, 388–93; D. Burchmore, ‘Triamond, Agape, and the Fates: Neoplatonic Cosmology in Spenser’s Legend of Friendship’, SSt 5 (1984), 45–64, 273–87; E. Bieman, Plato Baptized: Towards the Interpretation of Spenser’s Mimetic Fictions (University of Toronto Press, 1988), 105–51, 212–43; Spenser Studies 24, ed. C. Kaske, K. Borris, J. Quitslund. Cf. R.W. Battenhouse, ‘The Doctrine of Man in Calvin and in Renaissance Platonism’, JHI 9:4 (1948), 447–71. 94 Arthur’s partial engagement in Holiness contrasts with his full participation in Temperance (touring and defending Alma’s Castle). As a Briton like Redcrosse rather than a Fairy like Guyon, Arthur needs fuller education and vision, apparently in the epic’s final half. On the crucial issue of whether ‘Arthurus est Christus’, see Tuve, Allegorical Imagery, 134–43; Anderson, The Growth of a Personal Voice, 159–84, esp. 160–2; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 35–58, 74–6, 85, 272–5, 317–31, passim; G. Teskey, ‘Arthur in The Faerie Queene’, SE; Gless, Interpretation, 126–41. K. Borris’s argument for Arthur’s ‘continued heroic allegorism’ in Book 6, focusing on ‘Salvaging the State of Nature’, reinforces our view that Courtesy is not The Faerie Queene’s final virtue but prepares for the nadir of the soul’s ‘dilation’ or descent. See Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2000), chs 6 and 7. 95 If Spenser had died after completing the first half of Book I, some might find Redcross’s defeat of Sansjoy in canto 5 and Una’s courteous civilizing of woodland creatures in canto 6 a suitable ending for ‘Holiness’. Yet Redcross is dismayed by his inconclusive victory over Sansjoy (as the real-life Artegall knows the sponsor of the Souldan and Grantorto is still at large), dismayed by the House of Pride’s false revels (as Artegall is dismayed by Envy and Detraction), and dismayed by ‘huge nombers’ of imprisoned ‘wretched thralls’ (1.5.45) (as unsettling as the legions slain by Talus). Holiness, at canto 5, is as insecure as Justice in Book 5. In canto 6 Una gains brief pastoral respite while struggling to enlighten pagan souls (as Pastorella inspires civility); but neither maiden has at this point fulfilled a quest; each is dishevelled by threats of rape and slander, despite the efforts of Satyrane and Calidore. One must not underestimate the achievement of Books 5 and 6, but neither Mercilla’s Court nor Colin’s visions resolve these legends’ dire problems of savagery and turpitude. Justice and Courtesy can be secured only if reinforced by additional virtues – all integrated to form a perfect ring of twelve. 96 On Elizabeth I’s omission from Acidale, see E.J. Bellamy, ‘The Vocative and the Vocational: The Unreadability of Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene’, ELH 54 (1987), 1–30; M. Grossman, The Story of All Things (Duke University Press, 1998), 126–37; K. Eggert, Showing like a Queen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 47–8, 217.  97 Kuin, ‘The Double Helix’, 14-15, says a Legend of Courage ‘would go well in the middle of the third triad’, but rejects Prudence for Book 11. On magnificence as source of courtesy, courage, and justice, see Speculum morale, I.53-4, as explained by H. MacLachlan and P. Rollinson, ‘Magnanimity, Magnificence’, SE.  98 ‘Sophy’ as ‘sophia’ (sapience) or ‘sophrosyne’ (prudence) could be the eleventh virtue (central to the final triad), prior to the conclusive Magnificence/Magnanimity that completes Arthur’s quest, thus integrating the twelve virtues. For a connection between prudence and sophia in The Faerie Queene, see J.H. Anderson, ‘Prudence and Her Silence: Spenser’s Use of Chaucer’s Melibee’, ELH 62 (1995), 29– 46. On the Platonizing and Christianising of prudence, see H. North, Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature (Cornell University Press, 1966), 1–31, 150–96, 312–86. 99  Several critics have ingeniously explained Spenserian dilation (‘by their change their being doe dilate: / And turning to themselves at length againe, / Doe worke their owne perfection’, FQ 7.7.58), notably Nohrnberg, Analogy, 76–86, 325n, 729, 737–60; and P.A. Parker, Ines-

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capable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton University Press, 1979), 54–63, and passim. But no one has explained the eventual reversal of dilation (whereby creatures ‘turning to themselves againe’ can ‘worke their owne perfection’). Nohrnberg (Analogy, 655–733) envisions an abbreviated recovery, with Books 1 to 6 as a parabola: instead of three pairs of legends, he links Books 1 and 6, Books 2 and 5, Books 3 and 4. If, however, Books 1 to 6 trace a continuous descent into fleshly temporality, then Books 7 to 12 would show the soul’s inverse ascent through three pairs of polarized quests to renewed spiritual purity and unity. That recovery is adumbrated by the three stages of training in the House of Holiness: in each, the soul imitates Christ by accepting incarnation and thereby suffering passion as a means of union with God who is Love: Fidelia’s teaching mortifies bodily desires, Charissa tends to others’ afflictions, Contemplation’s vision ends in combating the Dragon of the false self (with repeated self-mortifications) to redeem the Edenic body. 100 On Mirabella’s endless penalty, see Tonkin, Spenser’s Courteous Pastoral, 87–100, 204–5, 223–37; A. Shaver, ‘Rereading Mirabella’, SSt 9 (1991), 211–26. 101 Cf. Mallette, ‘Book Five of The Faerie Queene: An Elizabethan Apocalypse’, SSt 11 (1994), 129–59. 102 On Gloriana, not Elizabeth I, as the essential subject of Spenser’s epic, see J.P. Fruen, ‘“True Glorious Type”: The Place of Gloriana in The Faerie Queene’, SSt 7 (1987), 147–73; ‘The Faery Queen Unveiled? Five Glimpses of Gloriana’, SSt 11 (1994), 53–88. Cf. Nohrnberg, Analogy, 40–60, 52–3 nn. 133–5; W.H. Herendeen, ‘Gloriana’, SE. 103 Books 5 and 6 represent a descent into material-historical-personal reality, presaging a temporary impasse in Book 7 (corresponding to captivity by carnal pride in 1.7). The quest for Constancy veils a Christian-Platonic anxiety over the impact on the soul of fleshly mutability – an anxiety Spenser voices with increasing urgency. In the literal-sensate perspective of Justice and Courtesy, the antagonists are objectified as ‘other’, rather than as mirrors of the hero’s own inner darkness, as in Book 1. On how this forms the hero’s inconclusive quest, see D.A. Northrop, ‘The Uncertainty of Courtesy in Book VI of The Faerie Queene’, SSt 14 (2000), 215–32; W.A. Oram, ‘Spenserian Paralysis’, SEL 41 (2001), 49–70. 104 See J.P. Bednarz, ‘Imitations of Spenser in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, RenD 14 (1983), 79–102; M. Woodcock, Fairy in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 88–140. 105 For Elizabethans, the pun yokes the holy Biblical ass with the foolish ass of Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, and the priapic one in Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans.W. Adlington (London, 1566). According to the OED (‘ass’, I.1a, 1b, ‘bottom’, I.1b), Elizabethans did not yet know the lewder puns: ass (or bottom) = arse. If, however, the pun was available, Shakespeare seems more likely than Spenser to have exploited it, and in Bottom to have made an emblem of it. 106 See J.J.M. Tobin, Shakespeare’s Favorite Novel: A Study of ‘The Golden Asse’ as Prime Source (University Press of America, 1984); Tobin, ‘Apuleius’, SE. 107 See J.M. Steadman, ‘Una and the Clergy: The Ass Symbol in The Faerie Queene’, JWCI 21 (1958), 134–7; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 207– 22, 237–8; D. Brooks-Davies, ‘Una’, SE, and Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’: A Critical Commentary on Books I and II (Manchester University Press, 1977), 60–9; Gless, Interpretation, 105–14. In Books 1 to 6 of The Faerie Queene, the impact of a ‘salvage nation’ on three different maidens clarifies the three stages of descent in the three pairs of legends. In Books 1–2 the satyr-savages, notably with Una in 1.6, subvert theological-philosophical truths accessible to Reason. In Books 3–4 the satyrs, especially with Hellenore (3.10) and implicitly in relation to ‘Satyrane’, distort passions of the Heart. In Books 5–6, focusing on the ‘salvage Island’ (5.11.39; 6.1.9), the savages (no longer called satyrs) turn their idolatry and lust to cannibalism, making Serena serve their Sensory Appetites (6.8). On identifying satyrs and savages in the sixteenth century, see R. Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Harvard University Press, 1952), 71; and Tonkin, Spenser’s Courteous Pastoral, 61–2. In A. Hadfield’s ‘The ‘“sacred hunger of ambitious minds”: Spenser’s Savage Religion’, Edmund Spenser, ed. Hadfield (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 177–95, the shift from almost-redeemable savages who ‘save’ Una (1.6) to brutes who would eat Serena (6.8) shows Spenser’s hardening view of the Irish; in Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience Hadfield’s analysis of the ‘salvage nation’ includes the satyrs cavorting with

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Hellenore – forming the second in three stages of descent or ‘dilation’. K. Borris, in ‘“Diuelish Ceremonies”: Allegorical Satire of Protestant Extremism in The Faerie Queene 6.8.31–51’, SSt 8 (1987), 175– 209, also gives a helpful context for viewing the satyrs – but only as Puritans, rather than, more broadly, as the exuberant half-bestial energies of the common masses in unillumined enjoyment of the natural world. 108 ‘A Speculative Political Allegory in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, CompD 34 (2000–1), 423–53. 109 P.E.J. Hammer, The Polarization of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 120, 138–40, 161–2, 211–16, 225–6, 229–31, 268, 297–8, 302, 307–8, 315, 318, 326, 333ff, 349, 358, 371–3, 380–1, 387, 393–4, 399ff, 403–4. Cf. A. Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 92, 178 n. 7. 110 See R.M. Benbow, ‘The Providential Theory of Historical Causation in Holinshed’s Chronicles 1577 and 1587’, TSLL 1:2 (1959), 276ff; E.S. Donno, ‘Some Aspects of Shakespeare’s Holinshed’, HLQ 50 (1987), 229–48; D. Womersley, ‘Why Is Falstaff Fat?’, RES ns 47:185 (1996), 1–22. 111 E. Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustre families of Lancastre and York (1548), sig. Nviiv; Benbow, ‘Providential Theory’, 277–8. 112 On Essex’s rise to leadership of the ‘Protestant cause’, see Hammer, Polarization, 6, 39ff, 51–2, 76, 107, 119, 143, 241ff, 247, 260–1, 284, 393–4, 400. 113 E.S. Mallin, ‘Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida’, Representations 29 (1990), 145–79. On Essex’s ‘ambition of warre’, political ruthlessness, and obsessive quest for honour, see Hammer, Polarization, 50–1, 62ff, 71–5, 82–3, 88–90, 94–7, 103ff, 111ff, 118, 145–6, 199ff, 208, 216ff, 225ff, 233–4, 249, 267–8, 297–8, 323, 367–8, 371–3, 386ff, 393ff, 399–401, 404. For speculation on Shakespeare’s access to Essex House, see M. Green, Wriothesley’s Roses in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Poems, and Plays (Baltimore: Clevedon Books, 1993), 115–56, 201–11. 114 Rebhorn, ‘The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar’, RenQ 43 (1990), 75–111. For the philosophical tradition of anti-militancy in relation to Henry V, see H.C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, vol. 1 (University of Chicago Press, 1951), 215–68; R.W. Battenhouse, ‘The Relation of Henry V to Tamburlaine’, ShS 27 (1974), 71–9, and ‘Henry V in the Light of Erasmus’, ShakS 18 (1985), 77–88. 115 See pp. 95–113 below. 116 Anderson, ‘The Conspiracy of Realism: Impasse and Vision in King Lear’, SP 84 (1987), 1–23. 117 H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 11: ‘Shakespeare is the largest instance in the language of … the absolute absorption of the precursor’. 118 Spenser’s moral-religious allegory is rivalled by that in The Merchant of Venice: Shylock’s vengeful legalism is displaced by a merciful New Law fitfully unfolding in Portia, Antonio, Bassanio, and the Venetians to redeem Shylock from hatred, Bassanio from prodigality, Antonio from melancholy, Portia from a shaky marriage. The allegorical dimension is, however, nuanced by Antonio’s homoerotic bond with Bassanio and by Portia’s use of male transvestism. The Biblical subtext provides a smokescreen and justification for the same-sex bond (i.e., the forbidden true love) at the embattled heart of the play. J. Rosenheim, ‘Allegorical Commentary in The Merchant of Venice’, ShakS 24 (1996), 156–210, observes the allegory is qualified by the subplots of Launcelot/Old Gobbo and Jessica/Shylock. 119 Ultimately the play is dominated by Shylock’s unresolved passion. But Portia’s self-possession surpasses Shakespeare’s previous female protagonists and has no basis in the sourcematerial for The Merchant of Venice. Portia demonstrates Elizabeth’s masterful sovereignty but also the male fantasy of her marital acessibility. On Shakespeare’s subtextual allusions to Elizabeth I, see L.S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare (University of California Press, 1988), ch. 2: ‘Elizabeth’, 51–105; esp. 96–105. 120 The name ‘Rosalind’, possibly alluding to Queen Elizabeth, is traceable through Lodge to The Shepheardes Calender. See R. Mallette, ‘Rosalind’, SE. Again Shakespeare adapts and inverts

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a favourite Spenserian trope for Elizabeth: from the pastoral name springs his fantasy of a sovereign mind that is wittily and personally accessible. 121 L. Hotson in The First Night of Twelfth Night (London: Hart-Davis, 1954), chs 2 and 6, sees Countess Olivia as a flattering portrait of Elizabeth I when she was visited by the Italian duke, Orsino. If so, Shakespeare again wishfully resolves succession anxiety, as well as Elizabeth’s increasing moodiness. 122 H. Morris, ‘Queen Elizabeth I “Shadowed” in Cleopatra’, HLQ 32 (1969), 271–8; K. Rinehart, ‘Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and England’s Elizabeth’, SQ 23 (1972), 81–6; Eggert, Showing like a Queen (University of Pennsylvanis Press, 2000), 133–54, 157–61. 123 Anderson, ‘Conspiracy of Realism’. 124 See J. Nosworthy, ‘The Narrative Sources of The Tempest’, RES ns 24 (1948), 281–94; J. Kott, ‘The Aeneid and The Tempest’, Arion ns 3:4 (1976), 424–51, and ‘The Tempest, or Repetition’, Mosaic 10 (1977), 9–36; G. Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (University of California Press, 1981), 74–5, 165–73; J. Pitcher, ‘A Theatre of the Future: The Aeneid and The Tempest’, EIC 34 (1984), 193–215; B.J. Bono, Literary Transvaluation: From Virgilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy (University of California Press, 1984); R. Miola, ‘Vergil in Shakespeare: From Allusion to Imitation’, Vergil at 2000, ed. J.D. Bernard (New York: AMS, 1986), 254–6; R. Wiltenberg, ‘The Aeneid in The Tempest’, ShS 39 (1987), 159–68; D.B. Hamilton, Virgil and ‘The Tempest’ (Ohio State University Press, 1990); James, ­Shakespeare’s Troy, 189–221; M. Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge University Press, 1998); R.H. Wells, ‘Blessing Europe: Virgil, Ovid, and Seneca in The Tempest’, Shakespeare and Intertextuality, ed. M. Marrapodi (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), 69–84. 125 See pp. 310–21 below. On Isaiah as source for The Tempest, see A.P. Slater, ‘Variations within a Source: From Isaiah XXIX to The Tempest’, ShS 25 (1972), 125–35; K. Berger, ‘Prospero’s Art’, ShakS 10 (1977), 211–39; A. Esolen, ‘“The Isles Shall Wait for His Law”: Isaiah and The Tempest’, SP 94 (1997), 221–48. On sacramental symbols in The Tempest, R.G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (Columbia University Press, 1965); E.J. Devereux, ‘Sacramental imagery in The Tempest’, Bulletin de l’Association Canadienne des Humanités 19 (1968), 50–62. On Prospero’s spiritual ‘Art’, D. Woodman, White Magic and English Renaissance Drama (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973); B. Traister, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (University of Missouri Press, 1984); John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age (University of Nebraska Press, 1989); G. Slover, ‘Magic, Mystery, and Make-Believe: An Analogical Reading of The Tempest’, ShakS 11 (1978), 180–205; R. Battenhouse, ed., Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension (Indiana University Press, 1994), 250–79. 126 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning (University of Chicago Press, 1980), 252. 127 On philautia in Sidney, see R.E. Stillman, ‘The Perils of Fancy: Poetry and Self-Love in The Old Arcadia’, TSLL 26 (1984), 1–17; ‘The Truths of a Slippery World: Poetry and Tyranny in Sidney’s “Defense”’, RenQ 55 (2002), 1287–1319. On Sidney’s advocacy of selfless and selfsacrificial love, see W. Craft, ‘Remaking the Heroic Self in the New Arcadia’, SEL 25 (1985), 45–67; Labyrinth of Desire: Invention and Culture in the Work of Sir Philip Sidney (University of Delaware Press, 1994), 26–39, 56–67, 87–99. 128 See J.P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (Columbia University Press, 2001), 155–202. 129 See R. Wiltenburg, Ben Jonson and Self-Love (University of Missouri Press, 1990), x–xi, 7, 19, 30, 44, 64, 89, 92, 124, 127–8. 130 See D. Robertson’s fine analysis of self-love: ‘My self / Before me’: Self-Love in the Works of John Milton (University of Tampere, 1992). J. Guillory says Milton gives Adam, but not Eve, the intellect and will to transform self-love into ‘self-esteem’ in ‘Milton, Narcissism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male Self-Esteem’, Critical Essays on John Milton, ed. C. Kendrick (New York: G.K. Hale, 1995), 194–233. 131 D.V. Stump, ‘Pride’, SE; Stump and J.M. Crossett, ‘Spenser’s Inferno: The Order of the Seven Deadly Sins at the Palace of Pride’, JMRS 14 (1984), 203–18; J.H. Blythe, ‘Spenser and the Seven Deadly Sins: Book 1, Cantos 4 and 5’, ELH 39 (1972), 342–52; Tuve, Allegorical

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Imagery, 36, 38, 59, 106, 108n, 120–30, 175–6, 182–4, 188n, 192, 195, 206, 229; M.W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (University of Michigan Press, 1952), 74–8, 87–8, 145, 181–3, 188, 201, 223, 241, 349. 132 As usurper (1.4.12) Lucifera has been identified with the vainglorious Mary Queen of Scots, a lover of progresses. But the analogy with Elizabeth I is inescapable, as are allusions to Accession Day tourneys and prodigy houses, notably Burghley’s many-turreted palace. See Books I and II of ‘The Faerie Queene’, ed. R. Kellogg and O. Steele (New York: Odyssey, 1969), 25–7; M. Eccles, ‘Burghley, William Cecil, Lord’, SE. 133 Aquinas cites Gregory: pride, ‘queen and mother of all the vices’, ‘when it has vanquished and captured the heart, forthwith delivers it into the hands of … the seven principal vices, that they may despoil it and produce vices of all kinds’, ST II–II.162.8. On Spenser’s persistent depiction of pride’s hegemony in all sinfulness, see n. 131 above. 134 Honor and the Epic Hero (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960); Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton University Press, 1960). Cf. M. James, Society, Politics and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1986), 308–465; J. Alvis, Shakespeare’s Understanding of Honor (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1990); R.A. Terry, ‘“Vows to the Blackest Devil”: Hamlet and the Evolving Code of Honor in Early Modern England’, RenQ 52 (1999), 1070–86; N. Council, When Honour’s at the Stake (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973). 135 Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor, 279–366. 136 See pp. 239–51 below. 137 Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6–147; Broaddus, Spenser’s Allegory of Love (University of Delaware Press, 1999), 23–4, 45, 60, 109, 124–5, 156–8, 163 n. 12. In Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Cornell University Press, 1992), 189, E.J. Bellamy disagrees: ‘If epic history is dependent on the ideological position of the absent phallus, if the lesson of Ryence’s mirror is that anatomy is (epic) destiny, then the woman within epic history must be made to stand in for (anatomical) difference and loss’. Despite Britomart’s ‘combative androgyny’, little in her ‘internal violence’ shows Spenser ‘exploring a new kind of female subjectivity’. 138 See M. Leslie, Spenser’s ‘Fierce Warres and Faithfull Loves’: Martial and Chivalric Symbolism in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), 68–84. 139 See D.L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1988), 71, 81; H. Berger, Jr, ‘Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene’, ELR 21 (1991), 3–48, esp. 36ff; D.V. Stump, ‘Pride’, SE. 140 A. Dunlop, ‘Drama of Amoretti’, 109ff. A.F. Marotti is harsher: ‘the speaker teasingly criticizes his mistress’ personal vanity and egotism (Sonnets 27, 45), her coquettishness (Sonnet 47), her hubristic self-assurance (Sonnet 58), and … her fear of commitment (Sonnet 65)’: ‘“Love Is Not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order’, ELH 49 (1982), 396–428; 413–17. 141 Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. W.A. Oram et al. (Yale University Press, 1989), 603–4. 142 Augustine, The City of God, trans. J. Healey (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1950), I.162. 143 ‘The Construction of Inwardness in The Faerie Queene, Book 2’, Worldmaking Spenser, eds P. Cheney and L. Silberman (University of Kentucky Press, 2000), 234–43. 144 See D. Trevor, ‘Sadness in The Faerie Queene’, Reading the Early Modern Passions, eds G.K. Paster, K. Rowe and M. Floyd-Wilson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 240–52. 145 Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Columbia University Press, 1963), 147ff. 146 On the hierarchy of virtues in relation to the hierarchy of human faculties, see Aquinas, ST,I–II.61.2; I.77.2 and 4; Disputations, de Virtutibus Cardinalibus, 1. On this structure as a component of the imago Dei, see ST I.60.5: ‘Every creature is entirely of God’; and ST I.13.5: ‘creatures are shaped to God as to their principle; their perfections surpassingly preexist in him’. Aquinas’s emphasis of Prudence’s dominant role in virtuous action supports the placement of ‘Sophy’ as a culminating virtue of The Faerie Queene, perhaps Book 11. But Aquinas acknowledges the mystical supremacy of the soul’s affective power: ‘Our will can

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reach higher than can our intelligence when we are confronted by things that are above us. Whereas our notions about moral matters, which are below man, are enlightened by a cognitive habit (for prudence informs the other moral virtues), when it comes to the divine virtues about God, a will-virtue, namely charity, informs the mind-virtue, namely faith’ (Disputations, de Caritate 3, ad 13). Taken from Saint Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical Texts, trans. T. Gilby (Oxford University Press, 1960), 94, 213–14. 147 See Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. H. Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1845, repr. 1972), I.xv.8; II.i.5, 8; Commentary on Genesis and Commentary on Romans, trans. J. King (Edinburgh, 1847), III.6 and VII.15; W. Perkins, A Golden Chaine (London, 1600), 911–12. 148 Spenser’s self-love has been viewed in relation to his laureate aspirations (Helgerson), his Amoretti courtship (Dunlop), and his Irish governance (Hadfield). But Spenser, like Sidney, never approves of self-love in any form. His ideal of self-abnegation is quite distinct from Shakespeare’s ‘negative capability’, which is resolved in imaginative identification with the central psychological principle of self-love, from which self-sacrifice may s­ urprisingly spring. 149 On the dragon, well, and tree in FQ 1.11, see C.V. Kaske, ‘The Dragon’s Spark and Sting and the Structure of Red Cross’s Dragon-Fight: The Faerie Queene, I.xi–xii’, SP 66 (1969), 609–38; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 135–47, 159, 181–7, 195–7, 203–4, 241n., 286, 335–6n., 341n., 485–6, 643, 666, 692n.; B. Humfrey, ‘Dragons’, SE; Gless, Interpretation, 163–71; H. Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace (University of Toronto Press, 1994). 150 See T.A. Dughi, ‘Redcrosse’s “Springing Well” of Scriptural Faith’, SEL 37 (1997), 21–38. On Spenser’s Reformation focus on the power of the Word, see J.N. Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (University of Georgia Press, 1988), 83–8; J.N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1990), 58–65, 212–16; R. Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 1–49. 151 The descent into material-historical-personal reality (‘dilation’) would perhaps reach crisis level in the Legend of Constancy (like Redcrosse’s captivity by carnal pride in 1.7). Constancy’s hero must cope with Christian-Platonic anxiety over Mutabilitie, the impact of change on the body and natural world, on the soul and human history. To lay the ontological basis for that crisis, the Legends of Justice and Courtesy depict allegory in a sensory realm (a descent from the intellectual realm of Books 1–2 and passional realm of Books 3–4). In Books 5 and 6 the antagonists are objectified, completely ‘other’: heroes do not face villains who represent their own flaws – in striking contrast to Book 1 where the mirror principle is insistent. Artegall’s enslavement by Radigund and Calidore’s truancy with Pastorella do not suggest absolute falls from Justice and Courtesy (nothing like Redcrosse’s wretched imprisonment and despair). Errancy in Books 5 and 6 is depicted as an ambivalent subservience to woman, as reduction to commonness, and as ceding (or hiding) the arms that enable full power. In contrast to Artegall’s shaming by aggressive Radigund, Calidore seems justified in disarming, becoming a shepherd, and serving demure Pastorella to learn Courtesy: he ‘thought it best / To change the manner of his loftie looke; / And doffing his bright armes himselfe addrest / In shepheards weed’ (6.9.36). Yet these complementary modes of bondage to woman (resembling Colin’s homage to graces and muses on Acidale) diverge from the heroic quest, showing the humble nadir (the fullest ‘dilation’) of the quest for Gloriana. 152 Though the noble knights of Book 6 (Calepine, Arthur, Calidore) eschew weapons to learn courtesy, their disarming in a fallen world has disastrous results. Increasingly Books 1–6 fail to attain Book 1’s apocalyptic pattern as the allegory engages with increasingly materialist dimensions of human life. 153 Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani, An English Version, ed. A.M. O’Donnell, SND for EETS (Oxford University Press, 1981), 59: ‘so it is that one christen man hath not warre with an other but with hymselfe / & verily a great hoost of aduersaryes spryng out of our owne fleshe / out of the very bowels & inwarde parte of vs. Lykewyse as it is redde in certeyn poetes tales of the bretherne gendred of the erth. And there is so lytell difference bytwene our enemy & our frende / and so harde to knowe the one fro the other.’ Calvin too abandons

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the popular military analogy of God and Christ leading a war against the devil (Inst. 1.17.8). Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 12.10 (1075a); Augustine, Confessions, 7.21.27; Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 3.64; Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, 35. Christian militancy has been justified by the presumed oneness of the church’s body politic: non-believers must be plucked out. See nn. 151–2 above. 154 On the essentially positive mode of self-love that evolves in Shakespeare’s works, see pp.  24–6 above. 155 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 8.5; 9.4 and 8; Aquinas, ST I.6.1, I–II.25.2–3, I–II.28.1–3, II–II.26.4. 156 ST I.60.1–5. 157 The Second Part of The French Academie (London, 1618; orig. 1586), 458–61. 158 See O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine, 75–111, 127–36. 159 With arrogant Aragon, Portia refers to ‘my worthless self ’ and, encouraging Bassanio to be a Herculean saviour, ‘I stand for sacrifice’ (2.9.18, 3.2.57, my italics). Such phrases epitomize Portia’s bent for self-derogation: her initial melancholy (1.2.1–34), tact with Morocco and submissive modesty with Bassanio, masterful restraint in the trial and the ruse of rings. Each episode, however, also shows ever-stronger self-love: snippy gibes at the self-indulgent suitors, dismissive farewells to Morocco and Aragon, self-gratulation at Bassanio’s halfassisted success and in artfully managing the trial and ring-trickery. 160 Though Books 2, 4, and 6 acknowledge the natural world’s pleasure-principle, the heroes avoid exploiting it; victories are achieved only by abstinence and self-restraint, and in the natural realm weapons are less effective, cast aside especially in Book 6. 161 See C. Martindale and C. Burrow, ‘Clapham’s Narcissus: A Pretext for Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis? (text, translation, commentary)’, ELR 22 (1992), 147–76. 162 On the insistent, capitalized ‘Rose’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets (1, 54, 67, 95, 99, 109) as a reference to Henry Wriothesley (‘rosely’), his ancestral home at Titchfield adorned with stone roses (ancient heraldic emblem of the town of Southampton), see Green, Wriothesley’s Roses (n. 113 above). Cf. M.H. Shackford, ‘Rose in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, MLN 33 (1918), 122; A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. H.E. Rollins (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1944); G.P.V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), 3, 231–4; L. Freinkel, ‘The Name of the Rose: Christian Figurality and Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. J. Schiffer (New York: Garland, 1999), 241–61. 163 R. Heffner, ‘Essex and Book Five of The Faerie Queene’, ELH 3 (1936), 67–82. 164 R. Heffner, ‘Essex, the Ideal Courtier’, ELH 1 (1934), 7–36; J. Pitcher, ‘Essex, Robert Devereux, second Earl of ’, SE; R.B. Gottfried, ‘Spenser’s View and Essex’, PMLA 52 (1937), 645–51; A. Fowler, Conceitful Thought: The Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems (University of Edinburgh Press, 1975), ch. 4. 165 C.E. Mounts, ‘Spenser and the Countess of Leicester’, That Soueraine Light: Essays in Honor of Edmund Spenser, 1552–1952, eds W.R. Mueller and D.C. Allen (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1952), 11–22; Mounts, ‘Spenser and the Earl of Essex’, RenP (1958–60), 12–19; D.L. Miller, ‘Spenser’s Vocation, Spenser’s Career’, ELH 50 (1983), 197–231; H.R. Woudhuysen, ‘Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of ’, SE; G. Braden, ‘Complaints: Virgil’s Gnat’, SE. 166 Prothalamion, 5–10, 135–42, laments the proud who neglect poets. Cf. Fowler, ‘Spenser’s Prothalamion’, Conceitful Thought, 79–85; P. Cheney, ‘The Old Poet Presents Himself: Prothalamion as a Defense of Spenser’s Career’, SSt 8 (1990), 211–38; A.L. Prescott, ‘Spenser’s Shorter Poems’, Cambridge Companion to Spenser (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 143–61. 167 See Gregerson’s probing account of Essex’s 1595 Accession Day device, in Reformation of the Subject, 80–110. On Essex’s career as courtier, general, scholar, politician, see P.J. Hammer, ‘Devereux, Robert, Second Earl of Essex’, DNB (Oxford University Press, 2004), 15, 945–60; Hammer, The Polarization of Elizabethan Politics, n. 109 above; G.B. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (New York: Henry Holt, 1937), chs 6–11; R. Lacey, Robert, Earl of Essex: An Elizabethan Icarus (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); R.C.

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McCoy, ‘“A Dangerous Image”: the Earl of Essex and Elizabethan Chivalry’, JMRS 13 (1983), 313–29. 168 On the complexity of Shakespeare’s allusions to Essex, see E.M. Albright, ‘The Folio Version of Henry V in Relation to Shakespeare’s Times’, PMLA 43 (1928), 722–56; Troilus and Cressida, A New Variorum, ed. H.N. Hillebrand (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953), 375–82; A. Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Duke University Press, 1966), 87–99; R.S. Ide, Possessed with Greatness: The Heroic Tragedies of Chapman and Shakespeare (University of North Carolina Press, 1980), xiv, 3–4, 6, 16–18, 31–3, 46–9, 71–5, 98–9, 129, 132, 161, 198–201; P. Erickson, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (University of California Press, 1991), 26–8, 74–91; Gregerson, Reformation of the Subject, 80–110; Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, 11, 27–31, 71–92. 169 Rebhorn, ‘The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar’; J. Kahan, ‘Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the Anticipation of 1603’, Cithara 44 (2004), 3–21. 170 J.D. Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1932), 79–87, 92–107; E.S. Le Comte, ‘The Ending of Hamlet as a Farewell to Essex’, ELH 17 (1950), 87–114; K.S. Coddin, ‘“Such Strange Desygns”: Madness, Subjectivity, and Treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan Culture’, RenD ns 20 (1989), 51–75; E.S. Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (University of California Press, 1995), 106–66; J. Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 43–57, 85–106, 173–87, 253–333. 171 See n. 113 above. 172 See A. Hume, ‘Love’s Martyr, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, and the Aftermath of the Essex Rebellion’, RES ns 40 (1989), 48–71; A. Tipton, ‘The Transformation of the Earl of Essex: Post-Execution Ballads and “The Phoenix and the Turtle”’, SP 99 (2002), 57–80. 173 Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Christian Premises (Indiana University Press, 1969), 204–66, esp. 220–7. 174 ‘The Tragedy of Shakespeare’s Brutus’, ELH 22 (1955), 1–15, esp. 15. 175 Le Comte, ‘The Ending of Hamlet as a Farewell to Essex’; B. Langston, ‘Essex and the Art of Dying’, HLQ 2 (1950), 109–29.

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Humoral (versus providential) psychology in Spenser’s Faerie Queene A paean to Paster (with quibbles) Masterful studies of humour-based emotions in the Renaissance by Gail Kern Paster, Michael Schoenfeldt, and Zirka Filipczak1 have surpassed earlier views of Shakespearean humours – Lily Campbell’s argument for each tragedy’s ruling passion, John Draper’s naming of each character’s temperament.2 Of special interest is Paster’s work: passions in English Renaissance drama closely relate to bodily elements and humoral fluids, though some characters boast a ‘humour’ just to gain social status. I am deeply indebted to Paster, but seek to widen her materialist focus into a more holistic model of Renaissance psychology, one closer to Shakespeare’s and Spenser’s views of human nature, in which the humoral impulses interact with the rational soul and with supernatural powers that guide or countermand bodily causes. In templar visions Spenser emblematically educates reason while invoking providential aid to control unruly humours; and Shakespeare’s plays manage passion with complex rational strategies – restraining it, goading it to fatal extremes, or ‘performing’ it for admirable or evil ends. Reason may thus exploit or subvert humoral urges, and supernatural powers affect them to a still greater degree.3 Protagonists in Spenser’s epic and Shakespeare’s late plays, when misled by demonic slanders, rely on modes of grace to resolve unruly passions, either by fully educating reason, by salvific aid from Christlike or semi-divine figures, by sacramental restoration, or by Prospero’s providential ‘Art’. Adding this moral and theological perspective to Paster’s model of human nature is crucial for interpreting humoral-passional activity in Spenser’s allegory. Likewise, in Shakespeare’s late plays reason is increasingly empowered by multilevel ‘spirit’ to manage and transform bodily-humoral impulses. Though Paster notes the use of reason in Petruchio’s artful ruses and in Jonson’s commoners claiming a ‘humour’ for social status, she treats these ploys not as rational strategies but as exfoliants of ruling humors – even, in her recent work, as absorbed by elemental landscape, authorizing materiality to overgo both reason and spirit. In ‘Nervous Tension’ she occludes the complex history of ‘spirit’, focusing on Bacon’s materialist and mechanistic account of bodily spirits, ignoring Spenser’s emphasis of supernatural spirits and Shakespeare’s multilevel puns on ‘spirit’ to evoke both bodily fluids (humours,

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bodily spirits, semen) and supernatural agents (soul, when free of bodily limitations; fairies, ghosts, witches, angels; Olympian theophanies, conscience, and soul as an imago Dei). In materializing psychology, viewing the elemental body and world as dominant cause, Paster can claim allies from all eras – ancient, medieval, early modern, modern – not only Aristotle, but his medieval and Renaissance adherents, and in modern times the formidable influence of Freud, who insists that ‘the ego is a bodily ego’. But Paster’s assessment of early modern psychology oversimplifies: the biggest source of historical otherness … in the bodies represented in Shakespearean comedy lies in the fact that, in the humoral interaction of the four qualities, the early moderns accounted for a person’s thoughts and deeds in a way that did not distinguish, as we tend to do, between the psychological and the physiological. [emphasis added]

Alas, early moderns had no such unanimity regarding the body–soul relation: Spenser and Shakespeare were poles apart – Christian-Platonist Spenser privileging soul and sharply distinguishing its acts from those of body, while Shakespeare is closer to the body primacy and body–soul collusion of Paster’s model. Nor can moderns claim unanimity in differentiating body from soul, as is evident in the contrary tribes of Freud and Jung, and the diversity of current psychoanalysis. Nor can psychology be clarified in declensions of ‘modernism’. (In this scheme, ancient and medieval occur before psychology properly begins. Psyche’s true reality, based for modernists in sensate and secular phenomena, is glimpsed in early modernism, ripens via world wars and dazzling technology into modernism, until postmodernism brings cultural gaming and the arrogance of the Now to its silly fulfillment.) Thus Shakespeare is mostly early modern; his contemporary Spenser, late ancient. For the Renaissance view of the embodied soul Paster cites Katherine Park on ‘organic psychology’: ‘the physical model underlying ancient and early modern psychology was … a simple hydraulic one, based on a clear localization of psychological function by organ or system of organs’.4 Paster concludes that ‘ancient and early modern psychology’ coalesced soul and body (‘the psychological and the physiological’) until Descartes and Locke established the mind–body division with a ‘possessive view of the bodily self ’. This view of an ancient-to-early-modern identity of body and soul extraordinarily oversimplifies both the history of psychology and the differing views of human nature implicit in Spenser’s, Shakespeare’s, and Jonson’s characters. Park’s account of the ‘organic psychology’ deriving from Aristotle (with many accretions) is in fact quite different from Paster’s, for Park begins by distinguishing these lower, bodily operations from the soul’s ‘agent intellect’, which for Aristotle was the means of taming bodily passions and (perhaps) of attaining immortality.5 Paster occludes this power. In John Selden’s Titles of Honor (1614), sig. b4, Paster finds further evidence of the early modern collusion of body and mind: ‘the Minds inclination follows the Bodies Temperature’.6 But Selden’s maxim concerns only the titled elite (a lordly mind has a lordly temperature). Spenser, though bearing a similar aristocratic

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bias, seeks in his epic to define all four tempers and their flaws. Instead of identifying humoral body and rational soul, he sharply distinguishes them, making reason, as exalted partner, prove itself differently in each legend. Each of Spenser’s six legends is based on a descending ontological setting for psyche (presumably intending to re-ascend in the final six). In each legend, reason’s heroic effort to rule soma – always failing but rescued by spirit-powers – is the central allegory of character-development and plot-design. To resolve humoral excess the hero is tutored by classical and Christian wisdom, but is ultimately dependent on divine aid, often while unconscious.7 Spenser’s focus on intellectual and theological powers to achieve a decisive (but temporary) conquest of ever-unruly humoral passions differs radically from Shakespeare’s more sympathetic view of body-based passions and (in early plays) his view of minimal rational control and minimal providential aid. A further difference in the two poets’ psychologies lies in the epistemological source of truth: Spenser’s reform of unruly passion draws from the doctrinal authority of written classics, especially the theological anthropology that views humankind as a likeness of God, while Shakespeare’s portrait of passion springs from sensory-emotional experience as directly observed, which makes his work, far more than Spenser’s, amenable to Paster’s materialist and fluid model. But despite Shakespeare’s devotion to the body, its passions, and the flux of sensory experience, he too increasingly enlists conscientious reason in this struggle, though unlike Spenser he shows it learning to endure bodily flux – riding unruly humours (like Hal) to master them, or (like Lear) suffering them fully to ‘see feelingly’ and gain ‘ripeness’, or (like Cleopatra) constantly refashioning a humoral, passional, intellectual self to cope with political and relational change. My next section, ‘Humoral Psychology in Shakespeare’s Henriad’, originally published 1996, differs significantly from Paster’s work, especially regarding the degree of material determinism that drives her theoretical model. Here are some of Paster’s most important findings: 1. Galenism centrally values heat, gendering it as male (see ‘The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being: Women’s Imperfection and the Humoral Economy’; and three of the four chapters in Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage). Paster’s analysis of heat stresses male pathology, the dry heat of abusive choler (chapters 1 and 4, ‘Roasted in Wrath and Fire’ and ‘Belching Quarrels’).8 This scholarship is superb. But aside from a marvellous essay on women’s romantically gaining (then losing) ‘heat’, Paster neglects the role of sanguinity’s tempered heat in Shakespeare’s sanest protagonists, thus missing the crucial implications of sanguinity’s superiority to choler. As Magnifico Giuliano says in The Courtier, in itself warmth is more perfect than cold; but this is not therefore the case with things that are mixed and composite, since if it were so, the warmer any particular substance was the more perfect it would be, whereas in fact temperate bodies are the most perfect.9

Ideal sanguinity, nurtured by friendly romance, weds male heat and female moisture into a harmony of interchangeable powers to cope with conflict: Romeo and

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Juliet (amid feuding duels), Orlando and Rosalind (in exile), Hal and Falstaff (amid civil war and humour-excess in all four protagonists), Othello and Desdemona (until Iago’s slander), Antony and Cleopatra (amid continual crises), and ‘perfect’ Hamlet (until evils draw him to suicidal melancholy, choleric fury, phlegmatic lethargy; and Ophelia to complexly humoured madness). Romantic communion and cross-dressing inspire a gender exchange that verges on mutual androgyny!10 2. Also incisive is Paster’s account of commoners claiming the humour of choleric heat to gain social privilege. A humoral irony (not noted) is that the most boastful males (Spenser’s Braggadochio, Jonson’s Captain Bobadil, Shakespeare’s Corporal Nym) are closet phlegmatics. In Bottom’s wish to enact all humoral beings (‘the lion too!’) Paster finds the wondrous irony of Titania bestowing lordly immortality by purging his ‘mortal grossness’ with highly laxative fruits. My only quibble with this delicious aperçu is the neglected complexity of ‘that thou shalt like an airy spirit go’. Paster reduces ‘spirit’ to the Stoics’ material pneumatology, ignoring higher meanings that Shakespeare punningly exploits. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the Titania–Bottom affair implies many modes of ‘spirit’, which in The Tempest flowers etherially by demoting Bottom to Caliban and refining Puck to Ariel. More than Spenser or Jonson, Shakespeare complicates the lure to privileged heat – a theme simplified in early plays (notably the duping of Sly in Shrew) but gathering complexity as Shakespeare himself gains gentility: the cruel goadings of Malvolio, Sir Andrew, Viola-Cesario, and Sebastian in Twelfth Night; the poignant raising of Helena in All’s Well. 3. Equally central is blood, showing the supremacy of sanguinity’s moistened heat. Of ‘laudable blood’ Paster notes its biased connection with privileged, self-determining warriors and its denial to women for their corrupt and uncontrollable menses.11 The social prowess of blood is discussed in Shakespeare’s Theories of Blood, Character, and Class. Its most positive spiritual connotations are explained by Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood, and Bynum, Wonderful Blood, tracing the symbolic importance of Christ’s blood in late medieval art, literature, and religious life.12 4. A groundbreaking insight is Paster’s humoral account of Shakespearean women (Rosalind and Desdemona – and we can add Portia, Helena, Imogen, Marina, Perdita, Hermione, Paulina, Miranda) who gain ‘heat’ and confidence by bonding with or cross-dressing as men, but the women’s bodily-psychic flowering incites men to suppress their budding power – Petruchio’s ruses to cool Katherine’s frustrated choler; Iago’s demonic slander to quell Desdemona’s romantic heat; Leontes’ vicious indicting of Hermione to punish her self-assertive marital heat.13 But Paster does not explain how in Shakespeare’s mature plays the women’s increasingly dignified responses to such pressures show them surmounting the unbearably cold stereotype. If Petruchio tames Katherine, it is also true that Juliet tames Romeo, Rosalind tames Orlando, Cleopatra tames Antony, Helena nearly tames Bertrand. Shakespeare’s clever tamings often invert the genders, showing more than a few of his women as ‘fire and air’. These gender-inverted tamings occur in more mature plays and do not rely primarily on Galenic techniques.

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5. Corresponding humouring of animals. This charming and deeply suggestive account of Shakespeare’s animal symbolism as substantiating humoral influence adds complexity to Shakespeare’s physical-psychological scheme. Yet viewing the animal–human linkage as deterministic can diminish the rational-imaginative-performative power of major characters like Falstaff, Rosalind, Hamlet, and Cleopatra, who, in playfully comparing themselves and others to a smorgasbord of beastly humours and passions, vibrantly transcend humoral determinacy. 6. Paster exposes many absurdities of Renaissance humoralism, notably in patriarchal-misogynist gendering of body functions. Fiery choler was admired as a self-assertive male temper; and melancholy, despite lacking heat and moisture through ageing or sorrow, was admired as a male humour of sharp intelligence. In contrast, women were scorned as watery phlegmatics, ‘leaky vessels’ who did not control bodily fluids or loose desires, whose sleepy minds defied educative training.14 Such gender bias pervades Spenser’s epic and especially Shakespeare’s early plays, where women’s contribution to holistic sanguinity is often reduced to naive frivolity. As Sheila Cavanagh shows, many women in The Faerie Queene are vampirish succubi (Duessa, Acrasia, Argante, Venus, Radigund) or fearful flyers from male aggression (Una, Florimell, Amoret, Priscilla, Serena), and the few who boldly take arms (Belphoebe, Diana, Britomart) rarely support weaker women, though Britomart moves in that direction.15 Female cohorts for the Henriad’s protagonists (Hotspur’s Kate, Falstaff ’s Doll and Hostess, Henry V’s Princess Katherine) are mocked and marginalized. Only in Spenser’s handful of exalted women and in the magisterial women of Shakespeare’s mature plays is this reductive gendering significantly revised. Mixed with her insights are shortcomings in Paster’s theorizing about humoralism. 1. Lack of a holistic view. First, in no work does Paster observe an interplay of all humours. Thus she does not fully examine conflicts between tempers: Hotspur’s hot–dry choler contemning Falstaff ’s cold–wet phlegmatism, Henry IV’s cold–dry melancholy chiding Hal’s hot–wet sanguinity. Nor does she explore alliances or antagonisms caused by a shared quality – the deadly combustion of dry tempers, choler and melancholia (Hotspur and Henry IV), with no moisture to allay the bile; the merriment of moist tempers, sanguine and phlegmatic (Hal and Falstaff), leading to indulgent frivolity. Paster ignores phlegmatism’s positive aspects, its convivial nurture of sanguinity (see Lemnius’ Touchstone of Complexions and Elyot’s Castel of Helth).16 Of the sets of humour-emblems shown by Paster, two portray phlegmatism negatively (stressing sleepiness), but in others a man and woman dance to music (stressing delightful indulgence). Second, Paster emphasizes the humours’ obsessive body-determined fixity, not their cyclic and intentional changes. Only in the taming of Katherine does she explain the altering of a temper, mainly by forceful Galenic cures; but Paster omits Katherine’s heated interplay with other tempers, notably with Bianca’s feigned phlegmatism, with the effete phlegmatism of faint-hearted, dim-witted suitors, and with Petruchio’s conditional offer of mutual-sanguinity. Above all, Paster minimizes reason’s role in managing such humourings: Petruchio gains

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Katherine’s accord not just by choleric dominance but by mixing his commands with ‘gentler’ arts: voicing interest in her as a woman of strong mind and will, arranging mutual discomforts to allay the choler of them both, showing her in the sun–moon scene the social reality (and absurdity) of patriarchal entrenchment, and inviting her to perform sanguine marital harmony, with or without an audience. If this optimistic reading is valid, then instead of quenching Katherine’s mind and will, Petruchio invites her to a partnership in the controlled heat of theatrical power. Inasmuch as she realizes that power, her final performance achieves sanguinity and potential ascendancy over Petruchio. Third, Paster does not explore holistic humoralism in Shakespeare’s portraits of a regal protagonist who shows ‘all humours’: Hal’s empathetic theatrical mastery, Rosalind’s nearly universal role-playing, Hamlet’s range of ‘mad’ passional evasions and discourse with all social classes, Lear’s similar range in passions of genuine madness, Cleopatra’s mastery of all-passions (‘I am fire and air’), Prospero’s priestly cycle of impassioned stagings. A cruel claim on the kingly ‘be-all’ is made by Richard III and Macbeth, not empathetically but ruthlessly annihilating all bonds, making each tyrant finally ‘nothing’. Comic parody of the kingly ‘allhumours’ is wittily staged by Falstaff (as Hal’s shadow) and with charming inanity by Bottom’s burlesque of all passional being, human and animal. 2. Neglect of humoralism’s varied forms in Renaissance poetry. Paster homogenizes the humours of Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare into a single physico-psychology, which is far from true. First, Jonsonian psychology is laughably materialist, a focal point of his satire. He does not portray the emotive quadrants of human nature in normative form but instead (as Paster deftly shows)17 satirizes human pride in whimsical pseudo-humors that farcically claim prestige. Jonson’s humour-characters are purposely shallow, with little self-awareness and moral depth. With the partial exception of his first humour comedy, he does not portray the four tempers as a holistic psychology in which the dynamics of character and plot comprehensively show humoralism’s contrarious dynamics. Second, Spenser’s humour-figures also have limited awareness, but they contribute to a grand theological epic in which moral failure is not witty satire but a canvassing of Original Sin. Spenser’s encyclopaedic poem depicts humours in a thematically holistic psychology oriented to Calvinist doctrine and Platonic form. His allegorical humours are analytical fragments, lacking full human identity, mirroring perverse excesses of human nature. Guyon finally controls unruly humoral passions only by reforming his rational soul, but mainly by providential aid: an angel brings a Palmer (Christian prudence) to assist; Christlike Arthur slays unruly forward–froward passions with his temperate soul as model; in Alma’s orderly house Guyon sees the natural body ruled by right reason; Arthur slays Maleger, whose total melancholy, a sin-ridden death-in-life, subsumes other melancholics (Phantastes’ imaginings, Mammon’s hoardings). Only then can Guyon rase Acrasia’s bower with its idolatrous pretence of sanguinity. Paster occludes this entire allegory. In ‘Becoming the Landscape’ (see n. 1 above) she views Amavia’s watery-absorption and Pyrochles’ fiery-absorption in nature apart from rational and providential powers, explicitly dismissing the role of Alma’s

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Castle, the legend’s ‘allegorical center’, with its intricate Platonic-AristotelianChristian architecture. Third, Shakespeare’s humoral psychology is a story of remarkable growth. The four career-periods noted by Dowden show four distinct modes of humoralism, which finally subsume those of Jonson and Spenser. Early plays (farcical comedies, vengeful histories and tragedies) exploit uncontrolled humoral impulses in Ovidian or Marlovian erotic sensationalism. About 1597 a more mature psychology appears in Merchant of Venice and Henriad, subsuming Jonson’s satire in a deeper account of social difference, and subsuming Spenser’s promotion of right reasoning by creating humour-protagonists with a rational/theatrical agency. In major tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra) protagonists experience a daunting array of humoral passions that challenge their moral vision and arouse their rhetoric. In the romances (notably Winter’s Tale and Tempest) humoral psychology is wondrously complex, with body-based envy in extremis but managed by rational and providential ‘magic’, taming the multilevel power of ‘spirit’ to invite divinity’s sacramental presence in nature (see pp. 310–21 below). 3. Paster’s materialism marginalizes or occludes supernatural agencies (conscience, demonism, providence) that provoke or resolve humoral excesses. In stressing bodily engendering of passions in elemental tropes of cold, hot, wet, and dry, she de-emphasizes their management by reason and will, either by magisterial heroes (Petruchio, Oberon, Portia, Hal, Hamlet, Rosalind, Helena, Cleopatra, Paulina, Hermione, Prospero) or by demonic vices (Aaron, Claudius, Iago, Edmund-Goneril-Regan-Cornwall, Macbeths, witches, Iachimo, Leontes, Antonio). Paster does not explore the implications of characters performing passion, demonically or beneficently. Shakespeare’s characters, in Bloom’s apt phrase, ‘invent the human’. Though driven by humours of love, revenge, and ambition, they complexly manage such urges. The choler of Katherine and Petruchio is increasingly controlled by theatrical awareness and mastery. More than any other Shakespearean figure, royal Lear endures a harrowing of ‘all humours’: his bondage to a self-created ‘wheel of fire’ does not confirm a Tragedy of Wrath (as Campbell argued) but a madly spinning cycle of all passions – commanding, hating, pleading, whimpering – and finally, loving. His exorbitant reactions to Goneril’s scorn, to Tom’s suffering, and to Cordelia’s love form a progressive series of epiphanal centres for the play’s three passional cycles. These transformative moments, notably the final scenes with Cordelia, then with her body, cannot be fully explained in humoral terms (see pp. 258–68 below). Shakespeare’s ­sophisticated protagonists vacillate between Galenic subjection to experiential flux and ironic detachment from it. Their finest passions have, moreover, a ­spiritual dimension. The main limitation of Paster’s humoralism is its insistent materialism, occluding supernatural power in the human compound, so that she misses Shakespeare’s radically changing view of these elements. After his heavy use of ‘soul’ in Hamlet and Othello (forty intensely self-conscious uses in each play), why does the word nearly disappear in the darkness of King Lear? The entirety of Hamlet is an ardent Montaignian questioning of human nature – questioning whether Galenic bodyimpulses can reduce an individual or nation to a drunken stereotype (Act  1), but

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equally questioning the Godlike self-control sought by Neoplatonists and Christian mystics (Act 2). If Galenic impulse dominates humankind, why does not Hamlet (like Pyrrhus and Laertes, or Spenser’s thematically conceived Pyrochles) seek rapid revenge? Why the endless thoughtful delay, struggling against impulse? Hamlet also complicates humoralism by enacting so many passions, some halfmad, yet each more convincingly performed than by the visiting players. Like Prince Hal, Hamlet interacts with all social castes, ‘all humours’. His madcap protean humoralism (like his prototype Amleth) partly seeks to evade entrapment, but his metatheatrical acting-directing also shows mastery of all humourspassions-tempers, affirming the power of soul. Some critics attribute Hamlet’s diversity to the reputed restlessness of melancholy; they cite the famous query in pseudo-Aristotle’s Problemata of how this bodily depleted temper can house brave and brilliant sensibilities.18 That question highlights the paradox of a talented soul enacting any humour, any gender, caste, age, temper, even (like Edgar in his ‘humour of Poor Tom’) demonic insanity. The humours’ complexity culminates in a spiritual paradox: Filipczak’s analysis of ‘hot dry men’ and ‘cold wet women’ in Western art ends with images of Christ and the saints that invert humoral-ele­­ mental conventions, showing the soul’s limitless empowerment if moved by God. 4. Nor is Paster holistic in pedagogic method, for rarely does she contextualise humoralism in the full scope of a plot’s evolving relationships. Only in the wonderfully detailed study of Katherine’s taming and of Jonson’s belching quarrellers does Paster trace humour-figures’ evolution through an entire play. Usually she modestly (and brilliantly) explains the humoral implications of a brief speech: Falstaff ’s self-mirroring in melancholy creatures, Desdemona’s lament for Othello’s ‘puddled spirit’, the choleric tropings of Pyrrhus in Hamlet. Comparing The Faerie Queene’s fiery Pyrochles, Paster treats him apart from Spenser’s moral allegory, neglecting his differing combats with Guyon and Arthur to resolve Original Sin (the opening ‘ymage of mortalitee’, the final combat with Maleger), showing providential aid (angel, Palmer, Arthur), not Hippocratic-Galenic cure, to be Spenser’s solution for humoral excess, to which Guyon adds only suppression of sensory allurement. Paster, however, views Spenser’s Pyrochles no differently from the cholerics of Shakespeare and Jonson. 5. In focusing on humoral absurdities (always ripe for harvest)19 Paster neglects humoralism’s positive aspects. She emphasizes abusive choler and reductive phlegmatism, but ignores humoralism’s holistic dynamic, drawn from a long tradition of quartering human nature into intersecting pairs of contraries, each quarter bearing a wealth of suggestive tropes (elemental, humoral, passional, intellectual, spiritual), which attain full scope in relation to rational, wilful, and supernatural power. Despite travesties of women’s physico-psychology, aligning them with a severely diminished temper, Spenser and Shakespeare (shadowed by Elizabeth I’s charismatic brilliance) also depict powerful females, some crossdressed or armed, who begin to reconfigure gender: Britomart matches men in physical skill, courage, and thought (see pp. 204–20 below); Beatrice and Hermione shame their counterparts in wit and courage; Portia, Rosalind and Cleopatra tame them with wit and theatricality.

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6. By marginalizing the rational and spiritual dimensions of Renaissance psychology, Paster neglects Shakespeare’s ironic reversals of humoralism, in clowns (Juliet’s nurse, Bottom, Dogberry, Mistress Quickly) and sophisticates (Falstaff, Hamlet, Cleopatra). No easy generalizations can be made for Shakespeare’s humoured characters; they are not rigidly limited by Galenic or other conventions, which simply provide more fields for his irony. Falstaff ’s phlegmatism renders his lively repartee surprising and delightful; and though Draper scorns and exaggerates Cleopatra’s phlegmatism, her watery idleness without Antony (pp. 40-3), Draper ignores the imperious bearing, charismatic intellect, and transcendent wit that lift her (and Shakespeare’s other mature female characters) far above the absurd humoral travesty. Despite widespread reductive humouring by gender and caste from Antiquity to the Renaissance, this dynamic scheme – evolved from Empedocles, Hippocrates, and Galen, but spiritualized by medieval allegorists, and elaborated by poets into four complex passional temperaments – richly informs Spenser’s allegorical epic and its rival epic, Shakespeare’s Henriad. This fourfold psychic division does not end in the Renaissance, for a similar scheme informs Blake’s zoas and Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov brothers (each group of four having its female counterparts). The scheme informs the four protagonists of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and those of Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City and the four notebooks of her Golden Notebook. The great poets’ perennial quartering of the psyche invites further study as an archetypal pattern of human nature, not simply as fluid-based impulses but as psychic types mystically apprehended as an imago Dei, as witnessed by Ezekiel and the writer of Revelation.20 The elaborate humoralism of The Faerie Queene, Book 2 In 1957 Harry Berger, Jr observed that Guyon’s quest for Temperance involves managing the four humoral tempers, a reading questioned by Fowler but approved and elaborated by Frye, Carscallen, Nohrnberg, Webster and Somaki.21 In the Legend of Temperance Spenser, more suggestively than any previous poet, anatomizes human motivity as four humoral tempers, each associated with an element and a passion,22 and each appearing as a perverse excess that Guyon (with Prince Arthur’s aid) resolves. Pyrochles is uncontrollably choleric (‘round about him threw forth sparkling fire, That seemd him to enflame on euery side’, 2.5.2). His brother, indulgent, drowsy Cymochles, is his phlegmatic contrary, as Atin’s scorn implies: ‘Vp, vp, thou womanish weake knight, / That here in Ladies lap entombed art’ (2.5.36). Sad melancholy appears in three males: earthy Mammon with his ‘selfe-consuming Care’ (2.7.25), Phantastes with his Saturnian ‘swarth complexion’ (2.9.52), and most complexly, Maleger with his earth-bound mortality. The opposite perversion, of sanguinity, appears in Phaedria’s superficial frivolity and conclusively in Acrasia’s paralysing sensuality.23A later section will argue (pp.  95–113) that Shakespeare’s answering epic, the Henriad, especially 1 Henry IV, presents an even more comprehensive, consistent, and in-depth depiction of four great characters who exemplify the four humors, four passions, and four elements. Comparing the humoralism of these two great poets is highly instructive.

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According to Bartholomaeus’s twelfth-century compendium (trans. S. Bateman, 1582) and the equally influential School of Salernum (trans. Harington, 1585) – as well as Elyot’s The Castel of Helthe (1539), Lemnius’s The Touchstone of Complexions (1565), Primaudaye’s The French Academie (1580, 1615), Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601), Coeffeteau’s A Table of Humane Passions (1621), and Walkington’s The Optick Glasse of Humors (1631) – the humoral tempers correspond with other quarterings of Nature (Table 1). Table 1 The four temperaments Temperament

Element

Qualities

Sanguine Air heat + moisture Choleric Fire heat, no moisture Phlegmatic Water moisture, no heat Melancholy Earth no heat, no moisture

Passion

Perverse Excess

Joy Hope + Anger Fear + Desire Sorrow

frivolous lust Jupiter ambition/cruel rage Sun + Mars cowardly sloth/gluttony Moon + Venus suicidal despair Saturn

Planet

The humours, however, are not discretely separate but are cyclic and interactive.24 The scheme’s dynamics are clearest when seen as a global whole, divided into quadrants by intersecting polarities (Figure 1). SANGUINE (AIR) (plenitude of heat & moisture) JOY Jupiter CHOLERIC (FIRE) (heat, no moisture) HOPE, ANGER Sun, Mars

PHLEGMATIC (WATER) (no heat, moisture) FEAR, DESIRE Moon, Venus MELANCHOLY (EARTH) (vacuity of heat & moisture) SORROW Saturn Figure 1 The temperaments as intersecting polarities (1)

The scheme synthesizes Empedocles’ warring elements, Hippocrates’ complementary humours, and Aristotle’s contrariety principle. Sanguinity’s airy joy opposes Melancholy’s earthy sorrow (in a vertical polarity of higher and lower substance); Choler’s fiery hope and anger oppose Phlegm’s watery fear and desire (in a horizontal polarity of nobler and less noble change). Each horizontal member is a hybrid passion with one present and one absent quality, and with two planetary influences. Phlegmatism’s desire relates to its moisture (under Venus), its fear to lack of inspiriting heat (under the Moon). Choler’s hope relates to its heat (under the Sun), its anger to lack of moderating moisture (under Mars).25

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Carscallen, Kaske, Fowler, and Nohrnberg have analysed Spenser’s humourfigures as violating Platonic and Aristotelian form, and also violating the imago Dei – as implied in the “image of mortalitee” (Mortdant-head, Amavia-heart, Ruddymane-hands), a corruption consummated in the parallel image of human sin as ‘the body of this death’ (Maleger-head, hags-heart, troops-hands).26 As Christian Platonist, Spenser devalues humour-based passions for being immersed in body. Instead of empathetically exploring the humours from inside experience (as does Shakespeare), Spenser intellectually stresses the contrariety principle of Book 2’s ‘forward–froward’ tropings, which focus on the horizontal polarity of choler and phlegm: Sansloy-Perissa’s forward lust and Huddibras-Elissa’s froward disdain, Pyrochles’ aggression and Cymochles’ recession, Tantalus’ reaching and Pilate’s withdrawal, Maleger’s Impatience and Impotence. The polarity informs each level of Alma’s House (see below, pp. 122–30 and 192–200). Guyon and the Palmer must resist forward–froward temptations like Scylla and Charybdis, and the bower’s forward excesses end in slothful enervation for knights like Verdant and bestial Gryll. The other two humours, sanguine merriment and melancholy care, form a complementary ‘vertical polarity’ that fully tests the hero at the legend’s midpoint and end. They include much rational craft, triple temptings baited with money and beauty, couched in Gospel plagiarism. Phaedria uses Jesus’ analogue of carefree lilies to draw Guyon into her aimless skiff. Her mirth (cantos 5-6), prepares for Acrasia’s full-scale parody of sanguinity (canto 12). Contrasting their jollity is the humour of sad care: Mammon and Maleger have melancholy’s self-consuming mind and wasted body. Mammon’s anxious hoarding of wealth starkly contrasts lovely Phaedria’s carefree flitting on Idle Lake, but they are flip sides of a coin. Mammon’s Philotime and Proserpine falsely promise access to Phaedria’s worldly pleasures; Phaedria’s frenetic lurings rival Mammon’s obsessive labour. These perversions of melancholy and sanguinity stress the aimless extremes of the unredeemed natural body: Maleger’s mordant melancholic vacuity, legacy of Original Sin with its twelvefold submission to sensuality, and Acrasia’s soul-draining parody of sanguine joy. Though one tropes on war and the other on love, they are again flip sides of a coin: spiritual death-in-life by intemperate managing of the natural body’s humoral passions. That Book 2 concerns the realm of nature is evident in elemental and circumstantial contexts that drive each humour: Pyrochles abetted by the fiery frenzies of Atin-Occasion-Furor, Cymochles the watery lures on Idle Lake, Mammon the earthy hoarding of money, Phaedria the restless winds on Idle Lake. In ‘Guyon’s Faint and the Elizabethan Soteriological Debate: Double Predestination in The Faerie Queene, book 2, canto 8’,27 Samuel R. Kessler explains the Calvinist redemptive theology implicit in Arthur’s slaying of Pyrochles and Cymochles, which providentially resolves humoral excesses. Though Temperance focuses on the natural body, it too is tested by spiritual foes and has a spiritual end. 1. Demonic corruption of humours. Guyon’s choler arises not from natural, materialist causes but from demonic slander, pitting his practical reason against Redcrosse’s superior reason. Guyon, not Redcrosse, halts the conflict, using infe-

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rior reason to see the red cross that seeks saintly bliss by faith in Christ’s Passion. In each quest the protagonist is deflected by demonic forces that slander truth with false doubles,28 and is aided by a prudential guide, as urged by Richard of St Victor in Benjamin Major,29 before ultimately being redeemed by a Christlike intervenor. 2. The ‘image of mortalitee’ (2.1.34–61), incurred by drinking from a fountain, emblematizes the humoral corruption of Original Sin: idle sensual phlegmatic pleasures evoke an impure, materialist sanguinity that causes Mortdant and Amavia’s deaths, and makes Ruddymane’s hands uncleanable, arousing deep melancholy in Guyon and the Palmer, and Guyon’s choleric vow of vengeance (stanzas 34–61). They commiserate over this material death that (unlike the ‘deaths’ experienced by Redcrosse and Una in Book 1) is not resolved by a comprehensive allegory of resurrection through grace.30 Guyon can avenge (but not unbind) this mortal condition by inhibiting Acrasia’s lures to sensual pleasure. In thus enacting the negative underbelly of Redcrosse’s quest, Guyon does not attain blissful union with loving Truth (Una, as the invisible church, mirroring Christ’s Passion); he simply exacts revenge on Acrasia’s extreme sensuality: Amavia’s sympathy-suicide re-enacts the spiritual ‘deaths’ of Una, but the mortality from bloodguilt incurred mainly by her husband Mortdant focuses on the natural body, which is not revived by Charissa’s nurture, nor resurrected by the sacramental powers of well and tree. 3. Medina and the humours. Guyon’s bringing the bloodied child to be taught by Medina to moderate his passions (2.2.1–12, 2.3.1–3) shows temperance as a quest of ratio, subordinate but parallel to holiness’s high quest to activate the mens. Such moderation, drawing on Classical fiction and philosophy, offers only partial resolution, an equivocal balancing of humoral flux until paying for sin (one’s own and one’s parents’) with mortality. In 2.2.12–38 Medina haplessly tries to temper Perissa and Sansloy’s lustful forwardness, Huddibras and Elissa’s snobbish frowardness.31 4. Humoral developments beyond Medina’s control (cantos 4–8) – first, fiery choler (intensified by furor, discord, and melancholy occasion).32 Macho-male choler claims primacy in challenging Temperance. The depravity of Phedon’s anger shows in his rising wilfulness (impulsively stabbing Claribell, craftily poisoning Philemon, wildly chasing the maid), making us wonder at Guyon and the Palmer’s sympathy.33 Pyrochles (‘fire-disturbance’) epitomizes perverse choler, incited by his squire Atin (‘discord’) and made incendiary by melancholy Occasion, so unnaturally extreme that plunging in a cold lake does not alter it. That the passions exceed Galenic bodily cures is first shown in Guyon’s ineffective pardoning of Pyrochles, who unchains Occasion and is mangled by Furor. These unruled passions will take full effect after Guyon’s proudly submitting to Mammon’s tempting, forgoing food and rest (life’s phlegmatic needs), causing Guyon’s faint. 5. Also beyond Medina are phlegmatic-sanguine lures to watery pleasure. After Atin rouses slothful Cymochles (‘wave-disturbance’) from Acrasia’s bower, he easily re-succumbs to Phaedria’s ‘immodest merth’ (27–51). Cymochles’ phlegmatism is, however, not innate but externally imposed by female allurement, for he is a great warrior,34 quickly wakened from post-coital slumber to resume a

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combative fury like his brother’s. Phlegmatism’s moisture (causing appetite) and coldness (causing sleep) play no part in Cymochles’ fight with Christlike Arthur. Cymochles’ threat is not idle drowning in sensual pleasure but mimicking his aggressive brother by despoiling Guyon’s body and grievously wounding Arthur.35 Like other Renaissance poets, Spenser prioritizes ‘male’ choler, marginalizing and neglecting ‘female’ phlegmatism by using the militancy trope for both brothers. 6. Mammon, whose melancholy shows in earth-bound avarice and careworn ugliness, triply tempts Guyon with false riches (28–39), false honour (40–50), false food and rest (51–66). He thus induces the worst bodily temper, its lack of heat and moisture causing envious care and lifeless vacuity, a perversion of nature curable only by a higher atonement. Mammon’s tempting enlists choler in the giant Disdain and in Philotime’s envious courtiers, and encourages phlegmatism in Proserpine’s gilded apples and chair (falsified food and rest). In proudly resisting these unnatural offers, forgoing real food and rest, Guyon faints, vulnerable to the forward–froward passions he earlier overcame, which Arthur now must resolve. 7. In slaying Pyrochles and Cymochles the Briton Arthur supersedes the Fairy Guyon. Archimago offers the pagans Arthur’s sword, but Arthur defeats them with Guyon’s sword, that is, with the power of ratio. Their refusal of Arthur’s generous offer of mercy, an extension of his ‘magnificence’, emphasizes the importance of reason and will in controlling passion, and the centrality of a Christlike redeemer.36 8. Alma’s House emblematically balances humoral, passional, and rational powers on each level of the natural body: Appetite is complemented by Diet in the belly, Praysdesire by Shamefastnes in the heart, Phantastes by Eumnestes in the brain – all three levels moderated by the middle sage of judgment. (On Alma’s iconic house, see pp. 122–30 and 192–200 below.) 9. Maleger’s full melancholic depletion (2.11.5–49) elaborates the ‘ymage of mortalitee’ (2.1.35–61). Among his troops he is rational ‘head’, Impatience and Impotence are a bifurcated passional ‘heart’, the five senses and seven deadly sins (a many-headed monster) are the sensate ‘hands’. This evil cause of the natural body’s mortality, with no Galenic cure, is resolved by Arthur’s Christian-Platonic removal of Maleger, ‘the bodie of this death’ (Rom. 6.6, 7.24, n. Hamilton) from the corrupt materialist earth that nurtures him. Arthur is thereby wounded on each level of his natural body – mental, emotional, sensate. 10. Acrasia’s bower concludes Book 2 by promoting sensual sanguinity as heavenly ‘bliss’. Again, no natural, Galenic cure can resolve her pretence. After Arthur’s conquest of Maleger, Guyon provides the complementary heroism of sensory self-abnegation by destroying the aimless pleasures of Acrasia’s false Eden. Though controlled sanguinity is the ideal temper,37 hedonist sensations do not bring true joy.38 In The Faerie Queene true sanguinity is inspired by idealized mirrors of Elizabeth (Gloriana, Una, Britomart) but is displaced by inauthentic pleasures of corrupt women (Duessa, Acrasia, Radigund). Though temperance is a function of lower reason, Richard of St Victor treats it as a culminating virtue in the Christian mystic’s quest for saintly perfection. Far more than the other five legends of

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The Faerie Queene, the quest for Temperance fully explores the humoral-passional tempers of the natural body, though a parallel dimension in the spiritual body is treated in the Legend of Holiness, where a still more comprehensive melancholy afflicts ‘sad’ Redcrosse in encounters with Sansjoy and Despair.39 Spiritualized humours in Spenser’s Legend of Holiness Humoral psychology informs not just Book 2, showing the natural body’s challenge to ratio, but the entire epic, for each legend challenges a descending power of the soul. The humoured passions are treated most comprehensively in Book 1, where demonic artificers pervert the humours to obstruct the mens in its quest for holiness, a spiritual allegory that subsumes all the ensuing legends. Each humoral excess in Book 2 has appeared in a fuller spiritual context in Book 1. (1) Redcrosse’s rage at Una (informing the fury of the Sans brothers, who figure the knight’s self-induced decline) is elaborated in Book 2’s natural realm by Phedon’s fury at Claribell (figured in the richly circumstantial sequence of Furor-OccasionAtin-Pyrochles). The triadic Sansboys show the decline of the spiritual body, while the jealousy-plot in Book 2 details the forces affecting the natural body: Occasion and Discord finally arouse Pyrochles’ total elemental surfeit. (2) The severe phlegmatism that paralyses Redcrosse and Fradubio serves a theological allegory that subsumes (but is wonderfully elaborated by) Book 2’s naturalistic phlegmatism that incapacitates Mortdant, Cymochles, Pilate, Verdant, and Gryll. (3) The spiritual melancholy of Sansjoy and Despair subsumes the natural melancholy of Book 2: Mammon, Phantastes, Maleger. (4) The holy bliss falsified by Duessa’s seductions, but finally gained by Redcrosse and Una, is naturalistically elaborated by Phaedria’s titillating lures and the vast sensual array of Acrasia’s bower and sea of temptings. The Legend of Holiness thus presents a comprehensive humoral allegory of the spiritual body, followed by the Legend of Temperance, which elaborates those temptings in the natural body. Choler, resulting from Redcrosse’s self-exalting defence of ‘honour’ on seeing a demon-parody of Una, drives him to desert the true Una, to battle Sansfoy and Sansjoy (as Satyrane futilely combats Sansloy) and fall prey to a giant of carnal arrogance. Though Contemplation teaches the errancy of such anger (‘blood can nought but sin’, 1.10.60), he encourages the knight’s on-going ‘warfare’. Yet for Redcrosse’s ultimate combat with the Dragon, the sacred muse must reform choler as a humbler ‘corage’:   O gently come into my feeble brest,    Come gently, but not with that mightie rage   Wherewith the martiall troupes thou doest infest,    And hartes of great Heroes doest enrage, That nought their kindled corage may aswage ….    … But now a while let downe that haughtie string, And to my tunes this second tenor rayse,    That I this man of God his godly armes may blaze.

(1.11.6–7)

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Now that the knight’s ‘godly armes’ have found their true spiritual meaning in Una’s House of Holiness, the poet replaces the choleric fury (and “proud humours”) that opposed the Sansboys in Una’s absence with deep humility for the culminating use of those arms against the Dragon. Phlegmatism’s excess, easily disclaimed by Cymochles, is spiritually devastating for Redcrosse. Removing his Godly arms for adultery is depicted as a humoral (specifically phlegmatic) fluidity: ‘Pourd out in loosenesse on the grassy grownd’ (1.7.7), like the faithless nymph who ‘Satt downe to rest in middest of the race’: ‘Thenceforth her waters wexed dull and slow, / And all that drunke thereof did faint and feeble grow’; ‘Eftsoones his manly forces gan to fayle, / And mightie strong was turned to feeble frayle: / . . . crudled cold his corage gan assayle, / And chearefull blood in fayntnes chill did melt, / Which, like a feuer fit, through all his body swelt’ (1.7.5–6, emphasis added). Finally, phlegmatism’s indulgent lethargy is transformed by Charissa’s cheerful care, then by the sacramental nurture and rest of a baptismal fountain and a tree’s anointing balm, a restorative rest in God that establishes the knight’s spiritual body. Melancholy, worst humour of the natural body, afflicts even more dreadfully the spiritual body; it haunts the “too sad” knight from beginning to end. The demonic Archimago and Duessa pervert his self-seriousness, causing him to desert Una and to achieve the sadness of fighting ‘Sansjoy’. Disdainfully he stands aloof from Lucifera’s courtiers, joining their snobbery. After Orgoglio wretchedly imprisons him in carnal pride, the self-wounding sadness reaches its peak in Despair’s ‘hollow caue, … / Darke, dolefull, dreary, like a greedy graue’ (1.9.33). Suicidal throes persist even in the House of Holiness, cured only by Charissa (1.10.21–9). Finally, like the other humours, melancholy is transformed to the paradoxical ‘ecstasis’ of emaciated Contemplation, filled with the empowering eagle-vision of heaven. Sanguinity as falsified by Archimago and Duessa makes Redcrosse easy prey for Orgoglio, the titan who mirrors the knight’s swollen carnal pride. Fidelia’s leech Patience must use ‘pincers fiery hot’ to pluck out such desires, ‘proud humours to abate’ – an excision not just of humours swollen with pride (proud flesh) but of humours generally, too enmired in the ‘fleshly slime’ of the bodily house (2.9.22). After wretched imprisonment by Orgoglio, Redcrosse’s proudly suicidal heart encounters withered Despair, and the Dragon (subsuming all demonic symbols in its vast flesh, black spots, fiery breath, poison tail) signifies total sin – total corruption of humoral passion – total affectation of proud power. Redcrosse surmounts these enormous obstacles only through supernatural aid, restoring in him a spiritual body, figured proleptically as a House of Holiness where merciful deeds and heavenly glory displace Cupid and thirst for fame. Caelia’s spiritual training immerses Redcrosse in an agony and ecstasy far beyond Guyon and Arthur’s encounter with their ruling passions in the heart of Alma’s Castle.40 The humourbased passions, which Spenser as Christian Platonist depicts so restrictively in the natural body, are transformed in the Legend of Holiness. Passions are most admirable when ‘poured into’ the soul from above (4.3.1–3), not generated from below in Alma’s sweaty kitchen. The goal of Book 1 is to redeem ever-errant reason and

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to ennoble the passions by varied forms of graces, especially by Arthur’s Christlike sufferance with ‘Gloriana’ as goal. Through the mystic hierarchic sequence that restores Redcrosse’s spiritual body, he regains true and integrated humoral passions: melancholy transformed by Fidelia’s and Contemplation’s deep thoughtfulness; phlegmatism transfigured by Charissa’s exalted nurture; choler allayed and given hopeful purpose by Arthur and by the sacramental well and tree of Gospel promises; sanguinity fulfilled in blissful betrothal to Una unveiled. Heavenly music evokes in all a spiritual body: ‘each one felt secretly, / Himselfe thereby refte of his sences meet, / And rauished with rare impression in his sprite.’ Such bliss, however, is known only ‘by signes’: Great ioy was made that day …   That their exceeding merth may not be told:   Suffice it here by signes to vnderstand   The vsuall ioys at knitting of loues band.   Thrice happy man the knight himself did hold,   Possessed of his ladies hart and hand,   And euer, when his eie did her behold, His heart did seeme to melt in pleasures manifold Her ioyous presence and sweet company  In full content he there did long enioy,   Ne wicked enuy, ne vile gealosy,  His deare delights were hable to annoy:  Yet swimming in that sea of blisfull ioy,   He nought forgot . . . his Faery Queene ….   Now strike your sailes, yee iolly mariners …. (1.12.39–42; emphasis added)

In Book 1’s holistic vision of human nature, the protagonists (and their humoral passions) suffer demonic debasement before being spiritualized for salvation in a quest to fulfil the immortal spiritual body (a house of holiness) before defending the natural, mortal body (Alma’s Castle), a shift from Briton to Faery protagonist. Each house figures an imago Dei but contracts from the mystic transcendence of a Christian church to an immanent parallel, a classical-Neoplatonic castle. In the quest for holiness Redcrosse fails at first to read the humours. His spiritual body must be saved by grace, his humoral drives spiritualized. Choler’s blinding rage, phlegmatism’s paralysing sloth, melancholy’s suicidal despair are transformed and integrated into not just sanguine merriment but an astonishing foretaste of mystic bliss. Evaluating Spenser’s humoralism vis-à-vis Shakespeare’s Spenser’s depiction of humours, most explicitly in the Legend of Temperance, raises questions. Does he fully show each humour’s physical and psychic reality? Shown as perverse extremes, humours seem disposable disturbances, and phlegmatism is utterly discredited as misogynist paralysis of personhood. Can humours be rationally managed? Guyon’s limited awareness appears in each humour-figure he misreads: each acts in a thematic cynosure, bound in predestined fixity with no

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relational interplay; none has intellect and free will to critique, mimic, or join the others. Does humoralism operate cohesively in all six completed legends – not just tempering the natural body in Book 2, but in Book 1 purging and transforming the spiritual body by heavenly influence (the soul-maiden ‘Caelia’) into a holy body to confront ‘spiritual foes’; and are humours similarly reformed to accommodate the passional virtues of Books 3–4 (chastity, friendship) and the sensate virtues of Books 5–6 (justice, courtesy)? 1. Spenser’s thematic art, drawing from the immense reserves of past authorities and using a mystically-numbered holistic design, has an intellectual advantage over Shakespeare, but, constricted by social and aesthetic principles, it does not depict holistic characters (Falstaff, Hamlet, Cleopatra, Bottom) but compiles allegorical figures of a partitioned self, handcuffed in a fragmented conceptual domain. Like Langland, Spenser creates a delightful multiplicity of such figures, which mirror parts and motilities, or larger intellectual domains, of human nature. Phaedria and Mammon, Pyrochles and Cymochles, Maleger and Acrasia are flawed thematic components of humankind that Guyon (or a more fully blessed hero) must resolve. Even major figures (Arthur and Britomart, Redcrosse and Una) resist full personhood, though Britomart and Arthur approach it by unfolding in many other noble figures. Thus in The Faerie Queene each ‘humour’ is a mere fragment of selfhood, not subsumed in a fully conscious person, not merged in the interrelated, fluctuating cycle of emotional states that a person undergoes in the course of a day, or a life. Shakespeare’s Henriad gives a more dynamic, holistic, experiential concept of humoral tempers, which in the English Renaissance appear fully only in Shakespeare’s plays. 2. Spenser’s general view of humours is quite negative, until they are spiritually transformed. The darkness shows in Pyrochles’ self-destructive choler, Cymochles’ wayward phlegmatism, Phaedria and Acrasia’s sensual lures, Mammon’s and Maleger’s melancholy self-consumption. But the shame derived from humours is deeper, for in Alma’s heart-parlour even gentlemanly Guyon and Arthur blush to meet their passions. This metaphysic of self-doubt and selfabnegation shapes the entire Faerie Queene.41 In the six completed legends, the most holistic view of the passions (arising from bodily humours, but reformed by heavenly influences) appears in Book 1, where the enchanter Archimago draws demon-infested ‘humours’ (from hell, or from Redcrosse’s unconscious) to separate the heroes by desecrating the passional bond. In Redcross and Una’s attaining a conjoined sainthood, the passions are transformed under the aegis of the divine Passion to consummate what Blake, looking back to Spenser and Milton, calls the ‘human form divine’. Though Shakespeare also exposes the foolish errancies of passion, his humoured characters have a far more complex consciousness of their behaviour, enabling willed change that invites audience empathy. 3. Spenser’s humour-characters are rigorously gendered, favouring the ‘male’ humours of combative choler and thoughtful melancholy, yet both these humours are fraught with worldly excess. The fiery engagement in warfare, ever more literal and questionable in books 1-6, persistently violates moral and religious laws, a key problem in Spenser’s allegory. The moist ‘female’ humours (phlegmatism’s idle

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gluttony, sanguinity’s seductive jollity) are shown as special gateways for demonic corruption in misusing sensory pleasures. Cymochles is not innately phlegmatic, for his typical male aggression is only distracted by ‘wat’rish’ sensual pleasure, arousing in him a post-coital lethargy to abandon the weaponry of male choleric assertion. The marginalizing of phlegmatism is also evident in Cymochles’ lack of a guide to reinforce slothful lust: he shares his brother’s guide Atin, who rouses him from womanly looseness to resume his innate combative choler. (How different is Falstaff ’s genuine phlegmatism!) The advent of Britomart, whose passional integrity confers extreme power, changes everything. Her skill at combat (physical, passional, intellectual) in a personal and national quest rivals men in heroic stature, and in liability for humoral excess and errancy. Spenser’s most exalted females are not phlegmatic but are spiritual beings – non-humoral, non-waterish, non-seductive – their natural bodies ‘naughted’ by veils (Una) or armour (Britomart). Some are infused by God with divine heat, light, and authority, transformed for war and rule, but stressing nurturing bounty more than Solomonic judgment. Britomart’s physical and mental prowess (the sword of rational debate, the lance of invincible will), and the inner drama implied in her repeated disarming, make her the poem’s most intensely developing figure, evolving from girlish hyper-passionality to calm restraint, armed against physical assault and Busyrane’s ‘maisterie’. Though combat with her Amazonian shadow Radigund renews passional excess, it resembles Arthur’s struggle with the extremity of Maleger’s mortal ills. More than the other heroes, Britomart draws passional energy from both natural and spiritual bodies: she combines Redcrosse’s and Guyon’s powers in a single distinct figuration, an extraordinary mystical power of chastity, as heaven-derived as Redcrosse’s saintly holiness. In figures like Portia, Rosalind, Helena, Cleopatra, Volumnia, Hermione, and Paulina, Shakespeare likewise moves beyond the sharply patriarchal bias of his early plays to imagine women’s androgynous empowerment, but he creates no female warrior as prominent as Britomart. 4. Because of their bodily origin and loose fluidity, Spenser depicts humours as a threat to gentle status. Shakespeare is more tolerant (and observant) of bodily passions and their connection with commoners. Spenser’s elitism clarifies why the passional excesses of Pyrochles, Cymochles, Phaedria, Mammon, and Maleger with his hags and legions, are so contemptible: yielding to vulgar humoral impulse discredits them, groups them with Gryll, for in Spenser’s fiction commoners hardly exist, unless treated to courteous condescension as in Book 6. The contrast with Shakespeare is clear: when Prince Hal claims to be ‘of all humours’, he only mildly chastises himself for mingling with tavern idlers, for the appeal of Hal, Hamlet, and Lear, Portia, Helena, and Cleopatra, partly derives from their easy conversance with all social classes, with ‘all humours’. In sustaining a bond with commoners they resemble both Elizabeth I and Essex. 5. Spenser’s allegorical epic seeks to ennoble the heart by refining the affections. Patience uses ‘pincers fiery hot’ to pluck out Redcrosse’s corrupt appetites, ‘proud humours to abate’. The excision is aimed not just at humours swollen with pride (proud flesh?) but at humours generally, derived basely from Alma’s kitchen,

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resembling, Nohrnberg notes, the sweaty labours of Mammon’s forge, grossly formed in ‘fleshly slime’ (2.9.22). Charissa, who voids ‘Cupids wanton snares’, joins Mercy in spiritualizing the passions to enable Contemplative vision. Though Shakespearean tragedy, notably King Lear, also severely purges passion, it occurs not in a soul-maiden’s ordered temple but in turbulent experience, challenging the naked body and soul by cruelly garrotting the soul-maiden. 6. Unlike Shakespeare, Spenser does not provide humour-figures, or protagonists, with depth of consciousness, with wit and irony. Some figures drawn from Chaucer and Ariosto (Squire of Dames, Satyrane, Paridell) use trivializing irony, but the cleverest demon, Archimago, has no sense of humour and is easily fooled, as in his near-fatal imitation of Redcrosse and inability to see through Braggadocchio. A naive self-consciousness appears in Arthur’s and Britomart’s complaints and in their coping with tempters’ ruses, but sophisticated awareness appears only in the poet-narrator’s playful ingenuity. In contrast, many of ­Shakespeare’s mature figures are ironic sophisticates. Even humoral types who traditionally lack self-control (cholerics like Hotspur and Coriolanus; ­phlegmatics like Launce, Falstaff, and Juliet’s nurse) surprise us with sharply thoughtful (though often foolish) vitality. Shakespeare depicts most characters in a morally mixed, constantly evolving (or devolving) form, almost always sympathetic. Only choler, the macho-male humour that claims highest privilege, is shown by Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson as dangerous to communal wellbeing, though theatrically exciting. In striking contrast to the lack of consciousness (and humoral self-control) in Spenser’s characters, the great quartet of humour-figures in the second Henriad – Henry IV, Hal, Hotspur, Falstaff – have astonishing performative awareness. Hal and Falstaff even use their empathetic, imaginative, and intellectual powers to appropriate, or parody, the humoral tempers of the others. Humoral psychology in Shakespeare’s Henriad A literary survey of Galenic usages between 1350 and 1700 confirms Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s dominion as deliberate humoralists, especially in the plays of 1597–1606: Chaucer uses ‘humour’ 8 times, Lyly 23, Spenser 22, Shakespeare 141, Jonson 236, Donne 9, and Milton 5. Contrary to popular opinion, however, the locus classicus of humoral psychology is not the voguish humour-comedy of Chapman (1597) or Jonson (1598–99) but Shakespeare’s epic Henriad, especially Part 1 (1597). We need not review (with C.R. Baskerville, J. Schafer, and J.A. Riddell) the rising tide of satiric pseudo-humors between 1580 and 1630. Lyly’s preening Euphuisms, Nashe’s caustic satire, Jonson’s fabulous grotesques, while accreting new meanings to ‘humour’, do not treat genuine Galenism but pseudo-tempers: whimsical quirks, obsessions, nonsensical affectations. Only Shakespeare fully exploits humoralism’s psychodynamic basis, the EmpedocleanHippocratic-Aristotelian principle of contrariety.42 The four main figures of 1 Henry IV exemplify the Galenic temperaments with psychological depth and in complex oppositional relationship.

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When between 1930 and 1945 Lily B. Campbell and John W. Draper restored a humoral lens to studies of Shakespearean character, they too viewed humours reductively: not as interactive and psychologically–based, but as static, discrete, and physically determined.43 Most Renaissance writers, however, would have agreed with Edmund Bunny that ‘the soul doth not folow, but rather doth use such temperature as the bodie hath’: humours form a somatic theatre for the rational soul, which may actively govern humoral flux, passively submit to its urgings, or slyly counterfeit other tempers, effecting subtle paradox in the body–soul r­ elation.44 Equally misleading is the tradition privileging melancholy as the most psychically complex temper, accentuating the idea of humours as pathological.45 With this bias for physical determinism, static disjunction, and pathology, moderns often see Renaissance humours culminating in Jonson’s satiric caricatures or in Burton’s brilliant but restrictive obsession with melancholy, ignoring Shakespeare’s more standard Galenism which, in plays prior to Hamlet and the great tragedies, takes sanguinity as its norm.46 No one has noted the affinity between the humours and the primary passions (joy, sorrow, hope, fear), making two poles of emotivity which inform the body– soul correspondence. One cannot overemphasize this parallel between physical fluids and psychic passions. As in the masque Hymenaei, the humours and passions ultimately join in a stately dance.47 Joy and sorrow, building on sanguine and melancholy humours, are the soul’s primary antipodes. Hope (with anger) and fear (with desire) spring from the choleric and phlegmatic humours to form a complementary polarity.48 These primary passions and polarities shall inform our character study. A second axiom is equally important. Humours, like passions, form an everchanging cycle: ‘Underlying this static concept (that each person’s humoral composition is instantly fixed at birth) is the dynamic idea of a rhythmical alteration of the fluids. These contrary perspectives must always be kept in view.’49 Each person, though of one basic temper, routinely enacts the others according to time of day, of year, of life – usually in the same sequence: sanguine (morning, spring, infancy), choleric (afternoon, summer, youth), phlegmatic (evening, autumn, old age), melancholic (night, winter, senility).50 Even this motility understates the capacity for radical complexional change in Shakespearean drama: Kate’s explicit conversion from choleric shrew to complacent spouse, Hamlet’s implicit fall from sanguine prince to melancholy avenger.51 Moreover, a character may wilfully playact other tempers, either for self-aggrandizement (Richard III, Falstaff) or for regal empathy (Prince Hal, Rosalind, Edgar).52 Amid these ‘ever whirling wheels of change’, humours display an intrinsic hierarchic order, a supremacy of blood. Following Galen and medical tradition, Sir Thomas Elyot in 1539 affirms that blood ‘hath preeminence over all other humours … by reason of temperatenes in heate and moysture, … beinge the very treasure of lyfe …. The dystemperature of bloud hapneth by one of the other thre humours by the inordinate or sup[er]fluous mixture of them.’53 So too in The Optick Glasse of Humors (1607) Thomas Walkington insists:

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this purple sanguine complexion should … aspire to that hie preheminence of bearing rule: for this is the ornament of the body, the pride of humors, the paragon of complexions, the prince of all temperatures, for blood is the oyle of the lampe of our life. If we doe but view the princely scarlet robes hee vsually is inuested with, his kingly throne seated in the midst of our earthly citty, like the Sunne amid the wandring Planets.54

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Joyful sanguinity, subsuming all humours/passions/tempers in the heart’s throneroom, defines personal and political well-being (Figure 2). SANGUINE JOY (plenitude of heat & moisture) CHOLERIC HOPE, ANGER (heat, no moisture)

PHLEGMATIC FEAR, DESIRE (no heat, moisture) MELANCHOLY SORROW (vacuity of heat & moisture)

Figure 2 The temperaments as intersecting polarities (2)

In this cyclic hierarchy, sanguinity at the apex (with both vital components) opposes melancholy at the nadir (with neither vital component). Choler and phlegm (each lacking one component) form an intersecting psychological tension; their combining of present and absent qualities gives each a passional ambivalence: the choleric as hope/anger, the phlegmatic as fear/desire. Sanguinity can harmonize not only the self but the body politic: England’s troops united for war by Henry V’s self-mastery, the shipwrecked society reconstituted for peace by Prospero’s maturer temperance and theatrical magic. Yet despite sanguinity’s plenitude of vital resources, any temper can fully accommodate the soul’s rational power. The paradox is most acute in melancholy, noted since Antiquity for promoting genius.55 Though Shakespeare seems to favour the bilious ‘male’ tempers of melancholy and choler (69 and 39 uses) over the moist ‘female’ indulgences of sanguine (4) and phlegmatic (1), yet ‘blood’, the preferred term for sanguinity, occurs 862 times. Like ‘spirit’, blood proliferates in figurative meanings, often used in punning conjunction: it is dominant humour, complex fluid containing all four humours, but also vital essence, congenital treasury, communal bond, spiritual instrument. The semantic richness and inclusiveness of ‘blood’, enforcing its hegemony over the three subordinate fluids, prevent our tallying its use as a separate humour. Yet King Henry insistently focuses on Hal’s blood as a basis of t­ emperament. Shakespeare’s most admired protagonists are innately sanguine, comprehending all humours, capable of joy: lover-warriors like Romeo, Othello, Antony; princely rulers like Hal, Hamlet, Lear, Prospero; assertive, merry, regal women like Beatrice, Rosalind, Cleopatra. Occasionally the less-perfect tempers of choler and melancholy, as in Coriolanus and Timon, assume centrality; only phlegmatism, the stereotypical

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‘female’ temper of nurture and desire, timidity and mental torpor, is generally passed over by Shakespeare – and by other Renaissance playwrights – for leading roles.56 1 Henry IV, however, activates all four tempers and gives them nearly equal play as principals. The second Henriad defines the period of Shakespeare’s most salient humoralism. In fourteen plays prior to 1597 ‘humour’ appears three times per play; in the fifteen after 1600, only once per play – a retreat from the vogue for satiric humours. The eight plays of 1597–1600 (l Henry IV through Twelfth Night), averaging ten uses per play, form the heyday of explicit Shakespearean humoralism. In 1963 U.C. Knoepflmacher, insightfully arguing for the humours as ‘symbolic nucleus’ in 1 Henry IV, noted how effectively this central conceit ‘binds the play’s abundant references to blood, sickness, and the four elements’ as well as to ‘heavenly bodies and to time’: ‘the humors of the King, of Hotspur, and of Falstaff are fragmented’, vulnerable to ‘a protean world of changes and “counterfeit”.’ Hal’s humours ‘are well commingled’, allowing him to avoid the excessive passions of the others while integrating the best qualities of each.57 But despite his astute thesis, Knoepflmacher misconstrues three of the leads, for he calls Hotspur sanguine, King Henry choleric, and Hal no single temper. Aided by the medieval compendia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus and the school of Salerno, and Renaissance treatises of Lemnius, Elyot, Bright, Primaudaye, and others, we must refine Knoepflmacher’s explication of this insistently humoral play: the sanguine prince and melancholic king enact the central psychic tension, joy versus sorrow; choleric Hotspur and phlegmatic Falstaff form the complementary dynamic of hope versus fear, or anger versus desire. Shakespeare’s fourfold anatomy is richly complex: the ‘moist’, indulging tempers of Falstaff and Hal tend to appropriate other tempers (one for playful parody, one for sovereign integration); the ‘dry’, withdrawing natures of Hotspur and King Henry tend to repress other tempers, not only in others but in themselves. Melancholy: King Henry IV King Henry IV closely exemplifies the anxious melancholic in the school of ­Salernum’s oft-memorized rubric:58 The Melancholly from the rest doe varie, Both sport and ease, and company refusing, Exceeding studious, euer solitary, Inclining pensiue still to be, and musing, A secret hate to others apt to carry: Most constant in his choise, tho long a chusing, Extreme in loue sometime, yet seldom lustful, Suspitious in his nature, and mistrustful, A wary wit, a hand much giuen to sparing, A heauy looke, a spirit little daring.

When scolding Hal about base companions (1H4 3.2), Henry urges the avoidance of ‘sport and ease, and company’, often dismissing others from his presence (1.3.15–21, 123; 5.1.1l2) – a trait Hal mimics in the ‘play extempore’ (‘Henceforth

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Figure 3 ‘The Melancholy Man. Restat adhuc tristis Choleræ substantia nigra/ Quæ reddit pravos pertristes, pauca loquentes.’ From The School of Salernum (rpt. 1920).

ne’er look on me,’ 2.4.440–1). Henry’s ‘suspitious’ nature breeds ‘secret hate’ against the rebels; his ‘spirit little daring’ disguises others with his colours in battle and prevents Hal’s single combat. Henry’s opening lines (‘So shaken as we are, so wan with care …’) introduce his persistent melancholy as he frets over his embattled kingship, his image, his son’s prodigality. He admits his temper, ‘My blood hath been too cold’ (1.3.l); and Falstaff decries ‘the cold blood [Hal] did … inherit of his father’ (2H4 4.3.1l6–17). Far exceeding the normal chill of age and aggrieved parenthood, Henry’s melancholy epitomizes England’s moral miasma, distempered by sinful guilt. Grief for his bloody attaining of the crown and consequent ‘civil butchery’ congeals into a half-serious pose of religious melancholy as he publicly lauds the crucifix and urges a crusade. Ultimately he yearns fully to be king, in blood and spirit as in name. Brooding over his ignoble use of counterfeits in battle, Henry confesses that he “grieves at heart/ So many of [my] shadows thou hast met, / And not the very King’ (5.4.29– 31). He grieves equally for Hal’s truancy and suspects it as divine retribution, a sign that his son’s blood is not royal:        

I know not whether God will have it so For some displeasing service I have done, That, in his secret doom, out of my blood, He’ll breed revengement and a scourge for me.

(3.2.4–7)

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Hence the central humoral questions: is Henry’s blood hopelessly impure and distempered; and can Hal’s blood reunite the anarchic temperaments to form an Eden of England? In each part of 1 Henry IV, after a display of the ‘unyok’d humours’ of choleric rebels and phlegmatic idlers (1H4 1.2.190), Henry in the peripety of Act 3 solicits help to cure the ‘rank diseases’ in ‘the body of our kingdom’, ‘a body yet distempered’ (2H4 3.1.39–44). England’s distemperedness draws partly from his own sin-enhanced melancholia, as his insomniac soliloquy confirms: ‘O sleep, … how have I frighted thee’ (2H4 3.1.4–31). With grim irony the joyous news of Northumberland’s defeat initiates Henry’s death-throes: ‘wherefore should these good news make me sick?’ (2H4 4.4.l02). Falstaff ’s diagnosis of Henry’s paralysing apoplexy astutely traces it to habitual melancholy (‘from much grief, from study, and from perturbation in the brain’; ‘I have read the cause … in Galen’). Falstaff alludes (self-reflectively) to the malaise’s moral aspect: ‘a kind of deafness’, ‘lethargy’, ‘a kind of sleeping in the blood’ (2H4 1.2.110–16). Implicitly, England’s cure requires Henry’s death, and in that self-purging his melancholy plays an active part: ‘Th’ incessant care and labour of his mind / Hath wrought the mure that should confine it in’ (2H4 4.4.118–19). King Henry’s melancholy illustrates the most puzzling enigma of the body– soul relation. Physically the worst temper, lacking heat (spirit force) and moisture (bodily substance),59 melancholy nevertheless tended to transcend the material realm either through heroic effort and contemplative rigor or through divine infusion of ‘frenzy’. As the Portuguese writer Francisco de Mendoza says, ‘the mind blossoms at the same time that the body decays.’60 Hence the famous conundrum of pseudo-Aristotle: ‘Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics?’61 From Antiquity this philosopher’s riddle, which perplexed Galen and the physicians, drew numerous testimonials, as Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl show in Saturn and Melancholy, though Winfried Schleiner notes a Reformation counter-trend, doubting melancholy’s eminence and preferring sanguinity.62 Henry never masters the paradox of melancholy, greatness through loss – neither the diminished body that can magnify the soul nor the humbled spirit that can unite one with others. While shouldering the dark concomitants of sovereign care and a sinful past, Henry cannot cease his claim to power nor, till the very end, own his guilt. In final counsel with Hal, Henry nobly laments the ‘indirect crook’d ways / I met this crown’ and asks forgiveness; but in disclosing the crusade’s hypocrisy and advising Hal ‘to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels’ (4.5.182, 213–14) he cheapens the wisdom gained through grief. For each main figure of 1 Henry IV, selfhood is ultimately shaped by melancholic inadequacy and loss; but Henry IV, Shakespeare’s most innate, self-determined melancholic, bears this lack at his core.

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Choler: Hotspur Salerno’s poetic account of choler closely matches Hotspur’s fiery nature, but its negative cast hardly accounts for the heroic daring that makes him ‘the theme of honour’s tongue’ (1H4 1.1.80–2): Sharpe Choller is an humour most pernitious, All violent and fierce, and full of fire, Of quicke conceit, and therewithall ambitious, Their thoughts to greater fortunes still aspire, Proud, bountifull ynough, yet oft malicious A right bold speaker, and as bold a lyar, On little cause to anger great enclin’d ….

Like Coriolanus, Hotspur exemplifies what Fulke Greville in his Treatie of Warres called ‘the humour radicall / Of violence’, the Empedoclean instinct for strife.63 Impelled by the bilious humours of gall (1.3.228) and spleen (2.3.78, 3.2.125, 5.2.19), Hotspur is equated with Mars, or ‘Mars in swathling clothes’ (4.1.116, 3.2.112), and opposed to the phlegmatic evasiveness of the ‘pale-faced moon’, from whom he would ‘pluck bright honour’ (1.3.202). His violence evokes royal praise: ‘Ten thousand bold Scots … Balked in their own blood’, ‘a conquest for a prince to boast of ’ (1.1.68–9, 76). By the light of this ‘miracle of men’, recalls Lady Percy, ‘Did all the chivalry of England move’ (2H4 2.3.19–20, 33). As fire was godlike, many thought this fierce temper most kingly. In the Henriad choler vies with sanguinity for supremacy, pitting Hotspur against Hal, Hal against himself.

Figure 4 ‘The Choleric Man. Est humor Choleræ qui competit impetuosis.’ (School of Salernum)

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Hotspur’s temper, like his family motto, fixes on ambitious hope: ‘That roan shall be my throne … O, Esperance!’ (2.3.70–1); ‘Now, Esperance! Percy! And set on’ (5.2.96). Such hope, turning in crisis to anger, defines the choleric: ‘our plot is a good plot as ever was laid … and full of expectation’ (2.3.16–18). He twists the news of his father’s sickness into ‘The very bottom and the soul of hope’: ‘It lends … A larger dare to our great enterprise’ (4.1.50, 77–8). The rebels recall how Hotspur ‘lined himself with hope, / Eating the air on promise of supply’ (2H4 1.3.27–8). Lacking vision of a spiritual whole, Hotspur reduces hope to rash glory in earthly carnage. Hotspur’s sprightly eloquence and adroit gibes at Glendower reveal a mental acumen as intense as his courage but distracted by his own charisma, fitful sleep, and dreams of conflict (2.3.37–64). Like Tybalt, shrewish Kate, and Coriolanus, he is at times impervious to reason, ‘altogether governed by humours’ (3.1.231). Cholerics, says Lemnius, are ‘right well furnished and skilfull in perfect utterance, vehemence of speech, and readinesse of tongue: yet there is not in them such waight of words and pithinesse of Sentences … because … they bee very earnest and hasty.’64 This ‘hasty disposition’, says Bright, ‘will make reply … before the tale be halfe told, whereby he … aunswereth from the purpose’ and takes causeless offence.65   Hotspur’s choleric motives engender his linguistic habits. Ambitious hope breeds tropes of exaggeration, especially self-preening hyperbole (‘The mailed Mars shall on his altar sit’, 4.1.116) and surging, loquacious fantasies (‘it were an easy leap / To pluck bright honour …’, 1.3.201–2). Impatient anger provokes broken syntax, interjected exclamations, indecorous comparisons, and subversion of others’ hyperbole (Glendower’s boasts, Vernon’s praise of Hal: 3.1, 4.1, 5.2). Amid such assertive self-idealizing, Hotspur cannot abide ridicule, especially by Henry’s cold, envious, melancholic intelligence. The ‘jeering and disdained contempt’ of ‘this subtle king’ (1.3.169, 183) provokes Hotspur’s hopeful temper to a series of projective fantasies: his defensive sketch of the effete courtier (30ff) and mythic account of Mortimer’s combat with Glendower (94ff). Henry’s shift from flattery to public rebuke (‘Art thou not ashamed?’, 118) transforms Hotspur’s hope to fury: ‘Why, look you, I am whipp’d and scourg’d with rods! / Nettled and stung with pismires, when I hear / Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke’ (238–40). Lemnius, Bright, and Burton agree that mixing choler with melancholy creates the deadliest temper, burnt or ‘adust melancholy’, which in its hot choleric stage incites frenzy and murderous fury.66 Hotspur’s father and uncle decry his anarchic response: ‘What, drunk with choler?’ (1.3.129); My nephew’s trespass may be well forgot; It hath the excuse of youth and heat of blood, And an adopted name of privilege – A harebrained Hotspur, governed by a spleen.

(5.2.16–19)

Besides lacking self-rule, choleric Hotspur has little sovereign empathy with others, no wish to encompass ‘all humours’. Only the fiery mirror-image of Douglas draws

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his regard. He scorns the moist, indulgent complexions, especially the artful daintiness of the feminized man: the ‘trimly dress’d’ courtier, ‘perfumed like a milliner’, who deplores war’s nastiness with ‘holiday and lady terms’ (1.3.30–69). In Hotspur, however, Shakespeare complicates the choleric’s abuse of woman. Hotspur’s sardonic banter with Kate – mocking her mild oaths, nurture of ‘mammets’, and fear of war (3.1.245ff) – betrays grudging affection, disclosing his temper’s paradox. Despite his ardour for autonomy, he craves a phlegmatic contrary to define his glory, a fretful solicitor to feed his fire. Hal’s more integrated choler will effectively subjugate Hotspur while allying with his own Kate. Hotspur misreads his rival’s gaiety: ‘Never did I hear / Of any prince so wild a liberty’ (5.2.70–1). Hotspur’s sketches of evasive surfeit – the ‘madcap’ with his ‘pot of ale’ who ‘doffed the world aside’, the ‘nimble-footed … sword-and-buckler’ (1.3.229–32, 4.1.95–7) – typify not Hal but Falstaff, to whose contrary temper Hotspur will, in the finale of 1 Henry IV, be emblematically mated. Phlegmatism: Falstaff Despite Falstaff ’s astounding complexity, his physiological and passional core is clearly phlegmatic,67 as indicated by his surrendering name, his association with the moon, his limitless appetites, his drowsiness and evasion of crises, and his derogatory depiction as female. Salerno’s poem is again pertinent, though disturbingly reductive:

Figure 5 ‘The Phlegmatic Man. Otia non studio tradunt, sed corpora somno.’ (School of Salernum)

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Anatomy of human nature The Flegmatique are most of no great growth, Inclining to be rather fat and square: Giuen much vnto their ease, to rest and sloth, Content in knowledge to take little share, To put themselues to any paine most loth. So dead their spirits, so dull their sences are: Still either sitting, like to folke that dreame, Or else still spitting, to auoid the flegme: One qualitie doth yet these harmes repaire, That for the most part Flegmatique are faire.

Galen and countless patriarchs identify phlegmatism as female and stress obesity, lethargy, dullness of mind.68 While this dim-witted stereotype pales before the complexity of both womankind and Falstaff, his ‘grotesque body’ and allure do in Bakhtin’s terms evoke demeaning fantasies of the female other,69 as Hal suggests: ‘I prithee, call in Falstaff. I’ll play Percy, and that damned brawn shall play Dame Mortimer his wife’ (2.4.108–10). . Renaissance treatises characterize phlegmatism ambivalently. The medical tradition prizes natural phlegm’s ‘nearenesse and lykenesse to bloud’, its capacity to moisten and nourish, to be transformed into the very ‘essence of bloud’.70 Falstaff is brimful of this primal humour from which sanguine joy is concocted. He does not exaggerate in claiming that he is ‘not only witty in [him]self, but the cause that wit is in other men’ (2H4 1.2.9–10). The dull mind and timorous heart of ‘unnatural’ phlegmatism are displayed by other tavern dwellers: Bardolph, Nym, and especially the meek drawer Francis, whose mental and linguistic poverty complements the fat knight’s verbal cornucopia.71 Falstaff ’s exuberant appetite and wit make him an irresistible companion for play and re-creation, though his unrestrained indulgence leads invariably to slothful torpor. Falstaff epitomizes and reclaims this devalued temperament with his gluttonous corporeality: he is called ‘Sir John Paunch’, ‘greasy tallow-keech’, ‘horsebackbreaker’, ‘huge hill of flesh’, ‘tun of man’, ‘trunk of humours’, or simply ‘chewet’ (1H4 1.2.65; 2.4.226, 240–1, 443–4; 5.1.29). Equally phlegmatic is his somnolence. In the cycle of Acts 1–2 he yawns himself awake, is chided for ‘sleeping upon benches after noon’ (1.2.3–4), and crowns himself with the cushion of idle luxury (2.4.375).72 At the cycle’s end, even as the sheriff threatens, he resumes his natural torpor, ‘Fast asleep behind the arras’ (2.4.523–4). Phlegmatism is also manifest in Falstaff ’s speech. Gluttonous desire breeds copia, the prolix troping so admired by Erasmus and imitators;73 multiplying ‘buckram men’ and profuse name-calling (2.4); elaborate abuse of Bardolph’s nose and of other tavern associates (e.g., 1H4 3.3; 2H4 1.2, 2.4, 3.2); protracted censure of honour (1H4 5.1) and praise of sack (2HIV 4.3). So too, somnolence engenders tropes of evasion, ranging from periphrasis and metaphor to fantastic prevarication. The two linguistic ploys usually work in conjunction, copia accommodating his continual stratagems to evade reckonings: thus, in Part 1, his flyting and replay of the robbery, diatribes to evade the Hostess, and eschewals of honour; in Part 2, his distracting the Chief Justice, flattering Justice Shallow, and, as confronting

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Henry V nears, long soliloquies to cheer and delude himself. Despite his abundant display of phlegmatic physique and temper, Falstaff ’s passions and mental processes are, in modern parlance, overdetermined. The idle body belies a vigorous mind. The perennial charge of cowardice74 must be qualified by his feisty assertion as robber and soldier, his poised alertness in being baited, his unabashed clamour of appetite. That ‘the fat knight with the great-belly doublet’ transcends his physical temperament and its deplorable stereotype is a comic triumph. His capacity for self-change gives astonishing complexity. In keeping with his indulgent and fecund ‘womb’ (‘I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine’, 2H4 4.3.18–19), Falstaff greedily assimilates the other three tempers by role-playing. Given phlegmatism’s affinity with sanguinity, one is not surprised at Falstaff ’s Bacchic-Venerean excesses usually associated with intemperate sanguinity but equally apt for phlegmatism.75 Calling himself ‘old and merry’ (1H4 2.4.466), Falstaff, like Hal, invites mirthful sport: ‘What, shall we be merry? Shall we have a play extempore?’ (2.4.276–7); ‘Come sing me a bawdy song; make me merry’ (3.3.13–14). Though his gaiety is not simply feigned, it is often staged and increasingly strained, less tempting to Hal, especially with Doll Tearsheet. As the eulogy to sack reveals, strong wine must sustain Falstaff ’s verbal and emotional sallies; he lacks Hal’s innate ‘heat’ to resist excess and its lethargic aftermath. More laughable because more incongruous is Falstaff ’s theatrical appropriation of the ‘dry’ tempers, choler and melancholy. In keeping with the braggart soldier heritage, his choleric outbursts mix genuine irritation with a great deal of stagy affectation. Witness his horseless petulance and melodramatic assault on the ‘true men’ (1H4 2.2); his mock diatribe against ‘all cowards’, gamy flyting with Hal, and parody of the King’s parental ire (2.4); his blustery contention with Bardolph and Mistress Quickly (3.3), gibes at Worcester (5.1), and defiant boast over Hotspur’s body (5.4). Falstaff ’s re-enactment of the purse-taking (and each excursus into anger) hilariously parodies the choleric warrior Hotspur but always dissolves into phlegmatic solicitation of easy pleasure: ‘Give me a cup of sack to make my eyes look red, that it may be thought I … speak in passion’ (2.4.380–2). Equally droll is Falstaff ’s mimicry of melancholy – both as ageing father and as Puritan divine – a mask which deflects criticism of his indulgences and affords a witty vantage point for chiding Hal’s prodigality: ‘Thou hast done much harm upon me, Hal; God forgive thee for it. … and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked’ (1.2.90–4). Hal and Poins at first play along, naming Falstaff ‘Monsieur Remorse’ (1.2.110–11); yet, by adding distasteful melancholic similes and by inviting debauchery, both bait him to expose his true complexion. One critic, insisting on Falstaff ’s essential melancholy, notes the many references to his advanced age,76 but phlegmatics were also associated with senility. The Chief Justice, chastising Falstaff ’s youthful pretence, describes not the melancholic’s lean, dark-haired, wizened decrepitude but the plump, whitehaired, buffoonish decadence of the phlegmatic: ‘Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?’ (2H4 1.2.179–83). As Falstaff anticipates

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preferment, he discards the melancholic posings of Part 177 and turns to drunken, ever more strained fabrications of godlike merriment. The bursting of this selfdeifying dream of ‘golden joys’ (2H4 5.3),78 more than the loss of Hal’s friendship (5.5), precipitates Falstaff ’s first real melancholia. His stunned withdrawal from tavern life and Dame Quickly’s revisiting of his stone-cold limbs (H5 2.3) stress by contrast the pleasureful excess which has defined his life. Despite heavy evidence for Falstaff as a phlegmatic nonpareil, no one can rest content with such a labelling. The extreme indulgence of Falstaff ’s phlegmatic core affirms vital pleasure as life’s wellspring: ‘Counterfeit? I lie …. To die is to be a counterfeit’ (1H4 5.4.114–15). His burlesque of all tempers not only parodies but challenges Hal’s fashioning of a sovereign self: is it the prince or his jesting shadow who is truly ‘of all humours’? Yet Falstaff ’s role-playing does not develop the moral or spiritual capabilities latent in phlegmatism79 or in borrowed tempers. His passional excess mirrors his opposite, the warrior who stalks honour in deadly earnest, and equally in excess. The antipathy between Falstaff ’s complexion and Hotspur’s is continually evident as they indulge or deny appetite, mock or crave honour, elude or invite death.80 When Falstaff stabs Hotspur’s corpse and hoists it (probably upside-down) on his back, the contrary figures blazon a disjointed ‘double man’ (5.4.137) – the coupling of self-exposed jester and ungloried warrior forming an ironic emblem of poorly yoked humours that Hal alone clearly reads. Sanguinity: Prince Hal

Figure 6 ‘The Sanguine Man. Hoc Venus et Bacchus delectant fercula, risus.’ (School of Salernum)

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Despite Hotspur and Falstaff ’s allure, the Henriad’s central dialectic pits King Henry’s melancholy against Hal’s quest for sanguine fulfilment. Salerno’s sketch of sanguinity, though crowded by frivolities, stresses ultimate realization of joy, sublimating the Freudian pleasure principle, central to human emotivity: Complexions cannot vertue breed or vice, Yet may they vnto both giue inclination, The Sanguine game-some is, and nothing nice, Loues Wine, and Women, and all recreation, Likes pleasant tales, and news, playes, cards, & dice, Fit for all company, and euery fashion: Though bold, not apt to take offence, not irefull, But bountifull, and kinde, and looking cheerefull: Inclining to be fat, and prone to laughter, Loues mirth, & Musick, cares not what comes after.

Lemnius considers sanguinity ‘neerest and likest to the best’: ‘Blood and vitalI spirit, are in their chiefest prime and most abound in lusty and flourishing yeeres’; ‘the force and power of blood … causeth a promptnesse of minde …, which by daily use and exercise attaineth in the end to wisedome.’81 When Lemnius and Walkington examine ‘a Complexion perfectly and exactly temperate’, one ‘worthy of the fellowship of the Gods’82 with Christ as the only true exemplar,83 they admit that no complexion is ‘perfect and pure’, ‘though the sanguine doe excell all the rest’.84 Lemnius acknowledges the sanguine man’s difficulty in restraining his lusty urges when seeking a Christlike, evangelical vocation.85 Shakespeare’s prince shifts from the prodigal stereotype to sanguinity’s complex ideal: ‘bold, … bountifull, … kinde, … cheerefull’. Promising to redeem time and himself (1.2.211), Hal invokes a messianic analogue. Though less perplexed than melancholy, sanguinity is similarly invested with ambivalence and paradox. Does its association with infancy, morning, and springtime imply infantile mirth or the true joy of life’s early prime? Does one attain this golden temper by purging other humours or by subsuming them? Hal’s ironic reflection on his revelry among idlers – ‘I am now of all humours’ (1H4 2.4.92) – suggests that sanguinity is both a comprehensive containment and simultaneously a mode of purging. Instead of the guiltily ‘distempered’ sun of King Henry (5.1.1–3), Hal veils his passions until he can convincingly ‘imitate the sun … redeeming time’ (1.2.189– 211). Appropriate to Hal’s central sanguine temper are constant references to his blood. When his father questions how such low and base desires could ‘Accompany the greatness of thy blood’ (3.2.12–17), Hal vows to purge his and the country’s surfeited humours by a national blood-letting: ‘When I will wear a garment all of blood, / And stain my favours in a bloody mask, / Which, washed away, shall scour my shame with it’ (135–7). Such a distemperedness, according to the Archbishop of York, afflicts the entire body politic: the commonwealth’s ‘overgreedy love hath surfeited’ (2H4 1.3.87–8); they are ‘all diseased’, and ‘with [their] surfeiting and wanton hours / Have brought [themselves] into a burning fever’ and must ‘bleed for it’ (4.1.54–7). Whereas King Henry’s pious efforts at kingship

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are revealed as tainted by such self-aggrandizement, Hal, despite his legendary prodigality, is increasingly dissociated from this moral causation of disease; repeatedly he promotes the cure of England’s greedy surfeit through ‘bleeding’. Such voluntary and purposeful bleeding by a male warrior, as Paster notes in The Body Embarrassed, was encoded as highly honourable self-control, in contrast to the involuntary bleeding of women and the ill.86 Shakespeare has thus chastened legends of the swearing, boasting, wineguzzling, womanizing prince who carouses through The Famous Victories of Henry V. Hal’s jests at the expense of Francis and other ‘loggerheads amongst … hogsheads’ (2.4.1–111) distance the prince from their drunken, larcenous familiarity. From his opening speech Hal chides the Bacchic and Venerean excesses usually associated with sanguinity which have been deferred to Falstaff – who thus serves as projective scapegoat for a central part of Hal’s own temper.87 Though Hal’s reproof of tavern idlers escalates (as he assigns Falstaff an arduous ‘charge of foot’, rebukes Falstaff ’s inaugural solicitation, and approves Bardolph’s execution for thievery), still Hal’s goal is to restore sanguine joy to England. Throughout the Henriad he seeks ‘merriment’ and ‘happiness’, as in his coronation vow: ‘No prince nor peer shall have just cause to say, / God shorten Harry’s happy life one day!’ (2H4 5.2.144–5).88 Initially this ‘sweet honey lord’ helps Poins to devise ‘a good jest forever’ among the tavern folk (1H4 1.2.156ff, 2.2.95). ‘Shall we be merry?’ he asks, inviting everyone to a conviviality which conjoins all temperaments (2.4.88ff). In the heat of battle Hal disparages Falstaff ’s frivolity (‘What, is it a time to jest and dally now?’, 5.3.55), yet his own practical jokes persist during the campaign against France (H5 4.1). Though his glib chauvinism in courting Katherine chafes modern readers, Hal’s jocularity aims to transcend differences of gender, temper, caste, nationality. To achieve perfection, says Lemnius, blood must ally with other humours: ‘They that be meere Sanguine, and have none or very little Melancholy or Choler mixed there with …, are commonly dolts and fooles.’89 In accordance with blood’s sovereignty, Hal dominates and integrates the more fragmented humoral types: playfully, when he claims to be ‘of all humours’ among the tavern-dwellers who solicit favours of his royal blood; and in full earnest when, ‘to save the blood on either side’, he offers to represent England in single combat against Hotspur (1H4 5.1.83–100) or when he vows during battle that ‘the spirits / Of valiant Shirley, Stafford, Blunt, are in my arms’ (5.4.40–1). In contrast to Falstaff, Hal’s enactment of all four tempers is temperate and integrative in method, sovereign in purpose. Noting Lemnius’ exclusion of phlegm from the perfect mix, one may distrust Hal’s alliance with Falstaff and other idlers. Yet considerable precedent justifies this association of blood and phlegm, both ‘moist’ indulgent humours. Bartholomaeus observes ‘the neerenesse and lykenesse that fleame hath with bloud’ and the important role of phlegm for tempering the blood and moistening the body. ‘[O]f all the humours’, says Walkington, ‘this commeth nearest vnto the best, for it is a dulcet humour [Falstaff is a ‘sweet beef ’ (3.3.177)], which being concocted is changed into the essence of blood.’90 Hal’s sanguinity easily allies with the

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tavern’s pastoral pleasures and with the phlegmatic’s psychological inclination to subsume other tempers through role-playing. Such humoral theatrics, for Falstaff a light-hearted feasting on others’ pretences, for Hal a serious validating of identities,91 are not wholly at cross-purposes (by contrast, the choleric and melancholic contemn and exclude other tempers). Hal never intends completely to suppress Falstaff or the instinctual pleasures of his own sovereign quest for joy. To counter these dulcet indulgences, Hal exercises choler, needed to make the blood ‘subtill’,92 cleansed of congealings and corruption. He slays Hotspur in Part 1, rebukes Falstaff in Part 2, and in Henry V urges the English army to furious action: ‘imitate the action of the tiger: / Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood, / Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage’ (H5 3.1.6–8). As in the dalliance with Falstaffian idleness, Hal’s venture into Hotspurian fury is only a temporary ‘[d]isguise’ to meet ‘the blast of war’ (H5 3.1.5, 8) or purge corruptions, not his princely norm. As Salerno avows, the sanguine temper which defines fair nature is ‘not apt to take offence, not irefull’.93 Ultimately Hal adopts even his father’s sad temper, polar opposite to his own, and thus completes his mastery of all humours. According to Walkington, melancholy ‘is the most vnfortunate and greatest enemy to life’, ‘the very sponge of all sad humors’. Yet, says Bartholomaeus, it is needed ‘for cleansing of the bodie and the splene’ and to assist appetite. More important, in its ‘naturall’ form it is ‘the electuary and cordiall of the minde, a restoratiue conseruice of the memory, the nurse of contemplation, … the fountaine of sage aduise and good purueiance.’94 During the death-watch, Hal anticipates the melancholy he must endure, first as loyal son, pledging ‘tears and heavy sorrows of the blood’, then as bearer of the crown: ‘O polished perturbation, golden care, / That keep’st the ports of slumber open wide / To many a watchful night!’ (2H4 5.2.23–5, 38). After the funeral Hal announces that he and his father have exchanged temperaments: ‘My father is gone wild into his grave, / For in his tomb lie my affections, / And with his spirits sadly I survive’ (2H4 5.2.123–5). Hal’s ‘putting on’ of sadness is not, however, the final burying of his gaiety, but simply a ‘fashion’ intended to inculcate a deeper eventual joy: Sorrow so royally in you appears That I will deeply put the fashion on And wear it in my heart. Why then, be sad, But entertain no more of it, good brothers, Than a joint burden laid upon us all. Yet weep that Harry’s dead, and so will I; But Harry lives that shall convert those tears By number into hours of happiness.

(2H4 5.2.51–5, 59–61)

In Hal’s sober confrontations with his dying father, the Lord Chief Justice, and Falstaff (4.5; 5.2, 5), melancholy as it deepens into contemplation promotes selfsovereignty (what Freud in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ describes as superegoformation).95 Hal’s capacity for contemplative, self-restraining ‘ebb’96 consolidates his passions in a ‘sea’ of kingly Selfhood:

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The tide of blood in me Hath proudly flowed in vanity till now: Now doth it turn and ebb back to the sea, Where it shall mingle with the state of floods And flow henceforth in formal majesty.

(5.2.129–33)

This humble reflux of passions within a regal sea parallels Sir John Davies’s exalted vision in Nosce Teipsum (1599): the soul’s attainment of immortality is like Nature’s moisture which ‘doth make no final stay, / Till she her selfe unto the Ocean marry, / Within whose watry bosome first she lay.’97 Hal’s majestically controlled ocean of blood contrasts with the moon-dominated, fortune-tossed sea associated with both Hotspur and Falstaff.98 In contrast to their solipsistic excesses, Hal’s courtesies at the close of 1 Henry IV epitomize the loving joy of an integrated and well-governed sanguinity: rescuing his oppressed father (5.4.39–57), lauding the slain Hotspur (87–101), lamenting Falstaff ’s demise and indulging his resurgent boast (102–10, 138–59), praising Prince John’s courage (5.4.17–20) and deferring to him the release of valiant Douglas (5.5.17–33). By such chivalry Hal seems intent on subsuming others’ ‘spirits’ within his own, as if to affirm the royal plenitude of his blood, the all-embracing bounty of his sun-like heart. Humoral parody

Of othre humours could I telle also …. – (Dame Pertelote in ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’)

1 Henry IV, exploiting the polarities of humoral passion, elemental nature, and heavenly spheres of influence, thus depicts human nature in the most comprehensive fashion on an epic canvas. But after Jonson’s brilliant satire in Every Man in His Humour (1598), which reified and diversified humors as idiosyncratic obsessions, affectations, and mere whims,99 Shakespeare in Henry V, as in The Merry Wives of Windsor, expansively included the satiric mode. Mistress Quickly, Nym, and Pistol flaunt humoral terms with reversed, affected, or no meaning – a burlesque echoing both Jonson’s comedies and Lyly’s and Nashe’s earlier reductive troping on humours as wilful affectations of whimsical desire.100 The comic males of Henry V and Merry Wives indulge in humoral braggadocio, a vulgar self-assertion which shadows the battlefield rhetoric of Henry V in his quest for power as well as Shakespeare’s own quest for a ‘Muse of fire’ (H5 Pro.1). Nym’s feeble-spirited bravado confuses insult with obsequiousness: ‘I have an humour to knock you indifferently well. … I would prick your guts a little, in good terms, as I may, and that’s the humour of it’ (H5 2.1.55–60). His repressed bluster complements Pistol’s extravagant bombast: ‘0 braggart vile and damned furious wight! / The grave doth gape, and doting death is near. / Therefore exhale!’ (61–3). In Merry Wives Nym’s choler is equally diffident. When he imitates roaring-boys at sword-play (‘Slice, I say / pauca, pauca. Slice, that’s my humour’, 1.1.124), the thrusting ‘slice’ is offset by his shy feint, ‘pauca, pauca’. Nym’s phrase (little, little’) – displacing the brave soldier’s slogan, ‘pauca verba’ (‘few words’) – mirrors

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his phlegmatic faintness of heart and wit. But urged on by Pistol, he composes himself as choleric avenger: ‘I have operations which be humours of revenge…. My humour shall not cool …; the revolt of mine is dangerous’ – drawing Pistol’s consummate approval: ‘Thou art the Mars of Malcontents’ (1.3.88–102). Corporal Nym’s name (from Old English nimen, ‘to take or pilfer’) fits his petty filching from Slender and Mistress Bridget (MWW 1.1.117–18; 2.2.11–13);101 but more broadly it designates his chronic plagiarism of ideas, especially humours. ‘Corporal Nym’ thus translates as ‘body or humour thief ’: And this is true. I like not the humour of lying. He hath wronged me in some humours. I should have borne the humoured letter to her. … My name is Corporal Nym. I speak and I avouch ’tis true. My name is Nym …. I love not the humour of bread and cheese [rations with Falstaff], and there’s the humour of it. (2.1.122–30)

Nym’s omnivorous ‘humours’ – a facile means of possessing objects, passions, and ideas – aim to avouch grandiose selfhood; yet their absence of meaning and his spiritless sulking over imagined humiliations enforce the opposite of his intent. As Nym vies to outcrow Chaunticleer with feigned humours, Mistress Quickly complements his brag with Galenic malapropisms. Like Dame Pertelote, who in the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ attributes her husband’s dream to indigestion and prescribes a violent purgative, Mistress Quickly affects learned Galenism (the sole use of ‘phlegmatic’ in Shakespeare’s plays). Yet her fussy diagnoses invert the meaning of each humour. Of Caius’ choleric impatience she pleads, ‘be not so phlegmatic. Hear the truth of it’ (MWW 1.4.70–1); and of his boisterous sanguine outbursts says ‘I am glad he is so quiet: if he had been thoroughly moved, you should have heard him so loud and so melancholy’ (84–6). Finally she bobbles both form and meaning: ‘I shall never laugh but in that maid’s company! … she is given too much to allicholy and musing’ (143–4).102 Such mindless abuse of Galenism, especially Nym’ s obsessive repetition of ‘humour’ throughout Acts 1–2 of The Merry Wives of Windsor, signals the tediousness of the parody and the urge to annihilate it through reductio ad absurdum. With Sir Hugh Evans’s sensible counsel at the beginning of Act 3 (‘Pray you, let us not be laughing-stocks to other men’s humours’, 3.1.80–1), the vacuous pseudohumours disappear from the remainder of Merry Wives and, with the hanging of the thieves Bardolph and Nym in Henry V (4.4.71–4), from the rest of Shakespeare’s canon.103 Meanwhile, normative humoral psychology continues to inform the core of Shakespeare’s epic. In 2 Henry IV Hotspur’s fire is rekindled by Northumberland (and parodied by Pistol), Falstaff ’s idle play is increasingly flagrant, and Henry’s unabated sad care draws toward death. As the perturbed tempers disintegrate, Hal internalizes positive aspects of each within himself, and in Henry V this ‘mirror of all Christian kings’ (2.Pro.6) tries to harmonize all humours – personally, nationally, internationally. Is Hal’s sanguine rule of lesser tempers suspect? Certainly he is accused of unnaturally procuring their deaths. ‘0 Harry, thou hast robb’d me of my youth!’ charges Hotspur (1H4 5.4.77), ignoring his own culpability and the combat’s

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fairness. The hostess likewise blames Henry for Falstaff ’s death: ‘The King has killed his heart’ or, as Nym puts it, ‘hath run bad humours on the knight’ (H5 2.1.88, 121). But Falstaff ’s sweating-sickness derives from his own superfluous humours,104 and his exile is co-terminous with his intemperance: Make less thy body hence … And, as we hear you do reform yourselves, We will, according to your strengths and qualities, Give you advancement. (2H4 5.5.52, 68–70)

Hal’s bitterest critic is his father: ‘Thou hid’st a thousand daggers in thy thoughts,! / … To stab at half an hour of my life’ (2H4 4.5.106–8). Yet Henry’s own melancholy has hastened his end and has alienated his son from a cheerless court. Though one may exonerate Hal of wilfully dispatching others to subsume their spirits,105 it is more difficult to defend his artful stage-managing of passion: his own (‘herein will I imitate …’), that of the English army (‘Disguise fair nature …’), and even that of the French and of women (‘O Kate, nice customs cur’sy to great kings’; ‘[w]e are the makers of manners’, H5 3.1.8; 5.2.270, 272). Hal’s perpetual contrivances suggest Shakespeare’s faith (at this mid-point of his career) in the subservience of humours and spirits to the rational soul. Yet this genius for empathetic disguise – whether of phlegmatic tipplers (1H4 2.4.4ff), choleric soldiers (H5 3.1.6ff), melancholic mourners (2H4 5.2.49–61), or the sanguine sun of sovereignty (1H4 1.2.191 ff; 4.1.102ff) – suggests that effective kingship is self-fashioning more than royal blood, tour de force acting more than true golden temper.106 Some enigmas must haunt the study of complexional types. If everyone experiences all humoral passions (albeit through crisis, repression, pretence), and if humours interact, then why type each person as a distinct complexion? Though 1 Henry IV blatantly enacts such distinctions, Shakespeare portrays these ideational types within fields of immense fluidity and change. Identity, like relationship, is not simple but cyclical, evolving through successive modes of action and feeling; yet, like the periodic chart and the atomic double-helix, the pattern persists.107 Second, in a work so rich in secondary characters, can we claim for these four principals such a major role in defining the English psyche and human nature generally? Falstaff muses on moral contamination through complexional ‘spirits’: ‘It is a wonderful thing to observe the semblable coherence of [Shallow’s] men’s spirits and his …; they flock together in consent, like so many wild geese’; ‘wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another; therefore let men take heed of their company’ (2H4 5.1.63–76). Falstaff ignores the broader pertinence of his maxim, which sums up the four main characters’ shaping influences.108 Henry’s complex melancholy radiates into his counsellors and eventually into his sons; Hotspur’s choler, replicated by Northumberland in Part 2, infects all the rebel leaders; Falstaff ’s phlegmatism spawns indulgent levity in the tribe of tavern dwellers; and Hal/Henry V shapes first a group of idlers, then an army, finally a nation to his sanguine ideal: ‘We happy few, we band of brothers’ (H5 4.3.60).

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More vexing is the question of each temper’s authenticity, especially Hal’s sanguinity. Is he truly a merry prince, a happy king; do England and broader audiences find joy in his stage-reign? The 1983 bibliography of Henry V criticism lists 154 positive, 58 negative, 111 mixed answers. Many directors, actors, and critics have insisted that Hal/Harry/Henry V inspires allegiance and merriment.109 But as Joel B. Altman argues, the Henriad’s ‘amplification of violence’ translates the tavern’s ‘vile participation’ to a disturbingly bloody ‘communion’ with Henry’s gentility (H5 4.3.20–66).110 This mode of sanguine sovereignty, persistently questioning royal artifice, radically alters in subsequent tragedies and romances. The Henriad’s least-admired episode, the baiting of Francis, is capped by Hal’s most alluring claim, ‘I am now of all humours’ (1H4 2.4.1–95), a virtual slogan for sanguine sovereignty. Though Hal grows restive at the vulgarity of small beer (‘That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of a woman!’, 8–9), he is not yet of Percy’s mind (‘he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast’, 102–3), nor of his father’s (scorning Richard II for mingling with ‘every beardless vain comparative’, 3.2.67). In the jest against ‘my puny drawer’ (29, italics mine), like the fuller baiting of ‘my sweet beef ’, Hal speaks with double voice, ritually purging grossness while exploring social-psychic difference with some empathy. Though Hal is not fully ‘of all humours’, one marvels at a Renaissance prince’s entertaining such a thought in such a context. With Maynard Mack one also wonders at Shakespeare’s ‘transfiguring’ and ‘inventing’ the four great characters who are mere hints in the Chronicles and Famous Victories.111 King Henry, thirty-seven at the Battle of Shrewsbury, becomes an aged, care-worn monarch; Harry Percy, two years older than the King, is reshaped as Hal’s youthful dark twin, with an invented character of rash choler; Oldcastle, a high sheriff and lord whose moral fibre had shrunk to the ‘dull stage roisterer’ of the Famous Victories, is translated as the grandly seductive Falstaff; and Hal, sixteen at the Battle of Shrewsbury and reputedly dissolute, ripens toward the idealized warrior-monarch. Clearly Shakespeare intends a political psychomachia, with Falstaff, Hotspur, and King Henry giving vivid reality to Riot, Rebellion, and Usurpation – the great ills Hal must study to cure. But what shapes these figures into a metapsychology rivalling those of Freud and Jung, a human anatomy as inclusive and dynamic as Blake’s four zoas, Dostoyevsky’s four Karamazov brothers, or Lessing’s four notebooks, is their enacting all points of the humoral-passional compass.112 Humoralism as a comprehensive model of psychic possibility remains crucial to Shakespeare’s character studies in the mature tragedies, most notably in the polarized tempers unleashed in Lear’s madness. Yet after 1600 Shakespeare’s reference to humoral complexions is more subtly implicit; and, at the centre of his vision of human nature, sanguine merriment is displaced by melancholic awareness of mortality, providing a more problematic and paradoxical nexus of passional change. Never again would humoralism be exploited so schematically, comprehensively, openly, and optimistically as in Shakespeare’s epic, the Henriad.

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Notes  1 Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1993); Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (University of Chicago Press, 2004); ‘Nervous Tension’, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, eds D. Hillman and C. Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 107–25; ‘Becoming the Landscape: The Ecology of the Passions in the Legend of Temperance’, Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England, eds M. Floyd-Wilson and G.A. Sullivan, Jr (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 137–52; Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Filipczak, Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western European Art 1575–1700 (New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1997).  2 Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1952); Draper, The Humors & Shakespeare’s Characters (Duke University Press, 1945).  3 See Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, passim, on demon-possession of bodily spirits and humours.  4 ‘The Organic Soul’, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds C.B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–84.  5 F. Brentano, The Psychology of Aristotle, In Particular His Doctrine of the Agent Intellect (1867), trans. R. George (University of California Press, 1977): agent intellect, 106–61; immortality, 118–39; God, 162–80.  6 Paster, ‘The Unbearable Coldness’, ELR 28 (1998), 419: see n. 9; ‘The Humor of It’ in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works (2003), 48; Humoring the Body (2004), 13.  7 After Redcrosse’s imprisonment and Guyon’s faint, Britomart is remarkably exempted from dependency on Arthur’s Christlike aid. As Roche notes, her own providential prowess displaces Arthur’s.  8 Self-destructive choler like that of Pyrrhus and Othello is salient in Shakespeare’s early histories and tragedies (Henry VI, Richard III, Titus Andronicus), is tempered in Romeo and Juliet and the second Henriad, but grows virulent in the problem plays and mature tragedies (Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus) which root it in privileged males’ ‘honour’. This catalytic humour occludes other humours, notably the sensual passive phlegmatic over-indulgence and lethargy ascribed to women.  9 Castigliano, The Courtier (1528) (London: Penguin, 1967, 222). See Filipczak, Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women, 195–6, and medical/dietary treatises cited by Draper, ‘The Sanguine Type’, in The Humors & Shakespeare’s Characters, 17–28. 10 See R. Kimbrough, Shakespeare and the Art of Humankindness (New York: Humanity Books, 1990). Shakespeare’s plays increasingly exploit such androgyny, though never fully. 11 Paster, ch. 3 in The Body Embarrassed. 12 P. Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood (New York: Continuum, 1995; orig. Milan, 1988); Shakespeare’s Theories of Blood, Character, and Class, eds P. Rollins and A. Smith (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 19–60, 123–62; C. Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 13 See Paster on virginal ‘green-sickness’ in Humoring the Body. Beatrice’s wit is heated to perfection; and Hero’s heat in tempering Beatrice’s self-love makes her public shaming still more perfidious. 14 On patriarchal and misogynist gendering of phlegmatism, see Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 1–22. J. Schiesari treats a complementary misogyny in The Gendering of Melancholia (Cornell University Press, 1992). 15 S. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes & Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene (Indiana University Press, 1994). Cf. J. Anderson, ‘Britomart’s Armor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Reopening Cultural Matters of Gender and Figuration’, ELR 39 (2009), 74–96. 16 The Castel of Helthe (London, 1539, 1541, 1547, 1559, 1560, 1561, 1572, 1580, 1587, 1595, 1610); The Touchstone of Complexions, trans. T. Newton (London, 1565, 1576, 1581, 1591, 1633).

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17 Paster, Humoring the Body, ch. 4. 18 On the popularity of pseudo-Aristotle’s Problemata, see R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New York: Basic Books, 1964); D. Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 19 Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters, cites many howlers in sixteenth-century treatises; L. Thorndike, ‘De Complexionibus’, Isis 49 (1958), 398–408, gives ludicrous thirteenth- to fourteenth-century humours curricula. 20 Aristotle’s four causes (material, formal, efficient, final) parallel the four psychic types observed by the great poets, as do Jung’s four psychic types (instinct, reason, emotion, intuition). Ezekiel envisioned God supported by four cherubs that theologians have identified with the gospel writers. In Modes of Being Paul Weiss gives a comprehensive ontological scheme: Actuality, Ideality, Existence, and God. 21 For Fowler the Pyrochles–Cymochles contrast ‘is not mainly between humours but depends on a common Renaissance symbolism whereby water denotes instability’. Cymochles is like Chapman’s ‘moist man or “watrish thing”. This ‘type of ”unstayed” character [is] given over to the unstable flux of humours’ (10n2). 22 J. Carscallen, ‘The Goodly Frame of Temperance: The Metaphor of Cosmos in The Faerie Queene, Book II’, UTQ 37 (1967–68), 136–55, noting prominent elemental traits in some figures, doubts Spenser’s making a consistent correspondence between the four humourcharacters, the four elements, and the four passions. UTQ 37 (1968), 136–55; rpt in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1972), 347–65. See Carscallen, ‘temperance’, in SE. 23 H. Berger, Jr, The Allegorical Temper (Yale University Press, 1958), 59–61; N. Frye, ‘The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene’, in Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963); A. Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (New York:Barnes and Noble, 1964); J. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princton University Press, 1976); J. Webster and R. Somaki, ‘Pyrochles, Cymochles’, SE. 24 Batman upon Bartolome, His Booke De proprietatibus Rerum (S. Batman’s trans. of Bartholomaeus’s twelfth-century encyclopaedia 1582); The School of Salernum, trans. Harington; Elyot, The Castel of Helthe (1539); Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions (1565); Primaudaye, The French Academie (1580; 1615); T. Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586); T. Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601); N. Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions (1621), T. Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors (1631). For these correspondences (matched with planetary ones, with four times of day, four seasons of the year, four ages of life), see the graphs in Paster, Humoring the Body, and Filipczak, Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women. 25 Carscallen notes schematic inconsistencies. 26 On the ‘ymage of mortalitie’, see pp. 179–85 below. 27 Kessler, Sixteenth Century Journal 43:1 (2012), 19–45. 28 Kessler. Likewise the witch’s False Florimell, and Archimago’s displacing Guyon with Braggadocchio. In Book 1 Archimago-Duessa-Sansboys versus Arthur-Una-Fidelia-CharissaContemplation-tree/well; in Book 2 Mammon and Acrasia versus the Cupidlike angel and Palmer’s rod; in Book 3 Malecasta-witch-Busirane versus Merlin-Diana-Venus; in Book 4 Ate versus Cambina-Venus; in Book 5 Isis, etc. 29 See B. McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism (New York: Crossroads Press, 1998), 395–418. 30 Book 1’s analogous hierarchy (Redcrosse-Una-Dwarf, 1.1.1–6), fulfilled in the hierarchic pageant of liberated Eden, is an image of immortality. 31 Sansloy’s incivility in Medina’s house acutely shrinks his role in Book 1: ‘He that faire Una late fowle outraged’ (2.2.18). Spenser could have sustained the theological symbolism by having Sansloy, not farcical Braggadocchio, threaten to rape Belphoebe (2.3), but Book 2 concerns natural honour more than spiritual salvation. Maintaining Sansloy in Book 2 (Archimago in 2, 3; Duessa in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) shows all the quests as part of a spiritual struggle, but in constricting perspectives. On the changing significance of these characters in accord with the poem’s Christian-Platonic sequence of virtues, see pp. 220–6 below. 32 On Renaissance views of choler as the most pernicious passion, see L. Campbell, Tragic

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Heroes: Slaves of Passion (rept New York: Barnes & Noble, 1959), 175–84; J.W. Draper, The Humors & Shakespeare’s Characters (Duke University Press, 1945), ch. 4; W. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 267–70; G.K. Paster, Humoring the Body (University of Chicago, 2004). See n. 93 below. 33 Phedon’s obscene jealousy seems to have influenced many of Shakespeare’s plays, especially Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. 34 Spenser depicts no privileged male as phlegmatic, only a ‘losel’ of ‘baser brest’ like Braggadocchio. In contrast, Shakespeare has many privileged phlegmatics: wittily indulgent Falstaff, silly Sir Andrew, lethargic Cleopatra – all showing Shakespeare’s playfully ironic inversions of Galenism. 35 Prudentius’ trope of moral warfare lures poets to view all moral struggle as violent conflict; Erasmus warns in Handbook of the Militant Christian that the trope evokes unChristlike and misogynist behaviour. 36 See Kessler, ‘Guyon’s Faint and the Elizabethan Soteriological Debate’. 37 This fundamental point is wonderfully illustrated by Filipczak’s Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women. 38 See ‘Epicurus and Christianity’, The Cambridge History of Philosophy. 39 See D. Trevor, The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2004), ‘Sadness in The Faerie Queene’, 47–62; L. Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (Michigan State College Press, 1951); B.G. Lyons, Voices of Melancholy (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971) University Press. 40 Compare the complementary learning experience in each house’s three stages. The ‘fleshly slime’ and sweaty kitchen of Alma’s Castle match the ‘purgative’ stage of Redcrosse’s mystic training, subjecting the body to penance, ‘proud humours to abate’, a mortification that prepares for illuminative charity and contemplative union with God. Each stage in the House of Holiness enforces an immense inner change in Redcrosse and, sympathetically, in Una. 41 See D.L. Miller’s discussion of ‘Alma’s Nought’ in ch. 4 of The Poem’s Two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1988). 42 L.C.T. Forest, ‘A Caveat for Critics against Invoking Elizabethan Psychology’, PMLA 61 (1946), 652, properly denies consistency in Renaissance physiology-psychology, as a glance at the disparate humoralism of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson shows. None the less, this tetradic division of psychic motives, with correspondences throughout the Chain of Being, provides as much consistency as any modern psychology. On the provenance of Shakespeare’s humoralism, see F.D. Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (University of Delaware Press, 1992), 71–116; O. Temkin, Galenism (Cornell University Press, 1973). On pseudo-humours, see nn. 99–100, below. 43 Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes, 112–13; Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters, 67–8, 84; cf. Babb, The Elizabethan Malady, 106–10; Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, 77–112; B.O. States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 63–86, 183–4. Draper, despite scores of humoral insights, often assumed a rigid physiological determinism of character – minimising the capacity for affectation or witty reversal of temper; see Stratford to Dogberry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961), 157–63. But in the final chapters of his best work, The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters, he insightfully explains ‘balanced and mercurial’, ‘counterfeit’, and ‘changing’ humours. Campbell, by stressing one passional perturbation in each tragedy (Hamlet-grief; Othello-jealousy; Learwrath; Macbeth-fear), also obscures holistic psychology. Hamlet apparently enjoyed mirthful sanguinity (2.2.6–10, 296ff; 3.1.160) until Claudius’ primal sin fragmented the prince into all distempers: choleric fury, phlegmatic delay, melancholic despair. Lear, instead of focusing simply on wrath or choler, carries the fragmentation of kingly ‘all-humours’ to its absolute limit. 44 Bunny’s critique of R. Parson’s A Booke of Christian Exercise (London, 1585), cited by P.H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1953), 284–5. Cf. Primaudaye, The French Academie (London, 1615), Book II.22–4, 65, 67, 77, 100; T. Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586; facs. rpt New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), chs 9–10,

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12; T. Wright, The Passions of the Minde [1601] (University of Illinois Press, 1971), Books 2–3. 45 For the ancient privileging of melancholy as a basis for contemplation, renewed by Ficino and others, see Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy; W. Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991). The vogue for melancholy between the publication of Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie (1586) and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), crucially bearing on Shakespeare’s tragic period, especially Hamlet, is discussed by Babb, The Elizabethan Malady, and Lyons, Voices of Melancholy. But melancholy should not be decontextualized from holistic humoralism, as the Henriad confirms. 46 C.H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, eds, Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–52), wrongly hold that Jonson was unique in making humour characters ‘the sole function of the plot’ (I, 343). Cf. Y. Yamada, ‘Shakespeare’s Humour Plays’, Shakespeare Studies (Tokyo) 21 (1982– 83), 35–64. 47 Jonson does not specify these humours and affections. Eight unruly males, wearing red, are chastened by eight female spirits who descend in white (Hymenaei [1606], in Ben Jonson, VII, 203–41; X, 465–82). 48 On joy, sorrow, hope, fear as the major passions, see R. Soellner, ‘The Four Primary Passions: A Renaissance Theory Reflected in the Works of Shakespeare’, SP 55 (1958), 549–67. For their connection to the humoral tempers, see Batman vppon Bartholome, His Book De Proprietatibus Rerum (London, 1582), fols 29–33; Primaudaye, The French Academie, II.39–59, esp. 44–6; Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 80–101; Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 59–66; N. Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, trans. E. Grimeston (London, 1621), 31: ‘Pleasure, Paine, Hope, & Feare: … these foure haue as it were the Empiry ouer all the rest.’ Primaudaye finds ‘no affection … not intermingled with some grief or else with some joy’ (466), and he matches joy with sanguinity, sorrow with melancholy (II.41, 44). Hope becomes choler in facing obstacles to goodness (Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, 507–74; Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 83–4). Phlegmatism’s link with fear and desire is commonplace: The School of Salernum, trans. Sir J. Harington (New York: Hoeber, 1920), 138–9; Batman vppon Bartholome, fol. 32; Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 78; T. Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors (London, 1631), 124. All passions form a causal chain springing from primal Love and Hate (Primaudaye, The French Academie, II.39–59; Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, chs 15–16; Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 59–66; Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, 29–51, 152–215ff). 49 J. Schäfer, Wort und Begriff ‘Humour’ in der Elisabethanischen Komödie (Münster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1966), 14–15 (trans. mine; cf. 83–4). On humours’ cyclic evolution (and analogous stages of wine fermenting, parodied by Falstaff, 2H4 4.3.90–125), see Batman vppon Bartholome, fol. 29: ‘By sethinge, bloud is bred of f1eame’; ‘bloud is made cholar, by great heate drieng’; ‘by burning of cholar in lyke manner Melancholia is made’. Cf. Galen, On the Natural Faculties (London: Heinemann, 1916), 208–9; Elyot, The Castel of Helthe (1539; facs. rpt New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1937), sig. iii. 50 Following Galen, many treatises reverse the sequence of ‘cold’ tempers, placing phlegmatism last (corresponding with night, winter, senility); see E. Schaner, Das Viererschema in der Antiken Humoralpathologie (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1964), 87–92; Schäfer, Wort und Begriff ‘Humour’, 14–17. The School of Salernum, 128–41, gives the indignity of last place to melancholy, underscoring Aristotle’s paradox; as do Elyot, The Castel of Helthe, fols 37–40; Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions [1565] (London, 1633), 139, 86, 135; and Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters, 1213, 19, 22–3, 30, 49, 63–4. 51 Kate’s reversal is not simply from male choler to female phlegmatism; rather she learns to shape her inner fire into a mode of sanguinity, anticipating Beatrice and Cleopatra, who belie humoral stereotyping by gender. Scholars tend to agree with Campbell in seeing Hamlet as ‘clearly … of the sanguine humour’ but changed to melancholy through ‘excessive grief ’ (Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes, 112–13). Cf. States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character, 183–4, 190; Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters, ch. 6; Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, 78. 52 The Q1 title of King Lear includes Edgar’s ‘assumed humour of Tom of Bedlam’. Prince Hal likewise assumes the humours of the vulgar poor: ‘I am sworn brother to a leash of drawers

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and can call them all by their christen names …. I am now of all humours’ (1H4 2.4.6–8ff, 92). On Rosalind’s character as concordia discors, see M.B. Beckman, ‘The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It’, SQ29 (1978), 44–51. 53 Elyot, The Castel of Helthe, fol. 8. 54 Walkington, The Optick Glasse, 111. On blood as supreme humour, cf. Batman vppon Bartholome, fols 29–31; Primaudaye, The French Academie, II.66–8; Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 69–84; Camporesi, Juice of Life, 80ff. On joy as the supreme, plenary passion, see Primaudaye, The French Academie, II.44–6; Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 97–9; Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 59–60; Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, 244–96. The inferior humours reside in outlying organs (choler in gall, melancholy in spleen, phlegm in kidneys or stomach), while blood attains spirited plenitude in the sunlike heart. See Primaudaye, The French Academie; The Purple Island, in The Poetical Works of Giles and Phineas Fletcher, ed. F.S. Boas (Cambridge University Press, 1909), II, 37–44; Camporesi, Juice of Life. 55 Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, passim. 56 Galen’s association of phlegmatic with female, choleric with male, established a physiological-psychological basis for the subjection of woman; see nn. 68 and 70, below. In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, especially after Jonson, phlegmatism is also the temper of gulls, reinforcing its derogatory connotations. Shakespeare’s portraits of phlegmatism as an ideal womanly temper are pointedly ironic stereotypes: sweet and accommodating Luciana, Bianca, Hero, Celia, and Octavia serve as foils to those feisty women who aspire to choler and sanguinity: Adriana, Kate, Beatrice, Rosalind, and above all Cleopatra (‘I am fire and air’). In so doing they aspire to wholeness, the capacity to exercise all humours, passions, tempers effectively. 57 U.C. Knoepflmacher, ‘The Humors as Symbolic Nucleus in Henry IV, Part I’, CE 24 (1963), 497ff. 58 The four central epigrams of The School of Salernum initiate my analyses of the major characters of 1 Henry IV. Knoepflmacher, noting Henry’s rebuke of Hotspur (1H4, 1.3) – recalling Bolingbroke’s angry encounters in Richard II – suggests choler as Henry’s core temper. But his chilling wrath never shows the rash fury that is Hotspur’s native element. 59 ‘Radical moisture’ signifies mutable bodily substance (passional, generative). ‘Innate heat’, focusing its spirits in the heart, signifies activating force (sublimating, potentially destructive). See Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. M.T. May (Cornell University Press, 1968), I.52, 292; II.630; Aristotle, Parts of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (1937; rpt Harvard University Press, 1955), 265 (III.vii.670a); Lemnius, The Touchstone, 61–73, 97–134; Primaudaye, The French Academie, 523–37; Walkington, Optick Glasse, 62–6. See Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare, 99–101; Paster, Body Embarrassed, 74–82. 60 Quoted by Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia, 37. 61 The Problems of Aristotle, XXX.i, as quoted in Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 18–29. Schiesari explains how the Renaissance sages viewed males, but not females, as mentally empowered through lack, The Gendering of Melancholy University Press, 96–159. 62 Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 15–41; Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia, 9–38. Cf. Babb, The Elizabethan Malady, 21–72; Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, 1–16. 63 A Treatie of Warres, st. 25, in F. Greville, The Poems and Dramas, ed. G. Bullough (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939). Cf. T. McAlindon, ‘Coriolanus: An Essentialist Tragedy’, RES ns 44 (1993), 502–20. 64 Lemnius, The Touchstone, 160. 65 Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 94. 66 According to Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1932; rpt New York: Vintage, 1977), 401–2 (I.3.1.3), ‘this adustion of choler and melancholy’, which is ‘most violent’, and seemingly demon-possessed, commonly ‘degenerates into madness’. Cf. Elyot, The Castel of Helthe, fol. 73; Lemnius, The Touchstone, 148; Primaudaye, The French Academie, 533–4; Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 32–3; Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 33–7, 84–91. 67 Cf. Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters, 30ff; Knoepflmacher, ‘The Humors as Symbolic Nucleus’, 498–9.

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68 On woman as phlegmatic, man as choleric, see Galen, Opera Omnia, ed. C.G. Kuhn (Leipzig, 1821–33), IX, 107, 109; IV, 624, 631. The misogynist subtext persists in the Renaissance: the phlegmatic ‘doth sonest digresse into another grosse cold nature’, tending to be ‘dull of wit’, ‘forgetfull’, ‘drowsie headed’, ‘dull of conceit’, ‘fearfull’, ‘faint hearted, most subject to impostumes’ (Batman vppon Bartholome, fol. 32; Lemnius, The Touchstone, 100–6, 172–90; Walkington, The Optick Glasse, 124; School of Salernum, 138). Cf. Schoner, Das Viererschema in der Antiken Humoralpathologie, 91–3; I. Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge University Press, 1980), 28–44; Camporesi, Juice of Life, 33. 69 M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (MIT Press, 1968). See V. Traub, ‘Prince Hal’s Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body’, SQ 40 (1989), 456–74; W.H. Auden, ‘The Prince’s Dog’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962), 195–6; C. Kahn, Man’s Estate (University of California Press, 1981), 72–3; S. Hawkins, ‘Falstaff as Mom’, unpublished paper at 1977 MLA; P. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies (London: Methuen, 1987), 20–2. J. Goldberg sees Falstaff ’s feminizing as repressed homosexism, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford University Press, 1992), 145–75. 70 Batman vppon Bartholome, fol. 32. Elyot associates phlegmatism and sanguinity in physical substance (body fat, hair, urine, sweat, blood). But cold phlegm’s superfluity and unrefinement lead to torpor; warm sanguinity’s energy and rational control enhance colour, wakefulness, passion, pulse, wit, and livelier dreams (The Castel of Helthe, ch. 2). 71 Mark Rose compares Falstaff and Francis, Shakespearean Design (Harvard University Press, 1972), 50–9. 72 The pillow signifies idleness and lechery. See E. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer (Princeton University Press, 1943), I, 71; II, 27, figs 98, 103; Studies in Iconology (1939; rpt New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 88, fig. 65. 73 Falstaff ’s copia utterly flout decorum: amplifying with scurrilous comparisons, arousing immoral affections, distorting truth, he abuses all Erasmus’ precepts (De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, 1512) and its imitators – Wilson (1553), Rainold (1563), Ascham (1570), Peacham (1593). See M. Doran, Endeavors of Art (University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), 24–52. 74 Falstaff ’s character transcends simple cowardice as much as simplistic phlegmatism. See M. Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (London, 1777); E.E. Stoll, Shakespeare Studies, 2nd ed. (1942; rpt New York: Unger, 1960), 415–24; J.D. Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge University Press, 1944), 43–56, 82–93. Does Hal’s calling Falstaff a ‘sanguine coward’ (1H4 2.4.239–40) indicate a combined sanguinity and phlegmatism? a consummate cowardice? a parody of sanguinity? 75 On the pleasures of Bacchus and Venus as sanguine norm, see Salerno’s ‘Sanguine Man’ (fig.  6, above). Cf. Lemnius, The Touchstone, 158–9, 162–3, 168–72; Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 98–100, 176; Walkington, Optick Glasse, 50–61, 117. See 1H4 1.3.2–12, 189ff; 2.2.5–6, 30; 2.4.151–2, 276ff, 358ff, 442ff, 529ff; 3.3.13ff, 152ff; 5.3.50ff. 76 Many have speculated on Falstaff ’s temper. S.A. Small, ‘The Reflective Element in Falstaff ’, SAB 14 (1939), 139ff, describes his ‘melancholic’ intellect. R.E. Sims, ‘The Green Old Age of Falstaff ’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 13 (1943), 144–57, finds him mainly choleric, feigning sanguinity but needing to accept the melancholy of old age. Draper justly sees him as phlegmatic ‘under a cover of the assumed disguise of choler’ (The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters, 113) – and, I would add, of melancholy and sanguinity. 77 1H4 1.2.72–96, 148–53; 2.4.130–1, 328–9, 379–413; 3.3.1–15, 165–74, 190–2; 5.1.125–40, 4.143–4, 160–3. 78 In Shallow’s drunken revels (2H4 5.3), ‘merry’ and its derivatives recur sixteen times. Pistol, fusing Arthurian legend and scripture, sublimates the mood into ‘golden joys’ and ‘happy news of price’. Falstaff consummates the sanguine fantasy: England is at his ‘commandment’ as messiah-king; ‘Blessed are they that have been my friends.’ 79 On the tempers’ spiritual potential, matching the four evangelists, see Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 366–73.

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80 L. Levin, ‘Hotspur, Falstaff, and the Emblem of Wrath in 1 Henry IV’, ShakS 10 (1977), 43–65. 81 Lemnius, The Touchstone, 141, 144, 159–60. 82 Walkington, The Optick Glasse, 158. 83 Lemnius, The Touchstone, 59–60. 84 Walkington, The Optick Glasse, 151; cf. Lemnius, The Touchstone, 141. Cf. Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia, 32–8. On the spiritualized complexions as a ‘sacred tetrad’ (four apostles with Christ at centre and John as sanguine link with Christ), see Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, 366–73, pl. 80. 85 Lemnius, The Touchstone, 171–2. 86 Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 64–112; Camporesi, Juice of Life, 98. 87 On Falstaff as Hal’s projective substitute for his own appetites, see R.N. Watson, Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (Harvard University Press, 1984), 65–70. 88 1H4 1.2.157–84; 2.2.92–110, 4.2.88–91, 276ff; 2H4 2.4.297ff; 4.3.115ff, 5.1l1, 169 ff; 5.1.76–84, 2.60–1, 108–45, 5.48–65; Epi1.26–7; H5 1.2.266–97; 4.3.60–3, 8.126; 5.2.3–8, 12, 186–8. 89 Lemnius, Touchstone, 155. 90 Batman vppon Bartholome, fol. 31; Walkington, Optick Glasse, p. 118. 91 See P.A. Gottschalk, ‘Hal and the “Play Extempore” in 1 Henry IV’, TSLL 15 (1974), 605–14. 92 Batman vppon Bartholome, fols 32–33. 93 On kingly choler in Henry IV, see Knoepflmacher, ‘The Humors as Symbolic Nucleus’, 497–501, and S. Hawkins, ‘Virtue and Kingship in Shakespeare’s Henry IV’ ELR 5 (1975), 313–43. On Henry V’s apotheosis through war, see Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters, 45, 58–9; on Lear’s ‘noble anger’ (via Ficino), see W.R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (1966; rpt Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 275ff. Kate’s view of Hotspur’s ‘humours of blood’ as ‘the mark and glass, copy and book, / That fashioned others” (2H4 2.3.30–2) is deeply biased. Renaissance censures of anger are listed by Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes, 175–84, and Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 267–70. 94 Batman vppon Bartholome, fol. 33; Walkington, Optick Glasse, 126, 130–2. 95 S. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), SE, 14, 239–61. 96 In contrast to Hal, his father fails to ‘ebb’ – either in sleep, holiday retreat, or humble selfabasement. Clarence compares the King’s mind with the English floods: ‘The river hath thrice flowed, no ebb between’ (2H4 4.4.125): Henry’s anxious passions have no respite. As comic foil to this sovereign temper, Falstaff ’s passions, governed by the moon, flow unrestrainedly: ‘now in as low an ebb as the foot of the ladder and by and by in as high a flow as the ridge of the gallows’ (1H4 1.2.36–8). 97 ‘Nosce Teipsum’, 1333–56, in The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. R. Kreuger (Clarendon, 1975). 98 Falstaff is associated with the moon, Hotspur with Mars, Henry and Hal with the sun (though Henry’s sun is ‘bloody’ and ‘distemp’rate’). Knoepflmacher, generally accurate on humoral astrology but overlooking Henry’s association with the sun, connects him, like the rebel leaders, with the short, precocious career of comets (1H4 3.2.46–59). Cf. J. Hoyle, ‘Some Emblems in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Plays’, ELH 38 (1971), 512–27. 99 Jonson’s pseudo-humours appear after, perhaps in response to, the normative humours of 1 Henry IV (1596–97). If Merry Wives was composed in 1597, then even the pseudo-humoral satire springs from Shakespeare. Only in Every Man in His Humour (1598) did Jonson exploit a simulacrum of Galenism (using character-contrasts like those of 1 Henry IV): old Knowell’s melancholy versus young Knowell ‘s prodigal sanguinity; Kitely and Cob’s irate choler versus the phlegmatic gullibility of Stephen and Matthew; and Justice Clement’s madcap mirth a higher sanguinity reconciling all tempers. J.A. Riddell, ‘The Evolution of the Humours Character in Seventeenth-Century English Comedy’, diss., University of Southern California, 1966, 48–71, correctly explains the ‘genuine humors’ in Every Man in His Humour, except for omitting young Knowell’s immature sanguinity. In Jonson’s subsequent comedies, humour is ‘almost exclusively affectation or eccentricity’ (H.L. Snuggs, ‘The Comic Humours: A New Interpretation’, PMLA 62 (1947), 114–22). Cf. J.D. Redwine, ‘Beyond Psychology: The Moral Basis of Jonson’s Theory of Humour Characterization’, ELH 28 (1961), 316–34; R. Shenk, ‘The Habits of Ben Jonson’s Humours’, JMRS 8 (1978), 115–36.

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100 On pseudo-humours culminating in Jonson, see C.R. Baskerville, English Elements in Jonson’s Early Comedy (1911; rpt New York: Gordian Press, 1967), 34–75; Schäfer, Wort und Begriff ‘Humour’; W. Green, ‘Humours Characters and Attributive Names in Shakespeare’s Plays’, Names 20 (1972), 157–65. 101 See Green, ‘Humours Characters and Attributive Names’, 163. To Draper, Nym is a cowardly phlegmatic posing as choleric avenger (‘The Humor of Corporal Nym’, SAB 13 [1938], 131–8). 102 B. Hardy, Dramatic Quicklyisms (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1979), 87–121, 383–439. 103 Sarrazin suggests that the ‘urShakespearean’ portrayal of Nym in The Merry Wives of Windsor, his jerky manner and doltish obsession with ‘humour’, parodies Jonson’s early dramatic style in the humour comedies of 1598–99 (‘Nym und Ben Jonson,’ ShakJ 40 (1904), 213–22). But if Merry Wives (perhaps in Ur-forrn) was a command performance for Garter Day of 1597, then compositional haste may account for the crude portrayal of ‘irregular humoralists’, and Shakespeare’s parody of his own humoralism may thus precede Jonson’s humoral satires. On dating Merry Wives relative to the Henriad, see W. Green, Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (Princeton University Press, 1962); The Merry Wives of Windsor, Arden, ed. H.J. Oliver (London: Methuen, 1971), lxiii–lxv; J.A. Roberts, Shakespeare’s English Comedy: ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in Context (University of Nebraska Press, 1979); G. Melchiori, Shakespeare’s Garter Plays: Edward III to Merry Wives of Windsor (University of Delaware Press, 1994); G. Tiffany, ‘Falstaff ’s False Staff: “Jonsonian” Asexuality in The Merry Wives of Windsor’, CompD 26 (1992), 254–70. 104 The prediction that Falstaff will ‘die of a sweat’ (2H4 Epi.28) recalls his discomfiture in the robbery (‘Falstaff sweats to death/ And lards the lean earth’, 1H4 2.2.107–8) and anticipates war’s toll on his corpulence. Lemnius notes the ‘English sweat’ caused by overeating, so the English ‘almost daily … drink Malmesey or Sacke, to comfort and restore their Stomackes when they be quasie or surcharged with excesse of sundry curious dishes’ (The Touchstone, 165). Cf. Hardy, Dramatic Quicklyisms, 395–401. 105 Hal’s hasty claiming of the crown suggests eagerness for his father’s power (2H4 4.5.60–79, 92–116; cf. 1H4 3.2.4ff, 122–8); from Hotspur Hal vows to appropriate ‘every glory, … or I will tear the reckoning from his heart’ (1H4 3.2.132–52); though never affirming Falstaff ’s vaunts, the prince clearly delights in his playful ‘spirits’. 106 On Hal’s forming a ‘corporate self ’, see A. Barton, ‘The King Disguised: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Comical History’, The Triple Bond, ed. J.G. Price (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 92–117. Cf. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. 107 See Schäfer, Wort und Begriff ‘Humour’, 14–15. 108 Cassius, before corrupting the sanguine Brutus, states the maxim with tragic irony: ‘Therefore it is meet / That noble minds keep ever with their likes; / For who so firm that cannot be seduced?’ (JC1.2.310–12; cf. 1.2.192ff). 109 J. Candido and C.R. Forker, Henry V: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1983). 110 J.B. Altman, ‘“Vile Participation”: The Amplification of Violence in the Theater of Henry V’, SQ 42 (1991), 1–32. 111 Henry IV, Part I, ed. M. Mack (New York: New American Library, 1965), xxvii–xxxi. 112 Watson, Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition, 57–75, explains Falstaff, Hal, and Henry as Freudian id, ego, and superego, oddly omitting Hotspur. Since Freud’s metapsychology devalued the id as a fountain of instinctual pleasure (Falstaff), he did not envision id forming a nobler but more dangerous power of ‘superid’ (Hotspur). Jung’s instinct, reason, passion, and intuition aptly match Falstaff, Henry, Hotspur, and Hal. This tetrad closely parallels the four creatures (Blake’s ‘zoas’) surrounding the throne of God (Ezek. 1, Rev. 4). Shakespeare’s humoral scheme begs comparison with such epic metapsychologies.

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Depicting intellect: ‘Experience, though noon auctoritee’

Spenser’s authoritative rationality: Alma’s formal castle tour Of the many ‘allegorical centres’ in The Faerie Queene, one takes special interest in Alma’s Castle, for along with its spiritual parallel, the House of Holinesse, it posits human identity more comprehensively than the poem’s other houses and gardens. Analyses of this elaborate castle of the body have, however, misconstrued ‘Renaissance psychology’ by assuming the hegemony of Aristotelian faculty psychology, neglecting the vitality of Platonic psychology in the Renaissance, especially in Spenser. In a meticulous, ground-breaking analysis of Alma’s Castle, Harry Berger, Jr, in The Allegorical Temper (1957) stressed ‘the Aristotelean-Thomist psychology which Alma’s house embodies’; and, though Jerry Mills moved away from this exclusively Aristotelian reading, there is still a need to clarify the castle’s essential form and the identity of its principal occupants.1 Does Spenser in Alma’s Castle follow Plato’s simple hierarchy (lower appetites in belly, higher ‘spirited’ passion in heart, and reason in brain); or is the castle based on Aristotle’s more complicated faculty psychology (vegetable principle in belly and loins, animal principle in both heart’s affections and head’s sensitive faculties, rational principle operating throughout the castle, but closely associated with the heart)? Spenser’s image of the natural body, by far the most complex and carefully structured in the long history of the figurative castle, is a remarkable synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian systems. Its essential frame (as seen in the arithmological stanza, 2.9.22) honours the Platonic hierarchy, a mystical scheme that is analogous to the three levels of the House of Holiness. Within this ideal framework, however, Spenser’s castle incorporates much of Aristotle’s system as well – in the proliferation of lower ‘nutritive’ parts, in the heart’s dichotomy of pleasant–painful emotions, and in the diversity of rational activity.2 In order to understand Spenser’s integration of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas into a scheme which is broader than both, we must focus on the location and functioning of the rational principle. We cannot concur with Berger’s Aristotelian reading of the three sages and their brain-turret as merely ‘the apprehensive part of the sensitive power’, that is, as subrational agents; nor can we agree that the powers of intellect itself (which Aristotle views as noncorporeal) ‘are not represented in Alma’s Castle’.3 How then do we interpret the sages in their watch-

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tower, or Alma herself, and her two protector-knights, as aspects of reason in the castle? To begin with the most abstract debate sparked by Plato and Aristotle, did Spenser view the rational power as integrated with the working of bodily organs, especially the brain’s three ‘inner wits’? Next, did he locate the rational principle at the top or centre of the body, head or heart? Finally, to move from metaphysics to metaphor, did medieval allegory depict the rational soul’s highest aspect as a virginal passive female like Alma, or as an active male protector like Arthur and Guyon? Consider the background for conceiving the three sages’ activities in the brain. Plato in Timaeus described the head as set apart from the lower body by the ‘isthmus of the neck’ in order to be the seat of the most godlike part of man. Within this circular abode he saw divine reason as mysteriously mixed with the corporeal operations of the brain (though he did not distinguish the functioning of inner wits):4 but Aristotle, rejecting this mystical union, dissociated the rational power from the corporeal functioning of the inner wits in the brain, which he termed sensitive faculties, a view confirmed by Avicenna, and equivocally by Aquinas, in the Middle Ages.5 This distinction persists in many Renaissance treatises. In Nosce Teipsum Sir John Davies (like Davies of Hereford, Coeffeteau, Wright, and de Mornay) insists ‘that the Soul is a thing subsisting by itself without the Body’, that wit and will ‘use not the body when they use their skill.’6 Many other medieval and Renaissance philosophers, however, argued the contrary view. Pierre Charron says that ‘the reasonable Soule is organicall’, and ‘the instrument of the reasonable Soule, is the braine’. Likewise, Huarte, Bright, Walkington, and Bacon argue that corporeality must have a definite association with man’s rational soul in this life;7 and they join Vicary, Primaudaye, Forset, Du Laurens, Charron, Crooke, Burton, and Batman in seating divine reason in the head.8 Moreover, many philosophical and medical treatises identify the inner wits, or at least the central one (termed ‘reason’, ‘understanding’, or ‘judgment’) as man’s immortal reason, in accordance with their functioning and their privileged lodging in the head.9 The more limiting view of Spenser’s three sages, as merely the sensitive or animal powers of Aristotelian psychology, is forcefully argued by Berger: as instruments of practical reason, the sages are ‘fundamentally passive to the data they receive’; they are dependent on a higher, active, and more strictly rational power which, Berger says, is missing in Alma’s Castle.10 This view of the inner wits as subrational appears in Davies’s Nosce Teipsum, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and Fletcher’s The Purple Island, where the three wits are Common Sense, Phantasy, and Memory.11 In contrast to this Aristotelian conception, however, Spenser selects the nobler trio of Imagination, an unnamed wit of Judgment, and Memory; and like Huarte, Du Laurens, Charron, Boaistuau, Bright, and Bacon, Spenser describes the wits as ‘powers of the reasonable soul’.12 Spenser’s first wit, Phantastes, whose operations embrace Common Sense, Imaginatio, and even Imaginativa,13 uses his ‘sharp foresight and working wit’ to produce and play with an unending stream of p ­ hantasms. The involvement of human reason in this process is indi-

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cated by the moral ­implications of his productions: ‘idle thoughts and fantasies … l­easings, tales, and lies’ (2.9.51). That the imaginative power of the first wit partakes of reason and thus surpasses the corresponding power in beasts is argued at length by Du Laurens; and Bacon goes even further, associating the work of this wit with ‘Poesy’ and allowing that ‘in matters of faith and religion our imagination raises itself above our reason’ (that is, above the power of the middle wit), since divine grace uses it as ‘an instrument of illumination’.14 Though imagination’s role in the natural body (Alma’s Castle) is highly corruptible, Spenser has shown its exalted functioning in the House of Holiness, where it gives Contemplation access to spiritual truth – implying that even the natural functioning of P ­ hantastes, dependent on sense impressions, is part of the rational process. Even more definitively, Spenser’s middle sage partakes of that illuminating power of reason which makes the phantasms intelligible. He cannot be reduced to the philosophers’ definitions of ‘sensible reason’ (Bartholomaeus), ‘cogitatio’ or ‘extimativa’ (Avicenna), ‘particular reason’ (Aquinas), or even Langland’s broad notion of ‘kynde Wit’.15 Spenser’s unnamed middle sage deliberates not simply on the intentiones of things, and not simply on the ‘ultimate particulars’ (the object of Aquinas’s particular reason); rather, he contemplates the paintings and ‘picturals’   Of Magistrates, of courts, of tribunals,   Of commen wealthes, of states, of pollicy,   Of lawes, of iudgements, and of decretals;   All artes, all science, all Philosophy, And all that in the world was aye thought wittily.

(2.9.53)

The pictures of the first three lines are objects of what Aristotle calls ‘politics or practical wisdom’, and the final two lines expand the field of vision to what he calls art, applied science, and even theoretical wisdom, in so far as these truths can be learned by abstraction from sense data.16 Like the great thinkers of Antiquity, this middle sage performs the highest work of natural reason (ratio), illuminating the phantasms in order to attain this political or practical wisdom, ‘a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for men’.17 Arthur and Guyon acknowledge his rational identity: Great pleasure had those stranger knights, to see His goodly reason, and graue personage, That his disciples both desir’d to bee.

(2.9.54)

Similarly, for Du Laurens this middle power ‘maketh things sensible, vniversall, discourseth, gathereth conclusions, reasoneth from the effects to the causes, and from the beginnings, euen to the middest, and so to the ends and issues of things’; and likewise for Bacon, the work of this middle wit (‘reason’) is ‘Philosophy’.18

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Finally, the ‘immortall scrine’ of Spenser’s third wit, Eumnestes, also exem­ plifies an aspect of the rational power. Du Laurens’s description is again instructive: This is that rich treasurie, which incloseth within one only inner roome all the sciences, and what else soeuer hath passed since the creation of the world, which lodgeth euerything in his seuerall place, not shufling them vp disorderly together, which obserueth time, circumstances and order …: for beasts haue likewise a certaine kinde of memorie, but they cannot call to minde the time, order and circumstances, this cannot be accomplished without a Syllogisme.

Bacon likewise designates its work as ‘History’, ‘concerned with individuals, … circumscribed by place and time’.19 According to Bacon, only the middle wit rises above particulars; but though the workings of the middle sage are tempered by disabilities of the other two sages – one overly youthful and the other decrepit – it is clear that Spenser, like Bacon, Du Laurens, Huarte, and others, considers the diverse temporal operations of these three powers as the work of ratio. In keeping with the sages’ identity as natural reason, Kellogg and Steele, and then more elaborately Mills, note that the sages form the ‘allegory of prudence’,20 as Primaudaye explains: Moral philosophers attributed three eies to this vertue of Prudence, namelie, Memorie, Vnderstanding, and Prouidence: which three things Cicero calleth the parts of Prudence. With the first she beholdeth the time past: with the second the time present: with the third, the time to come.

He concludes that ‘Prudence … is the guide and light of all the morall vertues, from whence all good and noble actions haue their being and beginning’.21 Mills, like Kellogg and Steele, formulates a compromise between the conflicting views of the sages: ‘On one level Alma’s counselors symbolize the usual components of faculty psychology, but on an ethical level they assert the importance of rational virtue as guide and mentor of the psychological process’; hence, ‘in its higher faculties the sensitive soul overlaps with the ratio’.22 This synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, such that reason is intimately connected with the organical working of the brain, was in fact formulated by Galen and assumed by much of the medical tradition; it is close to Aquinas’s thought on the matter, and is echoed by Renaissance philosophers. Charron, for example, says, ‘the Soule exercises what we call the Sensitive and Rational faculties more peculiarly in the Brain’.23 We must, however, go beyond this synthesis in emphasizing that, for Spenser, the operations of the three wits distinctly symbolize the process of ratio, and that this identity subsumes or even obviates their working as animal or sensitive faculties. They are not merely passive instruments, for Spenser likens their powers and attainments to those of the greatest minds of ­Classical Antiquity (2.9.48). To appreciate the potential of these powers in the brain-turret, one must compare them with the corresponding three aspects of vision at the summit of the House of Holiness. Spenser’s allusion to the visionary experiences of Moses on Sinai, Christ on the Mount of Olives, and the poet on Parnassus (1.10.53–4) suggests a

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transcendental rendering of the past-present-future allegory of the three sages – though in reverse order! The power latent in each sage is transformed and consummately fulfilled within the holy condition of man’s mystical body: the chronicles of Eumnestes are a pale replica of Moses’ vision of sacred history and severe law governing the chosen race; the ‘goodly reason’ of the middle sage becomes the incarnate Logos, Christ himself, preparing himself for crucifixion; and the scattershot projections of Phantastes become the spiritual visions of the poet who is enabled through contemplation to scale Parnassus. Christ, like the middle sage, is the central and fulfilling image in this intellectual unfolding; but the tutelage of Heavenly Contemplation also brings out the transcendent possibilities of the compelling figure of Phantastes, who expends himself so dynamically and wastefully in the first chamber of the brain, as he looks downward to the sense impressions of the natural order. Such a downward perspective makes him, in Spenser’s view, the most uncontrolled and unreliable of the three powers, a mere initiator of ratio, who indeed misuses his considerable powers on ‘leasings, tales, and lies’. But when the mind is humbled, chastened, and turned upward to transcendental reality, the imaginative power becomes the third and culminating flower of man’s intellectual vision, able by grace to express ‘the vertue of God … in image, in figure’ (Batman uppon Bartholome, II.ix): for, as Aquinas testifies, ‘sometimes … the phantasms in the human imagination are divinely formed, so as to express divine things better than those do which we receive from sensible things, as appears in prophetic visions’ (ST 1.12.13). Thus, the only difference between the sages in their tower and Heavenly Contemplation on his mountain is in the direction of vision, for both exemplify the power of reason. As Aquinas says, citing Augustine: ‘the higher reason is that which is intent on the contemplation and consultation of things eternal’, whereas the lower reason ‘is intent on the disposal of temporal things’.24 Hence, within the castle of the natural body, Spenser’s three sages represent the working of the rational power, following Plato’s scheme, rather than being merely sensitive faculties, following Aristotle. Spenser’s essential Platonism is also confirmed by considering whether the rational principle is located in head or heart. Aristotle’s divergence from the simple Platonic tripartism was compounded by his assertion that the supreme sense organ was the heart: all sanguineous animals have the supreme organ of sense-faculties in the heart, for it is here that we must look for the common sensorium belonging to all the senseorgans …. if the life is always located in this part, evidently the principle of sensation must be situated there too.25

Despite the anatomical findings of the Alexandrian school, Avicenna, though with some equivocation, transmitted to the Middle Ages the A ­ ristotelian view that the essential, ruling organ of the body was the heart, which was therefore assumed by many to be the soul’s preferred seat.26 This view is reflected in numerous render-

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ings of the figurative castle of the body, whether in love lyric or lengthy allegory. Lady Anima in Langland’s Castle of Kynde resides primarily in the heart; Chaucer, in The Book of the Duchess, affirms that ‘the harte … ys membre principal of the body’; and Spenser himself in Amoretti, 50, asks, ‘is not the hart of all the body chiefe? / and rules the members as it selfe doth please?’27 But Plato’s Timaeus (70a–b), from which this idea of the heart as a ruling organ partly springs, makes clear that the heart is only master of the mortal and desirous region of the body, for which reason it is fittingly placed in the torso to transmit orders from the brain to the rest of the body. The heart is subject to the head’s intellectual power, functioning either as counsellor-protector or as itself the king. A fifteenth-century poem, ‘The Descryving of Mannes Membres’, has the usual vertical hierarchy, with ‘The heued y likne to a king’; Shakespeare in Coriolanus (1.1.108–9) says ‘The kingly crown’d head’ and ‘Counsailor Heart’ must prevail over the mutinous ‘Belly’ of the multitude; and Luca Pacioli in De Divina Proportione uses mystical Neoplatonic geometry to explain the sovereignty of the circular head over the square torso. Most medieval and Renaissance philosophers agreed that, because of its supremacy, reason has its seat in the brain.28 This highest chamber of Alma’s Castle, whose circular form symbolizes the perfection of the spirit, is clearly shaped to house the endeavours of humankind’s immortal part. The tower image, traced by D.C. Allen to Timaeus (70a) and Republic (560b), symbolizes the seat of reason, the watchtower of the soul, ‘from which orders dictated by the reason were dispatched to the body’.29 Spenser compares this chamber to ‘that heauenly towre, / That God hath built for his owne blessed bowre’ (2.9.47), apparently referring to the perfection of the natural faculties of reason in God’s incarnate son, or to that part of every man which God has chosen as the special seat of his own image. Thus, in that he describes the sages’ circular domain in the commonplace Platonic manner as seat of the rational power, in that he compares their functioning to that of the greatest Greek philosophers and rhetoricians, and in that he gives the sages a position in the bodily hierarchy analogous to that of Heavenly Contem­plation within the mystical body, Spenser obviously views the sages’ tower as the seat of reason, that is, lower reason, which works in connection with sense data. What role, then, does Alma play as an aspect of ‘reason’, as indicated in 2.11.1–2? Mills, after arriving at similar conclusions about the sages’ identity (prudence or ratio), argues that Alma must be the mens, and that the circle of stanza 22 is the symbolic correlative of Alma’s role in the castle, containing or subsuming all the rest.30 This reading has several disadvantages. First, the circle, the literal shape of the head, is the domain of the sages, but not specifically of Alma. Second, the whole tour through Alma’s Castle emphasizes the natural functions that culminate in the sense-based vision of ratio; the working of mens, in its preoccupation with eternal verities, is nowhere evident. Alastair Fowler is thus correct in viewing the Legend of Temperance as a quest to perfect ratio (its

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goal being to moderate passions and resist urges to idolize its natural estate as a ‘bower of bliss’), and in viewing the Legend of Holiness as a quest to perfect mens (its goal being a humbly informed faith in reaching New Jerusalem, the spiritual Eden, only glimpsed in this life).31 Alma’s relation to the three sages (ratio) is exactly analogous to Caelia’s relation to Contemplation (mens); these prudent or wise counsellors are the crowning power of each soul-maiden’s domain. The maiden herself stands apart, virginally distinct, as her being is unfolded by all three levels or powers of her house.32 Yet the most potent aspect of reason in Alma’s Castle remains to be considered. If Alma represents ‘reason’ or the ‘soul’ in this general and subsuming way, one still feels an inadequacy in her figuring of a specifically rational activity, especially with regard to the sages’ task and the forces of evil that threaten her natural body: one notes her vulnerability, her general passivity, and her association more with heart than head. Alma is free to wander through all three regions of the castle, but apparently her main seat or throne room is the chamber of the heart, where she is diligently attended by the affections, who are her courtiers (2.9.36).33 Only in this chamber does Alma verbally express her authority, by helping each knight to know his emotional identity when Arthur entertains Praysdesire and Guyon courts Shamefastnes (2.9.43). Nowhere else in the castle, particularly not in the brain-turret, does she make another such comment, which would certainly strengthen the idea that she represents the specifically rational activity of the soul. Other factors likewise suggest that Alma does not exclusively represent the rational power: we note her capacity for marriage (2.9.18), and the struggle to defend her castle emphatically points to her dependence on an active masculine power like that of the knights. Considering these limitations of Alma’s role, and seeing that the sages are not free to enact their wisdom beyond their cells, one may suspect with Berger that the highest power of intellect is not present in Alma’s Castle. Aquinas defines this power as an ability ‘to light up the phantasms … , to make things actually intelligible, by abstraction of the species from the material conditions’. Langland shows the enactment of such a power in Sir Inwit in the Castle of Kynde.34 Perhaps Alma’s two protector knights, Guyon and Arthur, also enact this power, playing a role comparable to that of Inwit (though considerably fleshed out); to understand the symbolization of reason in the castle we must consider their role as well as Alma’s. In order to understand Alma’s partial and somewhat passive exemplification of the rational soul, we must come to grips with the ambivalent concept which Spenser inherited from medieval philosophers and allegorists. Alma is not the soul in the sense of rational activity (the Greek nous, Augustine’s intellectus, or Langland’s Inwit), a power seated primarily in the brain. Rather she is soul in the more general and passive sense of the life principle (the Greek psyche; or the medieval anima, which could assume numerous other names according to context), a figure generally set apart from all chambers of the body but usually taking its main lodging in the heart, the body’s centre.35 The soul in this latter sense was ordinarily

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figured as female (the vulnerable Psyche of Greek legend, or the medieval Lady Anima), in contrast to the male figure which usually symbolized the active intellectual power (King Animus or Sir Inwit).36 This male figure of Intellect, seated in the head, was often seen as the lover, or counsellor and protector, of the female figure of Soul in the heart. We see this love relationship on a natural level when Davies in Nosce Teipsum speaks of ‘The mutual love, the kind intelligence / Twixt heart and brain’; and it appears on a mystical level in the moral play Wisdom, who is Christ: Anima has sought Wisdom ‘Fro my yougthe … / To haue to my spowse’. The most elaborate portrayal (prior to Spenser) of these two noble denizens of the castle appears in Langland’s Castle of Kynde, where Anima inhabits the heart, and is guided and protected by her lover Inwit, who dwells in the head: Inwit and aIle wittes . closed ben therinne, For loue of lady anima . that lyf is ynempned; Ouer al in mannes body . he walketh and wandreth, Ac in the herte is hir home . and hir moste reste. Ac Inwitte is in the hed . and to the herte he loketh, What anima is lief or loth . he lat hir at his wille; For afucter grace of God . the grettest is Inwitte.37

Spenser’s Alma seems in need of such a busy intellect to inform the ‘head’ of her castle, an active embodiment of the rational power like Sir Inwit or Wisdom. Perhaps the absence of this traditional protector in the head was a purposeful omission: first, to allow for the two stranger knights to fill that crucial role as well as they can; second, to imply that the best protector and spouse for Alma is Christ himself. For this latter reason Alma, like her counterpart Caelia in Book 1, remains a virgin. The protector knights, Redcrosse in Book 1 and Guyon in 2, are being reformed in the image of Christ but are not yet worthy of a consummate relation to these idealized virgins. Thus the full embodiment of agens intellectus is missing, is only approximated by each hero knight. The knights in Book 2 correspond closely with Langland’s Inwit. Like their predecessors in the ‘soul’s ward’ tradition, they defend the whole castle against the forces of evil. Other aspects of the medieval inwit are shown in the forward– froward distinction between Arthur and Guyon, one motivated by Praysdesire, the other by its complement Shamefastnes.38 Guyon’s resistance to shameful acts unfolds that part of inwit identified with conscience and synderesis, ‘a cause of the sense of shame’.39 Arthur’s desire of praise or glory is Inwit’s more positive motivation for defending the castle. Finally, like Sir Inwit, these knights’ ultimate identity and purpose are illustrated in relation to the head, the culminating stage of Alma’s tour. The knights yearn to understand their ancestry (2.9.60), just as Redcross gained culminating knowledge of his lineage and destiny in the House of Holiness. Yet it is a striking demonstration of the knights’ intellectual prowess that neither of them needs help from Alma (as Redcrosse needed no help from Caelia) to understand his chronicle’s moral imperatives and bearing on his identity.40

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The active intelligence needed to comprehend the chronicles (especially Arthur’s long and bloody one), to abstract from them the traces of God’s glorious plan for humankind (the ‘signs’ or ‘fine footing’ which the Proem of Book 2 offers in this legend),41 must thus reside in the three sages’ deliberation, and in the knights’ ability to understand and carry out the moral imperatives of this sense of the past. It is these combined activities (‘Inwit and alle wittes’) that exemplifies the highest, active functioning of reason in Alma’s Castle. The concluding victories in the Legend of Temperance demonstrate the full engagement of active intellect in the natural dimension (as ratio). In approaching and encountering the Bower of Bliss Guyon resists temptations to idolize his natural condition, and as a preliminary rational victory Arthur destroys the demonic forces impeding the castle’s three levels (the rude rabble afflicting the senses’ bulwarks; the hags Impotence and Impatience diverting the heart’s concupiscent-irascible powers; Maleger assaulting the godly head). Before this final enactment of intellectual skill against the delusions of evil, the knights internalize the castle’s harmony by ascending through its three realms, from the appetitive belly which provides them with delight and nourishment to the passional heart which shows their motivating drives, to the brain’s rational operations, where they pore at length over their earthly histories, and where their identities as Christlike rational creatures within nature are tentatively established. In the opening legends of The Faerie Queene Spenser depicts the microcosm most complexly in its rational agency. He distinguishes facets of Anima (Caelia ruling the mystical body, Alma the natural body, and soul maidens of ensuing legends the increasingly subordinated and focused realms of human nature). He also varies the models of Inwit: Contemplation in Book 1 giving the Redcrosse Knight access to superior reason, the sages in Book 2 showing Guyon the aims of inferior reason, and Arthur continually figuring intellect in a state of grace (though increasingly confused in Books 1–6), adapting its skills and weaponry for each dimension of reality.42 Shakespeare’s experiential thinking (door to the unconscious): wise  folly  of  the poor-in-spirit on a stormy heath The contrariness of Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s art is especially apparent in depictions of rationality. Spenser depicts wisdom as ideological and iconic, fully controlled by a narrator-poet whose art is intellectual, authoritative, and readerly. His intellectualism builds on a Cambridge education, compounded by native b ­ rilliance and the discomfort of being a poor sizar. His authority builds on constant discourse with canonized classics of Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch; with the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Macrobius; with the spiritual quests of Augustine, Langland, DeGuileville; with dynastic epics of Malory, Ariosto, Tasso; with the line of Christian Platonists including Augustine, twelfth-century Chartrians, Ficino. Spenser revises these sources to fit his Reformation and English national goals. Above all, his art is readerly: his own immense reading and doctrinal convictions generate a narrator-dominated allegory that culminates in universal

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myth; readerly also in aiming at an educated elite, notably Elizabeth I; and ­readerly because his heroes must ‘read’ the deep meaning of each setting, figure, and action, which they invariably fail to do. Such error-prone reading informs each combat and love-quest (‘Fierce warres and faithful loves will moralize my song’), thus layering it with spiritual jeopardy. Shakespeare also draws widely on the classics but privileges worldly observation. He seeks not to schematize morality but to intensify consciousness in a dramatic present. For him thinking is experiential, ironic, passional. He privileges not canonical writings but experiential realities that unsettle authors, audiences, and characters, both elite and common. His plunderings from Virgil, Ovid, Plautus, Apuleius, Plutarch, Holinshed, and the rest carry a sceptical irony that destabilizes traditional authority, not cheapening it satirically but mixing greatness with commonness, even in famed examplars of history and myth. In each play, waves of feeling shape the five acts into three chiastic cycles that submerge and transform intellect through the impact of incremental passional epiphanies.43 Spenser depicts rational empowerment as stable architecture, the figurative house that Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers explain as an ancient device for remembering complex subjects as well as for ‘knowing oneself ’.44 In the Legend of Temperance reason’s ‘due regalitie’ (2.9.1) is a soul-maiden ruling a three-level castle of the body, aided by wise sages and guardian-knights who enact an ‘agent intellect’ like Langland’s Inwit. Such an iconic place of training enforces each quest in The Faerie Queene.45 In Book 1 superior reason is actualized by faith, love, and contemplation in the House of Holiness to prepare for a climactic apocalyptic struggle. In Book 2 inferior reason observes the harmony of belly, heart, and brain in Alma’s Castle in order to resist sensual distractions from heavenly bliss. Books 3 and 4 show eros-driven reason alternating between transcendent and immanent ‘magic’ (Merlin and Canacee) to channel the heart’s passions; and in Books 5 and 6 reason alternates between transcendent and immanent ordering of the sensate world in Mercilla’s council and in Meliboe’s pastoral retreat. Spenser thus depicts reason comprehensively in a mystic hierarchy of virtues, using Christian, GraecoRoman, and medieval classics to authorize each hero’s goal. But, as Thomas Roche once remarked at the Kalamazoo conference, ‘Spenser’s characters do not learn from experience.’ In contrast, Shakespeare’s favourite tropes for rational power are exploratory and allied with uncontrollable natural forces: storm, raging sea, changing clouds, madness. Though the final romances show a ‘magic’ beyond reason transforming these passional energies into Spenserian tropes of music and social harmony,46 Shakespeare remains ironically detached from such ‘dreams’. While Spenser’s heroes learn objectively by a definitive iconic vision, Shakespeare’s characters, both gentle and common, learn subjectively (often chaotically and ironically) in ­turbulent experience: vivid sensations, passionate relationships, oceanic ­shiftings of the unconscious. Wisdom evolves circumstantially, often in traumas of psychic conflict and broken bonds. This passionate performance of the self, excitingly quirky, brings both shame and epiphany. A.D. Nuttall, arguing for Shakespeare’s superiority to rival writers, stresses his compassionate view of humankind and his

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‘­ overdetermined’ thinking.47 The word is well-chosen, for the plays show an eccentric multiplicity of sensory settings, relations, thought processes, and social cultures; plot exfoliates in multiple subplots; speech-thought intensifies by mixing vulgarity and eloquence; and Shakespeare persistently dazzles us with the ‘protracted process of thought’ that explores ‘the nature of consciousness and ­identity’,48 exposing complex motives that end with the tour-de-force of psychic reversibility. But lest we idolize the complexity and ‘infinite variety’ of Shakespeare’s thinking, we note that Spenser’s allegorical thinking is also overdetermined: the profuse temptings of Despair, Mammon, Acrasia, Busirane; the iconic templar ‘houses’; the paradisal settings of Adonis’ garden, the British rivers, Mount Acidale, and Arlo Hill. Boisterous nurse Shakespeare, like Spenser, reads widely and delights in moralizing, but, instead of neatly containing romance energies in doctrinal stanzas packed with allusions to classical and Christian authorities, Shakespeare highlights bodily and passional energies, conveyed in the moving oral rhythms of everyday speech. Here is Juliet’s Nurse: Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen. Susan and she – God rest all Christian souls! – Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God; She was too good for me. But, as I said, On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen, That shall she, marry, I remember it well. ’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years, And she was weaned – I never shall forget it – Of all the days of the year, upon that day; For I had then laid wormwood to my dug, Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall. My lord and you were then at Mantua – Nay, I do bear a brain! But, as I said, When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool, To see it tetchy and fall out wi’ th’ dug! ‘Shake’ quoth the dovehouse. ‘’Twas no need, I trow, To bid me trudge! And since that time it is eleven years, For then she could stand high-lone; nay, by the rood, She could have run and waddled all about. For even the day before, she broke her brow, And then my husband – God be with his soul! ’A was a merry man – took up the child. ‘Yea’, quoth he, ‘dost thou fall upon thy face? Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit, Wilt thou not, Jule?’ and by my halidom, The pretty wretch left crying and said ‘Ay.’ I warrant, an I should live a thousand years, I never should forget it. ‘Wilt thou not, Jule?’ quoth he, And, pretty fool, it stinted and said ‘Ay.’

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When Dame Capulet demands that the Nurse stop her lewd ramble, she agrees but forges on: Yes, madam. Yet I cannot choose but laugh To think it should leave crying and say ‘Ay.’ And yet, I warrant, it had upon its brow A bump as big as a young cockerel’s stone – A perilous knock – and it cried bitterly. ‘Yea,’ quoth my husband. ‘Fall’st upon thy face? Thou wilt fall backward when thou comest to age, Wilt thou not, Jule?’ It stinted and said ‘Ay.’

What does this exuberant, repetitious outburst add to a story of young folk dying for love? It seems as disposable as the Nurse herself. Yet her unforgettably torrential anecdote is quite relevant. (1) It is driven by libido, intent on Juliet’s erotic potency but assuming female passivity (‘Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit’) that Juliet will disprove. The Nurse’s focus on life-force is reinforced by the poignant memory of her own child’s death, which led to wet-nursing Juliet. (2) Spurring the energy is the Nurse’s self-love: she enjoys overhearing herself,49 she pauses to praise her memory, she exults in her matronly power in the weaning. (3) She is wilfully performative, violating master–servant decorum to impress Juliet and her mother (and playhouse audiences and God). Shakespeare depicts reason not as a fixed construct but as dynamically self-creating, changing-in-performance, now wittily ironic, now vulgarly literal. The power of acting is heightened by cross-dress, which adds the wonder of theatrical androgyny. (4) The Nurse shows how vulgar impassioned reasoning can upstage privilege and take over the play, the human voice caught up in the power of playing to an audience. Shakespeare like Erasmus exploits spiritual paradox, capturing the élan vital across the social spectrum, but especially in colloquial idiom. Despite her lewd impropriety the Nurse focuses the mystery of desire in her apocryphal tale of the genesis of Juliet’s erotic potency, mirroring the Nurse’s own libido. Her lack of authority intensifies the life-force. Shakespeare’s privileging of an outsider (woman, servant, fool, Jew, black) arouses the audience by empowering the occluded ‘other’ as a mediary and ally in passion. (5) Finally, the speech is insistently repetitive, and this Freudian repetition compulsion50 unites the pleasure principle and repressed death-wish in a way vital to the play. Energies of the unconscious arise as the Nurse invites eavesdropping on her inner life, setting up a potential for epiphany which is beyond the Nurse’s grasp. Shakespeare’s characters gain self-knowledge in passional experience of the natural world. Random phenomena generating their own symbolism, especially flowers, herbs, animals, are more important than bookish allusions (though, as we shall see, Shakespeare’s magic actually combines them). The nurse’s speech focuses on bodily, elemental images; she thinks in material specifics: ‘Lammas eve at night’, lost Susan, earthquake, ‘wormwood on the nipple of my dug’, the animated dovehouse, the high-lone child able to ‘run and waddle all about’, the husband’s patriarchal joke, the ‘bump as big as a young cockerel’s stone’, Juliet’s ‘Ay’. Her potent images – dug, dovehouse, cockerel’s stone – form a rich symbolic

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interplay: the vulgar ‘dug’ (used mainly for animal suckling) holds the yearning for maternal nurture yet puns on the hard knock of mortality, the bitter weaning from maternal care. The ‘dovehouse’ sheltering the Nurse implies a nobler psychic complex, the dream of love (the dove) in the old belief (the house, as a maternal shelter) that promises the soul’s flight but ‘shakes’ at the weaning. The ‘cockerel’s stone’ bump that elicits as much bitter crying as the weaning suggests the aggressive thrusts of Tybalt, Mercutio, and other feuders. Such sensual engagement in experience drives Shakespeare’s thinking and extends the Delphic maxim: not just ‘know thyself’ but ‘know, feel, and be thyself’, connecting with others and all that is.51 Mad king Shakespeare’s finest portrayal of thinking occurs in King Lear: the nine judgmentscenes that define its plot; the constant inner debate; the King’s colloquy with exiles including his Fool and the demon-haunted beggar he calls ‘my philosopher’; his madly profound questionings;52 his recovery of loving thoughts in sublimative mourning. Immersion in the bodily and elemental sensorium is achieved in the Fool’s commonsense observations, in Edgar’s experience as a naked, self-persecuting beggar, and especially in the king’s strippings that in Acts 3–4 bring him close to nature. Like Ophelia, Lear returns to the flowering natural world to pour out half-coherent memories, wishes, songs, demands, childish babblings – a massive eruption of the unconscious. The wonder of this seemingchaos is that the three cycles of the king’s mental storm form a perfect chiastic pattern: the opening two-act cycle is precisely inverted by the final two-act cycle, connected by Act 3’s intense cycle which revolves around the meeting of king and beggar, fusing the two plots at the play’s centre. (For Shakespeare’s brilliant dramaturgical-psychological patterning, especially in King Lear and Macbeth, see pp. 251–68 below.)53 What do Lear’s ‘mad’ speeches imply about Shakespeare’s depiction of thinking, and about Lear’s access to self-knowledge and truth? After Lear’s growing experience of stormy wrath in Acts 1–2 (a cycle centred in explosive rage at Goneril), Act 3 shifts to the strange, half-cognizant lessons of a violent storm that induces sharing with poor homeless exiles. What a polar contrast is this evolving storm of lunacy to Spenser’s heroes learning in iconic doctrinal houses. Despite Spenser’s extensive debt to Orlando furioso, he subjects no protagonist to genuine madness – no psychic splitting like that of Lear, Ophelia, and Shylock; no half-feigned lunacy like that of Hamlet and Edgar; no self-overhearing like that of Proteus, Launce, Richard III, Richard II, Falstaff, Henry V, Hamlet, Viola, Iago, and Leontes. Though Spenser does show Britomart’s hysteria, Timias’s self-abnegation, and the disturbing melancholia of central figures, he depicts no ‘Arthur Furioso’,54 for such an event would privilege passion over reason, would challenge Spenser’s stanzaic form (which shows madness or Dionysian ecstasy only as objectified narrative), and would make Spenser escalate his hero’s consciousness, which never matches Lear’s inner–outer turmoil, his growing awareness in stormy experience:

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Depicting intellect This tempest will not give me leave to ponder On things would hurt me more. But I’ll go in; [to the Fool] In boy, go first. You houseless poverty— Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep. [Kneels.] Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just.

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thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? … Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings: come, unbutton here. (3.4.99–107)

After the dark close of Act 3 (the fantasy-trial, the blinding) the final two-act cycle disturbingly mixes psychic extremes. Though Lear’s ‘sermon’ to Gloucester drops eloquent nuggets of wisdom on flattery of power, on Nature’s harsh simplicity, on injustices to the poor-in-spirit (Edgar calls it ‘matter and impertinency mixed, / Reason in madness’),55 the wisdom is mixed with atrocious errors: Lear praises Edmund’s kindness, he commands that all sins be excused, especially adultery (his listener’s notable flaw), yet he blames women for bestially instigating desire, and he persistently takes pride in his manly and kingly power to kill. As usual, his thoughts are enlivened by sensory powers. He ‘smells’ the truth. When the rain came to wet me once and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding, there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they arenot men o’ their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof. (4.6.96–104)        Ay, every inch a king. When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause? Adultery? Thou shalt not die – die for adultery? No! The wren goes to’t and the small gilded fly Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive, For Gloucester’s bastard son was kinder to his father Than were my daughters got ’tween lawful sheets. To’t, luxury, pell-mell, for I lack soldiers. The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to’t with a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend’s: there’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption! Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination. (4.6.96–128)

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When Gloucester asks to kiss his hand, Lear will first wipe off its smell of mortality, and he yearns to enforce that mortality on proud disloyal children:

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It were a delicate stratagem to shoe A troop of horse with felt. I’ll put it in proof And when I have stolen upon these son-in-laws, Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! (4.6.150–69, 172–6, 177–83)

What does Lear learn from Gloucester, whose adultery and bleeding eyes Lear notes before fully identifying him? Like the indirect compassion for other exiles in the storm, it prepares for allowing openly loving thoughts and deep spiritual poverty in the reunion with Cordelia. A plague upon you murderers, traitors all; I might have saved her; now she’s gone for ever. Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little. Ha? What is’t thou sayst? Her voice was ever soft, Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman. I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee.

(5.3.274–9)

Lear’s cycles of ‘sovereign shame’ show the inexorable growth of his spiritual poverty, which Christian mystics attribute to the Holy Spirit. Yet Shakespeare fiercely interrupts this gentling of Lear’s spirit with ruthless urges to kill. The paradox testifies to Shakespeare’s psychic complexity and his dramaturgical mastery in managing audiences. But it is a far cry from Spenser. What then is the difference in Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s depiction of thinking? It is a comforting house ordered by salvific doctrine versus cyclic shakings of body, heart, and mind; it is a civilizing self-censorship versus offensively vulgar and lawless outbursts; it is elite heroism versus a range of social types that often focuses on the most bestial-instinctual; it is ‘clothing’ (complex-sophisticated-cosmetic ornamentation of body-clothing-speech, specializing in artfully suggestively hiding sexually alluring features) versus ‘nakedness’ (bodily-sexuallinguistic simplicity and openness); it is privileged power versus the humbled and stripped poor-in-spirit.56 When Spenser strips Duessa, she is painted as a false double without authority or essential being; but in King Lear Shakespeare strips a true sovereign – a boldness Spenser never dared until Faunus in the Mutabilitie Cantos guffaws at the naked Diana’s ‘somewhat’! Shakespeare’s ultimate depiction of percipience transcends reason. Using traumatic loss of human bonds with nature, fond relations, oceanic memory, and the spirit-world, he destabilizes our essential being by showing thought with disturbing honesty, bypassing psychic defences that censor all we reject as constituting what we are. Is Lear more thoughtful than Hamlet? Hamlet’s eloquent, sceptical brooding is often cited as Shakespeare’s ultimate model of rationality (and of Shakespeare’s own thinking), yet the prince’s bitter disaffection and riddling language, though specially appealing to scholars, is problematic. His restless intensity, often explained as a ‘melancholy’ verging on madness,57 is surpassed by the rational

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probing of Lear. In his genuine madness Lear draws deeply on resources of the unconscious. Like Hamlet he sceptically tests human nature but in a larger frame, from a kingly and a fully impassioned perspective. Like Job his queries reach a breaking point – confronting injustices not just to himself and to family but to God. Lear’s reasoning is far more impassioned than that of Hamlet, who remains detached from full moral involvement, while Lear loses that detachment in the great opening scene, drawing him to increasingly ardent ‘judgment-scenes’ throughout the play. The growing pressure of ‘feeling’ in these judgments elevates their intensity and meaning above Hamlet’s eloquent but detached soliloquies. Lear’s increasingly self-indicting thoughts are set beside Gloucester’s plodding sentiments and against the cruelly indifferent kangaroo court of Edmund, Goneril, Cornwall, and Regan – as Hamlet’s thoughts are set beside those of Polonius and Claudius. A major difference in the performative thinking of Hamlet and Lear is in their assumed audience. Hamlet’s soliloquies show a solitary soul addressing his deepest self or ‘conscience’, but Lear’s ‘public soliloquies’, though partly unaware of those around him while focused on his inner fragmented self, always express and test the habit of sovereignty. King Lear is a play rich in thinking, and in thinking about thinking, showing how healthy thinking depends not on definitive doctrine but on heartfelt discourse with others and, in Lear’s heath-rambles, on sensory awareness of the natural world. The play exposes the bias that links clever thinking to power, and shows a more open, generous thinking in empathetic compassion. It is surprisingly rich in the transformative reasoning that yields to the inner sea of unconscious apprehension with its hoard of defence mechanisms and, most important, its capacity for wisdom through epiphanal sublimation. Lear’s free-wheeling dialogue with the unknowable, the largely inexpressible, gives us a small purchase on the looming sense of paradox at the heart of Shakespeare’s plays. It is not Hamlet’s madness so much as Ophelia’s (and Shylock’s) that prefigures the storm of lunacy in Lear, superseding the rational tours de force in other plays. The intellect’s dynamic and subtle reactions to storms of feeling in experiential crises disclose the remarkable complexity of unconscious inner disturbances – thus distinguishing Shakespeare’s view of human nature, and his artistic rendering of it, from Spenser’s. Temptation in Spenser and Shakespeare lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom, power, and glory . . . .

The plot of great fiction often turns on rigorous temptation, drawing characters to maturity or to the heart of loss. That Spenser and Shakespeare depict this extreme testing with different psychic and metaphysical grounds is evident in (1) the degree of awareness in the one tempted, and in the tempter; (2) the crucial context of personal relationship and the sex split, since dividing the family is tempting’s focal point; (3) the tempting’s plot-form as the ‘soul’ of its meaning; and (4) its motive: if pleasure is the goal, why does Iago poison the well? Does the tempter

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claim power by divorcing others from God, yet does tempting enhance bonds? If tempting is useful, even Job’s horror, why does Jesus ask to avoid it? The ancient concatenation of temptings Philo’s Platonic reading of the Fall’s three stages set the pattern that Spenser elaborated. The triple temptation, central to Spenser’s and Milton’s major poems, builds on such allegorized readings, later aligned with the three desert temptings of Jesus and the “three lusts” in John’s Gospel. The snake’s fleshly ‘suggestion’, Eve’s wilful ‘delight’, and Adam’s rational ‘consent’ form a hierarchy that matches the three desires in Plato’s Republic: belly’s concupiscent appetite, heart’s irascible avarice, reason’s treacherous deceit – thus fully perverting the soul. This Edenic allegory was transmitted by Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, Isidore, Bede, Rabanus Maurus, Erigena, Aelfric, Petrus Comestor, and the Glossa Ordinaria among early exegetes; by Alanus de Insulis, Aquinas, Chaucer, the Pearl-poet, and Jean de Meun in the Middle Ages; by Erasmus, Leone Ebreo, Huarte, Spenser, Raleigh, Browne, More, and Milton in the Renaissance.58 Spenser’s penchant for such a doctrinal sequence is evident in Mammon’s cave and Acrasia’s bower, and with a different, passional-romance symbolism in Busirane’s house and Venus’ temple. In fact, the soul’s Christian-Platonic hierarchy of powers informs all Spenser’s allegorical houses, gardens, and ritual sequences of action.59 Milton’s major poems (Comus, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes) all use the triple tempting, the pattern becoming ever more formulaic. But Milton parts from Spenser’s Platonic format by following Luke’s pattern for Jesus’ temptings (ending with the leap from on high) while Spenser follows Matthew (ending with the offer of worldly power).60 Shakespeare makes complex temptation equally central, notably in urgings to kill a king. Richard III tempts Buckingham to kill the young princes; Cassius tempts Brutus to kill Caesar; Claudius, after his regicide, tempts Laertes to kill the prince; Iago persuades Roderigo and Othello to murder both persons and reputations; Edmund tempts Gloucester to kill his son, Regan and Cornwall to kill their host, a soldier to kill the king and his daughter; Macbeth, having killed Duncan, tempts villains to murder Banquo and his line; Octavius’ proxy tempts Cleopatra to kill Antony; Antonio, having exiled Prospero, tempts Sebastian to murder Alonso. Yet none of these psychologically complex sequences uses the three-stage hierarchic tempting. Indeed, Shakespeare’s only use of it is an annoyance to most actors and directors. Shakespeare’s distasteful ‘triple temptation’ Most critics dislike the formal tempting that centres the final two-act cycle of Macbeth (4.3). Malcolm’s awkward testing of Macduff lacks the subtleties of master-seducers (Richard III, Iago, Edmund), their deft use of flattery, suggestion, glaring omission, hesitation, negative psychology – ah yes, and material props (knife, handkerchief, letter). Malcolm’s old-fashioned ritual is notably out of place in Macbeth, quite unlike the wonderfully overdetermined, subtly conflicted temptings in Act 1 that lead to regicide: bewitching prophecies, an (unhistorical)

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pile-up of civil and international wars, a weak king’s irritating appointment of his son and naive submission to the Macbeths’ hospitality, a note to Lady Macbeth that clearly invites her ardent urgings. Why did Shakespeare in Act 4 burden Malcolm with a doctrinaire medieval test from fourteenth-century Scottish chronicles? Why ritualize the action at this dynamic turning-point; and why revise the third tempting from its form in the chronicles? We wonder what can make this crude device theatrically effective, for most directors have cut it, even after Granville-Barker, Knights, Walker, Elliott, and Battenhouse argue for its key placement and potential theatrical power. Granville-Barker urged ‘that the whole interview be retained’ and ‘everything possible be done to enhance its importance as the starting-point of the play’s counter-action’. It gives ‘a breathing-space in which to recover from the shaking effects of the tragedy’ as it has been developed so far and ‘to prepare for the final rush of events.’ The ‘formalism in the writing’ underlines ‘Malcolm’s level-headedness, but … the scene is charged with unexpressed emotion …. The contrast between the natures of the two men should be stressed’: ‘Macduff outspoken; Malcolm reserved, over-cautious at first. Though never cold.’61 G.W. Knight offered a psychic basis for the test’s unnaturalness: Malcolm and Macduff are ‘paralysed by fear and a sense of evil in and outside of themselves’.62 When ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’, even the good are drawn into moral equivocation. Marvin Rosenberg’s line-by-line reading includes actors’ gestures and nuances as they try to make the scene believable and theatrically effective.63 Ruth Frieman, however, speaks for most in finding the scene impossibly flawed: It is difficult to imagine that Malcolm would devise such a silly test or that Macduff would be taken in by it. Macduff … must have known Malcolm’s character from having seen him often in Scotland, and he must have had a fairly good opinion of him to seek him out. Therefore, Macduff must then also believe that Malcolm has changed radically since he came to England and that so devout and holy a king as Edward the Confessor would tolerate, and even honor, such a monster …. Malcolm’s about-face verges on the melodramatic.64

Why, in short, would Malcolm boast of his plan for tyranny and risk losing a key ally? Many critics deny psychological realism, but for quite different reasons. In this ‘choric commentary’, says L.C. Knights, Malcolm ‘has ceased to be a person. His lines repeat and magnify the evils that have already been attributed to Macbeth, acting as a mirror wherein the evils of Scotland are reflected.’65 Yet Shakespeare’s other choric and ritualistic scenes do not obstruct personality but develop it (Richard II’s tourney and divestiture, Lear’s judgment-rituals, Enobarbus’ choric accounts, Prospero’s choric stagings). Only Malcolm’s rite leaves a bad taste. Dover Wilson saw the political subtext. The dialogue ‘on bad kings and good much engaged the minds of the British Solomon and his court’.66 Shakespeare’s revision of the third vice (not falsehood, but loss of ‘concord, peace, and unity’) refers to James’s plan to unite Britain’s four kingdoms and pacify warmongering European states.67 In The Royal Play of Macbeth, H.N. Paul saw the triple tempting, indeed the whole play, as consummately flattering James and idealizing Malcolm.68

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For others the flattery swells in a religious subtext. Battenhouse, Jorgensen, and Hunter see Malcolm’s choric ritual as a Christian providential symbolism that excludes psychological realism. Hunter finds it ‘in danger of being tedious if regarded only as a piece of theatrical naturalism, or an “atmospheric” device for depicting the loss of confidence in human beings that is one result of tyranny. Its important subject is the mystery of grace.’69 Malcolm’s medieval device announces his need of such grace as an unmerited gift of God. But two other Christian readings mistakenly praise the scene’s dramatic power and Malcolm’s bourgeoning character. The triple testing of Macduff, says Roy Walker, is also Malcolm’s sincere triple confession: his ‘unregenerate manhood is transfigured by grace into divine royalty’, a reading reinforced by saintly Edward’s healing touch.70 G.R. Elliott finds the scene ‘intensely and subtly dramatic’, as Malcolm ‘outwits’ Macduff in showing his ‘modest wisdom’ and prudence.71 Nothing could be further from the truth. Wilbur Sanders catalogues Malcolm’s unsavoury traits, and Francis Fergusson notes that the scene’s ‘stiff and old-fashioned’ classification of sins ‘lacks the visionary intensity of the rest of the play’.72 Shakespeare disregards the temptings’ triple hierarchy by proliferating the vices and virtues a scholarly king like James would know; but his main revision of Holinshed is in stressing Macduff ’s growing reaction to the testings and to the horrid disclosure that follows. News of his family’s slaughter provokes Macduff ’s self-judging cry, and a long silence that disturbs Malcolm (and perhaps James) returns the play to its basic Shakespearean footing. Modes of temptation in Spenser and Shakespeare For Renaissance literature we must update the ancient series of temptings to focus on those that appear most prominently in Spenser’s epic and Shakespeare’s plays. (1) Most primal is the siren-call to sensual pleasure. ‘I can resist anything but temptation,’ says Wilde’s protagonist.73 Woman is usually blamed for this allure, often as a nightmare-lamia who sucks the marrow of man’s soul: Spenser’s Duessa toys with disposable Sansboys, Phaedria with Cymochles, Acrasia with Verdant. These vampirish seductions are matched by male deities’ indiscriminate rapes, flaunted in Busirane’s Ovidian tapestries. Shakespeare concocts his own array of dominatrixes with their teddy-boys: Titania with Bottom in her lavish bower, Doll with Falstaff in the tavern, Cleopatra with Antony by the fertile Nile. And the threat of rape by power-hungry males unsettles Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. For both male and female seducers the motive is not mutual pleasure but demonstrating unrestrained power. (2) A darker tempting uses envious slander of the once-beloved, built on fear of dishonour and wounded pride. Such malice initiates Redcrosse’s downfall and proliferates in The Faerie Queene, 4–6: Ate, Slander, Detraction, Disdain, Scorn, Blatant Beast. Shakespeare in Othello incomparably stages this disowning of a beloved – also central in Two Gentlemen, Much Ado, Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, Henry VIII, and above all The Winter’s Tale. Defaming love surpasses sensuality by undermining life’s main joy; it is the unforgivable ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’.

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(3) Severance from God and other souls culminates in proud self-idolatry, posing oneself as a deity without need of others, annihilating life altogether, needing nothing beyond one’s secret self. Such consummate temptation is practised by Spenser’s Archimago, Duessa, Lucifera, Despair, Mammon, Maleger, Acrasia, Busirane, and Ate, as well as by Shakespeare’s most obsessively destructive tempters, Richard III, Iago, Edmund, the Macbeths and witches, Leontes. These temptings (seduction, slander, self-idolatry) show a progressive evil resembling the hierarchy in ancient readings of the Fall. Since Spenser and Shakespeare treat these temptings both separately and collectively, how do their depictions differ? Spenser, in each temptation-sequence and in the Faerie Queene as a whole, stresses intellectual structure and iconic comprehensiveness. Each legend depicts temptation on a different psychic level in a descending hierarchy: Books 1 and 2, quests for Holiness and Temperance, give a formulaic view of intellective temptation – first superior reason attains Christian weapons of faith-hope-charity to regain Being, then inferior reason wields subordinate weapons of moderating reason to avoid being absorbed by Becoming. Book 1’s comprehensive temptations bring wretched death-in-life to Redcrosse and (empathetically) to Una in allegory of maximal density. Book 2’s main temptings, managed by Mammon and Acrasia, test inferior reason. The temptings of Books 3 and 4 show a similar polarity in tempting the heart – first transcendent Chastity, then Friendship’s natural immanence – but with diverse (centrally female) heroes who suffer no comprehensive formulaic temptation sequence: Britomart resists provocative Ovidian tapestries of Olympian gods raping mortals; Amoret and Florimell resist the abusive proposals of Busirane and Proteus. Books 5 and 6, Justice and Courtesy, show a similar polarity of temptations in the literal sensate world, but neither Artegall/Arthur nor Calidore/Calepine is tempted in a comprehensive intellective series like those of Books 1 and 2. The moral testing of Artegall with Radigund, of Mercilla’s court with Duessa, and of Calidore with Pastorella have no hierarchic ritual of tempting but resemble the equivocal choices of the daily sensate world. Spenser’s six legends thus descend to where Shakespeare begins. Shakespeare’s best temptations are equally complex – Richard III with Lady Anne (and many others), Cassio with Brutus, Claudius with Laertes, Iago with Othello, Octavius’ agent with Cleopatra – but none is intellectually schematic and architectural. Instead they resemble sea-waves in a growing storm, a rhythmic orchestration of conflicted desire that subjects the victim to childishness, blindness, or madness, yet the impassioned folly intensifies self-awareness. In tragic heightening of consciousness, Shakespeare’s finest (signature) tempting is selftempting, beginning as early as Proteus and reaching astonishing complexity in Leontes’ perverse self-delusion. In their contrary modes of temptation Spenser and Shakespeare show complementary views of human nature. (1) While Spenser offers an authoritative Christian-Platonist synthesis of past wisdom about evil, ranking heroes and deities in hierarchies of cultural myth, Shakespeare immerses protagonists in present passional experience, endowing them with vibrant consciousness and depth psychology. (2) Spenser’s moral testings privilege aristocratic birth and formally

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trained intellect, enlisting commoners only as foils. Shakespeare, though he too celebrates learning and privilege, shares his performative magic with clownish commoners – Launce, Bottom, Juliet’s Nurse, Dogberry, Mistress Quickly – whose blunders universalize errancy and (as in the mystery plays) invite sympathetic laughter at the soul as an image of God. (3) Both Spenser and Shakespeare gradually depict woman’s full partnership in errancy and its consequences, as in ancient epics. Circe, when Odysseus resists her, changes from degrading witch to sapient counsellor; Dido is not just passion but a rival imperator, suborned by Venus to reclaim her son for Rome; Beatrice’s radiance enables Dante to witness all temptations as a basis for knowing God; and, in Milton’s study of originary temptation, Eve, even more than Circe, Dido, or Beatrice, enables both the Fall and the answering ‘passion’. That Milton sets his epic in Eden correlates with the Reformation’s growing valuation of temptation.74 In each legend of Spenser’s epic and in Shakespeare’s mature plays, temptation is a central action. Both Spenser’s authoritative schematic temptings and Shakespeare’s experiential passional temptings are impressively complex, but there is a remarkable difference between Spenser’s objectified and Shakespeare’s subjectified depiction of the descent into sin. Spenserian temptation We note the encyclopaedic scope of Spenser’s analysis of allurement. His authoritative temptation imitates the scriptural model with three hierarchic stages, like the climactic series at Book 2’s mid-point and end, Mammon’s Cave and Acrasia’s Bower. But the triadic pattern is complicated by profuse mythic-iconic details, brilliantly coalescing past classics and thereby radically revising the Edenic pattern. Equally complex is Spenser’s schematic altering of the ground of allegory in each book of The Faerie Queene; thus his depiction of temptation changes with the psychic dimension of each moral virtue. Book 1’s spiritual testing of mens subsumes Book 2’s testing of ratio, and both differ from the temptings of Books 3 and 4 – Britomart and Amoret tested by Busirane, Scudamour by Venus, Florimell by Proteus – which focus on heart and will. In Book 1 the triadic temptation is shown as apocalyptic moral combat, as in Revelation. When Archimago divides the protagonists by summoning a false Una (not by explicit tempting!), Redcrosse and Una endure separate assaults by three pagan brothers (Sansfoy, Sansloy, Sansjoy), yet, as the cognate names imply, they jointly abuse the holy couple, each assault deepening the error of Redcrosse’s leaving Una for Duessa. This triadic progress in sin is later cured by the House of Holiness’s three mystic stages: Sansfoy, loss of faith, repealed by Fidelia; Sansloy, loss of loyalty or love, repaired by Charissa;75 Sansjoy’s paralysing sadness resolved by Contemplation’s vision of bliss. In this triadic fall (“constructing sin,” Gless calls it) the tempting is barely conscious. Redcrosse is blind to the Sansboys’ mirroring of his soul’s decline, totally unaware of the central brother’s assault on Una. The Sansboys are a progressive aporia: their belligerent lack of telling discourse shows Redcrosse’s complete loss of superior reason. His combat with Sansjoy to gain honour in the House of Pride confirms Erasmus’s warning in Handbook of the Militant Christian about the misleading trope of moral warfare. The Sansboys’ indirect mirroring of

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sin gives way in the legend’s final half to full, positive, transparent sin, as Orgoglio, Despair, and the Dragon definitively assail the soul’s three levels. These ‘spiritual foes’ overwhelm the knight’s intellect – never under his control, subject to demonic conjuration, utterly dependent on providential reform. Quite different are Book 2’s triple temptings, explicitly offered so Guyon’s practical reason can partly resist them: in Mammon’s Cave Guyon rejects artificial wealth (false riches, false honor, false food and rest); at the Bower of Blisse aided by the Palmer he rejects psychically-narrowing stages of sensory pleasure: Genius, Excesse, Acrasia. Guyon’s faint after Mammon’s tempting shows how mistaken is his pride in unaided practical reason (‘euermore himself with comfort feeds / Of his owne virtues and praise-worthie deedes’, 2.7.2), for he must be rescued by an angel and Palmer, by Arthur’s defeat of unruly passions, by Alma’s ordered house and Arthur’s defeat of Maleger. In Book 3 the triple tempting again changes its psychic ground: Britomart’s trials test the heart and will, reforming Ovid’s disturbing portraits of passion. Though her naivety recalls Guyon’s and Redcrosse’s errancy, her success with the temptings of Malecasta and Busirane shows chastity’s transcendent power as matching and joining Redcrosse’s holiness. In homage to Elizabeth I, Britomart overthrows most men and develops morally in two more legends, Friendship and Justice; none of her testings – Malecasta, Busirane, Dolon, Radigund – causes wretchedness or fainting. And though buoyed by the visions of Merlin and Isis’ priests, she receives no regimented, doctrinaire, templar education in Chastity, nor in Friendship and Justice. In each legend Spenser depicts evil’s incursion in orderly hierarchic stages that recall the rabbinic and Christian commenries on the stages of the Edenic couple’s fall and the answering stages of Jesus’ recovery in resisting Satan in the desert. As developed by medieval glosses, the Edenic triple tempting includes gluttony for the forbidden fruit, lust that converts to hateful slander, and idolatrous pride – thus fostering in the soul’s three levels an illusory godliness.76 In Spenser’s sweeping analysis of sin on descending psychic levels in the six completed legends of virtue, no hero adequately resists temptation, with the partial exception of Britomart and Arthur. All others need substantial divine aid: angelic watch, Christianized prudent counsel, a Christlike saviour, sacramental balm. In Book 2 Mammon’s clear seductive intent and Guyon’s marshalling Classical wisdom do not avert temptation’s debilitating end, a fact Milton conveniently ignores.77 In each legend of The Faerie Queene Spenser’s tradition-heavy intellectualism forms an emblematic sermon that his hero and his learned audience must properly ‘read’. I skip Book 1’s subtle and indirect allegory of spiritual seduction to examine Book 2’s more commonplace and explicit tempting, as Guyon, exemplifying the soul’s power of lower reason, refuses Mammon’s three offerings.78 Stage 1: Mammon presides over the first room’s vast riches, which he praises in the language of epiphany: ‘Lo here the world’s bliss’. Stage 2: In the next room Philotime (‘love of honour’) rules a ruthless court where status is bought by her father’s wealth. Stage 3: Proserpine’s hellish garden has golden apples that give no nourishment and a silver seat that gives no rest, the gold and silver again showing

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Mammon’s materialist rule. These three architecturally distinct ‘rooms’ follow the hierarchic triadic pattern of Jewish and Christian commentary on Adam and Eve’s fall (and Jesus’ refusal of three analogous temptings). They match the soul’s three powers, snake-Eve-Adam representing sense-heart-mind, as does Jesus’ resistance of gluttony, vainglory, and avarice for power. What could be more conventional? But Spenser reverses the hierarchy. Unlike Satan’s temptings of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, Spenser’s listing moves from top to bottom – first Mammon’s rational power, then Philotime’s irascible passion, then Proserpine’s concupiscent appetite – culminating in the power of sensory appetite in the temporal world. As Harry Berger noted, even to engage with Mammon is a mistake, for his coining trivializes Creation: hoarding that artificial and material-based wealth, using it to purchase honour, and using it to gild natural bodily needs thus proceeds in a hierarchic descent to displace God within the imago Dei. In refusing Mammon’s offers, Guyon does not draw from Jesus’ testing by Satan but rather from Classical wisdom (Seneca, Horace, Cicero, Epicurus, Stoics). The unnaturalness of Mammon’s offers, their trenchant materialism, induces Guyon’s faint. In this authoritative depiction of temptation we note the intellectual abstraction of its careful hierarchic ontology and the thoroughness of its lavish iconographic detail. Such principles inform each of The Faerie Queene’s allegorical centres. Shakespearean temptation Temptation is equally central in Shakespeare’s plays, not as an iconic hierarchic testing of the soul’s powers but in experiential immediacy, using egoistic selfworship, flattery, and negative psychology in rhythmic waves of passion that form chiastic cycles. During his career Shakespeare’s temptings increase in complexity to match the deepening conflict within protagonists. Demonic tempters (Claudius, Iago, Edmund, witches, Antonio) give way to self-tempters (Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeths, Antony, Cleopatra, Leontes) who exploit the waywardness in t­ hemselves. Shakespeare’s greatest temptation scene, Iago’s perversion of Othello (3.3.1– 496) is a polar contrast of Spenser’s testing of Redcrosse, Guyon, or Britomart: Iago does not follow the three thematic steps of Jewish-Christian tradition that match the tripartite human form in Plato’s Republic and Timaeus. Instead, his tempting unfolds in experiential stages, six theatrical phrases of 80–90 lines each. (‘Phrase’ is Merce Cunningham’s term for a choreographic unit – a longer, more complex and holistic sequence of action than a theatrical ‘beat’.) A second contrast is the darker negativity of Iago’s temptation, which eviscerates both personal identity and loving bonds. If Mammon seeks material power, Iago sullies the soul by voiding love. In slandering Desdemona, Iago discredits life’s main values. Finally, in portraying the tempting, Shakespeare’s experiential artistry forms a polar contrast to Spenser’s doctrinal allegory: he uses no prolific literary and religious allusions to stress authoritative doctrine and the narrator’s firm control of it; rather, he captures the rhythms of everyday passional experience, subject to the sophisticated, ironic manipulation that demonstrates Iago’s and Shakespeare’s theatrical power.

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The first phrase (93 lines) establishes a personal relational context for the temptation: Cassio pleads for Desdemona to restore his office, lost through the drunken dishonour engineered by Iago in Act 2. The fullest relational context is, of course, Act 1’s closing demonstration of Othello and Desdemona’s bond – surpassing that of Romeo and Juliet in defying social decorum by transcending racial prejudice. (None of Guyon’s temptations by Phaedria, Mammon, Acrasia is given such a relational context, except in the most abstract way.) In the second phrase (94–196: 103 lines) the suggested betrayal becomes explicit as he mentions ‘jealousy’ seven times and ‘cuckoldry’ once, while pretending to dismiss their relevance and always inducing Othello to make connections himself. In the third phrase (197–281: 84 lines) Iago suggests personal and cultural reasons for Desdemona’s disloyalty: she deceived her father; she is oddly drawn by fear of your looks; she ignores the unnaturalness of interracial bonding. Throughout this misogynist assault on Desdemona’s character and racist assault on Othello’s self-confidence, Iago escalates his flatteries of Othello, vowing loving concern for his honour, drawing attention to his anxiety, and urging him to ignore the matter. These three phrases complete the first half of the temptation, and Iago leaves the stage, allowing for Desdemona’s return and for the business of the handkerchief to deepen the tempting’s personal relational context. In the fourth phrase (281–363: 82 lines) Othello and Desdemona jointly lose the handkerchief and leave the stage, Emilia steals it to comply with her husband’s frequent wish, and after Iago notes jealousy’s vulnerability to such ‘trifles’, Othello appears in a state of intense, sleepless anxiety. In the climactic fifth phrase (364–446: 83 lines) Othello demands ‘ocular proof ’, and Iago (after offering to take all blame on himself) gives three such ‘proofs’: he merely imagines the couple’s bestial copulation; he recalls Cassio crying aloud for Desdemona during a dream; and he reports that Cassio wiped his beard with Desdemona’s handkerchief. Othello is of course overwhelmed by this orchestrated fantasia, building as it does on Desdemona’s efforts to restore Cassio’s position. In the short, intense sixth phrase (447–482; 36 lines) Othello dismisses love, embraces vengeful hatred, and kneels to assign Iago to kill Cassio, himself to kill Desdemona. My dividing Iago’s temptation into six stages is of course arbitrary, and to audiences imperceptible because of the experiential flow of dialogue and stage business. No architectural gateways introduce separate ‘rooms’ of tempting; no iconic figures like Mammon, Philotime, and Proserpine define each phase. Rather, Shakespeare’s depiction of temptation is ‘organic’, passional, and closely allied to the unconscious. In the natural rhythms of common experience, each event and speech flows into the next – though sometimes seeming to digress or flow backwards, for Iago exploits the psychic devices of suggestion, ironic reversal, paradoxical defence mechanisms, and most centrally, immense flattery. To Othello the entire event seems to unfold accidentally, from momentary impulses, not a neatly hierarchic Satanic assault on his psyche. Twice Iago leaves the stage to let Othello mull over his suggestions (good teachers, I think, will take note of this),

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then hurriedly returns, affecting concern for Othello before further building his case against Desdemona’s goodness and the possibility of her truly loving Othello. Two doorways to spiritual decay The contrast between these great depictions of temptation begins with ­Shakespeare’s sympathy for bodily sensuality: Spenser’s leading ladies (Gloriana, Belphoebe, Amoret, Florimell, Britomart, Pastorella), in an intellectual iconography drawn from the Song of Songs, Dante, and Petrarch, are basically b ­ odiless, the body conceived as veiling their spiritual being.79 Only demonic idols (Duessa, Acrasia, False Florimell) flaunt their bodies. In contrast, Shakespeare’s tempters (Titania, Falstaff, Cleopatra) have complete stage presence, immensely attractive in their emphatic physicality; even the virginal maidens of the late plays (Marina, Imogen, Perdita, Miranda) are wonderfully embodied. While Spenser views provocative sensuality as sinister, admitting no compromise, Shakespeare encourages such enticement, surprisingly arming the tempters (notably Falstaff and Cleopatra) with wittily ironic self-awareness. Though promiscuity assumes grave consequences in the middle and late plays (Angelo’s fall, Prospero’s threats), Shakespeare constantly delights in bodily sensation, grieves at thoughts of losing it. An equally sharp contrast with Spenser is Shakespeare’s contextualizing temptation in intimate personal relationship: such bonding is broken by clever tempting, flaunting the psychic complexities of flattery that seeks relational power, but true bonds always reassert themselves. For both Spenser and Shakespeare slander is contemptible, but, while Spenser implies that victims bring calumny on themselves by unguarded behaviour, Shakespeare stresses their gentle loving decency. Because Shakespeare so fully values relationship, he portrays suicide (which Spenser views with horror) not as sinful tempting but as affirming deepest bonds (‘whither you go I will go’). Such positive love-deaths include romantic couples (Juliet and Romeo, Portia and Brutus, Desdemona and Othello, Cleopatra and Antony, Pericles and Thaisa, Imogen and Posthumus), same-sex friends (Romeo and Mercutio, Brutus and Cassius, Desdemona and Emilia, Cleopatra and Charmian and Mardian, Antony and Enobarbus and Eros), and parent and child (Old and Young Talbot, Cordelia and Lear, Ferdinand and Alonso). For Shakespeare, sympathetic self-immolation is a cottage (and palace) industry. As for selfidolatry and a resulting suicidal despair, Spenser is horrified by both, though he partly idolizes Elizabeth and poetic laureateship; Shakespeare, in striking contrast, depicts self-love positively, even when it verges on idolatry and even when it leads to self-immolation. The psychic and theological causes of temptation differ greatly in the two poets. Each book of The Faerie Queene is part of a quest for communion with God (which temptation obstructs), so Spenser’s tempters are emphatically Satanic, and his rescuers are providential. Though Shakespeare does connect evil with the supernatural, it is an overdetermined mix with natural causation: ghosts, fairies, witches, and pagan deities commingle with human causation (warfare, family dynamics, the near-demonism of malicious humans), and Shakespeare stresses personal responsibility for evil. Though Hamlet’s ghost and Macbeth’s witches give

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evil a cosmic range, the causal locus is a complex human psyche engendering selftemptation and self-deception, most impressively in King Leontes. As for temptation’s ontological basis, Spenser subordinates material and emotional being (so subject to mutability) and instead privileges intellect, formal ordering and spiritual doctrine: he shapes temptation to match the soul’s tripartite hierarchy of powers. His characters lack the self-awareness and sense of humour that would enable them to ‘learn from experience’; rather they receive doctrinal revelations in emblematic form from moral sages who teach them to ‘read’ experience by means of predetermined formal structures. In contrast, Shakespeare valorizes empirical realities and cycles of passion, promoting psychic change through foolery, madness, and the immense reticence of love. His characters are self-conscious performers who (regardless of social station) fashion an identity grounded in passional change. Unlike Iago, Spenser’s Mammon cannot say, ‘I am not what I am’ – epitomizing Iago’s self-conscious veiling and performativity, while unconsciously inverting the divine ‘I am.’ Giving such a complex inner dialogue to an evil character is unthinkable for the Christian Platonist Spenser. Moral counsel in Spenser and Shakespeare The schematic narrowing of moral counsel in The Faerie Queene Moral counsel, good and bad, pervades Spenser’s allegorical epic. In each legend a wise adviser helps the protagonist to ‘read’ the moral meaning of events – the maskings of evil and mirrorings of providence – always in collusion with authoritative writings (the Bible, ancient classics, medieval romance and theology). Such counsel is crucial in this doctrinal poem where heroes do not by themselves ‘learn from experience’80 but must be taught by an authority figure. No hero is good at reading signs. Britomart puzzles over Busyrane’s abusive icons (amatory triumphs of the Olympian gods) until with bold faith but little rational clarity she dispels his idolatrous art to liberate a timid, unarmed soul.81 Complicating the hero’s moral readings are the false counsellors who, as Jesus warns, build shaky ‘houses’ (Matt. 7.20–7). Books 1 and 2: Archimago pretends ‘wisely to advise’ (1.1.33) but crafts a duplicate of Una to take Redcrosse to the House of Pride (built on sand), until Una leads him to the House of Holiness. In Books 1 and 2, after the hero vacillates between antithetical teachers, the true adviser is unfolded as a house of training – Una as a House of Holiness, the Palmer as Alma’s Castle.82 Frances Yates and Mary Carruthers show this compartmentalized architecture to be an ancient memory-device for ‘knowing oneself ’.83 Its very form, a Christian-Platonic threelayered hierarchy, shapes the hero to defeat evil and reunite with good. In Book 1’s final canto the Redcrosse Knight’s intimacy with Spenser’s wisest counsellor, the humble Una, provides a taste of immortality, a ‘sea of blissful joy’. And at the end of Book 2 the prudential Palmer collaborates with Guyon to avoid the undertow of alluring worldly desires that do not lead to God. This moral pattern – a wise counsellor, an elaborate place of learning, and a final episode relating to the vision of God – recurs in each legend, yet, as we will see, the comprehensiveness of this

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training shrinks in Books 2–6 as the quests descend into material reality, which renders their moral empowerment increasingly ambivalent. In Books 3–6 the material descent brings proliferation, a loss of simple unity. As virtues move from private to public, each hero splits into subtypes or complements, each needing moral counsel: Britomart into ‘three graces’ (Florimell, Belphoebe, Amoret); Telamond into ‘three worlds’ (Priamond, Diamond, Triamond); Artegall matched with a stronger complement, Arthur; Calidore with a weaker complement, Calepine. Yet the sages who counsel them decline in authority, as do the allegorical centres that clarify virtuous power, and as do the twelfth-canto epiphanies that should confirm the success of the moral quest. Books 3 and 4 depict the more equivocal moral authority of Olympian deities: Amoret and Belphoebe are trained by Venus and Diana, Amoret and Florimell endure material bondage by gods of perpetual flux (Proteus and Neptune) and the threat of reductive metamorphosis by rapist-gods (Jove, Apollo, Pan).84 In Book 5 the adviser for justice, Astraea, goes missing (5.1.5–11), making the victories over titans a crude wish-fulfilment; and she remains absent in Book 6 where the sequestered pastoral wisdom of the Hermit, Meliboe, and Colin Clout seems powerless to correct a fallen world.85 In Books 1–6 the training in self-knowledge steadily narrows as Spenser alters each legend’s hermeneutics for a descent through six psychic levels, from the spiritual-intellective mode of Book 1 to the material-sensate mode of Book 6, a ‘dilation’ that shows the deepening challenge of sin and salvation in the obscuring veils of the material world.86 After two levels of rational training by Una and the Palmer in Books 1–2, in Books 3–4 a stream of ardent matrons (Glauce and Cymodoce, Venus and Diana, Cambina and Canacee, Agape), along with magical Merlin and the equivocal divinity of Proteus and Neptune, show an altered mode of moral counsel in the heart’s passional realm. In the sensate realm of Books 5–6 moral counsel grows even more equivocal and problematic. Astraea abandons Artegall, leaving brutal Talus to enforce justice in a desecrated world, alleviated only by Britomart’s equity and Mercilla’s mercy. Calidore’s quest for courtesy in this same sensate realm draws even more limited moral advice: a savage man’s untutored inner light can’t solve moral turpitude;87 a Hermit’s sense-restraint can’t stop unillumined savages from shaming Serena;88 Meliboe’s pastoral otium can’t stop brigands from murder and rape; and, as a culminating irony, the ‘furious insolence’ of Colin Clout’s visions actually distracts Calidore from preventing such cruelty. The Faerie Queene’s persistent goal, the combating of vices in the hope of disclosing God’s image in human nature, is in the six legends increasingly obstructed and darkened. Whereas Book 1 engages the evil in oneself (three Sansboys, then Orgoglio-Despair-Dragon), Books 5 and 6 shift to demonizing others: the Souldan, instead of a universal pride like Orgoglio, now specifies Philip II’s Armada; Duessa, instead of universal duplicity, now specifies Mary Queen of Scots; Irena, instead of universal Eden, now specifies an Ireland purged of savage Catholics; and the errant lovers and backbiters of Book 6 allude, at least in part, to specific members of Elizabeth’s court. The holistic perspective of Book 1 best exemplifies the moral counsellor and a house unfolding her wisdom. Una’s pithy advice stresses a Christlike wisdom-

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of-love, consummated by taking Redcrosse to the House of Holiness and sharing his suffering and joy during its mystic stages that fulfil the spiritual body.89 In Books 2–6 moral counsel is increasingly less definitive and effective, precisely because of Spenser’s systematic descent into materialism, testing the immortal soul by embodiment. Presumably Spenser, in the final six legends, would reverse this moral declension.90 The growth of moral counsel in Shakespeare’s plays While Spenser’s portrait of moral education in The Faerie Queene methodically narrows, Shakespeare’s moral counsellors radically improve91 but only slowly and only after a very shabby beginning. I will outline three stages of development in Shakespeare’s counsellors: a lengthy initial stage of farcically absurd counsellors, a second stage of counsellors who are chastened by suffering, and a final stage of counsellors who are artfully effective. No Shakespearean counsellor has the broad canonical authority of Spenser’s Una or his Palmer, and no Shakespearean protagonist visits a doctrinal castle like those in the morality plays and in Spenser’s epic. But in Shakespeare’s mature tragedies, where counsellors undergo suffering and anxious questioning, or even insanity and loss of loved ones, they are transformed, and this process contributes to the mysterious ‘Art’ by which Prospero (and Paulina) approximate wise counsel.92 Debunking counsel in the early plays (1590–1600) Shakespeare’s early plays portray extravagant failures of moral counsel: parents, tutors, friars, and noble councillors are farcically neglectful or cruelly obtuse. We recall Proteus’s father in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,93 Bianca and Katherina’s father in The Taming of the Shrew, Hermia’s father in Midsummer Night’s Dream. We recall the feuding parents and clans in Romeo and Juliet and the Henry VI cycle. And we recall the ruthlessly misleading advice of Titus, Tamora, Aaron, and Richard III – always for their own worldly success or revenge, never for anyone’s moral growth. Instead of attaining their worldly goals, they foster horror. The few exceptions (Old Talbot, the Bastard Falconbridge, John of Gaunt, and temporizing Friar Laurence) prove the rule, compounding our dismay at those who unleash fury, childish regression and self-indulgence. A distinct improvement occurs in the golden comedies and histories (The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Henriad) which contain much good counsel, though full of Machiavellian equivocations and wittily clothed in paradox: wise fools comment archly on a crowded pageant of actual fools; the wisdom of cross-dressed maidens springs from their humble lack of entitlement and their skill at theatrical improvisation; and Prince Hal further refines this theatrical mode of moral counsel and governance. Fashioning himself as ‘all humours’ he promotes a fantasy-bond with soldiers of all social levels. Though optimistic, the counsel of these plays is riddled with irony. Privileged authority figures still have feet of clay, and, throughout Shakespeare’s canon, lewd commoners charm with parodies of wisdom. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Launce treats his dog, and us, to forthright moral advice – as does the Nurse

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in Romeo and Juliet, Mistress Quickly in Henry V, and, most suggestive, the gravedigger in Hamlet. Despite his absurd analysis of suicide and indecorous ballads as he uncovers bones, the gravedigger’s exuberant earthiness starkly contrasts the courtly deceptions of Claudius and Polonius. As the digger recalls Hamlet’s birth and relives Yorick’s raw and vibrant spirit, Hamlet regains his best self. Other clowns in the tragedies – Lear’s fool, Macbeth’s porter, Cleopatra’s snake-keeper – likewise promote moral wisdom in simple forthrightness. Shakespeare’s brilliant use of this commoner-wisdom distinctly separates his aesthetic from Spenser’s.94 Moral counsellors grow markedly in the mature tragedies, but only after Shakespeare’s sharpest exposure of failed counsel. Hamlet’s Polonius, the most complex and engaging of Shakespeare’s counsellors, clearly believes he has perfected this high moral calling, but his fussy effort to control both his children and the royal family, and his inattention to moral realities, epitomizes the errors of counsel in the early plays. This play, Shakespeare’s longest and perhaps best, swallows up Polonius in its large machinery of moral advice, overshadowing him with Claudius’s deceitful pronouncements, Hamlet’s sceptical questions, and the gravedigger’s disarming openness. In a time of evil Polonius misreads the needs of his children and the kingdom, yet his wayward eloquence and prying surveillance add a disturbing moral energy and establish a norm of shallow human insight. Harold Jenkins scolds those who reduce Polonius to mere comedy, noting that his ‘maxims of worldly prudence’ are distilled from works of Isocrates, Cato, and Erasmus, echoed in fictions of Lyly, Greene, Lodge, Florio, and Shakespeare (AW 1.1.54), as also in letters of advice by Sidney’s father, Lord Burleigh, Raleigh, and the Ninth Earl of Northumberland. Polonius’s maxims, says Jenkins, ‘are entirely appropriate to [him] as a man of experience. It is a mistake to suppose they … make him seem ridiculous. Their purpose … is to present him in his role of father … preparing for the emergence of Laertes later as the avenger.’95 Polonius’s precepts show heartfelt concern for his son as they tap rich veins of ancient wisdom, but Josephine Waters Bennett notes that Shakespeare’s literate audience would recognize Polonius’s precepts as plundered from Isocrates’ famous letter to Demonicus, required reading for Tudor schoolboys at three levels of their schooling. Those with good memories would also sense Polonius’ selective use of it. He ignores the religious maxims with which Isocrates began (religion, piety, discipline, modesty, reverence) and instead focuses on social image (discretion, affability and friendship, quarrels, reticence, dress, thrift, and the integrity that solidifies social relations). Polonius encourages his son to cultivate noble friends and a noble identity, and, like Claudius and Osric, he emphasizes the French mastery of stylish appearance. Polonius intrusively panders to Claudius and Gertrude, with no concern for their incestuous revelry; he gives lurid instructions to foxy Reynaldo for spying on Laertes’ affairs in Paris; and most telling is his choice of fashionable Paris, not Lutheran Wittenburg, to groom his son for power. In his self-interested shaping of his son and in catering to royal power, Polonius resembles Elizabeth’s great statesman Lord Burleigh, who moulded his son Robert Cecil into a crafty leader like Claudius, while discrediting his former ward, the princely Essex, into frustrated disempowerment like Hamlet’s.96

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Polonius is the first of Shakespeare’s moral counsellors to die for his blindness, drawing his children into the same darkness. Though Hamlet mocks his officious unawareness both before and after the slaying, Polonius is never trivialized: he is saved from this fate by Ophelia’s grief in madness, by Hamlet’s defensive sarcasm, by the bonding of Hamlet and Laertes at death, but mainly by Polonius’ lively quest for wrongful knowledge, with flickerings of insight as he questions his surveillance of Hamlet. Always he plays a normative game of courtly power that restricts his soul from tragic awareness. Unlike King Hamlet’s secretive murder, Polonius is publicly slain as he intrusively collaborates in misusing royal power. Habitually he advises the royal couple and the youths in his charge with little concern for Isocrates’ main precepts. Compassionate suffering: moral counsel in the late tragedies (1600–1607) If Polonius sums up the self-serving myopia of Shakespeare’s early counsellors, the mature tragedies bring moral insight through traumatic suffering that deeply wounds but restores relationships. As Gloucester says, ‘I stumbled when I saw.’ No Spenserian sage undergoes this experiential transformation. Though Una and Meliboe endure great suffering, their moral authority does not develop through the harrowing experience; their truth is simply a given. That Shakespeare subjects proud, intelligent, eloquent authority-figures to intense suffering raises a puzzling issue: what do they learn from it? Physical, emotional, mental anguish certainly lays a basis for learning, but to transform the soul it must be contextualized in human relations. In compassional suffering one realizes a commonality with the poor and unprivileged; in humble suffering one learns the fragility of the fantasy of power, fame, and self-control; and the profound experience of shaming suffering exposes one’s cruelty toward others and neglect of their suffering. Shakespeare’s characters do learn from experience, especially from these kinds of suffering. The shaming of Claudio, Othello, and Leontes enables them to appreciate with some fullness what they have publicly contemned in the women who love them. Lear’s three cycles of shaming strengthen him spiritually. It is a sentimental misreading to view him as disabled by senility, to view the scenes of deepening madness as showing no deepening of insight, or to view his ending as a mere renewing of insanity with no concurrent epiphany. The only nagging question is how much Lear, enduring this ‘wheel of fire’, is able to share his moral insight with others. As in Shakespeare’s other mature tragedies, moral counsellors are transformed mainly by compassional suffering, which activates the most genuine awareness and authority. Gloucester and Edgar, Kent and Lear, learn to counsel themselves as they see and identify with the suffering of others. Shakespeare thus bases moral wisdom on each individual’s experience of suffering, especially in bonded relationships, whereas Spenser bases it on canonical written authority as delivered by an approved and objective tutor. Instead of being taught moral authority by a perfectly wise guide or a stable doctrinal ‘house’, Shakespeare’s characters find value enmeshed in life’s protean, passional changeableness. Such insight resembles the ‘Montaignian moment’, for Montaigne viewed his ideas and values as intensely

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subject to change, contextualized by fortunal circumstance, relationships, and physical, emotional, mental, spiritual well-being.97 Artful and effective counsel: The Tempest The Tempest offers a more mysterious advance in moral counsel, a third refining of moral wisdom. Prospero is a father-counsellor who, like Polonius, allowed disastrous misrule through self-indulgent neglect; and, like Lear and Gloucester, he has been chastened by exile and hardship while also being gentled by compassionate relations. But more than any previous character Prospero has learned an ‘Art’98 of moral counsel and responsible care – of parenting, ruling, and even morally transforming souls. His art is poetic, theatrical, educative, socio-political, and spiritual. With it he cultivates Miranda’s loving innocence, harnesses Caliban’s beastly impulses, and exploits Ariel’s spirited powers. With it he treats social ills by managing his anger and forgiving others, by restrainedly punishing malicious evildoers, by praising and rewarding the kind and the penitent. To realize the moral dimensions of Prospero’s art we need only compare his long careful counselling of Miranda (Tmp 1.2.1–184) with Polonius’ brief patronizing of Ophelia (Ham 1.3.87–135). First, whereas Polonius considers only his son to be educable, Prospero tutors Miranda extensively, often inviting dialogue rather than mere lecture. Though her naivety is repeatedly stressed, so is her outspoken mental acuity. It is especially apparent if she has the lines chastising Caliban for misusing her teachings (the ‘Abhorred slave’ speech, 1.1.352–63); her audacious will and intellect are always apparent, notably in initiating the betrothal to Ferdinand. Second, Polonius, in advising Ophelia and later directing her for the eavesdropping, assumes that she knows nothing and has little capacity for reason; his cautionary harangue aims at protecting his own honour and position while ordering her to be passive, silent, and distant. Contrarily Prospero encourages Miranda to learn from harsh experience: at the outset he stages for her a shipwreck’s anguished social disorder, then gently comforts her: ‘I have done nothing but in care of thee, / Of thee, my dear one, thee my daughter’ (1.2.16–17). Third, after the tempest-lesson Prospero deepens her education by exposing evils that accrue to power. Polonius never discusses court politics with Ophelia, partly because he is blind to the corrupted court but also because he views his daughter mainly as bait to snare a prince. Finally, while Polonius orders Ophelia to distance herself from Hamlet, viewing her as prey to mere animality, Prospero stages and supervises Miranda’s engagement with a princely stranger – a meeting contextualized by the tempest-lesson of mortality and bonding, epitomized in Ariel’s mourning songs that refine Ferdinand’s soul to meet Miranda. The contrast between these modes of counsel could hardly be more striking. The moral counsel of Hamlet, Lear, and Prospero teasingly suggests the playwright’s own evolving polyphonic irony. If Hamlet and King Lear finally marginalize moral counsel, leading to a poisoned bloodbath and to transcendent darkness, The Tempest’s elusive allegory also ambiguates moral wisdom. Prospero’s lengthy counsel of his beloved daughter implies that her intellectual and spiritual wellbeing is a touchstone for the future good of Naples and Milan, as well as for future

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audiences of The Tempest. But if as kulturträger Miranda transmits essential values, why doesn’t Prospero educate her completely? If she has been exposed to Caliban’s bestiality, should she not also witness Ariel’s spiriting? Why must she (and others) sleep when Ariel appears? Why does Prospero not openly share his Art with his daughter and with others who might use Ariel’s power in beneficial ways? Which leads to the deeper mystery: what is Prospero’s ‘Art’, and what is the exact nature of its moral counsel? After harsh lessons from neglecting a ruler’s duties, Prospero’s further study of ‘books’ and people has enlightened him about the complexities of humankind and governance, especially for integrating his child and himself into the civilized community. It enables him to punish some and reward others by staging spectacles of suffering and recognition. Even if it is ‘rough magic’, why must Prospero disclaim it before resuming his dukedom? And why does Shakespeare show an artist concealing his means of empowerment: Ariel and the other ‘spirits’? These issues will be addressed in this book’s final chapter. On the poet’s prowess in depicting moral wisdom Shakespeare and Spenser have much in common: Spenser depicts morally elite but largely unconscious protagonists who must be assisted by doctrinally trained advisers, by a poet gifted with magical language and a providential overview of characters and actions: Colin Clout’s ‘furious insolence’ asserts high civility and moral vision, while lamenting its neglect by privileged people (Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, Shepheardes Calender, Teares of the Muses, The Fairie Queene, 6.10); Spenser’s moral and spiritual vision, which subsumes that of Colin Clout, is not fully revealed in Books 1–6 of The Faerie Queene. Despite his aspiration for high privilege, Spenser affects a humility that allies him and his protagonists with commoners, indeed even with ‘salvages’: Redcrosse begins as a lowly clown in a furrow (Ge/orge = earth/spirit) and gains spiritual arms that link all social classes; in Book 6 the golden courtier Calidore fulfils Courtesy partly by abasing himself among country folk. In this awkward (and, says Richard Neuse, inauthentic)99 social abasement near the end of his truncated epic, Spenser edges toward Shakespeare’s habitual vision. Prospero’s ‘potent Art’ expresses a moral wisdom highly dependent on his ‘Book(s)’ but also on experientially derived compassion: watchful for dark forces in humankind, he delights in imitating God (Hadfield calls it ‘republicanism’), but, quite unlike Spenser, Shakespeare has commoners set his patrician-aristocratic protagonists on a proper path by affirming a bond with simple Nature. More than Spenser, Shakespeare views the sensory, bodily reality shared by all social classes, and the mutual aid in dealing with it, as a basis of moral well-being. Both poets anticipate the decline of that mortal frame such that the poet’s ‘magic’ can succeed only by acknowledging personal failure, suffering, and impotence. Notes  1 Berger, The Allegorical Temper (Yale University Press, 1957), 71n, 65–88; Mills, ‘Spenser, Lodowick Bryskett, and the Mortalist Controversy: The Faerie Queene II.ix.22’, PQ 52 (1973), 173–86; ‘Prudence, History, and the Prince in The Faerie Queene, Book II’, HLQ 61 (1978), 84–7.  2 Plato, Timaeus, 44d–45b, 69d–71a, 73b–d; cf. Republic, IV.440b–445b; both in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, 4th ed., 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953). Aristotle, De Anima,

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II.2–12, passim, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W.D. Ross, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908– 52). On Spenser’s arithmological stanza, confirming the castle’s essentially Platonic form, see Mills, ‘Spenser, Lodowick Bryskett, and the Mortalist Controversy’, and its bibliography.  3 Berger, The Allegorical Temper, 72, 81.  4 Timaeus, 35a, 36b–c, 44d–45b. Jowett summarizes: ‘God took of the unchangeable and indivisible and also of the divisible and corporeal, and out of the two he made a third nature, which was in a mean between them …. The entire compound was divided by him lengthways into two parts, which he united at the centre like the letter X, and bent them into an inner and outer circle or sphere…. The two divine courses were encased by the gods in a sphere which is called the head, and which is the god and lord of us’ (III.642–3, 647).  5 Aristotle, De Anima, III.4, 429a22–7: ‘that in the soul which is called mind (by mind I mean that whereby the soul thinks and judges) is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing. For this reason it cannot reasonably be regarded as blended with the body: if so, it would acquire some quality, e.g. warmth or cold, or even have an organ like the sensitive faculty: as it is, it has none.’ On Avicenna and Aquinas, see E.R. Harvey, The Inward Wits (University of London: Warburg Institute, 1975), 51–3, 56–61. Cf. Aristotle’s De Anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. K. Foster and S. Humphries (Yale University Press, 1951), 406.  6 Sir John Davies, Nosce Teipsum, in Silver Poets of the 16th Century, ed. G. Bullitt (London: Dent, 1947), 353, 379. Cf. John Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos [1603], in The Complete Works, ed. A.B. Grosart (Edinburgh University Press, 1878), 84–6; F.N. Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, trans. E. Grimeston (London, 1621), 2–3; T. Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601), 62; and Philippe de Mornay, A Worke Concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion, trans. Sir. P. Sidney and A. Golding (London, 1587), 225–57.  7 Charron, Of Wisdome, trans. S. Lennard (London, 1607), I.47–8: ‘We are not here enquiring what the soul is, but how she operates, and what Laws of Action she is bound up to, while in Conjunction with a Mortal Body. And Secondly, the making Use of Corporeal Instruments, does by no means prove the User to be Corporeal, or Mortal. God, without all Question, is Immortal, and yet God himself does not think it below him to use such; and to proportion the Effects and Operations of his Providence to them.’ Cf. Juan de Dios Huarte Navarro, Examine de Ingenios, The Examination of mens Wits, trans. R. Carew (London, 1594), 23ff, 28ff., 52–6, 70–101; Bright. A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586), 39–67; Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors [1607] (London, 1664). 18–32; Bacon, ‘Advancement of Learning’, in Works, ed. J. Spedding et al. (1870; rpt New York: Garrett Press, 1968), IV, 377-–.  8 Thomas Vicary, The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (1548; rpt London: Trübner, 1888), 32–3; Primaudaye, The French Academie, 21–4, 29, 34–5; Andre Du Laurens (Laurentius), A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, trans. R. Surphlet (London, 1599), 1–9, 15–16; Wright, The Passions of the Minde, 62; Edward Forset, A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (London, 1606), 26–9; Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos, 86; Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body Of Man (London, 1615), 431–4; Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Vintage, 1977; orig. 1621), I, 153; Batman uppon Bartholome, His Booke De proprietatibus Rerum, trans. S. Bateman (London, 1582), 35–7.  9 Peter Boaistuau, Theatrum Mundi, the Theatre or rule of the World (London, 1566?), Book II, 63; Huarte, The Examination of mens Wits, 52–6, 60–1; Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, II.47; Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, 8, 15, 73–80; Charron, Of Wisdome, 46–7; Bacon, ‘Advancement of Learning’, IV, 292–3, 398, 405–6. Cf. R.L. Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays (1927; rpt New York: Haskell House, 1964), 16, 43–4; H. Baker, The Image of Man (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1952), 283–4 and n; and R. Harvey, The Inward Wits (London: University of London, Warburg Institute, 1975) 12–13, 15ff., 36, 38 and passim, who cites the medical tradition as leaning toward this view. 10 H. Berger, Jr, ‘Archaism, Immortality, and the Muse in Spenser’s Poetry’, Yale Review 58 (1968), 218, elaborates his view of the wits in Allegorical Temper. The same overly limited conception of Spenser’s three sages is found in Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology, 16, and Harvey, The Inward Wits, 30.

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11 Davies, Nosce Teipsum, 376–7; Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 154, 157; Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island (New York: Gale ECCO, 2010), canto 6, stanzas 46–8. Burton allows of the middle wit that ‘some call it estimative, or cogitative’ (159, 154), and that it is ‘governed by reason, or at least it should be’ (160); but the inner wits’ purpose, he believed, was merely to ‘perceive the species of sensible things, present or absent, and retain them as wax doth the print of a seal’ (157). For comparable views of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Aquinas, see n. 5. 12 See n. 10. The nobler conception of the three inner wits as rational agents received impetus from Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus de Insulis, and the Chartrians. See T. Silverstein, ‘The Fabulous Cosmogony of Bernardus Silvestris’, MP 47 (1948), 97–8 and n. 34; Alanus de Insulis, The Complaint of Nature, trans. M. Moffat (1908; rpt Hamden, CT: Archon, 1972), 25, 27. 13 According to Aquinas and Avicenna, Imaginativa (as distinct from the lesser power of Imaginatio) was a synthesizing and evaluating power which occupied the middle ventricle. Davies, Burton, and Fletcher follow this tradition when they name the middle wit Phantasy. Spenser, however, follows the Averroean line in envisioning a higher imaginative power as occupying the first ventricle, and in identifying the crucial middle wit (‘cogitativa’, or ‘judgment’) with dianoia or reason. See H.A. Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts’, HTR 28 (1935), 107–13. Aquinas tried to synthesize Averroes and Avicenna by defining the middle power as ‘cogitativa’ or ‘particular reason’ (Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses’, 121–2; Harvey, The Inward Wits, 55). 14 Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, 74–6; Bacon, ‘Advancement of Learning’, IV, 292–3, 406. 15 Batman uppon Bartholome, 15; Avicenna, De Anima, qui sextus naturalium diciiur, in Opera (Venice, 1508), I.v (5r, col. b, D–E); Aquinas, ST 1.78.4, 83.1; B.J. Harwood, ‘Langland’s Kynde Wit’, JEGP 75 (1976), 330–6. Cf. Harvey, The Inward Wits, 44ff., 55ff.; G. Klubertanz, The Discursive Power: Sources and Doctrine of the ‘Vis Cogitativa’ According to St. Thomas Aquinas (St Louis: Modern Schoolman, 1952), 212–14, 231–7, 242, 265–94. 16 Aristotle, Eth. Nic. VI.5, 1140b5, 20; VI.6, 1141a8, 1141a18ff, 1141b3; VI.7, 1141a22. 17 Ibid. VI.6, 1141a8, 1141a18ff., 1141b3. 18 Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, 76; Bacon, ‘Advancement of Learning’, IV, 292–3. 19 Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, 77; Bacon, ‘Advancement of Learning’, IV, 292. 20 Kellogg and Steele’s edition of The Faerie Queene, Books I and II (New York: Odyssey Press, 1965), nn. to 2.9.47, 53–4; Mills, ‘Spenser, Lodowick Bryskett, and the Mortalist Controversy’, 180–1. 21 Primaudaye, The French Academie, 105, 115. Cf. Huarte, The Examination of mens Wits, 40–1; Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 70–1; Dante, Purgatorio, 29.132. Aquinas also conceived of prudence as an intellectual virtue which governed moral habits. thus mediating between the rational and sensitive powers (ST I–II.57.4–5); but there is occasional difficulty in his attempt to maintain the distinction between practical reason or prudence and the sensitive powers of apprehension in the brain (ST II–II.47.3.reply obj.3). 22 Kellogg and Steele, n. 20 above. Recent annotations of The Faerie Queene are also ambivalent, using Aristotelian terms to identify the sages as part of the sensitive soul, then acknowledging their role as practical reason, their abode as the seat of reason: Brooks-Davies, Spenser’s Faerie Queene: A Critical Commentary on Books I and II (Manchester University Press, 1977), nn. to 2.9.27, 33–5, 44–5, 49–58; The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton New York, nn. to 2.9.44–54. 23 Charron, Of Wisdome, 30, 49–54; Huarte, The Examination of mens Wits, 52; Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 70–1. On the Galenic tradition, see P.A. Robin, The Old Physiology in English Literature (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1911), 48–55; Harvey, The Inward Wits, 28. 24 Aquinas, ST 1.79.9; cf. the distinction between ‘Intellectus’ and ‘Racio’ in Batman uppon Bartholome, III.6. 25 Aristotle, De Juventute et Senectute, III.469a4–18, 24ff. Also, see Aristotle, De Somno et Vigilia, 458a15; De Juv., 467b28ff: De Respiratione, 478b33ff: De Spiritu, 482b6; De Partibus Anima-

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lium, 656a15–b8 (and note), 665all–15; De Generatione Animalium, 781a20. Concerning Aristotle’s view of the heart, not the brain, as the main sense-organ, W.D. Ross notes that ‘he was reactionary, and his mistake retarded knowledge for centuries’ (Aristotle [London: Methuen, 1923], 143n.). For the historical development of this controversy between heart and brain as main sense organ and seat of the rational soul, see F.E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms (New York University Press, 1967), under ‘psyche’. sections 14–26, and ‘noesis’, sections 1–2,7–12, 17–21; Robin, The Old Physiology, 47–9; Baker, The Image of Man, 283–4, 284n., 289; A.L. Kellogg, ‘Amatory Psychology and Amatory Frustration in the Interpretation of the “Book of the Duchess”’, in Chaucer, Langland, Arthur (Rutgers University Press, 1972), 70–2 ff.; and esp. Harvey, The Inward Wits, 6, 22–3, 34–5, 39, who cites Aristotle, the Stoics, and Avicenna as major advocates for the primacy of the heart. The idea of the heart’s sovereignty also derives from Old Testament and Jewish Apocalyptic literature; see D.S. Russell, The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964), 141ff. The ambivalence between head and heart is reflected in Batman uppon Bartholome, 12, 357, 55–6; Vicary, The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man, 32–3, 56; Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos, 26; Davies, Nosce Teipsum, 351; Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 150, 152–3. The debate is taken up by Charron and Huarte (see n. 7); John Woolton, A Treatise on the Immortalitie of the Soule (London, 1576); Cornelius Agrippa, Of the Vanitie and vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, trans. Ja. San. (London, 1569), 66–70; Lodowick Bryskett, A Discovrse of Civill Life (London, 1606), 46–9; Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, 1–9: and Forset, A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique, 23–35, who argues for both head and heart. 26 See Harvey, The Inward Wits, 22–3 and n. 27 The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, in Three Parallel Texts, ed. W. Skeat (1886; rpt Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), B, IX.52–8; The Book of the Duchess, ll. 492–6, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 272; Spenser, Amoretti, 50, in The Minor Poems, II, 216. Cf. Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII.466–8, 485–9; Shakespeare, 2H4 5.5.47; Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, meditation 11; R.D. Cornelius, ‘The Figurative Castle’, diss. Bryn Mawr, 1930, 17–36. For philosophical and medical treatises, see The Middle English Translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Anatomy, ed. B. Wallner (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1964), 110; Elyot, Of the Knowledge which Maketh a Wise Man, ed. E.J. Howard (1533; rpt Oxford, OH: Anchor, 1946), 82, 119; Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 150–3. 28 See L. Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art (Yale University Press, 1975), 13, 51, 84, 128: ‘The Head always represents the king, for reasons of physical preeminence, mental capacities, or possession of the soul. … The head rules the body, stands on top of the body, and contains reason, much like the king in relation to the body politic’ (84). Cf. Baker, The Image of Man, 289 and n; Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology, 140; John Wyclif, De Compositione Hominis, ed. R. Beer (London: Trübner, 1884), 82; Batman uppon Bartholome, 14; and Davies of Hereford: ‘The hart’s the lower house, the head the hie’ (32). 29 D.C. Allen, The Harmonious Vision: Studies in Milton’s Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1954), 17; he cites the tower in Donne’s ‘Second Anniversary’ and Milton’s ‘II Penseroso’, where it signifies the higher activity of mens; but in Alma’s Castle, where the sages focus on sense data, the tower is the seat of lower reason or ratio. Cf. Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, II; Du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, 4, 6, 77; Davies, Nosce Teipsum, 350, 352, 373. 30 Mills, ‘Spenser, Lodowick Bryskett, and the Mortalist Controversy’, 181. 31 Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time, 86. 32 Ratio and mens are thus seen, not as the soul itself, but as the highest power of the soul, in its diverse aspects. On this distinction between the soul and its intellective power, see Aquinas, ST 1.79.1; Batman uppon Bartholome, Book III, ch. 6; and O. Lottin, ‘La distinction entre l’ame et ses facultes’, in Psychologie et morale aux xiie et xiiie siècles (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1957), I, 507ff. But see the caveat in n. 36 below. 33 Hamilton: the ‘royal arras (appropriately red)’ of the heart chamber shows ‘that Alma, the

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soul, resides here’ (2.9.33n.), as well as the muses enthroned ‘In th’ hearts of men’ (TM 313–14). 34 Aquinas, ST I.79.3–4. Cf. R.E. Brennan, Thomistic Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 186, on active intellect as an intermediary between sensation and thought. On Langland’s Inwit as active intellect, see R. Quirk, ‘Langland’s Use of Kind Wit and Inwit’, JEGP 52 (1953), 182–8. 35 On the medieval proliferation of names for Anima, showing she could operate at different levels of man’s being, see Isidore, Etymologiae, XV.xiv, from whence it is cited by Langland, Piers Plowman, B, XV, 1–49, by Batman uppon Bartholome, 13, and by Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos, 27. 36 The medieval figuring of the higher soul as masculine and the lower soul as feminine is discussed by D.W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton University Press, 1962), 74–5; J.M. Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature (Columbia University Press, 1975), 17 and passim; C. Butler, Western Mysticism (London: Constable & Co., 1922), 72–3; A.V.C. Schmidt, ‘A Note on Langland’s Conception of “Anima” and “Inwit”’, N&Q 15 (1968), 363–4. Schmidt cites the De Spiritus et Anima attributed to Alcher of Clairvaux (Migne, PL XL, cols 779–831) for viewing the soul as most intensely present in heart and brain, the main habitats of Anima and Inwit. Quirk in ‘Langland’s Use of Kind Wit and Inwit’ warns that ‘the distinction between the soul and the highest mental faculty, intellect, was never established to the complete satisfaction of all the scholastic philosophers’ (185). 37 Davies, Nosce Teipsum, 378; Wisdom, who Is Christ, ll. 18–19, The Macro Plays, ed. F.J. Furnivall and A.W. Pollard (London: Trübner, 1904), 36; Piers Plowman, B, IX.528. Cf. Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos, 26; Huarte, The Examination of mens Wits, 32; L. Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, trans. T. Newton (London, 1539), 141. On the spiritual marriage between affective and cognitive parts of the soul, see E. Underhill, Mysticism (1910; rpt New York: Meridian, 1955), 128, 136–40, 426; J.E. Milosh, The Scale of Perfection and the English Mystical Tradition (University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 46–8; Butler, Western Mysticism, passim. 38 Guyon’s and Arthur’s complementary motives are a commonplace. Cf. Bryskett, A Discovrse of Civill Life, 137–42; 140: ‘the Platonikes say two things among others are specially giuen to for a diuine gift vnto man: Bashfulnesse the one, and Magnanimitie the other: the one to hold vs back from doing of anything worthy blame & reproch: the other to put vs forward into the way of praise and vertue’. 39 B.J. Harwood and R.F. Smith, ‘Inwit and the Castle of Caro in Piers Plowman’, NM 71 (1970), 648–9 and n.; and Quirk, ‘Langland’s Use of Kind Wit and Inwit’, 186–7. 40 Berger discusses Arthur’s excited response to the chronicles (Allegorical Temper, 90–1). 41 In Book 2 God’s traces are figured in nature, as the Proem makes clear. Guyon (or the reader) has only natural reason (functioning, as Aquinas would say, analogically) to perceive them. 42 The richest permutation of the Inwit–Anima interplay occurs in Britomart’s dynamic development, an evolving androgynous presence dominating Books 3–5. See pp. 204–20. 43 On Shakespearean epiphany as central to his dramaturgical structure, see Chapter 6 below. 44 Plato uses the house trope in Republic and Timaeus. On classical, medieval, and R ­ enaissance use of this memory-device to remember and to organize a complex subject, see Yates, The Book of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; University of Chicago Press, 1966); Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1990, 2008); The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Things, 400–1200 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). 45 Except Book 3. Britomart sees no Petrarchan Triumph of Chastity, and (appropriately) does not witness the Garden of Adonis, which orients chastity to generative sexual love. 46 See G.W. Knight’s comments on The Tempest in The Crown of Life (1947; rept New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966). 47 Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (Yale University Press, 2007), 82–6. Cf. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London: Methuen, 1983); Thinking with Shakespeare, ed. R. Scholar and W. Poole (Legenda Main, 2007); H. Bloom, Shakespeare: Inventing the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998); P.A. Jorgensen, ‘“Perplex’d in

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the Extreme”: The Role of Thought in Othello’, SQ 15 (1964), 265–75, and King Lear’s SelfDiscovery (University of California Press, 1967); S. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1987); R. Soellner, Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Ohio State University Press, 1972); R. Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (1948; New York: Praeger, 1976). 48 Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, 25, 82–6, 101–2. 49 See H. Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, on characters ‘overhearing’ themselves, showing how extensively Shakespeare invests consciousness in them. 50 As a child back from summer camp sings the campsong five zillion times, the death-wish being the parents’. On the Freudian ‘repetition compulsion’, see pp. 251–2, 258–9 below. 51 In both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra Mark Antony exemplifies the Dionysian thinker who enjoys the sensational and passional energy of Cleopatra and Egypt but must manage its varying tide. In contrast, Spenser’s Redcrosse is paralysed by sensual experience, and Malbecco petrified by experiential overload; Despair squelches life-experience. Guyon and the Palmer’s absurd response to Phedon’s murderous fury precludes moral debate by removing the horror from experience (FQ 2.4). 52 See especially 3.2, 4, 6; 4.6.83–203; 5.3.255–310. 53 Shakespeare shows thought as it is engaged (and transformed) in passional cycles, whose chiastic arrangement gives an uncanny sense of ‘perfection’ to an outcome initiated by the protagonist. Growth to self-knowledge is implicit in Shakespeare’s holistic design: three cycles (Acts 1–2, Act 3, Acts 4–5) form a powerful passional chiasmus – a stark contrast to Spenser’s intellectual chiasmus of hierarchic descent and ascent, not only in each legend but surely the intended form of the entire Faerie Queene. 54 Arthur’s fall into confusion (though surely not ‘madness’ like Orlando’s and Lear’s) and its eventual resolution, might have occurred in Books 7–8, followed by doctrinal training in Charity in 9–10 and ascension to Sapience in 11–12 – thus Malory’s tragic Arthur becomes Spenser’s Reformed Arthur. 55 4.6.170–1. 56 Did Spenser from the beginning plan the first six legends to descend from spiritual wholeness to sensate confusion, and the final six to ascend to fullest mystic vision? 57 On the complexity of melancholy, especially in gaining self-knowledge, and on its quite different depiction by Shakespeare and Spenser, see Chapter 2 above. 58 M.I. Corcoran, Milton’s Paradise with Reference to the Hexameral Background (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1945; rpt Kessinger, 2010), 66–8, and passim; E.M. Pope, Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947), 51–69, 80–92; A. Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries of Genesis 1527–1633 (University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 85–8; D.W. Robertson Jr, A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton University Press, 1962) 70–5, 382–4; S.C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (Yale University Press, 1962) 70–8; D.R. Howard, The Three Temptations (Princeton University Press, 1966), 41–75; B.K. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Brown University Press, 1966), 222–7; J.M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 68–74, 250, 266–7; P.  Cullen, The Infernal Triad: The Flesh, the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton (Princeton University Press, 1974), xxv–xxxvi. In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle radically altered Plato’s psychic scheme: see pp. 179–203 below. 59 See P. Cullen, ‘“Guyon Microchristus: The Cave of Mammon Re-examined’, ELH 37 (1970), 153–74, repr. in The Infernal Triad, 68–96. 60 Pope and Lewalski, n. 58 above. Cf. R.M. Frye, ‘“Theological and Non-Theological Structures in Tragedy’, ShS 4 (1969), 132–48. 61 H. Granville-Barker, The Players’ Shakespeare: The Tragedie of Macbeth (1927), xlvii. 62 G. W. Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sombre Tragedies (Oxford University Press, 1930), 166–7. 63 Rosenberg, The Masks of Macbeth (University of California Press, 1978), 543–58. 64 R. Frieman, Understanding Shakespeare: Macbeth (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 136–44.

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65 L.C. Knights, ‘How Many Children Hath Lady Macbeth?’, An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespearean Criticism (1933), rpt in Explorations (1946; New York University Press, 1964), 42–7. 66 Macbeth, ed. J.D. Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 1947), xliv. 67 Ibid., xxxi–xxxii. 68 The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1948, 1950), 183–225, 359–98. 69 R. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of God’s Judgments (University of Georgia Press, 1976), 163. 70 R. Walker, The Time Is Free: A Study of Macbeth (London: Andrew Dakers, 1949), 162. 71 G.R. Elliott, Dramatic Providence in Macbeth: A Study of Shakespeare’s Tragic Theme of Humanity and Grace (Princeton University Press, 1958), 12–13, 24, 166–70. 72 Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1968), 257–73); Fergusson, Shakespeare: The Pattern in the Carpet (New York: Dell, 1958), 246. 73 In Lady Windermere’s Fan Lord Darlington thus begins his seductive overtures. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. M. Holland (London: HarperCollins, 2003), 424. 74 See N. Johnstone, ‘The Protestant Devil: The Experience of Temptation in Early Modern England’, The Journal of British Studies 43.2 (2004), 173–205. 75 Sansloy is called ‘lawlesse lust’ (1.6.Pr.), leading many critics, versed in French, to define him only as ‘lawless’. To appreciate his part in the triadic pagan aporia we must re-examine his etymology and role: the noun ‘lust’ supersedes the adjective ‘lawless’: loy signifies not just ‘law’ but ‘loving loyalty’. Such a reading makes sense of Sansloy’s role, especially his attempt to rape Una – a result of Redcosse’s courtship of Duessa. See R.L. Reid, ‘Sansloy’s Double Meaning and the Mystic Design of Spenser’s Legend of Holiness’, SSt 29 (2014), 63–74. 76 See S. Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth (University of North Carolina Press, 1963). 77 Sansfoy-Sansloy-Sansjoy (experienced conjointly by Redcrosse and Una); Orgoglio-DespairDragon (each with three stages); then, inversely, Mammon-Philotime-Proserpine; GeniusExcesse-Acrasia; then, shifting to the psychic venue of heart and will, Britomart’s strange empowerment to resist and conquer Busirane’s three levels of passional mastery and the three-in-one success of the Telamond triplets and of Scudamour’s triple combat at Venus’ Temple. 78 In Book 2’s finale he again uses lower reason, but with the Palmer’s aid, to resist the similarly prolific seductions en route to, and within, Acrasia’s ‘Bower of Blisse’. 79 As Dante learns in Convivio. Cf. Miller, ‘Alma’s Naught’, in The Poem’s Two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1988). 80 T.P. Roche, Jr, discussion, Spenser at Kalamazoo, 1982. That Spenser’s heroes depend so fully on authoritative counsel makes Astraea’s desertion of Artegall especially alarming. 81 Britomart is the only Spenserian hero who completes her quest with little aid from a mentor (Glauce compares poorly with Una, the Palmer, Cambina, Mercilla, Isis’ priests, Colin, Meliboe) or from an Olympian deity (Diana trains Belphoebe; Venus trains Amoret and supervises Scudamore). Nor is Britomart trained in an institutional centre until Isis’ Temple in Book 5. Despite Donald Stump’s fine analysis of Isis’ Temple and Mercilla’s Court, no one would argue that Isis’ Temple offers Britomart adequate moral counsel for gaining the virtues of Chastity, Friendship, or Justice. 82 Alma’s Castle teaches prudential control of belly’s appetites and of the heart’s passions, her three sages emblematizing the ‘allegory of prudence’ or inferior reason, as used by the Palmer. Una develops the knight’s superior reason, not only by training in the House of Holiness but by her Godlike loyal love. 83 See Yates, The Art of Memory; ‘Architecture and the Art of Memory’, Architectural Association Quarterly 12 (1980), 4–13; Carruthers, The Book of Memory; ‘The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages’, NLH 24 (1993), 881–904; The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). 84 An exception to the pattern of moral training occurs in Books 3–4. As an intellective mentor,

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Glauce pales beside Una and the Palmer, but as a passional guide, calming Britomart’s hysteria and patiently enduring Scudamour’s jealousy, she plays a crucial role in this dominant dimension of Books 3–4. Merlin’s vision of Britomart’s progeny (3.2) is a diminished romance analogue for the disclosures of Contemplation in Book 1 and the three sages in Book 2. The Garden of Adonis, a soul-seminary linking human and divine love, appears in canto 6, not 10; and it is not Britomart but her subtype Amoret who is educated there by Venus. Since Britomart demonstrates rational prowess within a passional ontology, she receives no doctrinal intellective schooling like that of Redcrosse and Guyon: she does not undergo spiritual annihilation and renewal like Redcrosse, does not confront the natural body’s mortal vulnerability like Guyon. She awakes to her own power in cantos 1–4 through emotional stress and romance magic, is in cantos 5–8 displaced by her subtypes (Amoret, Belphoebe, Florimell), who undergo the usual descent into fleshliness. Britomart’s iconic arms – female-derived and more elaborate than Belphoebe’s – make her power analogous to that of Redcrosse, Arthur, and Artegall, surpassing most male knights. Finally, and perhaps most important, Britomart’s skill with arms shows her passional power as intellective: wielding the sword of reason and the lance of will, and wearing the armour of restrained integrity, Britomart’s (like Elizabeth’s) intellect and will match all Briton heroes and surpass the Fairies. 85 As a final view of moral counsel, the Mutabilitie Cantos are immensely suggestive: here Elizabeth is seen as frail and mortal, highlighting Providence’s rule, as we meet the poem’s most grandiose counsellor, Dame Nature, who contains the incarnate messiah. The brief glimpse of Nature’s exalted presence might signal Spenser’s intended transition to higher moral counsel in Books 7–12. 86 The first section of Chapter 7 will discuss this descent of moral vision through deepening veils of materiality. Book 1: Una (the church, spiritual body, higher reason) – schematized in the House of Holiness. Book 2: Palmer (lower reason or prudence) – schematized in Alma’s Castle. Book 3: Glauce and Merlin (counsellors of the heart, in a veiled romance-magic symbolism, on Britomart’s bisexual being, unfolded in Florimell/Belphoebe/Amoret as grace-components), and the paradisal Garden of Adonis conveys the heart’s primal nature and end. Book 4: Canacee and Cambina (counsellors of the heart, in romance-Neoplatonic symbolism, reconcile and unite the three-worlds brothers), and the Temple of Venus enables genderfriendship. Book 5: Astraea, Isis, Mercilla (counsellors in a sensate fallen city), a wisdom schematized both in Isis’ Temple and in Mercilla’s Court. Book 6: Hermit, Pastorella, Meliboe (counsellors in the sensate world of nature), schematized in rural retreats, especially the beautiful but vulnerable pastoral world. 87 Comparing the satyrs of Book 1 who resist Una’s religious teaching, those of Book 3 who glee­­fully rape Hellenore, and Book 6’s salvages who seek to devour Serena epitomizes the ontological descent, the materializing and narrowing moral vision, in the first half of Spenser’s epic. 88 The sensate narrowing of moral education in Book 6 is evident if we compare the advice of the hermit, Meliboe, and Colin Clout with the elaborate training in the House of Holiness and Alma’s Castle. 89 See J. Collins, Mystical Theology in the Elizabethan Age (1937). 90 In Book 2 the Palmer guides Guyon’s use of the natural body (Alma’s Castle). In the affective virtues of Books 3 and 4, Diana teaches isolate chastity to Belphoebe in the forest (without temple-training), and Venus teaches married chastity to Amoret (Garden of Adonis) and to Amoret and Scudamour in her Temple. In the fallen sensate world of Books 5–6, Justice and Courtesy’s counsel unfolds with deep ambivalence in Isis and Mercilla’s templar realms, and in the pastoral of Pastorella, Meliboe, and Colin. 91 This comparison is of course unfair to Spenser, whose precipitous death after the Irish revolt against English colonization truncated The Faerie Queene at its apparent mid-point.

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92 Also compare the ‘magical’, ‘theatrical’, ‘healing’ art of Cerimon in Pericles, Cornelius in Cymbeline, and especially Paulina in The Winter’s Tale. 93 In The Two Gentlemen of Verona Proteus’ father advises him to ‘seek preferment’ in war, in sea exploration, in college study, or, along with Valentine, in courtly ‘perfection’ and advancement (‘practise tilts and tournaments, / Hear sweet discourse, converse with noblemen, / And be in eye of every exercise / Worthy his youth and nobleness of birth’, 1.3.4–43). But Proteus’s moral treachery, evoked by Valentine’s aggressive boast, undoes social ‘perfection’. Likewise in Love’s Labour’s Lost pedantic Holofernes and boastful Armado are figures of ridicule, unable to guide wayward young lords to maturity. 94 An Erasmian praise of folly. On Montaigne’s similar delight in ‘common wisdom’, see n. 97 below. 95 Hamlet, Arden, ed. H. Jenkins. 96 ‘Young Osric’ (or ‘Ostrich’), as his name implies, is a Frenchified dandy. Such emulation in dress and horsemanship is used by Claudius to draw Laertes to the poison duel, comparing him to a Frenchman who merges with his horse. The centaur image confirms Claudius’s own bestiality, which Hamlet stresses (‘Hyperion to a satyr’). On animal-satire of Osric and Claudius, see R. Hile, ‘Hamlet’s Debt to Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale: A Satire on Robert Cecil’, Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive Opposites, ed. J.B. Lethbridge (Manchester University Press, 2008). 187–200. 97 See D. Engster, ‘The Montaignian Moment’, JHI 59:4 (1998), 625–50. 98 ‘Art’ is capitalized in F, retained in Kermode’s Arden edition. On Prospero’s Art, pp. 316–21 below. 99 R. Neuse, ‘Book VI as Conclusion to The Faerie Queene’, ELH 35 (1968), 329–53.

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Depicting soul and spirit: Spenser and Shakespeare

He letteth in, he letteth out to wend,   All that to come into the world desire;   A thousand thousand naked babes attend   About him day and night, which do require,   That he with fleshly weedes would them attire;   Such as them list, such as eternall fate   Ordained hath, he clothes with sinfull mire,   And sendeth forth to liue in mortall state,   Till they againe returne backe by the hinder gate.  (The Faerie Queene, 3.6.32) What is ’t? A spirit?

(Miranda, The Tempest, 1.2.413)

Notions of ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ evolving from Antiquity and medieval Christendom to the Renaissance invite multivolume analysis.1 The diversity is fully apparent in Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s polarized depictions of human nature. Spenser’s allegory intellectually idealizes the power of the soul to inform and define the body (‘Of the soul the body form does take, / For soul is form, which doth the body make,’ HB 214). Drawing from the Pythagorean-Platonic tripartism of Timaeus (transmitted by Chalcidius, Cicero, Macrobius, Martianus Cappelanus) and its partner strain of Christian-Platonic trinitarianism (Augustine, Eriugena, Bernard, Bonaventure, Ficino, Primaudaye), Spenser views the soul with the oft-neglected half of ‘Renaissance psychology’.2 He privileges Platonic idealism over Aristotelian empiricism, yet combines both in The Faerie Queene’s complex schema, its legends hierarchically arranged and alternating between transcendence and immanence. His doctrinal epic synthesizes major aspects of Langland’s intellectual pilgrimage, Malory’s Arthurian and grail quests, and the dynastic quests of Italian romancers. The Faerie Queene’s moral scope, if completed, would surely have rivalled Hugo of St Victor’s ark treatises, Aquinas’s Summa, Ficino’s Platonic Theology, and Bateman’s popular translation of Bartholomaeus. In a neatly programmatic scheme of self-knowledge, Spenser lays block on block (stanza on stanza) to depict the soul’s architectonic dwelling in different settings for each virtue, viewed in a descending hierarchy: Caelia in a spiritual body, Alma in a natural body, Venus

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in a seminary of souls, then in her temple of passional virtues, Mercilla in a court of justice, Pastorella in a rural countryside where three Graces and a hundred naked maidens dance their concentric unfoldings. What is important about these increasingly incarnate visions of the soul is that they are depicted objectively and doctrinally, using prominent metaphors from classical antiquity and medieval Christianity, but adding the excitement of conveying the doctrine as an allegorical romance-epic. In contrast, Shakespeare’s major protagonists discover the essential self or soul indirectly in a dynamic experiential aesthetics – in later plays, beginning with King Lear, the word ‘soul’ is far less frequently used. In Shakespeare’s mature dramaturgical form, at the core of each of its three cycles the protagonist is uncannily ‘invaded’ by an inverse mirror-self: conqueror Titus stunned by his mutilated daughter; proud Titania doting on ass-headed Bottom; Othello possessed/rapt by Desdemona, then by demonic Iago; Lear enduring three distinct ‘possessions’ (Goneril, Tom, Cordelia); Macbeth, infernally ‘manned’ by his wife, unmanned by Banquo’s ghost, voided by Macduff; Antony entranced by Cleopatra before they lovingly embrace abnegation; Pericles overwhelmed by oceanic reunion with Marina. In such mirroring exchanges with Otherness Shakespeare’s most thoughtful heroes (Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Prospero) compare the enigmatic self with clouds or dreams; they obscurely explore that self in masking, foolery, and performance, or they are transported to deepest selfhood by stormy madness and impassioned bonding. Self-discovery occurs as a result of a chiasmic sequence of passional cycles, but Shakespeare treats this spiritual ‘knot intrinsicate’ with increasing ambivalence and reserve. In King Lear the word ‘soul’ almost disappears, as if its nature and permanence were in doubt. No subsequent play exploits the word as persistently as the early plays. The word ‘spirit’ gathers a growing range of jarring nuances, dominated by the natural (bodily spirits, passional spirits) but never omitting the supernatural (soul, ghost, demon, elemental sprite, divinity). Spenser’s allegorical centres, his figurative houses or gardens that imply selfknowledge in antique and medieval tropes, differ radically from Shakespearean epiphany, the soul-discovery that is the focal point and axis in his dramaturgy. Shakespeare’s subjective experiential naturalism inverts Spenser’s objective idealizing supernaturalism. Shakespeare’s dramaturgical landscape grew by a quantum leap when he discovered the implications of Spenser’s complementary vision, a Christian-Platonic view of England as an idealized fairyland, ruled with virginal perfection by a fairy queen. The result was a sublime parody, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and later its remarkable refinement, The Tempest. Shakespeare’s art wondrously expands when it internalizes and revises Spenser’s art, animating his plays with tension between an iconic rational ideal and a dynamic moment of present passion.

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Rival views of soul: Christianized Platonism versus sceptical Aristotelianism Privileging transcendent Reality, Augustine desired ‘to know God and my soul…. Nothing else.’3 He saw the body as a mere context for psyche’s functioning, a housing that drew its idealized hierarchic form from the soul. Like Philo and Origin, Augustine subjected body to soul, and soul to spirit. As designators of the God-force in human nature, soul and spirit are often used interchangeably, but in Words with Power Northrop Frye notes their distinction in Jewish and Christian scriptures.4 ‘Soul’ is the numinous entity in embodied form, its Godlike nature shown in hierarchic, harmonious ordering of bodily powers as it mirrors God and other souls. ‘Spirit’ shows this essence as a nature-transcending force that plays freely through the body (and through society and the cosmos). Often symbolized by fire, it can activate body and soul as at Pentecost and Transfiguration, thus fully revealing its divine source. ‘Spirit’ has richly varied meanings in Renaissance literature, ultimately signifying a divine power, as in PlatonicPauline-Augustinian transcendentalism; but Aristotelian-Stoic-Galenic tradition stresses ‘bodily spirits’ (pneuma) as materia subtilis, increasingly refined motive powers in the ensouled body: natural spirits assist digestion, vital spirits move the passions, animal spirits implement ideas and intentions.5 As in Donne’s ‘The Exstasie’, such ‘fingers’ must ‘knit / That subtile knot, which makes us man’. Some scholars insist that Renaissance psychology viewed spirit mainly as ‘a corporeal substance [that] served as a vehicle for the senses’,6 differing from the soul since it ‘was not itself immortal and would eventually decay into its elements’.7 Primaudaye’s influential French Academie, however, explicitly disagrees: it views ‘spirit’ as an offshoot of the Holy Spirit, showing humankind’s potential immortality in alliance with God.8 Primaudaye affirms medieval Christian spirituality (and chides Aristotle and Galen) by minimizing attention to materialistic bodily spirits as the basis of human nature; he describes spirit as a divine power continually infused into the soul. In his tripartite model of human nature as spirit-soulbody, spirit is not a materialist link between soul and body but a first principle of being, a divine synteresis, as in the Christian-Platonic scheme of Augustine, Erasmus, and Spenser.9 Many nosce teipsum treatises imitate The French Academy’s format: they praise divine spirit; they survey the microcosm’s trinitarian form as a spirit-body impervious to material contingencies, and they anticipate eternal reunion with God, which is the stated goal of all such treatises.10 These contrary views of ‘spirit’, one integrated with body to enforce its range of functions, the other transcending bodily constraint, are both demonstrated, though strikingly in conflict, in Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie, long noted as an influence on Hamlet.11 As physician-minister, Bright wavers on melancholia’s cause. Chapters 1–8 trace it to humoral spirits and animal/vegetable diet; but chapters 9–14 stress the hierarchy of body-soul-spirit that resists the body’s mutable multiplicity. Chapters 15–31 return to naturalist concerns (‘How perturbations and passions arise from humours’); but he again stresses in chapters 19–22 that melancholy’s impact on body and mind need not affect the soul. The finale epitomizes Bright’s failure to integrate the two world-views: chapters 32–6 offer

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consolation for religious melancholy, treating transcendent Spirit as closely linked with conscience, and bodily spirits as secondary influences to ease the burden of conscience; chapters 37–42, a stark anticlimax, list environmental influences: Galen’s ‘six non-natural factors’ (climate, diet, sleep, exercise, digestion, passion), social factors (vocation, reputation), and a final pragmatic list of dietary remedies and herbal purgatives. Bright’s disjunctive treatise affirms the growing tension between natural and spiritual gnosis. Shakespeare may have been moved by Bright’s effort to draw from both realms to console and cure his suicidal friend. At one moment ‘spirits’ are material forces conditioned by humoral balance and environmental factors; then they are spiritual forces, aspects of Godlike soul or demons invading the humors and passions, as in demon-possession. Like Bright, Shakespeare envisioned opposing models for the essence of human nature, often pitting them against each other, as in King Lear, where, as we shall see, he shows doubts about the soul’s nature, hegemony, immortality – indeed, its very existence. Spenser’s houses, Shakespeare’s clouds Constant in Spenser’s Faerie Queene is his Christian-Platonic affirmation of the primacy of Godlike ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, seeking restoration as an imago Dei. Each legend’s quest for virtue presents the same pattern of fall and redemption in a systematic declension of perspectives on the soul’s quest: the intellectual allegory of Books 1–2 (fulfilled transcendentally in the House of Holiness, then immanentially in Alma’s Castle); the passional allegory of Books 3–4 (fulfilled in the same complementary fashion in the Garden of Adonis and Venus’s Temple); and the sensory allegory of Books 5–6 (circumstantially fulfilled in Mercilla’s Court and Pastorella’s countryside). Thus the holistic perspective of Book 1 (the soul’s quest for Grace in New Jerusalem) narrows to the immanent pluralism of Book 6 (the soul as 1-within-3-within-100 graces unfolding in Nature’s multiplicity on Mount Acidale). This descending sequence need not imply a crisis of faith about the soul’s destiny, despite signs of discouragement about Elizabeth’s ability to approximate Gloriana and to acknowledge her divinely inspired poet. By Book 12 Prince Arthur would exemplify the soul’s greatest possible earthly fulfilment. After descending in Books 1–6 into the mutable multiplicity of the sensate world of Justice and Courtesy (the latter marked by incompleted quests and interrupted epiphanies), Books 7–12 would re-ascend toward the attainment of a direct vision of Gloriana. This reversal is intimated in the Cantos of Mutabilitie, where we learn that change is not just a nihilistic deterioration; rather, through change ‘all things … their being doe dilate’ in order to ‘worke their owne perfection’ (FQ 7.7.58). In the poem’s unfinished state this optimistic goal remains uncertain, yet each legend’s allegorical centre, the educative temple or garden mirroring the imago Dei, affirms Spenser’s confidence in the soul’s immortal nature and destiny.

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In contrast, Shakespeare never trains his protagonists in educative houses, moralized gardens, or allegorical templar visions, though he verges on such doctrinal art in Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. One recalls Friar Laurence’s equivocal counsel of Romeo and Juliet, his easy accommodation of their impetuous passion, his reliance on deceptive theatrical strategems. Shakespeare’s view of soul and spirit, however, undergoes complex evolution during his career. He treats with mistrust all demonic spirit-power, from the Ephesian sorcery in The Comedy of Errors and Joan la Pucelle’s witchcraft in Henry VI to the equivocating Weird Sisters. Beginning with Hamlet, protagonists of the tragedies and romances pointedly question both supernatural spirits and the soul’s immortal Godlikeness, often comparing the self ’s wishful identity to clouds, a metaphoric signature for scepticism: it connects the struggle for personal identity with teleological aspiration (‘in the clouds’), but, unlike the jewelled fixity of the New Jerusalem, it depicts heaven as a mutable realm of ‘vapours’.12 Similar anxiety invests Shakespeare’s association of soul with dream, which evolves ever more complexly in The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, The Tempest. Does Prospero’s gnomic ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’ imply deluding fantasies and nightmares, or does it include prophetic oracles and heaven-sent visions? The questioning of dreams and their ‘cloudy’ provenance by Hamlet, Timon, Antony, and Prospero, always suggesting doubt about human identity, sharply contrasts Spenser’s hieratic treatment of dreams whose emphatically supernatural provenance must be properly ‘read’: the Satanic Arch-imager’s false fantasy to delude Redcrosse Knight; Britomart’s troubling mirror-inspired dream, then her quasi-epiphany in Isis’s Temple, clarifying her divine nature and destiny; Arthur’s dream of Tanaquill, leaving in the grass vestigial traces of the embodied Glory that inspires his quest.13 In every aspect of his allegory Spenser contains and defines the soul in hierarchic forms. In each legend an educative house or garden (an idealized figure of Reason or Nature) is countered by its antitype: House of Pride versus House of Holiness, Mammon’s Cave versus Alma’s House, Busirane’s House versus Gardens of Adonis, Lust’s cave versus Venus’ Temple, Radigund’s castle versus Mercilla’s palace, brigands’ cave versus Mount Acidale. Each chaste structure orders the soul’s powers, disparages evil by temperately balancing Nature’s contraries, and prepares for the conclusive visio Dei by reshaping the embodied soul as an imago Dei. Shakespeare’s protagonists have little recourse to iconic education in ideal selfhood. Clouds, dreams, or a drop of water lost in the sea suggest the soul’s instability; and architectural fantasies will likewise dissolve: ‘like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve’ (4.1.151–4). If, for Shakespeare, all bodily housing, artful superstructures, and ‘cloud-capp’d’ aspirations must submit to Time’s dissolution, what of the soul itself, the ‘stuff ’ that dreams are made on? Is life ‘rounded with a sleep’ by the soul’s submergence in drowsy recurrence, by its completing life’s cycle, or by gaining perfect circularity? Or is it rounded in pregnancy, a spiritual labour like that noted by Plato

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as philosopher and by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare as artists, to deliver a spiritual body?14 Does ‘sleep’ (like the ‘rest’ that succeeds Creation) bring loss of consciousness, or waking to a more total dimension of dream?15 Whereas dreams lead Spenser’s characters to find definitive identity, Shakespeare’s dreams suggest the soul’s continual passional metamorphosis and incertitude.16

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Fulfilment as rational ecstasy, or as passional ripeness: Spenser restricts – while Shakespeare explores – passion, woman, and commoners Spenser’s view of spirit as immortal essence is stressed by Joseph Collins, who uses the Legend of Holiness and Fowre Hymnes as examplars of a ChristianPlatonic scale of perfection.17 Spenser shows the soul’s divine origin in the Garden of Adonis and Fowre Hymnes; he notes its immortal destiny, most fully in the Legend of Holiness (hell in canto 5, heaven in canto 10); and throughout The Faerie Queene he depicts virtuous soul-maidens in figurative castles and gardens, with a knight to view that templar vision and defend it. To help the soul attain that clarity, Spenser’s allegory intellectualizes passional experience into mystically numbered art, the touchstone of Platonism.18 Shakespeare’s plays invert this mode of vision and artistry. With little interest in numerological form and mythic depiction of the soul’s origin or destiny, he privileges immediate experience, despite its deceptive appearances and passions, and enlists intellect for Protean self-fashioning, the dynamic, ever-changing manipulation of bodily appearances. Shakespeare’s one venture into cosmic mythography, Oberon’s recount of the origin of erotic passion (MND 2.1.148), aptly appears in a play which parodies Spenser’s art. More commonly, Shakespeare’s leading protagonists (Richard II, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Helena, Brutus, Hamlet, Troilus, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony, Cleopatra, Prospero) test the soul’s capacity for self-control. Hamlet and Lear question the soul’s very existence: ‘what is this quintessence of dust’; ‘Is man no more than this? … no more but such a poor bare forked animal’. Each hero is shadowed by the self-concept of ‘a poor player’, by self-comparison to shifting clouds and ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’. Lovers reverse loyalties, especially in the sylvan darkness of a sublunar dream-world, and the fairy queen (a majestically ‘grounded’ version of Spenser’s Gloriana) can love an ass-headed commoner. Identity is a fleeting psychic projection in a world of passional flux. In Shakespeare’s plays, especially the tragedies, the radical education of protagonists occurs in epiphanal interchanges of souls when they are subjected to Time, Mutability, and Mortality – above all when wounded by broken bonds. For Spenser such passional experience, a labyrinth of confusion, holds no educative value. The soul gains moral maturity and perfection only by an intellectual mode of epiphany, by being lifted out of bodily passional experience into carefully configured houses of education and mainly by supervening grace. For Shakespeare, however, the immersion in carnal passion, intensifying suffering and love, is what refines and ‘ripens’ the soul. To surmount the unending trivializations of soul through subjection to the body and worldly circumstance, one might like Cleopatra meet death with majestic art, always focused on bodily passion,

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yearning for sexual-spiritual consummation with ‘the curled Antony’ before he can ‘spend that kiss’ on the sensual Iras. Animating Cleopatra’s most decisive actions (like those of Romeo and Juliet, Lear and Cordelia) is submission to lovesuffering. Though Shakespeare hilariously parodies Pyramus and Thisbe’s lovedeath, such blind faith in the other informs the love tragedies, always pushing toward Godliness: Cleopatra’s ‘immortal longings’ foster an Olympian dream of Emperor Antony (5.2.75ff); Juliet envisions Romeo as the sun (3.2.1ff); Romeo dreams he dies and is revived as emperor by her kisses (5.1.1ff); Cordelia, with the generous love of 1 Corinthians 13, calms Lear’s ‘wheel of fire’ to envision her as ‘a soul in bliss’, a changed identity like that described in 1 Corinthians 15.19 The difference between Spenser’s quest for transcendent rationality and Shakespeare’s immersion in passional experience is apparent in their treatment of gender. Both poets extensively seek to control woman, first, by praising or privileging her for submissive self-mastery and procreative nurture and by urging her dependence on a male protector, and, second, by exploring the implications of female empowerment. Initially Spenser guards and veils the soul-maiden’s integrity while exposing the soul-warrior to corruption; but with Britomart’s arming and Amoret’s wound (Book 3), culminating in Serena’s naked shame (Book 6), Spenser increasingly subjects both sexes to the full consequences of the fall. From the outset Shakespeare is far more aggressive: in Henry VI the brutal male overreachers are matched by scheming viragos, and humiliations of weak-willed monarchs are more than matched by the spectacle of Lavinia and of Ophelia. Shakespeare assaults and compromises both sexes, stripping away all veils and civilizing commodities, immersing them in sensory and passional experience, especially in the tragedies, where both male and female suffer abuse, death, and moral chaos.20 Both poets, in quite different ways, disclose the soul’s androgyny: Spenser in templar visions of Venus, Nature, and hermaphroditic couples; Shakespeare in the protean range of some protagonists (Rosalind, Lear, Cleopatra, Falstaff), and in experiments with bi-gender doubling, cross-dressing, mirroring sexes, and psychic transference between lovers.21 Both poets explore the tension between hierarchic dominion and mystical communion as the goal of gendered relationship. Shakespeare’s comedies, and then tragedies, evolve female protagonists of increasingly troubling power, a problem partly resolved by unveiling Hermione’s majestic endurance and Miranda’s power in innocence. In contrast to Spenser, Shakespeare’s epiphanies of soul as imago Dei entwine hilarious parody with serious analogue: mirroring of souls in the comedies, antithesis of souls in the tragedies, and fully epiphanal encounters in the romances, with recognition-scenes that revive the miracle plays’ ecce homo. Shakespearean epiphany emphasizes empirical experience, coloured with humorous vulgarity that shows, as Bradley noted, a delight in ‘the uneducated mind, and its tendency to express a sound meaning in an absurd form’.22 In portraying commoners as vulgar but full-fledged exemplars of soul, Shakespeare again inverts the vision of Spenser, who (like Plato) restricts commoners to the labouring class base of the city-state, restricting their minds to the belly’s lowly appetites.23 Shakespeare, though similarly reductive in portraying common clowns (Lance, Bottom, Francis, Lancelot,

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Dogberry), also paradoxically privileges this figure as a touchstone for the soul’s power amid all its flaws. Quaintly mirroring the ‘mystery of … God manifest in the flesh’, these hard-handed workmen presume to know what Lancelot Andrewes calls ‘secrets of divinity …, for all men even by nature love to be knowing’.24 In a 1607 nativity sermon on 1 Timothy 3.16 (‘great is the mystery of godliness’) Andrewes declares that ‘The world hath her mysteries in all arts and trades (yea, mechanical, pertaining to this life) which are imparted to none but such as are filii scientiae, apprentices to them. … So they delight to style themselves by the name of such and such a mystery.’25 Hamlet’s gravedigger glories in his ‘profession’, parodying priestly judgment on one who ‘wilfully seeks her own salvation’ (5.1.31); Abhorson (Meas 4.2.26–53) and Autolycus (WT 5.2.120ff) ‘profess’ their ‘mystery’; the Clown sermons Cleopatra on the worm’s ‘immortal’ bite (5.2.240– 78); Boult and the Bawd ‘profess’ unchastity (4.6.1–199); in The Winter’s Tale the Clown and Shepherd philosophize of ‘things dying and … newborn’ (3.3.112–13); and the unlikely Caliban is a conduit for ‘music’ (3.2.133ff) and ‘grace’ (5.1.295). Of all the festive Lords of Misrule, most impressive is Bottom: his ‘translation’ fails to bring understanding, as shown in his misquoting 1 Corinthians 2.5, yet it is he of all mortal lovers who enjoys a ‘rare vision’. As in the mystery cycles, whose terms he borrows, Shakespeare evokes laughter at vulgar self-definition to affirm the central mystery of human nature.26 Shakespeare’s changing use of ‘soul’ In Shakespeare’s plays the meaning and frequency of ‘soul’ undergoes continual sea-change. The histories use the word most, 24 per play, compared to 9 per comedy, 13 per tragedy, 6 per romance. The first history tetrad’s busy wheel of vengeance sends many stereotyped souls, like those of the Talbots, winging upward from the stage. In Richard III the facile invoking of ‘soul’ peaks with 60 usages, twice as many as any other play. Numerous death-crises that provoke shallow, undeveloped soul-consciousness are engineered by Richard, who reinforces the superficiality by snide mockery, gloating at his ability to hurry souls to the afterlife – till ghostly spirits awaken his own night-terrors. Quite different are the many references to soul in Richard II (35), especially in the mirror-scene (4.1), bringing a deeper questioning of human identity, anticipating the similar self-consciousness in Hamlet and Othello. The awakening of Richard’s soul is fittingly echoed in the Lancasters’ insomniac soliloquies (2H4 3.1.4–31, H5 4.1.228–82); but such fretting over regal responsibility for ambitious sins of the commonweal only briefly interrupts their practical agenda and hardly involves soul-consciousness, as is evident in the word’s moderate use in the Henriad (14 in 1H4, 7 in 2H4, 19 in H5). Though Henry V’s generous engagement in kingship makes him no mere Machiavellian, he is not the ‘mirror of all Christian kings’ in a fully spiritual sense. Hamlet and Othello renew the deeper inner dialogue: their explicit and solemn references to ‘soul’ reach a climax with 40 uses in each play. Hamlet often appeals to his soul, always intensely self-aware and engaged in a cosmic scenario: ‘Would that the night would come! Till then sit still, my soul’; ‘thou, dead corpse … shake

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our disposition / With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls’; ‘O, my prophetic soul! My Uncle!’; ‘O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters’; ‘Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, … She hath sealed thee for herself.’ In Hamlet it is not just the prince who habitually addresses himself and others as ‘souls’. Polonius holds his duty ‘as I hold my soul’. The Ghost ‘could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul’. Claudius mistrusts ‘something in [Hamlet’s] soul / O’er which his melancholy sits on brood’, and worries for his own ‘limed soul that struggling to be free / Art more engaged!’ Gertrude grieves that Hamlet ‘turn’st mine eyes into my very soul’, for ‘To my sick soul … , / Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss’. While Laertes urges the devil to ‘take [Hamlet’s] soul!’, Ophelia pleads, ‘God ha’ mercy on his soul! And of all Christian souls, I pray’; and as the gravedigger wishes rest for Ophelia’s soul, the priest ungenerously denies it. Central to the play’s long brood on human frailty and mortality is an insistent reference to self and others as ‘souls’. Othello, equally persistent in addressing himself as soul, draws the God-image into a maelstrom of decay. First he affirms ‘my parts, my title, and my perfect soul’; takes pride in gaining Desdemona’s love by ‘such fair question / As soul to soul affordeth’; and rapturously celebrates their marriage of true minds: ‘O my soul’s joy!’; ‘my soul hath her content so absolute’. The descent into jealousy evokes the dark side of marriage’s double-identity: ‘Perdition catch my soul / But I do love thee!’ In arming his mind to kill, he swears ‘by the worth of mine eternal soul’ and addresses his soul as conscience: ‘it is the cause, my soul’. On learning the truth he laments, ‘This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven’, and demands to know ‘from this demi-devil / Why he hath thus ensnared my soul’. Though too preoccupied with his own ‘perfect soul’, Othello at best sees Desdemona and himself as mirroring God-images, ‘soul to soul’; and Desdemona, who can see ‘Othello’s visage in his mind’,27 commits to him her ‘soul and fortunes’. When Iago disrupts the bond, she becomes a ‘poor soul … sighing by a sycamore tree’, but in her final defence she swears ‘by my life and soul!’ Just as often, Emilia uses ‘soul’ with sincere piety. Iago, however, makes vice seem a virtue in urging Roderigo and Othello to ‘have some soul’ by seeking money and by the ‘manly’ act of murder. The prolific references to ‘soul’ in Othello show the same obsession with the soul’s ultimate destiny as in Hamlet, not with Hamlet’s philosophic mind but with fullness of heart. In King Lear and Macbeth, where death, spiritual death, and residual guilt leave deepest scars, one expects profuse reference to ‘soul’. Yet we see a distinct withdrawal from the word. Whereas Hamlet and Othello each use the word over thirty times, King Lear has but three. Admittedly, these uses are deeply suggestive: blind Gloucester, empathizing with Poor Tom, urges an Old Man to ‘bring some covering for this naked soul’; Lear, waking from madness, imagines Cordelia ‘a soul in bliss’; and at the final horror Albany appeals to the survivors as ‘Friends of my soul’. In these scenes the awareness of ‘soul’ – the most acute awareness in all Shakespeare’s works – springs from exposure to stark nothingness and from a resultant, humbling poverty of spirit.

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The paucity of references to soul in King Lear is no aberrant fluke; it marks a watershed in Shakespeare’s explicit invoking of the elusive human essence, for the word appears no more than four to eight times in any of the remaining tragedies and romances.28 The word does not disappear but is harder earned, and its value increases with this resistance to naming it. Far more moving than the facile and prolix naming of the soul in the early history plays is the staged experience of Gloucester’s blinding and Lear’s mad sufferings, especially as he stares at Cordelia’s lips and says, ‘look there!’29 During the long awakenings in the romances’ reunion scenes, where soul is also fully exposed, the word is again used very sparingly, always with great force: Leontes’s ‘now piercing to my soul’ (5.3.34), Posthumus’ ‘Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die!’ (5.5.266–7). Posthumus’ cry epitomizes the value of passional experience or ‘ripeness’ over the distanced, idealized epiphany of Spenser’s emblematic visions. This cry initiates Cymbeline’s remarkable series of recognitions, each enmeshed in ironies that force both characters and audience to adjust to the soul’s unpredictability, denying rational clarity. Such indirection is especially evocative in light of Shakespeare’s preference for bodily, sensory, outward experience over the invisible world of spirit. When crisis reverses this valuation (in the murders of Desdemona and Cordelia, the self-immolations of Ophelia and Cleopatra, the miraculous resurrections of Marina, Thaisa, Imogen, Perdita, Hermione, Miranda), we see the intensity with which earthly garments are removed or transformed into spiritual emblems. The musical-poetic-dramaturgic magic, and above all the linguistic failure and silence, train the audience’s inner eye toward ‘nothing’: invisible reality becomes momentarily more apparent than what is seen, heard, and touched on stage. The soul at death: Spenser and Shakespeare Even in the mortifying encounter with Despair (FQ 1.9) Spenser’s hero does not seem to fear death, indeed seems drawn to its strange allure.30 Although chivalry mitigates such fear, the aplomb derives from disdain for bodily-worldly experience. The contemptus mundi of the ‘too solemn sad’ Redcrosse Knight is shared by all of Spenser’s heroes: each epiphany of a soul-maiden in her castle or garden affirms not body but the spirit that shines through it (or, in the Gardens of Adonis, the souls that sexual acts enflesh). When Redcrosse is finally at one with Una unveiled, ‘swimming in that sea of blissful joy’ (FQ 1.12), one assumes, despite the energetic bodily image, that he briefly shares with her only a spiritual body, a mystic ocean of essence. In Shakespeare’s world, on the other hand, such joys enhance the fleshly body and its bodily spirits – spirits of sherris sack that enforce Falstaff ’s fantasy of deified kingship (2H4 4.3.88ff, 5.3.138–9), or sexual spirits that animate Cleopatra’s dying transfiguration (5.2.228ff). Thus, Shakespeare’s characters always show profound, explicit regret when the mortal coil is shuffled off. Mistress Quickly uneasily feels Falstaff ’s legs (and genitals) ‘as cold as any stone’ (H5 2.3.25); and, like Hamlet, Claudio gains chilling eloquence at the horrific fantasy ‘to die, and go we know not where, / To lie in cold obstruction and to rot” (Meas 3.1.118–33). Such misgiv-

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ings are so prominent in the history plays, problem plays, and tragedies that Elias Schwartz in The Mortal Worm: Shakespeare’s Master Theme argues that dread of mortality and a growing intuition of immortality form Shakespeare’s major concern.31 Duke Vincentio urges Claudio, and all in his overly sensual kingdom, to embrace the tragedy of mortality: ‘Be absolute for death.’ His urgings to release the spirit from embodiment is, however, not achieved in Measure for Measure, nor in its neighbour-play, King Lear, nor in the romances. While Spenser’s heroes easily become absolute for death, containing earthly passion in heavenly purpose, Shakespeare’s protagonists, even in the late plays, remain committed to bodily, passional intensity: they are absolute for love, a love of great complexity but always known through embodiment. ‘Spirit’ in Spenser and Shakespeare In their use of ‘spirit’ Shakespeare and Spenser are again poles apart, with Spenser privileging transcendent reality. Of 237 uses in Faerie Queene, 5 refer to elemental air or breath, and 36 to bodily spirits: these elemental or bodily usages form 17 per cent of the whole. The majority (83 per cent) refer to higher modes of being: 140 to the human soul, 59 to various supernatural spirits – ghost (7), demon (34), angel or beatified soul (7), daemon (5), and Holy Spirit (6). Thus in The Faerie Queene ‘spirit’ usually signifies an immortal Godlike essence, the soul, either embodied or, more powerfully, disembodied; for Spenser, bodily spirits are in short supply and have little share in the motivation and exercise of human nature: they are merely secondary consequences. In contrast to the ease of summarizing Spenser’s distinct modes of ‘spirit’, Shakes­­­peare’s persistent intermingling of varied levels of meaning can ensure a migraine in trying to define the word in his work. Compared to Shakespeare’s 533 uses of ‘soul’ (which remains stable in meaning, so that our interest is mainly in his growing hesitancy to use the word at all), it is far more daunting to analyse his 342 uses of ‘spirit’. Two examples will illustrate how he invests ‘spirit’ with multiple meanings, forming an unstable dynamic tension that defies simple assignment of meaning.32 First consider the dark connotations of Sonnet 129: ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action,’ where ‘spirit’ is strongly coloured by bodily meanings – semen and vital spirits – yet retains its higher meanings so that contrary modes of spirit, opposing motives of human nature, seem at war. In this losing struggle with lust, the bodily meanings dominate; yet the sonnet implies that spirit’s higher meaning (soul, Godlike essence) is equally there but repressed, travestied, imposed upon in the shameful waste or ‘expense’ of its nature and power. Prospero’s epilogue activates a still greater range of meanings; but now the transcendent ones dominate, partly through the subtle capitalizing of ‘Spirits’ to begin a line: ‘Now I want / Spirits to enforce, art to enchant.’ ‘Spirits’ gathers all levels of meaning exploited by the play: bodily spirits or vital force, passional spirits or strength of will, theatrical spirits or actors, and divine Spirits or guardian angels to offer grace and succour. That the humbled Prospero must want such spirits

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suggests both a yearning for such power (on every level) and an acknowledging of frailties of age. Whereas 17 per cent of Spenser’s usages refer to elemental or bodily spirits and passions, Shakespeare reverses the percentages. Over 70 per cent of his uses of ‘spirit’ refer to bodily passions, and in the later plays the word punningly alludes to the flow of bodily spirits (often by sexual arousal) – as when Goneril bawdily offers to ‘raise [Edmund’s] spirits up into the air’ (recalling Sonnet 129 about lust in action). Only 7 per cent of Shakespeare’s uses of ‘spirit’ refer to the human soul, and 18 per cent to supernatural beings. Three factors add to this contrast. (1) Spenser’s references to supernatural spirits are sincere: demons preying on Redcrosse Knight’s mind and angels inviting him heavenward are genuine, as are Mammon’s fiend and the angel that vie for Guyon’s soul. But Shakespeare always invites scepticism about the supernatural, hinting at fraudulent delusions and theatrical deceptions: Hamlet questions the ghost, Othello projects witchcraft, Edgar half-pretends demon possession. Even the overt supernatural forces in Macbeth (the ghost, witches, and demon masters), while asserting an undeniable, staged reality, seem to be projective effluvia of human evil, the fantastic outgrowth of warfare and the ambitious heart, lacking definitive reality: ‘The earth has bubbles, as the water hath, And these are of them’ (1.3.79–80).33 (2) Spenser’s supernatural ‘spirits’ include many divine beings (angelic spirits, Holy Spirit): about 25 per cent of the whole. Shakespeare’s plays include only a few such ‘spirits’, bona fide angels (less than 1 per cent of the whole). Considering the 1606 Act of Abuses against use of the name of God in stage plays,34 the reference to pagan gods in King Lear and the romances might indicate a less severe contrast between Spenser and Shakespeare in this regard. But throughout The Faerie Queene Spenser’s prolific use of pagan deities to represent immanent human virtues far exceeds Shakespeare’s use of such figures.35 (3) Shakespeare shows a distinct bias for elemental spirits and natural magic, as in Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, suggesting his concern for the spirit’s habitation and fulfilment in the natural world. Though Spenser includes many immanent epiphanies with pagan gods (especially in Books 2, 4, 6 of The Faerie Queene, which focus on Faery protagonists, whose souls are portrayed sub specie natura), Spenser privileges the transcendent Christian manifestations of spirit (Books 1, 3, 5, which focus on Briton protagonists, whose souls are envisioned sub specie aeternitatis). Spenser thus systematically subordinates pagan deities to Christian revelation: in the six legends’ descending specula, each set of pagan spirit-powers is carefully formulated to reflect, for its particular level and perspective, the mystery of the summum bonum, the ineffable face of Spirit.36 Each generic phase of Shakespeare’s career holds a jostling admixture of four disparate attitudes toward supernatural spirits (ghosts, demons, witches, fairies): (1) straightforward supernaturalism (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Cymbeline); (2) anti-supernaturalism, with characters voicing scepticism about spiritual causation, reinforced by deluded or fraudulent references to spiritual beings (The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Troilus and Cressida);

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(3) both attitudes in unresolved tension (Richard III, Henriad, King John, Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline); (4) natural supernaturalism, in which magic, miracle, and wonder are treated as valid but also as simply a part of ordinary human existence (The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest). Such diversity, expressed in the varied, contrarious, and shifting tempers of his characters, is the keynote of Shakespearean psychology.37 Spenser and Shakespeare would define quite differently the Delphic maxim, ‘Know thyself ’. The former would privilege the soul’s invisible and eternally unchanging substance, contemning fleshly appearances that enshroud it; the latter would delight in the soul’s immersion in Time-and-Fortune’s sensory flux and its protean self-fashioning through play-acting. Try to imagine the two poets meeting in bliss. Spenser’s resurrection body shines with the changeless numbered perfection described by Augustine in The City of God,38 while Shakespeare’s resurrection body assumes a quite different apotheosis – a protean ever-changing force unlimited in its dynamic capacity to assume all forms of being, what Keats called ‘negative capability’. What sort of dialogue could occur between two such psyches? With their access to paradisal powers one might expect an easy, fluent chat; yet their visions of nature, the soul, and God are so distinct that one can hardly picture them in the same communion of saints. Since one is chanting Virgilian hosannas to a national soul-maiden sublimely conceived as Gloriana, while the other is rapping out Ovidian dithyrambs to the same maiden disarmingly and ironically conceived as Titania, one suspects that even in heaven the hosts of angelic scholars will have organized separate Renaissance Conferences to fill timelessness with praise. Notes  1 O. Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux xii et xiii siècles, 2 vols (Paris, 1949–51); G. Verbeke, L’évolution de la doctrine du pneuma du Stoicisme à S. Augustin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer; Louvain: Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1945); E.D. Burton, Spirit, Soul, and Flesh (University of Chicago Press, 1918).  2 On Renaissance use of Christian-Platonic psychology, see R.L. Reid, ‘Psychology, Platonic’, SE.  3 Augustine, Soliloquia, 1.2.7. Cf. De Quantitate animae, 14.24; De Ordinantia, 2.18.47.  4 N. Frye, Words with Power, Being a Second Study of ‘The Bible and Literature’ (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 97–135, esp. 121–9.  5 Verbeke, L’évolution de la doctrine du pneuma du Stoicisme à S. Augustin, 11–174, 175–220. For links between Stoicism and the Renaissance, via Avicenna, see E.R. Harvey, ‘Psychology’, SE.  6 J.E. Hankins, Backgrounds of Shakespeare’s Thought (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1978), 87. See L. Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions [1565], trans. T. Newton (London, 1576), 1.2.12– 15.  7 Harvey, ‘Psychology’, SE. Cf. R. Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays (1927; repr. Haskell House, 1964).  8 Primaudaye, The French Academie [1580], Eng. trans. 1594, 1618: 2.63.522, 2.78.564, and passim.  9 Primaudaye’s highlighting the tripartism of the embodied soul (as in his conclusion) corresponds to the main structural principle of Spenser’s allegory. Both writers observe pagan and Christian tripartite structures (Platonic, Aristotelian, Galenic, Neoplatonic, Augustinian)

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throughout their work, especially in Spenser’s mythic structures: three chambers in every house, temple, garden, cave or underworld, as well as three graces, nine muses, six stages of lechery and of jealousy, six virtues in Venus’ Temple. 10 French Academy, pt 2: ‘Human Philosophy’ (1580) established the pattern for many English and French nosce teipsum treatises, including Sir John Davies, Nosce Teipsum (1592–94, 1599); Thomas Barckley, The Felicitie of Man (1598); Pierre Charron, Of Wisdome (1601); John Davies of Hereford, Microcosmus (1603), Mirum in Modum (1604), and Summa Totalis (1607). 11 A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586). Cf. M.I. O’Sullivan, ‘Hamlet and Dr. Timothy Bright’, PMLA 41 (1926), 667–79. 12 See G. Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Skepticism (Brighton: Harvester, 1987); Elton, King Lear and the Gods (University Press of Lentucky, 1988); S. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Cf. D.C. Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964); M.C. Bradbrook, The School of Night (Cambridge University Press, 1936); G.T. Buckley, Rationalism in Sixteenth Century English Literature (University of Chicago Press, 1933); H. Busson, Les sources et le développement du rationalisme dans la littérature française de la renaissance (1922; rev. ed. Paris, 1957); L. Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, trans. B. Gottlieb (1942; rpt Harvard University Press, 1982), 174–239; V. Harris, All Coherence Gone (University of Chicago Press, 1949); W. Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, and Shakespeare (Harvard University Press, 1963); P.H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Renaissance England (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1953); R.H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (1960; rpt University of California Press, 1979); E.A. Strathmann, Sir Walter Raleigh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism (1951; rpt New York: Hippocrene,1973); D.P. Walker, ‘Ways of Dealing with Atheists: A Background to Pamela’s Refutation of Cecropia’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 17 (1955), 252–77. 13 Shakespeare’s protagonists often sceptically compare human nature to vaporish clouds: see Ham 3.1.65, 3.2.393; Tim 4.2.34; A&C 4.14.2, 5.2.74, 302; Cor 4.5.109; Tmp 4.1.150–6. 14 The medieval hierarchy of dreams ranges from nightmarish insomnium and hallucinative visium to the ordinary but enigmatic somnium, prophetic oraculum and exalted visio. See C.B. Hieatt, The Realism of Dream Visions (The Hague amd Paris: Mouton, 1967), 14–33. Cf. M. Weidhorn, Dreams in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1970); C.S. Rupprecht, ‘Dreams’, SE. 15 See Plato, Phaedrus; Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, 1, 15; Spenser, FQ 2.12.47; Shakespeare, Sonnets 1–18, 22, 59, 86, 97, 98, 102, 114, interweaving metaphors of generation, self-generation, and imaginative generation by the pregnant poet whose love-labours and art-labours seek to bring forth a more refined and constant beauty in the beloved. Cf. the motif ’s greater complexity in Tmp 1.2.155–7, 92–7. 16 Shakespeare’s dreams include self-delusions and nightmares, prophecies, holy visions, and comic parodies (Tam Induc.2.71, 114; MND 4.1.203, passim; 2H4 5.5.53; Meas 3.1.34; A&C 5.2.76–97; Per 4.5.5, 5.1.163, 250; Cym 4.2.306, 349ff, 5.4.128–46, 5.5.180; Tmp 3.2.149, 4.1.157–8. See F. Rubinstein, ‘Shakespeare’s Dream-Stuff: A Forerunner of Freud’s “DreamMaterial”’, AI 43 (1986), 335–55. 17 J.B. Collins, Christian Mysticism in the Elizabethan Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940). 18 For number symbolism in Pythagorean-Platonic psychology, see V.F. Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism (1938; rpt New York: Cooper Square, 1969); A. Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), and Silent Poetry: Essays in Numerological Analysis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970); C. Butler, Number Symbolism (New York: Routledge, 1970); M.-S. Røstvig, Fair Forms (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1975); S.K. Heninger, Jr, Touches of Sweet Harmony (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1974) and The Cosmographical Glass (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1977). 19 On Shakespeare’s favouring Pauline Christianity, see R. Cox, Between Earth and Heaven (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1969), 82–90; P. Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (Indiana University Press, 1973); Biblical Influences in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies (Indiana University Press, 1987).

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20 Cf. Petruchio’s abuse of Kate, Richard III’s seduction-disposal of Lady Anne, and Oberon’s subjecting Titania to bestiality; public shamings of Hero, Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia, and Hermione; and the power-hunger in Goneril, Regan, Lady Macbeth, and Volumnia. 21 See L. Silberman, ‘The Hermaphrodite and the Metamorphosis of Spenserian Allegory’, ELR 17 (1987), 207–23, and ‘Hermaphrodite’, SE; A.R. Cirillo, ‘The Fair Hermaphrodite: LoveUnion in the Poetry of Donne and Spenser’, SEL 9 (1969), 81–95; D. Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Hermaphrodite and the 1590 Faerie Queene’, PMLA 87 (1972), 192–200; C. Paglia, ‘The Apollonian Androgyne and the Faerie Queene’, ELR 9 (1979), 42–63; M.B. Beckman, ‘The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It’, SQ 29 (1978), 44–51; S. Brown, ‘The Boyhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines: Notes on Gender Ambiguity in the Sixteenth Century’, SEL (1990); R. Kimbrough, Shakespeare and the Art of Humankindness (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press ­International, 1990). 22 A.C. Bradley, ‘On Coriolanus’; As You Like It, Arden ed. H. Jenkins (5.1.6–7n.). 23 On Plato’s and Spenser’s tripartite hierarchy of self, family, and commonwealth, see pp. 179– 203 below. 24 Andrewes, Works, 1, 33. 25 Ibid., 1:34. 26 See V.A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford University Press, 1966), 124–74. 27 ‘The face is the trace of the Other. …” P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 355. Cf. C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (1958; Old Tappan: Macmillan, 1998). 28 The exception is Henry VIII, with 21 uses. 29 ‘Look there! Look there!’ might indicate Cordelia’s departing spirit. See Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 258n.; T. Clayton, ‘“Is this the promis’d end?” Revision in the Role of the King’, The Division of the Kingdom, eds G. Taylor and M. Warren (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 121–41; B.A. Doebler, ‘Rooted Sorrow’: Dying in Early Modern England (Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1994), 168–9. 30 See H. Skulsky, ‘Despair’, SE. 31 Schwartz, The Mortal Worm: Shakespeare’s Master Theme (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1977). 32 When Shakespeare activates empirical and spiritual meaning in the same usage, I count it both ways. 33 On the questionable reality of evil and the weird sisters, see W.C. Curry, Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns (1937; rpt Magnolia: Peter Smith, 1990); R.H. West, Shakespeare and the Outer Mystery (University Press of Kentucky Press, 1968). 34 See ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester University Press, 1990), 103–4. 35 Spenser views pagan deities (notably Venus and Cupid) in polarized contexts. See H.G. Lotspeich, Classical Mythology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Princeton University Press, 1932); Roche, Kindly Flame (Princeton University Press, 1964); W.V. Nestrick, ‘Spenser and the Renaissance Mythology of Love’, Literary Monographs 6 (1975), 35–70, 161–6; Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princrton University Press, 1976), passim; T. Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love: Cupid in Renaissance Literature (University of Delaware Press, 1986). 36 Medieval and Renaissance mythography commonly subordinate pagan deities to Christian doctrine; see C. de Boer et al., eds, Ovide moralisée (Wiesbaden, 1966–68); N. Conti, Mythologiae sive explicationum fabularum libri decem (Venice, 1567; rpt New York: Garland, 1976); E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939; rpt New York: Harper & Row, 1967); J. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. B.F. Sessions (1940; rpt New York, 1953); D. Javitch, ‘Rescuing Ovid from the Allegorizers’, CompLit 30 (1978), 97–107. 37 For diverse views of supernatural beings in the English Renaissance, see R.H. West, The Invisible World: A Study of Pneumatology in Elizabethan Drama (1939; rpt New York: Octagon, 1969), 1–53. 38 See Augustine, The City of God, trans. H. Bettenson (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), 13.17–18; 20.6; 22.4–5, 11–21.

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PART II

Holistic design

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5

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Hierarchic architecture in The Faerie Queene

Man, woman, child or servant: the problem of hierarchy in  ­theological  anthropology Eve was of Adam, and out of hym ydrawe, And Abel of hem bothe and all thre o kynde. (Langland, Piers Plowman) The soul then ought to conduct the body, and the spirit of our minds the soul. (Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity)

Among the many structural interpretations of Spenser’s allegory in The Faerie Queene, there has been no comprehensive investigation of his major images of a composite human form – no attempt, that is, to explicate the basic scheme of psychology informing the poem as a whole. When we compare the shapes of Spenser’s main figurative castles and gardens, particularly those in Books 1 and 2, which treat the entire embodied soul, we find three ascending chambers, gateways, or stages in each. In accord with some schemes of the triple temptation, with the three Platonic desires and three mystical ways to reform the soul, Spenser’s hero must successfully experience these three levels of consciousness in human nature. The poem opens with an analogous tripartism in the holy family of Redcrosse, Una, and her Dwarf (1.1.1–6), followed by the natural and fallen image of Book 2 (Mortdant, Amavia, Ruddymane, 2.1) and the romance analogue in Books 3–5 (Artegall, Britomart, Talus). The psychological components of these groups have been diversely identified, but no one has noted the consistent three-part hierarchy of this allegorical configuration, nor its analogy to other spatial images and plotsequences in the poem. Each triadic group illustrates the ancient concept of the soul’s three powers, but Spenser has significantly revised its gendered components. The male figure (Redcross, Mortdant, Artegall), instead of effectively enacting the ruling intellectual power, is blinded or put to sleep, ‘unmanned’ by disarming sensuality and impassioned excess. A female double (Duessa, Acrasia, Radigund), spawned by demonic sorcery, divests him of his arms of power and armour of restraint. Subsequent to the fall of intellect, each woman (Una, Amavia, Britomart), ­ shown traditionally as an affective power, suffers bitter agonies, illustrated by her ‘bleeding heart’ and her suicidal impulse in response to the fall of her ‘Lord’.1 But

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unlike the traditional hexameral allegory, Spenser depicts woman not simply as sinful passion but as a complementary (indeed superior) form of reason, a compassionate reason that seeks to reform her male counterpart. Finally, the third power of the soul, sensory awareness or activity (Dwarf, Ruddymane, Talus), exemplifies the special but limited potencies of the human mind on the lowest, corporeal or sensory level of being. Each of these diminutive or subservient figures signifies the ‘hands’ of the composite image, either the fleshly issue of the two higher powers, or the bodily members which execute their behests, or the manager of their material ‘needments’. These familial groups, whether tracing their lineage to Adam and Eve or to Christ and the Church, show Spenser’s conception of the imago Dei, the mysterious dynamics of the human form as created in God’s image but then debilitated by a wilful fall from grace. Spenser alters this ancient trope by placing the burden of Calvinist fallibility mainly on man, and secondarily on woman, whose guilt is lessened by recuperative compassion; like the Church she patiently seeks her sinful spouse, drawing Christlike aid to redeem him from imprisoning pride. (1) Male (and ignored female) reason: Though the man (Redcrosse, Mortdant, Artegall) symbolically shows rational power in skill with arms, notably the sword (as dialogic word), he misuses and abandons them, making him less rational than the woman who tries to reform him: Una’s spiritual counsel by means of the House of Holiness, Amavia’s gentle natural reasoning, Britomart’s chaste militancy. While Books 1 and 2 stress woman’s dependency on the man’s armed power, in Book 3 Britomart shows woman’s comparable skill with the sword of reason and the lance of will; and unlike Redcrosse and Guyon she suffers no sinful fall, needs no reformative training in an allegorical centre (no temple of chastity) to enable her to dispel fallen reason’s false magic. (2) Female (and occluded male) passion: Though Spenser’s heroic woman is pointedly passional, she is rationally passional, making her more morally effective than man (more like God who is Love). Passional reason deals best with sinful errancy: Malory’s Guenevere shows Lancelot the penitent way to perfection; Spenser’s Britomart forbears arms to pardon Artegall and submit to childbearing; Milton’s Eve teaches Adam to confess. Spenser’s men are equally passional, but repressively so, unleashing passions that bring selfdefeat, necessitating that each male be humbled by passion; Arthur’s role in the allegory of love is notably incomplete. (3) Sensation as limited adjunct: The fearful dwarf, blood-stained child, and savagery of Talus show the vital importance but severe limits of sensory awareness. Spenser’s deep alterations in the hexameral formula make his human family far more complex than the traditional patriarchal scheme. The three-level hierarchy is still evident, but the flaws of man and the rising empowerment of woman make us wonder if Spenser planned his epic as an Arthuriad, or a Glorianad. The natural (and fallen) Edenic family: Mortdant, Amavia, Ruddymane That the ‘image of mortalitie’ in Book 2 forms a composite image of human nature has been observed by many critics.2 Alastair Fowler ingeniously explicates Spenser’s treatment of this ‘single composite organism’,3 and to his comments we might add

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that the fallen lovers are described as the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ aspects of a complementary nature (2.1.57); they are treated as a composite source of the babe’s taint (2.2.2); and finally, the burial process combines them into a single body, ‘couering with a clod their closed eye’ (2.1.60). Fowler’s analysis is less helpful when he calls Mortdant the fleshly ‘outward man’, and Amavia the spiritual ‘inward man’. On the contrary, both lovers participate in the outward mortal nature which forms the perspective of Book 2; both have been overcome by extremity of passion (2.1.57); and both form the stinking trunk of contagion which taints the child. What distinguishes the parts of this familial image, making the weaker parts more innocent of ‘crime’ (2.1.37, 58; 2.2.1, 10), is rather to be explained in terms of the traditional hierarchic conception of human nature: Mortdant, the strong part, is the dominant intellectual power, fallen through pride and sensual excess, whereas Amavia, the weak part, is the soul’s affective power which is more closely connected with the fleshly members or fleshly issue, Ruddymane. For Spenser, however, unlike the patriarchal writers we will now survey, woman’s affective power is also rational and sustains a closer contact with God. This composite psychology derives from Hellenistic Judaeo-Christian interpretations of Eden. Origen, elaborating Philo Judaeus’ allegory, explains a tripartite familial image similar to Spenser’s: Our interior man consists of a spirit and a soul. One might call the spirit the male and the soul the female. If these two elements reach a mutual understanding and accord, through their union they will cross and multiply, generating as their children sensory and intellectual goods [i.e., good deeds] … with which they will fill the earth and dominate it.

Origen discusses how this composite image may fall into sin. He blames the female ‘soul’, which may ‘lean toward corporeal pleasures and … cease to obey … the spirit’, so that she produces as her imperfect offspring ‘children of adultery’. In numerous commentaries he depicts the feminine soul (anima) as passional intermediary: ‘it is plain that the will of this soul is something intermediate between the flesh and the spirit, undoubtedly serving and obeying one of the two, whichever it has chosen to obey.’4 A similar hierarchy of human nature is described by St Augustine, who advises that ‘manly reason should have in subjection the appetite of the soul, whereby we act through the bodily members’.5 In the Renaissance Erasmus was instrumental in propagating interest in the exegeses of Origen and Augustine, and he adapted the exact dynamics of their soul-family: Origen correctly infers a threefold division of man. The body or flesh is the lowest part, which the cunning serpent has marked for sin’s rule…. The opposite part is the spirit, in which we demonstrate our kinship to the God-head; copying His mind’s original, the wise Creator marked this part for the eternal rule of His justice…. Finally, He placed midway between these two the soul to monitor our natural senses and movements. As if in a divided commonwealth, the soul must take sides with one party and is drawn this way and that, free to choose which side she favors.6

This scheme of masculine spirit or mind (spiritus or mens), feminine soul or heart (anima or appetitum animae), and bodily members or sensory movement (corpus

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or sensus) is echoed by Pierre Charron in Of Wisdome (I.ii), and Richard Hooker in Ecclesiastical Polity (I.viii.6) calls it a basic ‘Law of Nature’. Though Spenser accepts this moral-psychological hierarchy and its figurative association with man, woman, and a lower fleshly member or child, he radically revises its dynamics in not blaming the fall on the ‘weaker’ parts, the feminine anima or the fleshly corpus; instead he indicts the godlike intellect, the masculine spiritus, as the primary failure, and shows the vulnerable loving power as continually struggling for redemption, and capable of instructive reform – as in the fallen family of Book 2. The woman’s capacity for full-scale ‘combat’ and intellectual growth becomes in Books 3–5 a central, momentous concern. Though never affirming full gender equity, Spenser in these legends explores woman’s nature and capacity for empowerment more extensively than any previous epic poet. Mortdant, the armed knightly protector, exemplifies ‘manly reason’, the highest power and the primary target of corruption. Mortdant’s pricking his horse ‘his puissant force to proue’ (2.1.49, 50) suggests the role of intellect, dominating the animal passions and striving to prove its ‘puissant force’ by attaining virtue for the entire human form.7 Mortdant’s armour (41) signifies an intellectual weaponry, a special conditioning of the mind to assume lordship over creation and over his body and soul. In disarming each knight becomes ‘drunken mad’ (2.1.52) or ‘Pourd out in loosnesse’ (1.7.7) – like Verdant, Mortdant’s alter-image at the end of the legend. This incontinent disarming is motivated by a lustful displacement of the loving lady, the appetitum animae. Thus by having lost control of his intellectual ‘skill’ (54) Mortdant, as his name implies, ‘gives death’ to the entire human family. Second, the lady Amavia, with her ‘life-loving’ name, is the proper ‘appetite of the soul’, a power seated in the heart. Her bleeding heart or love-wound, a focal point throughout the episode,8 is central to her identity. Guyon’s references to her wound suggest not a rationally managed suicide but an irresistible grief, an emotional reflex to the fall of the manly head. The Palmer makes this interpretation explicit: ‘sith this wretched woman ouercome / Of anguish, rather then of crime hath beene’ (58). Amavia’s death-scene inevitably recalls that of Dido, with Virgil’s comment: ‘nam quia nec fato, merita nec morte peribat, / I sed misera ante diem subitoque accensa furore’ (Aeneid, 4.696–7). The ambiguous phrase, ‘merita nec morte peribat’, probably meant ‘nor by a death she had earned’ (as in battle); but later translators add a moral and Christian dimension which is more sympathetic: ‘nor for any crime of hers’, or ‘nor as the wage of sin’ – making Dido’s situation fully analogous to Amavia’s. This positive (but partly subordinate) view of woman accords with Spenser’s ennoblement of her emotional nature. In ‘Aprill’ and ‘November’ he idealizes Dido as a type of Queen Elizabeth. 9 A similar lovewound afflicts Spenser’s other heroines, Una, Britomart, and Amoret; and in each case the wound signifies, at least in part, an emotional reaction to the knight’s failure to exercise his intellectual lordship properly.10 On the question of culpability for Amoret’s wound, Hieatt blames Scudamour’s mastery of Amoret; Roche, Amoret’s fear of mastery. I believe it is a composite failing, following Spenser’s hierarchic conception of the human family. Hieatt is primarily right to criticize

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Scudamour for being (like Redcross and Mortdant) too impetuous with his dominant manly power; Roche is also right in that woman’s complementary nature is liable to evil, so she must learn to fight her own battle.11 Britomart’s conquest of Busirane shows that fear of mastery is defeated by woman’s self-mastery, stemming of course from the divine gift of chastity. In his positive conception of woman’s emotional role, Spenser shows himself to be a culminating figure in the later tradition, particularly after the eleventh century, which ameliorated the image of woman as a part of human psychology. Though he still views woman as the desirous and ‘weak’ part of the rational soul, Spenser tends to exalt this suffering power and to exonerate her from essential culpability in the process of sin. The stress on the woman’s innocence (2.1.37, 58; 2.2.10), which one observes in each of Spenser’s composite human images, is reinforced by the story of the sad nymph’s fountain. The stony nymph, whose virginal, pure waters slay Mortdant (a symbolic death showing baptism’s effect on the fleshly ‘old man’12 – the ultimate recompense of the entire human family), is even more than Amavia a testimonial to the steadfastness of virtue within the womanly heart: these ‘chast and pure’ waters, which ‘euer like her selfe vnstayned hath beene tried’ (2.2.9), epitomize Spenser’s belief in the heart’s potency through chaste integrity. The nymph’s ‘weeping eyes’ (9), like Amavia’s bleeding heart, show the capacity for suffering of the desirous part of the soul, and Spenser’s veneration of this sacrificial grief. Moreover, he emphasizes the positive role of woman in seeking redemption. Humbly acknowledging her womanly weakness, Amavia takes on the guise of palmer to reform her knight (2.1.52, 54). This ‘fair gouernance’ which briefly rehabilitates Mortdant is more a loyal love than preaching ethical maxims or using intellectual weapons: her devoted love replaces Acrasia’s lustful enchantment. Spenser’s gendering of moral counselors raises a major question: why is the prudential teaching of Amavia, disguised as a palmer, not as effective as that of Guyon’s palmer – especially given the precedent of Una, whose sapient power unfolds as the three theological virtues in Book 1? What part, then, does the child Ruddymane play in this image? Clearly he participates in the tainted organism: ‘As budding braunch rent from the natiue tree’ (2.2.2). Ruddymane represents the most limited aspect of the composite image, sensory movements or the bodily members, as is indicated by his name, the ‘bloudie hands’ which are emphasized just as repeatedly as his mother’s bleeding heart.13 That he exemplifies only the lower, sensory appetites, and not the higher passions or reason, is shown by his inappropriate playfulness, his inability to experience ‘sorrow dew’ for his dying mother (2.1.40) or to understand his own dilemma (2.2.1). The child thus signifies the ‘flesh’ (2.2.9), his bloody hands showing the absorption of the taint in the unwitting members of the body. When Guyon commits him to Medina for training in prudence, she clearly has much work to do. Guyon’s unsuccessful attempts to repair the mother’s heart-wound (2.1.43–8) and to clean the child’s stained hands (2.2.3–4, 10) confirm the composite identity of the three figures. In spite of the partial innocence of mother and child, they must share in the corruption which comes through the father’s misjudgment,

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his partaking of the fountain of cupidity which taints them all, ‘Being diffused through the sencelesse tronck’ (2.2.4). Mortdant, then, is the ruling intellectual power which primarily incurs the fall; Amavia is the weaker, affective power which, though steadfast in its devotion, suffers sympathetically from its profound attachment to and sharing in the intellect; and the child shows the diffusion of sinfulness into the weakest, most vulnerable part of the human form, the bodily members, or by implication into every literal deed which humankind performs. Spenser is not alone in adapting this three-part hierarchy for literary purposes, yet it is important to note his revision of earlier uses, especially in ameliorating their negative view of the flesh and of woman. Chaucer’s Parson describes the process of sin as the snake’s fleshly suggestion, Eve’s emotional delight, and Adam’s rational consent.14 Similarly, in the popular tales of Orpheus–Eurydice and Aeneas–Dido, woman was viewed as the lower, desirous part which, in turning downward to idolize the flesh, influenced the higher masculine reason to turn from God also.15 In Paradise Lost this temptation sequence is of course elaborately displayed, and Milton even provides a demonic parody of the group in Satan, his daughter-wife Sin, and their perverse fleshly issue Death.16 Man, woman, and serpent are thus seen as types of intellect, soul, and flesh (or in some cases, following Philo Judaeus’ influential distinction of mens and sensus, woman’s role is further reduced and conflated with the fleshly aspect). This Edenic allegory, with its negative view of woman, was transmitted by Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory, Isidore, Bede, Rabanus Maurus, Erigena, Aelfric, Petrus Comestor, and the Glossa Ordinaria among early exegetes; by Alanus de Insulis, Aquinas, Chaucer, and the Roman de la Rose in the Middle Ages; by Erasmus, Leone Ebreo, and Huarte in the Renaissance; down to Raleigh, Browne, and More in the seventeenth century.17 Throughout this long misogynist use of the figure, stress was placed on the need to maintain man’s dominion as the essentially rational part and the only part made unequivocally in God’s image. The woman, like Eve, was seen as the desirous and ‘irrational’ aspect, more closely allied to the fleshly offspring or fleshly serpent, and assuming the burden of the crime of disobedience. An alternate tradition, apparently more sympathetic to woman, stems from the scheme which Augustine devised in De Trinitate: Adam is higher reason (sapientia), Eve lower reason (scientia), and the serpent the motion of the senses. But this interpretation, taken up by Peter Lombard, Hugo of St. Victor, Bonaventure, and Agrippa, unfortunately tends to absorb the feminine principle totally into a process oriented to male cognition.18 As we shall later see, only in Bonaventure, and in allegorists of a similar Franciscan bent, is this interpretation combined with an appreciation of the feminine principle as a power of love. Spenser’s composite image of humankind bears the marked influence of this latter development. Woman in The Faerie Queene is not Philo’s fleshly sensus, nor Augustine’s lower reason or scientia; rather Spenser eminently values woman as the affective component of the rational soul, the appetitum animae in fullest bloom and fullest integration with reason (as exemplified by Una as the ‘invisible church’ in Book 1).19 What is striking about the fallen Edenic group of Mortdant, Amavia, and Ruddymane in Book 2 is that even here, on the natural level, Spenser ideal-

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izes woman’s role. Her share of the blame is shifted to a false Eve, Acrasia, who displaces her; and in her persistent loving devotion Amavia continues to manifest traces of God’s image, striving to regenerate the whole human image. As with Una in Book 1, Spenser portrays Amavia with impressive cognitive powers as she strives to reform her fallen lord, but, unlike Britomart in Book 3, neither Una nor Amavia bears arms to win the combat with evil on her own. The most idealized conception of the Edenic family appears in its parallel with the Holy Trinity, a favourite analogy of medieval exegetes, e.g., Augustine in De Trinitate and Langland in Piers Plowman:20 That God is three persons departable I will prove by mankind…. Eve was of Adam, and drawn out of him, And Abel of them both, and all three one kind; Thus these three…. Adam, and Eve, And Abel, their issue, are but one in manhead.

Langland then describes the similar generative relationship of the three hypostases of Godhead. This exalted portrayal of natural man as imago Dei offers a glimpse of what Mortdant, Amavia, and Ruddymane might have been had they not been corrupted by Acrasia’s fountain of self-love. The sanctified image of Book 1: Redcrosse, Una, and the Dwarf The most spiritually potent image of Spenser’s tripartite human form is the group of figures which opens the poem and is fulfilled in Book 1. This triadic group forms a stately hierarchy,21 as indicated, first, by their means of movement: the knight ‘pricking’ his noble steed signifies (like Mortdant) the highest power yet the most errant one; the lady’s submissive riding on a ‘lowly Asse’ shows her dependency on the knight’s power yet her superior self-control through humble, selfless love;22 finally, that the Dwarf, with no beast at all, lags ‘Behind her farre away’ and ‘lasie seemed in being euer last’, displays his lowest power, tending the material needs of these characters, especially the woman. This hierarchy is further illustrated by what each carries or wears: the knight’s armour and weapons show his intellectual power, and their insignia identify him as an aspiring type of Christ Militant.23 Corresponding to the knight’s need for armour, the lady wears a ‘vele’ and ‘black stole’, showing her vulnerability in the fallen world, shielding her special beauty and power of love. Her ‘milke white lambe’, like the ass, shows that she too is a symbol of Christ (part of the imago Dei), but in a more passive and self-sacrificing manner; she thus typifies the regenerate soul or the Church, instituted by Christ to be his bride. Finally, the Dwarf signifies the lowest power of this noble image, consciousness on a corporeal level, and his bag thus carries the sensory needs of the Church or Soul. That Redcrosse represents the Logos, the active intellectual power, is borne out by the allegory of Book 1: the final object of his earthly quest is apprehension of the Truth, as symbolized by Una (a truth shown in her pithy speeches, her ‘unfolding’ as a House of Holiness, and above all, her Godlike love); Redcrosse’s initial enemies, which clearly play on his identity as an intellectual power, are ‘Errour’ and ‘Hypocrisie’, which divert him from Truth when his ‘eye of reason’ is blinded (1.2.5); other foes include the Sansboys who are sons of blindness

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(Aveugle), blind Ignaro who holds the keys to the castle of carnal pride where Redcrosse is imprisoned (pride being sustained by ignorance), and Despair with his self-deluding rhetoric. Even the Dragon, for all his complicated symbolism, suggests (like Orgoglio) an enormous, puffed-up intellectual delusion, occasioned by pride, which the knight with his shining arms must overcome on behalf of all men.24 Finally, when his mind has been cleansed and vivified by the schooling of Faith, Love, and Contemplative Vision, Redcrosse is able not only to expel the Dragon but also to perceive clearly the truth of Una’s love and beauty, when her veil is laid aside. Thus, the essential development of this quest for wholeness is a reforming of intellectual vision, imperative for the knight to understand his own identity and also the object of his earthly quest, Una herself.25 As the intellectual power, he must assume lordship over Una (his own ‘appetitive soul’) by marrying or integrating this vital truth within his heart, oneness with God’s love. That Una, like the other heroines, exemplifies the desirous aspect of the rational soul is evident from the constant emphasis on her loving devotion, or on her emotional torment on behalf of the knight.26 Her emotional identity is most clearly seen in the attempt to displace her, at the very outset, with perverse passions. Archimago, by conjuring up the false Una and by using her to abuse the knight’s conception of Venus (1.1.48ff), strives to undermine Redcross’s belief in Una’s integrity as a loving power. Her emotional identity is further highlighted during her wanderings in cantos 3 and 6, particularly in the abuse by Sansloy’s ‘lawlesse lust’. Her capacity for emotion appears in her paralysing grief at the knight’s fall to Orgoglio, and in her intense sympathetic feelings in the House of Holiness and during the Dragon fight. Finally, the vision of Una unveiled, when the knight is ‘Possessed of his ladies hart’ (1.12.40), suggests the fulfilment of the intellectual power by means of its mystical union with the affective power. In general, then, Una is described in terms of her capacity for love. As Rosemund Tuve has stated, ‘her Truth is her troth’; veritas is in her described as fides or emotional purity.27 As a type of the Church or as the individual soul, she embodies the awareness of God’s love, as expressed in Christ’s atoning sacrifice (her association with ass and lamb). Because she fosters the sense of this love, as when she rescues Redcrosse from Despair and leads him to the Church, she is essential to his regeneration into the active, masculine image of Christ, her counterpart. In the evolving relation of Redcrosse and Una one detects the characteristic paradox, the recurring tendency to invert the male-female hierarchy on the basis of relative moral constancy, which leads many critics to laud the woman far above the man.28 However, Una’s moral beauty and the knight’s errancy and profound dependency on her should not blind us to Spenser’s consistent goal for this holy couple. With Una’s reforming guidance, this clownish, earthy man becomes an apocalyptic Christlike warrior who defeats the Dragon and redeems Eden. Though Una’s loving power is more effective and constant than his armed intellect, he is to become her ‘Lord’, the head of the composite image. Finally, Una’s Dwarf exemplifies the slow and encumbered perception of the senses, the third and lowest level of consciousness. Una’s ‘bag / Of needments’ suggests her need to make herself known and to operate practically on the level

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of sensory appearances. Kathryn Walls explains many aspects of ‘Una’s adiaphoric dwarf ’ in relation to the Church’s outward trappings, such as vestments.29 This aspect of the Church or Soul lags far behind her essential self, and her Dwarf perceives moral struggle only from a frighteningly limited yet nevertheless helpful perspective.30 At Error’s den and at Lucifera’s palace he encourages terrified withdrawal from all appearances of evil. Although his escapist warnings are a poor substitute for Una’s deeper vision of faith in God’s love, this dwarfish aspect of humankind plays an important role by relating his perception of material things to the higher faculties of awareness. It is the Dwarf who first suspects the danger of Lucifera’s castle, simply by noting the sensory consequences of her reign – the ‘donghill of dead carkases’ which is ‘vnderneath the castell wall’ (1.5.45–53). At the conclusion of Book 1, as the populace of Eden parade out to greet their liberator, this redeemed commonwealth assumes a hierarchical order exactly analogous to the three figures at the start of the legend.31 First, Redcrosse is lauded by the royalty with their counsellors and guard, who together form an essentially masculine image signifying the ruling intellect. Second, the maidens and young children come forth praising Una, a basically feminine image showing the fulfilment of the affective power. And third, the common folk, as they press around to stare and tremble at the huge fallen bulk of the Dragon, suggest the movement of the senses. Like the Dwarf, they know by material evidences how terrifying the forces of evil may appear to be. Together, these three hierarchic perspectives show the harmony of man as he was created and re-created in Edenic innocence, and accordingly this commonwealth hears the music of the spheres (1.12.39). The historical basis for this sanctified image of man, woman, and fleshly nature is of course the regenerative role of Christ and his establishment of the Church as his mystical body and future bride, thus making of Adam and Eve and their offspring a ‘new creation’.32 Numerous developments in the Middle Ages enhanced the role of woman as a part of human nature, especially veneration of the Virgin Mary and the growth of the ‘allegory of love’, transforming the passive and vulnerable maiden of the ‘sawles warde’ tradition to a more positive and active role – as we see her in Pearl and in Dante’s Commedia.33 Joan Ferrante has observed this ennobling of the image of woman in the works of Bernard, Abelard, Hugh of St Victor, Bonaventure, Dante, and others.34 We might single out Bonaventure, whose views have a striking congruence with Spenser’s portrayal of woman in The Faerie Queene. Unlike Augustine and Aquinas, Bonaventure does not tend to see woman merely as a tool for procreation, as merely passive matter which must be impressed with the active form of man, or as an irrational sensuality which must be dominated by man’s reason.35 Woman, according to Bonaventure, carries a complementary part of the rational substance which reflects divinity. The difference between the sexes (in terms which remind us of Mortdant and Amavia) is that ‘man, the stronger of the two, symbolizes the higher faculty of the mind; woman, the weaker of the two, the lower’.36 This commonplace distinction between active and passive aspects of the rational soul was interpreted quite differently by Aquinas and Bonaventure, for Bonaventure assigned to woman as passive intellect a much more comprehensive role: ‘The active intellect is not

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entirely active, nor is the possible intellect entirely passive. They are dependent upon each other, the activity of the one sharing in the passivity of the other and vice versa.’37 Most important, Bonaventure perceives woman’s nature, the ‘passive’ aspect of the rational soul, primarily as a power of love: God formed woman ‘from such perfect material as a part taken from the body close to the heart.’38 Thus, ‘man was created to act while woman was destined especially to love, and by her love to render action easier to man whose companion she is, and whose glory she should be.’39 This conception of woman as a loving rationality, complementing male rationality and essential to the fulfilment of human nature, is a culminating flower of the allegory of love tradition and central to Spenser’s composite human image – involving not only Una but Gloriana. Thus, in keeping with both positive and negative traditional views of this marital image, Spenser conceives the man as the stronger and ruling power of the human form. Una calls Redcrosse ‘the God of my life’ (1.3.7) and ‘my light, and shining lampe of blis’ (27) – deeply ironic epithets in that she is praising Archimago disguised as Redcrosse, underscoring Una’s share in rational errancy. Yet her lauding the knight by the sign of his shield emphasizes his desire to imitate Christ and her dependence (as bride, church, soul) on his active intellectual power. Despite his putative superiority in this hierarchy, he must pay homage to her ‘weaker’ but far more instrumentally effective power – first, because his intellect is disabled by pride, blindness to true love, and sensuality; and, second, because she herself is capable of active intellect, especially in trying to redeem the fallen knight. Redcrosse’s power is perfected by the love he learns from Una, a passional intellect deriving from Christ’s Passion. Their reciprocal dependency recalls Robert Burton’s vision of the marital ideal: ‘The husband rules her as head, but she again commands his heart, he is her servant, she his only joy and content.’40 The harmony of Eden’s commonwealth, and of the familial group which opens the legend, springs from this loving union of humankind as the corpus mysticum of the Gospels and Paul’s letters.41 The romance analogue of Books 3–5: Artegall, Britomart, and Talus This final group’s communal bond and hierarchic order, which matches the triadic groups of the prior books, evolves only gradually and eclectically in Books 3–5. It becomes integrated in Britomart and Artegall’s combat-betrothal (4.6), in Talus’ extensive service to both, and in Britomart’s dream at Isis’ Temple and subsequent slaying of Radigund (5.7). Commentators observe how integral a part of Artegall’s quest (and of the ‘salvage’ Artegall) is the compelling figure of Talus;42 and Britomart, by defeating Artegall in the tourney, forcing him to acknowledge her ‘power of equity’, and liberating him from Radigund’s abuse of womanly power, demonstrates her crucial role in bringing both Chastity and Friendship to bear on Justice. As Angus Fletcher remarks, ‘the family unit, and then, even more radically, the male–female relation,’ is central to the ‘mythos of justice’ in Book 5.43 Artegall, like Redcrosse and Mortdant, represents the power of ‘manly reason’. He is ‘best skild in righteous lore’ (5.1.4; cf. 7–8). As Redcrosse and Mortdant demonstrate intellectual dominion over their steeds, so too Artegall is taught by

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Astraea ‘to make experience / Vpon wyld beasts’ (1.7). Artegall’s ‘skill of deeming wrong and right’ (5.1.8) is also enforced by special armour and weaponry, until he abandons them in the struggle with Radigund. His main weapon is the sword Chrysaor which, like the swords of Redcrosse, Guyon, and Arthur, and like the sword (or word of judgment) of Christ, symbolizes not just physical force but the exercise of rational power (5.1.10).44 Next, Britomart represents the ‘affection of the soul’, but unlike Una and Amavia she becomes proficient at wielding arms; indeed she unseats all knights (including her future husband) except Arthur. Like Redcrosse, Guyon, Arthur, and Artegall, she wears armour of restraining containment, and like them (and like Elizabeth I) she is a master of iconic weaponry: both the sword-word of reason and the ‘enchanted lance’ of will. Britomart’s skill with such weapons, and the impact on her persona of armour instead of a veil, raise crucial questions: (1) Does her armed prowess show cognitive equality, power to argue and enforce decisions as well as any man?45 Sheila Cavanagh disparages Britomart for adopting an insensitive militant aggression46 – a transgendered ‘disguise’ whose dark metaphysical nuances Kari Vogt explores in ‘Becoming Male’.47 (2) But Britomart’s armed prowess seems different, an affective power, derived from weaponry of a Saxon princess, which can surpass men’s cognitive power. Judith Anderson, Pamela Benson, Suzanne Wofford, and James Broaddus explain the complex evolution in Books 3–5 of Britomart’s character and allegorical significance. Her power is a ‘sacred fyre … ykindled first aboue …. / And thence pourd into men’, the moving power for virtuous endeavour and for raising her great tree of ancestry (3.2.1–3). In her opening joust with Guyon, Britomart is ‘affection chaste’ (3.1.12), and her first major challenge, the assault at Castle Joyous, elaborately defines her nature as an emotional power. Malecasta, False Florimell, and Hellenore all display the adulterous mode of courtly love which threatens Britomart’s integrity. The many irruptions of her fiery passions in Books 3–5 are increasingly controlled and channelled toward Providential ends. In demonstrating the power of chaste love, her victories lay a basis for male–female relationship partly by combining affective and cognitive prowess. In overthrowing Busirane she actively uses the sword-word of reason to resist male tyranny by false arts and thereby quells woman’s fear of mastery; in defeating Radigund she prevents the abuse of womanly power by reversing mastery. In both episodes Britomart’s wielding of symbolic arms is vital. As with Una and Amavia, there is paradox in Britomart’s role and in her relation to her knightly ‘Lord’. Her supremacy with arms shows her womanly, passional virtue to be, no less than man’s, an active supernatural power (3.3.1–3) whose ‘mortal puissance mote not [be] withstond’ (3.1.10), able to overthrow all men, including Artegall, though her victory in their final intimate combat is accomplished through his voluntary submission.48 Her inverting of the male–female hierarchy is fully expressed in Isis’ Temple, where in her vision she rules over the brutish crocodile Artegall. Like other women presiding over figurative castles and gardens in the poem, Britomart is here a type of Anima, the soul with its dominion over bodily creation. But she does not reign alone over the human form, for the crocodile, her monstrous counterpart, will express earth-shaking power

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in this earthly dwelling-place. With the male’s sexual assertion, and the female’s chastening him into his proper form, the reign of Isis yields voluntarily to that of Osiris.49 We recall that, at her betrothal to Artegall, Britomart discarded her warlike guise, following Glauce’s advice (4.6.32); indeed, Britomart’s assumption of armour and of an active role is six times called a ‘disguise’ of her true nature.50 She takes up arms once more only to overthrow Radigund, denying women the right to rule if it threatens the basic hierarchy of human nature: ‘vertuous women wisely vnderstand, / That they were borne to base humilitie, / Vnlesse the heauens them lift to lawfull soueraintie’ (5.5.25). Spenser’s concluding qualification (‘Vnlesse the heauens them lift …’) is, however, not just a singular flattery of Elizabeth I; for his heroines’ regnant qualities and ability to assume active power is illustrated in every legend. Elizabeth Bieman notes that Britomart enables male supremacy, not just by conquering Radigund (and implicitly herself), but by the cumulative effect of her emotional power on Artegall, liberating his higher self from the monstrous crocodile form.51 Such a role is paradigmatic of the loving female’s influence on the male Logos-figure in each legend. Britomart’s extensive role, however, raises large questions. First, her nature: what is chastity’s armed power, its awesome militancy yet ambivalent moral stature?52 How deeply cognizant is she – does she apprehend the artful perversities of Malecasta, Paridell, and Busirane, and does her sensibility grow during three legends?53 Second, why are her moral counsellors so equivocal? Glauce’s patient motherly passional comfort impressively helps both Britomart and Scudamour, but it differs greatly from Una’s spiritual counsel and the Palmer’s prudent advice; likewise Merlin is far more morally ambivalent and ill-defined than the earlier counsellors. Third, why are the characters and plot of Book 3 so diversified, Britomart’s quest ‘intermedled’ with those of Florimell, Belphoebe, and Amoret, who show her facets? Above all, why does Britomart suffer no definitive fall, and receive no templar education – not even in the Temple of Isis? Though she generally conforms to Spenser’s Christian-Platonic familial hierarchy, her advent in Book 3 radically challenges the ancient norm, generating a new kind of allegory, showing passion’s definitive power and Godlikeness (see pp.  204–20 and 299–301 below). Finally, the robot-man Talus, like Una’s Dwarf and like Ruddymane, exemplifies the lowest aspect of the human form, the sensory ‘bodily members’. This ‘yron man’, whose few attempts at thinking or feeling show his ineptness at higher levels of consciousness (5.2.23–5, 6.9), operates throughout Book 5 as a bodily extension or instrument, either of Britomart’s emotional power or of Artegall’s intellectual judgments. From the outset Talus is a mere reflex of his master’s mind, instructed by Astraea to ‘doe what euer thing he [Artegall] did intend’ (5.1.12). Artegall, Britomart, and Talus each correspond to a level of the body politic. When Artegall is ‘loth … his noble hands t’ embrew / In the base blood’ of the Giant’s ‘rascall crew’ (2.52), he sends Talus to deal with them, for it is this lowest, corporeal element, the vulgar masses, that Talus controls. His flail, drawn from Biblical symbolism, scourges and mortifies this unruly and prolific aspect of human nature.54 Second, it is Britomart who resists the passional depression of Dolon

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and opposes ­Radigund’s womanly perversion of justice, her abuse of the power of love. Finally, Artegall contends with perversions of the ruling intellectual power.55 The relationship of these three figures is consummately stated at Isis’s Temple, in light of Britomart’s visionary apotheosis. The essential members of the hierarchy are of course the male figure of Artegall-Osiris, ‘The iustest man aliue’, and the female figure of Britomart-Isis, who represents ‘That part of Iustice, which is Equity’ (5.7.2–3). Her emotional power teaches clemency, which must temper the rigour of his intellectual judgments (5.7.22), must, moreover, keep him in mind of the goodness and beauty enshrined in creation. During the prophetic vision in the temple, Britomart and her spouse-to-be assume a regnant and ecstatic state, and in this holy dimension Talus ‘mote not be admitted to her part’ (5.7.3). (We recall the Dwarf ’s exclusion from the ecstatic union of Redcrosse and Una at the end of Book 1.) Though Talus works closely with the higher powers as bodily executor of their judgment and will, he is omitted when the action enters a spiritual dimension. Nevertheless, it is clear that such moments must be short-lived. After Britomart’s vision she descends ‘into the lower parts’ of the temple again (5.7.17), and Talus again plays a crucial role, a major aspect of the composite image of humankind in facing the mixed realities of a fallen world. Spenser thus depicts each triadic group of characters – man, woman, child or servant – as exemplifying the basic components of human nature: the armed knight signifying manly reason, too easily deterred by demonic deception; the loving lady representing an affectionate rationality, which chastely seeks to reform the male; the child or servant figuring the bodily members, assisting the quests of the two higher powers or showing the effects of their decisions and feelings on a corporeal level. These three groups, seen in the differing allegorical perspective of each legend, offer varied insights into humankind’s tripartite nature. For example, each of the diminutive or subservient figures – Dwarf, Ruddymane, Talus – discloses a unique aspect of the ‘bodily members’. The Dwarf, and the sensory consciousness he exemplifies, are indeed dwarfed in the spiritual perspective of Book 1, dwarfed by the high aims of the man and woman he serves. Yet his simple functions show how corporeally involved in the world are his masters. Ruddymane, with his stained hands, reveals another aspect of man’s fleshly nature or bodily members: the taint of Original Sin, once incurred by a wrongful selfish choice, suffuses sin through the human form to the nescient bodily members and their deeds. In Book 5’s literal, historical dimension this subservient power becomes overwhelmingly active. Talus adds to the imago Dei by mortifying the fleshly appetites, the vulgar part of the social organism. Wielding his flail, he reflects the apocalyptic chore of Christ, ‘whose fanne is in his hand, and he wil make cleane his flooer, and wil gather the wheat into his garner, but the chaff wil he burne vp with fyre that neuer shalbe quenched’ (Luke 3.17). Talus’s ruthless scourging and dispersal of vulgar commonality and sensate physicality enforces a Platonic and aristocratic elitism that pervades Spenser’s epic, increasingly showing the ‘saluage nation’ to be unredeemable, as in A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland. Spenser’s strong dismissal makes one wonder whether the bedesmen in the House of Holiness serve commoners as well as the privileged.

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One is intrigued by the episodes in the Legend of Courtesy where, far more than in Sidney’s Arcadia, Sir Calidore’s masking allows him to extend his courtesies to the world of common shepherds. Richard Neuse observes that his condescensions are in fact demeaning, and Pastorella, the object of Calidore’s efforts, is (like saintly Redcrosse) finally found to be of noble birth and removed from the pastoral setting that provides her name. Nevertheless, as Anderson explains in ‘“Nor man it is”: The Knight of Justice in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’,56 Spenser depicts Artegall (Arthur’s equal) as ‘saluagesse sans finesse’, a signal example of the poet’s candid questioning of the higher levels of the social and familial hierarchy. Books 1 and 2: Christian-Platonic tripartism in Spenser’s intellective allegory The knowledge of the Soule, and of her Powres, Is the well-head of morrall-Wisdome’s flood. (John Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos)

In 1 Cor. 15, St Paul grapples with one of the most difficult questions, the nature of the resurrection body: ‘Some wil say, How are the dead raised vp? and with what bodie come they forthe?’ Paul distinguishes between man’s physical body and his spiritual body, affirming our access to both: ‘As we haue borne the image of the earthlie, so shal we beare the image of the heauenlie…. For this corruptible must put on incorruption: and this mortal must put on immortalitie.’57 Are there then two types of psychology, a corruptible and an incorruptible human form? And what exactly does Paul mean by ‘put on’? What is the relation between our natural and spiritual bodies, between our Adam-nature and our Christ-nature? Spenser, in the allegorical centres of The Faerie Queene, most clearly in the House of Holiness and Alma’s Castle, has much to say about the composition of these two bodies. The spiritual house has primacy, attaining all virtues in sainthood (a holistic feat to be elaborated in Arthur’s twelve-legend quest for Gloriana), and it thus subsumes Guyon’s subordinate quest to maintain the physical house; but the sequence of training in the two edifices is structurally similar, and, despite their distinct differences, their attempts to fulfil human nature are shown to be interdependent. Though Harry Berger, Jr, has analysed the features of Alma’s Castle, and Joseph Collins has explicated the three mystical ways in the House of Holiness, and though many critics have noted the irascible-concupiscent (froward–forward) polarity of motivation throughout Book 2,58 there has been very inadequate consideration of the nature and complicated origins of Spenserian psychology. It is especially important to determine whether Spenser has integrated the various Platonic, Aristotelian, and Patristic schemes into a configuration which consistently informs the structure of his main allegorical groupings, sequences, landscapes, and houses – those composite figures which exemplify the total human form. Unfortunately, Berger has overvalued Aristotelian faculty psychology in explaining Alma’s Castle. A.K. Hieatt, who emphasizes the more crucial influence of Plato, follows Sirluck, Nelson, Hankins, and others in focusing on the

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irascible-concupiscent (or froward–forward) extremes which recur continually in the allegory of Book 2. This bifurcation, an Aristotelian development of Plato’s moral-psychological scheme, does not, however, show the total human form in The Faerie Queene but only the polarity to which each of its three levels is liable.59 The main figures of Books 1 and 2 show a vertical tripartite hierarchy: at the base are sensory appetites in the belly; on the middle level are nobler passions in the heart; and at the top, governing the two forms of lower desire, is reason in the brain. The scheme derives largely from Plato’s Timaeus and Republic, but each stage, especially heart and brain, is elaborated by later theorists. Before tracing the history of Spenser’s Christian-Platonic psychology, we note the main allegorical figures in Books 1 and 2 showing Spenser’s concept of the soul’s three powers or levels. 1. The tripartite human image at the outset. Redcrosse Knight, Una, and the Dwarf show a structured concept of psychology; and the same pattern appears in Mortdant, Amavia, and Ruddymane, who form the crucial emblem near the outset of Book 2. The image’s perversion has formed at mid-legend in the demonic trio of Orgoglio, Duessa, and the many-headed monster; and in Book 2’s battle with Maleger, his hags, and his prolific rabblement. This group of man-womanchild (or man-woman-monster or snake) shows human nature’s three aspects as evolved in Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Patristic psychology: man as intellect or brain, woman as soul or heart, child or monster as senses or lower appetites (the fleshly issue, or the source of temptation, for the higher powers). This concept (salient in Spenser’s allegory, in Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s ‘Parson’s Tale’, and Paradise Lost) draws on the natural archetype of Adam-Eve-snake or Adam-Eve-Abel; and the mystic analogue of Christ, the Church or Soul, and the Church’s physical ‘needments’. This composite image evolved in commentaries on the Garden of Eden, notably those of Philo, Origen, and Augustine,60 and in Patristic views of the Pauline corpus mysticum and the Song of Songs.61 As noted above, Spenser in Books 1–2 radically alters the Patristic allegory, showing the male’s failure to rule effectively until reformed by the ministry of Christlike Arthur, Una as Church, and sacramental power. The composite image is then further chastened as virtue is tested in the realms of passion (Books 3–4) and sense (Books 5–6). The male protagonists, including Arthur, show further their weak and ineffective lordship as Christlike head, while Britomart, with the God-granted purity of heart of her chaste integrity, shows her superior prowess with the lance of will and the sword of reason. 2. Three stages of sin, and of temptation. In the first half of Book 1 the Sansbrothers’ assaults on Redcrosse and Una exemplify three stages of ‘achieving sin’62 (a progression greatly elaborated in the legend’s final half by Redcrosse’s subjection to Orgoglio, Despair, and Dragon). In ‘Sansloy’s Double Meaning and the Mystic Design of Spenser’s Legend of Holiness’ I have shown that Sansloy’s full meaning (not just ‘without law’ but ‘without loyal love’) confirms the progressive pattern of sin in the three Saracens: lack of foy-loy-joy (of faith-love-joy) is precisely resolved in the three stages of the House of Holiness.63 In Book 2 Guyon endures a similar (but inverse) hierarchy of evil in the triple temptation of Mammon at the centre,

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and of Acrasia at the finale. Mammon’s three rooms offer Guyon wealth, honour, and pleasure, tempting the soul’s powers in descending order: lust of the eye or intellect (avarice), lust of the heart (vainglory), lust of the flesh (gluttony). The Bower of Blisse offers the same narrowing series of allurements: from Genius’s intellective artifice to Excesse’s passional extremes, to Acrasia’s vampirish perversion of the senses. Such triple temptings evolved from commentary on the Edenic Fall, and Adam and Eve’s three-stage downfall was compared to the three temptings which Jesus successfully resisted.64 3. The three-layered figurative castle in cantos 9–10 of each legend: before concluding the quest, the hero’s extensive education or reform provides a consummate image of Spenser’s notion of psychology: three levels of the natural body are shown in Alma’s Castle, and three analogous levels of the mystical body form the House of Holiness. This architectural and communal image of the microcosm has a long and varied lineage: Plato is a primary source for the castle or commonwealth with three levels; and equally important is Christian allegorists’ corresponding castle of humankind’s mystical body.65 4. A three-part image of Eden signals each legend’s goal: three groups issue forth in stately hierarchic fashion from Eden’s commonwealth at the end of Book 1; and Book 2 presents three concentric regions of Acrasia’s false paradise, where the three powers of Guyon’s soul are finally tested. Thus, the allegorical figures which embody Spenser’s concept of psychology include, first, the composite group of three figures at the outset of each quest, and demonic parodies of this grouping; second, the triadic progress of sin and of temptation that threaten the soul’s powers; third, the figurative castle of three levels showing the ideal form of humankind’s three levels of consciousness; and the final Edenic setting which tests, or fulfils, the soul’s powers. In these complementary (positive and negative) views of a three-part Eden in Books 1 and 2, Spenser complexly treats the immensely influential allegory of Creation and Fall in Genesis, developed by Jewish and Christian scholars, with a Platonic conception of psychology. The evolution of tripartite psychology from Plato to Alma’s Castle The frame thereof seemed partly circulare,   And part triangulare: O worke diuine!   Those two the first and last proportions are …   And twixt them both a quadrate was the base … : All which compacted made a goodly diapase.

(2.9.22)

The idealized form of tripartite psychology, often involving numerical and geometrical symbols for parts of the body and powers of the soul, extends from Plato and Pythagorean mystical idealism to the Neoplatonists and St Augustine, to Al-Farabi and the Arab Platonists, to the Chartrian school, Bonaventure, and other medieval Platonists, to Italian Platonists such as Ficino and Castiglione, to English Platonists such as Colet, Elyot, and Spenser. The geometrically formed microcosm of the Timaeus, as transmitted by Chalcidius and Macrobius, is an essential strand of continuity in this tradition, the three main parts of the body

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reflecting an ideal moral and cosmic hierarchy. But of strong secondary importance to the study of tripartism in Spenser is the conflicting line, the more empirical and diverse rendering of the embodied soul, extending from Aristotle to Avicenna and Aquinas, and from thence to numerous Renaissance treatises on faculty psychology and Galenic humoral psychology.66 Let us briefly consider the progression and intermingling of the two traditions which spring from Plato and Aristotle, and then show the misleading Aristotelian bias in modern studies of Renaissance psychology, especially in misconstruing Spenserian psychology in Alma’s Castle. First note Plato’s seminal metaphors for the embodied soul’s three powers – as a three-layered castle or city-state, and as a charioteer controlling two diverse horses. Then observe Aristotle’s tentative adaptation of this scheme in Nicomachean Ethics, but his thorough revision of tripartism in De Anima and later works. Third, in the neo-Aristotelian schemes of Aquinas and the later Middle Ages, and especially in the Christian-Platonic mysticism of Augustine, Bernard, Bonaventure and others, one sees important ramifications of the tripartite hierarchy, especially in fulfilling the spiritual body.67 Finally, Renaissance treatises on the body–soul relationship show the most varied combinations of Aristotelian and Platonic schemes, but modern scholars continue to imply an almost exclusive predominance of Aristotelian faculty psychology. Plato’s influential scheme in Timaeus depicts a figurative castle with head over heart over belly; and in the similar scheme of the Republic he identifies the intellect as a philosopher-king, the heart as the warrior class, and the belly’s appetites as the fractious labouring class.68 Though Aristotle seems in Nicomachean Ethics to adopt this simple Platonic scheme, in which reason must control the two appetitive principles, even here Aristotle largely ignored the vertical hierarchic aspect of these three powers, as well as Plato’s mystical geometry for their three bodily regions. Instead (as if drawing on the deceptive figure of the charioteer and two horses in Phaedrus) Aristotle describes irascibility and concupiscence as a polarity, ‘the feelings that are accompanied by pleasure or pain’,69 a dichotomy which can affect each level of desire (belly’s appetites, heart’s affections, reason’s will), but for him it operates mainly in the affective part of the ‘animal’ or ‘sensitive’ faculties.70 Later, in De Anima, Aristotle broke drastically with Plato. Here he explicitly denied Plato’s scheme of three levels of human consciousness (concupiscent, irascible, rational), while expanding his own view of the microcosm as three more completely incommensurate levels (vegetable, animal, rational).71 Above all, he proposed that reason, the highest principle, had no specific organic connection; it was not integrated with the brain, but was more loosely associated with the heart, from which it spread its influence through the body as its form.72 Does Spenser in Alma’s Castle follow Plato’s simple hierarchy (appetites in belly, higher ‘spirited’ passions in heart, reason in head), or Aristotle’s faculty psychology (vegetative principle in belly and lower parts, animal principle in heart’s affections and head’s sensitive faculties, rational principle throughout the castle, but closely associated with the heart)? Spenser’s image of the natural body, by far the most complex and carefully structured in the long history of the figurative castle, is a remarkable synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian systems. Its

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essential frame is informed by the Platonic hierarchy, a mystical scheme exactly analogous to the three levels of the House of Holiness; but in the proliferation of lower ‘nutritive’ parts of the castle, in its dichotomy of forward–froward motives in the heart, and in its diverse rational activity in both brain and heart, Spenser’s castle incorporates much of Aristotle’s system as well.73 We especially note that the brain-turret (‘that heauenly towre, / That God hath built for his owne blessed bowre’ (2.9.47) is the seat of the highest, rational power, following Plato; and the three sages or inner wits are depicted, not in Aristotelian fashion as subrational powers of the sensitive soul, but as the temporal sequence of ratio, the ‘allegory of prudence’.74 This tripartite scheme of the human body, essentially derived from Plato, is consummately expressed by the anatomist Helkiah Crooke in Microcosmographia (1615), and he actually cites Alma’s Castle as an illustration of this scheme: The head, the Castle and tower of the Soule, the seate of reason, the mansion house of wisdome, the treasury of memory, judgement and discourse, wherein mankind is most like to the Angels or intelligencies, obtaining the loftiest and most eminent place in the body; doth it not elegantly resemble that supreame and Angelicall part of the worlde? The middle and celestiall part, is in the breast or middle venter…. For as in that celestiall part, the Sun is predominant, by whose motion, beames and light, all things have brightnesse, luster and beauty; so in the middest of the chest, the heart resideth, … the Sunne of mans bodie…. Now further, who seeth not the sublunary part of the world expressed in the inferior or lower belly? For in it are contained the parts that are ordained for nourishment and procreation, so … all things are found in the body of man, which this universall world doth embrace and comprehend.

In the writings of Ebreo, Agrippa, Colet, Elyot, Davies of Hereford, and Burton, one finds comparable renderings of the microcosm.75 Alma’s Castle is informed by this essentially Platonic scheme (in which the sages occupy the ‘tower of the Soule, the seate of reason’) though many aspects of Aristotelian faculty psychology are also apparent at each level of Spenser’s castle. Many Renaissance and late medieval treatises on man’s body and soul (including Batman uppon Bartholome) are a similar amalgam of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas,76 though never in so integrated a form as in Alma’s Castle; and, like Spenser, many Renaissance theorists lean heavily toward Platonism for the essential framework of the human form. This Platonic scheme of idealized psychology, which is so adaptable to moral allegory and which informs so many medieval and Renaissance allegorical figures, has been relatively neglected by modern scholars. Many studies of medieval and Renaissance psychology – e.g., Anderson’s Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays, Baker’s The Image of Man, Bamborough’s The Little World of Man, Lewis’s The Discarded Image – focus on the prolific terminology of Aristotelian faculty psychology and Galenic humoral psychology.77 They strive to set forth a consistent version of this complicated system (mainly aimed at clarifying Shakespeare’s plays), but rarely mention conflicting views. Though Anderson does note some variances and Plato’s important influence, she often uses Aristotelian terms to describe the Platonic conflict between the soul’s powers. Baker only briefly mentions an ‘incompatibility’ between Aristotle’s naturalistic psychology and the

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more idealistic or mystical scheme from Platonic and Augustinian tradition.78 The neglect of Plato’s system has been particularly unfortunate in interpretations of Spenser’s allegory. Berger’s Aristotelian reading of the three levels of Alma’s Castle, especially in viewing the sages as subrational,79 has obscured the essentially Platonic scheme. This Platonic framework is clearly established in the arithmological stanza (2.9.22), which uses Neoplatonic forms to describe the overall shape of the castle: circular head over quadrangular torso over triangular lower body.80 The tripartite order of the mystical body: the House of Holiness thogh our outwarde man perish, yet the inwarde man is renewed daily…. For we knowe that if our earthlie house of this tabernacle be destroied, we haue a buylding giuen of God,…. therefore we sigh, desiring to be clothed with our house, which is from heauen…. Therefore if anie man be in Christ, let him be a new creature. (2 Cor. 4.16, 5.1–2, 17)

Once the form of Alma’s Castle, man’s natural body, is properly conceived, its three stages are found to be exactly analogous to the three stages of the House of Holiness; but here the soul’s powers are seen sub specie aeternitatis, in relation to man’s mystical body and its eternal destiny.81 Just as Alma’s tour of the three natural faculties is essentially upward (from belly to heart to brain), so too in the House of Holiness the knight moves gradually upward: from the dark, hellish lower regions where the knight’s body is scourged, to the middle region where he practises loving care for others, to the mountain of contemplation with its vision of his beatific destiny. As in Alma’s Castle, these progressive phases of education move from viewing the lower appetites (mortifying the body and senses by means of the teachings of Faith and Hope, culminating in the fasting and scourging administered by Patience), to grappling with feelings of the heart (vivifying the knight’s soul by means of the teachings of Charity, culminating in the guidance of Mercy to the loving acts of the seven beadsmen), to a concern finally with the thoughts of intellect (the envisioned unification of the knight’s soul with God, by means of the teachings of Heavenly Contemplation, culminating in the act of humility of returning to the earthly quest). The tripartite reformation of man’s soul within this spiritual perspective is thus precisely analogous to the soul’s three-part education within the natural perspective of Alma’s Castle. There is an important correspondence between the main figures of the two houses, as well as between their three levels of vision or experience. Alma, the soul in the fleshly body, is analogous to Dame Caelia, the soul in the mystical body, the Church, or the ‘new body’ of man as reformed by Christ and betrothed to him.82 Both Alma and Caelia, as figures of the soul, are essentially spiritual, noncorporeal beings; but whereas Caelia’s heavenly origin and destiny are explicit, as is her name (1.10.4), Alma’s spiritual being is expressed equivocally within the natural order. Alma, a ‘virgin bright’ who ‘had not yet felt Cupides wanton rage’, is ‘woo’d of many’; though she seems immune to Cupid’s darts, still the god sports himself freely in her castle’s centre; and Alma is ‘crowned with a garland of sweete Rosiere’, connecting her with the earthly image of Venus (2.9.18–19). Finally, Alma’s close interdependence with her castle (showing her as an immanent spiritual being

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rather than a transcendent one) is suggested by her leading the tour through it; Caelia delegates this responsibility and returns, one supposes, to her beads and meditations. In short, Caelia’s spiritual nature is seen explicitly as an attachment to heaven; Alma’s implicitly divine nature is seen in negative terms, as a detachment from her earthly lineaments. Because of Caelia’s general and inclusive nature, there has been no problem in conceiving her relation to the house as a whole, as there has been with Alma:83 no one has tried to conceive Caelia as the highest, intellectual power or vision of her house, for she simply presides over the three stages which express her own activities of self-mortification, good works, and visionary aspiration (cf. 1.10.3ff). Alma has essentially the same detached and subsuming relation to the three powers of her castle, though in a natural dimension.84 The first part of the education in each house (1.10.18–28, 2.9.23–33) is concerned with the lowest aspect of man’s embodied soul, his fleshly appetites and fleshly vision. Alma’s ‘stately hall’ of the belly, governed by Diet the steward and Appetite the marshal, and her ‘kitchen room’, regulated by Concoction and Digestion, are designed to nourish and support man’s fleshly nature and to delight and satisfy his fleshly appetites. Fidelia’s teachings in her ‘schoolhouse’ also concentrate on fleshly nature, but merely in order to transcend it. From her sacred book, written in blood, she reveals thoughts and histories which mortify man’s bodily nature and then give a new and more potent life: ‘She was able, with her words to kill, / And raise againe to life the hart, that she did thrill’ (1.10.19). She can mortify or subvert nature on a still larger scale: she commands the sun to stand still, or to move backward; she overthrows great armies, ‘parts the flouds’, and moves mountains. This whole process of mortification – to which Speranza, or Hope, is a mere appendage (1.10.22) – culminates in abnegations of the leech Patience, who lays the knight ‘Downe in a darksome lowly place’, an experience referred to as a type of hell (1.10.32). Patience applies his terrible ‘corrosiues’, designed to abuse the knight’s body and to abate his sinful appetites:   And euer as superfluous flesh did rot   Amendment readie still at hand did wayt,   To pluck it out with pincers firie whot, That soone in him was left no one corrupted jot.

(1.10.26)

What a stark contrast is this treatment of the body and its fleshly appetites to that afforded by Alma, who gives her guests ‘rare delight’ with the wonders of her castle’s outward parts and belly (2.9.33) and ‘fairely feasted’ them at the end of her casual and pleasant tour (2.10.77). The second phase of Redcrosse’s education, the teaching of Charissa (1.10.29– 45), corresponds to the intermediate level of Alma’s Castle, the chamber of the heart with its various affections attending like courtiers (2.9.33–44). The contrast between these two treatments of the soul’s emotive power is quite evident. Though Alma ‘had not yet felt Cupides wanton rage’ (18), still the god plays his ‘wanton sports’ in her heart-chamber (34) evoking both pleasant and unpleasant emotions (35), a dichotomy epitomized by the contrary ladies who represent Arthur’s and Guyon’s natural drives, with which they are well acquainted. In contrast, Redcrosse

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Knight is ‘vnacquainted’ with the emotional purity of Charissa’s nursing chamber (1.10.29) and her hospital of merciful deeds for others. Charity supernaturally re-creates the ‘spirited’ middle power. By grace it transcends the self-directed affections of Alma’s heart-chamber where Cupid plays. The contrast is emphasized: Charissa ‘was on earth not easie to compare; / Full of great loue, but Cupids wanton snare / As hell she hated, chast in work and will’ (1.10.30). Again the soul’s equivocal condition in Alma’s Castle, the natural body, contrasts its rectitude and wholeness in each corresponding stage of the House of Holiness, the mystical body as formed by the Church. Charissa fulfils the emotive power. Her great capacity for love is entirely at the service of others: ‘her neck and brests were euer open bare, / That ay thereof her babes might sucke their fill’ (1.10.30). This phase of Redcrosse’s education again culminates in practical acts that embody the knowledge: Mercy’s ‘holy Hospitall’ teaches the seven corporal acts of mercy, an order of which Charissa is the ‘founderesse’. The highest level of the House of Holiness, the mount of Contemplation (1.10.46–67), is analogous to Alma’s brain-turret (2.9.44–60). In moving to this final stage, we see how beautifully integrated are the three phases of Redcross’s training. Mercy, still performing Charissa’s behests (1.10.33), effects the knight’s transition from charitable love to intellectual fulfilment, a vision of beatific union with God. (Thus, a self-denying faith lays the basis for a special love, which in turn leads to this exalted vision.) The mountain and tower images in these summitstages stress the work of intellect,85 but the mode of seeing markedly differs in these castles. In contrast to Alma’s sages, whose work is based on worldly sensation, the ‘earthly eyne’ of Contemplation were ‘both blunt and bad / And through great age had lost their kindly sight / Yet wondrous quick and persant was his sight, / As Eagles eye, that can behold the Sunne’ (1.10.47).86 Though he is blind to the world, Contemplation fulfils the intellectual power by envisioning heavenly bliss; the three sages with their allegory of prudence provide a ‘negative’ complement to that spiritual fulfilment. Contemplation’s vision of a timeless future is spiritual and incorruptible; the sages’ chronicles look to the past,87 to that which is temporal, mortal, corruptible – yet includes glorious traces of God’s working. In the chronicles of the brain-turret the knowledge of God’s plan for humankind is dimly figured in an immanent form (with brief data mentioning Christ’s incarnation and participation in the bloody history of the natural body); on his mountain Contemplation envisages the transcendent and eternal aspect of this divine plan, the joy of the regenerate body in the New Jerusalem. Even this third and highest phase of the House of Holiness culminates in a practical act which ‘embodies’ the new awareness. When Contemplation reminds the knight of his responsibility not only to heavenly but to worldly ends, Redcrosse affirms his humanity by humbly returning to the earthly quest. The three stages of Redcrosse Knight’s spiritual development (which so closely parallel the tripartite psychology of Alma’s Castle) are an exact allegorization of the threefold mystical way to God:88 Fidelia’s teachings correspond to Purgation, Charissa’s teachings to Illumination, and Heavenly Contemplation’s teachings to Union, since the knight’s vision of New Jerusalem is a foretaste of the beatific

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condition promised to humankind.89 In this portrayal of levels of vision and mystical experience which pertain to the three powers of the soul, we see how Plato’s conception of the soul, as it was unfolded by Neoplatonists, Augustine, and medieval mystics, became the basis for the Christian conception of tripartite psychology which pervades the allegory of The Faerie Queene.90 Emblems of tripartite psychology in the allegory of Books 1 and 2 At each major juncture of Books 1 and 2 there are emblems of the same tripartite hierarchy that we have observed in the House of Holiness and Alma’s Castle: the triad of figures at the opening, the triadic fall that proceeds in the first half and climaxes at the centre, and the triadic Eden at each legend’s close. The triadic group at the beginning of each legend (1.1.1–6, 2.1.35–61) emblematizes both the nature of the soul and the problems which threaten to undo it. The figure who should exercise the highest, rational power (Redcrosse, Mortdant) is either blinded, put to sleep, or slain by passional excess. Subsequently, the lady, who in the traditional allegory signifies the heart’s emotional power (Una, Amavia), suffers bitter agonies, unable to avenge her protector’s fall or estrangement: her suicidal impulse (1.7.20–8, 2.1.39ff) is not of her own making, but connotes her strong attachment to her fallen ‘Lord’ (1.3.7, 27; 2.1.50, 52, 55; Una even refers to Redcrosse as ‘the God of my life’). Spenser, however, radically alters the Patristic allegory, for Amavia’s compassionate teaching briefly reforms her knight, and Una’s special wisdom is wholly successful in promoting Redcrosse’s recovery: she attracts Christlike aid, takes her knight to the House of Holinesse, and constantly voices the wisdom of divine love. The representatives of the lowest power of the soul, fleshly awareness and appetites (Dwarf, Ruddymane), show the soul’s limited potency on the lowest, corporeal level: the Dwarf contributes a basic sensory awareness (and the fearfulness which adheres to this limited vision); and Ruddymane, who obliviously plays ‘his cruell sport’ in his mother’s streaming blood, aptly exemplifies the undirected, vulnerable condition of the fleshly appetites when the two higher powers (intellect and heart) have fallen. His bloody hands clearly define him in relation to the outward, fleshly part of the composite human organism. At the centre of Books 1 and 2, where each knight reaches the nadir of his quest, is a debased emblem of the tripartite soul. In Book 1 the Sans-brothers’ assaults culminate in their mistress Duessa’s liaison with Orgoglio, who seats her on a monster with seven heads, thus forming a demonic parody of the tripartite group which opened the legend. Orgoglio usurps Redcrosse’s headship; Duessa supplants Una; the monster replaces the Dwarf. (The monster, like the manyheaded beast of Revelation and like other allegorical serpents and dragons, would seem to be a type of Satan;91 but if so, it is Satan in the lowly serpentine form by which he initiated temptation, which the Middle Ages allegorized as fleshly appetites or pleasures. The monster, which provides Duessa’s lower body in this composite image, might also trace its lineage to nonbiblical sources, such as the many-headed beast which was a popular emblem of the vulgar populace or of the soul’s lowest, appetitive power.)92

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At the centre of Book 2 Mammon’s three chambers use a similar tripartism to test the soul’s powers; but the traditional hierarchy of temptings is reversed,93 testing the powers of Guyon’ s soul in descending order: from lust of the intellect to lust of the heart, to lust of the flesh. The House of Richess over which Mammon presides (2.7.24–39) is a temptation of avarice or lust of the eye (concupiscentia oculorum) to pervert the soul’s highest, intellectual power. The episode is loaded with references to the eyes and imagery of lustful seeing (27, 29, 31, 33, 37, 38, 39), and Mammon construes his wealth in the highest and most abstract terms, as ‘the worldes bliss, the end, / To which all men do ayme …, / Such grace now to be happy’ (32) – clearly appealing to Guyon’s intellectual power. The second chamber (40–50) is a temptation to vainglory or pride of life (superbia vitae). This perversion of the soul’s intermediate power, seated in the heart, is presided over by a woman (indeed women – Philotime and Proserpine – preside over the temptations of both of the lower, appetitive parts of the soul). The attempt to use vainglory or pride of life to pervert the condition of Guyon’s heart is evident in the figure of Disdain who guards the gate, in Philotime’s vain display of her worldly glory, in the chain of Ambition which leads up to her throne, and above all in Mammon’s offer of his daughter Philotime to Guyon to take as his heart’s desire. The third region of the cave, the Garden of Proserpine (51–64), is a temptation to lust of the flesh (concupiscentia carnis). This perversion of the lowest, corporeal power of the soul seated in the belly or carnal appetites has two complementary aspects: committing a sinful act (eating forbidden fruit, like Tantalus), and omitting a virtuous act (resting on the silver seat of indolence, or washing one’s hands of responsibility, like Pilate) – the former a sin against the first Adam’s nature, the latter against the second Adam. This temptation to eat and to rest (which consummates in literal fact the thrust of the two previous chambers, especially the usurping of divinity) is essentially a temptation of the lowest power of man’s soul, his carnal appetites.94 This reversed order of temptations, and of the soul’s hierarchic powers, shows the ‘backward looking’ (downward-looking, immanent) nature of Temperance as Spenser conceives it.95 The final emblem of tripartite psychology appears in the three-part structure of Eden at the conclusion of each legend: the three groups which parade in hierarchic fashion from Eden’s liberated commonwealth in Book 1, and the three regions of Acrasia’s false paradise in which the powers of Guyon’s soul are ultimately tested. The three stages of Guyon’s progress through that demonic garden follow the same inverted hierarchic sequence as in Mammon’s Cave, assaulting first intellect, then emotion, then sensory appetite. As in Mammon’s Cave the first region, or the first perspective, of the garden is presided over by a masculine figure. Genius (2.12.42–52) symbolizes a perversion of the intellectual power,96 his gate leading to a general or intellectual view in which the gifts of nature as a whole are idolized, the garden conceived as better even than Eden (52) and as an end in itself. The two subsequent perspectives on the garden are increasingly particularized, as we move from the more intellectual to the more sensory vision; and, as in Mammon’s Cave, women preside over these appeals to the soul’s passional powers. The second gate, governed by a ‘comely dame’ named Excesse,

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leads to a region or a perspective which attempts to pervert the emotional integrity of the heart. It is packed with lustful images: ‘naked boyes … playing their wanton toyes’ (60), ‘lasciuious’ ivy steeping its leaves with ‘wantones’ (61), and especially ‘two naked Damzelles’ who begin ‘to wrestle wantonly, ne car’d to hide / Their dainty parts’ (63–8), which begins to arouse ‘secret signes of kindled lust’ in Guyon until the Palmer rebukes him. The most particularized view of the garden, over which Acrasia presides, is the third and inmost region, which directly appeals to the senses and fleshly appetites, the culminating test for Guyon’s virtue. Images appealing to the ear (70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76), eye (73, 74, 77, 78), tongue (73), nose (77), and tactile sense (73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78), as well as the appropriate imagery of the carpe diem song, produce the downward metamorphosis of Verdant into a vegetative form of life: ‘On his tender lips the downy heare / Did now but freshly spring, and silken blossomes beare.’ Since Spenser conceives Temperance as a virtue in which the soul’s powers depend on sense-impressions, Guyon descends through the levels of consciousness to focus on the lowest power, senses and carnal appetites, as the basis of humankind’s virtue in the order of nature. Guyon and the palmer, by destroying the pseudo-Eden that falsely offers heavenly ‘bliss’, show that the natural body’s pleasures are merely equivocal. The exalted attainment of Redcrosse and Una is to liberate the true Eden for a joyous progress of the spiritual body in full-scale tripartite hierarchic order. First Redcrosse, fully armed, is lauded by royalty with counsellors and guard (1.12.5–6). This mainly male group symbolizes the soul’s intellectual power, but Spenser alters Plato’s metaphor in the Republic by figuring reason not just as a philosopher-king but as rulers accompanied by philosophic counsellors and executive warriors. More important, Spenser depicts the the fulfilment of superior reason (mens) in a humbled Christlike saint. The last-minute drama of Archimago and Duessa highlighting the knight’s failure to exercise intellect effectively has no counterpart in Plato’s dialogues. Next, maidens and young children sing heartfelt but moderate praise of Una (6–8). This mainly female group, symbolizing emotional purity (maidens) and its innocent impulses (children), fulfils the soul’s intermediate power in the heart. Plato saw this middle ‘spirited’ power only as the warriors’ desire for honour, assisting the ruling intellect by restraining the workers’ lower appetites (Republic, 440b–c). Spenser Christianizes the heart’s desires to show not just restraint of base appetites but a crucial complementary means of fulfilment. His spiritualized notion of Psyche or Anima, the female power destined to marry the male Nous or Intellect, shows a ‘loving wisdom’ that mirrors the imago Dei more effectively and consistently than male intellect, which is repeatedly distracted by proud a­ rrogance. The lowest of the soul’s powers is represented by the common folk, the “raskall many” who clamour to see the Dragon’s huge fallen bulk. Like the Dwarf, they use sensory evidence to focus on the physical dimensions of evil’s seeming-terror: And after, all the raskall many ran,   Heaped together in rude rabblement,   To see the face of that victorious man ….

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  But when they came where that dead Dragon lay,   Stretcht on the ground in monstrous large extent,   The sight with idle feare did them dismay ….

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Some feard and fled; some feard and well it faynd;   One that would wiser seeme, then all the rest,   Warnd him not touch, for yet perhaps remaynd   Some lingring life within his hollow brest …. Another said, he saw him moue his eyes indeed. One mother, when as her foolehardie chyld   Did come too neare, and with his talants play,   Halfe dead through feare, her little babe reuyld, …   So diuersly themselves in vaine they fray;   Whiles some more bold, to measure him nigh stand, To proue how many acres he did spred of land.

(9–11)

These responses beautifully exemplify the third and lowest power of consciousness, which judges by external appearances. Their corporeal vision, like the Dwarf ’s, is prone to fearfulness (1.1.13; 1.5.45–53), but can render practical assistance to the two higher powers. The absence of the Dwarf from the final tableau (instead of the Dwarf, the Dragon is the object of interest to the rabblement) suggests that the soul’s lowest power finds its identity in service to the two higher powers, that even at its best it is base, diminutive, perhaps unneeded for humankind’s end. Most important to Spenser was the ‘male’ power of intellect, exemplified by Redcrosse (the Greek nous, Langland’s Inwit, or Wisdom in the moral play Wisdom, who Is Christ – a power fulfilled in Christ), and the ‘female’ power in the heart of man, symbolized by Una (the Greek psyche, Langland’s Lady Anima, Anima in Wisdom – a power fulfilled in the Church). Their blissful intimacy when betrothed, when Una’s veil falls away so Redcrosse can experience the joy of her presence (1.12.40–1), is a foretaste of the spiritual marriage, the perfect mingling of the soul’s cognitive and affective parts on reaching the unitive level of contemplation. The soul’s third and lowest aspect, the corporeal vision which Langland calls Caro, Anima’s fleshly machinery, and which Spenser figures as a Dwarf carrying Una’s bag of ‘needments’, is necessary to man in this life, but perhaps not in the spiritual estate of the life to come. In this vision of Eden, the opening image of Redcrosse, Una, and the Dwarf has blossomed into a sanctified body politic. The hierarchic pageant from Eden’s liberated commonwealth offers a consummate image of the tripartite psychology, derived from Platonic and Christian theorists, which informs Spenser’s moral allegory in Books 1 and 2 of The Faerie Queene.

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Books 3 and 4: female heroism and passional theology –  ­irresistible  ­Britomart Books 3 and 4: Love’s complementary virtues Like C.S. Lewis, most critics read Books 3–4 as a coherent unit on the subject of love.97 As Holiness and Temperance (1–2) are transcendent and immanent forms of intellective power, Chastity and Friendship (3–4) are transcendent and immanent forms of passional power. The multiple interlaced plots of Book 3 that continue in 4 (unlike the singular plot of 1 and of 2) aptly depict an affective ontology: fluid shifting episodes, a fluctuating mix of heroes, and names designating a different psychomachia – no longer Truth versus Falsehood (1) and Moderation versus Excess (2) but Love versus Lust (3), Concord versus Discord (4). For some critics the varied (‘intermedled’) and contravening plotlines of 3 and 4 typify the entire Faerie Queene, which they see as a romance so changeable as to deny closure.98 Yet Spenser attains remarkable closure in each legend, even 3 and 4, despite their multiple heroes, interrupted tales, and focus on volatile passions. In allegorizing passion these books depict a closure that differs from earlier legends – no definitive slaying or destruction, but release from bondage for joyful marital union.99 As in Books 1 and 2, Books 3 and 4 provide closure in complementary forms: in 3 Britomart’s Briton transcendence through passional fire leads to the Edenic oneness of Amoret and Scudamour’s rapturous embrace;100 in 4 the controlling of Proteus by motherly care allows Florimell and Marinell’s Fairy immanence to attain closure in a great wedding of waters. That Books 3 and 4 are allegories of passion is underscored by heavy reference to Ovid and Ariosto. Book 3 is framed by scenes of Britomart chastely resisting (or innocently failing to discern) perverse uses of Ovid. At Malecasta’s castle (3.1.34–40) an Ovidian tapestry of Venus and Adonis promotes a femaledominated courtly love, aided by an aggressive Cupid; and an armed, blind Cupid is triumphant in Busirane’s tyrannous art (3.11–12), where Britomart views the Metamorphoses’ full range of divine rapes, testing her moral fibre but also testing the adequacy of Ovid’s art and pagan gods.101 Book 3 not only chastens Ovid’s vision of love; it also strives, more than any other legend, to ‘overgo Ariosto’, parodying his interlaced plots, ironic ethos, and wilful heroes.102 The Ariostan elements are carefully reformed, for character-names and plot-design compose a moral and mythic anatomy of the heart, an elemental anatomy of the cosmos, a political anatomy of the British-Trojan dynasty. Rebellious Bradamante translates to Britomart’s growing moral presence, augmented in three legends.103 Flirtatious Angelica is recast as Florimell’s chaste creational beauty, initiating each half of Book 3, until betrothed to Marinell at the great river-wedding that ends Book 4. The reform of Ariosto is absolute when Angelica’s sensual tryst with lowly Medoro becomes Belphoebe’s stern detachment from the honourable squire Timias.104 Josephine Bennett viewed parts of Book 3 as ‘primal material’, as the epic’s earliest writing, heavily influenced by Ariosto but already in process of adaptation to a grand allegorical design.105 Spenser’s treatment of passional virtue is of course not confined to Books 3 and 4, for all six legends (and the Mutabilitie Cantos)

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involve properly managed passion. In Book 1 passion’s challenge is viewed holistically (potentially free of body), moved by the Holy Spirit to form a saint in selfless charity, rapt from the sinful body to see Una’s beauty as the now-visible church, and ‘swimming in that sea of blisful ioy’ as a foretaste of heaven. S­ ubsequent legends deal with subordinate virtues on increasingly embodied psychic powers. Books 3 and 4 treat the vagaries of ‘embodied passion’ most directly and ­elaborately. Female ascendancy in Books 3 and 4: Britomart’s dominance The emotional ontology of Books 3 and 4 informs not only theme and plot but also character. Unlike the intellective quests of 1 and 2 (the Biblical, mystic, numerological figures in the quest of mens; the classical, pragmatic figuring of ratio’s parallel quest), Books 3 and 4 focus on figures from Trojan-Arthurian dynastic epic-romance, and deities from Graeco-Roman myths (chiding the gods’ moral errancy in 3, then affirming their natural force in 4). For Books 3 and 4 the gender of protagonists has radically shifted. Books 1 and 2 focused on male heroes – saintly Redcrosse (humbled to rely on God via Arthur and lady Una), prudent Guyon (shamed to rely on God via Arthur and the Palmer), magnificent Arthur (in six legends largely ignorant of his Christlike nature, with growing dismay at his ignorance) – all three men reliant on women’s inspiration and guidance (Una, Gloriana, and matrons of educative houses). In striking contrast, the main heroes of Books 3 and 4 are women (Britomart, Belphoebe, Florimell, Amoret) whose agency, though subject to love-sufferance, subsumes men to their quests. Their male consorts (Artegall, Timias, Marinell, Scudamour) are disabled in Books 3 and 4, revealing their flawed integrity and subservience to female powers, with whom they bond deeply. As Benson observes, Spenser ‘feminizes the epic’ – celebrating Elizabeth I in the title figure, in deities like Diana and Venus, in wise consorts and educative matrons, but especially in reforming Ariosto’s rebellious Amazons into Britomart, a warrior-heroine who seeks traditional marriage.106 Britomart’s androgynous feats reveal the power of chastely controlled will and passion. By shifting from royal Elizabeth to warrior Britomart (an archaic ur-Elizabeth), Book 3 shows Elizabeth’s prowess as an active quest with an inner development that adds remarkable psychological depth to the allegory. Britomart’s passional power seeks an imperial marriage with a Just Man, though one who in a fallen world begins as explicitly ‘salvage’.107 Her armour and weaponry offer an equally daunting disguise. She contemns courtly love in the houses of Malecasta, Malbecco, and Busirane, receiving a slight wound in the first and last of these. Though the passional allegory of Books 3 and 4 narrows the intellective scope of 1 and 2, it sharply intensifies moral growth by exposing the mind to the heart’s power and complexity. Britomart’s opening joust with Guyon shows the chaste heart’s prowess surpassing reason’s downward-looking concerns, then allying with Redcrosse’s upward aspiration:108 In Books 3 and 4 Britomart largely displaces Arthur as the main overarching hero linked to Tudor lineage and Providential glory.109 She quickly aids Redcrosse but shames other male heroes, including the titular protagonists of three other legends. The power of her integrated heart is contained only by herself, by Love, and by Providential Grace – as when combat

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with Artegall leads to mutual apocalypse (doffing her arms, and his savage guise). Book 3 excludes Britomart from the usual mid-quest humiliation, which is deferred to her more limited subtypes.110 Like Belphoebe and Palladine, she rescues woman from lechery and from mastery. The primary recipient of Britomart’s chivalry is Amoret, who, as the culminating figure in the cycle of Graces, shows Spenser’s idea of womanly fulfilment as engaging in sexual passional bonding, which is why Amoret endures the worst forms of male abuse. As the culminating Grace, she exemplifies what Britomart herself seeks, and thus their evolving intimacy is a complex, end-oriented fiction. Britomart’s enforcing of female ascendancy in Books 3–4 is evident, first, in titular heroism. Though Scudamour in the Letter to Raleigh is assigned to rescue Amoret, the task is quickly deferred to Britomart, who owns the title-page and unseats Scudamour in public and private venues. So too in Book 4, though Cambell and Telamond are headlined, their limited part in the legend and the repetitive abstraction of their deeds (Neoplatonic infolding of combats, siblingmarriages, and joustings in cantos 2–4)111 is dwarfed by Britomart’s power and poignant humanity. Canto 1 of Book 4 does not showcase Cambell and Telamond’s virtue in relation to prior heroes, but keeps the spotlight on Britomart who, after teasing Amoret by her male disguise, reveals her sex in aiding a fellow-knight and begins to add friendship to her chastity. Britomart also dominates Books 3 and 4 in competitive prowess, first unseating Guyon, hero of Temperance, and at Satyrane’s tourney unseating all male challengers, including Cambell and Triamond, titular heroes of Friendship, and her future spouse Artegall (‘Arthur’s equal’), hero of Justice. Her unsettling of gender hierarchy persists through three legends, and not just in chivalric tilts. As Judith Anderson observes, Britomart’s armour signifies both self-control and, as i­ntentional disguise, a deepening awareness.112 Symbolic skill with arms – added to candour, courage, beauty – confirms her androgynous powers of self-­ definition: the invincible lance exemplifies a chaste will, and the masterful (and often restrained) swordplay implies prowess in rational discourse, enhancing her relations with both sexes. As Britomart accrues complex doctrinal/mythic empowerment in Chastity, Friendship, and Equitable Justice, she also evolves as a ‘character’. Unlike Redcrosse and Guyon, she needs no house of instruction;113 she exfoliates in subtypes; she even (unlike the male heroes) partly ‘learns from experience’; yet her nanny-counsellor Glauce, though charming as an experiential character (possibly a source for Shakespeare’s ground-breaking figure, Juliet’s Nurse), is lacking in the doctrinal, allegorical depth that would justify comparison with Una’s wisdom and the Palmer’s prudence in Books 1 and 2. Susanne Wofford in ‘Gendering Allegory: Spenser’s Bold Reader and the Emergence of Character in The Faerie Queene III’114 sees in Book 3 a conflict between, on one hand, daemonic male artifice (Merlin, Busirane, Ovid, Spenser) using reductive Petrarchan ideology and doctrinal allegory to shape/control woman and, on the other, a growing multidimensional Britomart who seems uncontainable by allegorical figuration. After Busirane in 3.12 re-verses his Ovidian conjuries, he is in Book 4 replaced by female daemonic

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artificers (Cambina, Canacee) and a series of mothers who reverse Proteus’ rule. With this shifting ideology of gender, Britomart’s function in the moral allegory expands: after exemplifying Chastity, she overcomes her chaste detachment (‘armour’) enough to practise Friendship, then combines her chaste integrity and friendly compassion to form the equity that perfects Justice. Besides evolving in allegorical breadth, Britomart is complexly human, operating on many levels, from the historical dimension that reflects heroic deeds and traits of Elizabeth I, to the full cycle of humoral-passional complexions, to a mythic cycle of feminine graces that unfolds in the subtypes of Florimell, Belphoebe, and Amoret, to a syncretic theology of matronly Isis impregnated by a crocodile’s tempestuous power. More than any other Spenserian character, Britomart evolves in consciousness, almost resembling Shakespeare’s protagonists. No character except Arthur and Britomart (and maybe Satyrane) is depicted fully enough to include the unsettled impulses of youth. As with Hamlet and Cleopatra, Britomart’s overdetermined and mysterious motives beg for psychoanalysis: initial near-hysteria at her self-projection in Merlin’s mirror and in reaction to stolid Glauce; initial neglect of weaker women’s problems (ignoring Florimell’s flight from a forester, and hiding her sex to tease Amoret after rescuing her); wounding and leaving Marinell ‘like a gored ox’; complaining to the sea, but no longer hysterical at loving a mirror-image; and growing in androgynous power, gained (with Glauce’s aid) by armour and combative skills – not unlike Elizabeth’s dealings with parliament and her privy council. Britomart, clearly the dominant hero of Books 3 and 4, shares the stage with beauteous Florimell, chaste Belphoebe, and compassionate Amoret, whose diverse strengths are integrated in Britomart. But these Graces are as yet unintegrated, not shown in the customary circle with arms about each other’s shoulders. Because of Britomart’s androgynous breadth her love-problems intertwine not only with the three potent women but with their male consorts (Timias, Marinell, Scudamour) and with Arthur, each mirroring aspects of her dilemma but none of them, as yet, showing her fullness of character. Britomart, like Arthur, has only a visionary image of her beloved, suggesting a high degree of transcendent striving. Yet if Britomart’s armed supremacy so dominates the passional realm of 3 and 4, we wonder at Spenser’s reversion to patriarchy in key features of Book 4 – privileging males in the title role (despite their limited part in the legend), listing only males in Venus’ ‘paradise of friends’ (no Ruth and Naomi!), and ensconcing Britomart’s heroism in endless salacious encounters that render even nobler males suspect. Do Britomart’s extraordinary feats, like those of her descendant Elizabeth I, suggest not gender equality but only that she is specially blessed by Providence, thus making her eventual deferral to Artegall as ‘lord’ an appropriate submission to the hierarchy of nature and necessary for the good of the nation? Merit: Britomart and her peers Unrewarded merit is an omnipresent theme in Spenser’s work. Andrew Hadfield notes that in Shepheardes Calender and Letters to Harvey, Spenser calls himself ‘“Immerito”, the unworthy’, or equally self-effacing, Colin Clout, after ‘the plain-

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spoken husbandman-poet … John Skelton’.115 This Calvinist insistence on unworthiness is oddly combined by Spenser with elaborate laments for unrewarded merit, showing a deep conflict in his narrative voice and in his ‘sad’ heroes – notably the Britons (Arthur, Redcrosse and Una, Britomart and Artegall) but also Fairies (shamefast Guyon, anxious Scudamour). A Spenserian hero is admired mainly by accepting full and abject humiliation, then having faith to move on. Those who claim honour are subservient to those who deny all worth. With regard to this theological crux Britomart’s quest is surprisingly different. Since she visits no educative temple (and witnesses no iconic ‘triumph’ for either passional virtue) until Isis’ Temple in Book 5, we question her moral growth in earlier legends. Does she, by androgynous disguise, or by chastity’s nature as a divine gift, need no training? Her will, enforced by her enchanted lance, is invincible, but is her intellect downplayed as she puzzles over Busirane’s tapestries of divine rapes? Let us contextualize Britomart’s merit among the other heroes of The Faerie Queene. Claims to honour and fame occur in all six legends, but most fully and unequivocally by the fairy protagonists of even legends, operating in their immanent, natural realms.116 In Book 2 Guyon takes pride in ‘his owne virtues and praiseworthy deeds’, preferring chivalric honour to Mammon’s hoard, refusing Mammon’s daughter Philotime (love of [bought] honour), preferring Gloriana’s praise, and partnering with Arthur’s Praysdesire to serve the body’s well-being. But Guyon’s failure to discern his body’s limits necessitates training in Alma’s Castle and Arthur’s supervening conquest of Maleger. In Book 4 Scudamour, after many conquests at Venus’ Temple, thinks the goddess urges him to claim Amoret at the ‘Gate of Good Desert’, yet the resistance to his claim by both Amoret and Womanhood makes us question the degree of his merit and the accuracy of his reading of Venus: can prowess earn a lady, mastering her as ‘spoyle’? or is patient service and mutual loving loyalty more crucial, awaiting her willing grace in offering herself, as in Amoretti, 67? Likewise in Book 6 Calidore seems to merit (or to ‘earn’)117 Pastorella by fighting a lion, courteously deferring honour to commoners, and redeeming her from brigands. Richard Neuse’s analysis of Calidore’s courteous deeds is highly critical, sensitive to modern egalitarian class and gender, thus finding Calidore’s merit as equivocal as Guyon’s temperance and as the friendship of Cambell, of Triamond, and of Scudamour.118 But in the idealized world of Faerie (the immanent Creational realm of Books 2, 4, and 6), honour and fame are genuinely merited and won by knights like Guyon, Cambell and Telamond, Scudamour, and Calidore. We are not fully aware of the Fairy heroes’ shortcomings until they are matched with the harder and higher lot of Britons like Artegall and Britomart, who not only conquer all Fairy knights but pursue higher rewards, ignoring the false (as well as the true) Florimell. In Books 1, 3, and 5 the Briton heroes seek transcendent goals requiring providential aid. They also seek worldly honour, but without success, indeed counterproductively. In Book 1 Redcrosse seeks fame in facing Error, and his thirst for honour culminates against Sansjoy at the House of Pride:

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The noble hart, that harbours virtuous thought,   And is with childe of glorious great intent,   Can neuer rest, vntill it forth haue brought   Th’ eternall brood of glorie excellent:   Such restless passion did all night torment   The flaming corage of that Faery knight,   Deuizing, how that doughtie tournament   With greatest honour he atchieuen might….

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Such restless self-promotion will lead him to wretchedness. The House of Holiness will convey the exceedingly complex lesson that there is no real human merit: ‘all the good is God’s’ (1.10.1). In Book 3 Britomart is not required to merit her noble husband and dynastic splendour. Her providentially infused power of chaste love (‘poured in’) has already worked to reform her Trojan lineage and ensure her glory, despite her husband’s destined tragedy. Unlike Redcrosse and Guyon, Britomart’s goal is not meriting glory in deeds of arms. Her one claim of such a purpose, early in her quest (3.2.7–8), is made simply to disguise her true goal, the search for Artegall. Thus a huge irony informs her defeat of so many merit-seeking knights to gain the unwanted right to False Florimell, who shames her advocates by choosing a cowardly braggart. In Book 5 Artegall, after being unseated in the realm of Friendship by his future wife, is fully shamed by Radigund, voiding any claim to merit. His Solomonic wisdom hides in savagery, both at the tourney and in scourging varied evils with Talus’ aid. Implicit in the slanders of Ate, Duessa, Sclaunder, and Blatant Beast is ingratitude for Artegall’s hard-won conquests, but also proof that in the literalsensate-historical realm of Books 5 and 6 (where savagery infects both the hero and his foes) there is little merit in such brutal, dehumanizing, incomplete victories, which, unlike those of Redcrosse, are assumed to combat evil in others, rather than in oneself. In sum, our fascination with Britomart’s heroism grows partly from her lack of interest in gaining honour through deeds of arms, even while showing high mastery of martial skills. Her complementary female quest (marital, matronly, dynastic) involves not only bearing children but finding the Just Man who fulfils the mirrored projection of her own virtuous mind. Spenser’s innovative epic thus provides a radically new perspective on Arthurian chivalric romance and on the grail quest, for clearly Malory never entertained the prospect of a Britomart. Infolding of triadic subtypes in Books 3 and 4: Britomart and the three Graces, Cambell and the three Worlds (‘Telamond’) A major parallel between Books 3 and 4 is each hero’s unfolding/infolding in three subtypes, most suggestively in Book 3 where, as James Nohrnberg explains (building on Edgar Wind’s study of pagan gods in the Renaissance), Britomart contains the Graces as facets of her power (Florimell’s beauty, Belphoebe’s chastity, Amoret’s generative love).119 These mythic subtypes of Britomart make her

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(like Arthur) a repository of complex allegorical meaning that grows in successive legends. Likewise, in Book 4 Cambell and Telamond contain Priamond, Diamond, and Triamond within their bond of friendship. As with other parallels between the two books, this tripartism is transcendent in 3 (stressing chastity’s heavenly source in Britomart and her three subtypes) and immanent in 4 (friendship integrating the three souls of worldly nature – hence the suffix ‘-mond’), forming a Creational trace of the Trinity.120 Britomart most fully models active heroism, but her subtypes are also heroic. Beauteous Florimell actively controls passion by fleeing lechers but also by seeking her love Marinell. Belphoebe, with Amazonian weapons and without disguise, evokes Spenser’s longest blazon of female beauty, instilling a thirst for transcendence like Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura.121 Amoret’s heroism (a romance analogue of Una’s) resembles Christ’s Passion, combining symbols of crucifix and grail as she endures the ravages of Busirane’s mental abuse and of Lust’s physical assault.122 Thus while Britomart in Books 3–4 remains central as a redeemer-hero like Arthur, the Graces (Florimell, Belphoebe, Amoret) as fragments of her persona suffer errancies which Britomart’s integrity avoids. She shares the stage with these ‘substitutive’ figures who appear mainly in 3 and 4. Besides elaborating the glories of woman, their parallel placement helps to distinguish Book 3’s transcendent virtue from Book 4’s immanent virtue. Both Belphoebe and Britomart manifest their powerful will with weaponry – the former showing divine power in virginal separateness, the latter using her chaste militancy to seek a husband and to engage widely with society. The weaker women, whose trials in 3 and 4 show parallel patterning, thereby reveal the two legends’ difference. In 3.7–8 Florimell is pursued by lechers (witch’s son, hyena, old fisherman, Proteus) and imprisoned by Proteus; the parallel cantos of Book 4 show Amoret’s more violent wounding. In the conclusion of 3 Amoret is saved from Busirane’s walls of fire, and in the finale of 4 Florimell is freed by a motherly subjecting of Proteus to a higher rule of law, and by the poet’s taming-naming-ordering Proteus’s diversity of waters.123 Why is Amoret’s abuse (chained to a pillar, transfixed by a knife in her breast) so much more violent than Florimell’s captivity to a witch and to Proteus’s oceanic flux (4.11–12)? And why is Britomart’s rescue of Amoret braver and more providential than Cymodoce’s freeing of Florimell as a gift for her son? It is because Books 3 and 4 explore different dimensions of the psyche. Florimell and Marinell’s names exemplify nature’s elemental realm of Fairy, but Amoret and Belphoebe seem Briton by their immaculate birth, with Amoret further ennobled by a Christlike extravagance of suffering,124 which Britomart with her breast wounds partly shares. The extremity of Amoret’s chaste suffering is what makes her hermaphroditic union with Scudamour so moving. Throughout Books 3 and 4 the heroic male consorts of these Graces suffer extensive shamings – both privately and in public tourneys.125 Marinell, a consummate narcissist, is disabled both physically and psychically: women enforce his maturation without his own will or awareness: Britomart’s wounding of this Achillean warrior sharply revises Homer’s valuing of bodily prowess; Cymoent, having caused her son’s selfish evading of love, becomes the means of curing

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him outwardly and inwardly (her changed name, Cymodoce, implies reform of Achilles’ doting mother Thetis); beauteous Florimell chastely pursues him until her outspoken love (not physical beauty) brings him to his senses. Not Marinell himself but the potent women in his life are on display in these two legends. Women also dominate Timias’ life, though his passional disability is opposite to Marinell’s, a self-abnegating frustration in the social mismatch of loving Belphoebe, a demi-goddess far above his station as squire, and, moreover, fully committed to virginity.126 Repeatedly Spenser shows Timias’ susceptibility to sexual passion: his lust-wound from fighting a lecher who chases Florimell, his frustrated bodily desire for virginal Belphoebe, his kissing wounded Amoret. The lowly but honourable squire is deeply aroused by all three Graces: drawn by Florimell’s beauty but distracted by lechery, awed but oppressed by Belphoebe’s purified beauty, intimately drawn to Amoret because of her sexual wounds. Scudamour, ‘Cupid’s man’, is disabled by inability to consummate the passions aroused in a committed love, and by ensuing jealousy. His frustration is similar to Timias’ self-abuse, but quite unlike Marinell’s reclusive narcissism. Unable to free Amoret from Busirane (3.11), he is racked by Care after Ate and Duessa’s false slander of his bride. Despite his male ardour in claiming (‘mastering’) Amoret, Scudamour, no less than Marinell and Timias, depends on women to fulfil his lovegoal, and to cure his paralysing jealousy. (1) Venus nurtures Amoret in the Garden of Adonis’s happy sexual bonding, sponsors Womanhood’s training Amoret in relationship, and encourages Scudamour’s bold courtship; (2) Glauce provides a patient buffer for Scudamour’s jealous anger; (3) Amoret, during varied male assaults, maintains ‘steadfast loialtie’ to Scudamour; and perhaps most important, (4) Britomart, in powerfully freeing Amoret from Busirane’s abusive art and in her developing friendship with Amoret, models for the couple a bisexual womanhood that can prevent Amoret’s self-torturing fears and Scudamour’s wish to master her. Having in Book 3 dispelled Busirane’s sorcerous passions, Britomart’s heroism can also resolve the problems of natural passion at Venus’ Temple. Scudamour’s combative claiming of Amoret violates Womanhood’s sanctified social restraint (alluding, it seems, to Queen Elizabeth’s rigorous management of her ladies-inwaiting). Scudamour’s overboldness does not secure friendship for the central human bond but, combined with Amoret’s timid fears, magnifies the problems of marital union, which Britomart resolves by her armed, but increasingly compassionate, androgyny, her bold power combining Venus’ assertiveness with Womanhood’s restraint. Most prominent of the disabled male heroes in Books 3 and 4 is Prince Arthur. In these highly feminized legends, the vision of lovely Florimell fleeing from a lewd forester moves both the temperate Guyon and the magnificent Arthur to ‘enuy’ and ‘gelosy’. Arthur hopes his fairy queen resembles her, and he exits the Legend of Chastity in canto 4 after a long lament to the ocean, collective symbol of Elizabeth’s passional realm. Arthur is of little assistance in mastering the tempestuous problem of driving desire, which torments him as much as the others, though his painstaking gentility in restraining the false friends of Book 4 is impressive.

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Britomart’s overarching heroism, like Arthur’s, surpasses the other titular heroes. In never suffering a radical fall and in receiving little organized moral training, she overgoes even Arthur, who, despite awesome victories over Orgoglio and Maleger,127 seems headed for a fall as demeaning as Redcrosse’s. His debilitating combat with Maleger’s sin-ridden mortality (2.11), distraction by alluring Florimell (3.1–4), frustration by scandal-mongering society (4.7–8), dangerous pity for Duessa (5.9), and utter failure to resolve Disdain (6.7) progressively expose Arthur’s flaws, preparatory to a significant fall early in the epic’s final half. He has yet to visit Caelia’s house, and the fuller shaping of a ‘Reformed Arthur’ is surely central to Spenser’s lost legends. As noted at pp. 147–9 above, moral counsel becomes increasingly problematic in Books 1–6, including the central legends of passional virtue. In contrast to the educative cantos 9–10 of Books 1 and 2, which effectively reform each hero in his virtue, those of Books 3 and 4 are disturbingly equivocal. Neither Malbecco’s Castle (though it stages Paridell and Britomart’s tales of Old and New Troy) nor Venus’ Temple (despite its ardent rites of manhood, its paradise of friends, and its iconic circle of female virtues) readies a protagonist for a climactic test of virtue. Instead, these sites, like the garden and court of Roman de la Rose, show vestiges of an ideal vision torn by emotional uncertainty and wrongful, immoderate actions. Florimell, Belphoebe, and Amoret – as the Graces (beauty, chastity, generative love) – are carefully placed at the beginning, middle, and end of Book 3 and the parallel sites of Book 4128 to show the normal cycle of female powers. They also underscore these legends’ parallel-yet-complementary form since in Book 3 the order in which the three appear is inverted in 4. As Roche observes, each legend has two six-canto sections. In Book 3 the Graces appear in their usual order: each section begins with Florimell (Beauty, the initiating Grace) attracting men – in canto 1, a lewd forester and three gentlemen pricked by ‘enuy’ and ‘gelousy’; in canto 7 a witch’s son, hyena, old fisher, and Proteus. Each of these six-canto movements ends with an epiphany of Amoret as Generative Love, the culminating Grace: in canto 6 her holy birth and nurturing by Venus in the Garden of Adonis; in canto 12 her rescue from Busirane and blissful reunion with Scudamour. The cycle is reversed in the two parts of Book 4: each begins with Amoret’s abuse in canto 1 (teased by Britomart) and canto 7 (molested by Lust), and ends with Britomart’s combat-epiphany-betrothal with Artegall (canto 6) and Florimell’s epiphanic bond with Marinell (canto 12). In each book Belphoebe (Chastity, the purifying Grace) is central: her inciting of Timias’ devotion and her immaculate birth (3.5–6); her slaying of Lust and chastising/forgiving Timias (4.7–8). Despite this careful placement of Florimell, Belphoebe, and Amoret in Books 3 and 4 to show their sequential functioning, the three semi-divine women never consciously meet and collaborate. Thus, Wind notes, ‘Augustine explained that the Holy Trinity had left its mark on every part of creation, but that the three aspects of the deity that are co-essential in the creator become unequal and separable in created things’ (my italics).129 This disjunctive separateness is a striking feature of Spenser’s Graces. The two episodes involving both Amoret and Belphoebe emphasize their incompatibility in a fallen world: after miraculous birth they are separated by the

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disparate goddesses into contrary lives (3.6), and in adulthood Belphoebe’s slaying of Lust is followed by fury at Timias for kissing her wounded twin (4.7). Even more isolated is Florimell, who seems a Fairy with her elemental name and nature, never joining Amoret and Belphoebe, who seem Britons with their transcendent birth. The parallel placement of Florimell and Amoret’s suffering and triumph at beginning and end of the six-canto sections of Books 3 and 4 highlights their radically different treatment. Despite imprisonment by the witch and Proteus, Florimell (elemental beauty) never suffers direct abuse, but Amoret (generative love) is threatened with severe penetrative violation by Busirane and Lust. From the outset Britomart ignores beauteous Florimell, and never meets virginal Belphoebe, but risks her life to redeem and guard Amoret, exemplar of generative love, and soon develops an intimate bond with her. Mothers as moral counsellors in Books 3 and 4 In these legends of passional virtue, women still preside as soul-maidens over castles and gardens, showing dominion over embodiment, but Britomart and Belphoebe are now actively armed heroes, and Florimell and Amoret heroically resist male abuse. As Goldberg observes, women also assert power as caretaking mothers: long-suffering Glauce, anxious Cymoent (reformed to wise ‘Cymodoce’), the nurturing deities Venus and Diana, the wise magic of Canacee and Cambina, the reconciling dominion of Concord and Womanhood.130 Wicked women disfigure this shaping role: Malecasta with her self-serving system of courtly love; the witch with her spoiled boy, predatory hyena, and false Florimell; Ate, Duessa, and Sclaunder with their crafty despoiling of reputations and souls. The deeply restrained male advisers in the first two legends (Contemplation and Palmer) form an intriguing contrast to mainly female advisers of Books 3–4, who in Glauce and Cymoent, as well as in the feuding goddesses Diana and Venus, initially show a quirky, equivocal passionality but evolve into grand matronly prowess. Glauce soothes Britomart, leads her to Merlin, then patiently endures Scudamour’s jealous anxiety; Venus, after enjoying her own pleasurable passion with Adonis in 3, joins Womanhood and Concord in 4 to encourage complex social bonding; likewise Cymoent matures into ‘Cymodoce’, but remains indecipherable, resisting clear doctrinal identity: Britomart’s nurse Glauce, Marinell’s mother Cymoent, Diana and Venus as divine caretakers of Belphoebe and Amoret, Canacee and Cambina resolving male strife, Venus as sly nurturer of Scudamour’s boldness, Cymodoce as reformed mother who pacifies Proteus and Neptune for her son. Obvious exceptions to this gendered division of legends: in Book 1 Una, the essential consort and psychic complement of saintly Redcrosse, repeatedly gives him crucial advice. Against Errour she urges him to ‘Add faith unto thy force’; against Despair she reprimands his near-suicide, ‘why shouldst thou then despair that chosen art’; against his engrained sinfulness she takes him to the House of Holiness which unfolds her very being; against the persistent ‘spiritual foes’, Archimago and Duessa, she gives definitive testimony. Then, in Book 3, Merlin gives lengthy prophetic advice to Britomart.

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Female theology in Books 3 and 4 The main signs of female ascendancy in Books 3 and 4 are theological. First, Britomart’s chaste quest for marriage is a female analogue for Redcrosse’s saintly quest; it is fitting that they join in fighting Malecasta’s sixfold process of adultery. Second, Florimell, as her name implies, is Creational Beauty, and Amoret’s training in the Garden of Adonis provides an analogue of Eden’s pleasurable and procreative energy. That Spenser privileges Amoret as the ‘culminating Grace’, at least for Britomart’s quest, is evident in his providing no equally spectacular mythic setting for training Belphoebe in singular purity. (A convent seems inappropriate for Diana’s charge.) Third, Belphoebe and Amoret’s virgin birth is a female analogue of the Incar­ nation, as Chrysogonee’s impregnation by the sun re-enacts the immaculate conception.131 Fourth, Florimell, Belphoebe, and Amoret, as the Graces, form a female analogue of the Trinity. In Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance Edgar Wind discusses the Graces and other triads as ‘Pagan Vestiges of the Trinity’ (36–52, 241–55; cf. Kathryn Walls on ‘Una as Trinity’), ‘for it was an axiom of Platonic theology that every god exerts his power in a triadic rhythm’. However, like other Trinitarian analogues in the fallen world, the three gifted women do not work harmoniously together. Fifth, in Books 3 and 4 the epiphanic unveilings of women, Britomart (at least seven times), along with Belphoebe, Amoret, Florimell, Canacee and Cambina, are analogues of the Transfiguration. In these two legends the few epiphanic disclosures of males include Telamond and Artegall (in Merlin’s mirror and in his combat with Britomart). Sixth, the evils of Book 3 (adulteries of Malecasta, Argante-Olyphant, HellenoreParidell, Busirane; slanders of Ate, Duessa, and the rest) seek to subvert wedlock as the imago Dei, as implied in the hermaphrodite simile and the great riverwedding. In Books 1 and 2 where male heroes are central, their main obstructions are seductive females (Duessa, Lucifera, Phaedria, Philotime, ‘Cissie & Flossie’, Acrasia). In Books 3–4, where women dominate as heroes, engaged in their own quests, the main obstructions are greedily seductive males (fosters, fisher, Proteus, Malbecco, Paridell, satyrs, Busirane; Lust, Proteus). But Spenser’s remarkable gender-equity renders this generalization over-simple: Archimago, a major obstructer in 1–2 who creates Duessa, is male; the witch, a parallel artificer who creates the snowy Florimell, is female. Seventh, in Books 3–4 the severe abuse suffered by Florimell and especially by Amoret forms a female analogue of Christ’s Passion, as well as that of the Virgin Mary.132 Structural principles in Books 3 and 4 In The Kindly Flame Roche sees Books 3 and 4 as four movements of six cantos each.133 Indeed each legend of Spenser’s epic divides suggestively into two halves, with each section’s development informed by Platonic and Christian principles. The first half begins (canto i) with a microcosmic episode of the featured hero

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achieving an equivocal triumph, yet it also initiates a Platonic descent into the natural world (punctuated by cantos 3 and 6, as female-dominated pastoral retreats disclosing epiphanies of divine beauty). The final half begins (canto 7) with a titan-enforced bondage to the material world, from which the hero is rescued, reformed, and providentially enabled to realize transcendence (again, cantos 9–10 and 12 feature an iconic, often female-dominated doctrinal centre). In Books 3 and 4 this structural pattern has four major differences from the other legends – all showing deference to Britomart, guarding her from blame, yet subtly using her to critique and advise Elizabeth I. First, deferring problematic encounters to less-comprehensive female avatars allows Spenser to sustain Britomart’s dominance in 3 and 4; it affirms the archetypal potency of the Graces (Florimell, Belphoebe, Amoret) as mythic figures of womanhood and as major facets of Britomart. Second, this diversity of female heroes allows Spenser to exempt Britomart from cantos 5–8 of her main legend – cantos that in all legends show (in 5–6) a full descent into the natural world, and (in 7–8) a bondage to artful-daemonic perversions of nature. Instead of Britomart it is the Graces, separated to show divided aspects of woman, who suffer the abusive captivity that haunts cantos 5–8 of each legend. In these episodes the more vulnerable Graces, Florimell and Amoret, endure the descent into fallen nature, and the powerful Grace, Belphoebe, inflicts suffering (somewhat inadvertently) on her male devotee. Third, Book 3’s most striking divergence from other legends is lack of an authoritative house of training in cantos 9–10: though Paridell and Britomart in these cantos suggestively explain old and new Troy, the racy fabliau of Malbecco-Hellenore-Paridell-satyrs subverts the forming of an iconic teaching-site. Perhaps from the outset Spenser planned for Britomart to bridge three legends, not enjoying an iconic centre until Isis’ Temple in Book 5, where the Egyptian syncretism of Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris adds an arcane panache in readying Britomart for her dark double, Radigund, and readying her to forgive and submit to her betrothed (her dream’s savage crocodile)—an acceptance which, after his shameful defeat and bondage, shows a mature grace quite opposite to her hysteria at the outset.134 Fourth, by depicting the potential glory of the diverse female heroes, Spenser provides interactive depth for Britomart in relation to the ‘culminating Grace’ Amoret. In the conclusion of the 1590 Faerie Queene (3.12.43–7) her ecstatic union with Scudamour (recalling Una and Redcrosse’s ‘sea of blisful ioy’ in 1.12) is suggestively handled in relation to Britomart’s growing awareness. In this scene both of the heroines (and readers) taste the delights of the Garden of Adonis – Amoret actively and Britomart with a consciousness heightened by anticipation (‘much empassiond in her gentle sprite’). The embrace is highly complex, an extraordinary moment in Spenser’s art, transfiguring mere physical pleasure as a result of Christlike aspects of Amoret’s suffering and of Britomart’s rescue. The intently viewed embrace collects previous wonders – Redcrosse and Una’s mystic bliss, Guyon’s and Belphoebe’s contrary acts of supreme restraint – and redirects them toward Britomart’s triumphant founding of a great dynasty. Here then is Spenser’s allegorical structuring of the four segments of Books 3 and 4.

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Book 3 and transcendence The first six cantos of Book 3 establish the Briton transcendency of Britomart’s chaste love amid ‘natural’ challenges to its integrity. She immediately surpasses the Fairy Guyon’s natural temperate power; she ignores the outer beauty of Florimell, whose deeper beauty appears later, and soon overthrows (nearly slaying) the narcissistic, materially wealthy Marinell; with St George she resists Malecasta’s sensual indulgences. Though Florimell’s beauty (as the first Grace) attracts both lewd and gentle men as she seeks her love, it does not draw Britomart, who helps Redcrosse oppose Malecasta’s six sensory stages of Courtly Love. Britomart, seeing her future husband in Merlin’s mirror, angrily rejects the implied selflove (of the material self), but she delights in Merlin’s prophecy of her glorious dynasty. Britomart, Cymoent, and Arthur complain to the sea about illusive love-objects as seen within the watery glass of the natural world. But the mythic Garden of Adonis affirms physical love in its goals of pleasure and generation: Venus nurtures Amoret there, and Cupid, with no weapons or blindfold, enjoys profound and continual interplay with Psyche. This iconic Eden of sexual fruition draws on Alanus, Guillaume, and Chaucer135 to idealize a Creational view of Love, though challenged by Time and Death. This paradisal vision provides an incomparable culmination of the ‘descent into nature’ which occurs in the first half of each legend, but this iconic garden is not comparable to the educative templar centres in cantos 9–10, for it is experienced not by the main protagonist Britomart but by her subtype Amoret, the ‘culminating Grace’. After this engagement with the physical realm and its natural errancies, the final six cantos of Book 3 graduate to horrific artful perversities of lust. Resolving these demonic violations of spiritual love affirms Britomart’s transcendent prowess: Florimell again initiates the sequence, her loveliness now drawing a fuller range of lechers – a witch’s base child and monstrous hyena, an old fisher, the god Proteus. The problem of worldly beauty is artfully compounded by the witch’s creation of False Florimell, by Proteus’s endlessly changing forms, and by the incestuous and materialist titans Argante and Ollyphant, who epitomize the sado-masochistic misogyny that possesses the Squire of Dames (held under Argante’s arm) – a misogyny he shares with half-bestial Satyrane, and which Britomart counteracts in the legend’s two final episodes. The lurid tale of Malbecco, Paridell, Hellenore, and satyrs re-enacts sins of Old Troy, of Ovid’s ars amoris, and of Courtly Love. Busirane’s mythic rituals fully show the impact of artfully induced lust in the depictions of blind, armed Cupid, and of Jove and Apollo’s wilful rapes, thus testing Amoret’s and Britomart’s transcendent chastity. Book 4 and immanence Book 4’s complementary passional virtue is a down-going from the transcendent realm of Chastity to the natural immanence of Friendship (from Christlike redemption of the imago Dei as a single bond to Creational proliferation of social bonds). First, Book 4 reverses the sequence of Graces, now moving from Amoret to Belphoebe to Florimell (praising her immanent beauty), and it acknowledges the subsidiary power of immanent deities (Cymodoce, Proteus, Neptune) in order

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to celebrate God’s presence in Creation. Book 3 presents the Graces in the usual triadic order in each six-canto segment: (1) Florimell’s fugitive beauty initiates each segment (3.1 and 3.7); (2) Belphoebe’s immaculate birth and daunting purity chastens but frustrates love (3.5.27– 3.6), so Britomart enforces the chastening in cantos 7–12; (3) Amoret’s generative love completes the cycle, first nourished in the Garden of Adonis (3.6), then fulfilled by rescue from Busirane and union with Scudamour (3.12). Book 4 reverses this sequence. (1) Each six-canto segment begins with abusing Amoret. Though rescued from Busirane’s artful-spiritual power, she now suffers in immanent natural contexts – by Britomart’s teasing disguise of her sex (4.1) and by the bodily abuse of Lust and Timias’ accidental wounding, (4.7). (2) At the legend’s centre Belphoebe again chastens love but now immanently: instead of her exalted spiritual blazon and immaculate birth at the centre of Book 3, Belphoebe in the centre of 4 slays Lust and reprimands Timias’ bodily intimacy with Amoret (4.7.23ff, 4.8.1–18). (3) Finally, Florimell’s beauty flourishes not as outward glamour but as inward devotion to her beloved (4.12). Presiding over Florimell and Marinell’s betrothal and the marriage of rivers, Spenser privileges immanent deities, Proteus and Neptune, both of them bowing to Cymodoce’s motherly power. Second, Book 4 also celebrates divine immanence by shifting from a focus on unity (sacramental chaste love for a single person, imitating Christ’s love for the Church) to a focus on multiplicity (friendship with everyone). The descent from unity to multiplicity in Books 3–4 is part of the poem’s general movement from Book 1 (Holiness) to Book 6 (Courtesy), a movement Nature calls ‘dilation’ (7.7). For Spenser the dilation into multiplicity is always recuperable into unity, as Nature explains – and as shown in the Garden of Adonis, in Acidale’s dance, in the Arlo Hill pageant, and presumably with fullest resonance in the poem’s unpublished conclusion. The first half of Book 4 obstructs love’s dilation into friendship: Malecasta’s sensual welcoming castle in 3.1 becomes a castle of social exclusion at the outset of 4. More discord is roused by slanders of Ate-Duessa-Paridell-Blandamour, elaborated in Satyrane’s tourney and beauty contest, seemingly resolved in the combatamity of Cambell-Telamond-Cambina-Canacee but re-enacted in the traumatic discords of Belphoebe-Timias, Amoret-Scudamour, and Britomart-Artegall. The final six cantos of Book 4 affirm friendly love’s divine immanence by Belphoebe’s defeat of the titan-body of Lust and by Arthur’s defeat of the titan Corflambo; Arthur’s gentle elixir; Timias’ dove-led reunion with Belphoebe. Scudamour’s taking Amoret at Venus’ Temple is morally equivocal, but Florimell-Marinell’s betrothal at the river-marriage affirms constancy amid change. Book 4, far more than 3, offers its interlaced tales ‘rather as Accidents, then intendments’, as Spenser cryptically says in the Letter to Raleigh. Apparently the ‘Accidents” (oddly capitalized) are irresistible God-induced passions (the wind of the spirit ‘bloweth where it listeth’), whereas ‘intendments’ flow presumably from intellectually controlled doctrinal principles, as in the allegory of Books 1 and 2.136 Book 4 has no central hero to absorb the proliferating characters as mirroring facets of him/herself. Thus though the Fairy Queen would have no

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trouble assigning a quest for the main hero of Book 5 and of 6, she would surely be tongue-tied, verklempt, unable to articulate Friendship’s exceedingly complex protagonist. Before her stand not one but two, Cambell and Telamond, and the latter is in fact three persons. Besides these four, the quest of Friendship (like Chastity) shows male heroes as inadequate models for passional virtue, which rises through women, both in origin (Agape) and in magical-marital resolution (Cambina and Canacee). Though the legend’s title and Venus’s ‘paradise of friends’ suggest that Friendship is a same-sex male bond, the roles of Agape, Cambina, and Canacee show friendship as providentially (‘Accidentally’) interwoven with sisters, spouses, and especially the charity of mothers. So perhaps Tanaquill offers high tea to all seven (potent prime number) before they set forth. Yet these seven intricately related figures do not account fully for Book 4’s structure, for they appear in only three cantos. Certainly they relate (inversely) with the malicious tetrad of Blandamour, Paridell, Ate, Duessa, whose false friendship and selfish discord are a perfect foil for true friendship; and they easily connect with the comic subplot, for the familial-marital bonds with Canacee and Cambina enable Cambell and Triamond easily to reject False Florimell, with her comic choice of Braggadocchio. But the structural problem of Book 4 is the disjunction between the idealized, Neoplatonic, Fairy actions of the titular heroes and the on-going saga of the predominantly Briton group – notably Britomart, along with her subtypes the Graces and their consorts. Cambell and Telamond’s familial group has little to do with them, except for losing to Artegall and Britomart in Satyrane’s tourney. Upstaged from the outset by Britomart and Amoret’s budding friendship, Cambell and Telamond’s entourage lack the epiphanal power of Britomart and Artegall’s combat, lack the poignancy of Belphoebe-AmoretTimias’s trial-by-lust; and have no connection with the legend’s two spectacular concluding episodes: (1) Scudamour’s claim on Amoret at Venus’ Temple violates marital friendship (the masculine force that formed ‘Telamond’ thus blocks the true imago Dei), and (2) at the wedding of rivers motherly Cymodoce compels the water-gods to allow her child’s betrothal after hearing Florimell declare her love. Book 4 is ruled by the mother-love of Agape and Cymodoce. Though Spenser does not adequately link the mechanistic Neoplatonic fable of Cambell and Telamond (4.3–5) to the more engaging tales of heroines from the previous legend, these diverse segments of Book 4 do share the principle of immanence (complementing the transcendent tropes of Book 3). Book 4 draws the quests of Britomart and the Graces into the realm of nature, implementing their powers by means of the ‘dilation’ by which virtues are incarnated in humankind: (1) Britomart, who in 3 redeemed Amoret from supernatural arts, in 4 reveals her physical nature by disarming, thereby befriending Amoret and bonding with Artegall; (2) Amoret, who in 3 suffered the anguish of Busirane’s artful perversions, in 4 endures Lust’s bodily assault; (3) Belphoebe, after showing transcendent purity in 3 (her epiphanal blazon, her immaculate conception), in 4 confronts monstrous male genitalia and the toll of physical desire on her devotee Timias; (4) Florimell, whose fleetingly transcendent allure distracts even Arthur in 3 (in terms recalling the Blessed Virgin Mary, ‘so meeke and milde’, 3.7) is at the end

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of 4 immersed in the great confluence of waters that epitomizes the immanent divinity in Nature. Residual questions about the legends of Chastity and Friendship 1. Why did Spenser select these two passional virtues from those dominant in the late Middle Ages and in his heyday (1570–98)? Aristotle’s crowning virtue of Friendship, given two books at the end of Nicomachean Ethics, is based in virtuous self-interest that seeks its likeness in the equally worthy; Cicero in De Amicitia confirms the high praise. Chastity is quite non-Aristotelian (indeed, non-classical, despite efforts to adapt it). Rooted in writings of Paul, Augustine, and Cassian’s monastic code, it is reformed by Puritan reclaiming of married bonds, and depicted by Spenser in tropes of Arthurian romance, recalling Malory’s rigours of the grail quest far more than Cassian.137 If like Northrop Frye we see Spenser’s six virtues as a completed sequence, then with him we must question why Chastity is not Charity.138 Though Spenser’s Chastity and Friendship have marvellous range, neither virtue attains passion’s ultimate goal – love of God’s image in fellow-creatures, enabling heavenly vision in Book 1. If Spenser had completed Books 7–12, the paired virtues at the centre of this ascending sequence might well have been Fairy Gentleness for Book 9, Briton Charity for 10. 2. Many critics find deep conflict in the implicit praise of Elizabeth I in Britomart’s legend.139 On the positive side, her chastely innocent virtue precludes the humiliation experienced by the male heroes, and thus she needs no templar instruction except Merlin’s prophecy (3.3) and her own account of a reformed Trojan heritage (3.9). But Britomart’s quest to marry and to fulfil the dynastic prophecy profoundly challenges Elizabeth’s termination of that dynasty. Moreover, Britomart’s virtuous power persistently appears in equivocal contexts. The latter half of Book 3 is loaded with salacious lewdness which, though a foil for Britomart’s chastity, also trumpets a cultural misogyny, evident in Argante’s base parody of the female dominance of Malecasta and Venus, evident in Busirane’s display of Jove, Apollo, and Cupid’s sadistic abuses, evident in Satyrane and the Squire of Dames’s ribaldry, strikingly evident in Malbecco, Paridell, and Hellenore among satyrs. This brilliant fabliau surpasses Ariosto in his own wittily sensual idiom. As if to rescue his readers, Spenser finally reduces Malbecco to allegorical non-essence, flexing the intellectual thematic power of what we reductively call Spenser’s own idiom, which seems to dismiss cynical Eros yet sensually compromises the praise of Elizabeth, revealing the narrative’s conflicted aims. The fabliau’s welter of risqué ironies distracts us from Britomart’s quest and a full epiphany of Chastity. Alas, many of us prefer it that way. 3. Above all, why is Britomart the most fully developed character in Spenser’s epic? Of many characters who wear masks (all armed knights, until visors are raised and conversation begins), only Britomart persistently disguises and undisguises, thereby developing her consciousness and her capacity for relationship. Her quest for love and marriage subsumes alternative love quests of both women and men; like Hamlet she reduces other characters to foils. Book 3 resembles Books 1 and 2 in the hero’s fulfilling a virtue, but Britomart is radically different.

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In the early stages of most legends the hero shows immature impetuosity, and descent into a worldly forest brings pyrrhic victories, false pride, separation from virtuous partners, blindness to the quest’s goal. Britomart, however, never incurs degrading frailties of intellect, will, and bodily crime. Her hysteria over Artegall’s mirror-image may seem like other heroes’ initial errancy, but her intense childish suffering resolves itself with Glauce in a single canto. Thus Britomart’s quest severely curtails her corruptive descent into the material world in cantos 1–6; and it differs from the other legends even more strikingly in cantos 7–12. The latter half of each legend ascends to clarity with grander antagonists showing the full nature of evil and with the hero receiving providential aid to defeat them – rescue by Arthur, a house of instruction symbolizing idealized self-knowledge, and sacramental or consiliar support in combating ultimate evil. But Britomart, not having fallen into wretchedly shameful disability and bondage, receives no such aid (no rescue by Arthur, no training in Chastity); moreover, she receives no sacramental assistance or prudential advice during her rescue of Amoret from Busirane, whose power she utterly dispels, without benefit of a diamond shield to reflect heavenly light – indeed without a clear sense of how to dispose of Busirane’s power. Perhaps most impressive in that climactic trial of her Chastity (3.11–12) is that Spenser provides no doctrinal assistance (what help could Glauce give!), allowing Britomart simply to puzzle over each of Busirane’s archival Ovidian atrocities for inspiring lust and anxiety in both sexes. What do these differences show? Britomart, more than any other figure in The Faerie Queene, surpasses thematic constraints. She surprises us continually: by unconventional womanhood in wielding arms that show not just providential gifts but, as conscious ‘disguise’, a capacity for intelligent voluntarist development; by submission to Artegall as an act of extreme grace; and by having an identity that is partly thematic but also partly experiential. In Britomart Spenser sharply revises his sources (notably Virgil, Ovid, Ariosto), using Christian and Neoplatonic doctrines from Plotinus, Augustine, and Ficino to chasten courtly love in ways recalling the grail-quest’s refinement of Arthurian heroes. Britomart’s aggressive witnessing of the hermaphroditic union, her embarrassedyet-hopeful detachment, is a remarkable displacement of Malory’s few privileged souls who see the Grail, that overwhelming vision of the Passion as an invitation to mystic communion. Books 5 and 6: materialist declensions of Gloriana, of Duessa, of Timias, and  of the satyrs/salvages If, as some astute critics believe, Spenser purposely reduced his plan for twelve private and twelve public virtues to only three private and three public,140 how adequately do Justice and Courtesy provide closure? Book 5 is often read as an English apocalypse, with Providence ensuring defeat of titan-like foes, beginning with a miracle-decimation of the Armada, the Souldan’s chariot (FQ 5.7).141 But Florence Sandler notes that Spenser’s troping on apocalypse radically changes in Books 4–6.142 Compared to Book 1’s spectacular apocalypse based on Revelation, Book 5’s inconclusive victories over Spanish allies in Belgium, France, and

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Ireland, even over the Armada, has a diminished symbolic scope. Book 6 may seem a benevolent close, reprising Book 1’s concern with grace, now reified in acts of simple kindness,143 but the reification raises a similar question: why does the poem’s allegory shrink from theological-intellectual principia in Books 1 and 2, and from Neoplatonic-passional schema in Books 3 and 4,144 to literal history of recent wars in Book 5 and scandalous courtships in 6? These lead to a third query: how do these disparate stages of The Faerie Queene’s allegory cohere? Moral angst grows as the poem descends from a grand spiritual vision of English history in Book 1 (saintly assailing one’s own sins) to history’s sensate reality in Books 5–6 (brutal, equivocal, incomplete in assailing the sins of others). The six legends show increasingly worldly subtypes of Gloriana (from Una to Britomart to Mercilla), shadowed by a similar focusing of Duessa-Mary (from Babylon’s whore to Ate’s cohort to Norfolk’s co-conspirator), showing Spenser’s canny sophistication as allegorist: Duessa’s descending figuration from Unholiness to Social Discord to Murderous Treason methodically unpeels the layered reasons for Mary’s execution. The beheading in Book 5 of two queens, as Donald Stump explains, doubly disposes of Elizabeth’s nemesis, Mary Queen of Scots.145 A similar narrowing focus occurs for Philip II as a Roman Catholic apostate: while Book 1’s foes (Archimago, Orgoglio, Dragon) figure a Cosmic Antichrist, Book 5’s titans (Souldan, Geryoneo, Grantorto) signify literal events: the splintered Armada, the Inquisitional horrors in Belgium, the massacre of mercenaries at Smerwick. The pyrrhic victories of Book 5, far from assuring irenic order, simply highlight Elizabeth’s on-going anxieties: executing a rival queen, expecting new Armadas, dreading further Irish carnage, all ending in her council’s defaming of Lord Grey (Artegall) for failing to resolve Ireland’s political-religious morass. Following Book 5’s raggedly literal and sensate apocalypse is the problematic pastoral of Book 6, which tries to resolve private incivility. But Calidore, instead of tempering his predecessor’s salvagesse sans finesse, also turns to violence (the sword under his shepherd garb) to enforce Pax Britannia in the material world. Perhaps Spenser meant simply to reify the stages of Redcrosse’s mystic training (faith, charity, contemplation) in having Calidore adapt Meliboe’s faith in pastoral otium, imitate Pastorella’s charitable deeds, and witness Colin’s rapt vision. But Arthur’s healing ‘liquor pure’ is not used in Book 6, and unlike Book 1’s joyous near-closure, Book 6 keeps its characters in moral incertitude (cf. 1.9.19, 4.8.20). None of its errant heroes (Calidore, Pastorella, Calepine, Serena, Timias) receives full doctrinal training in sin and penance, only a hermit urging sense-restraint and circumstantial caution (6.6.1–17). So far are we from the definitive schooling in Books 1 and 2 that Calidore’s exposure to common rural courtesies in cantos 9–10 (the usual site of templar vision) are viewed as ‘truant’ indulgences. Book 6 offers no full-scale templar training to remedy the ruthless incivilities of Turpine, the salvages, the brigands. Even magnificent Arthur is stymied in this legend. Though Book 6 does recall Creation’s wonder as it inculcates grace in the Salvage’s rapport with Arthur, in lovely maidens’ circling dance, and in Pastorella’s rose birthmark,146 it matches Book 5 in lacking closure, focusing its heroes’ awareness on a sensate world that insists on physical violence to cope with earth-bound

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titans, cannibalism, and brigandry. The poem reaches a moral stage comparable to cantos 5–6 of Book 1, a frustrating impasse that represents no more than the epic’s mid-point. The descending figuration of Books 1–6 Books 1–6 of The Faerie Queene form an ontological and metaphoric descent: each legend’s allegorical range narrows as Gloriana and Arthur, their subtypes and evil antagonists, methodically descend into the shadows of material reality. Yet the allegory retains its connection with universal truth by means of a hierarchic pattern of metaphoric change – a reversible sequence that Spenser calls ‘dilation’ and ‘return’. The pattern is evident in the poem’s schematically descending portrayal of key figures. Gloriana is represented in Books 1–2 by her subtypes Una and Belphoebe, her main faces in the realms of grace and nature. In Books 3–4, the world of chaste passion and binding friendship, Gloriana is represented by Britomart with her three Grace-like facets (Florimell-Belphoebe-Amoret), and in broad social terms as Venus and Concord. In Books 5 and 6, where Gloriana’s subtypes are Mercilla and Pastorella, she is subjected to the frustrations of the literal sensate world. Though Arthur heroically exemplifies each virtue, in Books 1–6 his awareness is limited; his sense of origin, nature, and purpose unfold slowly, never fully; and in the course of these six legends he grows increasingly confused, his power increasingly inconclusive. In the intellectual purview of Books 1–2 he is spectacular yet mysterious, his chivalric charity mirroring Christ’s redemptive succour, yet in honouring Cupid rather than Christ he shows a delayed access to spiritual truth, an obliqueness enforced by romance symbolism – potent arms, Merlin’s training, Tanaquill’s dream-visit. The second legend offers a closely parallel but earth-bound perspective that subjects Arthur to Maleger’s ‘body of death’, a conflict which aptly occurs after reading his bloody Briton chronicles. In the passional realm of Books 3–4, Arthur’s attraction to Florimell’s beauty, his complaint to the ocean, and his distraction by False Florimell add to his heart’s confusion; and Book 4 multiplies this distress in social disharmony. In the sensate world of Books 5–6 Arthur moves toward a moral nadir: his sympathy for Duessa, his astonishment at Turpine’s codeless cruelty, and his failure to cure Mirabella’s disdain reveal his ignorance of the wages of sin and need for penance. Arthur’s role in Books 1–6 is intensely paradoxical. Though he at first mimics Christ by defeating apocalyptic demons and harrowing a hellish prison to save a wretched knight, the knight then bestows on him the New Testament, implying Arthur’s sacramental ignorance. Books 1–6 show a frustrating decline of Arthur’s potency (like that of Redcrosse in cantos 1–6 of the Legend of Holiness). Perhaps a central aim of the poem’s latter half would have been reforming Arthur’s chivalric symbolism, replacing or reconfiguring the grail quest to gain access to sapiential truth, reflected in ‘Gloriana’.147 Arthur’s chivalric heroism and Gloriana’s fairyland epitomize Spenser’s romance analogue for the Christian hope of moral perfection. He evokes both Briton transcendence and Fairy immanence, Christian and Olympian deity, civilized and native morality, showing the complementary modes on all three Christian-

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Platonic levels of human nature. This three-stage (or indeed six-stage) devolution of allegorical meaning is apparent in the poem’s most prominent figures: Olympian deities (Cupid, Venus, Jove, Proteus, Neptune); demonic antagonists (magicians, enchantresses, titans); symbolic arms, houses, gardens. The schematic change in these figures as they reappear in the three pairs of complementary legends is a touchstone for comprehending the poem’s holistic design: its ideational form, its political purpose, and ultimately its mystic vision.148 Three faces of Duessa The Faerie Queene’s descent through three stages of allegory (Books 1–2, 3–4, 5–6) is evident in Spenser’s changing depiction of key figures who reappear in the poem. Most obvious is Duessa. Linked with Archimago in Book 1, she exemplifies evil in the broadest theological, philosophical, mythic sense: Revelation’s scarlet whore, the principle of duplicity, the false pretender to contain Christ’s body – roles that also inform her more pragmatic effort in Book 2 to divide the knights by claiming Redcrosse has raped her. In the passional world of Book 3 she tries to prevent alliance with Chastity, and in 4 she joins with Ate to cause social discord. Only in Book 5 is she specified as Mary Queen of Scots; and only then does James VI demand Spenser’s execution for libelling his mother.149 This historical identity of Duessa may well be implied by her highly abstract figuration in Book 1, as well as by her catalysing social discord in Book 4; but why withhold her specific historical identity until Book 5? The answer helps to explain the holistic design of the first half of Spenser’s epic. Only the holistic symbolism of Book 1 gives the full spiritual import of Duessa, based on mystic numerology and on Revelation’s apocalyptic plot, showing her role in the Eschaton at the end of time; this broadest identity easily subsumes her passional duplicity and impurity in Books 3 and 4,150 and her literal-historical-sensate identity in Book 5. From first to last Duessa is as fragmented as her name denotes. An essential unreality is implied in her being conjured from hell by Archimago, an arch-imager disguised as a Catholic priest. Duessa’s nihilistic duplicity seeks to displace Una’s oneness and truth; as ‘Mistress Missa’ she is the Catholic mass’s false allure; and dressed in scarlet atop a multi-headed beast she opposes New Jerusalem as the prostituted Babylon-Rome, quick to seduce any carnal power. Symbolism of female evil is never more grandiose. In Book 2 she reappears, again with Archimago, as perverse duplicity, but the immense idolatrous import of Book 1 remains only by implication. No longer is she summoned from supernatural darkness (and from the knight’s unconscious) to displace the true guide who will be Redcrosse’s exalted bride in glory. Indeed, Guyon has no active female consort other than Gloriana’s iconic image on his shield. As a pretended rape victim, Duessa provokes Guyon’s brief fit of impulsive anger, but her pretence is not successful. In Book 2 Duessa exemplifies the fatal consequences of Original Sin, her whorish habits more specifically exemplified by Phedria and Acrasia to distract Mordant and Verdant from the proper use of earthly pleasures – a symbolism further developed by Malecasta, Hellenore, False Florimell, Ate, and Duessa in Books 3–4. In her final unmasking at Mercilla’s court (5.9.36ff,

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10.1–4) she finally assumes her narrowest identity as a specific historical political scion who has used her complete duplicity and adulterous impurity to assassinate the anointed sovereign and supplant her as ruler. Duessa’s evolving meaning was noted by R. Dodge: in Book 1 her elaborate role as ‘the Roman Church, Roman Catholicism, masquerading as Fidessa, “the Faith”’. Then, after brief appearances in 2.1.8 and 3.1.arg, her part in the social turmoil of Book 4 (cantos 1, 2, 5, 9), and only in Book 5 (cantos 9–10) the full disclosure of her historical identity as Mary Queen of Scots. In the SE ‘Duessa’, Anthea Hume astutely comments on these evolving roles. Unlike her importance as a central obstacle to Holiness, Duessa’s lengthy roles in Books 4 and 5 as an obstacle to Friendship and Justice no longer stress the absolute numerological evil of doubling Una’s truth), yet the coherence of Duessa’s changing roles is quite evident. Her spiritual duplicity in the Legend of Holiness lays a basis for her two-faced behaviour in alliance with Ate to foment social discord in the Legend of Friendship, and as Mary Queen of Scots in the Legend of Justice her deceptive power-quest forms the core of the case against her at Mercilla’s court – but now her evil appears as specific duplicities which vie for sovereignty and threaten the life of Elizabeth I. Donald Stump explains the beheading of Radigund and of Duessa in Book 5 as representing two aspects of the execution of Mary, and Richard McCabe argues that, despite the radically different depictions of Duessa in Books 1 and 5, both represent Mary Queen of Scots. In fact, multiple portraits of Duessa-Mary appear in Books 1–5, culminating in the literal-sensate-historical portrait of Book 5, whose effect is partly apocalyptic, matching the Philip-Armada episode of the Souldan’s chariot, where the historical materialist specificity sharply contrasts the spiritual-religious effulgence of Book 1’s apocalypse (Orgoglio, Despair, Dragon), where the exposure and dismissal of Archimago and Duessa have consummate (though abridged) meaning. Three faces of Timias Like Duessa, Timias in the six legends shows three distinct ‘faces’.151 First, in the intellective allegory of Books 1–2 he is simply, as his name implies, Arthur’s ‘honored’ squire, aiding in Book 1’s combat against arrogant Orgoglio but more crucially in Book 2’s struggle with elusive Maleger, who as ‘the body of this death’ is the dark underside of Orgoglio’s fleshly pride. Second, in Books 3 and 4, which focus on passional virtues, Timias devotes himself to Belphoebe – quite aptly since she entered the poem praising ‘honour’ (2.3.40–1).152 Her healing of his honourable wounds (from slaying three fosters who pursued Florimell) induces in Timias a Petrarchan devotion that shadows Raleigh’s complex relation to Elizabeth I (recalling the 1582 defeat of three Irish rebels that instigated Raleigh’s courtly favour).153 Timias is wounded by Belphoebe’s special beauty, an armed intellectual prowess and spiritual integrity that sublimates the natural but fugitive beauty of Florimell; Belphoebe is, however, enraged by Timias’s over-intimate care for her twin Amoret after Lust’s assault. In Books 3–4, Florimell, Belphoebe, and Amoret (whom Wind explains as the Graces)154 form a cycle of influence on Timias – showing passion’s problematic diversity in

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the quest for moral perfection, regarding both Elizabeth’s virginal sovereignty and Britomart’s chaste quest for marriage, which fictively resolves Timias-Raleigh’s dilemma and England’s succession anxiety. Timias’ penitential seclusion makes him unhelpful and unknowable to Arthur, but prepares for reconciliation to Belphoebe through a dove’s heart-shaped ruby that mimics the gift of grace.155 J.B. Lethbridge questions topical readings of Belphoebe–Timias as Elizabeth– Raleigh, in particular the identifying of wounded Amoret as Raleigh’s scandalized mistress-wife,156 for as semi-divine twins Belphoebe and Amoret cannot easily figure Elizabeth I and Elizabeth Throckmorton. In fact, in Books 3–4 Timias engages sequentially with all three of the ‘graces’ (Florimell, Belphoebe, Amoret) who are cyclic subtypes of Britomart and thus of Elizabeth I: Florimell, her arousing natural beauty; Belphoebe her corrective chastity; Amoret her generative womanhood. Of course, Florimell’s natural beauty can signify the allure of any court beauty; Belphoebe’s chaste integrity is the standard for all the Queen’s maids of honour; and Amoret’s flowering womanhood is the goal of such attraction. But, as Lethbridge warns, it is reductive to view beleaguered Florimell and Amoret (the first and third Graces) only in terms of Throckmorton’s affair with Raleigh, thus severing Spenser’s brilliant rendering of the womanly ‘graces’ from their central reference to Britomart and Queen Elizabeth. Third, if the intellective allegory of Books 1–2 shows Timias’ relation to Arthur, and if the passional allegory of Books 3–4 shows his relation to the graces as subtypes of Gloriana, Book 6 shows Timias’ third face in a literal sensate realm where his ventures ally him with ‘Serena’ (Raleigh’s name for his wife).157 Ravaged by the Blatant Beast’s countless tongues, Serena and Timias are advised by a woodland hermit to control their ‘outward sences’, avoiding any ‘occasion’ for scandal:   in your selfe your onely helpe doth lie,   To heale your selues, and must proceed alone   From your owne will, to cure your maladie.   … First learne your outward sences to refraine   From things, that stirre vp fraile affection;   Your eies, your eares, your tongue, your talk restraine From that they most affect, and in due termes containe. For from those outward sences ill affected,   The seede of all this euill first doth spring ….

(6.6.7)

The focus in Book 6 (as in 5) is not on the mind’s rectitude, or the heart’s errant passions, but the literal sensate realm of history and the material self: in Book 6 the adversary is a ‘salvage nation’ that contemns civil discipline, viewing naked Serena and captive Pastorella simply as edible or ravishable bodies. The fiction has descended to a fleshly-literal-historical-topical level of allegorical reference. Three faces of the satyrs/salvages The troops of satyrs who engage Una in 1.6 and Hellenore in 3.10 offer a vigorous Nature-based challenge to Gloriana and to the integrity of all gentlewomen; and if the salvages of 6.8 are a materialist consummation of the satyrs, they perfectly

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complete the three descending moral dimensions in Spenser’s three pairs of legends. (1) Una with satyrs in the intellective realm: In book 1 the satyrs are a foil for Una’s purity. They prevent Sansloy’s rape, are awed at her special beauty, but are unreceptive to her teachings. Even half-human Satyrane, with his chivalric nobility and Christian teaching, cannot surmount the satyr-strain, as seen in his stand-off with Sansloy. (2) Hellenore with satyrs in the passional realm: In Books 3–5 Satyrane’s erotic energy and sophistication engage in high moral striving, but his spiritually blinkered exuberance differs strikingly from Britomart’s passional integrity. The bawdy misogyny of Satyrane, Paridell, the Squire of Dames, and Malbecco forms a lurid context for the satyrs’ communal sex with Hellenore (‘Helen-o’er’, says Berger), re-enacting the impurity that destroyed the old Troy. Britomart, progenitor of the New Troy, has no contact with satyrs except an acquaintance with Satyrane. (3) Serena with salvages in the sensate realm: In Books 5–6 the satyrs are displaced by non-mythic salvages, especially the ‘Salvage Nation’ (6.8.35ff) that nearly cannibalizes Serena when she strays into the material world’s forest. Though a ‘Salvage Man’ shows Nature’s basic goodness (6.4.1–16; 6.5; 5.6.18ff; 6.7.19–27; 6.8.28f), most of the savagery in Books 4–6 confirms a darkly fallen world. Artegall’s persona as the ‘salvage knight’ (4.4.39ff, 4.6) seems needed to control ‘the Salvage Island’ (5.11.39; 6.1.9), but Britomart’s dream in Isis’ Temple shows the need to tame this ‘crocodile’-man. The three distinct views of these bestial humans trace the soul’s descent in Books 1–6. Spenser’s satyrs are not morally neutral, for they connote his deep judgment on bestiality. Even Satyrane, though half-human and partly Christianized, cannot effectively defend Holiness, or Chastity and Friendship. The encounters of vulnerable gentlewomen with ever-more-bestial males in a material world form a suggestive feature of The Faerie Queene’s holistic design. The descent of Spenser’s epic into ever more materialist dimensions, narrowing the figuration of Gloriana and Arthur, of Duessa, of Timias, and of satyrs who become savages, does not create a sense of closure, nor optimism for the poem’s theological, cultural, and historical contexts. But I shall argue for partial optimism in this book’s concluding chapters. Notes  1 For the bleeding heart image, 1.7.20ff; 2.1.37ff; 3.4.6; for the suicidal desire, 1.7.20–8; 2.1.39– 57; 5.6.13ff. Each lady refers to her ‘Lord’ in 1.3.7; 2.1.50, 52, 55; 5.7.40, 45.  2 Fowler, ‘The Image of Mortality: The Faerie Queene, II.i–ii’, HLQ 24 (1961), 91–110; Intro., Books I and II of The Faerie Queene, eds Kellogg and Steele (New York: Odyssey Press), 55–6; K. Williams, Spenser’s World of Glass (University of California Press, 1966), 40ff, 65; M. Evans, Spenser’s Anatomy of Heroism (Cambridge University Press, 1970), 113–20; A.K. Hieatt, Chaucer Spenser Milton (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 172–8ff. Kellogg and Steele associate Mortdant and Amavia with the irascible and concupiscent powers (55–6), and Hieatt extends this thesis, taking the ill-fated lovers as an emblem of the irascible-concupiscent polarity throughout the legend. But this dichotomy that fatally affects them (2.1.57) is not their basic identity: Mortdant’s ‘strong’ power is his intellect, Amavia’s ‘weake’ power is her heart (stanza 57 calls her ‘the weakest heart’). Kellogg and Steele corroborate this Patristic psychology, associating Mortdant with Adam (the ‘intellective soul’) and Amavia with Eve (the ‘appetitive faculties’).

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 3 Fowler, ‘The Image of Mortality’, 93.  4 Origen, In Genesim Homilia, I.15, PG XII, 158–9 (my trans.); De Principiis, III, iv, 2, cited from Origen on First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (New York, 1966), 233. Cf. Origen, Commentaria in Iohannem, XXXII, 18; In Epistolam ad Romanos, I.18; De Principiis, II.viii.4; IV.ii.4. Note Origen’s important revision of Philo Judaeus: in Origen’s quasi-Platonic scheme (spiritu, anima, sensus or corpus) the feminine principle is associated more closely with the rational element, whereas in Philo’s two-part scheme (mens, sensus) woman has no rational choice and is irrevocably connected with fleshliness.  5 Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos, II.xv, PL XXXIV, 1086 (virilis ratio, appetitum animae, membris corporis). Cf. Augustine, Confessione, XIII.xxxii.47; De Trinitate, XII.12–13; De sermone domini in monte, I.xii (34).  6 Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani, in Ausgewählte Schriften, cited from D. Marsh, ‘Erasmus on the Antithesis of Body and Soul’, JHI 37 (1976), 673–88; 674.  7 On reason as the ‘skilfull horserider’, see references to Laurentius, Du Bartas, Sir John Davies, Milton in Baker, The Image of Man, 289; and M.U. Vogel, Some Aspects of the Horse and Rider Analogy in ‘The Debate between the Body and the Soul’ (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1948).  8 2.1.37–41, 46–8.  9 See J. Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and the Virgilian Epic (Yale University Press, 1995), 119–26. For mixed responses to Dido in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, see D.C. Allen, ‘Marlowe’s Dido and the Tradition’, Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. R. Hosley (University of Missouri Press, 1962), 55–68; Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid (University of Minnesota Press, 1994); David Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2010). 10 See n. 2; for Amoret’s wound, 3.12.20–38. 11 Roche, Kindly Flame (Princeton University Press, 1964), 73–88, 129n.; A.K. Hieatt, ‘Scudamour’s Practice of Maistrye upon Amoret’, PMLA 77 (1962), 509–10; Chaucer Spenser Milton, 2, 60ff, 91ff, 109–33; A.L. DeNeef, ‘Spenser’s Amor Fuggitivo and the Transfixed Heart’, ELH 46 (1979), 13–18. 12 Cf. Fowler, ‘The Image of Mortality’. 13 2.1.37, 40; 2.2.headnote, 3, 4, 10; 2.3.2. 14 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson (Oxford University Press, 1959), 237, 260ff, 330ff. 15 See the citations from Ovide moralisée and from Pierre Bersuire’s Reductione Morale in J.B. Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Harvard University Press, 1970), 124ff; and J. Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth Century to Dante (Columbia University Press, 1975), 157ff. 16 Paradise Lost, 9.1127–31, its hierarchy is ‘Understanding’, ‘Will’, ‘sensual Appetite’); 10.229– 609. 17 Besides the sources in nn. 4–6, see Philo, Legum Allegoria, II.vii–xiv (19–52), xviii (70–5), De Opificio Mundi, li–liii (145–52), lv–lix (155–66); Ambrose, De paradiso, xv (73); Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, IV.xlix, Homiliarum in evangelia, XVI.i, Liber regulae pastoralis, III.xxix; Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, IX.v.5–6; Bede, Commentarium in Pentateuchum, ‘Expositio … in genesis’, iii, In Matthaei evangelium expositio, I.v; Paschasius Radbertus, Expositio in evangelium Matthaei, III.v; Rabanus, Commentaniorumin Genesim, I.xi.xv; Erigena, De divisione naturae, IV.xvi–xvii; Aelfric, Homilia, I.174; Comestor, Historia Scholastica, ix.xxii; Alanus, De planctu natura, V.246–53; Leone Ebreo, The Philosophy of Love (Dialoghi d’Amore), trans. F. Friedenberg-Seeley and J.H.Barnes (London, 1937; orig. 1535), 345–62; Juan de Dios Huarte Navarro, Examen de Ingenios. The Examination of mens Wits, trans. R. Carew (London, 1594), ‘The Epistle to the Reader’; Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World, I.iii.2; Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I.i; Henry More, Conjectura Cabbalistica, ‘The Philosophick Cabbala’, ‘The Moral Cabbala’. Cf. C. Abbetmeyer, Old English Poetic Motives Derived from the Doctrine of Sin (1903; rpt Cornell University Library, 2009), 35ff;

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M.I. Corcoran, Milton’s Paradise with Reference to the Hexameral Background (Washington, DC, 1945; rpt Kessinger, 2010), 66–8ff; A. Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries of Genesis 1527–1633 (University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 85–8; J.M. Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1968), 68–74, 250, 266–7; R.E. Osmond, ‘Body, Soul, and the Marriage Relationship: The History of an Analogy’, JHI 34 (1973), 283–90; Ferrante, Woman as Image, 17–57, 99–108. 18 Augustine, De Trin. XII, 12; Peter Lombard, Sententiae, II.xxiv.6–13; Hugo of St Victor, De sacramentis christianae fidae, I.viii.13; Bonaventure, see nn. 35–6; Agrippa, De originali peccato, in Heinrici Cornelii Agrippae . . . Operum pars posterior (Lugdini, ca. 1600), pp. 550–65. For this tradition in literature and art, see D.W. Robertson, ‘Chaucerian Tragedy’, ELH,19 (1952), 10–11; ‘The Subject of the De Amore of Andreas Capellanus’, MP 50 (1953), 152–3; A Preface to Chaucer, 74–5; C. Dahlberg, ‘Macrobius and the Unity of the “‘Roman de la Rose”’,SP 58 (1961), 578ff. A.K. Hieatt graciously sent me his ‘Eve as Reason in a Tradition of Allegorical Interpretation of the Fall’, treating man and woman as higher and lower reason, scheduled for publication in JWCI. 19 K. Walls, God’s Only Daughter: Spenser’s Una as the invisible Church (Manchester University Press, 2013). 20 Augustine, De Trin., XII.5–8; Piers the Plowman, ed. Skeat (1886: rpt Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), C, XIX.189ff. I modernize spelling. 21 Evans, Spenser’s Anatomy of Heroism, disagrees: ‘ideally Una should go first, the dwarf second, and Red Cross’s horse a well-controlled third’. But in spite of the image’s latent discord and suspenseful mingling of symbolic modes, the three figures do form a hierarchy, prefiguring the similar hierarchic harmony of Eden at the end of the legend. Cf. H. Berger, Jr, ‘Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I: Prelude to Interpretation’, Southern Review: An Australian Journal 2 (1966), 18–49. 22 On Una’s ass as the clergy (bearing the word), cf. J. Steadman, ‘Una and the Clergy: The Ass Symbol in The Faerie Queene’, JWCI 21 (1958), 134–7. J. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Fairie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1976), 151–2, says that Una is ‘the Word of God that Redcrosse properly champions’. I would add that Una is the Word’s passive loving sufferance; Redcrosse, its final active victory, as typified in Revelation. They must work as one. 23 On Redcrosse as a type of Christ the Word in Revelation, see J. Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 108–l0; and Nohrnberg, Analogy, 186–90, 198. In Spenser’s ‘Visions from Revelation’ this knight is ‘The faithfull man … The worde of God’ ‘Vpon a white horse’; cf. Rev. 19.11–15. That Redcross’s horse is dappled grey (2.1.18) is a telling distinction from the Apocalyptic image. See P. Grant, ‘The Arms of the Red Cross’ in Images and Ideas in Literature of the English Renaissance (1979; rpt Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 32ff. Redcrosse’s armour and insignia do not identify him with Christ, but show his attempted imitatio Christi. 24 On the Dragon’s symbolic complexity, see C.V. Kaske, ‘The Dragon’s Spark and Sting and the Structure of Red Cross’s Dragon-Fight: The Faerie Queene, I.xi–xii’, SP 66 (1969), 609–38; and Hankins, Source and Meaning, 100ff. Orgoglio’s ‘huge great body’, projecting Redcrosse’s fleshly pride, vanishes when its head (its psychic source) is severed (‘of that monstrous mas / Was nothing left’, 1.8.24). Likewise the Dragon’s ‘body monstrous’ (1.11.8, 55) is slain with a head-blow, penetrating ‘his darksom hollow maw’ (11.53) like a harrowing of hell. With this mental lancing, the body ‘vanisht into smoke’ (1.11.54), only its empty shell remaining to affright the ‘rude rabblement’ (1.12.9–11). Each monster of pride thus essentially challenges Redcrosse’s intellectual vision. 25 On Redcrosse as intellect, cf. Hankins, Source and Meaning, 120–1; on Una’s veil as an obstruction resulting from sin, see Nohrnberg, Analogy, 207–8; and on the pervasiveness of intellectual vision as theme and metaphor in Book 1, cf. J. Dallett, ‘Ideas of Sight in The Faerie Queene’, ELH 27 (1960), 87–121; K. Williams, ‘Spenser and the Metaphor of Sight’, Rice University Studies 60 (1974), 160–1. 26 1.2.8; 1.3.2, 7, 27, 32; 4.2; 6.2–4, 32, 36; 7.20, 42–3; 9.17; 10.28–9, 68; 11.1, 32–3, 50, 55; 12.23, 40–1.

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27 R. Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (Princeton University Press, 1977), 121. 28 K. Walls, God’s Only Daughter: Spenser’s Una as the Invisible Church (Manchester University Press, 2013), 15–16; C.S. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, ed. A. Fowler (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 109, 111; Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. W. Hooper (Cambridge University Press, 1966), 144, 157; J.S. Harrison, Platonism in English Poetry of the 16th and 17th Centuries (New York, 1965; rpt Palate Press, 2016), 1–12. Cf. qualifications in M. Evans, Spenser’s Anatomy of Heroism (Cambridge University Press, 1970), 92ff; M.P. Parker, The Allegory of The Faerie Queene (Oxford University Press, 1960), 67–73ff, 81–2ff; and A.C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene (Oxford University Press, 1961), 83ff. One can hardly over-idealize Una’s beauty and constancy, yet this ‘errant damsel’, ‘as the truth, can err, insofar as the Church itself, the pillar of truth, “erreth and strayethe farre from the waye of trwthe”’ (Nohrnberg, Analogy, 211). 29 Walls, God’s Only Daughter, ch. 6. 30 The Dwarf is not comparable to the Palmer of Book 2, or to ‘Natural Reason’ and ‘Prudence,’ as he is often glossed. Nohrnberg notes the fearful and comical aspects of his advice (Analogy, 146, 197, 261–2). 31 Berger, ‘Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I’,’ 47–8, observes this Platonic metaphor at the end of Book I, but does not note how Spenser alters it, placing woman (rather than warriorguardians) as middle term. 32 Eph. 4.22–4, Col. 3.9-10, Rom. 6.6. 33 Cf. M. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage, 1976), 121–74; C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), 1–23; P. Dronke, Medieval Literature and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric (Oxford University Press, 1965), 1, 1–97; Ferrante, Woman as Image. 34 Ferrante, Woman as Image; but she and others note the incomplete idealizing of woman in all the authors treated. 35 On woman as limited to an instrument of procreation, cf. Augustine, De Gratia Christi et peccato originali, II.40, De Genesi ad litteram, IX.3, 5; Aquinas, Summa Theologia, I.a.92, q.1; Bonaventure, Commentaria in quatuor libros sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi (hereafter, Sent.), II.d.20, a.1, q.1, t.II, 477a, and Sister E.T. Healy, Woman According to St. Bonaventure (New York, 1955 rpt Literary Licensing, 2011), 19–20. On man–woman as spirit–body, cf. Augustine, Conf. XIII.xxxii, De Opere Monachorum, 40; Aquinas, ST I.a.92, q.1, II–II.a.70, q.3, concl., II–II.a.156, ad 1; Bonaventure, IV Sent. d.36, a.2, q.i, concl., t.IV, 796b. On Aquinas’s Aristotelian view of woman as a misbegotten male, ST I.a.92, q.1, ad 1, I.a.gg, q.2, ad 1; on woman’s inability to represent the imago Dei by herself, see Augustine, De Trin. VII.7, 10; and, in Bonaventure’s terms, on the imago Dei being more distinct in man than in woman, see II Sent. d.16, a.2, q.2, t.II, 404b (Sister Healy comments: ‘although the human soul is always the image of God, it does not always appear as such to one who does not make an effort to see it,’ Woman According to St. Bonaventure, 24). On the necessity of subjecting woman’s nature to man’s in order to avoid sin, cf. Augustine, De Continentia, I.23, De Gen. con. Man. II.xv; Aquinas, ST I–II.a.81, q.5, ad 2; Bonaventure, II Sent. d.21, a.l, q.3, t.II, 496–7; and Healy, Woman According to St. Bonaventure, 18–24ff. On woman’s greater responsibility for the Fall, cf. Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV.11, De Gen. ad litt. XI.42; Aquinas, ST II–II.a.163, q.4, concl., a.164, q.2, a.165, q.2, ad 1; Bonaventure, II Sent. d.22, a.l, q.2–3, t.II, 519–20. Bonaventure’s tendency to ameliorate or exculpate woman’s role in most of these aspects is discussed by Healy, Woman According to St. Bonaventure, 9–45. Cf. R.R. Ruether, ‘Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church’, 150–83, and E.C. McLaughlin, ‘Equality of Souls, Inequality of Sexes: Woman in Medieval Theology’, 21366, Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Ruether (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974); and K.E. Borresen, Subordination et Equivalence: Nature et rôle de la femme d’après Augustin et Thomas d’Aquin (Oslo, 1968; rpt in Eng. trans., New York: Rowman & Littlefield, n.d.). 36 Bonaventure, Breviloquium, p. 2, c.9, t.V, 227; II Sent. d.24, a.i, q.2, concl. Cf. Healy, Woman According to St. Bonaventure, 21.

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37 Cf. Aquinas, ST I.a.85, q.1, I.a.54, q.4; Bonaventure, II Sent. d.24, a.i, q.2, 4, concl., t.II, 569a. See Healy, Woman According to St. Bonaventure, 22–3ff. Emphasis added. 38 Bonaventure, De Perfectione Vitae et Sorores, cap.vi, t.viii, 121b. Aquinas simply stresses the rib as intermediate part of the body, ST I.a.92, q.3. Emphasis added. 39 Healy, Woman According to St. Bonaventure, 23–4. 40 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621; rpt New York: Vintage, 1977), 3, 53. 41 Matt. 19.3–6; John 17.21–6, 15.12–17; 1 Peter 3.1, 7–8; 1 Cor. 11.3, 11–12; Eph. 5.22–33; Rom. 15.1–6. 42 T. K. Dunseath, Spenser’s Allegory of Justice in Book V of The Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1968), 66–7; J. Aptekar, Icons of Justice (Columbia University Press, 1969), 39–57; A. Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (University of Chicago Press, 1971), 138–46; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 409–25; J. Anderson, ‘“Nor Man It Is”: The Knight of Justice in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, PMLA 85 (1970), 65–77. 43 Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment, 248, 247. But 264, 272, equivocate the ‘hierarchy of powers’ in Isis’ Temple, where male and female are perfectly ‘equal’. 44 According to Bernard Sylvestris, ‘the sword with which Aeneas defends himself from enemies is reason, which resists vice’, Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid, trans. E.G. Schreiber and T.E. Maresca (University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 74. For Spenser’s knight, it is associated with the Christian use of reason: ‘take … the sworde of the Spirit, which is the worde of God’ (Eph. 6.17). The sword of Christ’s mouth is the word of his warfare and his judgment: ‘out of his mouth went out a sharpe sworde, that with it he shulde smite the heathen’ (Rev. 19.15; cf. Rev. 1.16, Heb. 4.12, John 12.48 – cited from the Geneva Bible. The broken-sword motif in Book 5 (Sanglier, 5.1.19; Braggadocchio, 5.3.37; Artegall, 5.5.21) signifies an abrogation of the basic masculine integrity, a travesty of the use of reason. 45 See J. Anderson, ‘Britomart’s Armor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Reopening Cultural Matters of Gender and Figuration’, ELR 39 (2009), 74–96; M. Leslie, Spenser’s ‘fierce warres and faithfull loves’: Martial and Chivalric Symbolism in The Faerie Queene (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1983), 31–5, 40–5. 46 Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires (Indiana University Press, 1999), 141–60. 47 ‘“Becoming Male”: A Gnostic and Early Christian Metaphor’, The Image of God: Gender Models in Judaeo-Christian Tradition, ed. K.E. Borresen (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 170–86. 48 4.6.11–32. Like its parody, the combat between Radigund and Artegall (5.5.1–21), this final battle between Britomart and Artegall concludes with the voluntary submission of intellect to the divinely beautiful power of the heart. 49 Cf. Williams, Spenser’s World of Glass, 174–6; Aptekar, Icons of Justice, 87–107. Interpreting Britomart’s dream, the priest says, ‘Osyris … under Isis feete doth sleepe for euer’ (5.2.22); but in the next line the word ‘oft’ suggests that ‘for euer’ is hyperbolic, as subsequent events make clear. The dream partly shows Britomart’s wish-fulfilment: she delights at first in assuming regnant power over her destined spouse. Yet the crocodile’s sexual arousal leaves her ‘full of fearefull fright, / And doubtfully dismayd’ (5.7.16), signalling a transfer to male supremacy, which Britomart herself will enforce. 50 3.2.4, 3.3.53; 4.1.14, 4.6.30, 32; 5.7.21. 51 E. Bieman, ‘Britomart in Book V of The Faerie Queene’, UTQ XXXVII (1967–68), 167ff. 52 See P. Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London and New York: Routledge, 1989, 1994), chs 1–4. 53 See C. McManus, Spenser’s Female Readers (Delaware University Press, 2007); Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires. 54 Fletcher, Prophetic Moment, 141–3; Dunseath, Spenser’s Allegory of Justice, 67; Aptekar, Icons of Justice, 42–52; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 411–12. 55 Aptekar, Icons of Justice, 41–2, explicates this division of power, also in the rescue of Burbon: ‘Talus … / Made cruell hauocke of the baser crew, / … But the two knights themselues their captains did subdew’ (5.11.59). To further divide the composite, Britomart resolves perversions of womanly power.

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56 PMLA 85 (1970), 65–77. 57 Geneva Bible, 1 Cor. 15.35–53. 58 Berger, The Allegorical Temper, 65–88; J. Collins, Christian Mysticism in the Elizabethan Age (1940; rpt New York: Octagon, 1971), 37–40, 97–102, 113–17, 192–203; E. Sirluck, ‘The Faerie Queene, Book II, and the Nicomachean Ethics’, MP 49 (1951), 73–100; W. Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Columbia University Press, 1965), 183–98; Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory (Oxford University Press); Hieatt, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, 171–214. Cf. relevant notation in The Faerie Queene, Books I and II, ed. Kellogg and Steele; Hamilton’s Faerie Queene; Brooks-Davies, Spenser’s Faerie Queene: A Critical Commentary on Books I and II. 59 Interpretations of the irascible–concupiscent dichotomy are as varied as the ideas descending from Plato and Aristotle. (1) Hieatt, more sweepingly than Nelson, views Book 2’s froward– forward, withdrawing–indulging types as Aristotelian. (2) Hankins cites Aristotle as source for Book 2’s rational–irascible-concupiscent scheme; but in fact he is using Plato’s hierarchy of three levels: figures of concupiscible appetite issue from ‘the forest of [man’s] lower nature’, while figures of irascible passion typify ‘a nobler nature’ in the breast which ‘recognizes reason …, as its lawful guide and ruler’ (26–7). These provocative insights ignore the Platonic pattern of the poem’s main images: figurative castles, gardens, sequences of temptation or instruction. (3) Nohrnberg, Analogy, 343–51, acknowledges Platonic tripartism in Spenser’s main figures by comparing the three levels of Alma’s Castle with the three temptations, and with Platonic psychology’s three desires. (4) Z. Pollock, ‘Concupiscence and Intemperance in the Bower of Bliss’, SEL 20 (1980), 43–58, sees that Spenser views irascibility–concupiscence not as a polarity but ‘a dynamic process directed upward’ (44); according to Aquinas, ‘irascible passions arise out of concupiscent passions’ (ST 1.81.2). And we must add that a rational reaction forms the final stage of the hierarchy. 60 Langland, Piers Plowman, C, 19.189–240; Chaucer, ‘Parson’s Tale’, lines 330ff., 260ff., in Robinson’s Chaucer, 237; Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 9, where the temptation sequence from snake to woman to man is elaborately displayed. Milton adds a demonic parody of this composite image in Satan, his daughter-wife Sin, and their fleshly issue Death (Paradise Lost, 10.229–609). 61 On the Church as Christ’s body, see 1 Cor. 12.12–30, Eph. 1.22–33, Col. 1.18, 24; on the Church or individual soul as Christ’s bride, see 2 Cor. 11.2–3, Eph. 5.22–33. The evangelists add to the portrait of Christ as bridegroom: Matt. 9.15 (cf. Mark 2.18–20, Luke 5.33–5); Matt. 22.1–14, 25.1–13; John 3.29. The eschatological form of the image appears in Rev. 19.6–8; 21.2, 9; 22.17. Origen and Bernard, in exegeses of the Song of Songs, provide key allegorical developments. Origen, and the Platonic tradition that follows him, depict the composite image with three terms: man as spirit (spiritu), woman as soul (anima), their fleshly offspring as bodily deeds or senses (sensus). See Origen, In Genesim Homilia, 1.15. 62 See D. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 80–114. 63 R. Reid, ‘Sansloy’s Double Meaning and the Mystic Design of Spenser’s Legend of Holiness’, Spenser Studies 29 (2014), 63–74. 64 Plato conceived three desires for the soul’s three powers (Republic 9.580d–583a); Aristotle, tentatively following Plato’s system in Nicomachean Ethics, designated three objects of desire (1.5, 1095b13 ff). Medieval and Patristic thinkers correlated these three desires (and the Johannine three lusts) with the three temptations of Adam and Jesus; see E.M. Pope, Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947), 51–69; Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 70–5, 382–4; D.R. Howard, The Three Temptations (Princeton University Press, 1966), 47n., 54–5; and P. Cullen, The Infernal Triad (Princeton University Press, 1974), xxv–xxxvi, and passim. Cullen touches on the idea that a Platonic tripartite psychology informs the allegory of triple temptation in The Faerie Queene (xxvn.); but preoccupied by the inner logic of his own triad (flesh, world, devil), he does not pursue this fruitful idea. 65 Plato, Republic, 4.440b–445b. For the medieval development of both natural and mystical

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castles of the body, many with three chambers for the soul (belly, heart, brain), see R.D. Cornelius, ‘The Figurative Castle’, diss., Bryn Mawr, 1930, 17–36; J.F. Doubleday, ‘The Allegory of the Soul as Fortress in Old English Literature’, Anglia 88 (1970), 503–8; and G.B. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (1933; rpt New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), 77–87. 66 For the influence of these two systems, see nn. 68 and 71 below. The two traditions were often intermixed, rarely integrated; see n. 73. On the Renaissance access to Platonism, see S. Jayne, ‘Ficino and the Platonism of the English Renaissance’, CL 4 (1952), 214–38; and M.H. Partee, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and the Renaissance Knowledge of Plato’, ES 51 (1970), 411–27. 67 For the background of mystical tripartism, see nn. 81, 90 below. 68 Timaeus, 35a, 36b, 44d; 69d–70d; 73a–b; cf. Republic, 4.440b–445b. For the vast influence of this tripartite hierarchy on medieval and Renaissance figurative castles, anatomical treatises, and philosophies of the embodied soul, see Cornelius, ‘The Figurative Castle’, 17–36; Claudian, The Fourth Consulship of Honorius, lines 235–54; Augustine, City of God, 19.13– 14; Langland, Piers Plowman, A, 10.1ff.; Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (1.1.37) and Cymbeline (5.5.16); Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, meditation 11; Batman uppon Bartholome, His Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum (London, 1582), 16, 22, 35–7, 54–7; Elyot, Of the Knowledge Which Maketh a Wise Man, ed. E.J. Howard (1533; rpt Oxford, OH, 1946), 116–21; L. Ebreo, Philosophy of Love (Dialoghi d’Amore) [1535], trans. Friedenberg-Seeley and Barnes (London: Soncino Press, 1937), 102–5; T. Vicary, The Anatomy of the Bodie of Man (1548; rpt London, 1888), 24, 32–3, 54, 56, 62, 67; John Davies of Hereford, Microcosmos [1603], in The Complete Works, ed. A.B. Grosart (Edinburgh, 1878), 26–7, 83; Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (London, 1615), 6–7, 62–4, 346ff, 428ff; Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1, 150–4. Plato’s influence on Renaissance psychology is briefly treated by L. Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art (Yale University Press, 1975), 9–14, 61–3, 132n.; Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays (1927; rpt New York: Haskell House, 1964), 132ff.; J.M. Major, Sir Thomas Elyot and Renaissance Humanism (University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 173–4, 210; R. Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Geneva: Folcroft, 1960), 53–4, 83–4. 69 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 2.5, 1105b, and 2.2–3, 1104a–1105a. All Aristotle quotations are taken from The Works of Aristotle, ed. W.D. Ross, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1908–52). 70 Ibid., 1.13, 1102a–b, and passim. 71 For Aristotle’s eventual rejection of Plato’s scheme, see De Anima, 3.9, 432a24ff. For his revised tripartism, see De Anima, 2.2–12; cf. F. Nuyens, L’évolution de la psychologie d’Aristote (Louvain: Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philiosophie, 1948), 189–93; and Aquinas’s attempt to explain the shift in Aristotle’s De Anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. K. Foster and S. Humphries (Yale University Press, 1951), 462. The prevalence of Aristotelian faculty psychology in the Renaissance is apparent in expository poems (Nosce Teipsum by Sir John Davies, Microcosmos and Mirum in Modum by John Davies of Hereford, The Purple Island by Phineas Fletcher); in allegorical plays (Tomkis’s Lingua and Nabbes’s Microcosmus); and in philosophical treatises on nosce teipsum: John Woolton, A Treatise on the Immortalitie of the Soule (London, 1576); Juan de Dios Huarte Navarro, Examen de Ingenios, The Examination of Mens Wits, trans. R. Carew (London, 1594); Batman uppon Bartholome; Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie, trans. T. Bowes (London, 1586); Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London, 1586); Andre Du Laurens (Laurentius), A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight, trans. R. Surphlet (London, 1599); Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601); Philippe de Mornay, The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe, trans. A. Munday (London, 1602); Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement of Learning (London, 1605); Pierre Charron, Of Wisdome, trans. S. Lennard (London, ca. 1607); Thomas Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors (London, 1607); F.N. Coeffeteau, A Table of Humane Passions, trans. E. Grimeston (London, 1621). 72 On Aristotle’s view of the noncorporeality of reason, see De Anima, 3.4, 429a22–7; on his seating of reason in the heart, see De Juventute et Senectute, 3.4, 67b28ff. and 469a4–18; De

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Somno et Vigilia, 458a 15; De Respiratione, 478b33ff.; De Spiritu, 482b6; De Partibus Animalium, 656a 15–b8 (and n.), 665a 11–15; De Generatione Animalium, 781a20. Cf. E.R. Harvey, The Inward Wits (London: Warburg Institute, 1975), 6, 22–3, 34–5, 39, citing Aristotle, the Stoics, and Avicenna as advocates for the heart’s sovereignty. In Aristotle’s view of the heart as the main sense-organ, W.D. Ross says, ‘he was reactionary, and his mistake retarded knowledge for centuries’,’ Aristotle, 143n. 73 Where there is a choice, Spenser follows Plato. In the lowest region of the body, Spenser’s emphasis on the digestive system (ignoring Aristotle’s concern with reproduction, growth, and locomotion) matches Plato’s focus on the belly as seat of appetites. On the intermediate level, Spenser like Plato concentrates on the heart’s affections, rather than the process of sensation. (When the senses appear as Maleger’s troops, they do not exemplify an Aristotelian intermediate power, but rather, in Augustinian fashion, the lowest, outermost consciousness, the ‘bulwarkes’, attacked by the rabble’s appetitive darts and artillery.) At the castle’s summit, the sages signify not the intermediate sensitive faculty but the working of reason. The castle thus follows the geometric and moral idealism of Timaeus, with elements of Aristotelian faculty psychology grafted on to this Platonic base. 74 For the complex tradition of inner wits leading to Spenser’s sages, see pp. 122–30 above. On Spenser’s sages as the three eyes of Prudence, see Kellogg and Steele, Books I and II of The Faerie Queene, notes to 2.9.47, 53–4; and J.L. Mills, ‘Spenser, Lodowick Bryskett, and the Mortalist Controversy: The Faerie Queene, II.ix.22’, PQ 52 (1973), 180–1. Cf. Cicero, De Inventione Rhetorica, 2.53; Aquinas, ST 2.1.57.6.obj.4, and 2.2.48; Dante, Purgatorio, 29.132; Huarte, The Examination of mens Wits, 40–1; Primaudaye, The French Academie, 105, 115; Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 70–1. 75 Crooke, Microcosmographia, 6–8; cf. 249. For the other sources, see n. 68 above. 76 Batman uppon Bartholome is strongly influenced by both Timaeus and the prevalent Aristotelianism of the thirteenth century. Book 3, chs 1–7, compiles Platonic, Aristotelian, and Patristic theories on the nature of the soul. Book 3, chs 10–13, and Book 5, chs 1–3, echo both Plato and Aristotle in seating the soul’s powers in the body. 77 Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology, 7–28; Baker, The Image of Man, 276ff; J.B. Bamborough, The Little World of Man (London: Longmans, Green, 1952); C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge University Press, 1964), 152–69. Cf. P.A. Robin, The Old Physiology in English Literature (London, 1911; rpt Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 2012); M.W. Bundy, ‘Shakespeare and Elizabethan Psychology’, JEGP 23 (1924), 516–49; T. Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (London: Macmillan, 1942); Babb, The Elizabethan Malady, 1–20; Campbell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Heroes, 63ff; Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare’s Characters; G. Bullough, Mirror of Minds (University of Toronto Press, 1962), 1–47; Harvey, Inward Wits. In Harvey’s meticulous history of the wits (which unfortunately ends with Aquinas) she notes Platonic psychology’s continuing influence but ignores it, including the twelfth-century Chartrians’ conception of the wits as rational powers (ingenium, judgment, and memory). 78 Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays, 132ff; Baker, The Image of Man, 275–6. 79 Berger, The Allegorical Temper, 77–84; and his elaboration in ‘Archaism, Immortality, and the Muse in Spenser’s Poetry’, Yale Review 58 (1968), 218. Cf. Anderson, Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays, 16; Harvey, Inward Wits, 30; and the ambivalent views in Kellogg and Steele, Books I and II of The Faerie Queene, 2.9.47n.; Hamilton, ed. at 2.9.47n.; and BrooksDavies, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 2.9.44–5n. 80 This Neoplatonic rendering of the microcosm may be found in Batman uppon Bartholome, 14. Cf. Kellogg and Steele, 2.9.22n.; Mills, ‘Spenser, Lodowick Bryskett’, 173–86. 81 Christianization of the tripartite microcosm is evident in numerous medieval figurative castles: in Castrum humani corporis King Animus has palaces first in the heart, also in the liver and head; in Langland’s Castle of Kynde, Lady Anima resides mainly in the heart, with her protector Sir Inwit above in the head, and Caro, the flesh, under the care of them both; the castle of Sawles Warde presents a hierarchy of Wit and Will, the Soul, and the servant senses; in the thirty-sixth tale of Gesta Romanorum the master of the knights (Reason), the

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daughter of the knight (the Soul), and the master’s greyhound (the Flesh) reveal the characteristic hierarchy; in the fifth of the ‘Parables of Bernard’, the city of Mansoul has three strongholds, Rationabilitas, Concupiscibilitas, and Irascibilitas, which are presided over by Faith, Hope, and Charity, respectively. See Cornelius, ‘The Figurative Castle’, 17–18, 23–4, 27–32, and C.L. Powell, ‘The Castle of the Body’, SP 16 (1919),197–205. The vertical hierarchy of Timaeus is sometimes not strictly maintained (as in Bernard’s allegory, and in other castles which give sovereignty to the heart), yet it usually roughly appears. Spenser’s mastery of the progressive hierarchic structure is evident in the House of Holiness and in his exquisite parallel between the spiritual castle and the castle of the natural body. 82 See Col. 3.8-14, Eph. 4.24. 83 Berger, Allegorical Temper, 81; Mills, ‘Spenser, Lodowick Bryskett, and the Mortalist Controversy’, 182. 84 On the distinction between the soul and its faculties, particularly its intellectual power, see Aquinas, ST 1.79.1; Batman uppon Bartholome, Book 3, ch. 6; and O. Lottin, ‘La distinction entre l’âme et ses facultés’, in Psychologie et morale aux xiie et xiiie siècles (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1957), 1, 507ff. However, the distinction was far from universal among medieval and Renaissance philosophers. 85 On transcendent mountain-vision vis-à-vis the lower watchtower image, see J.S. Wittig, ‘Piers Plowman, B, Passus IX–XII: Elements in the Design of the Inward Journey’, Traditio 28 (1972), 240. 86 On eagle-vision as symbol of contemplative intellect, see Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes, HHL, 55, 68–70; HHB, 24–8, 134–40. Cf. E. Bjorvand, ‘Spenser’s Defence of Poetry: Some Structural Aspects of the Fowre Hymnes’, Fair Forms: Essays in English Literature from Spenser to Jane Austen, ed. M. Røstvig (Cambridge University Press, 1975), 37–9; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 156–8; and B.G. Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame (Princeton University Press, 1966), on the eagle in Dante and Chaucer. 87 For the ‘temporal’ virtue of Temperance Spenser presents the sages in an order that reverses their usual order in the ‘allegory of prudence’. See E. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, New York: Doubleday 1955), 146–68. Instead of looking toward the future with the projecting ability of Phantastes, Spenser’s sense of the natural order looks to the past, through the decrepit but steady working of Eumnestes, thus acknowledging mortality as the price of sin, despite occasional glory incarnated in fleshly existence. 88 Collins explicates the three mystical ways in the House of Holiness (n. 58 above); cf. V.B. Whitaker, The Religious Basis of Spenser’s Thought (Stanford University Press, 1950), 29, 44, 54. Spenser’s use of this scheme, like St George’s cross, suggests a general Christian heritage, not a specifically Roman Catholic sympathy. 89 On the vision of the New Jerusalem as a symbol of the unitive phase, see Walter Hilton, The Ladder of Perfection, trans. L. Sherley-Price (Baltimore: Penguin, 1957), 154ff, 168ff; E. Underhill, Mysticism (1910; rpt New York, 1955), 130, 334–5; Collins, Christian Mysticism, 61, 86. 90 The means of purifying the three levels of man’s being for ascending the ladder of vision was often expressed in this Christian-Platonic pattern: three realms of Dante’s ascending journey, three ‘lives’ of Langland’s Dowel, Dobet, Dobest, or the threefold and sixfold ladders of Augustine, Bonaventure, and other Christian Platonists. See Augustine, Confessione, 10.6– 27, De Quantitate Animae, 1.33, and De Genesi ad Litteram, 12.6-–1; Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum and De Triplici Via; Pietro Bembo, Gli Asolani, trans. R. Gottfried (Indiana University Press, 1954), 173ff; B. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir T. Hoby (1561; rpt London: Penguin, 1976), 303ff. Cf. E.T. Donaldson, Piers Plowman: The C-Text and the Poet (1949; rpt Yale University Press, 1966), 156–61, 169–98; F.X. Newman, ‘St. Augustine’s Three Visions and the Structure of the Commedia’, MLN 82 (1967), 56–78, citing many such schemes in the Middle Ages. C. Butler in Western Mysticism (1928; rpt London and New York: Dover, 2003), 49–56, discusses Augustine’s seminal scheme (sensus, spiritus, intellectus), relating the three stages of vision to the three ways of mystical reform (p. 37), which the Neoplatonic ladders of Bembo and Castiglione omit.

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 91 Rev. 12.3–4, 13.1–8, 17.3–10. Cf. J.E. Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 101–5, 110–14.  92 On the masses as a ‘monster of many heads’, see Spenser, SC, ‘September’, 120–1. Cf. Plato, Republic, 9.588c; and Major. Sir Thomas Elyot and English Humanism, 204–5, n. 83. Maleger, his hags, and his troops form a similar demonic hierarchy: the rabblement assault the senses or lower appetites; the two female assistants attempt to subvert the heart’s dual tendencies; and Maleger himself attacks the rational power (2.11.5–47).  93 Mammon’s sequence of temptations, wealth–honour–pleasure (where wealth, or worldly kingdoms, replaces Aristotle’s knowledge), reverses the classical hierarchy of desires, and also reverses the Biblical temptation sequence in Matt. 4.1–11. The Matthew sequence, as explicated by St Gregory, was the orthodox pattern for the Middle Ages (see E.M. Pope, ‘Paradise Regained’: The Tradition and the Poem (Johns Hopkins Press, 1947), 6–9, 51ff; P. Cullen, Infernal Triad: The Flesh, the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton (Princeton University Press, 1974), xxvi–xxviii). Nevertheless, some medieval exegetes, and Milton in Paradise Regained, chose the unorthodox sequence of Luke 4.1–13. This diversity has obscured the Platonic hierarchy that informs the classic Gregorian sequence.  94 See A.K. Hieatt, ‘Three Fearful Symmetries and the Meaning of Faerie Queene II’, A Theatre for Spenserians, eds J. Kennedy and J. Reither (University of Toronto Press, 1973), 32–43, on how eating the apple and washing the hands signify an infringement of divinity. My point, that these images of temptation have ‘the Flesh as the controlling idea allegorically’, is advanced by Cullen (n. 93) from his different viewpoint (76).  95 See nn. 87, 93 above. Two different principles may be observed in Spenser’s allegorization of tripartite psychology. First, in a static emblematic configuration of this order it is usual to find the sequence according to supremacy: intellect-emotion-sense (especially note the trio of figures at the beginning of Book 1 and the analogous Edenic pageant at the end of Book 2). The backward presentation of Amavia- Ruddymane and then Mortdant at the beginning of Book 2 gives a sense of chaos in comparison with the stately hierarchy of Redcross, Una, and the Dwarf. Second, in an experiential sequence, testing or educating the hero (as in the House of Holiness, Alma’s Castle, Mammon’s Cave, and the Bower of Bliss), it is more usual for the hero to proceed upward through the scale of psychic awareness: from sense, to emotion, to intellect. Mammon’s Cave and the Bower of Bliss are backward in this respect: their development is downward, toward the flesh, the senses, the uttermost conditions of temporality and mutability. These contrary modes of ordering the soul’s powers correspond to what Aquinas calls the ‘order of nature’ (static configuration) and the ‘order of generation’ (experiential sequence) (ST 1.76.4).  96 Cf. E.C. Knowlton, ‘The Genii of Spenser’, SP 25 (1928), 439–56; and J.C. Nietsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Columbia University Press, 1975), esp. chs 5 and 6, on the allegory of Genius, in his higher role as Nature’s priest, showing reason’s supremacy, and the Evil Genius showing its abusive use.  97 See J. Erskine, ‘The Virtue of Friendship in The Faerie Queene’, PMLA 30 (1915), 831–50, 832; Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 338; Roche, The Kindly Flame; Nohrnberg, Analogy; Goldberg, Endlesse Worke; L. Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene (University of California Press, 1995); and A.C. Hamilton’s annotations to FQ 3 and 4.  98 See Goldberg, Endlesse Worke; B. Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound. For fuller debate on closure see pp. 35–40 above, 282–304 below.  99 Though less comprehensive than Book 1’s liberation of the entire city of Eden with Redcrosse and Una’s ‘sea of blissful joy’ (Book 1 being a microcosm of the entire epic), Amoret in 3 is released to reunite with Scudamour, and in 4 Florimell is freed to unite with Marinell. 100 The sensational embrace is omitted – or perhaps simply deferred – in the poem’s 1596 edition. 101 M.I. Stapleton, ‘“Loue my lewd Pilot”: The Ars Amatoria in The Faerie Queen’, TSLL 40 (1998), 328–46. In Ovid and Spenser Pugh analyses Spenser’s treatment of Ovid in a far more positive light.

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102 J.W. Bennett, The Evolution of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1942; rpt New York: Burt Franklin, 1960); Roche, Kindly Flame, 3, 14, 26–7; P.J. Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1967), 160–99; ‘Ariosto, Lodovico’, SE; P.J. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman (Penn State University Press, 1992); P. Wiggins, ‘Spenser’s Use of Ariosto: Imitation and Allusion in Book I of The Faerie Queene’, RenQ 44 (1991), 257–79; R.W. Dasenbrock, Imitating the Italians (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 103 On Bradamante’s translation to Britomart, see Benson, The Invention 123–32, 256–78. 104 Spenser’s reforming of Ariosto is deeply instructive: e.g., Fiordespina as Malecasta, Melissa as Merlin, Atlante as Busirane, the Orc split into Argante/Ollyphant, Proteus remarkably contained. 105 Bennett, Evolution, ch.11, ‘The Emulation of Ariosto: Book III’, 138–53. Cf. D. Javitch, Pro­­ claiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando Furioso (Princeton University Press, 1991). 106 Benson, Invention of the Renaissance Woman. 107 See J. Anderson, ‘“Nor Man It Is”: The Knight of Justice in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, PMLA 85 (1970), 65–77. 108 Britomart unseats the Fairy Guyon (ratio) but aids her co-Briton Redcrosse (mens) in resisting impure desires like Malecasta’s. That the heart can surpass the mind, especially in the postlapsarian state, is emphasized by Aquinas and by many women mystics in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. See B. McGinn, The Presence of God, vols 3, 4, and 5. 109 On Britomart’s displacing Arthur as over-arching hero in Books 3–4, see Roche, Kindly Flame, 47–9, 197. 110 For Venus’ infolding the Graces (Beauty, Chastity, Pleasure), and Britomart’s infolding Florimell, Belphoebe, and Amoret, see E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 28–96, 241–55, and Nohrnberg, Analogy, 461–70, 657–726. Britomart’s integration of the three female avatars complements the Neoplatonic triad of Agape’s sons Priamond, Diamond, Triamond. See Nohrnberg, Analogy, 608–33. On the complementary victimizing of Amoret and Florimell throughout Books 3 and 4, see Nohrnberg, Analogy, and E. Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 117. 111 See Nohrnberg, Analogy; Kaske, ‘Hallmarks of Platonism and the Sons of Agape (FQ IV.ii– iv)’, SSt 24 (2009), 15–71. 112 See Anderson, ‘Britomart’s Armor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’. 113 See J. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge University Press, 1989); M. Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Cornell University Press, 1989); S. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene (Indiana University Press, 1994). 114 S. Wofford, Criticism 30:1 (1988), 1–21; and Anderson, ‘Britomart’, SE. 115 Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2012), 119. On the source of ‘Colin Clout’ in Skelton, see D.L. Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1988). 116 See D. Quint, ‘Bragging Rights: Honor and Courtesy in Shakespeare and Spenser’, Creative Imitation: New Essays in Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, eds D. Quint, M.W. Ferguson, G.W. Pigman III, and W.A. Rebhorn (Binghamton: New York Press, 1992), 391–430. 117 A glance at ‘earn’ in the Spenser Concordance shows a deep shift in its meaning in Books 5 and 6, where the movement into the historical and sensate realm enables protagonists to merit reward. 118 Special concern for merit occurs in public chivalric rites, but irony pervades Satyrane’s tourney (aptly placed in Book 4), both in his erotic energy’s dubiety and in his faulty conferring of awards. 119 Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 39ff, 196ff; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 461–70. Neither Redcrosse nor Guyon has such trinitarian subtypes. Cf. K. Walls on Una’s Trinitarian nature. 120 Nohrnberg, Analogy, 604–33; D.W. Burchmore, ‘Triamond, Agape, and the Fates: Neoplatonic Cosmology in Spenser’s Legend of Friendship’, SSt 5 (1985), 45–64; Kaske, ‘Hallmarks of Platonism and the Sons of Agape’ (n. 111).

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121 Spenser’s Graces reprise veneration of Mary (see Roche, The Kindly Flame, on Belphoebe, 140–1), but allusions to ‘Diana and Actaeon’ also fantasize spectral access to a queen who disdains sexuality. 122 See T.H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), chs 2, 4, 5, appendix 1. 123 See Nohrnberg and Heale, n. 110 above. 124 See P. Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood (1988; New York: Continuum, 1995), and the discussion of sacred blood at pp. 106–10 above. 125 J. Campana insightfully analyses Spenser’s hampered males in The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 126 See M. Villeponteaux, ‘Semper Eadem: Belphoebe’s Denial of Desire’, Renaissance Discourses of Desire, eds C.J. Summers and T.-L. Pebworth (University of Missouri Press, 1993), 29–45; R.W. Dasenbrock, ‘The Squires’ Double-Bind’, notes that Timias is one of many squires in Books 3–4 whose social station obscures merit; but neglects that Timias’ problem might spring from his sensuality, pace Raleigh. 127 Enabled, of course, by heavenly light and aid from his squire Timias. 128 The exceptions are Belphoebe’s advent in 2.3, Florimell’s wedding in 5.3. 129 Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, appendix 2, ‘Pagan Vestiges of the Trinity’, 242: ‘Aliud est itaque trinita res ipsa, aliud imago trinitatis in re alia’. 130 Goldberg, ‘The Mothers in Book III of The Faerie Queene’, TSLL 17 (1975–76), 5–26. Cf. J. Craig, ‘“All Flesh Doth Frailty Breed”: Mothers and Children in The Faerie Queene’, TSLL 42 (2000), 16–32. 131 Roche, Kindly Flame, 43n., 105–9, 114. 132 See L. DeNeef, ‘Spenser’s Amor Fuggitivo and the Transfixed Heart,’ ELH 46 (1979), 13–18; Bestul, Texts of the Passion. 133 Also see Roche, ‘The Faerie Queene, Book III’, SE. 134 The Garden of Adonis (3.6), one of the poem’s most impressive allegorical centres, is not directly experienced by Britomart. 135 See Lewis, The Allegory of Love, chs 3–4,and esp. Nohrnberg, Analogy, ‘The Conjugation of the World’, 429–654. 136 Letter to Raleigh, Hamilton ed., 718. On Spenser’s mysterious reference to ‘accidents’ versus ‘intendments’ in the allegorical design of Book 3, see Roche, The Kindly Flame, 195–211, esp. 196–8. 137 See Brown, The Body and Society. 138 See G. Morgan’s different view, ‘The Meaning of Spenser’s Chastity as the Fairest of Virtues’, in Noble and Joyous Histories: English Romances, 1375–1650 (Dublin, 1993), 245–63. 139 See, e.g., E.J. Bellamy, ‘The Vocative and the Vocational: The Unreadability of Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene’, ELH 54 (1987), 1–30; E. Fowler, ‘The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser’, Representations 51 (1995), 47–76; S. Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford University Press, 1993). 140 See Letter to Raleigh, 1590 title-page, and the discussion of closure in Spenser’s epic at ­pp.  35–40 above, 282–304 below. 141 F. Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (New York: Viking, 1971), ch. 2, ‘The Faerie Queene, I and V’; A. Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (University of Chicago Press, 1971), ‘Apocalyptic thought’; R. Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation (University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 46–9, 143–68; J. Wittreich, ‘Apocalyse’, SE; K. Borris, Spenser’s Poetics of Prophecy in The Faerie Queene V (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, 1990). 142 F. Sandler, ‘The Faerie Queene: An Elizabethan Apocalypse’, The Apocalypse in English Renaissance thought and literature, eds C.A. Patrides and J. Wittreich (Manchester University Press, 1984), 148–74. 143 Nohrnberg, Analogy, 655–733; Borris, ‘Sub Rosa: Pastorella’s Allegorical Homecoming and Closure in the 1596 Faerie Queene’, SSt 21 (2006), 133–80. But for many, Book 6’s ambivalent

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morality is a failed conclusion. D.L. Miller, ‘Calidore’, SE, cites Maxwell, Berger, Cheney, Neuse, Culp, Tonkin, Cain, and Nohrnberg on its endless interruptions and its condescensions to country folk as mere foils for Pastorella. 144 On the complex passional Neoplatonism of Books 3–4, see Nohrnberg, Analogy, 429–651; Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction; and Borris, Quitslund, Kaske (eds), Spenser Studies 24, entirely on Spenser’s Platonism. 145 See D. Stump, ‘The Two Deaths of Mary Stuart: Historical Allegory in Spenser’s Legend of Justice’, SSt 9 (1988), 81–105; R. McCabe, n. 150 below. 146 See Nohrnberg, Analogy, 655–733; H. Berger, Jr, ‘A Secret Discipline’; H. Tonkin, Spenser’s Courteous Pastoral; K. Borris, ‘Sub Rosa’, n. 143 above. 147 In Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton (Cambridge University Press, 2000), K. Borris argues for Arthur’s sustained symbolic power in Book 6. 148 On the poem’s changing allegorical symbolism in Books 5–6, see L. DeNeef, Motives of Metaphor, and his ‘Timias’ and ‘Serena’, SE. Note the major shift in the ontological/psychological base for each of the three pairs of legends. On Books 5 and 6 as inadequately concluding the epic’s development, see pp. 35–40 above. 149 Duessa appears only briefly at the outset of Books 2 and 3. Her three distinct allegorical roles are established mainly in Book 1 (cantos 2, 4–5, 7–8, 12), sporadically in Book 4 (cantos 1.17f, 2.3, 2.19f, 5.11, 9.24), and conclusively but reductively in Book 5 (9.36ff, 10.1–4). 150 On Duessa’s changing import in the first five legends (especially 1, 4, 5) see A. Hume, ‘Duessa’, SE. Cf. R. McCabe, ‘The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI’, ELR 17 (1987), 224–42; Stump, ‘The Two Deaths of Mary Stuart’. 151 For Timias’ role in the intellective allegory of Books 1–2, see 1.7–8; 2.8.17, 9.11, 11.17, 29–31, 48. 152 For Timias’ role in the passional allegory of Books 3–4, see 3.1.18, 3.4.47, 3.5, 4.7.23ff, 4.8.1– 18. 153 See J.L. Mills, ‘Raleigh, Sir Walter’, SE. 154 Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. 155 Elizabeth Throckmorton’s brother Arthur thus restored her to the Queen’s favour. Spenser’s humbled Timias differs from bold Ralegh, who never apologized for loving-ravishingmarrying his ‘Serena’. 156 J.B. Lethbridge, ‘Raleigh in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene’, Studia Neophilologica 64 (1992), 55–66. For Spenser’s management of this scandal, see Hamilton’s note to 4.7.36.8–9; and in SE, L. DeNeef ’s ‘Timias’ and ‘Serena’; J.L. Mills’s ‘Raleigh, Sir Walter’; and J. Anderson’s ‘Belphoebe’. 157 For this third face of Timias, see 6.5.11ff, 6.6.1–16, 6.7.39ff, 6.8.1–30. Spenser, perhaps shrouding this delicate material, alternates the name Serena with Crispina (6.2.23) and Matilda (6.5.Arg). On the Timias episodes, cf. K. Koller, ‘Spenser and Raleigh’, ELH 1 (1934), 48; A.H. Gilbert, ‘Belphoebe’s Misdeeming of Timias’, PMLA 62 (1947), 622–43; M. O’Connell, Mirror and Veil (University of North Carolina Press, 1977), ch. 4; D. Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Fortieth Birthday and Related Fictions’, SSt IV (1983), 3–31; W. Oram, ‘Elizabethan Fact and Spenserian Fictions’, SSt IV (1983), 33–47; J. Bednarz, ‘Raleigh in Spenser’s Historical Allegory’, SSt IV (1983), 49–70; and Andrew Hadfield’s meticulous account of Raleigh–Spenser in, Edmund Spenser (Oxford University Press, 2012).

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6

Shakespeare’s plays as passional cycles: revealing the unconscious in chiastic symmetry Epiphanal encounters within cycles of impassioned judgment Just before Perdita’s reunion with Leontes, a courtly gentleman announces her presence in evangelical terms: This is a creature, Would she begin a sect, might quench the zeal Of all professors else, make proselytes Of who she but bid follow. (The Winter’s Tale, 5.1.106–9)

Leontes calls her ‘princess – goddess!’ and thus evokes again her role as ‘Flora’, a part of ‘great creating nature’ (4.4.2, 88). In Act 5 she is integrated into the ­sophistications of courtly Art, which thus claims Nature’s wonder as its basis (as in Revelation, the jewelled city-court of New Jerusalem finally discloses an Edenic garden at its core).1 But if, like her precursors (Ophelia, Helena, Isabella, Desdemona, Cordelia, Marina, Imogen), Perdita can revitalize the sovereign and his realm, a second recognition scene more conclusively resolves Leontes’s abuse of kingship. The awakened statue moves him from generation to regeneration, reveals divinity not only in nature but in grace, the wonder of Hermione’s persistent loving forgiveness. These conjoined discoveries, a magical piece of theater, draw on Shakespeare’s most potent dramaturgical device: epiphany, a recognition that awakens faith in spiritual identity, arousing the spiritual body. As a ‘showing-forth’ of essential reality (in Christianity, of Jesus’ divinity)2 epiphany in The Winter’s Tale occurs not simply in final recognitions but throughout the play. Hermione’s gracious love is apparent from the outset, is acutely confirmed in her majestic self-defence during the trial, and achieves fullest impact in her radiant unsilencing and tender attentiveness in the final scene; yet it is perceived by Leontes only after sixteen years of grieved absence, aided by ­Paulina’s stern counsel and consummated in her artful direction of the iconic statue scene. Epiphany thus depends on the seer (and the experiential process and artful management of seeing) as much as on the quality of what is seen.3 The ‘reall

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presence’, Richard Hooker says, ‘is not … to be sought for in the sacrament, but in the worthie receiver of the sacrament.’4 To achieve such vision, Lancelot Andrewes in a sermon of 1597 urges continual effort: ‘look again and again; or … “think upon it over and over again”, … to supply the weakness and want of our former lack of attention’.5 The spiritual reality is always there but not always perceived – often is strangely opposed and obscured. Five modes of Biblical epiphany in Shakespeare’s plays In The Origins of Shakespeare Emrys Jones finds four features of mystery plays that recur regularly in Shakespeare’s plays: stress on the antagonists’ ‘virulent malice’; their ‘conspiratorial method’; their ‘legalistic’ and ‘hypocritical speechtones’, a loquaciousness that contrasts Jesus’ silence; and Jesus’ ‘progressive isolation’ and abuse.6 Jones’s focus on the darkest aspects of the mystery cycle accords with Shakespeare’s earliest plays: the first history tetrad highlights the egocentric persecutors (Margaret, Cardinal Beaufort, Richard III); those who are baited (Gloucester, York) seem Christlike only in their subjection to torment. Victims in later plays (Richard II, Desdemona, Lear, Edgar, Cordelia, Timon, Coriolanus) offer richer analogues;7 but in none of these does Jones treat the positive aspects of the mystery plays: epiphany of the incarnate deity, shown in an outpouring of forgiving love;8 change from worldliness to spirituality through suffering;9 and spiritual empowerment of the vulgar and unworthy which evokes empathetic laughter among those who parody the central mystery.10 What central mystery informs Shakespearean epiphany? I will consider five New Testament events widely regarded as epiphanal; each, with its drama of obstructing agents, appears with increasing depth of meaning in many Shakespearean scenes. 1. Most prominent is Jesus’ Nativity, resisted by Herod, deflected by the innkeeper, and celebrated by shepherds and Magi. John Donne calls it ‘a day that consists of twelve dayes’, and all ‘make up the Epiphany’.11 ‘Every manifestation of Christ to the world, to the church, to a particular soul, is an Epiphany, a Christmas-day.’ Priests ‘who dwell in God’s house are most inexcusable, if they have not a continual Epiphany; and at the sacrament every man is a priest.’12 Richard III and Macbeth stress the subversion of nativity: deformed birth, violent caesarean, and a Herod-like slaughter of innocents.13 In All’s Well that Ends Well even nativity from bed-trickery echoes Christ’s manifestation: ‘one that’s dead is quick’ (5.3.304). Nativity epiphanies abound in the final plays where they induce in male protagonists their own empathetic labour, struggling for spiritual rebirth. Pericles laments the ‘blustrous birth’ of Marina, ‘as chiding a nativity / As … heaven can make / To herald thee from the womb’ (Pericles, 3.1.28, 32–4), but is drawn to active participation: ‘I am great with woe and shall deliver weeping’ (5.1.109).14 In The Winter’s Tale Leontes repudiates nativity despite Paulina’s effort to make him ‘soften at the sight o’ the child’ (2.2.40): ‘Behold, my lords, / Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father’ (2.3.98– 100). In The Tempest the ‘cherubin’ Miranda preserves her father’s faith and thus elicits another spiritual pregnancy:

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        Thou didst smile, Infused with a fortitude from heaven, When I have decked the sea with drops full salt, Under my burden groaned, which raised in me An undergoing stomach, to bear up Against what should ensue.

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(1.2.153–8)

And in Henry VIII Cranmer as magus holds up a new-born babe to behold (‘royal infant-heaven still move about her!’) and swaddles it in Biblical allusions to predict an England where ‘God shall be truly known’ (5.5.16–56). 2. Almost equally prominent is Jesus’ Baptism,15 with God’s approving voice and the Spirit descending as a dove. In this case obstructing agents are those who resist cleansing and hence make the water destructive, as in Noah’s flood and the Red Sea debacle. Lancelot Andrewes plumbs the levels of this second epiphany in a Whitsunday sermon: the cleansing baptism of water, atoning baptism of blood, rapturous baptism of fire – each conferring freedom, power, and love by sacrificing all that impedes vision.16 With a baptismal allusion Romeo confirms his affection (‘Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized’, 2.2.50); Henry V, his conscientiousness in invading France (1.2.31–2); Iago, his villainy (2.3.337–8). Baptismal imagery may be negatively inverted (Othello’s flood of guilt, Macbeth’s and Lady Macbeth’s vain washing),17 painfully ambivalent (the tempestuous nativities of Marina, Perdita, Miranda, or the steeple-drenching, cock-drowning storm of madness that transforms Lear’s pride),18 or joyously direct (the national baptism of Elizabeth). Besides watery dissolution, baptism may bring a change of name (Romeo), clothing (Lear),19 national identity (Cymbeline),20 or religious faith (Shylock).21 These cleansing renewals are parodied by Falstaff ’s mockPuritan devotion to sack and dousing in the river. Such an inversion is described in Andrewes’s Whitsunday sermon: ‘“even soused over head and ears” in their sins, in “many foolish and noisome lusts, which drown men in perdition”’.22 3. A third epiphany is Jesus’ Transfiguration, when Peter, James, and John saw fully his spiritual being23 yet were unable to interpret or to participate in that glory. Transfiguration epiphanies figure prominently in Shakespeare’s plays, first as comic parody: in the duping of Christopher Sly (‘I am a lord indeed’ (The Taming of the Shrew, Induction 2.72), showing anyone’s capacity for change; in Bianca’s tricky self-idolatry (‘Am I your bird? I mean to shift my bush’, 5.2.46); and in Kate’s learning to role-play sufficiently to perform a stunning self-revelation, which draws force from the model of epiphanal transfiguration.24 The parody of a divinely sponsored change is more explicit and sweeping in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.25 Hippolyta observes in the young lovers’ midsummer madness ‘all their minds transfigured so together’ (5.1.24); and to explain his ‘translation’ Bottom alludes not to Ovid or Apuleius but to Paul’s Corinthian vision: ‘eye of man hath not seen …. We shall all be changed.’ Transfiguration by love is affirmed in Romeo and Juliet and all the romantic comedies; All’s Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure, using humiliating bed-trickery for a deeper change, bring guilt and gracious forgiveness. And in the romances, transfiguration springs

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from ­disclosure of an ocean of love,26 a Nothingness fully accessible to the soul’s nothing. 4. A fourth type of epiphany is Jesus’ Resurrection and then Ascension27 – obstructions being Mary Magdalene’s sense of unworth, strangers’ failure to see, Thomas’s doubt. Such risings recur in many Shakespearean plays. In keeping with Hal’s messianic promise of ‘Redeeming time’ (1H4 1.2.211), Vernon sees him ‘Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury’ (4.1.106).28 Falstaff parodies such claims – ‘we rose both at an instant and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock’ (5.4.145–6) – and is resurrected by the Hostess ‘in Arthur’s bosom’ (H5 2.3.9–10). The romances offer Thaisa’ s literal resurrection, the resuscitation of Imogen and ‘Posthumus’, Hermione’s climactic reanimation, and Prospero’s recovery of all the ship’s ‘freighting souls’, especially Alonso, transformed by an oceanic remorse that eluded Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. 5. Epiphany gains fullest meaning amid the desolation of the Crucifixion.29 This paradox is echoed in most of the tragedies, especially King Lear, the impoverished venue where epiphany gains full effect in Shakespeare’s works. Lear’s empathetic defence of Tom, the Bethlehem beggar who is terrified of fiends and obsessed with his sins, matches Southwell’s allegory of the Passion in Spiritual Exercises: Consider first how thou wert the captive and slave of the devil, bound hand and foot by the chains of sin and at the very gates of hell. Thy king, hearing of this, laid aside His royal majesty, His power, His attendants, and His state, clothed Himself in coarse and torn garments and came into this vale of tears. He has been torn by thorns and has been without protection from the rain and storms.30

At first Lear travesties the analogue. In supreme pride, not loving service, he divests himself of ‘majesty … power … attendants … state’, though he intends to keep all four; and even as suffering awakens sympathy for ‘naked wretches’ (3.4.28) he fluctuates from lewd indulgence (‘Let copulation thrive’) to nihilistic aggression (‘kill, kill, kill’, 4.6.114, 187). So too Edgar’s imitation of a demonpossessed beggar differs markedly from Jesus’ Passion. Yet the analogue persists as Edgar and Lear attend to each other’s condition, especially when Edgar calls the mad king a ‘side-piercing sight’ (4.6.85), forcing Jacobeans and subsequent audiences to recall the Crucifixion. For that wound, says Andrewes, consummates the Passion: ‘the perfection of our knowledge … is the knowledge of Christ’s piercing’, ‘the deadliest and deepest wound’ of ‘His very heart’; ‘Christ pierced on the cross is liber charitatis, “the very book of love” laid open before us’.31 Medieval dramas and narratives of Christ’s Passion provide prototypes of the tortured body that is central to King Lear, though the analogue is continually disfigured by Lear, Edgar, and Gloucester.32 Cordelia evokes the memory most fully: her silence at Lear’s Pilate-like request, France’s praise for her honest poverty of spirit (1.1.254–65), her attention to ‘my father’s business’ in order to redeem ‘nature from the general curse / Which twain have brought her to’ (4.6.206–7), her ‘hanged’ body and the concluding pietà.33 Does Shakespeare evoke these powerful epiphany images of the Passion – which Louis Martz finds central to Renaissance devotions and lyrics – only to enforce the most profoundly sceptical nihilism?34

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The evolution of epiphany in Shakespeare’s plays The progressive but conflicted discovery process in King Lear will become overtly religious in the romances, but in the early plays it is shockingly vulgar, either a proudly narcissistic self-promotion or a grotesquely cruel exposure of others. It focuses on body more than soul; it tends to polarize, dividing male from female, master from servant, self from other; it arouses sentimentality or fury rather than complex empathetic awareness; and it brings little learning or growth. In Titus Andronicus each ‘recognition’ is sheer anti-epiphany, a Medusan spectacle of savage mutilation that reduces persons to body-parts; dispiriting characters and audience, it paralyses us into statuary like Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.35 Equally focused on ‘outward faces’ is The Comedy of Errors, where epiphany involves no moral engagement between the various divided ‘twins’ (three sets of siblings, severed parents, rival cities). Likewise other early revelations – the tamed shrew, the pageants of unworthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Proteus’ shamed glance at Julia’s love – remain obscure, opaque, not fully realized. In the romantic comedies and histories of 1597–1600 – with characters capable of role-playing and self-parody – recognition increasingly involves a sophisticated self-determining mode of transfiguration. Shakespeare engineers a half convincing epiphany of Hal/Henry V as a prodigal self-transformed into the ‘mirror of all Christian kings’ (H5 2.Pr.6) by baptizing his army in blood (1H4 3.2.132–7). Similarly sophisticated and oblique are the comic epiphanies celebrating undervalued virtues of Hero and Beatrice, Portia, Nerissa and Jessica, Rosalind and Celia, Viola and Olivia – revelations achieved by humbling male pride and by displaying the women’s active wit and artful use of disguise: here, to some extent, epiphany works both ways by awakening both male and female. The bi-gender twins of Twelfth Night, both drawn between homoerotic and heteroerotic loves (neither fully realized), cannot entirely escape courtly Illyria’s maskings in the final revelation – which occurs, of course, in the context of Twelfth Night, the feast of Epiphany in the liturgical calendar. These disclosures of the soul’s reality are complex – interchange of selfhood through love or sufferance, twinship with the sexual other, limited access to Spirit – but none of them, not even the elaborate religious allusiveness of The Merchant of Venice, presents a convincing Christian epiphany. In the problem comedies epiphany is more troubled and thereby more miraculous. Spiritual power is invested in those who must use it indirectly. Helena’s selfdisclosure must cure the wounded male – the king’s body, Bertram’s soul – and must draw him to acknowledge her goodness; and Vincentio’s ‘second coming’ must transform both sensualists and hypocrites. Each play uses a bed-trick to beguile the wilful into righteous bonding, as in the Biblical story of Tamar and Judah.36 Epiphany is disturbingly split: a shocking display of shameful guilt, then a stunning revelation of loving forgiveness.37 Those who engineer the beguilement know it compromises even the well-intentioned (‘wicked meaning in a lawful deed, / And lawful meaning in a wicked act, / Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact’, AW 3.7.45–7), yet they take this sinfulness upon themselves to reclaim the lost.

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The mature tragedies also use epiphany as a dramaturgical axis but with greater impact. Tragic anagnorisis, by revealing implacable mortality and profoundest guilt, attains great radiance and power, and it discloses a supernatural provenance; yet this intense vision is disfigured by fiendish evil. Hamlet acutely questions the will ‘to be’, yet his vision of being is hampered by troubled relationships. Despite his relatively sensitive dialogues with commoners (guards, players, gravedigger), despite his efforts to reconcile with Ophelia, Gertrude, and Laertes, despite his philosophic acceptance of mortality, and Horatio’s ethereal eulogy – despite all that fosters admiration for this eloquent everyman, he never attains genuine epiphany. The ghostly encounter, one of Shakespeare’s most richly symbolic scenes, suggests how much Hamlet desires such vision; but the ghost – a haunting image of his father as spectral superego – is a subverted epiphany (rightly debated by critics and by Hamlet himself),38 and the remaining action teases us not just by delaying vengeance but by evading epiphany. At the centre of Act 3, ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ re-enacts the ghostly anti-epiphany, stunning Claudius with a vision of his primal evil: ‘Give me some light. Away!’ This ‘Mousetrap’, baited with queen and crown, is framed by two other entrapments: one baited with Ophelia, one with Gertrude. One might find a paradigm of human nature in this conflict of enemy egos, with love reduced to a deadly lure; but as epiphany it leaves much to be desired. The final cycle of action turns on the dense symbolism of Ophelia’s madness, death, and burial – a sequence which should bring enlightenment at the primal scene of the id, the core of self with its craving for absolute love – but her madness, missing Hamlet’s reaction, lacks focus. Though at the burial Hamlet proclaims (in past tense) his love for Ophelia, the sentiment is quickly displaced by sibling rivalry and self-preening hyperbole: ‘Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum’ (5.1.272–4). Thereafter Ophelia is forgotten, the crowning epiphany voided.39 Hamlet’s discovery of evil in human nature (though not fully in himself) activates psychic defences of denial and projection that cruelly isolate and sacrifice those who might provide access to epiphany. Hamlet epitomizes the problem of tragic epiphany, which in radically exposing human guilt obscures the soul’s divine mystery. The play’s main revelations focus its three cycles of action: the ghost’s disclosure of evil at the centre of Acts 1–2, Hamlet’s artful imitatio (the Mousetrap) at the centre of Act 3, and Ophelia’s internalization of that malice (her Edenic flowers showing Nature’s unused potencies, her bawdy songs showing Reason’s disfigurement) at the centre of Acts 4–5. But instead of progressive enlightenment, these dark anagnorises disable the psyche’s objectrelational cathexes and thus cancel the power of reconciliation at the levels of superego, ego, and id (or, in Augustine’s terms, memory, understanding, and will – those parts of the soul corresponding to God, Christ, and Spirit).40 Like the chaos of Lear’s escalating madness, Ophelia’s wounded fantasy enables neither Hamlet’s illumination nor her own. Yet her distraught passion holds the seeds of Desdemona’s and Cordelia’s sacrifice, Cleopatra’s and Hermione’s passionate transfiguration, and the men’s shame-faced recovery of a loving, generative wife/daughter in the romances. Why does Shakespeare’s

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tragic epiphany conclude with the aggressive sacrifice of women, and his romance epiphany with their recovery? According to David Bakan’s Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice (1968), in situations involving death-crisis, ‘that which is “me” is made into something which is “not-me”, and … that “not-me” is sacrificed in order that “I” might continue to live’.41 Such psychic scenes pervade Hamlet, which insistently broods on humankind’s vulnerability to mortality. The anxiety intensifies in man’s problematic relation to woman, who in many ways is seen as causing the horrid vulnerability. Womb is tomb – once loving source, now feared devourer, of his mortal being. As cause of his vulnerable body, as strange sexual other, as sponsor of dependence, and perhaps above all as object-relational symbol of his soul, which he suspects of being tainted and attached to evil, she is sacrificed to reassert his power, autonomy, freedom. The lesson of the tragedies, and supremely of The Winter’s Tale, is that the formulation and exaggeration of that sexual divide – the creation, scapegoating, and sacrificing of a ‘not-me’ – completely desecrates the ‘me’. The tragedies increasingly suggest a goal not just of self-discovery but of selfdiscovery-through-otherness. Othello, attending more deeply to relationship, refocuses the ontological query: ‘To love or not to love – that is the question.’ The moving public epiphany of transfiguring affection at the end of Act I (‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind’) is displaced by the contrary revelation Iago engineers at the centre of Act 3 – discrediting Desdemona’s love, replacing it with Iago’s false devotion (‘I am your own forever’, 3.3.495), and turning from spiritual communion to obsession with physical sexuality and with the handkerchief (3.3.449ff). The third and final cycle has at its centre Desdemona singing ‘willow’ at her death-bed and debating with Emilia on the nature of woman (4.3), a scene which parallels that with Ophelia’s mad songs but is more overtly spiritual and radiant. Othello, murderously absent, does not witness this epiphany; but, as the conclusion reveals, pragmatic vulgar Emilia, who would have considered adultery for the right price, is transformed to imitate Desdemona’s spirituality:        What did thy song bode, lady? Hark, canst thou hear me? I will play the swan, And die in music. [Sings.] ‘Willow, willow, willow’. Moor, she was chaste. She loved thee, cruel Moor. So come my soul to bliss as I speak true.

(5.2.255–9)

And in so doing she at last transfers the vision to Othello. In the tragedies such encounters assume great depth by merging self-discovery with awareness of others’ consciousness. In Being and Nothingness Sartre notes that our identity forms by ‘seeing others see us’.42 As Prospero says of Ferdinand and Miranda at their mutual epiphany, ‘They have changed eyes’ (1.2.445). In each other he knows the lovers have discovered (despite his skeptical insistence on Ferdinand’s bodiliness) a reflection of divinity, the imago Dei: yes, Miranda, it is a ‘spirit’. Each mature tragedy, especially after Hamlet, offers a progressive series of relational epiphanies that systematically illuminate the soul’s powers. Increasingly they

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show the protagonist’s success or failure to exhibit himself or herself as perfect, selfknowing, immortal. Recognition is not reserved for the final scene but evolves in a series of encounters that serve as axis and conclusion for each of the play’s three cycles. (1) Central to the first two-act cycle of King Lear is the face-off with loveless Goneril in which Lear sees mirrored his own abuse of authority, and the cycle ends with the fuller embarrassment that inverts his initial treatment of Cordelia and Kent. (2) In meeting Poor Tom at the mid-point of Act 3 Lear reclaims the vulnerable otherness he has denied in himself and others; and this central cycle ends with Gloucester’s analogous insight. (3) In Lear’s reunion with Cordelia at the centre of Acts 4–5, he acknowledges the deepest vulnerability, a childlike dependence on her motherly nurture and love; and the cycle ends in painful (but, in folio, rapturous) merging with her spirit. Epiphany, thus shaping each stage of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, focuses on three individuals who represent the human family’s main object-relational bonds and draws the protagonist toward the primal stage of human development and the core of selfhood. (See pp. 258–68 below.) As immature prototypes for this masterful dramaturgy, consider the matching epiphany-series in two earlier plays. At the centre of the first cycle of Romeo and Juliet (Acts 1–2) is the balcony encounter in which they pledge love in a mutual sonnet, a cycle ending in secret marriage. At the centre of Act 3 is not the duel but the tower bedroom scene, a love-epiphany intensified by guilt (his duels before, her family deceptions after). At the centre of acts 4–5 are Juliet’s feigned death and Romeo’s vision of rebirth, the cycle ending in love-deaths that implicitly consummate the marriage. A Midsummer Night’s Dream parodies that sequence. Central to acts 1–2 is the casting of rustics for ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ (a hilarious parody of Romeo and Juliet’s initial commitment), the cycle ending with Lysander’s reversal and Titania’s sleep. At the centre of Act 3 is love’s fullest reversal: both young men chase fleeing Helena, Titania dotes on ass-headed Bottom, and the cycle again ends in sleep. At the centre of Acts 4–5 all wake with memories of supernatural metamorphosis; and, at the cycle’s end, Pyramus and Thisbe perform a feigned love-death. The series of parody-epiphanies (Bottom playing both lovers; Bottomas-ass enjoying Titania’s dotage; Bottom recalling a ‘rare vision’ while garbling 1 Corinthians, and finally ‘disfiguring’ the love-death) both celebrates and questions the love-epiphanies of Dante, Petrarch, and the romances, showing Shakespeare’s aloof sophistication.43 Shakespeare’s early plays satirically disclose the soul’s reality, the parody gaining mythic scope in the ‘translations’ and ‘transfigurations’ of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later comedies (The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale) give the religious idiom more substance but always with a parodic analogue like the executioner Abhorson’s ‘profession’ of his ‘mystery’. Increasingly they expose – in Shylock, Antonio, Leontes – abuses of judgment and power that require the supervening art of a Portia, Vincentio, or Paulina. Their task is not to punish but to prepare the soul for seeing, then to reveal, by well-managed epiphany, the loving forgiveness that genuinely transfigures. The deflected symbolic promise of the early comedies is fulfilled in the romances. R.S. White calls The Tempest ‘a sustained epiphany’, and with Northrop Frye, Frank

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Kermode, and others he stresses ‘recognition’ as each romance’s goal:44 Pericles with Marina and Thaisa, Posthumus with Imogen, Cymbeline with his lost family, Leontes with Perdita and Hermione, Prospero even with enemies, Henry VIII with his miracle-daughter Elizabeth. Epiphany is progressively realized in these plays, culminating in a final exhilarating concatenation, a chain-reaction of recognitions like Chinese fireworks. As in Henri Bergson’s durée, ‘ideas and sensations succeed each other with increased rapidity…. Finally, in extreme joy, our perceptions and memories acquire an indefinable quality, … and so new, that at certain moments, returning upon ourselves, we experience an astonishment of being.’45 Does Shakespeare secularize epiphany? Unanswerable questions remain. In Shakespeare’s plays to what extent does each major reunion and recognition constitute a Christian epiphany, purposely or subtextually evoking the life, teachings, and divinity of the messiah? In so far as they promote what R.G. Hunter calls ‘the comedy of forgiveness’,46 the mature comedies – from The Merchant of Venice through the romances – suggest a guardedly positive reply; and the transfigurational parodies in The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Falstaff ’s antics, and in the romances’ vulgar subplots show insistent ironic engagement with the dream of perfecting spiritual empowerment as the greatest and most travestied Christian hope. In the problem comedies, tragedies, and romances the deep testings of love, informing suffering with redemptive purpose, establish a more comprehensive and religious mode of recognition. Nevertheless, a wealth of recalcitrant material in each play deters us from making simplistic generalizations. Emrys Jones shows how Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies adopt the Passion plays’ victimization scenes, especially in King Lear; yet the tragedies, both Roman and Christian, include rituals of violent sacrifice and scapegoating which do not easily evoke the Gospel story. Ambitious Caesar and scornful Coriolanus attract violence in a different way from Jesus,47 and all the tragedies enact ritual slayings (or threatened slayings) of the three ‘object-relations’ that structure familial and individual identity: first, authority figures (Titus and Saturninus, Julius Caesar, King Hamlet, King Lear, King Duncan, Coriolanus); second, rival siblings or enemy twins (Hamlet versus Laertes, Edmund versus Edgar, Macbeth versus Banquo or Macbeth versus Macduff, Antony/Cleopatra versus Octavius, Coriolanus versus Aufidius), and, third, nurturing women – both virginal innocents (Lavinia, Desdemona, Cordelia) and mothers (Lady Macduff, Cleopatra, Volumnia, Virgilia). Such intimately savage rites associate Shakespeare with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as easily as with medieval mysteries and martyred-saint plays.48 Equally disturbing is the epiphany gained through love-death (Romeo and Juliet, Portia, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and perhaps Ophelia and Lady Macbeth) or through friendship-suicide (Brutus, Enobarbus, Eros, Charmian, Iras). The ‘high Roman fashion’ of noble self-destruction (A&C 4.15.92) joins hands with the allegorizing of medieval romance to present some suicides favourably, not repudiating life but affirming the bond with a beloved. Many Christian critics, however, refuse to see suicide as epiphany.49

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Though the case for Christian tragedy (thus ‘tragic epiphany’) rests mainly on Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and indirectly King Lear,50 one is awed by Shakespeare’s diversity, which achieves something like epiphany even in the Roman plays – darkly in Titus’ revenge, brightly in Cleopatra’s love-death. Unlike medieval clerics such as the author of Ovide moralisée who reduced all pagan tales to a narrow salvational masterplot, Shakespeare partly evokes the atmosphere and ethos of Plutarch’s Rome or of pre-Christian England; yet, subjecting each tale to profound revision, he arrives at increasingly epiphanal endings which often differ strikingly from his sources – as, for example, in Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. As Walter Foreman argues in The Music at the Close, those endings brilliantly link visionary insight with passional fullness, embodied in poetic magic or ‘music’ that fully exploits the power of the word.51 Does Shakespeare ‘secularize’ epiphany, recasting the soul’s quest for joyous vision in his own culture’s ideologies and fictive paradigms? Comparison with the visionary aesthetics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists offers some perspective on this unsolvable question. James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, turning from the priesthood to write poetic fictions, explains his new vocation as an openness to moments of ‘epiphany’, both in life and language: By epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.52

Whereas the epiphanies of Shakespeare’s late plays increasingly serve both artistry and religious faith, Morris Beja in Epiphany in the Modern Novel stresses that for modern poets such as the Imagists and novelists such as Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, and Woolf, this ‘spiritual manifestation’ is basically secular.53 For Joyce it is not a ‘manifestation of godhead, the showing forth of Christ to the Magi, although that is a useful metaphor’, but rather ‘the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thing”, the moment in which “the soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant”’.54 Richard Ellmann notes Joyce’s brash secularization of the mystery’s source and meaning: some epiphanies, says Stephen, are ‘eucharistic’, moments of fullness and passion; but ‘I must wait for the Eucharist to come to me’ and then ‘set about translating the phrase into common sense,’55 – into everyday pragmatism and demystified materialism. What then is secularization: substantial, or only nominal change? If Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce offer distinct modes of epiphany, does this difference alter the complexities of being (world, embodied soul, God) to which each poet refers? Does it distinguish their inner conditions, or the meaning and impact of their fictions? Does the reality of God, Christ, and Spirit, and the devotional or philosophic quests to know this spiritual reality, steadily lose bearing on literary works? The question of epiphany is surely as complex for Joyce as for Shakespeare, each reared in a divided and embattled Christian culture, each a sophisticated master of metaphoric evasiveness, indirectness, irony, reversibility. Let us evaluate

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some apparent differences between Shakespeare’s epiphanies (especially in the romances) and those of Joyce and other moderns. First, Shakespearean epiphany, evoked by momentous relational crisis, discloses the value and miraculousness of human life: the comic epiphany of love, keying on magical twinship of souls; the epiphany of power in the histories, and guilt in the tragedies – mesmerizing acts of domination (Titus, Aaron, Richard III, Cornwall, Coriolanus) or the true empowerment of loving sacrifice (Talbot, Henry V, Orlando, Viola, Helena, Cordelia);56 and the epiphany of spiritual rebirth in the romances – Pericles’s hearing the music of the spheres, Posthumus’ dream of gods and ancestors, Polyxenes’ court viewing Perdita as Flora amid ‘great creating nature’, Leontes’ court witnessing Hermione’s reanimation as ‘grace’, kings/ lovers/clowns seeing their spiritual reflections in Prospero’s potent visions. In contrast, for many modern artists these illuminations focus on vulgar events and speeches of everyday life with seemingly trivial, arbitrary causes: Proust eating a tea-soaked pastry; Joyce reliving a Dublin day by cooking a sausage, drinking at the pub, flushing the commode. Joyce keenly distinguished his special ‘radiant’ insights from ordinary processes of moral judgment. In his journals he designated epiphanies by using the ‘Criterion of Incongruity’ (Irrelevance) and the ‘Criterion of Insignificance’.57 In Ulysses Leopold and Molly Bloom derive illumination and passion from the most commonplace events – with no easily reasoned connection between life’s random ordinariness and the rich interplay of sense perception, memory, fantasy, and ‘spiritual manifestation’ springing from that circumstantial flux. Robert Langbaum, Ashton Nichols, and Martin Bidney trace these aspects of modern epiphany – its common naturalistic basis, its sudden passionate overflow that defies rational prediction – to Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’.58 Modern artists’ privileging of the ‘trivial’ does not, however, prevent imaginative access to the sublime, nor does it prevent the Blooms’ quotidian routines and imaginings from alluding to all human history, all poetic fictions. It does make us wonder whether the trivial is, in itself, the substance of epiphany. Joyce’s stress on ‘insignificant’ material objects or parts of the body seems ironic and disingenuous: modestly disallowing reason’s value in such illuminations, he inevitably reasserts intellectual prowess by subjecting those ‘moments’ to rigorous evaluation. Contrarily, Shakespeare’s privileging of miraculous spirit-powers does not prevent his embracing the colourfully crude and common. The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, though admired for sublime spectacle, also delight in vulgar dialect and homely detail – vulgarity which does not desacramentalize the romance vision but substantiates it by making ‘wonder seem familiar’.59 Second, Shakespearean epiphany is mainly experienced by the royal, heroic, sophisticated, and saintly – especially those who, after betraying their royal heritage, atone with courage, long-suffering, and humility (Pericles, Posthumus, Florizel, Ferdinand, Leontes, Alonso, Prospero ), as well as those whose purity of heart brings sympathetic suffering (Marina, Thaisa, Imogen, Perdita, Hermione, Miranda) and those whose imaginative prowess makes wonder of their very foibles

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(Falstaff, Cleopatra).60 Modern fictions, on the other hand, often urge a democracy of epiphany: illuminations may come to anyone, no matter what social caste, no matter how unworthy – indeed almost because of the struggle with self-esteem: Swann and Odette, Leopold and Molly Bloom, Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit and other grotesques. Despite this apparent privileging of the vulgar and unworthy, however, most modem ‘epiphanies’ are perceived and recorded by a sophisticated elite: the well-bred, well-educated Swann (and Proust) whose deeply moral aperçu surpasses the awareness of most of the aristocrats; the epiphanal insights of Leopold Bloom (and Joyce) revealing an intellectually literate and allusive sensibility, painfully sensitive to the moral failures of self and others; Molly Bloom’s and Mrs Ramsey’s empathic, discerning overflow of observations, feelings, and intuitions – intricately recorded by the intellectual Joyce and the Bloomsburian Woolf as an ongoing epiphany of ‘great creating nature’ from the inside. Contrarily, if epiphany is democratic, Shakespeare surely surpasses most poets in attributing intense consciousness to the common mind: Bottom’s ‘rare vision’ and persistent stealing of centre-stage; the gravedigger’s daunting presence (like the remembered Yorick) that, besides grounding Hamlet in the spry humour and insightfulness of his workman’s soul, momentarily displaces Hamlet as a source of epiphanal vision; Caliban’s irresistible centrality, delighting in the heavenly music and dreams most courtiers neglect (3.2.137–45) and provoking Prospero’s admission of relationship (5.1.278–9). Shakespeare persistently engenders epiphany out of simplest clay. He gives poignant self-revelations not only to the vulgar and literal-minded but also to the woefully hard-hearted and devious: judgmental Shylock of The Merchant of Venice and Antonio of Measure for Measure; proudly jealous Lear, Posthumus, Leontes; wilfully masterful Falstaff and Cleopatra; unruly servants such as Launce, Grumio, Puck, Dogberry, Touchstone, Parolles, Pompey, and Caliban – often, against or beyond their will, instrumental in bringing epiphany to the aristocrats, and entrusted with moments of centre-stage self-disclosure in which audiences see themselves no less than in Hamlet, Lear, and Cleopatra. Few writers (Chaucer, Faulkner) rival Shakespeare in the outrageous vulgarity and unworthiness of those who provoke and receive, in some measure, epiphany. Finally, Shakespearean epiphany, especially in the romances, is caused by supernatural spirit-power, often emphatically immanent in nature and human nature, yet clearly allied with transcendent reality: either in elemental spirits (Puck, Ariel); in magi using the spiritual force of wit to manage the power of herbs, words, and human psyches (Oberon, Portia, Helena, Vincentio, Cerimon, Cornelius, Paulina, Prospero); or in deities who appear in spiritual crises to enlighten royals who have been humbled – and thus ensure providential justice (Diana in Pericles, Jupiter in Cymbeline, Apollo in The Winter’s Tale, the ‘providence’ and ‘Spirits’ to which Prospero and Cranmer refer).61 In contrast, the origin of epiphany in modern art is rarely identified. For most modern artists one assumes ‘natural’ causes: bodily and material circumstances, with tempers, defences, and fantasies generated by the Freudian ‘bodily ego’. But there is mysterious suggestiveness in the provenance of their illuminations: in Faulkner’s ‘The Bear’ Ike McCaslin finds depths of his nature in a weaponless meeting with a bear (‘no more but such a poor bare forked

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animal’), in ledgers of his slave-owning family (‘the dark backward and abysm of time’), and in the apparition of Boon Hogganbeck cursing and banging his jammed gun under a tree alive with squirrels (‘some monster of the isle …. Where the devil should he learn our language?’).62 For Renaissance divines and allegorists such as Andrewes and Edmund Spenser, as for Aquinas and Dante, rational Ideality constructs a noble highway to the vision of God: they privilege both formal and final causes. Wordsworth’s epiphanies stress the efficient cause, passional psychic Existence (‘feeling’, ‘imagination’); and Joycean epiphany stresses the material cause or Actuality (‘the “whatness” of things’).63 These four modes of being and of vision endure, like the four ‘zoas’ Blake perceived in human nature, but cultures (and individuals) tend to privilege one over the rest. These diverse epiphanies, says Lancelot Andrewes, affirm the plural manifestation of ‘the Father of Lights’ (James 1.17), who offers to humankind both ‘the light of nature’ and the multifold ‘light of God’s Law’ – prophecy and the Gospel, ‘the inward light of grace’, ‘the light of comfort of His Holy Spirit’, and ‘the light of glory … where God dwelleth and where we shall dwell with Him …, the sun whereof never sets’.64 Shakespeare balances these worldviews. Material sensation and bodily drives do not claim full allegiance, though he always attends deeply to bodily appearances. Nor does the ineffable vision of God swallow up lesser realities, like the ‘great sea of joys’ Pericles feared might ‘O’erbear the shores of my mortality, / And drown me with their sweetness’ (5.1.197–9). Shakespeare’s broad humanist focus is on personal encounter, the human face, and all the natural and divine reality it can reflect. The loving, suffering visages of Othello, Desdemona, Cordelia, Marina, Hermione, Miranda – and the questing visages of Rosalind, Lear, Cleopatra, Pericles, Leontes – finally suggest a creature that in human bonding yearns to mirror and merge with its source: Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, Look there, look there! (King Lear, 5.3.316–17)           It is required You do awake your faith.

(The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.94–5)

Shakespearean psychology and tragic form: Macbeth’s three murders Macbeth is a milestone in man’s exploration of … this ‘depth of things’ which our age calls the unconscious. (Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare)

Interpreters of Macbeth have focused almost exclusively on the first murder, the killing of a king in Acts 1–2, as the basis for understanding the play – its social, psychological, and metaphysical meanings. Macbeth’s subsequent two assassinations, of Banquo in Act 3, and of Macduff ’s wife and children in Acts 4–5, are either ignored or are treated simply as efforts to secure the usurped crown, or

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perhaps as a kind of Freudian ‘repetition compulsion’ – the blooded man’s first heinous kill engendering serial slayings.65 Neither of the subsequent murders has been accorded its own distinctive meaning and psychological motivation; they are seen as mere shadowy re-enactments of the Oedipal complex which is presumed to underlie the one essential crime, the slaying of the patriarchal king.66 As R.A. Foakes puts it, ‘the murder of Duncan was the equivalent in mountaineering terms of scaling Everest, and after this [Macbeth] has no trouble with lower hills.’67 This exclusive highlighting of the regicide (as the ‘be-all and end-all’ of the play) entails, however, that the final three acts must dwindle from real theatrical power to melodramatic spectacle68 – a result of the victims’ shrinking symbolic import and, correspondingly, the shrinking spiritual grandeur of the protagonists, who deliver fewer and fewer eloquent soliloquies, consign their villainies to hired thugs, and finally are swept aside by the nobler (but less charismatic) avengers, Macduff and Malcolm. Many astute critics of the play – including Bradley, Rossiter, Heilman, Sanders, Jorgensen, Kirsch, Muir – struggle with this conundrum: can the playwright sustain great tragedy if the only true kingly spirit is dispatched at the outset?69 Like most of these critics, I believe that Macbeth’s capacious mind, despite its moral degeneration, remains at centre stage, showing the horrific consequences of a truly heroic spirit embracing evil. But instead of conceiving the tragedy as one great cosmos-shaking act of regicide followed by two subordinate aftershocks, I would characterize the Macbeths’ journey into darkness as three equally significant stages of spiritual catastrophe, three distinctive and theatrically-potent dimensions of evil as it evolves and festers in the human psyche. Macbeth murders first a parental ruler, then a brotherly friend (his ‘chiefest friend’ according to Holinshed), and finally a mother and her children.70 His victims thus represent the three fundamental human bonds, together comprising (in reverse order) the three basic stages of human maturation, the three essential cathexes of the human psyche. Thus, in the course of the three murders Macbeth deconstructs the entire psychological infrastructure of human identity. Shakespeare’s awareness of this pattern is underscored by its earlier prototypical appearance in Richard III, where that villain-hero similarly kills a king (Henry VI), then a brother (Clarence), then children (the Princes),71 In Macbeth, however, the playwright is much more fully apprised of the scheme’s psychological implications, which he methodically exploits. The dramaturgical design of Macbeth precisely emphasizes this three-phase pattern: Acts 1 and 2 present, in a continuous sequence, the regicide and its immediate consequences; Act 3 shows the murder of Banquo and then its impact on Macbeth at the banquet; Acts 4 and 5, another continuous cycle of action, presents the slaughter of Macduff ’s family, then its social and psychological consequences.72 This 2–1–2 structure, the dramaturgic pattern of all of Shakespeare’s mature tragedies, perfectly accommodates his treatment of Macbeth’s three murders. To attain this neatly coherent pattern of psychological devolution, Shakespeare has drastically altered Holinshed’s Chronicles73 – first, by condensing all the major crises of Duncan’s six-year reign and of Macbeth’s seventeen-year reign into the two-hour traffic of the stage. The entire battery of wars and assassinations seems

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to occur in a matter of days, rather than a quarter of a century, making the three murders (as well as the broader framework of political violence in Acts 1 and 5) seem closely and causally connected. Equally striking is Shakespeare’s moral reshaping of the victims, casting them as iconically benevolent members of the human family, in order to accommodate his threefold tragic pattern. Instead of the chronicles’ portrait of a weak, cowardly, and greedy king, about the same age as his cousin Macbeth, Shakespeare portrays Duncan as aged, humble, and generous – an ideal, almost saintly monarch.74 Similarly Banquo, in the chronicles a co-conspirator in regicide, is recast as a devoted friend in life’s warfare, modestly resisting each temptation to which his colleague falls prey.75 Likewise Macduff, who in the chronicles enters the story belatedly, mainly seeking personal revenge, is transmuted into a touchstone of charitable social compassion – the Man of Feeling who best embodies what his wife and babes, those ‘strong knots of love’, represent: the most primitive human bond. It is Macduff ’s horrified response to Duncan’s murder that initiates the knocking of conscience in the Macbeths; and it is his patriotic opposition to the usurper that galvanizes Scotland and England into a retributive force.76 Shakespeare’s radical reconstruction of the chronicles, especially his amelioration of the victims’ moral character, thus emphasizes the destruction of three primordial human bonds. This three-phase sequence of psychological disintegration (and implicit affirmation of the values destroyed) provides a paradigm of Shakespeare’s mature tragic form. The initial two-act cycle: killing a king In presenting an initial assault on regal or parental authority in Acts 1–2, Macbeth is comparable to all the tragedies from Hamlet to Coriolanus. The murder of a parent-like king, reflecting the Macbeths’ aspiration to Godlike greatness and power, is an Oedipal repudiation of superego (as commentators since Freud and Jekels have acknowledged). Yet the gender implications of Duncan’s rule have been too reductively construed by Oedipal-oriented psychoanalysts. For centuries it has been assumed that Duncan’s fatherliness forms the basis of his comprehensive social identity (Scotland) and of his Christlike spiritual identity (‘The Lord’s anointed temple’, 2.3.70) – that as patriarch he, like Lear and Cymbeline, represents the acme of psychological development, the mature conscience of the race, or, in Freudian terms, ‘superego’.77 Critics persistently construe the regicidal motive as an Oedipal antagonism, citing Lady Macbeth’s distress at Duncan’s fatherly appearance during the assault (2.212–13), to which one might add Macbeth’s condemnation of the murder as a ‘parricide’, projecting his own Oedipal urges on to Malcolm and Donalbain (3.1.31). Yet the Macbeths envision Duncan not just as a father (who ‘hath been / So clear in his great office’, 1.7.17–18) but also as a mother (who vies with Lady Macbeth in expressing love for her husband and for the other thanes, and who is cast as Lucrece to Macbeth’s ‘ravishing Tarquin’ with his phallic dagger). In addition, both Macbeths at critical moments in their soliloquies envision the monarch as a vulnerable and soul-like child (the heavenly infant which Lady Macbeth would deny the chance to ‘peep through the blanket of the dark, / To cry, “Hold, hold!”’);

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and which Macbeth projects apocalyptically as a ‘naked new-born babe’ of Pity). Thus, in psychoanalytic (or ‘object-relational’) terms Duncan is not just the father but all aspects of the human family – most poignantly, mother and child.78 By their own gender obsessions, the Macbeths have promoted the erroneous and reductive conception of kingship as a pure patriarchy. As recent critics have noted, the Macbeths’ urge for kingly greatness is expressed as a fantasy of becoming exclusively ‘manly’ by taking up phallic weaponry to eliminate womanly and childlike characteristics.79 The Macbeths’ notable series of monologues in acts 1–2 is fueled by wilful hyperbole, which accommodates their male-oriented aspiration to ‘greatness’ (a word whose variants appear seventeen times in Act 1, more than in the other four acts combined). To the extent that we as audience identify with the Macbeths’ grand speechmaking, hypnotic role-playing, and cosmic aspiration for greatness in these acts, we must also experience the ironies that emerge in the actual performance of the murder: pettiness, furtiveness, cowardice, and utter deceit. As the hyperbolic fantasy of these early soliloquies reveals, the type of ego functioning that informs this regicidal-parenticidal stage of Macbeth’s career in villainy is sublimation but in its most perverted form. Anna Freud describes sublimation as the highest phase of psychic functioning in the construction of selfhood, the ultimate means of enriching the ego.80 Ideally, sublimation resolves the ongoing Oedipal struggle (a struggle for the final, genital stage of sexual maturation), not by evading bodily consummation of sexual energies, nor by suppressing the female aspect of those energies, but by promoting comprehensive and free interplay between gender-components of the self. Thus the Macbeths’ brutish rape of kingly greatness works exactly contrary to authentic sublimation. By furtively killing the king they not only destroy the bond with this androgynous parent, but they also violate the illuminating and consolidating powers of their own superego or conscience, thus inducing a deeper regression into self-divisive and annihilative ego defences. The central one-act cycle: killing a friend The murder of Macbeth’s ‘chiefest friend’ in Act 3 is motivated not by further aspiration to greatness but by rivalrous envy of a brotherly alter-ego.81 According to Aquinas, ‘After the sin of pride [whereby Lucifer aspired to be a deity] there followed the evil of envy … whereby he grieved over man’s good.’82 Envy, and the rivalrous doubling and splitting which necessitates confronting distasteful mirror-images of the self at the centre of each of the tragedies, is secondary to that earlier violent effort to displace divine-regal-parental authority. The regicide-­ parenticide thus leads to fratricide-amiticide, a chronologically secondary but equally universal phenomenon, which carries its own momentous psychological implications. This assault on a warrior-friend who is virtually the mirror-image or double of Macbeth (‘all hail, Macbeth and Banquo! / Banquo and Macbeth, all hail!’ 1.3.68–9) is a direct violation of ego, involving a psychological ‘splitting’ into self and shadow-self, as Macbeth perversely identifies with the darker, more illusory

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component. Though he rationalizes the murder of Banquo in only one soliloquy, far less grandiose than the monologues of Acts 1–2, Macbeth throughout Act 3 continues the fiery expression of his inner powers by a number of intense dialogues in which he no longer effectively communicates his deeper meaning either to his auditors or to himself.83 They can only guess at the dark nuances in his spate of bestial images: serpents and scorpions (3.2.13–15, 36; 3.4.28–30); bat, ‘shard-bound beetle’, and crow (3.2.40–2, 50–3); ‘greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs’ (3.1.92–4); ‘Russian bear, arm’d rhinoceros, or th’ Hyrcan tiger’ (3.4.99–100); ‘rnagot-pies, and choughs, and rooks’ (3.4.121–4). If Acts 1–2 show a perverse mode of hyperbolic aspiration (appropriating sublimation as a means of overthrowing the superego or conscience), this furtive imagery of Act 3 shows Macbeth’s regression to the prior psychic function of projection, the defensive externalization of his depraved and problematic qualities on to others, which enforces a general process of ‘decomposition’ and ‘splitting’ of the ego.84 At its best, projection (an expulsive psychic function deriving from the anal stage of infancy) has a key role in developing selfhood, enabling one to influence others by projecting on to them one’s own ego ideals and inadequacies, and also enabling one thereby to experiment with and test those values and identities. But at its worst, as in malicious rituals of murder and scapegoating, projection revises reality so drastically that ‘nothing is, / But what is not’, and the murderer’s own selfhood, his ‘single state of man’, is increasingly shaken and disjoined (1.3.134–42). Envy, and the resultant splitting of selfhood, dictates the entire sequence of Act  3: Macbeth’s spiteful soliloquy in which he feels ‘rebuked’ by Banquo’s ‘royalty of nature’; his strange ranking of dogs in the abusive hiring of the assassins, humiliating them, even as he claims to raise and ‘make love’ to them; his furtive insecurity even with his wife (rehearsing her part while concealing his full intent); his ‘halfparticipation’ in the murder itself, perhaps as the third murderer;85 and of course the self-division which builds to a climax during the banquet. Macbeth’s schizoid vacillation between noblemen and assassins, between true and feigned selves, gradually gives way to a deeper vacillation between conscious and unconscious realities. His obscene praise of the missing guest (‘And to our dear friend Banquo, whom we miss’) serves the psychic function of invoking his double’s macabre presence, filling the central seat to which Macbeth himself is inexorably drawn.86 Throughout Act 3 Macbeth’s insecurity focuses no longer on the proud aspiration for kingly greatness, but on envious rivalry with his antithetical friend Banquo, who is to him what Edgar is to Edmund, Hal to Hotspur, Orlando to Oliver: the child favoured with a loving heart, who thus calls into question the unloving self ’s entire ‘being’ and must be utterly eliminated: every minute of his being thrusts Against my near’st of life: and though I could With bare-faced power sweep him from my sight, And bid my will avouch it, yet I must not, For certain friends that are both his and mine, Whose loves I may not drop.

(3.1.116–21)

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Instinctively Macbeth envisions the bond with his ‘chiefest friend’ in the context of a universal siblinghood, making the murder of Banquo as broadly symbolic as that of Duncan: first he eliminates the universal parent or greater-self, then the archetypal sibling or mirror-self. In each of the mature Shakespearean tragedies, this shattering confrontation with an antithetical self-image occurs at the play’s centre, the middle of Act 3: Othello’s temptation by lago (3.3), Lear’s discovery of Poor Tom (3.4), Macbeth’s spectral encounter with Banquo (3.4), Antony’s battle with Octavius (3.7). As in Lear’s meeting with the mad beggar, Macbeth’s rencontre with his mutilated alter-ego engages him in full awareness of fraternal Otherness; but while this stunning encounter leads the kingly Lear instinctively to affirm the oneness of human souls, it provokes the usurper Macbeth to repudiate ‘that great bond’ (3.2.49).87 In discarding Banquo, Macbeth thus divests himself of brother-love, the homoerotic bond, the second crucial cathexis forming the normative identity of the human psyche. The conclusive two-act cycle: killing a mother and her children In Acts 4 and 5, focusing on the slaughter of a mother and children (and the immediate social and psychological consequences of that deed), Macbeth eliminates the third and most fundamental human bond, as he violates the primitive core of selfhood, what Freud called the id. Most critics treat this third assault as mere ‘fourth-act pathos’, as a dim echo of the previous kills, or as a hasty and illogical afterthought testifying to a kind of madness in the tyrant, since these victims offer neither militant opposition nor patrilineal threat to Macbeth’s royal claim.88 But Macbeth’s essential motive for the third murder is not a re-enactment of the Oedipal struggle (casting Macduff as the new parent-power to be deposed); nor is it another envious rivalry with a mirroring sibling (seeing Macduff ’s goodness, like Banquo’s, as a galling comparison to his own evil). Rather, building upon and blossoming out of those two previous modes of aggression, Macbeth’s ‘black and deep desires’ now enter a third and culminating phase: scornful annihilative hatred of the simple passional core, the mother-and-child matrix of selfhood – the healthy ‘oral-narcissist’ bonding which contrasts the perverse narcissism now unfolding in Macbeth.89 Macbeth’s contemptuous repudiation and perversion of the affective-cognitive human core (the ‘id’) informs this final sequence of psychic degradation in Acts 4 and 5. The ego function which dominates this earliest phase of psychic development (and which most pertinently informs the final two acts of Shakespeare’s mature tragedies) is introjection, the ego’s incorporation of desired aspects of the nurturant other in order to construct its own identity.90 Introjection of the beloved, for the purpose of achieving (or re-achieving) total selfhood, is the psychological principle which is either violated or embraced in the final phase of each of Shakespeare’s major tragedies. Acts 4 and 5 invariably draw their cathartic and transforming energy, not from the killing of a king, but from the heroic male’s reaction to the destruction of a beloved maiden (Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia) or, in the final tragedies, a mother with children (Lady Macduff and Lady Macbeth; Cleopatra; Virgilia and Volumnia).91

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A wholesome mode of introjective bonding informs the poignant scene of Lady Macduff and her son (4.2), where in the father’s absence she frets over the child’s continued sustenance. But the boy’s affirmation that Providential if not parental care will feed him, echoing Matthew 6.26, suggests the dignity of what he has thus far introjected from his parents. This humane and spiritual nurture contrasts with the strikingly perverse mode of introjection in the preceding scene: the witches’ materialistic, cannibalistic ritual. Into their womb-like cauldron’s mouth (the vagina dentata)92 they fling fragments of poisonous and ravenous beasts (toad, snake, dragon, wolf, shark, tiger) and parts representing the erotic and sensory powers of non-Christians (Jew’s liver, Turk’s nose, Tartar’s lips) – including the lower senses of smell and taste involved in feeding. The final and focal object in the witches’ catalogue of dismembered parts is ‘Finger of birth-strangled babe, / Ditch-deliver’d by a drab’ (4.1.26–31). Thus, from the ‘pilot’s thumb’ of the witches’ early scene (1.3.28), symbolizing the perversion of parental guidance or superego, Macbeth regresses inexorably to the aborted potency of the child (or id), as symbolized by the foetal ‘finger’ or phallus, ‘strangled’-castrated-devoured by the cauldron-womb-mouth of the Voracious Mother, the ‘drab’ or prostitute. Introjection (an incorporative mode of identification deriving from the experience of sucking and swallowing during the oral stage of infancy) is thus materialized and brutalized by the witches to secure worldly power. From the vicious opening ritual of Act 4 (which provokes the entire cycle of action in Acts 4–5), Macbeth embraces the witches’ omnivorous perversion of the primal introjective principle. Each of his three murders has been associated with imagery of feasting, but it is particularly in his impulsive butchering of mother and babes that Macbeth has willingly and unhesitatingly ‘supp’d full with horrors’ (5.5.13). Thus the third murderous assault, a Herod-like massacre of innocents from which Macbeth completely distances himself, but which Shakespeare exposes to the audience with the most excruciating intimacy, brings us to the peak of horror, the breaking of the deepest taboo, which violates the very rudiment of selfhood and of social bonding. Far more than King Duncan and Banquo, whose entrammelment in political motivations partly cloaks their essential being, the intimacy of mother and child brings us closest to the core of human nature. In each of Shakespeare’s mature tragedies, the final cathartic sequence of Acts 4–5 jeopardizes the primal psychic ground of being, the inception of love: the drawing of woman, ‘fool’, or child into the web of deceit and violence promotes in the male authority-figures not merely revulsion against evil but clear and intense awareness of the rich essence of life which has been lost. Macbeth himself, in his finest show of inner light, envisioned the soul’s greatest power in its early innocence and in its affective mode of ‘pity’: ‘like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast’ (1.7.19–20). As he loses touch with that childlike and woman-nurtured essence in himself, Macbeth also loses his capacity for true kingship.

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the face is the trace of the Other …. [One] cannot say whether this Other. .. is another person whom I can look in the face or who can stare at me, or my ancestors for whom there is no representation, to so great an extent does my debt to them constitute my very self, or God … or an empty place. (Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another)

Despite King Lear’s dark enlargement of the myth of human sufferance (surpassing those of Oedipus, Prometheus, Job, and Everyman),93 critics as astute as Bradley and Jones find its plot structure lacking. They blame Lear’s growing madness and passivity (inadequately causing the action, even retarding it in half-mad reverie), and they blame the double plot for further diffusing Lear’s agency.94 To Snyder and Booth, Lear’s growing incertitude is matched by deliberate undoings of plot: these miscues, reversing generic expectations and denying closure, ensure the play’s moral, teleological indeterminacy.95 Yet Lear’s ‘passivity’ is, as Berger and Jorgensen observe, sharply aggressive:96 each withdrawal (from kingship, from facing malice in himself, from loving bonds) is actively and proudly self-enforced; and his ‘madness’ is closely allied with insight. The play’s structure, moreover, subtly shapes and contains the anxiety of generic reversals, for the plot of King Lear exhibits the same exacting symmetry that informs all Shakespeare’s mature plays, a pattern closely resembling that of Macbeth. In both tragedies an evolving crisis of kingship and psyche occurs in three cycles of action: first, Acts 1–2, with 2 reversing the arc of 1; next Act 3, an intense action-reaction in a single masterful act; and finally Acts 4-5, with 5 reversing the arc of 4.97 Using the same pattern, these plays show obverse sides of human tragedy: the two monarchic crises, springing from Lear’s abdication and Macbeth’s usurpation,98 have contrary effects on their souls. Shakespeare’s tragedies are impelled by human relationship, making Lear seem closer to the family romance of Oedipus than to the God-centred dialogues of Prometheus, Job, and Everyman; yet for Lear, as for Hamlet and Prospero, human relationship becomes a mirror and impetus for the relation with divinity.99 Thus in King Lear, as in Macbeth, epiphanic human encounter serves as axis for each of the three cycles of action: Lear’s explosive meeting with Goneril at the centre of the first two-act cycle (1.4), his revelatory encounter with Tom at the midpoint of Act 3, and the humbling reunion with Cordelia that centres the final two-act cycle (4.7). At comparable structural points, but with inverse effect, Macbeth experiences increasingly evasive anti-epiphanies involving Lady Macbeth (1.7), Banquo’s ghost (3.4), and Macduff (4.3).100 In each play the protagonist’s procedure through these three cycles reverses the sequence of metapsychic development (in both Ego Psychology and Object Relations Psychology), enforcing a cathartic regression to primal selfhood. These complementary tragedies draw us back to the two ‘archaic relational’ scenes: in King Lear the ‘nurturant scenario’, where anticipated loss of a caring other ‘awakens the infant to its own dependence, helplessness, and impotent rage’; in Macbeth the ‘antagonistic scenario’, where ‘one is either predator or prey, … master or slave’.101 In these contrary psychic processes, the protagonists

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inversely apprehend the spirit world, as a direct outgrowth of the recovery or loss of human kinship. Macbeth seeks and increasingly reifies the phantasmic witches, becoming fiendish himself as he massacres loving innocents; Lear, at first (like Tom) obsessed with ‘fiends’ he has helped to create, gradually turns from their grotesque reality to Cordelia as a ‘soul in bliss’. Thus Macbeth’s three murders systematically deconstruct the three cathexes of human identity; Lear’s three selfmortifying visions re-establish human, and sovereign, selfhood. The initial two-act cycle: losing sovereign power Having analysed the chiasmic 2–1–2 pattern of devolution in Macbeth, we now study the pattern, but with inverse psychogenesis and outcome, in King Lear. Whereas Macbeth in his initial two-act cycle usurps authority, Lear in Acts 1–2 awkwardly relinquishes it. In King Lear this cycle opens with the long scene (310 lines) in which Lear asserts godlike power, humiliating and banishing Cordelia and Kent for refusing to confer idolatrous flattery; and it concludes with a closely analogous degenerating ritual of 311 lines (2.4) in which Lear enforces his own humiliation and exile. Near the end of this two-act sequence, Kent and the Fool draw attention to the ironic, cyclic shaping of Fortune – Fortune being portrayed and contemplated more insistently in King Lear than in any other Shakespearean play.102 Kent’s Stoic, proto-Christian view (‘Smile, … turn thy wheel’, 2.2.175–6) allows for wisdom through sufferance (‘Nothing almost sees miracles but misery,’ 168–9). The Fool contrarily stresses material needs and humankind’s wilful role in shaping Fortune’s cycle (2.4.70–3).103 And Lear does shape it. He is Shakespeare’s most complex version of the Abdicating Monarch – the king whose evasion of rule incurs moral decay, usurpation, and civil butchery. Unlike earlier portraits of the withdrawing monarch (meek Henry VI in the first tetralogy of history plays, diffident Richard II in the second), Lear aggressively directs his abdication-deposition and helps enforce each subsequent cycle of shaming:104 a ‘repetition compulsion’ drives Lear’s three acts of selfabasement, no less than Macbeth’s three murders.105 Shakespeare’s plot-structure highlights the centrepiece.106 In each of Lear’s shamings, Fortune’s wheel turns on a central encounter. The axis for the initial two-act cycle is his fiery meeting with Goneril at the end of Act 1, a scene looking back to his disowning of Cordelia, and forward to his total emasculation by the older daughters. When Goneril rebukes Lear’s governance and withdraws half of his hundred knights, he endures his first shameful epiphany, inverting his mood, self-image, and actions. His explosive reaction, a defensive evasion of the distasteful mirror-image of his own selfish will, shivers the glass of his kingly identity; and the recoil draws Lear to the cycle’s conclusion, the protracted humiliation at the end of Act 2. The face-off with Goneril closely resembles Macbeth’s fiery confrontation with Lady Macbeth at the same central turning-point of the two-act cycle which begins that play. Each fierce virago, reflecting the protagonist’s pitiless urges, is portrayed as a demonic spirit. Lear calls Goneril a ‘marble-hearted fiend, / More hideous

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when thou show’st thee in a child / Than the sea monster!’ (1.4.257–9);107 and, like Lady Macbeth’s fiendish threat of infanticide (1.7.55–9), Goneril’s antimaternity draws from Seneca’s Medea.108 Both Lear and Macbeth help create this demonism, yet their responses to the results are distinctly opposed: in contrast to Macbeth’s embrace of his spouse’s regicidal lust, Lear is repulsed by Goneril’s cold, measured lovelessness. The same galling infertility he invokes on Goneril (‘Into her womb convey sterility; / Dry up in her the organs of increase’, 1.4.277–8) is voluntarily assumed by Lady Macbeth (‘Stop up th’ access and passage of remorse, … take my milk for gall’, 1.5.43–8). The unveiling of Goneril’s life-denying weltlust, mirroring Lear’s own darker side, is the pivotal event in the first cycle of self-discovery, his arrogant divestiture leading to actual disempowerment in Acts 1–2. This initial two-act sequence is in each play dominated by the mechanism of sublimation, the most refined ego-function in the service of superego.109 In sublimation the soul aggrandizes itself through abstraction and spiritualization to achieve the ‘be-all and end-all’: androgynous and sovereign wholeness, omnipotence, immortality. The Macbeths’ thrilling soliloquies in Acts 1 and 2 voice their aspiration for such ‘greatness’,110 though without comprehending its nature. So too, in keeping with the mythic content of his love-test,111 Lear’s opening ritual evokes his daughters’ hyperbolic flattery as he seeks to affirm his sovereign greatness: ‘Which of you … doth love us most?’ The command to praise proves a devastating test for monarchic absolutism as well as for proud superego: it deflates the ‘great image of authority’, the integrity of state and selfhood, as effectively as Macbeth’s murder of Duncan.112 Those who do evil, says Boethius, ‘cease not merely to be powerful, but simply to be … . For that is, which keeps its order and preserves its nature’: Those lofty kings you see seated high on thrones, … Threatening with visage stern . . . If a man strip from those proud kings the cloak of their empty splendor, At once he will see these lords within bear closely bound chains; … anger whips the mind as a whirlwind.113

The central one-act cycle: losing sanity The superego’s loss of authority in the cycle of Acts 1–2 leads to the ego’s cyclic loss of rational control in Act 3; and this central sequence is neatly demarcated on each side by a repeated gesture. Jones in Scenic Form, noting the break which usually ends Act 3, argues for a two-part structure of Shakespearean drama;114 but he ignores the equally definitive break which always ends Act 2. King Lear’s third act is framed on each side by a slamming door: at each juncture an aged father is expelled but with increase in savagery (‘Shut up your doors, my lord’, 2.4.310; ‘Go thrust him out at gates’, 3.7.95). Similarly, Macbeth’s third act is framed on each side by a prayer for holy succour (2.4.41, 3.7.46–51). In each play this gesture helps to close the cycle of Acts 1–2 (Lear’s loss of authority, Macbeth’s grasp of it), and then the cycle of Act 3 (Lear’s psychic splitting on the heath, Macbeth’s at the banquet). Act 3 is also set apart by Lear’s exposure to contrary characters and setting, outcasts on a barren heath.115 Unlike the courtly affairs of Acts 1–2, Act 3 is

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­ ominated by a storm, matched by the exiles’ mental tempest. Fortune (in its d intensest form as ‘tempest’)116 wheels on a deeper level as Lear’s wits ‘begin to turn’ (3.2.67). Again the cycle opens with Lear assuming Godlike power, commanding the storm to destroy sinners, and Gloucester plotting war against the new order, and it ends, like each of the cycles, with both fathers’ deepened impotence: Lear’s madness and sleep, Gloucester’s blindness and exile. The axis for this second cycle of psychic divestiture is the meeting with Tom, combining Lear’s neglect and Edgar’s embodiment of spiritual poverty. Edgar’s riveting enactment serves as peripety for Lear’s change in Act 3: preceded by Lear’s care for the suffering Fool and for ‘poor naked wretches’, the naked crying ‘spirit’ of Poor Tom appears almost magically, as if called forth (or projected) by Lear’s evolving consciousness of human need. In this central encounter the two plots meet and join,117 showing how intrinsic is doubleness of plot to the play’s meaning – not only providing complementary analogues of self-abasement but promoting selfhood through relational awareness: oneself as another. Again Lear’s epiphany of human otherness is shown as a supernatural ontology: Tom, a vexed ‘spirit’, is haunted by ‘fiends’, though unlike Goneril he would ‘defy’ them.118 No modern reader can easily judge the genuineness of Edgar’s obsession with demons. By echoing Harsnett’s exposure of fraudulent exorcisms, Edgar’s ghoul-babble seems to parody Gloucester’s superstitious credulity, contrasting the staged reality of Macbeth’s witches.119 Yet the strenuousness of Edgar’s performance makes it more than hoax: ‘Though we may not believe literally in the devils with outlandish names … Flibbertigibbet, Smulkin, Modo and Mahu’, still ‘Poor Tom’s rhapsodies bring an intimacy with them and with the natural world through which he is driven.’120 For Edgar, each aspect of otherness – his body, his social connections, his conscience – has become a genuine hellish torment, until Lear’s anguish moves Edgar to abandon his nightmarish role in an aside (‘My tears begin to take his part so much / They mar my counterfeiting,’ 59–60) and then to emerge fully as chorus (102–15). Edgar-as-Tom epitomizes the ‘poor player’ who recurs at the heart of Shakespeare’s vision, where duplicity and authenticity persistently mingle. Like Hamlet’s use of players to test the veracity of the supernatural, Edgar’s survivalist role-playing does not discredit his genuineness, as Lear attests: ‘Thou art the thing itself.’ The allusions to Harsnett, instead of demystifying God, providence, and the spirit-world, affirm the potent immanence of spirit: humankind’s genuine capacity to fashion itself as deluded fiend, its need of charity to become imago Dei. Nor are the fiends mere fancy. As Gulstad notes, Lear’s fantasy-trial of his daughters 3.6) is encoded as witch-trial;121 and Edgar’s persecution fear is reified, starkly contextualized when, at the cycle’s end (3.7), Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall ‘rash boarish fangs’ in Gloucester’s flesh. The savage blinding, no less than Iago’s treachery and Macbeth’s blood lust, suggests cloven feet, demons incarnate. The explicit witchcraft of Macbeth generalizes the fiendish behaviour in all three plays. Each protagonist’s failure to sublimate or exalt himself as omnipotent parent or superego in Acts 1–2 gives way to a more primitive functioning in the central cycle, where projection accommodates ego’s doublings.122 Macbeth’s bloody assertion of

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omnipotence in Acts 1–2 gives way in Act 3 to envious rivalry with peers, evoking the mangled Banquo as his double. Lear’s failed fantasy of omnipotence in Acts 1–2 gives way in Act 3 to a contrary form of splitting, empathetically projecting himself in victims: the shivering Fool, naked wretches, and especially poor Tom. The same psychic division which makes Macbeth waver between public praise and secret murder of his noble double makes Lear waver between indicting his proud children and exalting his wretched double, Tom. Such projective splitting – crucial to the secondary stage of self-composition in early childhood – serves contrary ends in Macbeth’s and Lear’s central phase. Macbeth’s sadistic projections enforce self-alienation; Lear’s empathetic projections begin to restore sovereign selfhood. Some recent critics question Lear’s moral probity in Act 3, viewing his identification with Tom (‘Did’st thou give all to thy daughters, and art thou come to this?’ 3.4.46–7) as irresponsible self-obsession. According to Berger, Lear’s sympathy for ‘poor naked wretches’ vanishes at the sight of an actual wretch. Leggatt sees Lear ‘losing touch with literal reality – and losing his selflessness as well’; ‘his pity for Tom is all too obviously a projection of his pity for himself ’. Dollimore, Berger, and Leggatt all see Lear, until the reunion with Cordelia, driven by lunacy and self-concern, generally ignoring his auditors.123 I would offer a more optimistic, at least more ambivalent, reading of this central sequence. First, that Lear’s pity springs from self-pity is only natural: there is no shame in ‘loving one’s neighbor as one loves oneself ’. From Augustine to Kohut, healthy self-love is the key to ethics and psychological well-being.124 Self-love may sponsor blind exercise of power as in the initial love-test, but also genuine (though confused and deflected) sympathy as in the meeting with Poor Tom, and meek gratitude as in the reunion with Cordelia. As Lear learns, self-love may be distorted by excessive privilege and commodities (as also by their absence, wretched poverty). Though Act 3 begins with an inner storm of wounded pride and exclusive self-love, these motives form a tension with shame and compassion, beginning with sympathy for the shivering Fool. Lear in his ‘madness’ instinctively extends charity, partly recovering the sovereign nature which originally drew the devoted loyalty of Cordelia, Kent, Gloucester and the Fool;125 and the suffering caused by his shame and compassion, though crude and incomplete, helps bind the others into a fellowship of the heath. Lear’s initial response to Poor Tom (‘Has his daughters brought him to this pass?’ 3.4.48–9, 62–4, 66–7, 69–72), though reflecting the sovereign habit of empathy, does indeed neglect the beggar as an other, and this self-indulgence seems an empathetic response to the beggar’s initial self-pitying speeches (45–7, 504–61). Then comes Lear’s jolting sense of responsibility for ‘begetting’ (congenitally and morally) his unkind daughters: Is it the fashion that discarded fathers Should have thus little mercy on their flesh? Judicious punishment! ’Twas this flesh begot Those pelican daughters.

(3.4.71–4)

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This self-judgment begins to draw Lear out of himself, leading him to elicit the beggar’s identity as an other: ‘What hast thou been?’ (83). In a lengthy confession of sins, Tom responds to Lear in kind: whereas his first catalogue was self-pitying, blaming his vexations on the ‘foul fiend’ (45–62), this one is self-judging, listing his vices to forswear them, urging others to avoid sin and ‘defy’ the fiend. This lengthy self-indictment provokes Lear’s most self-judging remark: ‘Thou art the thing itself … Off, off, you lendings!’ (100–8). These initial interactions of king and beggar suggest neither mere insanity nor mere selfishness, but a deeply s­ ignificant giveand-take, a complex form of compassion, which deepens in the next sequence. Gloucester’s sudden appearance, provoking Edgar to imagine a cruel fiend ‘who hurts the poor creature of earth’, stresses anew humankind’s vulnerability to abuse. In this sequence, however, Gloucester’s capacity to reject his child, and the group’s capacity to reject Poor Tom, is abated, especially through the influence of Lear’s ‘madness’. As Lear continues his ‘other-directed’ frame of mind (‘What’s he?’), the whole group erupts into a torrent of identity questions, emphasizing both their unbonded strangeness and their anxious desire to relate: Lear: What’s he? Kent: Who’s there? What is’t you seek? Gloucester: What are you there? Your names?

Fearful of being identified by his father, Edgar in his role-playing relapses into selfpity, listing Tom’s disgusting habits and society’s efforts to punish and marginalize him (128–39): Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole …; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow dung for salads, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipped from tithing to tithing and stock-punished and imprisoned. (3.4.128–34)

Gloucester, repulsed, tries to expel the beggar from their fellowship (‘What, hath your grace no better company?’), and he ignores the beggar’s cry, ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold.’ But Lear refuses to take refuge without his new acquaintance, insisting that Tom be included in Gloucester’s charity: ‘Come, let’s in all’; ‘With him! I will keep still with my philosopher’ (3.4.178–80). A major sign of Lear’s compassion is his addressing the animalistic, unaccommodated beggar as ‘noble philosopher’ and ‘learned Theban’. Lear’s conceit is more than insane confusion, or a selfish enhancing of his own status by raising Tom’s. Playing on a Boethian subtext, Shakespeare revises the dream-vision of Lady Philosophy’s splendour and measured eloquence into the naked reality of a mad-dog Cynic: Lear has good grounds for comparing Tom with the legendary Diogenes (whose contempt for proud artifice led him to wear a blanket and speak bluntly) and his follower Crates (who threw his wealth into the sea and sharply criticized lustful hearts).126 This demeaning, sobering vision of ‘philosophy’ likewise plays on an Erasmian subtext, reflecting Renaissance sages’ ironic praise of folly.127 It is not just Tom’s poverty but his confessional candour, comparable to the Cynics’ self-annihilative zeal, that impresses the guilty Lear.

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While Lear admires such aggressive, even abusive, self-stripping, his calling Tom ‘philosopher’ also has a constructive purpose: Lear seeks to establish the beggar’s dignity and worth, making him acceptable to Gloucester and the others, as well as reconciling the beggar to himself. Gloucester – while trying to ingratiate himself to Lear in self-pitying terms – has treated Tom as a disposable nothing (146ff, 163ff); and Kent (Edgar later recalls) ‘having seen me in my worst estate, / Shunned my abhorred society’ (5.3.213–14). In reaction to their snubbing, Lear addresses the Bethlehem pauper as his better, someone in touch with life’s deepest truths. His attributing worth and wisdom to the beggar, a central instance of ‘reason in madness’, carries both symbolic import and characterological impact: it helps Edgar to sever himself from victimization fantasies, and it challenges the caste-bound mindset of Lear’s former courtiers. Though Lear does not try to give money or clothing (a flaw to Marxist critics),128 his extending sapient discourse and fellowship to Tom serves as catalyst for Gloucester’s later generosity (4.1.31– 76). This new communality is qualified by Tom’s stage-exit vision of a romanticized hero preying on others from his proud height: ‘Child Rowland to the dark tower came; / His word was still, “Fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man”.’ Scene 6 at first consummates the vengeful fantasy that began scenes 2 and 4 (‘To have a thousand with red burning spits / Come hizzing in upon ’em’): Lear arraigns his daughters as demons, a psychic hell which Tom fears (‘Frateretto calls me …’; ‘The foul fiend bites my back’). But, as in scenes 2 and 4, Lear’s empathetic impulse gains ascendancy. He empowers the wretched exiles as justices, and they play along, comforting and enabling him to voice rage without acting on it. Lear’s fantasy-trial ends not with an auto-da-fe of burning witches but with images that gently domesticate their identity as he guiltily displaces them in the dock (‘The little dogs and all, / Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me’), though he still evades full culpability (‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these proud hearts?’). To assist Lear’s fantasy and ‘working-through’, Edgar – as if sensing his psychic impact on Lear through transference – abandons his demon-obsessed role: ‘Let us deal justly.’ He sings a ballad to solace Lear (‘Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?’) and answers Lear’s desperate sadness with a lengthy exorcism of dogs, thus dispelling his own vicious familiars and self-abusive impulses. Lear is enabled to lull his tempestuous conscience (‘Make no noise’), veil his pride (‘Draw the curtains’), and defer his narcissistic appetites (‘We’ll go to supper i’ the morning’). Lear and Gloucester thus begin processes of judgment which turn back on themselves. Their ‘trials’ become self-discovery through the nurture of exiles and servants, who comfort Lear and carry him from danger, defend Gloucester and tend his wounds, enabling both fathers to turn inward and confront conscience. In direct contrast to Macbeth, who in his central sequence will ‘cancel and tear to pieces’ the ‘great bond’ of universal siblinghood by butchering his former best friend,129 Lear in the cycle of Act 3 affirms a radical fraternity of spirit. His sympathetic self-stripping attracts faithful servants who mirror his recapturing of relatedness, drawn to foolish fellowship with an outcast king. Amid such sensitive

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souls Lear experiences an inner storm of guilt and charity – more painful than the whirlwind of suffering by which Job perceived the face and voice of God.130 Again the cycle ends with a choric reflection by one at the wheel’s nadir. After surviving Act 3’s stormy cycle, beggared Edgar, like Kent in the stocks, is detached and hopeful: To be worst, The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune, Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear. The lamentable change is from the best, The worst returns to laughter. (4.1.1–7; cf. 3.6.102–10)

That Edgar’s resiliance is met by Gloucester’s despair (Fortune having whirled them contrarily in Act 3) underscores the wheel’s mysterious interconnectedness, irony, and paradox as they begin the final two-act cycle of reunion. The conclusive two-act cycle: losing love In Acts 4–5 Lear’s development again is an inversion of Macbeth’s. Macbeth precipitously initiates his final murderous cycle by seeking out the witches (forcing a false epiphany), but absents himself from the slaughter of innocents and is also absent as Macduff ’s English pilgrimage achieves, with Malcolm, the epiphanic moment (4.3) which is the axis for the final two-act sequence. Lear, absent for much of Act 4 as Gloucester’s Dover journey wavers from suicide to pilgrimage, appears belatedly for reunion with Gloucester and epiphanic reconciliation with Cordelia. Again the illuminative encounter in Act 4’s last scene is the pivot, the central defining moment, for the concluding two-act cycle. Though the outer storm has abated, the inward fiery wheeling of shame and love intensifies as in Acts 4–5 Lear incurs humiliating divestiture at the self ’s most primal stage. In this final cycle the King, like Gloucester, becomes most childlike, an intense dependency-love for Cordelia alternating with cruelty toward others: mockery of Gloucester’s (and love’s) blindness, an urge to kill the sons-in-law who threaten his sole claim to nurturant love, boasts of slaying Cordelia’s executioner and of former battle prowess, spasmodic fury at being distracted from watching her body. These impulses characterize Lear’s regression to the primal core of selfhood, the id, and its experience of mother-love. This final sequence activates the memory of absolute affection, so travestied in the opening ritual by presumptions of kingly worth: ‘Which of you doth love us most?’ Throughout King Lear the major psychic functions focus on object-relations or ‘bonds’, the conduits of human identity: in Acts 1–2, bonds with parental authority (Oedipal strivings to consolidate gender and power); in Act 3, homosocial bonds (sibling-love, or envious rivalries); and, in Acts 4–5, infant bonds (especially mother love). In this final two-act cycle the dominant relational mechanism is introjection, the most primitive and powerful ego-function.131 In Acts 4–5 the introjective principle is reformed as Gloucester rebukes his blindness as a ‘superfluous and lust-dieted man’ (4.1.66) and his cannibalistic rage

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when Edgar was ‘The food of thy abused father’s wrath’ (21–2). Wishing Tom ‘The bounty and the benison of heaven’ (4.6.228–9), Gloucester unknowingly lavishes wealth and affection on his child. In turn, he accepts generosity from the poor – servants, the good old man, and Tom – helping him become, like Lear, a ‘child-changed father’, impassioned by good and evil children, but also restored to childlikeness: ‘‘Thou know’st the first time we smell the air / We wawl and cry.’ Edgar, ‘pregnant to good pity’, reinforces the primal affection, gaining, as in Macbeth’s insight, the Godlike simplicity of ‘a naked new-born babe’ (1.7). In Acts 4–5 Macbeth destroys children, Lear and Gloucester die for love of them. Lear, however, proudly resists this deepest bond and its reduction to vulnerable simplicity. He crowns himself with rank, poisonous weeds that infest the ‘sustaining corn’ (4.4.6); he accuses women of ‘riotous appetite’ (6.123); and he runs from Cordelia, becoming quite infantile (202–3). He must be captured by love. The final two-act cycle turns on his reunion with Cordelia (4.7), the most moving epiphany and focal point of Lear’s deepest shame; and the cycle concludes with the traumatic stripping away of her life, for which Lear is partly responsible, and the horror of his powerlessness to revive her. As Cavell notes, Lear in these acts operates at a peak of defensive denial,132 despite the transparency of Cordelia’s affection: she is the only epiphanal figure without any duplicity. In Act 4 he evades guilt by proclaiming universal absolution from moral law, but then flees Cordelia. In Act 5 he refuses to confront the hateful daughters, then denies Cordelia’s death. That she must invade England underscores both her aggressive charity and Lear’s active evasion. Lear’s love-test, his ardent avoiding of love, and his shameful-joyous reunion all imply the main theme, the valuation of love (what Augustine calls ‘love of love’, amor amoris).133 Lear’s best self must be shaped by watching Cordelia; healthy love, including self-love, must be learned. The revelation of Cordelia again uses supernatural terms (‘Thou art a soul in bliss’) and a provocative image of Fortune’s cycling that moves beyond the wheeling of courtly power in Acts 1-2, and of stormy madness in Act 3: ‘I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire’ (4.7.47–8). Assisted by Elton’s glossary of analogues for the fiery wheel,134 one perceives three levels of meaning – each deriving from varied mythic sources. As a Wheel of Hell (Ixion’s wheel or Dante’s fifth circle) it springs from Lear’s proud, wilful rage at his failure to command Cordelia’s love. As a Wheel of Purgatory it is Lear’s penitent shame (‘mine own tears do scald like molten lead’), causing him to avoid her presence. As a Wheel of Heaven (a fiery ‘wheel of the sun’) it is Lear’s illumination through love. All three levels of passion’s cyclic burning focus on Cordelia, the ‘revealed heart’;135 with her tearful joy, rage and shame dissolve, leaving love dominion. Cordelia’s forgiving love is the axis of Acts 4–5; her death, the only means of complete communion, is the cycle’s fitting end.136 This paradox is the most complex element of Shakespeare’s retelling of the Everyman morality. Good Deeds’ accompanying Everyman into the grave comforts the audience in the hope of activating their own goodness. Cordelia is a suggestive realization of Charity or Good Deeds, her generosity reflecting her father’s charity (his prayer for the poor, empathy for the Fool and Tom): she is indeed his ‘child’. At first her preceding him

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into the grave gives no comfort; and the moral lesson (that Everyman can keep only what he gives away) seems insufficiently realized in Lear’s experience. But as he stands immersed in affection for a child whose virtue surpasses the Cynics, sustaining him with faithful bonding and kind deeds, Lear at her death extends and consummates the epiphanic attentiveness of the earlier reunion scene. Not only is he distracted from mortal fears but his mysterious final words (in the Folio version) suggest that Lear sees her parting spirit.137 Like Lear, we perceive Cordelia’s immortal, Godlike spirit only through epiphanic awareness, for this theatrical production subjects the audience to psychological stripping similar to his. Kiefer observes that King Lear – unlike Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra – has no outward manifestation of the supernatural: ‘no evidence of magic, no witchcraft, no portents …, no ghosts or other spirits, and no miracles’.138 Kiefer, however, does not acknowledge immanent, epiphanic manifestations of the supernatural in King Lear (the ‘spirit’ of naked Tom and of Cordelia even after death, Regan and Goneril’s ‘fiendish’ nature, the ‘magic’ of Edgar’s performance and language, the ‘miracle’ of Gloucester’s revivification in faith) – in short, the supernaturalism within human figures who reflect or deflect God’s image, engaged in paradoxical cycles of action which reflect providential order. Each epiphany – Goneril’s fiendish power hunger, Tom’s resistance of fiends and quest for charity, Cordelia’s gracious forgiveness as a ‘soul in bliss’ – serves as axis in a cycle of humiliation, stripping, self-mortification for Lear. Each shameful revelation probes deepening levels of selfhood. The encounter with Goneril, focusing the initial cycle, dismantles the superego’s contrived image of parental/ kingly/Godlike authority. The meeting with Poor Tom focuses the middle cycle, an interplay of ego with its doubles in a quest for philosophical insight. The reunion with Cordelia focuses the final cycle, exposing yearnings of the childlike id for absolute love, the nexus for Lear’s ‘wheel of fire’. In Ezekiel’s spectacular vision of God as ‘wheels within wheels’,139 each Creational ‘wheel’ expresses the spiritual power and radiance of a composite angelic-humananimal figure reflecting the Creator’s nature. This complex revelation supersedes those fatalistic emblems which show Fortune, or Death, at the wheel’s centre.140 So too, mature Shakespearean dramaturgy consists of cycles of action revolving around epiphanies of natural/supernatural figures whose ‘spirit is in the wheel’. As in Ezekiel’s vision, King Lear also portrays ‘wheels within wheels’: subsumed in the three great turnings of Lear’s fortune are other characters’ revolutions of selfhood, each shaping his or her own cycle by choosing an authority-figure as the ‘axis’ defining the wheel’s process. Oswald, Edmund, and the soldier who kills Cordelia adopt the rising arc of the new power clique; Kent, the Fool, Edgar, and Cordelia submit to Lear’s and Gloucester’s falling arc and, in so doing, attain the freedom of moral solidarity and purpose: of a number of spheres turning about the same centre, the innermost one approaches the simplicity of middleness and is a sort of pivot for the rest …; that which is furthest separated from the principal mind is entangled in the tighter meshes of fate.141

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Lear, rather than Macbeth, pushes toward the inmost simplicity of the ‘principal mind’, i.e., conscience, the voice and vision of Godlikeness. In the last two-act cycle of King Lear, Act 4’s pilgrimage inward is countered by the arc of murderous warfare in Act 5. At the end of this sequence Edmund’s choric reflection (‘The wheel is come full circle; I am here’) is – unlike the earlier ones of Kent and Edgar – resoundingly final, not only because he is dying but because he views the wheel of human being reductively, as revolutions of material and personal gain. The Fool seems to affirm such worldly wisdom when he advises hitching one’s cycle only to those ‘great wheels’ that move upward (2.4.70– 3), then ignores his maxim by following Lear into the storm. His foolish loyalty epitomizes King Lear’s paradoxical cycles. As in Boethius’ Consolation and Dante’s Commedia, the way up may be achieved by enduring the way down. Lear, Gloucester, Edgar, Kent, and Cordelia engage in cycles of abasement that ultimately exalt: ‘the last shall be first.’ Edgar, in assuming the humblest human form, the Bethlehem beggar, learns the agony of spinning sovereignty into poverty, and vice versa; and, like Boethius, he learns self-reflection, that he must ‘on himself turn back the light of his inward vision, / Bending and forcing his far-reaching movements / Into a circle’.142 This cycle of ‘good pity’ restores the gratitude of children to parents and of parents to the creator, ‘the love common to all things’: They seek to be bound by their end, the good, Since in no other way could they endure, If the causes that gave them being did not flow back Under the power of returning love.143

For Shakespeare more than Boethius, such interplay occurs through human bonding and active charity, which redefine the cycles of historical change and the wheels of our inner being. Edgar is the best commentator not only by his exposure to aloneness, nakedness, and terror but also by his modest admission of partial remove from the ‘wheel of fire’ – the burning of both shame and love which consumes his father and then still more terribly King Lear. Humbled by their vision and passion, he does not presume to ‘see so much’ or ‘live so long’. Notes  1 See Rev. 21–2, esp. 22.1–2: ‘Then [the angel] revealed to me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the highway of the city; and on either side of the river, there was a tree of life’, The Anchor Bible: Revelation, trans. J.M. Ford (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), 332. This apocalyptic unveiling is the supreme epiphany: the city’s tenants, who see God’s face and know God’s name, are filled with light, needing no external ‘sun or moon to shine upon it’ (Rev. 21.23).  2 Epiphany, the ‘showing forth’ or ‘manifestation’ of Christ’s divine nature and glory, is a solemnity established in the third century in Eastern Orthodox Christianity to celebrate Jesus’ baptism (when the Trinity was fully disclosed) as well as the Magi’s visit at the Nativity and Jesus’ first miracle at Cana. The Western Church focuses on the Magi’s visit (6 January, the twelfth day after Jesus’ birth, climax of the Christmas festival) to stress that Christ’s glory was now shared with the Gentiles. See K. Priman, ‘Epiphany’, The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). On epiphany in Judaeo-Christian scriptures and ‘pagan

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anticipations’ of Plato, Eleusinian mysteries, and Neoplatonism, see K.E. Kirk, The Vision of God: The Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum (1931; rpt New York: Harper, 1966).  3 For Andrewes’s distinction between ‘the thing to be seen’ (the physical pain, soul-sorrow, and shame of the Passion) and ‘the act of seeing’ (love transforming tragedy to joy, ‘His cross into ease, His shame into glory’), see The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 11 vols (1854; rpt New York: AMS, 1967), 2, 121, 160, 183.  4 Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, ed. W.S. HiIl (Harvard University Press, 1977), 334.  5 Andrewes, Works, 2, 130.  6 E. Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 51–5.  7 Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare, 51.  8 See R. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (Columbia University Press, 1965); G. Knight, The Crown of Life (1947; rpt New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966),76–128; S. BetheIl, The Winter’s Tale: A Study (London: Athlone, 1947); R. Brown, The Semitic Background of the Term ‘Mystery’ in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1968).  9 Despite the value-inversions provoked by mortality crises in the problem comedies, tragedies, and romances, Shakespeare remains firmly committed to embodiment and natural creation, not to ascetic other-worldliness and contempt for bodily pleasures. 10 See V.A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford University Press, 1966), 124–74. 11 The Sermons of John Donne, eds Potter and Simpson, 10 vols (University of California Press, 1953–62), 9, 131. 12 The Sermons of John Donne, 7, 279, 286. 13 See S. CoIley, ‘Richard III and Herod’, SQ 37 (1986), 451–8; G. Wickham, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 225–31. J. Adelman, in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Routledge, 1992), argues further that Shakespeare in Macbeth, Richard III, and other plays subverts the primal power of motherhood. 14 On male pregnancy: Sonnets 1–18, 22, 59, 86, 97, 98, 102, 114; Tempest, 1.2.92–7, 155–7. 15 A. Strittmatter, ‘Christmas and the Epiphany, Origins and Antecedents’, Thought 17 (1942), 600–26; T.E. Mommsen, ‘Aponius and Orosius on the Significance of the Epiphany’, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. E.F. Rice, Jr (CorneIl University Press, 1959), 299–324; Augustine, Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany, trans. T.C. Lawler (New York: Newman Press, 1952). 16 Andrewes, Works, 3, 241–60. 17 See also Pilate’s hand-washing in the Tilemakers’ play. The York Plays, ed. R. Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), 304–5. 18 For baptismal storms, see E.J. Devereux, ‘Sacramental Imagery in The Tempest’, Bulletin de l’Association Canadienne des Humanités 19 (1968), 50–62; J. Cunningham, ‘King Lear, the Storm, and the Liturgy’, C&L 34 (1984), 9–30. 19 Cunningham, ‘King Lear, the Storm, and the Liturgy’. 20 See A. Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 160–3. 21 See J.A. Bryant, Jr, Hippolyta’s View: Some Christian Aspects of Shakespeare’s Plays (UP of Kentucky, 1961), 33–51; A. Holaday, ‘Antonio and the Allegory of Salvation’, ShakS 4 (1968), 109–18; R. Levitsky, ‘Shylock as Unregenerate Man’, SQ 28 (1977), 58–64; L. Danson, The Harmonies of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (Yale University Press, 1978), 164–9. 22 Andrewes, Works, 3, 243, citing 1 Tim. 6.9, 2 Pet. 2.22. 23 J.A. McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1986); Kirk, The Vision of God, 97–101. 24 Kate’s final self-transfiguring epiphanal speech, if it is to be convincing, must draw not so much from forced humbling (withheld food and clothing) as from Petruchio’s teaching her to role-play, a lesson implicit in the central wedding epiphany (his self-mockery affirming inner spirit over outward show, an Erasmian praise of folly), and from his explicit attraction to her as a spirited power – implicitly, able to match his own. What keeps her climactic selffashioning from being fully positive (Maslovian self-actualization) is Petruchio’s insistence

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on enacting his improvisations. Subsequent female protagonists (Beatrice, Rosalind, Helena, Cleopatra) wittily arrange their own plots, through which they guide men. 25 Bryant, Hippolyta’s View, 1–18. 26 Pericles, 5.1.196–200: ‘put me to present pain, / Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me / O’erbear the shores of my mortality, / And drown me with their sweetness. –O, come hither, / Thou that begett’st him that did thee beget. …’ 27 McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ, 15, and passim. 28 Shakespeare mixes Hal’s messianism with pagan deities and Ovidian myth. See Bryant, Hippolyta’s View, 52–67; Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension, ed. R. Battenhouse (Indiana University Press, 1994), 315–26. P. Siegel surveys resurrection motifs in Shakespeare in His Time and Ours (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 108–21. 29 On the Crucifixion as a contemplative locus in Reformation England, see L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (Yale University Press, 1954), 19, 26–30, 71–117, 132–5, 193–7, 250–3, 282–7, 295–309. 30 Spiritual Exercises and Devotions of Blessed Robert Southwell, S.J., as quoted in Martz, ibid.,  29. 31 Andrewes, Works, 2, 122–3, 132–3: his Good-Friday sermon on Zechariah 12.10 (‘And they shall look upon Me, Whom they have pierced’). 32 See T.H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 26–68, 145–64. 33 Cordelia’s death recalls the Virgin Mother’s, as in Southwell’s ‘The Death of Our Ladie’: ‘Weepe, living thinges, of life the mother dyes, / The world doth loose the surnm of all her blisse, / The Quene of Earth, the Empresse of the skyes, / By Maryes death mankind an orphan is, / Lett nature weepe, yea lett all graces mone, / Their glory, grace, and giftes dye all in one.’ R. Southwell, The Complete Poems, ed. J.H. McDonald and N.P. Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), II. Cf. the Meditation by Bernard on the Lamentation of the Blessed Virgin, in Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 165–85. 34 W. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (1966; rpt University Press of Kentucky, 1988); H. Felperin, Shakespearean Romances (Princeton University Press, 1972). Cf. Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, 269–302, and Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension, 444–72; C. Guilfoyle, Shakespeare’s Play within Play (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1990), 111–27; P. Milward, ‘Notes on the Religious Dimension in King Lear’, English Literature and Language (Tokyo) 23 (1986), 5–27; R.A. Peck, ‘Edgar’s Pilgrimage: High Comedy in King Lear’, SEL 7 (1967), 219–37; J.H. Summers, Dreams of Love and Power (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 111–13. 35 See J. Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Harvard University Press, 1986), 119–35; and the seminal ideas in Freud’s ‘Medusa’s Head’, SE 18, 273–4. 36 See N. Coghill, ‘All’s Well Revalued’, Studies in Language and Literature in Honor of Margaret Schlauch, eds M. Brahmer et al. (Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publications, 1966), 71–83; D.J. Gless, Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent (Princeton University Press, 1979), 56–9, 179–80; Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love, 80–3, 116–18; K. Ashley, ‘The Guiler Beguiled: Christ and Satan as Theological Tricksters’, Criticism 24 (1982), 126–37; M.C. Desens, The Bed-Trick in English Renaissance Drama (University of Delaware Press, 1994), 20–4, 139–42. 37 For Kirsch, Measure for Measure has ‘no sense … of the epiphanies of the last plays, and perhaps not even of the wonder that characterizes All’s Well That Ends Well’, yet ‘the play is nevertheless not without marvelousness, and its own miracles are not less great because we are aware of how they have been contrived’ (Shakespeare and the Experience of Love, 105–6). 38 For the ghost’s nature, provenance, and psychic impact, see E. Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (1967; rpt Stanford University Press, 1971), ch. 5; J. Russell, Hamlet and Narcissus (University of Delaware Press, 1995), ch. 3. Battenhouse calls the vengeful spirit ‘a reverse analogy to a baptism or a Pentecost’ (Shakespearean Tragedy, 260–1); Guilfoyle sees it parodying Christ’s Nativity in the mystery cycles (Shakespeare’s Play within Play, 21–39). 39 In Shakespearean Representation (Princeton University Press, 1977), 64–5, 104–5, H. Felperin notes Hamlet’s obscuring of salvation; Lear evokes ‘Christian mystery’ yet vacillates ‘between demystification and mystification of the self ’, leaving characters and audiences in a ‘state of aporia, of being completely at a loss’.

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40 On humanity’s trinitarian nature, see The Works of Saint Augustine, ed. J.E. Rotelle, OSA, trans. E. Hill, pt 1, 24 vols (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1990), 9, 1–5; 10, 11–12; 14; 15, 6–7, 21–3; The City of God, 2.24–8, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. W.J. Oates (New York: Random House, 1948), 2, 166–71. 41 Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice: Toward a Psychology of Suffering (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 79, 99. Cf. W. Beers, Women and Sacrifice: Male Narcissism and the Psychology of Religion (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992). 42 J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H.E. Barnes (1943; rpt New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), lvii; cf. xlv–lxvii, 221–351, 361–430. 43 See S.B. Hemingway, ‘The Relation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Romeo and Juliet’, MLN 26 (1911), 78–80; H.A. Myers, in Tragedy: A View of Life (Cornell University Press, 1956), 110–28. 44 R.S. White, ‘Let Wonder Seem Familiar’: Endings in Shakespeare’s Romance Vision (London: Athlone, 1985), 172. On the centrality of epiphanal recognition in Shakespeare’s romances, see N. Frye, Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 107–18; F. Kermode, William Shakespeare: The Final Plays (London: Longmans, Green, 1963); Bethell, The Winter’s Tale: A Study; Knight, The Crown of Life; A. Bonjour, ‘The Final Scene of The Winter’s Tale’, ES 33 (1952), 193–208; N. Frye, A Natural Perspective (Columbia University Press, 1965); C.L. Barber, ‘“Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget”: Transformation in “Pericles” and “The Winter’s Tale”’, ShS 22 (1969), 59–67; A. Aronson, Psyche and Symbol in Shakespeare (Indiana University Press, 1972); Felperin, Shakespearean Romance; R. Grudin, ‘Prospero’s Masque and the Structure of The Tempest’, SAQ 71 (1972), 401–9; P.S. Gourlay, ‘“0 my most sacred lady”: Female Metaphor in The Winter’s Tale’, ELR 5 (1975), 375–95; M.M. Schwartz, ‘The Winter’s Tale: Loss and Transformation’, AI 32 (1975), 145–99; K. Muir, The Singularity of Shakespeare and Other Essays (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977), 76–91; P. Grant, Images and Ideas in Literature of the English Renaissance, 82–5; D. Grantley, ‘The Winter’s Tale and Early Religious Drama’, CompD 20 (1986), 17–34; P. Milward, Shakespeare’s Other Dimension (Tokyo: Renaissance Institute, Sophia University, 1987), 102–24; M. Hunt, Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word (Bucknell University Press, 1990); S. Hanna, ‘Christian Vision and Iconography in Pericles’, UCrow 11 (1991), 92–116. 45 H. Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1912), trans. by R. Langbaum in The Word from Below: Essays on Modern Literature and Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 51. 46 Hunter, The Comedy of Forgiveness, passim. 47 See R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 250–308; N. Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy (London: Routledge, 1995), 85–111, 155–72. 48 For the argument that the mystery cycles, miracle plays, and martyred-saint plays (especially Thomas Becket) exercised greater influence on Elizabethan tragedy than morality plays, see J. Wasson, ‘The Morality Play: Ancestor of Elizabethan Drama?’, Drama in the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays, eds C. Davidson, C.J. Gianakaris and J.H. Stroupe (New York: AMS, 1982), 316–27. 49 See W.C. Foreman, The Music of the Close: The Final Scenes of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (UP of Kentucky, 1978), 29–30, 50–6; Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, 102–30; and the essays of Auden, Fergusson, and Andrews in Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension, ed. Battenhouse, 363–81. 50 D.D. Waters, Christian Settings in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (London: Associated University Presses, 1994). 51 Foreman, The Music of the Close, 1–28, 29–71. 52 Stephen Hero, ed. T. Spencer (New York: New Directions, 1963), 211. See R. Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford University Press, 1959), 87–9, 98, 108, 125, 132, 137, 149; I. Hendry, ‘Joyce’s Epiphanies’, SR 54 (1946), 449–67. 53 M. Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972), 15. Beja cites Gerard Manly Hopkins and T.S. Eliot as exceptions.

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54 Ellmann, James Joyce, 87. 55 Joyce, Stephen Hero, 30. 56 Hal, ‘to save the blood on either side’, offers to ‘try fortune with [Hotspur] in a single fight’ (1H4 5.1.99–100). Battenhouse notes the Augustinian and Erasmian warnings against such privileging of worldly glory through militarism, ‘Henry V in the Light of Erasmus’, ShakS 17 (1985), 77–88; cf. H.C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (University of Chicago Press, 1951), 217–60. 57 Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel, 16–I 7. 58 R. Langbaum, ‘Wordsworth and the Epiphanic Mode in Modem Poetry’, NLH 14 (1983), 335–58; A. Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany (University of Alabama Press, 1987); M. Bidney, Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997). Cf. L. Gilkey, Naming the Whirlwind: The Renewal of God Language (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969); T. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 59 Ado 5.4.69. Felperin, Shakespeare’s Romances, discusses colloquial language in these plays. 60 Falstaff ’s mock-transfigurations include mirthful parody of Warrior and King (1H4 2.4.156– 427), then assumption of his deified kingship (2H4 5.3.124–40). Cleopatra’s regal transfigurations are evident in her barge scene and majestic death; but apotheosis always rises out of her ‘riggish’ self-change. 61 Cf. K. Muir, Shakespeare: Contrasts and Controversies (University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 67–77. The Act of Abuses (1606) having banned reference to Christian deity, Shakespeare enlists pagan gods: Diana resolves Pericles’ fear of sexual defilement; Jupiter rejoins ancestral bonds in Cymbeline; Apollo restores reason in Winter’s Tale; Juno, Iris, Ceres ensure generative bonds in Tempest. Still, each romance alludes prominently to Christianity: Pericles recreates the nativity and resurrection; Cymbeline reigns during Christ’s advent; in The Winter’s Tale grace brings spiritual rebirth; The Tempest’s transfiguring storm ends with Prospero’s prayer. 62 Faulkner, ‘The Bear’, in Go Down, Moses (New York: Random House, 1940), 209, 254–315, 330–1. See I. Malin, William Faulkner: An Interpretation (Stanford University Press, 1957), 70–3; R. Lewis, ‘The Hero in the New World: William Faulkner’s The Bear’, Kenyon Review 13 (1951), 641–60. 63 See P. Weiss, Modes of Being (Southern Illinois University Press, 1958). 64 Andrewes, Works, 3, 371–2. 65 Freud’s argument for the second instinctual drive, the aggressive death-wish, grew out of his reflections on the ‘repetition compulsion’ – obsessive re-enacting of a pleasurable sensation, or of a painful and self-destructive behaviour. The motive, he felt, was not simply to sustain pleasure or pain, but subconsciously to use it for recovering primal experience, especially in the aggressive and destructive obsession, which he viewed as a desire to return to peaceful nothingness. See ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-through’ (1914), SE 12, 147–56; ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), SE 18, 7–64; E. Bibring, ‘The Conception of the Repetition Compulsion’, PsyQ 12 (1941), 486–519; H.W. Loewald, ‘Some Considerations on Repetition and Repetition Compulsion’, IJP 52 (1971), 59–65. 66 See Freud, ‘Those Who Are Wrecked by Success’ (1916), SE 14, 318–24; and L. Jekels, ‘The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Macbeth’ (1917), The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. M.D. Faber (New York: Science House, 1970), 235–49. N.N. Holland surveys such readings in Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York: McGraw, 1964), 219–30. Analyses of the Oedipal theme include N. Frye, ‘My Father as He Slept’, in Fools of Time (University of Toronto Press, 1967), 3–39; N. Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (University of Chicago Press, 1981), 101–10; J. Krohn, ‘Addressing the Oedipal Dilemma in Macbeth’, PsyR 73 (1986), 333–47; P. Janton, ‘Sonship and Fatherhood in Macbeth’, CahiersE 35 (1989), 47–58.   Important revisionary studies of gender-psychology (shifting attention from embattled father to devouring mother, or fully re-evaluating the parental roles) include D. Barron, ‘The Babe That Milks: An Organic Study of Macbeth’ (1960), The Design Within, ed. M.D. Faber (New York: Science House, 1970), 251–79; D.W. Harding, ‘Women’s Fantasy of Manhood: A Shakespearean Theme’, SQ 20 (1969), 245–53; R. Kimbrough, ‘Macbeth: Prisoner of Gender’,

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ShakS 6 (1972), 175–90; M. French, Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (New York: Ballantine, 1981), 242–53; C. Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (University of California Press, 1981), 151–5, 172–92; C. Asp, ‘“Be bloody, bold, and resolute”: Tragic Action and Sexual Stereotyping in Macbeth’, SP 78 (1981), 153–69; P.C. Hogan, ‘Macbeth: Authority and Progenitorship’, AI 40 (1983), 385–95; J.J. Greene, ‘Macbeth: Masculinity as Murder’, AI 41 (1984), 155–80; A. Kirsch, ‘Macbeth’s Suicide’, ELH 51 (1984), 269–96, esp. 276–80; C.L. Barber and R.P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (University of California Press, 1986), 11–13, 242, 266–9; J. Adelman, ‘“Born of Woman”: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth’, Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. M. Garber (Johns Hopkins Press, 1987), 90–121; D. Hunter, ‘Doubling, Mythic Difference, and the Scapegoating of Female Power in Macbeth’, PsyR 75 (1988), 129–52. 67 Foakes, ‘Images of Death: Ambition in Macbeth’, Focus on Macbeth, ed. J.R. Brown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 18. 68 J. Markels, ‘The Spectacle of Deterioration: Macbeth and the “Manner” of Tragic Deterioration’, SQ 12 (1961), 293–303. 69 Heilman, Sanders, and Muir insist on Macbeth’s greatness of spirit, but also on the sordid depths of his degradation. Cf. A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. (1905; rpt New York: Macmillan, 1949), 349–65; A.P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns, ed. G. Storey (New York: Theatre Arts, 1961), 209–34; R.B. Heilman, ‘The Criminal as Tragic Hero: Dramatic Methods’, ShS 19 (1966), 12–24; W. Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge University Press, 1968), 253–316; P.A. Jorgensen, Our Naked Frailties: Sensational Art and Meaning in Macbeth (University of California Press, 1971), 185–216; Kirsch, ‘Macbeth’s Suicide’; K. Muir, intro., Macbeth, New Arden (London: Methuen, 1987), xliii–liii, lxv. 70 This ‘object relations’ pattern was first noted by L. Veszy-Wagner, ‘Macbeth: “Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair”’, AI 25 (1968), 242–57. She subordinates each victim to a patriarchal version of the Oedipal struggle but acutely observes that Macbeth’s ‘main problem is … uncertain identity’ with regard to gender. 71 Cf. E. Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 195–224. 72 On this three-part structure of Macbeth, see Jones, Scenic Form, 195–224. On Shakespearean tragic structure as three stages of self-discovery, see M. Mack, ‘The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations of the Construction of the Tragedies’, Stratford upon Avon Studies: Jacobean Theatre, eds J.R. Brown and B. Harris (London: St Martin’s, 1960), 11–42. R. Nevo considers both a three-part and a five-part structure of Shakespearean tragedy, Shakespeare’s Tragic Form (Princeton University Press, 1972), 3–30, 314–57.   I interpret the structure of mature Shakespearean tragedy as follows: Acts 1–2, like Acts 4–5, each work as a cyclical unit, in which the latter act ‘answers’ the former. In King Lear, e.g., the lengthy opening scene of Act 1, in which Lear divests, humiliates, and exiles Cordelia, is answered by the lengthy concluding scene of Act 2, in which Lear himself is, in precisely analogous manner, stripped, humiliated, and exiled – thus completing a cycle of worldly empowerment and divestiture. Acts 4 and 5 similarly work as a unit, the latter ‘answering’ the former, but now enforcing spiritual empowerment and divestiture. Act 3 is a coherent unit revolving around a central encounter which is the play’s axis. 73 See Muir, Arden Macbeth, xxxvi–xliii; M.C. Bradbrook, ‘The Sources of Macbeth’, ShS 4 (1951), 35–48; D. Norbrook, ‘Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography’, Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of 17th-Century England, eds K. Sharpe and S.N. Zavicker (University of California Press, 1987), 78–116. 74 Though some critics interpret Duncan’s ‘womanliness’ as Shakespeare’s indication of his unkingly impotence, I believe Norman Sanders’s view is correct: Duncan’s nurturing, fertile, self-mortifying traits contribute positively to Shakespeare’s portrait of ‘a most sainted king’ (4.3.109). Duncan begins where Lear and Cymbeline end, as a king who can ‘see feelingly’. Cf. H. Berger, Jr, ‘The Early Scenes of Macbeth: Preface to a New Interpretation’, ELH 47 (1980), 1–31; J.L. Calderwood, If It Were Done: Macbeth and Tragic Action (University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 119–21; G. Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Skepticism (New York: St Martin’s, 1987), 244–50; Adelman, ‘“Born of Woman,”’ 93ff.

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75 Banquo’s probity, even more than Duncan’s, has been intensely questioned and qualified: see Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 379–87; R. Walker, The Time Is Free (London: A. Dakers, 1949), 89ff; R.J. Jaarsma, ‘The Tragedy of Banquo’, L&P 17 (1967), 87–94. Berger’s and Calderwood’s subtle criticism of Duncan’s ‘aggressive giving’ (n. 74) would similarly qualify Banquo’s lavish praise of his warrior-colleague (1.4.54–8). Yet that Duncan’s and Banquo’s compliments are benevolent is underscored not only by their repeated association with ‘royalty’ and ‘grace’ but also by the contrast with Macbeth’s deceitful, murderous mode of ‘aggressive giving’ – especially his forceful invitation of Banquo to the feast (3.1.11–39) and flattery of the missing guest (3.2.30–1, 4.41–4, 91–2). Though Shakespeare implies political shortcomings in Duncan’s aged weakness and in Banquo’s Hamlet-like inertia after the regicide (thus qualifying the compliment to James I), nevertheless Shakespeare revises the chronicles to idealize the moral character of both victims; their frailties, like Hamlet’s, derive more from warring evils of the world than from their own innate urges. 76 Adelman and Hunter (n. 66 above) devalue Macduff ’s moral probity by taking seriously Lady Macduff ’s anxious but wittily exaggerated accusations of her husband (4.2.6–14, 44–5); yet even the child appreciates the irony of her remarks. In spite of the pointed criticisms levelled at Macduff by his wife, by Malcolm (4.3.26–8), and, most emphatically, by himself (224–7), it is clear that he is moved by generous compassion for Scotland as a whole, and that his compassion grows out of the intense family feeling manifested by his wife and child. 77 In Acts 1–2 of each mature tragedy, Shakespeare portrays an assault on conscience or synteresis (Freudian superego), not merely as a fatherly or kingly power but increasingly as a consolidating, androgynous figure of authority: Othello-Desdemona, Lear (whose initial attempt to arrogate female nurture confirms the flaw in his sovereignty), the bi-gendered Duncan, Antony-Cleopatra. On the nature and symbolization of superego, see Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923), SE, 19, 3–66; M. Furer, ‘The History of the Superego Concept in Psychoanalysis’, Moral Value and the Superego Concept in Psychoanalysis, ed. S.C. Post (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), 11–62; A. Holder, ‘Preoedipal Contributions to the Formation of the Superego’, PSOC 37 (1982), 245–72.   On the Renaissance view of conscience or synteresis as a means of consolidating mental powers and gender-components of human nature, see Primaudaye, The French Academie, II.364–511, especially to restore the Edenic communion between affective heart (437–511) and intellective head (364–436).   Both Elizabeth I and James I exploited the idea of monarchy as an androgynous consolidation of paternal authority and maternal nurture, as noted by S. Orgel and L.A. Montrose in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. M.W. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N.J. Vickers (University of Chicago Press, 1986), 58–9, 65–87. 78 Cf. D. Willbern, ‘Phantasmagoric Macbeth’, ELR 16 (1986), esp. 520–7. 79 See, e.g., Harding, Kimbrough, French, Kahn, Adelman, Hunter in n. 66 above. 80 ‘Some Remarks on Infant Observation’ (1952) in The Writings of Anna Freud, 8 vols. (New York: International Universities Press, 1968), 4, 509–85. In her main work, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, 1936, Anna Freud began to establish that ego-functions serve not only defensive but constructive purposes. In much current Ego Psychology, ‘sublimation’ is no longer a fashionable term, being displaced by ‘neutralization’ and ‘desexualization’. These latter terms, however, emphasize the defensive nature of the ego’s workings (especially its pacifying of the ever-clamorous libido) rather than identifying the essentially constructive purpose of this ultimate ego function, particularly its contribution to the Kohutian struggle for ‘grandiose selfhood’ (the evident goal of the Macbeths). On the ego’s defensive mechanisms, see W. Hoffer, ‘Defensive Process and Defensive Organization: Their Place in Psychoanalytic Technique’, IJP 35 (1954), 194–8; and H. Hartmann, ‘The Development of the Ego Concept in Freud’s Work’, IJP 37 (1956), 425–38. On the ego’s constructive functioning (especially in the closely related processes of sublimation, superego formation, and therapeutic transference), see H.W. Loewald, Sublimation (Yale University Press, 1988), chs 1–2; H. Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), 309–24.

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81 Rivalrous envy becomes Macbeth’s dominant motivation only in Act 3’s deliberation over killing Banquo. In Acts 1–2 Macbeth’s main motivation is not envy, either for Duncan, Banquo, or Malcolm (though the basis for later envy is obviously established): in spite of anxiety at Duncan’s appointing his son as Prince of Cumberland, Macbeth never considers killing Malcolm along with Duncan (leaving the unappointed Donalbain to shoulder the guilt). In his initial embracing of evil Macbeth is preoccupied with the sublime fantasy of regicide as the ‘be-all and end-all’, conferring inviolable supremacy. Only on discovering its failure to provide such aggrandizement does he turn to bitter envy of ‘fraternal’ rivals. 82 Aquinas, ST I.63.2. Macbeth’s rivalrous fury toward the fraternal Banquo is thus a second stage of evil, resulting from the failure to satisfy the hunger for greatness, just as Cain’s envious fratricide stemmed from his parents’ frustrated desire to emulate God. For a different perspective on the analogy between Cain and Macbeth, see P. Jorgensen, His Naked Frailty, 47–51, 190–5, 200, 213.   On the pervasive envy in human motivation, see M. Klein, Envy and Gratitude (New York: Basic Books, 1957); and R. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory (1972; rpt Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), esp. 56–168. On Shakespeare’s persistent use of this envy principle in ‘enemy twins’, see J. Fineman, ‘Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare’s Doubles’, Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, eds M.W. Schwartz and C. Kahn (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 70–109. 83 Jorgensen (His Naked Frailities, 194) calls such a speech (like Lear’s similar Act 3 raving) a ‘soliloquy made public’. Equally important, these soliloquiess are made obscure through intense repression, so that neither Macbeth and Lear nor their auditors can easily fathom their speeches’ profound self-reflections. Cf. B. Weller, ‘Identity and Representation in Shakespeare’, ELH 49 (1982), 356ff; R. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, ed. R. Schwartz (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 218ff. 84 On the key role of projection in developmental psychology see The Writings of Anna Freud, 4, 509–85; and D. Ornston, ‘On Projection’, PSOC 33 (1978), 117–66. M. Klein, in ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, IJP 27 (1946), 99–110, and in The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. A. Strachey (1932; rev. ed. New York: Delacorte, 1975), 142–8, 178, observed a pattern in childhood development of introjection–projection–reintrojection. But I believe that the ‘reintrojection’ occurs on a higher level, as in sublimation, and that this higher level is made possible by the stimulating effect of projection. Thus reintrojection, like Wordsworth’s ‘recollection in tranquillity’, is a culminating psychic internalization, an identity-construction occurring on a comprehensive, controlled, and ‘sublime’ level. Cf. R.P. Knight, ‘Introjection, Projection, and Identification’, PsyQ 9 (1940), 334–41; A. Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1966), 50–3. 85 In spite of Macbeth’s show of surprise at Fleance’s survival (3.4.20–4), it is tempting to believe that Macbeth is the ‘third murderer’ (noted by A.P. Paton, N&Q (1869), and reformulated by H.C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago University Press, 1960), 2, 122–6) – so that he only ‘half-participates’ in the second murder. That Macbeth can hardly admit (even to himself) his involvement suggests the extent of his splitting psyche. If he is the third murderer, it reveals deepening insecurity and a growing obsession with rational control (utter self-repression, anal attentiveness to detail, and a host of other defensive mechanisms aimed at sustaining to others and to himself the illusion of kingship, including the pretence of shock on learning of Fleance’s escape – which resembles his extravagant show of dismay on learning of Duncan’s death). Macbeth’s furtive pretence of uninvolvement even for his own cutthroats thus demonstrates increasing cowardice, alienation, and lack of a stable central self. Hence, for the second murder Macbeth both is and is not an active participant, owing to his descent into psychic bifurcation.   G.W. Williams, however, in ‘The Third Murderer in Macbeth’, SQ 23 (1972), 261, observes that ‘The supposition that Macbeth is the third murderer … necessitates a staging that twice violates the “Law of Reentry”’. Thus, though the third murderer indicates Macbeth’s growing anxiety, and his grasping for control (attending more closely than the others to the usurper’s crucial purposes), stage convention would seem to argue against Macbeth’s schizoid

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r­eappearance as monarch-cutthroat-monarch in such rapid sequence. Yet if one considers the extraordinary liberties and experimentation in the staging of other Shakespearean plays of this period (e.g., the Dover cliff scene in King Lear), one wonders at the theatrical ingenuity of having Macbeth immediately re-enter, perhaps with a dark cape only thinly disguising his kingly garments, so that the audience would actually witness his schizophrenic ‘doubling’. If so, it is the most stunningly purposeful violation of the Law of Reentry in the Shakespearean canon. 86 In ‘Macbeth: King James’s Play’, SAR 47 (1982), 12–21, G.W. Williams astutely observes that the ghost of Banquo, rather than of Duncan, holds sway in the drama’s central scene, thus heightening the compliment to King James I, though it subverts decorum. Williams (20–1, n. 12) notes the suggestive seating which underlies the doppelgänger effect at the banquet: ‘Macbeth does not sit in his throne [the ‘state’ where Lady Macbeth remains] – to which he has no spiritual right; he does expect to sit at the table – a level to which he does have a right.’ The ‘place reserved’ for Banquo, to which Macbeth is drawn as to his own natural place, is centrally located: ‘Both sides are even: here I’ll sit i’ th’ midst’ (3.4.11). Almost exactly the same event occurs in Dostoyevsky’s The Double, and similar psychic displacements occur in James’s The Turn of the Screw and Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’; but only Macbeth confronts a double who represents not his sinister shadow but the ruination of his better self.   No critic has fully considered Banquo as Macbeth’s ‘double’. R.N. Watson briefly mentions Banquo as ‘doppelgänger’, in ‘“Thriftless Ambition”, Foolish Wishes, and the Tragedy of Macbeth’, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ed. H. Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 142–7; J. Kirsch, in Shakespeare’s Royal Self (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1965), 331ff, comments on the ‘participation mystique’ of the two men (Macbeth being more attuned to the unconscious, but the weaker ego); M.N. Proser, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies (Princeton University Press, 1965), 76–8, describes the good Banquo’s ghost ‘as a kind of analogy for Macbeth’s mutilated soul’.   On literary uses of the ‘double’ and the ‘decomposition’ process, see D.L. Eder, ‘The Idea of the Double’, PsyR 65 (1978), 579–614; and R. Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), with a provocative but misleading identification of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as doubles. Rogers does not distinguish the homoerotic phenomenon of mirror-transference (between close friends, sibling rivals, or hero and alter-ego) from the more complex psychic transference between heterosexual partners, especially in marriage. 87 The positing of an ‘indissoluble tie’ (Mac 3.1.15–18) between self and shadow-self (or alterego) occurs at the exact centre of Othello and Macbeth (and, with more benevolent implications, at the centre of King Lear). At this moment each protagonist confronts the darkest possibilities of selfhood (the imputed treachery of Desdemona, the feigned sins of Poor Tom, the butchery inflicted by Macbeth). 88 See, e.g., Hogan (‘Macbeth: Authority and Progenitorship’, n. 2), who interprets the slaughter as a transference of the on-going Oedipal struggle, an indirect blow at Macduff as threatening authority and as fertile progenitor. 89 We must carefully distinguish Macbeth’s tyrannous infantilism (culminating in narcissistic rage) from the healthy oral-narcissicistic bond, involving mutual recognition and respect between parent and child during the sucking stage. For the potentially negative aspects of infantile narcissism, see S. Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, 14, 69–102; O.F. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: International Universities Press, 1975); and the important Shakespearean studies of aberrant narcissism by Kirsch, ‘Macbeth’s Suicide’, and Adelman, ‘“Born of Woman”’ (n. 66 above), and ‘“Anger’s My Meat”: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus’, in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, eds M.W. Schwartz and C. Kahn (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 129–49. On the positive mode of narcissism and of maternal oral-narcissistic bonding, see H. Kohut, ‘Forms and Transformations of Narcissism’, JAPA 14 (1966), 243–72; and J. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 11–50. Shakespeare is ­particularly attuned to this primitive cathexis which forms the core of human identity, emphasizing both

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negative and positive aspects of motherly nurture in the cathartic sequence of each mature tragedy, most strikingly in Cleopatra’s death-scene (‘Dost thou not see the baby at my breast / That sucks the nurse asleep?’). 90 On ‘introjection’ (and related functions: ‘incorporation’, ‘internalization’, and ‘identification’), see, in addition to writings of A. Freud and M. Klein cited in n. 84 above, S. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), 14, 237–58; H.W. Loewald, ‘Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego’, PsyQ 31 (1962), 483–504, and ‘On Internalization’, IJP 54 (1973), 9–17; R. Schafer, Aspects of Internalization (New York: International Universities Press, 1968); W.W. Meissner, ‘Internalization and Object Relations’, JAPA 27 (1979), 345–60, and Internalization in Psychoanalysis (New York: International Universities Press, 1981); R.S. Behrends and S.J. Blatt, ‘Internalization and Psychological Development throughout the Life Cycle’, PSOC 40 (1985), 11–39. 91 Though the cathartic power of womanly/matronly nurture in Acts 4–5 holds true for all of Shakespeare’s major tragedies, Hamlet requires qualification. Never fully reunited with Ophelia or Gertrude, Hamlet only incipiently comprehends the meaning of a grave holding his ‘fool’ and his beloved. The play’s final annihilation of a false parent-king, an inadequate sibling-double (Laertes), and a mother struggling to reclaim her child, suggests Hamlet’s unresolved Oedipal (and pre-Oedipal) anxieties and an incomplete quest for identity. 92 On the castration threat as a vagina dentata fantasy, see O. Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Robert Brunner, 1952; orig. 1924), 48–9; S.F. Ferenczi, The Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1925), 278–81; L. Shengold, ‘The Effects of Overstimulation’, IJP 48 (1967), 403–15; C.P. Wilson, ‘Stone as a Symbol of Teeth’, PsyQ 36 (1967), 418–27; D.B. Schuster, ‘Bisexuality and Body as Phallus’, PsyQ 38 (1969),72–80; and esp. R. Schafer, Language and Insight (Yale University Press, 1978), 153–60, who provides the context of a broad gender analysis.   Note, however, that the demoniac symbolism in Macbeth, 4.1 is an alliance of male and female perversions: the witches’ devouring cauldron (vagina dentata) is shortly joined by their demon masters’ ‘armed head’ (penis dentata) which similarly tempts Macbeth to annihilate children (4.1.69–86). This satanic collusion of perverted gender components, a marital travesty which promotes mutual deception and annihilation rather than mutual support and procreation, evolves throughout the play. 93 In ‘The Uniqueness of King Lear’, ShakJ (1984): 44–61, E.A.J. Honigmann calls Lear an ‘Oedipus-Everyman play’, in which ‘a sinner who becomes a thinker … suffers rather than initiates action’ (47). To this universal sufferance-myth one might add the stories of Job and Prometheus, also major analogues for Lear. Yet all of these, except Job, actively initiate their own suffering – and none more than Lear. 94 A.C. Bradley, ‘Construction in Shakespeare’s Tragedies’, Shakespearean Tragedy; E. Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 152–94. 95 S. Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Princeton University Press, 1979), 137–79; ch. 1 in Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition and Tragedy (Yale University Press, 1983). 96 H. Berger, Jr, ‘King Lear. The Lear Family Romance’, The Centennial Review 23 (1979): 348–76; P.A. Jorgensen, Lear’s Self-Discovery (University of California Press, 1967), 72–5. 97 On act divisions of the folio Lear, see Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare, 160; and G. Taylor and J. Jowett, ‘The Structure of Performance Act-Intervals in the London Theatres 1576–1642’, in Shakespeare Reshaped 1606–1621 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 48–50. Cf. W.T. Jewkes, Act Division in Elizabethan and Jacobean Plays, 1583–1616 (Hamden: Archon, 1958), 35–40. 98 In each history tetrad Shakespeare depicts the contrary monarchic crises in causal conjunction. The childish abdication of Henry VI invites Richard lII’s ruthless usurpation. In the more complex second tetrad Richard II, though weak and self-indulgent, matures through deposition, as does the usurper Bolingbroke through assuming the tasks of rule. Abdicator and usurper reach full complexity in King Lear and Macbeth: each fully causes the personal/ monarchic tragedy; and each, despite repression and madness, is conscience-struck by his mistakes.

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 99 G.W. Williams, in ‘Petitionary Prayer in King Lear’, SAQ 85 (1986), 360–73, by examining ‘twenty-one specific petitions … to the gods, to the heaven(s), and to Nature or Fortune’, discovers a more optimistic dialogue with divinity than that described by W.R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (UP of Kentucky, 1988), S. Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies, and many others. 100 Each of the three confrontations has been treated as a crux, especially in King Lear. G. Taylor explicates the deep significance of Lear’s clash with Goneril (1.4) in To Analyze Delight: A Hedonist Criticism of Shakespeare (University of Delaware Press, 1985), 162–236. The central import of Lear’s meeting with Tom (3.4), axis of the play, is often noted, e.g. by R.B. Heilman, This Great Stage (Louisiana State University Press, 1948); and M. Mack, Sr, ‘The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations on the Construction of the Tragedies’, Stratford upon Avon Studies, eds J.R. Brown and B. Harris (London: St Martin’s, 1960), 11–42. Lear’s reunion with Cordelia (4.7) is often viewed as the play’s goal, accession to self-knowledge. Lear’s epiphanies expand into fuller vision; Macbeth’s anti-epiphanies contract into evasion. 101 L. Josephs, Character Structure and the Organization of the Self (Columbia University Press, 1992), ch. 5: ‘The Archaic Relational Matrix’. 102 See F. Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy (Huntington Library, 1983), 296: ‘in no other of Shakespeare’s plays do characters invoke Fortune so insistently’, especially ‘at pivotal points in the action’ – i.e., after each completed turning of Fortune’s wheel. 103 See the comments on Fortune by Kent (2.2.176, 5.3.282–3), the Fool (2.4.70–3; 3.2.76), Edgar (3.6.101–14; 4.1.1–12; 5.2.9–11), Cordelia (5.3.3–6), Lear (5.3.16–19), Edmund (5.3.29–34). Cf. Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy, chs 1, 7, 9; R. Soellner, ‘King Lear and the Magic of the Wheel’, SQ 35 (1984), 274–89; H.R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature (New York, 1927); R. Chapman, ‘The Wheel of Fortune in Shakespeare’s Historical Plays’, RES 1 (1950), 1–7; Elton, King Lear and the Gods, passim. 104 Elton (King Lear and the Gods, 63) rightly contrasts Leir’s passivity in the source-play with Lear’s active role. Lear’s aggressive abdication parallels Hamlet’s occluded kingship and delayed revenge, and Prospero’s initial evasion of rule. All three, though capable of extraordinary agency, incline to sceptical detachment and, like Vincentio in Measure for Measure, exemplify the deus absconditas of Reformation controversy. Yet of all Shakespearean protago­ nists, Lear experiences the fullest passion, raises most unsettling questions, dominates plot and audience with most psychic energy, and most fully exemplifies sovereignty – his mad reveries evoking a lifetime of authority and proud accomplishment. It is inaccurate to call him passive. 105 On the repetition compulsion as a key to human drives, see S. Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-through’ (1914), SE, 12, 147–56; ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920): SE, 18, 7–64; E. Bibring, ‘The Conception of the Repetition Compulsion’, PsyQ 12 (1941), 486–519; H.W. Loewald, ‘Some Considerations on Repetition and Repetition Compulsion’, IJP 52 (1971), 59–65. 106 M. Rose, Shakespearean Design (Harvard University Press, 1972), 13–15, 35–9, 43–4, 126, 151, 179 n. 21. 107 Albany views Goneril’s fiendish behaviour as loss of true being: ‘That nature which contemns its origin cannot be bordered certain … Like monsters of the deep …. See thyself, devil!’ (4.2.33–4, 44, 51, 60–2). On Lady Macbeth’s demonism, see W.M. Merchant, ‘His Fiend-like Queen’, ShS 19 (1966), 75–94. 108 I-S. Ewbank traces the sterility wish in Lear and Macbeth to Medea, ‘The Fiend-like Queen: A Note on “Macbeth” and Seneca’s “Medea”’, ShS 19 (1966), 82–94. 109 On sublimation’s role in forming superego or conscience (internalized parental authority) and synthesizing gender roles into comprehensive androgynous selfhood, see H.W. Loewald, Sublimation (Yale University Press, 1988), chs 1–2. On grandiose selfhood as sublimation’s goal, see H. Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), 309–24. 110 Prior to murdering Duncan, the Macbeths refer to ‘great’ or ‘greatness’ seventeen times.

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Lear, using the love-test to confirm his greatness (and implicitly, his immortality), is only slowly weaned from self-conception as the ‘great image of authority’. 111 On the universal psychic content of Lear’s love-test, see A. Dundes, ‘“To love My Father All”: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Folktale Source of King Lear’, Southern Folklore Quarterly 40 (1976), 353–66. 112 Ricoeur notes hyperbole’s signal role in seeking ‘absolute otherness’ by ‘Elevation’ and ‘Exteriority’, undermining relationship. See Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 336–9. 113 Boethius, The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1978), 325–31. 114 Jones, Scenic Form, passim. 115 That Lear in his central cycle induces his own madness in self-exile on a stormy heath, while Macbeth deceitfully hosts an inaugural banquet, epitomizes their contrary developments. 116 For iconic linking of fortune with tempest, both driven by time, temporality, see E. Wind, Giorgione’s ‘Tempesta’ with Comments on Giorgione’s Poetic Allegories (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969); Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy, 287. 117 G.W. Williams alerted me to the importance of the two plots joining in this central encounter. 118 For Tom as ‘spirit’, see 34–9, 42; for his fearful defiance of the ‘fiend’, see 34–45, 51, 60, 79, 97, 114, 130, 139, 157; 3.6.8, 17, 29. In Act 4, after a brief reprise of demon-fantasies on becoming Gloucester’s guide (4.1.57), Edgar disengages from demonism, spatially distancing it on the cliff of pride, and exaggerating it into farce: ‘his eyes were two full moons; he had a thousand noses, / Horns whelked and waved like the enridged sea’ (4.6.69–72). 119 S. Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in Shakespearean Negotiations (University of California Press, 1988), 94–128; J.L. Murphy, Darkness and Devils: Exorcism in King Lear (Ohio U, 1984), ch. 7. 120 N. Grene, Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination (New York: St Martin’s, 1992), 178. 121 W. Gulstad, ‘Mock-Trial or Witch-Trial in King Lear?,’ N&Q 239:4 (1994), 494–7. 122 On projection’s crucial developmental role, see The Writings of Anna Freud, 4, 509–85; and D. Ornston, ‘On Projection’, PSOC 33 (1978), 117–66. M. Klein observed the childhood pattern of introjection-projection-reintrojection, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, IJP 27 (1946), 99–110, and The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. A. Strachey (1932; rev. ed. New York: Delacorte, 1975), 142–8, 178. Cf. R.P. Knight, ‘Introjection, Projection, and Identification’, PsyQ 9 (1940), 334–41; A. Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1966), 50–3. See n. 84 above. 123 Berger, ‘The Lear Family Romance’, 356–64; A. Leggatt, King Lear (New York: Harvester, 1988), 33, 79ff; J. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (University of Chicago Press, 1984), 189–203; S. Jayne, ‘Charity in King Lear’, SQ 15 (1964), 277–88, who finds ‘no compensating love anywhere in the world of this play’ (285). A more balanced view is K. Cartwright’s tracing of the audience’s alternating engagement with and detachment from Lear, in Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 181–226. 124 For Augustine, sane self-love reflects Creator love (De moribus ecclesiae, 25.46–29.61; De trinitate, 8–15); O. O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (Yale University Press, 1980), 37ff, 112ff; J. Burnaby, Amor Dei (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938); T.M. De Ferrari, The Problem of Charity for Self, A Study of Thomistic and Modern Theological Discussion (Washington, DC: St Paul Editions, 1962); G. Outka, Agape (Yale University Press, 1972); V.P. Furnish, The Love-Command in the New Testament (London: Abingdon Press, 1973). Cf. H. Kohut, ‘Forms and Transformations of Narcissism’, JAPA (1966), 243–72; and J. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 11–50, who explains positive aspects of maternal ‘oral-narcissist bonding’. For negative, obsessive self-love, see S. Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’, SE, 14, 69–102; O.F. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: International Universities Press, 1975). 125 The devotion shown to Lear by Kent, the Fool, Cordelia, Gloucester, Edgar, and other ‘gentlemen’ is more than habitual servitude. The ‘authority’ in Lear’s countenance which Kent ‘would fain call master’ implies Lear’s lifetime of sovereignty (1.4.27–30). Berger faults

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Lear and his supporters for subverting love (367–76); yet plain-speaking Kent and Cordelia do not simply antagonize Lear but express acknowledgment of his fatherly/kingly position (1.1.95–8; 1.1.139–42). 126 On the Cynic philosophers’ wise madness in connection with Poor Tom, see E.M.M. Taylor, ‘Lear’s Philosopher’, SQ 6 (1955), 364–5; R. Soellner, Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Ohio State University Press, 1972), 300–2; J. Donawerth, ‘Diogenes the Cynic and Lear’s Definition of Man, King Lear III.iv.101–109’, ELN (1977), 10–14; F.G. Butler, ‘Who Are King Lear’s Philosophers? An Answer, with Some Help from Erasmus’, ES 67 (1986), 511–24; S. Doloff, ‘“Let me talk with this philosopher”: The Alexander/Diogenes Paradigm in King Lear’, HLQ 54 (1991), 253–5. Cf. J.L. Lievsay, ‘Some Renaissance Views of Diogenes the Cynic’, Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. J.G. McManaway, G.E. Dawson, E.E. Willoughby (Washington: Folger Library, 1948), 447–55. In Elton’s more pessimistic reading (King Lear and the Gods, 97–8, 200ff), Lear’s ‘philosopher’ visually parodies Stoic denial of passion, and asking him the cause of thunder undermines belief in providence. 127 For Erasmus’ and Montaigne’s satire of presumption and praise of folly (exemplified on the heath and in Lear’s ‘sermon’ to Gloucester in Act 4), see P. McNamara, ‘King Lear and Comic Acceptance’, Erasmus Review 1 (1971), 95–105; E.R. Hooker, ‘The Relation of Shakespeare to Montaigne’, PMLA 17 (1902), 312–66, esp. 364; G.C. Taylor, Shakespeare’s Debt to Montaigne (London: Phaeton, 1925); W.B.D. Henderson, ‘Montaigne’s Apologie of Raymond Sebond and King Lear’, SAB 14 (1939), 209–25, esp. 216ff; Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 192–4, 231–3, 259, passim; Soellner, Shakespeare’s Patterns, 296–7, 314. 128 Dieter Mehl’s critique of Lear’s largely unrealized prayer for the poor, ‘Lear and the “Poor Naked Wretches”’, Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft West (1975), 154–62, is made an interpretative crux in Dollimore’s Marxist reading, Radical Tragedy, and cf. ‘Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism’, Political Shakespeare, eds J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (Manchester University Press, 1985), 2–17. 129 Interpretations of Macbeth’s ‘great bond’ include his complicity with witches, his friendship with Banquo, the general bond of universal siblinghood, and, for G. Wills, the baptismal bond with God, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Oxford University Press, 1995), 59–61. 130 Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 197–212, cites opposing Renaissance views of storm (thunder as Providential versus sceptical demystification); but a sophisticated mean (Erasmus, Montaigne) seems closest to Shakespeare. Elton neglects Renaissance use of paradox in tempest allusions and the metaphoric ‘inner storm’ of madness to awaken God’s voice within, conscience. Cf. J.W.Bennett, ‘The Storm Within: The Madness of Lear’, SQ 13 (1962), 137–55. 131 On introjection as primary in establishing selfhood, especially in reaction to the death of a loved nurturer (and related functions of incorporation, internalization, identification), see S. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, (1917), SE, 14, 237–58; H.W. Loewald, ‘Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego’, PsyQ 31 (1962), 483–504, and ‘On Internalization’, IJP 54 (1973), 9–17; R. Schafer, Aspects of Internalization (New York: International Universities Press, 1968); W.W. Meissner, ‘Internalization and Object Relations’, JAPA 27 (1979), 345–60; Internalization in Psychoanalysis (New York: International Universities Press, 1981); R.S. Behrends and S.J. Blatt, ‘Internalization and Psychological Development throughout the Life Cycle’, PSOC 40 (1985), 11–39. 132 S. Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’, in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 267–353. 133 See Augustine, De trinitate; Berger, ‘King Lear: The Lear Family Romance’, 374, on Cordelia’s aggressive charity. 134 Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 135–6, 175 and n., 234–8, 258, 326. 135 M.J. Levith, What’s in Shakespeare’s Names (New Haven: Archon, 1978), 57. 136 Compare the liebestod of Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, and especially Antony and Cleopatra, whose communion in the final scene of Act 4 is axis for the final two-act cycle. 137 The optimistic potential of Lear’s final words (in folio) is noted by T. Clayton, ‘“Is this the

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promis’d end?” Revision in the Role of the King’, The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, eds G. Taylor and M. Warren (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 121–41; B.A. Doebler, ‘Rooted Sorrow’: Dying in Early Modem England (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994), 168–9; and Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 258n. Cf. Williams, ‘Petitionary Prayer’, 371. 138 Kiefer, Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy, 295. 139 Ezekiel 1.4–21, 10.1–22. 140 Soellner, ‘King Lear and the Magic of the Wheel’, 283–4. 141 Boethius, The Theological Tractates, 361–3. 142 Ibid., 297; cf. 273. 143 Ibid., The Theological Tractates, 375.

7

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End-songs: final vistas of Spenser and Shakespeare

Spenser’s mutability-song: conclusion or transition? The Mutabilitie Cantos’ relation to The Faerie Queene remains a mystery. Is it a separate poem? – perhaps, considering its extensive and complete dramatic action, with a parallel comic subplot. Or a medullar episode of an uncompleted legend? – this seems more likely, considering its format of stanzas, cantos, and canto-headnotes; its mid-legend numbering of cantos; and the printer Lownes’s estimating it to be part of a ‘LEGEND OF Constancie’. Or is it a clever coda for a truncated epic; and if so, did Spenser intentionally halve his epic, or wryly bow to tragic circumstances, or both? Clearly the Cantos do not adequately conclude the epic’s overall plot structure, or its evolving characters and relationships, or its comprehensive moral-political allegory: a multivalent history of England’s rise to grandeur, expressed as a Summa Ethica, ‘the twelue priuate morall vertues, as Aristotle hath deuised’.1 But though Mutabilitie’s parable inadequately ends that ambitious epic, it is not an errant false-card, for it extends into mythic form the important motif of an earth-born titan asserting materialist dominion over all being, a threat routinely recurring in cantos 7–8 of each book, thus initiating the latter half of each legend of The Faerie Queene. In Chances of Mischief: Variations of Fortune in Spenser Michael Steppat examines the epic’s pervasive emphasis of fortune, chance, and mutability (and fortune-sponsoring deities like Venus, Nature, Proteus), thus making the Mutabilitie Cantos seem the poem’s apt conclusion.2 By extending his analysis in three ways, I will argue that the Cantos are not conclusive but transitional. First, as Steppat and others have observed, Mutabilitie herself undergoes radical mutation of behaviour and consciousness,3 shifting from rude assaults to ordered pageantry and deferential politeness (a change that mimics the maturation of the epic’s human personae). Initially Spenser depicts the titaness with limited awareness, focused on physicality and political power but lacking moral and theological depth. Like most of humankind, she first views change (herself) from a materialist perspective of Time and Fortune, whose iconography depicts life’s transient power as a meaningless cycle, a wheel with a grisly death’s head at its centre. Nature, however, enables Mutabilitie to see herself in deeper contexts: in the soul’s struggle to ‘work its own perfection’ with the help of decay and death, and in the movings

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of divine Providence, implicit in Nature’s ‘transfigured’ appearance and her calm, mostly silent certitude as she graciously models the return of creatures to their ‘first estate’. Nature thus subsumes her dark impulsive double, Mutabilitie. Instead of a skull at the wheel’s centre, one finds the neglected-but-always-present Christ, for whom the veiled Nature (‘Unseene of any, yet of all beheld’, 7.7.13) stands as vicar. Mutabilitie, thus detached from pagan moorings, is readied for sailing the sea of Christian-Platonic ideology. Still only half-disclosed, however, is that sea’s depth, the reformed titaness’s destiny, and Nature’s full unveiling as the human soul’s virtuous powers. Second, the salient change in Mutabilitie’s character – and in the epic’s evolving depiction of titanism – signals a major revelatory peripety in the overall plot structure of The Faerie Queene. This access to a broader vision, though still liminal and unfulfilled, designates the Cantos not as a conclusion for the epic (whose foreshortened or truncated form, full of loose ends in Books 5 and 6, would certainly testify to Mutabilitie’s rule) but as a transition to the final six legends. The Cantos’ dominant motifs – pagan deities feuding with Change, Faunus’ urge to see the naked physicality (especially the genitalia) of a chaste goddess, an alluringly fragile pastoralism, teasingly incomplete numerology – all suggest this transitional function. Finally, I will argue that Spenser meant to resolve the Cantos’ changeable estate by evolving a very different master-trope, one that would stabilize the impassioned gods and fauns of the pastoral world by providing numerological completeness and order. Spenser gives many signs that The Faerie Queene’s goal is to recover spiritual unity after ‘dilation’ (descent into material plurality)4 by completing the chivalric pilgrimage in a courtly templar vision – what Lawrence Manley’s brilliant study of Spenser’s minor poems calls ‘the progress of the poem toward the city’.5 The moral-intellectual-providential management of political change in Plato’s Republic and Timaeus, in Cicero’s De re publica, and in the Zion vision of Psalms, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Revelation, and Augustine’s City of God, would contribute to a vision of Cleopolis reformed into a holy eidetic city, the goal of Spenser as a Christianized Renaissance Orpheus or David.6 The implied human protagonist in Mutabilitie’s testing of pagan gods The Cantos do not disclose a human exemplar of Constancy, whose moral quest would interact with, or be contextualized by, the debate over Mutabilitie’s sway. Humphrey Tonkin exaggerates only slightly in saying that ‘nowhere else in The Faerie Queene do we have so extended a narrative completely divorced from fleshand-blood characters, with so little allusion to the poem’s chivalric theme’.7 One regrets the lack of that figure, allowing comparison with Shakespeare’s portrait of failed Stoic constancy in Brutus, Coriolanus, and Antony,8 as well as with Lady Mary Wroth’s depiction of female constancy, surpassing that of men, in Urania and its adjunct sonnets, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.9 Considering the dominant role of women in the Mutabilitie Cantos – the Titaness’s bold ambition, the embattled Cynthia/Diana as a type of Elizabeth I (with her motto semper eadem, ‘always the same’),10 and the grand genetrix Nature who encloses the transfigured sapient

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Christ – it seems inevitable that Spenser would have depicted a female protagonist, another facet of Elizabeth I, as his main exemplar of Constancy.11 Do the Cantos utterly exclude the human struggle that is central to the six completed legends of The Faerie Queene? The Cantos do depict two kinds of human presence. First, the human labours and sacramental rites in the pageant of months (7.7.32–43) form a crucial part of Mutabilitie’s display for Nature’s judgment.12 No one has fully explained the implications of these labourers, who in the Virgilian cursus suggest the Georgics’ democratizing impulse rather than the elitist ‘chivalric theme’ of the epic. The second, more prominent human presence in the Cantos is implied in the antics of pagan gods. A mingled human-and-divine figuration occurs throughout The Faerie Queene, especially in so far as the Olympians are flattering mirrors for great lords and a virgin queen. To analyse the gods is to anatomize the human psyche, for the interplay of three levels of divinity (Titaness, Olympian deities, highest God) mirrors the hierarchy of human nature: Mutabilitie (or Faunus) is Libido’s primal upstart urges;13 Jove (or Cynthia/Diana) is Reason, whose hard-won authority must manage both soul and state;14 and Nature is the inmost voice of Conscience (Synderesis) that discerns errancy in both humans and pagan deities.15 The gods’ droll self-humanizing, even self-bestializing (and the complementary self-divinizing of both aristocratic and common humans) is essential to the configuration of authority in The Faerie Queene. Increasingly the poem’s mythic theophanies involve a testing of both humans and gods. In templar and paradisal episodes we scrutinize the behaviour of both Britomart and Cupid, both Scudamour and Venus, both Britomart and Isis, both Calidore and the Graces. When we witness the gods’ errancies – Cupid’s blind, childish tyranny and the equivocal gestures of Venus, Diana, and Isis – the interplay is painfully driven home. This signal feature of the epic’s medullar episodes achieves much larger expression in the Mutabilitie Cantos. Here laughably obstreperous deities and natural powers – ‘foolish faun’, ‘foolish gerle’ Mutabilitie, fussily imperious ‘high Jove’ – steal the stage almost entirely, but only to magnify humanlike ­errancies:   Whil’st she thus spake, the Gods that gaue good eare   . . . Stood all astonied, like a sort of Steeres;   Mongst whom, some beast of strange and forraine race,   Vnwares is chaunc’t, far straying from his peeres: So did their ghastly gaze bewray their hidden feares. (FQ 7.6.28)

The Olympians in Homer’s and Virgil’s epics never suffer such ‘feares’, such paralysing ‘ghastly gaze’, such demeaning comparison to ‘Steeres’ who, separated from their familiar privileged ground, are threatened by a predator of superior power. What do these tropes imply? The likeness to livestock casts the gods as a pitiful dimension of Faunus, a derogatory simile that may be coloured by Spenser’s anxieties in Vewe over the wilfully unpredictable pasturings of Irish cattle. Equally unsettling is Mutabilitie’s likeness to a ‘beast of strange and forraine race’. Surpassing the menace of the old titans (even chaotic Typhon), this new giantess exemplifies a level of philosophical abstraction (as in Boethius’s Consolation) that surpasses

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Graeco-Roman theology and myth-making, thus drawing the gods’ power and their very existence into question. Not even the oracular pronouncement of a magnificent Nature can restore the gods’ authority from such a challenge. Jove is not (as the narrator naively avows) ‘confirm’d in his imperiall see’ (7.7.59) unless we note the limitations of his ‘see’. Why show the gods in such diminished form? If Spenser in additional legends had extended the roles of Jove and Diana, Cupid and Venus, they would now disclose a limited natural theophany and comparable human vanity; yet, as in The Fowre Hymnes, Spenser could balance the irony by unveiling their fuller meaning as integumenta.16 That Spenser used pagan gods to mirror aristocrats means that Mutabilitie also challenges England’s monarch. Though most of The Faerie Queene loudly praises Elizabeth’s reign (despite forebodings in Books 5–6 over her neglect of Ireland and her laureate poet), the Cantos form a sharp reversal, affronting Elizabeth’s personal and political bodies in ways that render her authority as equivocal as that of the pagan gods. Mutabilitie’s assault on Cynthia (most heavenly of the virgin queen’s divine personae) implies Elizabeth’s subjection to ageing and mortality, and Faunus’ lewd invasion implies disrespect from Elizabeth’s Irish subjects, here depicted as a bestially limited consciousness that focuses on the god’s (or monarch’s) bodily and sexual nature, as in Spenser’s recurrent motif of the woman with satyrs or savages: Una, Hellenore, Serena. A similar testing of authority and personal integrity is apparent in the Cantos’ main influences: Ovid (especially the Metamorphoses and Fasti) and Chaucer. Spenser, as Syrithe Pugh has shown, appropriates Ovid’s satiric tribute to Augustus’s self-comparison to the gods, implying a parody of Elizabeth.17 Spenser, moreover, subsumes Ovid’s critique of the self-divinizing emperor within a critique of Ovid himself. As Michael Holahan observes,18 Faunus’ offence of Cynthia radically revises the Ovidian tales of Callisto and Diana, Actaeon and Diana, Arethusa and Alpheus in order to affirm a Christian perspective on passional change – including, one might add, an earthy Chaucerian vitalism that affirms sensuality. If recasting Ovid’s concept of mutability is a key to the Faunus subplot, embracing Chaucer’s more positive view of change is a key to resolving Mutabilitie’s boisterous assaults.19 In translating Boethius’s Consolation Chaucer became the first known user of ‘mutability’ in English, and each aspect of the Mutabilitie Cantos – ironic myth-making, the exuberant yet humble tone, hilarious counterpointing of high and low, and the persistent theme of mutability – recalls Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules, House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, and Canterbury Tales, as well as his translations of three medieval classics: Boethius’ Consolation, Innocent III’s De Miseria Humane Conditionis, and Le Roman de la Rose. All emphasize Fortune’s changes, life’s fragility, detachment from the world, and mortality, yet balance these dark themes with an irresistible life-force which is paradoxically enhanced by mutability and mortality.20 Like Chaucer, Spenser portrays the Cantos’ loquacious protagonists – titaness, faun, and gods—as (no less than humans) deeply misled by pride. Like the mature Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales, Spenser provides a harmless outcome for each fable, as the evils springing from base desire and foolishness (Faunus’ animal urges, Diana’s excessive rage,

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Mutabilitie’s will to power, the pagan gods’ awkward embarrassment) are resolved simply by being expressed. More than any other of Spenser’s works, the Cantos reveal indebtedness to Chaucer. Spenser’s complex relation to Chaucer, including lavish tributes and revisionist self-comparisons, has been ably treated by A. Kent Hieatt, Judith Anderson, Patrick Cheney, Anne Higgins, Anthony Esolen, and Glenn Steinberg.21 But Higgins divides the poets too sharply: ‘Chaucer’s poetic and ideological model was Boethius, poet of transcendence of the mutable world; Spenser’s was Virgil, mythographer of the Roman empire’.22 Spenser in fact tightly combines these motives. While exalting Elizabeth I as Una, Book 1 also urges her to detach her court and ‘progresses’ from the House of Pride, to subordinate Cleopolis to the New Jerusalem. The Mutabilitie Cantos, composed near the end of Spenser’s life (as Lethbridge convincingly argues),23 bring Spenser very close to Chaucer’s worldview and voice – in their detached Boethian survey of the follies of humanlike Olympians and in the infectious humour of Faunus’ affront and Cynthia’s pique – making the tribute of 7.7.9 quite apropos. The voice of the Cantos closely mimics Chaucer’s authoritative persona, yet Spenser surpasses his master in structuring a multidimensional allegory (moral, political, theological) that subordinates these comic events to an epic plot. Within a Legend of Constancy the Cantos could have provided a philosophic grounding in mythic fables similar to other medullar fictions of The Faerie Queene. The conflicts between Faunus and Cynthia, and between Mutabilitie and Jove, would be no harder to relate to a human quest for Constancy than earlier tensions between Diana and Venus, Proteus and Cymoent, Isis and the crocodile. As is clear in Cicero’s ‘Dream of Scipio’ and its imitators in the Ascent of Prudence tradition, Spenser could also have exposed a human protagonist to a more cosmic setting – a broadening which seems inevitable at some point in the final six legends. Thus the epic’s interplay of pagan deities and heroic humans evolves a complex discourse of mutual mutability. Ovidian tapestries depict the gods’ descents, through Eros’ pricking, to earthly and bestial forms; and human avatars, moved by providential urgings, ascend to transcendent being, as the Redcrosse Knight envisions a heavenly destiny and Britomart dreams herself as Isis. Such metaphoric exchange between errant gods and exalted mortals should make us question whether the Mutabilitie Cantos utterly exclude humankind. The evolution of pagan gods in The Faerie Queene Defining the status of the pagan gods, especially in relation to humankind, is an essential subtext of the Mutabilitie Cantos. Spenser is not as antipathetic to these gods as Augustine, nor as quickly dismissive as Milton.24 Like Erasmus and Conti with their delight in classical legend and myth, Spenser treats the gods as metaphors, analogues for the shadowy immanence of divinity in the natural world and touchstones for human aristocratic aspirations.25 Henry Lotspeich saw Spenser’s diverse theophanies (Christian, Graeco-Roman, Egyptian) as evidence of his intellectual confusion,26 but Carol Kaske in Spenser and Biblical Poetics sees sharply intelligent management of The Faerie Queene’s syncretic pluralism, its encyclopaedic inclusion of diverse epiphanies: (1) each iconic motif (garden,

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stream or fountain, mountain, tree, animal, city, bird, altar, cup) is corrected or supplemented by similar figures in differing perspectives; (2) to warn of demonic deception and human self-deception, each motif takes polarized moral forms (in bono et in malo); (3) even sacramental healing, divine nurture, and strivings for salvation assume ranging forms – by equivocation and even by tapinosis (the atoning Christ in a vulgar figure like afterbirth). Truth thus appears in ‘supplementary’ and ‘contradictory’, yet mutually reinforcing stages (Law and Mercy, Old and New Testaments, Nature and Grace) to show the paradoxes of human nature, especially its freely willed yet grace-determined destiny.27 I believe this correctional dialectic informs not only individual episodes of The Faerie Queene but its overall pattern of virtues with their complementary theophanies. A survey of Books 1–6 and of the Mutabilitie Cantos shows a careful progression in Spenser’s depiction and placement of the pagan gods in this complex allegory of human virtue. In books 1, 3, and 5 he restricts the gods’ authority and presence, either dismissing them or rigorously subordinating them to the transcendent power of the Jewish-Christian God, the evident goal of the Briton protagonists of those legends; but in Books 2, 4, and 6 the Olympian gods enjoy full empowerment, deeply influencing Fairy knights like Guyon (reacting to sportive Cupid in Alma’s heart-parlour, 2.9.34), Scudamour (serving Venus in her temple, 4.10.31–48), and Calidore (eager to serve the Graces and the ‘Venus’ in their midst, 6.10.9–17). These alternating theophanies enhance the epic’s structural design, increasingly revealing the pagan gods’ limitations while affirming their equivocal prowess within the natural world. As in The Fowre Hymnes, Spenser’s use of the pagan gods focuses primarily on the power of Cupid and Venus to inspire relationship, and in Books 1–6 of The Faerie Queene these gods evolve (or devolve) to a point of great complexity. Their prowess is lauded in the proem of Book 1 when Cupid’s dart kindles ‘glorious fire’ in Arthur’s heart as he dreams of the fairy queen; yet the troubling dream which these gods sponsor suggests immaturity of vision – a naivety confirmed by Arthur’s pursuit of Florimell and ‘complaint to Night’ that show his partial blindness at this stage of the epic (FQ 3.4.47–61). Venerean power is, moreover, vulnerable to demonic enchantment,28 as when Archimago’s phantasms separate Redcrosse from Una, or when the witch’s False Florimell diverts most of the knights. The love-gods’ equivocal, manipulable, and often hurtful nature draws Charissa’s righteous wrath: ‘Full of great loue, but Cupids wanton snare / As hell she hated, chast in worke and will’ (1.10.30). In the courtships of Alma’s heart-parlour in Book 2 Cupid assumes his most restrained but still highly threatening character:       emongst them litle Cupid playd   His wanton sports, being returned late   From his fierce warres, and hauing from him layd His cruell bow, wherewith he thousands hath dismayd.

(2.9.34)

In the Bower of Bliss the love-deities’ potency is again perversely usurped by Acrasia, Venus’s dark double. The dilemma of Venus’s alluring power is inversely matched by Diana’s intimidating chastity, which informs Belphoebe’s mystic prowess and

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moral integrity (Books 2.3 and 3.6); but Belphoebe’s harsh response to Timias’ sensual frailty (Books 3, 4, 6), like Cynthia’s to Faunus’s appetites (7.6), suggests loveless intolerance. Given this ambivalent portrayal of the Olympians throughout Books 1–6 of The Faerie Queene, how does their quaint self-exposure in the Mutabilitie Cantos (unsponsored by the wicked machinations of demonic artificers like Archimago, Duessa, Acrasia, or Ate) affect their integumentum symbolism?29 The Fowre Hymnes pointedly demonstrates Spenser’s distinction between pagan and Christian gods, and between the realms of ‘nature’ and ‘grace’: the fleshly love and beauty of Cupid and Venus is subordinate to the spiritual love and beauty of Christ and Sapience, yet instead of dismissing the pagan deities, Spenser carefully parallels the two realms. He privileges Christian over pagan deities, Briton over Fairy protagonists, and transcendent over immanent virtues, yet a network of parallels affirms the goodness of both realms, always while stressing the fuller power and enlightenment through grace.30 Of the nymph’s well (FQ 2.2.6) we learn that some fountains are ‘indewd / By great Dame Nature … / But other some by gift of later grace’; and with Redcrosse we learn that New Jerusalem ‘neuer yet was seene of Faeries sonne’ (1.10.52). This hierarchic parallel is repeated in each pair of legends in The Faerie Queene. Though A.S.P. Woodhouse was right to prioritize Redcrosse’s struggle for holiness over Guyon’s parallel quest for temperance (‘like race to runne’, 2.1.32), he was wrong to restrict the holistic spiritual quest to Book 1, with Books 2–6 as mere explorations of ‘nature’.31 Instead, as some critics note,32 each pair of virtues (Holiness–Temperance, Chastity–Friendship, Justice–Courtesy) forms a transcendent–immanent polarity. Each odd legend orients a level of the human psyche to Christian theology and morality, dominated by Briton protagonists;33 each even legend orients the same psychic level to pagan-natural theology and morality, dominated by Fairy protagonists (Table 2). Table 2 Spenser’s ordered virtues, Books 1–6



Transcendent Immanent

intellective passional sensate

1. Holiness (Briton) 3. Chastity (Briton) 5. Justice (Briton)

2. Temperance (Faery) 4. Friendship (Faery) 6. Courtesy (Faery)

This descent through the six wings of Isaiah’s seraph implies, subsequently, an inverse ascent.34 The final six legends would reverse the pattern: virtues would alternate upward (immanent to transcendent), each pair ascending from sensate to passional to intellective. Faery theophanies would now occur in odd legends, with increasingly overt Christian theophanies in even legends (Table 3). Table 3 Spenser’s ordered virtues, Books 7–12



Immanent Transcendent

sensate passional intellective

7. Constancy (Faery) 9. Gentleness (Faery) 11. Prudence (Faery)

8. Fortitude (Briton) 10. Charity (Briton) 12. Sapience (Briton)

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Each virtue holds its integrity despite interplay between protagonists, yet the interplay implies a necessary mutual influence and bonding between ‘Briton’ and ‘Faery’, and between the powers of different psychic levels, to form the ‘Goodly golden chaine’ of virtues.35 As in The Fowre Hymnes, the Faery virtues’ association with immanental Greek/Roman deities implies subservience to the Briton virtues’ allegiance to transcendent Jewish/Christian deities. What is Mutabilitie’s role in such a scheme? Her assault reveals, as never before in The Faerie Queene with such clarity, the equivocal, vulnerable nature of the Olympian gods – indicating a need to read Ovid’s account of their erotic conquests with a chaste heart and watchful, transposing mind. In having the titaness charge the gods with irregular planetary movements (7.7.49–56, echoing 5.Pr.4–9), Spenser implies the Olympians’ moral mutability (‘what if I can proue, that euen yee / Your selues are likewise chang’d’) – a truth persistently disclosed in Books 1–6 of The Faerie Queene, often through demonic influence: the Venerean fantasies used by Archimago to separate Redcrosse from Una, and by Acrasia to tempt Guyon; the Ovidian tapestries and masque used by Malecasta and Busyrane to display Jove’s and Cupid’s triumphs; Florimell’s thraldom in Proteus’ sea of passion and Mirabella’s subjection to Cupid’s Disdain. Spenser’s affirmation of the pagan gods’ power emphasizes both divine immanence and the obliquity of fallen human vision, darkly apprehending its nature and destiny. The Cantos’ subjection of the gods’ power to sublime farce, threatening a return to Chaos, shows the allegory reaching deepest opacity, even as the Mutability conceit initiates its expansion to universal scope. The Mutabilitie Cantos (and Book 7) as transition to broader allegory: ­incomplete  numbering and transformed titanomachia Each argument for denying that the Cantos could be a medullar episode for a legend of Constancy – lack of a human hero, spillage into two cantos, metaphysical breadth that surpasses the medullar episodes of earlier legends – is inconclusive; but we must carefully assess the latter charge, the Cantos’ escalation of the allegory to a more abstract level and to a cosmic stage. On a scale vaster than the wedding of rivers in Proteus’ ocean-hall (4.11–12), Mutabilitie provokes an earthly/heavenly assembly of every god and all living creatures, not just as a passive jury for her claim to supremacy but to enforce their active participation in the cyclical pageants that demonstrate her pervasive potency. Most important in this escalation is the figure of Nature, whose mysterious and grandiose stature incorporates that of her massive ‘daughter’ Mutabilitie (7.7.59). This nearly divine Nature – drawing from allegories of Boethius, Macrobius, Bernard Sylvestris, Alanus, Guillaume, and Chaucer – has most encouraged readers to view the Cantos as concluding The Faerie Queene. Numbering the Mutabilitie Cantos as 6, 7, and 8 also fuels speculation that they conclude the poem by hexameral symbolism: thus the six legends of The Faerie Queene, like the six days of Creation, are followed by the Sabbath’s peaceful plenitude and communion with God.36 Several features of the Cantos might seem to support this reading. The cycles of change which Mutabilitie offers as proof of her

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power – notably the pageant of twelve months – actually reveal an orderly process, just as the six days of Creation manifested the orderly, purposeful power of God. This argument, however, seems flawed in that none of Mutabilitie’s cycles has six stages, but rather four (elements, seasons), twelve (months), twenty-four (hours), and two (light–dark, life–death). The six ‘days’ in which God made a good world have in the Mutabilitie Cantos (as in The Shepheardes Calender) been displaced by twelve ‘months’ of a world that continually falls and is restored. The creative, life-giving six now add a dark second half, as spring-summer fades to autumnwinter.37 Likewise, light and life yield to darkness and death. The yearning in the ‘unperfite’ Canto 8 for ‘that Sabaoths sight’ thus does not follow a joyous six-stage reprise of divine creation, but follows a more complex vision that combines the on-going life-force with painfully repeated moral failure and mortality – yet also with repeated joyous renewal that assists inner growth. There is further evidence that the Mutabilitie fable does not adequately form a sabbaoth vision to conclude the epic – namely, its parallel with the titanomachia at this position in every legend. Canto 7 always brings a captivating assault by an earth-born monster of ambitious bodily pride: Orgoglio in Book 1 (7.9–18ff), Disdain in the Mammon episode of Book 2 (7.40–3), Argante and Ollyphant as complementary titans in Book 3 (7.37–50, especially 47–8), Lust and Corflambo as the similar duo of Book 4 (7.4–8; 8.38–64),38 Radigund and the Souldan in Book 5 (7.9–10, 8.18–51),39 Disdain in Book 6 (7.27–8.30; especially 7.41–3), and Mutabilitie in putative Book 7 (6.2ff, 15, 29; 7.8, 10).40 In each legend this giant of carnal pride is defeated, usually in canto 8, not by Jove’s Olympians but by a Briton41 blessed with supernatural grace: Arthur (Books 1, 2, 4, 5, 6), Palladine, ‘the virgin’ (Book 3), Belphoebe (Book 4), Britomart (Book 5). The titan-struggle just past mid-legend serves as peripety, initiating ever-more-complex forms of pride in the final six cantos of each book. Thus Orgoglio’s aggressive bodily pride, though defeated by Arthur, lays a basis for Despair’s inverse, self-annihilative pride of heart; and this hopelessness, though treated in the House of Holiness, has a residual power that inflates the great Dragon, an ultimate collective pride of mind: its monstrous size and violent assault subsumes Orgoglio’s aggressive carnal pride; its sinful spots and hell-mouth subsume Despair’s nihilistic emotional pride. Similarly, in each legend the titanomachia of cantos 7–8, by asserting the dominion of material vision, serves as peripety, engendering the final sequence of definitive obstacles to the legend’s titular virtue. Mutabilitie, by revelling in the devastating effect of her self-aggrandizement on others, resembles former titans but surpasses them. She is the most complex titan yet to appear, a vaster manifestation of the proud desire for power, not just in the human soul but as an omnipresent spirit pervading the cosmos. Despite similarities with Orgoglio and his titan sibs, however, Mutabilitie is not physically slain but is redeemed. Her assault, though at first as physical and brash as the other titans, evolves into rational debate and orderly exposition. Her character meliorates by contact with Nature, whose judgment she respectfully seeks. Thus the titaness does not suffer bodily subjugation but suffers intellectual redefinition, almost spiritual ‘conversion’ – not by a heroic human who mirrors divine power

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but by a figure subsuming all humankind: the entirety of Nature (or Natural Law) as a spokesperson for God. Though the titan struggle of the Mutabilitie Cantos resembles those of Books 1–6, the stage and the titan have widened to cosmic dimensions; and, as Lethbridge notes, the poetry has become denser, more mature.42 Did Spenser design this elevated titanomachy, midway through Book 7, as the peripety for the entire epic? The twelve cantos of Book 1, Spenser’s most coherent and complete legend, might well present a microcosm of the twelve legends of The Faerie Queene. Canto 1’s defeat of a dragon (Error) prefigures the defeat of the great Dragon (one’s swollen sinful pride) to attain proximal Holiness; canto 2’s equivocal defeat of Sansfoy and inheritance of Duessa prefigure the struggle for Temperance; canto 3’s errancies of Una prefigure the quest for Chastity; canto 4’s aberrant socializing in the House of Pride prefigures the quest for Friendship; canto 5’s illusory defeat of Sansjoy prefigures the unsatisfied quest for Justice; canto 6’s failure to civilize satyrs and fauns, and the stand-off of Sansloy and Satyrane, prefigure the equally irresolute quest for Courtesy.43 If, then, the evils of the first half of Book 1 (the Saracen Sansboys who, as their names imply, are mere aporias) are escalated and clarified into Orgoglio, Despair, and the Dragon, what new ‘titans’ would follow Mutabilitie in Books 8–12, and to what immense and equally abstract antagonists would those titans lead in the final half of each of the missing legends? One would hope that the ever-intensifying (ever more literally physical) militarism of Books 1–6 (like the pyrrhic combats with Sansboys in the first half of Book 1) would in the final six legends, beginning with Nature’s gentle response to Mutabilitie, evolve more fully into Erasmus’ incisive concept of spiritual warfare: ‘one crysten man hath not warre with an other, but with himselfe’.44 Beginning with Book 7, the titan is reconceived, reformed, and preserved alive. Mutabilitie’s physical beauty, which had so allured Jove (7.6.28.4, 31.2 and 4), is subsumed in her mother Nature’s spiritual glory, ‘so beauteous’ that she must be veiled: ‘it the Sunne a thousand times did pass, / Ne could be seene, but like an image in a glass’ (7.7.6).45 We are thus frustrated by her curt disappearance at the Cantos’ end: ‘Then was that whole assembly quite dismist, / And Natur’s selfe did vanish, whither no man wist’ (7.7.59). If Spenser had completed his epic, would the earthy mutability of human nature have been similarly reformed to reflect the same potential depths of beauty? The alleged pastoral closure Crucial in assessing whether the Mutabilitie Cantos conclude The Faerie Queene is their pastoral imagery. Like Pastorella and Mount Acidale in Book 6, Nature and Arlo Hill in the Cantos provide contemplative appreciation of an idyllic natural world associated with the poet’s rural home in troubled Ireland. Did Spenser mean to end his epic with this artfully conceived nature as the ‘sacred noursery / Of vertue’ (6.Pr.3) and favoured haunt of gods (6.10.8–15, 7.6.37–9)? Or are the pastoral events in Books 6 and 7 designed as The Faerie Queene’s peripety, as a transition to its second half? Book 6, besides sharing with the Cantos an Edenic mountain vision, offers an extensive depiction of pastoral life, and the Cantos have

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many pastoral features. Elizabeth Heale summarizes Sherman Hawkins’s analysis of the pageant of months (more georgic than pastoral) which anchors Mutabilitie’s ironically self-defeating argument: the cycle of the months was traditionally regarded as the best evidence of God’s divine plan, especially when it begins … in March, the month of the Annunciation, the beginning of the church year. … Each month brings with it the delights of the season, accompanied by labourers who work cheerfully to fulfil the cycles of sowing and harvest, youth, age and birth. Even Mutabilitie’s curse of age and death [is] softened by the fantasy of February’s chariot and his readiness to begin the cycle anew.46

Other pastoral elements in the Cantos include (1) the recreative play of Mutabilitie’s challenge and Faunus’s game; (2) the discourse with sovereign authority (Elizabeth I as Cynthia/Diana) that creates a ‘pastoral of power’;47 and (3) the poet-philosopher-priest’s contemplative ascent within the pastoral in order to provide social leadership.48 The Cantos’ brief mention of Colin Clout (7.6.40) underscores his association with this setting and its narrative voice, inspired by the beauteous order of nature, society, and cosmos. These pastoral elements are now, however, viewed by an omniscient narrator who is above the Olympian gods, who subsumes Colin’s limited persona,49 and who could have led us through the escalating allegory of Books 7–12. The rural scene of Nature’s final judgment will aptly consummate Mutabilitie’s challenge to the gods. When she invades Cynthia’s and Jove’s luminous palaces in ‘heauens high Empire’ (7.6.21), Mutabilitie’s aim is not to ‘seat’ herself in those glittering façades but to destroy them. Initially she calls herself ‘great Chaos child’ (7.6.26), and if she were to ‘rule’ with this dreadful identity, there would be no regular planetary orbits, no orderly ‘houses’ in the heavens or on earth: all would return to the random, purposeless flux of Chaos. The gods are stunned by her claims, ‘Fearing least Chaos broken had his chaine, / And brought againe on them eternall night’ (7.6.14). Thus, in her initial assault Mutabilitie is the arch-enemy of Architecture, Spenser’s holy templar image of rational and divine order. She would pull down all houses and cities, all creations of human reason and art – multiplying the tragedies lamented in Spenser’s Complaints: ‘I was that Citie, which the garland wore / Of Britaines pride … / Though nought at all but ruines now I bee’.50 Being averse to architecture, Mutabilitie asks that her claim be adjudicated not in the gods’ palatial edifices but ‘Before great Natures presence’ (7.6.356). In light of the debate’s universality Spenser must justify this unfamiliar country scene near his Irish home. His rhetorical ‘Who knowes not Arlo-hill?’ (7.6.36) compounds the irony of the Acidale query, ‘who knowes not Colin Clout?’ Though each seems a simple interrogatio (assuming an answer, thus asserting in interrogative mode), the sequence builds an ironia (a meaning contrary to the words): the first query’s bravery (many know Colin Clout) leads to the second’s dubiety (few know Arlo Hill). The assertive question fades to a dubitatio that shrouds the pastoral of Arlo Hill since its distance from courtly power makes it vulnerable to evil, for, as Patricia Coughlan explains, the Glen of Aherlow near Mount Galtymore was in Spenser’s day a notorious hiding place for thieves.51 The irony of

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supremely valorizing this scene is driven home by the etiological tale of Faunus and Cynthia, showing how this setting, once the gods’ favourite haunt, was compromised by Faunus’ animal instincts but equally by the goddess’s pride – her furious overreaction to his invasion of her virginal privacy. If a ‘truant’ Calidore perfected his courtesy in pastoral simplicity, Faunus culpably but ‘naturally’ indulges in lustful voyeurism and deceitful conspiracy. The Faunus–Cynthia encounter is Spenser’s last rendering of the conflict between Chastity and Bestial Sensuality: Una failing to reform exuberant fauns and satyrs (1.6), Hellenore after Paridell’s seduction engaging riotously with satyrs (3.10.43–52), Serena nearly eaten by a salvage nation (6.8.35–51), Cynthia’s genitals provoking Faunus’s raucous laughter (7.6.46). Each encounter exposes pastoralism’s primitive naturalist base, Faunus being the progenitor of both fauns and satyrs; and this testing of a chaste noble lady (in Una and Cynthia’s case, a semi-divine princess) threatens her role in sustaining the nation’s moral-religious integrity.52 She sums up Creation’s physical and spiritual bounty: the garden’s seed-bed, finally to be a templar city, the bride of God. As the place where Cynthia/Diana is tested, this ‘rural’ scene (7.6.36.9) is also the ground for evaluating Mutabilitie’s claims. Its workaday simplicity (stressed in the pageant of monthly labours) inhibits the heroic quest which Spenser, like his epic predecessors, conceives mainly as chivalric service to a great city and its court of power. Does the historical-political allegory of Book 6 and the Mutabilitie Cantos, focusing on Spenser’s troubled homeland (Pastorella’s desecrated home, the despoiled Arlo Hill), provide an appropriate symbolic site for concluding The Faerie Queene? Judah Stampfer in 1952 suggestively but inaccurately saw in the Cantos the personal and political circumstances of Spenser’s fall.53 William Blissett in 1964 explained the frustrated presence of Elizabeth I in Cynthia’s angry alienation, and J.B. Lethbridge has drawn from a wealth of recent scholarship to trace ‘Spenser’s Last Days’ in the Cantos.54 Some studies suggest not just a truncation of The Faerie Queene but the demolition of Spenser’s moral vision.55 Others view the pastoral elements of Book 6 and the Cantos as an exalted setting that properly concludes the epic.56 The pastoral ideal is celebrated on a prominence: the hillock where Pastorella’s gracious beauty is admired with courteous song and dance; Mount Acidale where Colin’s piping more artfully unfolds a vision of universal civility; and Arlo Hill where cycles of human time, especially the twelve-month pageant, provide the basis for Mutabilitie’s claim and Nature’s judgment. But the events of Acidale and Arlo Hill mainly show humankind’s fallenness, whether as Pastorella’s desecrated descent into the thieves’ cave57 or as Mutabilitie’s arrogant ascent to assert an earthy supremacy over the cosmos. Neither episode adequately concludes The Faerie Queene. Though Calidore rescues Pastorella, and Mutabilitie is ‘put downe and whist’ by Nature, we are not encouraged to celebrate the earthly pastoral as the telos of human fulfilment. Pastorella does not return to idyllic country life but is reunited with her aristocratic lineage to secure her in a fallen world; and Mutabilitie learns she is the daughter not of Chaos but of a Nature bearing ‘seedes’ of a higher destiny.58 As in the Gardens of Adonis, the pastoral idyll, where pagan gods sponsor and enjoy the pleasures and fruitfulness of sexual congress, is not the goal of the moral quest. Even in Dante’s vision

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of an Eden restored, glorified and radiant atop Mount Purgatory, the garden is a mediate transitional state. Only Final Judgment can redeem the titaness fully, making Mutabilitie blossom, like Dante’s Celestial Rose and its swarming hive of angels and saints, in an eternally joyous and creative dynamic.59 The Faerie Queene’s true end: activating memory for Prudence’s flight to  the  holy  eidetic city The poignant lapidary ‘sabbaoth’ stanzas which conclude the Cantos do not conclude The Faerie Queene. As a narrative response to Mutabilitie, they resemble the hermaphrodite stanzas that so dramatically end the 1590 Faerie Queene, and no doubt they too would disappear in the finished epic. More important than those appended stanzas is the figure of ‘Great Nature’: ‘euer young yet full of eld, / Still moouing, yet vnmoued from her sted; / Vnseene of any, yet of all beheld’ (7.7.13). As Heale observes, ‘In the presence of such a deity, even Mutabilitie transforms herself from a bold parvenu to the mistress of infinite richness and beauty, unfolded, inevitably, in a self-revealing order’.60 In this broadening metaphysical fable, the mutability tale coalesces allegories of Nature from Antiquity and the Middle Ages – especially the ‘Dream of Scipio’ in Cicero’s De re publica, explicated by Macrobius (later parodied by Chaucer’s House of Fame and Parlement of Foules) and elaborated in Claudian’s Rape of Proserpine, Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Mercury and Philology, Boethius’ Consolation, Bernard Silvestris’ Cosmographia, Alan of Lille’s Complaint of Nature and Anticlaudianus, Guillaume and Jean’s Romance of the Rose. Lewis, Curtius, Economou, and White trace Nature’s growing stature in these evolving dream-visions.61 In Bernard Sylvestris’ Christian Platonism, Nature is a lower-order lieutenant, subordinate to Nous. For Alan and Chaucer, Nature is exalted as God’s vicar; and Spenser in the Cantos compares Nature to the Incarnate Logos in transfigured glory. Mutabilitie, parodying Prudence’s cosmic ascent to become properly ensouled, enacts a halfconscious quest not unlike that of The Faerie Queene’s protagonists. Instead of discrediting Mutabilitie, Dame Nature gently corrects her, illuminating her beauty in a providential process that is still far from complete in the pastoral vision of Acidale and Arlo Hill. The more obvious concluding setting for Spenser’s Christian-Platonic epic is the holy eidetic city, drawing from Plato’s Timaeus (most important of the Republic’s three sequels) and from Augustine’s City of God, which combines the mystic geometry of Plato’s anthropomorphic city with the Biblical templar city of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Psalms, and Revelation. Helen Rosenau and Jaroslav Pelikan diversely trace the evolution of this syncretic ‘ideal city’ to the sacred numerology and the moral harmony of Jerusalem’s temple, Plato’s Athens, Cicero’s Rome, Philo’s Alexandria, and Gregory’s Constantinople. These cities’ orderly perfection (arche) harnesses and governs chaotic flux (tyche), a symbolism which Pelikan sees as linking Hellenism and Christianity in the syncretic fourth century. Rosenau thus depicts the ideal city as stabilizing the mother-goddess Fortune; Peter Hawkins sees it appeasing the Magna Mater Cybele with her crown of towers; and Lawrence Manley suggestively explains its harnessing of a great ‘river’.62

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Spenser is always building toward this compelling civitas or arche, whose channelling of passional flux into perfect love is the true end of his epic. The Augustinian allegory of opposed cities (or ‘houses’) defines the quest for Holiness: Una’s errancy leads to the house of Abessa-Corceca-Kirkrapine, then sojourn in a fruitless ‘pastoral’; Redcrosse’s more debilitating errancy leads to the house of Pride, then dalliance in a false pastoral which transmutes to Orgoglio’s dungeon. He is restored in the house of Holiness, prefiguring the ‘goodly Citie’ in heaven with which it is in constant dialogue, and far surpassing the fame-city Cleopolis,   Whose wals and towres were builded high and strong   Of perle and precious stone … ;   The Citie of the great king hight it well, Wherein eternall peace and happinesse doth dwell. As he thereon stood gazing, he might see   The blessed Angels to and fro descend   From highest heauen, in gladsome companee,   And with great ioy into that Citie wend,   As commonly as friend does with his frend.

(FQ 1.10.55–6)

In this Edenopolis Una and the Redcrosse Knight are finally betrothed, for tropologically Una (like Beatrice in the Commedia) is the holy house, as she is the fulfilled urbanized garden.63 This foretaste of the city’s apocalyptic fulfilment is darkened and distanced in Books 2–6. In Guyon’s parallel quest in the realm of nature, the house-city appears as Medina’s moderated castle, as three perverted ‘rowmes’ of Mammon’s cave, and as the tri-level hierarchy of Alma’s Castle. The horror of Acrasia’s enervating pastoral, the Bower of Bliss, is that it has no holy ‘architectural’ constraints, no perfecting form deriving from spiritual intelligence and expressed in moral deeds. Books 3–6 unfold social-political dimensions of the city/house trope in the prophetic visions of Troynovant (3.3.22, 3.9.44), in references to the great mother of cities, Cybele64 (4.11.27–8; cf. 4.1.21; 4.3.39–42; 5.7.9), and in the civic allegories of Isis’ temple (5.7.9), Mercilla’s palace (5.9.33), and Elizabeth’s court (6.Proem). The city-visions in Books 1–6 (as in cantos 1–6 of Book 1) increasingly descend into the material world, bringing sufferance of sensory realities, and errancy among primitive settings and peoples, that darken the authoritative city. In Book 6 (as in canto 6 of Book 1) the moral courtly city is displaced by an innocent but inadequate pastoral, for it lacks the perfecting form of the holy city. Far more degrading than the pastoral holding-pattern of Una among satyrs and fauns in 1.6, the climactic events of Book 6 – near-fatal abuses of Serena and Pastorella by savages and thieves – are far from conclusive for this encyclopaedic allegorical epic. To what sort of city, then, would Spenser have led us in the final six legends? – surely one whose mystic numbers expand on the microcosmic body of Alma’s house (2.9.22), replacing the disgraceful metamorphoses of Ovidian deities and of the titaness Mutabilitie with visions of definitive transfiguration.

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Jerusalem renewed as God’s bride is the exemplary apocalyptic site, which Spenser prefigures in the city of Eden that ends Book 1. Features of this city – and of the heavenly city beyond it – are heralded in rhapsodic phrases of the Mutabilitie Cantos, notably the ‘pillars of eternity’ and the ‘sabaoths sight’. In the fourfold refrain of Psalm 46 David exults that ‘Yahweh Sabaoth is on our side, our citadel, the God of Jacob!’; and in the Zion song of Psalm 48 he glories in ‘the city of our God, the holy mountain’, ‘the city of Yahweh Sabaoth’ (48.1–2, 8).65 Second Isaiah evokes a ‘City Beyond’ that figures marital communion with God: They will rebuild the ancient ruins, They will raise what has long lain waste, They will restore the ruined cities, … I exult for joy in Yahweh, My soul rejoices in my God, For he has clothed me in the garments of salvation, He has wrapped me in the cloak of integrity, Like a bridegroom wearing his wreath, Like a bride adorned in her jewels.

(Isa. 61.10)

Paul advocates this city: ‘Our homeland is in heaven’ (Phil. 3.20), and the author of Hebrews anticipates ‘a city founded, designed and built by God’ (Heb.11.10): ‘there is no eternal city for us in this life but we look for one in the life to come’ (13.15). That apostle nevertheless believed that a dialogue with the city of God had already begun: ‘Continue to love each other like brothers, and remember always to welcome strangers, for by doing this, some people have entertained angels without knowing it’ (13.1–2). In Revelation John of Patmos fuses previous images of the transcendent Marriage City: I saw the holy city … the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, as beautiful as a bride all dressed for her husband. Then I heard a loud voice call from the throne, ‘You see this city? Here God lives among men …; his name is God-withthem.’ (Rev. 21.2–3)

At the heart of this holy city is the pastoral, now contained and perfected: the angel showed me the river of life, rising from the throne of God and of the Lamb and flowing crystal-clear down the middle of the city street. On either side of the river were the trees of life, which bear twelve crops of fruit in a year, one in each month, and the leaves of which are the cure for the pagans. (Rev. 22.1–2)

Thus, instead of envisioning the Mutabilitie Cantos as The Faerie Queene’s conclusion, we might view Book 7, the Legend of Constancie, as the first stage of re-ascent to a vision not just of Cleopolis but of the heavenly urbs orbis which lies beyond it – a spiritual blueprint for building a morally acceptable earthly city. In Book 1 the Redcrosse Knight briefly glimpsed the celestial city and the angelic ladder connecting it with the mutable earthly city. To reinforce that discourse with heaven, Prince Arthur and the protagonists of each legend must, like the Redcrosse

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Knight, be trained in the crucial virtue of Charity, which alone can lead to Sapience. Charissa, through the work of Mercy and the seven beadsmen, enables and guides the ascent to contemplative vision of the heavenly city (FQ 1.10.33–46). In acts of charity one envisions and becomes part of a God who is Love.66 John Wall in ‘The Poetics of Christian Commonwealth in The Faerie Queene’ sees Spenser’s Anglican purpose in Book 1, with a newly married priesthood, as encouraging such a bonded community of believers.67 Such charity is only vaguely implicit in the Mutabilitie Cantos – only in Nature’s transfigured, calming presence and in sacramental aspects of the pageant of months she parades before us. Still to come is the active fellowship of all twelve virtuous knights, praising Arthur’s magnific gifts and Gloriana’s bounty, and seeking full communion with the saints in the City of God. Isaiah’s six-winged seraph and the mystic form of The Faerie Queene, Books 1–12 Ordering the seven sins: Gregory, Bonaventure, Dante, Spenser Morton Bloomfield’s The Seven Deadly Sins ends by noting that Spenser, in his parade of those sins at The Faerie Queene’s House of Pride, unaccountably fails to follow the standard format of Gregory the Great.68 Gregory’s list is vital to the structure of Dante’s Commedia, where it nearly matches the order of sins in hell,69 exactly matches the seven levels of purgatory, and inversely approximates the fulfilments in paradise.70 John Crossett and Donald Stump explain Spenser’s deviation from Gregory as Renaissance humanism’s shift to pragmatic and Protestant principles;71 and, one might add, Spenser figures the sins as a political pageant, a ‘progress’. Siegfried Wenzel observes that most Patristic and medieval commentators saw the seven sins as a causal concatenation,72 and Spenser’s list surpasses Dante’s in the sequence’s pragmatic clarity: from lazy Sloth and Gluttony (sins of couch potatoes), to assertive Avarice and Lust (Hollywood staples), to vicious Envy and Wrath (specialties of Wall Street and Al-Qaeda). Like Gregory and Aquinas,73 Spenser sets Pride apart to inform and drive the sins, and he shows its complementary faces: Lucifera’s passive vainglory and Satan’s active whipping.74 Crossett and Stump deftly explain the causal progression of Spenser’s sequence, with each pair of sins having a passive and an active type (matching the complementarity of Lucifera and Satan, who frame the pageant); but they do not relate this three-level, bifurcated sequence to the Christian-Platonic pattern of Richard of St Victor’s The Mystical Ark and of Bonaventure’s The Soul’s Journey into God – a pattern epitomized by the six-winged seraph in Isaiah’s temple vision of God.75 Nor do Crossett and Stump observe that Spenser’s patterning of the sins matches the holistic design of The Faerie Queene, the doctrinal arrangement of the virtues (see Appendix 1 below). Several scholars note Spenser’s access to patristic mystical writings at Cam­­­ bridge.76 The Faerie Queene and Fowre Hymnes highlight a move to divine enthronement, like the merkavah vision in Ezekiel, Isaiah, Daniel, and Revelation. For Nohrnberg (Analogy, 51–4) this exalted vision of the prophets is the

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basis for Lucifera’s and Philotime’s travesties, and we note its positive imitation in the adulation of Una, Britomart, and Mercilla. Perhaps the rise to Sapience in Hymne to Heavenly Beauty adumbrates The Faerie Queene’s intended conclusion: Gloriana enthroned to reflect God’s true glory. Jewish and Christian commentaries on the merkavah vision often fused Isaiah’s and Revelation’s six-winged seraph with Ezekiel’s four-winged cherub (in Purg. 29 Dante apologizes to Ezekiel for preferring six wings). Did Spenser know the six-stage hierarchic sequence that structures self-knowledge as a contemplative progress to the visio Dei (notably in the Christian Platonism of Richard of St Victor’s De Arca Mystica and Bonaventure’s Itinerarium), and did he use this mystical scheme to order the twelve virtues of The Faerie Queene? – the first six virtues a humbling downward descent (or ‘dilation’) into the multiplicity of the created world, then the final six, if he had lived to publish them, ascending to awareness of God (or of Christlike Sapience) as the base of human virtue? Does the six-stage pattern of contemplation always form an ascent to God, or did poets like Dante and theologians like Augustine also use it to structure a preliminary descent into the incarnate world, as in Books 1–6 of The Faerie Queene? Leigh DeNeef has explained the structure of the Hymne of Heavenly Beauty by means of Bonaventure’s pattern in Itinerarium.77 Dante evoked the ‘six wings’ at each turning-point of the Commedia: (1) the Inferno’s culminating image views Satan’s six wings flapping ineffectually in total sin; (2) the Edenic peak of Mount Purgatory has a contrary image of Beatrice’s empowerment by cherubim and griffin, enabling Dante’s ascent to Paradise. Is Bonaventure’s six-stage journey into God (and Spenser’s into Sapience) also capable of inversion, as in The Faerie Queene’s first six legends that, with a similar bifurcated Trinitarian sequence, descend into the world’s problematic materiality?  Several scholars have toyed with the principles that order the six completed virtues of Spenser’s epic. In 1961 Harry Berger in ‘A Secret Discipline’ saw three pairs of virtues narrowing from grand abstraction to the poet’s awkwardly inconclusive personal dilemma.78 Judith Anderson also saw a broad universality narrowing to isolate individuality, and she adds a deep religious dimension by comparing Spenser’s serial virtues to Piers Plowman’s pilgrimage.79 Ronald Horton in The Unity of The Faerie Queene also saw three pairs of virtues, each with an absolute and a relativist mode; and, like Northrop Frye, he saw the move from individual virtues in Books 1–3 to social virtues in 4–6 as approximating closure.80 Still greater closure was argued by Alastair Fowler in Spenser and the Numbers of Time, using cosmic number symbolism to match the virtues with the seven planets. Finally, James Nohrnberg in The Analogy of The Faerie Queene described the six virtues as forming a complete closure, a parabola that descends to Book 3, then rises to Book 6, where common graces realize in creation the supernatural grace that saved the Redcrosse Knight in Book 1.81 These are the most far-reaching suggestions for The Faerie Queene’s design, all published by 1976. Recent critics show little interest in the poem’s holistic form, instead finding strange satisfaction in its frayed ending, for they view the poem as a monument to colonial greed and as a Lacanian model of violently repressed identity. Sheila

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Cavanagh, Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Elizabeth Fowler, and Harry Berger explore the poem’s veiled immorality, especially the ruthless imperialism of its Irish project and the misogyny lurking beneath its adulation of Elizabeth.82 My thesis is that the goal of Spenser’s epic was not just to praise (and actualize) Gloriana but was also to describe human perfection as an image of God, a vision that draws on Jewish merkavah mysticism, intellectually and affectively developed by Platonists and Christian mystics. Besides writing a dynastic epic that builds on Virgil, Malory, and Ariosto, Spenser’s goal was to compose a comprehensive mystic quest which forms the core of his (as of Langland’s) allegory. To view The Faerie Queene holistically, especially its progression of virtues, one must view Gloriana as subsumed in the ‘kingdom, power, and glory’ that concludes the Lord’s prayer.83 The Faerie Queene’s mystic readers One feature of The Faerie Queene might seem to obstruct my thesis, namely Brito­ mart, who resides at the heart of Spenser’s poem but is a questionable mystic.84 So I begin by comparing Britomart to Elizabeth I in their capacity for spiritual awareness. How did Spenser conceive of Elizabeth, the titular subject of his epic? After reading countless biographical, cultural, and literary studies of the Queen as an iconic figure (see Appendix 2), I favour the positive view: Spenser was deeply impressed with Elizabeth’s intelligence, her Reform-oriented piety, and her dramatic presence. All three qualities were evident when Princess Elizabeth at age eleven presented to her stepmother, Queen Catherine Parr, a new year’s gift: her handwritten translation of Queen Margaret of Navarre’s Le Miroir de l’ame pecheresse (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul). This love poem for Christ – which, as Anne Lake Prescott has shown, movingly reflects Elizabeth’s view of her father Henry VIII – also has the special cachet (for those of reformed faith) of having been quickly condemned by the Sorbonne’s theological faculty.85 In The Faerie Queene Spenser reverses that work’s humble title by calling Elizabeth not a mirror of sin but a ‘mirror of grace and majesty divine’. As such, she is the spiritual core and dynamic engine of Spenser’s epic, not only inspiring and commissioning each moral quest but indirectly taking part in each quest via her human and Olympian subtypes.86 The Redcrosse Knight attains sainthood only by means of Una, who figures Elizabeth as leader of the one true church; Sir Guyon’s shield bears Gloriana’s image, and his temperate quest includes Belphoebe as a type of Elizabeth’s personal perfection; and Britomart, whose quest spans three legends (connecting her with chastity, friendship, and justice), is a primal archetype of what Spenser and others wished the Queen to be: this bisexual maiden-knight bursts forth as the poem’s fullest, most psychologically analysable ‘character’ in our modern sense.87 Queen Elizabeth must have been amused by this brash heroine who inverts and primitivizes Elizabeth’s main attributes, liberating her from the tight restraints of royal civility. Instead of Elizabeth’s sophistication, Britomart is quite naive; instead of Elizabeth’s careful pacifism, Britomart is aggressively ­militant; instead of Elizabeth’s virgin rule, Britomart’s central goal is marriage. Since these three qualities (wisdom, pacifism, celibacy)

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make Elizabeth a prime candidate for mystic consciousness, let’s examine them more closely.88 First, the Queen’s wisdom: Elizabeth was learned, eloquent, and acutely attentive to governance: each day she read complex political reports, regularly read ancient and modern classics, and practised translating one language to another till she grew fluent in six of them; from a tender age she became expert at reading social-political subtexts and devising strategies. She dealt directly with many major ambassadors (each in his own tongue), showed her grasp of the most complex issues, and could shame the privy council and parliament with her insightful retorts and controlled temper (see Appendix 3). Such masterful poise sharply contrasts the youthful Britomart:89 her initial hysteria, her persistent disguise, her awed wonder at Busyrane’s lusty artworks, her slowness to befriend other women in need, her rage at her enemy-twin Radigund. At first sight Britomart is a remarkable dumbing-down of Queen Elizabeth, but several factors made the fiction palatable: young Britomart’s passionate mishaps are not far afield from those of young Elizabeth, and these fictive high jinks offered Elizabeth delightful respite from the realities of rule (modern rulers need such a griot-poet). Moreover, Britomart’s naivety about worldly matters confirms her chastity (thus brushing aside early rumours of Elizabeth’s wantonness), and finally it is evident that Britomart, like Elizabeth, rapidly matures in poise and sophisticated awareness. Second, the Queen’s pacifism: most endearing to the cautious Elizabeth must have been the implications of Britomart’s bold militarism. With symbolic armour and weaponry Britomart engages other knights as a physical and intellectual equal. As in the Bible, sword is a metaphor for word; Britomart’s swordplay partly signifies rational discourse; and her lance (symbol of her – and Elizabeth’s – imperious will) is irresistible, especially to narcissistic men like Marinell and Paridell. Elizabeth adeptly parried endless verbal assaults from adversarial male counsellors; thus Britomart’s martial (and implicitly rational) dominance of men was for Elizabeth a wish-fulfilment replete with truth. Britomart’s impulsive militancy offered the Queen comic relief from her vigilant avoidance of costly wars, for it was her pacifism that aroused the most ardent criticisms of her rule – including those of Spenser (see Appendix 4). Finally, the Queen’s virginity: Elizabeth’s preference for self-rule decisively contrasts Britomart’s central quest for marriage, consummated in the selfconquest of defeating her shadow-self, the Amazon Radigund, and the selfconquest of submitting to Artegall. Elizabeth’s decade-long courtship with the Duc d’Alençon, though partly a mutual political charade, made Britomart’s quest for Artegall another delicious excurse into fantasy, imagining (with the help of Merlin’s mirror) a partner so powerful, just, and gentlemanly as to inspire selfsurrender! Thus far I’ve presented Elizabeth’s ‘spiritual’ traits as a stark contrast to Britomart. But despite her errancies Britomart also displays mystic proclivities that captivate readers. First, she sternly resists sensual worldliness, both the hedonist lures of Malecasta and Busirane, and the promiscuous chasing of eye-candy like Florimell and Paridell, and she contemns the vast materialist spoils of Marinell’s

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‘rich strond’. In her ardent contemptus mundi amid so many sensual enticements Britomart surpasses all other knights, including Redcross, Guyon, and Arthur. A second sign of mystic aptitude is Britomart’s lengthy contemplative wonder at the artistry of Malecasta and Busirane, especially the Ovidian depiction of Olympians’ love-making and of their human victims welcoming the abuse. Her amazed incomprehension of Jove’s and Apollo’s divine rapes suggests her yearning for true Godly love that draws into question the selfish abuses of Graeco-Roman desire, as well as Ovid’s ravishing eloquence in describing them. (In depicting Busirane as a consummately abusive artist of lovemaking, Spenser typifies not himself but Ovid and other Italian artists past and present.) Britomart’s growth toward the spiritual potency of Elizabeth affirms that Spenser, in designing the virtues as a mystic quest and in revealing Christianity’s superiority to pagan theologies, was not just fashioning gentlemen but engaging at the deepest level his major reader, the learned, charismatic Queen. The Faerie Queene, Books 1–6, as a carefully structured descent Having noted Spenser’s primary concern with his readers’ spiritual capacity, I return to his poem’s holistic design as a progress toward the visio Dei: its ‘allegorical centres’ provide not just moral training for each virtue but foreshadowings of divine glory. In Book 1 the House of Holiness provides an exemplary model of the mystic’s three ascending stages of purgative faith, illuminative charity, and unitive contemplation, culminating in a view of the busy angelic ladder into the New Jerusalem.90 In Book 2 Alma’s Castle provides an immanent, natural parallel: the three ascending levels of human nature as God’s temple within Creation. The templar visions of Books 3, 4, 5, and 6, alternately transcendent and immanent, descend into increasingly problematic incarnations of deity in the material world. Spenser’s six completed virtues are arranged as three descending pairs in order to deal with sin on each of the soul’s three levels, a pervasive principle in The Faerie Queene: three-layered figurative houses and gardens, triadic family groups and sequences of action (triple temptations, or three escalating foes, the last requiring a three-day battle like Christ’s passion). Books 1 and 2 present virtues of the intellective realm, Holiness aiming at the transcendent goals of superior reason, Temperance at the immanent goals of inferior reason or prudence in the natural world. Books 3 and 4 show virtues of the passional realm, Chastity as transcendent and Friendship as immanent forms of love; Books 5 and 6 show the equivocal success of virtue in the sensate realm, Justice having a transcendent and Courtesy an immanent provenance. By now it will be clear that Renaissance psychology has two divergent modes: Aristotle’s empirically based faculty psychology focuses on bodily housing, while Plato’s ideational, numerological psychology stresses the soul’s immortal essence and relation to God. Spenser subsumes Plato’s and Aristotle’s views of human nature in a broad, essentialist scheme that is not just ‘psychology’ but ‘theological anthropology’.91 After viewing Spenser’s first six virtues as an ordered descent into the material world, we can invert the pattern to find the missing six, completing the quest for the divine presence, the throne-vision of God.92 This ascent to the

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ineffable core of Being may occur as a momentous rapture, as with Enoch and Elijah, Jesus and Paul; but usually the ascent requires three long stages: much humble penance, and then many deeds of illuminative charity, before approaching the climactic vision of God. Spenser’s systematic use of this scheme is astonishing in two ways. First, his sequence of quests for virtue rivals the works of Dante and Aquinas in its comprehensive encyclopaedic scope, with the special challenge of rendering that elaborate ethical-theological vision of human nature in allegorized romance fictions. Second, and equally magnificent in scope, Spenser’s first six legends describe an incarnational descent into the material world before inverting the pattern in the final legends to form the usual six-stage ascent to the throne-vision. The church fathers (notably Pseudo-Dionysius, Philo, Plotinus, Clement, Origen, and Augustine) evolve three main stages, and the Victorines and Bonaventure split each level into complementary modes – transcendent and immanent (Creator-centred and Christ-centred) – producing six stages of contemplative ascent into God. In the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, era of the romances, the spiritual ascent was profoundly elaborated – some scholars say ‘feminized’ – by infusing wisdom with love, combining exalted intellectual epiphany with intimate loving experience of God. The two work best in tandem, though often quite separately, and it is crucial to note that, in the fallen world, the will with its passions takes priority over the thoughts of intellect as a means of attaining the divine presence.93 The importance of passion is apparent in Paul, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Gallus, Francis and Claire of Assisi, Bonaventure, and many women mystics in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries: Angela in Italy, Hadewijch in Holland, Mechthild in Germany, Marguerite Porete in France, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich in England. We note this latter group’s focus on (1) knowing God as love, (2) experiential suffering through imitating Christ, (3) imagining God as a divine sea with one’s visions conceived as ‘flowings’; and (4) the self annihilation of being ‘poured out’. In Spenser’s epic such uncontrolled pouring takes opposite meanings, either a sinful looseness in abandoning the restraining ‘armour of God’ or an extraordinary joy when one’s heart is illuminated by grace and by faith (sola gratia, sola fide) to see God in others.94 Now a major question: could Spenser sustain this elaborate contemplative structure in such a long poem – ‘longer’, notes Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘than Paradise Lost, the Aeneid, and Jerusalem Liberated combined?’95 Paul Alpers staunchly denied that large doctrinal principles define and order The Faerie Queene’s virtues, citing the poem’s massiveness as making it impossible to compare legends, or to remember more than a canto or two at once.96 But surely the opposite is true: the poem’s great size requires the careful structuring that is everywhere evident. Alpers seriously neglected the poem’s systematic concern with theological and ethical doctrine, and he ignored the obvious cues that The Faerie Queene is an encyclopaedic teaching poem. We are struck, first, by the thematic nature of Spenser’s prefatory matter; no other epic has so many carefully devised signposts to accommodate the poem’s multiple levels of allegory (moral, historical, political, theological): the Letter to Raleigh partly imitates Tasso’s letter explaining aspects

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of his epic; but Spenser provides not only a headnote for each canto but also a lengthy proem for each legend specifying its inspiration and goal. The cantoheadnotes in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, though longer than Spenser’s, simply retell the story, a bit like student cribs. Spenser’s proem for each book and headnote for each canto stresses moral allegory and its divine source, not just suspenseful plotting. This difference is especially apparent in The Faerie Queene’s first two legends, which imitate Virgil’s unity of plot by focusing on a single hero learning a single moral virtue, and by paralleling the two legends’ complementary morality. Second, there is Spenser’s division of each legend into twelve cantos, which allows easy comparison of comparable phases in each legend:97 cantos 1–6 always descend into materialist delusion, with cantos 3 and 6 giving epiphanies of female prowess or the magnificence of Creation; cantos 7–8 show imprisonment by (and then liberation from) titans who signify earthly, materialist pride; cantos 9–10 provide templar education; cantos 11–12 show the dispelling of relevant evils and uniting of relevant goods. Third, underlying all these careful shapings, literally ‘in-forming’ the poem’s hierarchies and complementarities, there is Spenser’s pervasive use of Christian-Platonic idealism and mystic numerology.98 Alpers is not the only astute critic who questions the use of definitive doctrinal structures in The Faerie Queene. While Alpers chose to ignore this contextual dimension, Darryl Gless finds Spenser loading every rift with doctrine, but Gless’s deep awareness of conflicting and paradoxical Reformation doctrines gives dizzying complexity to reading the allegory, so that like Redcrosse we must be blessed by grace to read things rightly. Carol Kaske gives a third reason for denying a simple doctrinal pattern in the six virtues: she stresses Spenser’s pluralism in celebrating Christian and pagan deities, and in entertaining contrary aspects of Christian doctrine. All three critics thus question Woodhouse’s famous distinction between the order of grace in Book 1, where Holiness is attained only by divine aid, and restriction to the secular order of nature in the ensuing five virtues, gained without explicit supernatural support.99 I believe Spenser did use the grace–nature principle, but more complexly than Woodhouse realized, for he missed the second major structural principle of The Faerie Queene, that the three pairs of virtues descend through the soul’s three levels of power: complementary intellective virtues (holiness–temperance); complementary passional virtues (chastity–friendship); and complementary sensate virtues (justice–courtesy).100 Each legend addresses a different psychological-ontological level, with the first six legends (like the first six cantos in each legend) descending from the most spiritual to the most material dimension. This dilative descent into materialism accounts for the narrowing meaning of certain characters (like Duessa and Sansloy), the narrowing meaning of mythic figures (like satyrs or salvages and titans), the narrowing meaning of metaphors (like weaponry and houses), and the narrowing import of plot structures: allegory becomes literalized as history.101 This painful incarnational descent would surely have been transformed in the final six legends into an inverse ascent. We recall that Isaiah’s six-winged seraph became for Francis of Assisi an image of the crucified Christ, arousing such devo-

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tion that, near the end of his life, Francis’s hands, feet, and side began to bleed as he identified with its felt meaning. The realities uncovered by modern postcolonial studies make it hard to match the visions of Francis with those of Edmund Spenser, for the excruciating image of a gentle angel of fire nailed helplessly to a cross befits only too well the European and Irish horrors mirrored in Books 5 and 6 of The Faerie Queene. We can be grateful that in those legends, and in A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser candidly reported the angel’s agony, notably in Talus’ brutality and in the heart-wrenching vision of starving persons creeping from the Irish forest. What could remain for the final six legends but to depict those virtues that would enable the angel’s release. The summoning of Hamlet and Lear The impact, irony, and reversibility of summonings Summoning provokes the psyche’s most momentous unfoldings. The mental and visceral impact of a legal summons is obvious to all who receive one, unleashing a flood of piteous self-justification and sharp questioning of the Rule of Law. No one likes being called to judgment. To the discomfort of legal courts Shakespeare’s summonings add a spiritual burden. Because King Hamlet was killed as he slept, when his sinful soul was unready, his anxious ghost vanishes at cock-crow ‘like a guilty thing / Upon a fearful summons’ (1.1.154–5). King Lear, distraught at lost power and public humiliation, allies his voice with heavenly thundering (‘Close pent-up guilts, / Rive your concealing continents and cry / These dreadful summoners grace’) but denies that the thunder summons him: ‘I am a man / More sinned against than sinning’ (3.2.57–60). Each play begins with a king, or kingly wraith, summoning children for judgment, and each king’s spectacular enactment of sovereignty goes terribly wrong. The ‘fearful summons’ and ‘dreadful summoners’ carry deep irony in that each king – one secretly slain, one publicly shamed – clings to an illusory summoner-power after having been quite defanged. Old Hamlet’s ghost is ‘majestic’ in complete armour,102 an image that matches his son’s idealizing him as Hyperion and Hercules, and later the prince, to arouse his mother’s guilt for marrying the murderer, will further divinize his father by adding Jove, Mars, and Mercury (1.2.140, 153; 3.4.56–63). That Gertrude never sees the imperious ghost (which appears not just to Hamlet but, more distantly, to Horatio and the watch) suggests her moral blindness but also the warrior-ghost’s attraction to an adoring son. The ghost tries ultimately to affirm his regal authority by ordering his son to exact revenge. Likewise, Lear keeps ‘the name and all th’ addition to a king’, including the symbolic ‘hundred knights’ (1.1.132–36); he wears regal vestments till the play’s mid-point; and he too tries to consummate his royal identity by calling for vengeance. He ups the ante by calling not just his child to punish a murderer but a storm to punish all sinners. Neither king – the living nor the dead – easily concedes the high office of summoner and justicer, despite his current embarrassing impotence. The deeper irony is that each king, by summoning his offspring in order to judge how fully they affirm his power, ends by censuring himself. Lear’s ‘divine

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rite’ initiates a long causal chain of judgment-scenes, always dominated by Lear and drawing him to increasing depths of self-judgment. In the mad trial of 3.6, Lear vacillates between being a fierce parent-summoner and a whimpering child who is himself on trial. Likewise the ghost of King Hamlet in revealing his brother’s crime simultaneously discloses his own spiritual corruption: ‘Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, /… Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away’ (1.5.11–14). His purgatorial account brims with lavishly imagined physical details – traumatizing a witness (‘freeze thy young blood, / Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, / Thy knotted and combined locks to part, / And each particular hair to stand on end / Like quills upon the fretful porpentine’)103 as it cauterizes his ‘wholesome blood’, casing his ‘smooth body’ in ‘a most instant tetter …, / Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust’ (17–21, 71–4). The vivid concretizing captivates audiences as it shows the ghost’s clinging to bodily vigour and motion, or, as he puts it, the ‘blossoms of my sin’. Yet while affirming a persistent bodily desire, his chronicling of the poison’s effect implies his more traumatic concern. The extravagant physicality veils (especially for modern audiences) the dread of spiritual corruption. Poisonin-the-ear, besides corrupting the body, figures a Satanic flattery that corrupts the soul, a process common in Renaissance courts but not mentioned by the ghost.104 Thus we should not be surprised that his ultimate anxiety is not death’s spoilage of bodily pleasure but rather the lack of a ‘reck’ning’ to prepare for eternity: Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand … Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,105 No reck’ning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. O, horrible! O, horrible, most horrible!

(1.5.75–81)

Many readers neglect this intense agitation over spiritual reckoning, which provides a context for so much of the play. They observe Hamlet’s dismay at family treachery and mortality, but miss the play’s insistent focus on the sinful soul’s horror at facing Final Judgment.106 The ghost’s extravagant account of bodily perversion finally explodes into the repressed fact of spiritual corruption that brings purgatorial torment. We especially wonder at the ghost’s confessional prolixity since it belies Hamlet’s adulation of a perfect, godlike king. Each summoning thus reverses itself to indict the royal summoner, most thoroughly in King Lear. But before examining that play, let us note the importance of the summoning in literary and visual art. A cathartic judgment-scene is vital to each classical tragedy, each epic and romance, the best novels of Eliot, the Brontës, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Hawthorne, Hardy, Kafka, O’Connor, Mann, each film of Bergman, Kurosawa, and Wertmueller, each law-and-order show on TV. The harrowing indictment may occur, however, not just at the finale but at the beginning, and the middle, and the end of each work. King Lear offers by far the most exhaustive and carefully managed treatment: nine major scenes of summoning-to-judgment that precisely define the beginning, middle, and end of

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each of its three cycles; and its heart-rending finale evokes the actual experience of Doomsday. Such summonings instil night-terrors, activating our fears of public shame, torturous death, reduction to pettiness or nothingness. One more generality: the horrific summoning that arouses Kafkaesque dread is in fact completely invertible into a happy summoning. Odysseus, Aeneas, Dante, and every epic protagonist is summoned by deity to a ‘homecoming’ that, though challenging, brings full awareness and bliss. Most exalting are the Biblical summonings of ‘chosen’ ones who are called to atone with God: Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Israel’s twelve tribes, the prophets; then Mary, Jesus, the twelve apostles, Paul.107 Each medieval mystery play is such a summoning to covenant relationship, a naming that calls one into fullest being. Robert Potter, in his classic study of English morality plays in relation to Renaissance tragedy, singles out The Summoning of Everyman as the main analogue (and perhaps subtext) for two of the period’s greatest plays, Jonson’s Volpone and Shakespeare’s King Lear. Each is a multi-level summoning, leading to a ‘stripping plot’ which exposes difference and ultimately identity.108 Anatomizing the summoning Each summoning obliges us to test its three main elements. First, the summoner’s authority and power. Most awesome is divinity, whether Jewish, Christian, Greek, or Roman. Compelling but more intimate is a god-parent like Aeneas’s mother Venus, or a ghost-parent like Anchises and King Hamlet, or a fabulous mentor like Virgil. Also potent as a divine embassy is the ‘speech’ of Death or of natural disaster (a storm to Job, Lear, Antigonus, Alonso; a flood to Noah; global warming to us moderns). More questionable is the power of a human summoner, even a divinely anointed sovereign. Everyman, Hamlet, and King Lear vary sharply in the authority of each play’s Summoner. In Everyman it is not Death (a mere mediator) but God-as-the-incarnate-Christ who calls Everyman to account for his life in comparison to Christ’s charitable and suffering service. In Hamlet an anxious warrior-ghost usurps this role, ordering his son to avenge his murder; but is it to cleanse Denmark of tainted love and power, or to ease his purgatorial discomfort?109 Even more problematic is the authority of proud octogenarian Lear, who displaces God by making his daughters compete publicly in expressing love for him. His test might resemble God’s wish to reactivate love in Everyman, but Lear expresses ‘love’ quite differently. In the moral play Christ actively shows love in his Passion and in washing of feet; in contrast, Lear aloofly demands the hyperbolic speech-love of public flattery, for which he will bestow the created world: ‘Of all these bounds, … / With shadowy forests and champaigns riched, / With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads, / We make thee lady’ (1.1.63–6). The power of each summoner is enforced partly in alliance with death, but death is not equally acknowledged in the three plays. As God’s alarming herald in Everyman, Death’s presence spurs moral awakening and finally enables reunion with a God who also suffered death. A common misreading is that Everyman is terrified by Death, yet his real dread is Christ’s judgment. Shakespeare’s tragedies are haunted by death and prospects of Final Judgment, but that awareness appears

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in very few characters. In Hamlet final things are ignored by all except young Hamlet. For the kingly ghost, for Polonius and his children, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for Claudius and Gertrude, death comes unexpectedly, despite Hamlet’s showing its imminence in the Mousetrap play: though Claudius gets the message, he refuses to renounce his sins to ready his soul. In King Lear characters are even more emphatically surprised by death: Cornwall’s ‘Untimely comes this hurt’ (3.7.101) and Oswald’s ‘O, untimely death!’ (4.6.253) speak for many. Awareness of death is staunchly repressed, even by the aged protagonist, whose desire to shed kingly burdens and ‘crawl toward death’ (1.1.41) is belied by a hunting excursion. In Hamlet and King Lear personal mortality is rarely acknowledged, though it looms ominously over both plays with its sense of a call to ultimate wages, often in an apocalyptic context. Second, we question the worthiness of the one summoned. Greek and Roman heroes are summoned for their perseverance and virtù (Odysseus’ cunning prowess, Aeneas’ dutiful leadership); but in Jewish and Christian cultures the chosen one is often foolish, weak, and sinful, requiring only faithful obedience to the initiatives and gracious love of the divine summoner, as Everyman learns in the morality. The anxious intensity of Hamlet and King Lear suggests a combining of these cultural strains, antique arête and Reformation conscience, as noted in McNamee’s Honor and the Epic Hero.110 Hamlet’s epic stature is affirmed by his princely demeanour, eloquent insights, and discourse with the spirit-world,111 yet we equally admire the angst of conscience that connects him to Luther’s Wittenburg, centre of Reformation insistence on Original Sin and divine grace.112 Though a few of the summoned welcome it, most resist, doubt its authenticity, and appeal to worldly rather than spiritual power: thus Jesus laments, ‘Though many are called, few are chosen’ (Matt. 23.39, Luke 13.35). Even the chosen err in pride, are stripped of blessings, and need cleansing; thus we carefully study the evolving reaction of Everyman, Hamlet, and Lear to privation, mortality, and especially relationship. Everyman is torn from all worldly bonds, but after ‘Knowledge’ leads to Confession, Everyman scourges himself, gives alms, preaches, and finally is welcomed to bliss by angelic choirs. Hamlet’s growth from bitter scepticism to calm acceptance is ambivalent: after killing Polonius, avoiding assassination, reminiscing with a gravedigger, and witnessing Ophelia’s burial, he significantly softens and finally is lauded by rivals Laertes and Fortinbras as Horatio invokes ‘flights of angels’ to sing him to his rest. Lear’s mad communion with exiles is even more ambivalent, stressing his moral and mental imperfection yet also his ecstatic insights through shame, culminating in Cordelia’s forgiveness and then in his grief at her hanging body. Thus, if we compare the worthiness of these three who are summoned, Lear is shown as the most privileged, as well as the most culpable, yet also as the most fully activated human life. Finally we question the goal of the summons. Partly it is to scourge evil, but instead of evil in others, as seen by Odysseus and Aeneas, the corruption is acknowledged by Everyman, Hamlet, and Lear to be in themselves. The major goal of summonings is to affirm bonds of loving service,113 which occurs for Everyman and Lear but only partly for Hamlet, who, as Fredson Bowers noted, shifts with difficulty

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from ‘scourge’ to ‘minister’. Everyman, after fully enduring privation and extensively confessing, engages in ministries that bring joys of bonding with others. For Lear the indictment leading to confession, like the ‘ministry’ to Poor Tom and to blind Gloucester, is not fully in his conscious control; yet his psychic outpouring – even more than Everyman’s turn from despair and Hamlet’s from ‘madness’ – indicates radical transformation, as implied in each play’s gnomic lines on ‘readiness’ and ‘ripeness’. In the morality, Everyman persistently asks (in 39 passages) whether he is ‘redy’ or ‘unredy’114 to face the Messiah’s ‘reckoning’115 of his ‘boke of counte’.116 His soul is finally prepared for heaven, not by family, friends, or worldly goods but by a holistic knowledge that entails confession, which re-animates good deeds: thus ‘goods’, when given to the needy, become ‘good deeds’ (‘Duecht’ or ‘Virtue’ in the Dutch original), the only figure that can accompany Everyman to Christ’s judgment. Hamlet also focuses on final things, readiness for the reckoning. Even before meeting the ghost, Hamlet, studying at Luther’s Wittenburg, broods on stains that hamper the soul’s readiness: ‘too too sullied flesh’ (1.2.129), ‘vicious mole of nature’ (1.4.24), ‘dram of evil’ (1.4.36), ‘black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct’ (3.4.92–3). This is the play’s dark side, sharply analysed by Heather Hirschfeld in tracing its focus on the ‘first corse’, the endlessly re-enacted trauma of Original Sin.117 But there is a bright side: Hamlet rejects suicide’s rash approach to the ‘undiscovered country’; he decides to allow the worst evildoer to entrap his own soul; he encourages his mother to cleanse her soul by separation; he puzzles over Fortinbras’s pointless wars; he laments the mortality of Yorick’s laughter and of Ophelia’s love; and he learns to admire the ‘divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will’ (5.2.9–10). Vengeance ceases to be his main goal, and, when Horatio urges avoiding the duel, Hamlet affirms a ‘special providence in the fall of a sparrow.… if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all’ (5.2.217–20).118 The flood of contradictory views of this ‘readiness’ continues unabated. For Prosser, Hamlet in Act 5 is ready for salvation; for Hayden he is a mere Stoic ready to moderate passion and accept fortune’s lot; for Bloom the supremely altered Hamlet of Act 5 is a Nietzschean nihilist, self-divinizing and without hope of heaven; Roy Battenhouse, that fierce Augustinian, sees him as ready only for bloody revenge, ‘celebrant with Claudius in a Black Mass’,119 with none of the holy readiness of Everyman and of Matthew’s final parables: ‘Be ye therefore ready, for in such hour as ye think not, the Son of Man cometh’ (24.44).120 Similarly William Elton in King Lear and the Gods depicts Lear’s summoning as, even more than Hamlet’s, darkly irresolute. Never since Job has a protagonist so ardently questioned and petitioned God, and Job’s passionate cries never descend to Lear’s disoriented madness, punctuated by insights that, in the context of relationships, are epiphanal. For Everyman the central turning-point is a humble confession, and for Hamlet a set of bitter accusations: the Mousetrap play, the ‘To be or not’ soliloquy, the fiery indictments of Ophelia and Gertrude when used as bait to trap him. Lear’s turning-point, also beginning in Act 3, is the most complex transformation of the human psyche ever written: Lear is more fully confessional than Everyman, more fully accusatory than Hamlet, and surpassing Everyman,

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Hamlet, and Job in sublimative mourning for the loss of a worthy loved one. Such aggressive defences all cause ripening, but in King Lear’s complex web, how many levels of meaning accrue to Edgar’s ‘Ripeness is all’: (1) physical – ripe for harvest, sexuality, death; (2) passional – ripe for anger, love, tipsiness, despair; (3) situational – ripe for timely social or military action; (4) social-relational – for bonding or separating; (5) moral and psychological – matured in sympathetic suffering, or viciously decadent in evil; (6) providential or fortunal – a fulfilment beyond human causation? (See Appendix 5). Can any of these meanings be omitted? Though we may question Edgar’s authority in delivering the phrase, it epitomizes Shakespeare’s insistently basing his art in organic bodily processes, as in modes 1–3; yet, as in modes 4–6, it also connotes an evolving psychic response with a growing ironic awareness and a proleptic desire for transcendence. Neither Hamlet nor King Lear can be fully comprehended without using a moral and apocalyptic life-cycle (like that of Everyman) as template for the plot, providing a context for Hamlet’s anguished soliloquies on human nature and for his multi-meaning dialogues with commoners and kings; a context, moreover, for Lear’s shamed reaction to ungratefulness, to poor naked wretches, and to a daughter’s generous forgiveness. Hamlet is thus ‘The Dark Summons of a Thoughtful Prince to Resolve Original Sin’, and King Lear, even more mystically ambitious, is ‘The Dark Summoning of a Kingly Summoner to Embrace the Soul’s Nothingness’.121 These sceptical tragedies, in which royal protagonists question humankind’s connection with a spirit-world, finally imply that life’s goal is not just confronting death. Rather, ‘felicity’, as Hamlet calls it,122 is sought by ‘readying’ the soul for Doom through endless questionings of conscience, and in King Lear ‘bliss’ is approached by Lear and Gloucester as their embodied souls ‘ripen’ in contact with the natural world123 and with bondings based on communal suffering,124 enabling them to ‘see feelingly’. To what end is one ready or ripe? Like The Summoning of Everyman, these signature tragedies of Shakespeare repeatedly allude to the Imitatio Christi, but whereas the morality play explicitly delivers the fruit of the gospel message, Hamlet and King Lear leave in mysterious suspension the meaning of readiness and ripeness. They enact the Christ-analogue mainly in perverse travesties. Hamlet, despite his final softening, is far more scourge than minister. Edgar, a naked wretch pierced by thorns who becomes ‘one of the least of these’, is empowered only by caring for his elders in their blindness and lunacy. Lear, childishly mad and crowned by thorns, a ‘side-piercing sight’, finally experiences a more positive Christ-analogue, first by receiving Cordelia’s simple and absolute forgiveness, then most fully by seeing her hanging for love of him. Thus the implicit hopefulness of Lear’s last summoning to all of us: ‘Look there! Look there!’125 In several plays Shakespeare portrayed the spirit-world’s nothingness as a stageworthy thingness (ghosts cross the stage in Richard III, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth; fairies cavort in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Olympian gods mechanically descend in Cymbeline, and Ariel displays an extraordinary range of spiriting in The Tempest). But Shakespeare’s greatest metaphysical and theatrical challenge was to stage the spiritual nothingness of Lear’s dying. This scene corrects Hamlet’s

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sharp flaw (conflicted or absent love), and it wondrously elaborates the finale of Everyman, when the protagonist joins hands with Virtue or Good Deeds to enter the grave. Like Prince Hamlet, Lear readies his conscience partly by intellectual questioning; but he also passionally ‘ripens’ toward this end by deepening shame for his errors and by the joy of renewed bonding. In this play Shakespeare pricks the audience’s deep imagination by riddling comments on ‘nothing’, by cruelty and friendship so extreme as to evoke demonic monsters and a ‘soul in bliss’, by Edgar’s ‘miraculous’ poetic cure of Gloucester from despair and Cordelia’s perfect cure of Lear through forgiveness and death. Unlike his other ghostly stagings, Shakespeare asked no actor to perform the freed spirit of Cordelia, a ‘nothing’ that the fully loving Lear is at last able to see clearly and to follow. As Edgar’s closing remark implies, such trenchantly ripened vision is not shared by everyone. Sacerdotal vestiges in The Tempest In Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Geoffrey Bullough observes that The Tempest’s ‘didactic nature’, as well as Prospero’s ‘masterful aloofness’ and ‘use of the supernatural’, have encouraged some critics to treat the play as an ­allegory. The whole piece, … permeated with Christian feeling, … has been interpreted as a Mystery play in which Prospero, if not the Deity, is ‘the hierophant or initiating priest’ in a rite of purification which the Court party must willy-nilly undergo .… Caliban … becomes the Monster to be overcome, and Miranda Wisdom, the ­Celestial Bride.

Though wary of such allegorizing, Bullough has ‘no doubt that in The Tempest, more than in the other ‘romances’, Shakespeare was thinking of human life in a cosmic way,’ eliciting ‘a moral perfection in which reason and the affections would be united with grace’.126 Grace Tiffany notes that in the romances ‘grace’ appears more often and with deepening meaning as Shakespeare moves ‘away from a dramaturgy emphasizing tragic choice to one focusing on divine rescue’.127 Divine activity is, however, complexly portrayed in The Tempest. Certainly Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale show central characters rescued from tyrants or their own tyranny, and innocents resurrected from death, by an intervening deity (Diana, Jupiter, Apollo) as well as by wise counsel or medical-magical ministry (Helicanus and Cerimon in Pericles; Belarius, Pisanio, and Cornelius in Cymbeline; Camillo and Paulina in The Winter’s Tale) and by the talismanic power of a chaste maid (Marina, Innogen, Perdita). In The Tempest, however, ‘divine rescue’ occurs with a difference. Unlike previous protagonists (Pericles, Posthumus, Leontes) who steadily decline in moral agency, Prospero is a benevolent magus who uses supernatural power (or a theatrical simulacrum thereof) to redeem an entire ship of state. Though he too has engaged in a neglectful quest, received aid from a wise counsellor, and been inspired by an angelic daughter, he now shows virtuoso control of ‘spirits’ who can alter both settings and to some degree souls by means of magical/theatrical productions. The opening tempest, with Prospero’s choric follow-up, displays the magus’s power via the tour-de-force acting and nonillusionist staging at Blackfriars and the Globe.128 An explicit theatricality will make the presentation of divinity (as

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well as the final resurrection/reunion) quite different from the previous romances – indeed, polar opposite to the miraculous ending of The Winter’s Tale. Like Jupiter in Cymbeline (5.4), Juno in The Tempest (4.1) mechanically ‘descends’, and her masque extensively displays the beneficent role of divinity (and implicitly, of royalty) in human life; but since Juno, Ceres, and Iris are emphatically ‘enacted’ by Prospero’s spirits, they are far less shrouded in mystery than Diana, Jupiter, and Apollo in the previous plays.129 Spirits, which by mine Art I have from their confines called to enact My present fancies.… Thou and thy meaner fellows your last service Did worthily perform; and I must use you In such another trick.130

As with the tempest and the vanishing banquet, Prospero explicitly creates and controls each spectacle. Implicitly, these ornately clad ‘Spirits’ execute the monarch’s power as a viceroy of God, yet in this play their masque-function fails. Instead of banishing vulgarity and evil, these artificial deities are themselves dispelled by the encroaching baseness of Caliban’s conspiracy. These events acutely show the gods as artful projections of the magus’s mind and ‘spirits’. Accompanied by a ‘strange, hollow, and confused noise’, they ‘heavily vanish’ at Prospero’s command: ‘Avoid; no more!’ (4.1.139SD, 142). This dispersal of pagan deities (and of masque elements) in The Tempest makes us question the nature of its supernatural dimension. Is the play, as Colin Still argues in The Timeless Theme, a universal purgatorial allegory that mirrors the visionary rites of both ancient Eleusinian neophytes and medieval Christian pilgrims?131 Or does learned Prospero enact a Neoplatonic quest, as W.C. Curry argues in ‘Sacerdotal Science in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’ – with partial approval of Frank Kermode in his masterful Arden introduction?132 Or is The Tempest a Biblical ‘mystery play’ whose symbolism highlights the need of the Jewish/Christian messiah? Northrop Frye anticipates such a reading and its attendant problems: ‘the truly greatest art … presents a symbolic picture of the deepest religious impulses of the age’, but it ‘defeats its own ends by approaching the theological side and tending to explicit utterance of any teaching’. Shakespeare, when ‘striving to penetrate the uttermost depths …, drops from symbolism to allegory, the explicit statement of symbolism, in his last plays’.133 Frye saw Shakespeare approaching ‘nearer and nearer the sacerdotal drama as his genius developed.… The only possible development from the theme of The Tempest would have been the passion play itself ’, for that ‘supreme sacrifice’, ‘the nexus of all religious symbolism’, provides ‘the supreme drama’.134 In ‘The Tempest’ as Mystery Play Grace Hall offers a fully Christian reading.135 She proposes three Judaeo-Christian sources for its language, characters, and scenes: the Bible, the Coventry cycle of mystery plays, and the 1559 Book of Common Prayer. Despite the breadth of these works, whose epic-cosmic scope and liturgical ritual seem to embrace all human history and moral temperaments,

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her study’s shortcoming is its narrowed pool of sources. We must cast a wider net to appreciate the complex synthesis of Shakespeare’s valedictory play.136 Still, in privileging the gospel message, Hall gives deep suggestiveness to some of The Tempest’s most intriguing lines. Is the holy message there, and does it subsume the play’s multiple layers of symbolic story? Prospero’s forebears Consider the central figure of Prospero through six sets of sources, which I have arranged according to widening moral or spiritual import. How does each contribute to The Tempest’s generic identity; and can they be integrated within a Christian sacerdotal reading? 1. Farcical comedy: Prospero’s irascible and cunning care for Miranda draws on a long literary tradition of possessive, often self-deluded fathers: Roman comedy’s senex, the commedia dell’arte’s Pantalone, and Italian romance’s exiled monarch who contrives courtship and revenge on an enchanted island.137 This dimension is reinforced by the drunken servants’ antics, the young lovers’ naivety, Gonzalo’s gullibility, and Prospero’s petulance. These features jostle the play’s more dignified philosophic and religious components, but they closely resemble the moral frailties that afflict major figures of the Old and New Testaments. 2. Magical romance: Prospero’s deft separation of four groups (governors, lovers, servants, crew), as he entrances each with theatrical illusions, recalls the conjuring magicians of stage plays and romances, as well as real necromancers such as Faustus, Agrippa, and Dee.138 In ‘Prospero’s Book’ Barbara Mowat astutely analyses the lure of forbidden conjuration and joins those who question the validity of ‘white magic’ in the Renaissance: can a sacerdotal Christian magus traffic with earth-spirits?139 But other scholars find Prospero’s benevolent providence compatible with Christian morality and distinct from the darker necromantic analogues.140 3. Virgilian dynastic epic: Allusions to the Aeneid include a stormy voyage, debate over Dido and Carthage, treacherous political conflict, spirits who assist cosmic vision, and a protagonist who shapes an empire’s (and a world’s) cultural values. Renaissance poets viewed Virgil’s work as an allegorical reservoir of humane and Christian meaning, a model of national identity and destiny.141 Like pious Aeneas, Prospero learns through suffering, assumes communal responsibility, and implements a philosophic, Godly rule that resembles Gonzalo’s utopian ideal.142 Yet The Tempest surpasses the Aeneid by resolving each of its tragic elements. Despite the sceptics’ mockery, Gonzalo sees Dido as a faithful widow, not an illicit lover. ‘O dea certe!’ is chaste Miranda, not troublesome Venus, who with Cupid is barred from the betrothal masque (a chastening of pagan deities). Virgil’s legendary ‘magic’ as artificer is surpassed by Prospero’s Art, which looks beyond Aeneas’ suffering, beyond the Aeneid ‘s vengeful ending, and beyond the goal of dynastic empire: ‘Every third thought shall be my grave’ (5.1.311). Though Prospero resumes his dukedom, many scenes in The Tempest emphasize the transitoriness of worldly power, the Augustinian view of the imperium Romanum paling before the imperium sine fin.143

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4. Royal masque: Building on the epic quest for divinely ordained empire is the spectacle of goddesses (Juno, Iris, Ceres) who descend to bless the lovers – a scene that flatters James I for his civilizing influence.144 This refined syncretism easily accommodates a Christian reading of the play, though it tends to privilege the glory of an earthly king over that of Christian divinity. Eventually, however, even these benevolent deities are, like Venus and Cupid, dis-spelled. 5. Philosophic tragicomedy: Building on both the magical and the masque elements, a still more morally elevated genre is suggested by the thematic depth of Prospero’s remarks and stagings, which resemble the Neoplatonic ideas of Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Ficino, who seek to transcend Nature’s bodily restraints – thus anticipating Calderon’s Life Is a Dream, notable heir of The Tempest.145 Many who applaud this erudite dimension of the play sever it from Christian doctrine, citing the dark implications of magic art.146 Thus Prospero as Neoplatonist, or, more broadly, as humanist philosopher, controls his destiny through self-knowledge and self-restraint, with no significant confession of personal sin or dependence on divine grace. The ‘auspicious star’ indicates only a Ficinian cosmic awareness by which Prospero shapes his course. Yet many Christian humanists combined philosophic with spiritual quest: likewise, Prospero’s interplay of artful boasts and humble confessions seems central to the action. 6. Judaeo-Christian mystery play: John Bender explains the liturgical, seasonal implications of the play’s performance at Hallowmas, when one could invoke judgment against oppressors, discover true love, and eliminate winter by ‘ritual divinations’ like the masque. Yet he considers the play ‘fundamentally secular’: Gonzalo’s fervent Biblical allusiveness ‘provides no license to reduce the play to a Christian allegory’, and by abjuring supernatural power Prospero accepts his ‘simple humanity’.147 Besides Gonzalo’s oracular remarks, however, Prospero’s stagings (a fiery storm, manna in the wilderness, angelic music and song, apocalyptic judgment) recall the feats of exiles like Elijah and Moses, and the tempestcalming power of Jesus and the Apostles.148 Repeatedly, Prospero imitates aspects of the Trinity: God’s watchful power, the Messiah’s atoning presence, the Holy Spirit’s providential enactments. (Indeed, it is the presumption of this triune performance that necessitates his final abjuration of power.) The ‘most auspicious star’ (1.2.182) suggests not only ‘bountiful fortune’ (now Prospero’s ‘dear lady’) (179) but also Prospero and Miranda’s survival of persecution and the hope of her bearing a blessed child with Ferdinand, as implied in the masque. Prospero is thus aligned with ‘Providence divine’ (159) as he unites the lovers and, finally, with ‘immortal Providence’ (5.1.189; cf. 201–4) reunites everyone. To reform the ship of state, seeking not simply revenge but conversion to moral health, Prospero’s stagings form a coherent sequence of sacramental parodies. (1) The opening tempest resembles a communal baptism, though not equally received: to some a dreaded death threat, to others an awakening to deep bonds, and to a rare few like King Alonso, ‘a sea-change / Into something rich and strange’ (1.2.403–4). (2) To acknowledge this spiritual death, Ariel mimics a burial service, including the vision-anointing of extreme unction: ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’; ‘Seanymphs hourly ring his knell’ (1.2.401, 405).149 (3) Prospero’s lengthy teaching and

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questioning of young Miranda (‘’Tis time / I should inform thee farther’) resembles a confirmation, during which Prospero removes his ‘magic garment’ (1.2.22–4). (4) At the play’s centre, the lovers, with Prospero as invisible priestlike witness, enact an Edenic marriage, reclaiming nature’s innocent bond. (5) In contrast, the treacherous lords Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian are chastened by a vanishing banquet, denying communion to the sinful. (6) Ariel’s commination150 evokes confession from contrite Alonso, but contempt from Sebastian and Antonio. (7) The masque enacts unending harvest blessing for the lovers.151 (8) Finally, Ariel draws all souls into Prospero’s circle for judgment.152 These last two stagings (harvest fruition and final reckoning) are of crucial significance, for they surpass the office of priesthood, showing the overreaching of Prospero’s sacerdotal imitation. Indeed, of the seven sacraments, only the ordinance of priesthood is missing from Prospero’s theatrical analogues. In viewing The Tempest as sacramental theatre that prepares for a spiritual kingdom, we add the book of Isaiah to Italian romances, necromantic texts, Virgilian epic, and Neoplatonic treatises as a major source. It is a subtext for Ariel’s name and nature, for Gonzalo’s prophecies, and for the implicit messianic message.153 The Christian implications of Prospero’s ‘Art’ are affirmed by John Mebane’s study of Renaissance magic and by George Slover’s account of the ‘Magnum Magus’ in explaining Shakespeare’s reliance on the parable of Providence in The True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia. None of Prospero’s stagings, however, is explicitly Christian. Each spectacle’s epiphanic climax is shrouded in pagan imagery: the illusory drownings and enchanting songs that spur the naifs’ love quest are managed by Ariel, a spirit of questionable name and nature; the mannalike feast is given by ‘monstrous’ shapes (3.3.31), and Ariel chastises the befoulers of royal power as a harpy (indeed, he/ she metamorphoses for each occasion and individual: tongues of fire to inspirit the entire ship; hound and goblin for Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo; harpy for Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian; soul-changing singer for Ferdinand; goddess merging earth and heaven for the worthy lovers); the betrothal masque involves pagan deities of harvest; and the reunited passengers are addressed by Prospero neither as magus nor as priest but as Duke of Milan. Thus, while the play’s iconic imagery provides a mystery-play drive toward conversion and eschatology,154 the opacity of that iconography holds the mystery at bay as a continual challenge. Since this veiled sacerdotalism underlies a fable of the playwright’s personal achievement, it lays a basis for Prospero’s eventual act of humility. What, then, is the generic nature and purpose of this potent but indirect sacramental symbolism? Many have noted The Tempest’s generic synaesthesia (tragedy, comedy, ­tragicomedy; satire, pastoral, romance; masque, morality, mystery play), a medley so ranging as to suggest the elusive ‘unifable’ sought by James Joyce and Northrop Frye. A second, closely related interpretative maxim was proposed by G. W. Knight: The Tempest ’s main source is all of Shakespeare’s earlier plays. He ‘spins [t]his plot from his own poetic world’.155 It is not enough, however, simply to identify the recycled figures – Gonzalo, a good-natured but foolish counsellor like Polonius and Gloucester; Prospero, a stage-directing magus like Oberon, Hal, Hamlet, Vincentio, Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Helena, and Paulina; Ariel, another

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dynamic spirit-servant; Miranda, another wise innocent; Antonio, another ruthless villain; Caliban, Stephano, Trinculo, another set of clowns. One must also observe how The Tempest refines each figure.156 How does Gonzalo improve on Polonius and Gloucester? How does Caliban extend Bottom, and Miranda transfigure Ophelia? How do Puck and Oberon attain the larger and more poignant identities of Ariel and Prospero? Judaeo-Christian symbolism in The Tempest To fathom this transformation, consider Hall’s reading of The Tempest as a Christian parable. With an acute ear for biblical echoes in phrasing and events, she offers a typological reading. The opening storm reveals the need for a genuine messiah. The ship’s ‘fraughting souls’ (1.2.13) show humanity as a wayward church; they cry for ‘the master’ but find no one who ‘can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the presence’ (1.1.9, 21–2).157 The scream ‘We split’ (1.1.60) suggests both death and social dispersal, and most of the passengers will ‘sleep’ until the play ends with apocalyptic reunion.158 With mixed results, Hall identifies the play’s main characters with key figures in the Bible and mystery plays.159 Thus Prospero typifies Moses, divinely inspired lawgiver (with book, cloak, and staff) whose magic frees but severely tests his people. Hall gives inadequate attention to Ariel, whose name in Isaiah 29 means ‘lion of God’; she does not cite Slater’s, Berger’s, and Esolen’s studies of Isaiah’s extensive relevance to The Tempest.160 Nor does she compare Ariel to angel-messengers and angel-enforcers in the mystery cycle. Ariel’s dazzling role in the tempest recalls Hebrews 1.4: God ‘maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire’. Hall, however, astutely notes that Ariel serves Prospero’s stern commands until freed to enjoy a higher law of love, reinforced through Miranda and Ferdinand’s union. Hall’s most suggestive remark concerns Ariel’s vow to live merrily ‘under the blossom that hangs on the bough’ (5.1.94) – a phrase that connects this lively spirit not only with the natural world but with the mystery plays’ recurrent image of Christ, blossom of the virgin maid. Hall sees Ferdinand as a figure of Christ, who embraces suffering by carrying wood (as Christ bore a cross and as the prototype Isaac brought wood for his own sacrifice) to serve Miranda’s wondrous beauty of soul and body. Like the Virgin Mary, Miranda is humbly bold in her own sacerdotal role, inspiring veneration as a type of the true, beauteous church of believers. For Peter Milward, the praise of Miranda’s perfection recalls adoration of the Virgin Mary, and he compares Miranda’s joyful wonder at Ferdinand and later at other courtiers with the ‘exultet’ chant in liturgies for Christmas and Easter.161 Prospero’s balancing this capacity for wonder against darker realities (‘’Tis new to thee’, 5.1.184) resembles the balanced vision of the mystery plays, which match epiphany with laughable vulgarity.162 Gonzalo, an Isaiah in exile, predicts a messianic utopia, and at the final reunion his benediction recalls the lost-and-found paradoxes of the prophets, the Gospels, and Paul’s letters (see Ps. 119.171, Isa. 53.3–12, Luke 15.1–32, Matt. 18.12–14, John 3.16, 2 Cor. 7.8–11). Targets for the Magnificat’s humbling of the proud are the ‘three men of sin’ Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio (3.3.53) (and the vulgar parody Caliban, Stephano, Trinculo), who typify antics of Corpus Christi vice figures:

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ambitious Lucifer, envious Cain, power-hungry Herod and Pilate, betrayers like Judas, sinful victims of the Flood, and the unrighteous at Doomsday. Even before judgment they suffer ‘spiritual death’ (Luke 15.24, John 5.24, Eph. 2.5, 4.18–19, Gen. 2.17) unless ‘godly sorrow’ brings repentance (2 Cor. 7.8–11, Acts 17.30, Luke 15.20) so that the lost can be found, changed by ‘heart-sorrow’ to ‘a clear life ensuing’ (Tmp 3.3.81–2).163 The richly mysterious language of The Tempest is full of such Biblical allusions.164 Some of Hall’s typological readings are wonderfully suggestive; others are troubling. As a proposed Christ-type, Ferdinand is peculiarly unworthy, and Shakespeare in fact underscores the prince’s shortcomings: his despair over losing his sinful father Alonso, his paralysed sword and submission to Prospero’s ‘rough magic’, his naive courtship of Miranda when he assumes princely privilege, his residual errancy in the chess game. Though typology makes all things possible, this is a stretch. One might simply view Ferdinand, like the naive, fearful, obedient Isaac of the mystery play, as an unworthy prototype of Christ, for his charm lies in the paradoxical blend of folly with genuine princely potential – in a situation clearly beyond his control, except in his response to Miranda’s moral beauty and to her father’s Art. Ferdinand’s character derives partly from medieval and Renaissance romance, a provenance that interacts with Christian influence, as in the symbolism of the chess game.165 Likewise, Prospero is an inadequate Moses. Yet a close reading of Exodus will extend the similarity. Though Moses has no spirit-helper like Ariel, he is assisted by Aaron: ‘I have made thee a god to Pharaoh: and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet’ (Ex. 7.1). Aaron, whose name resembles Ariel’s, performs magic at Moses’ bidding, including a storm of fiery hail to daunt an errant sovereign. Moses’ final miracle, the Passover infanticide that convinces Pharaoh to free the Israelites, parallels Alonso’s belief that he has lost his son Ferdinand. A major reason for Hall’s comparing Prospero’s power with that of Moses is to justify the final abjuring of ‘rough magic’: the Old Law will be replaced by Jesus’ new ‘magic’, a dispensation of love.166 But defining Prospero’s power as Mosaic miracles and delivery of the Old Law is too limiting. Though Prospero never claims to be empowered by God, or identifies his ‘book’ as Holy Scripture rather than a conjurational grimoire, his providential Art nevertheless evokes comparison with not only Moses but Elijah and Jesus (co-luminaries of Transfiguration) and other Old and New Testament miracle workers. The biblical etymology of ‘Prospero’ suggests a wider figuration than a necromancer, wider even than Moses enacting the Old Law.167 Prospero’s Art The diverse generic sources of Prospero’s spacious identity all enrich the meaning of his ‘Art’. Only twice does Shakespeare describe his power as ‘magic’, precisely at the moments when he surrenders control of it: he lays aside his ‘magic garment’ after the initial tempest, and at the end, before reclaiming his ducal role, he abjures his ‘rough magic’. If Shakespeare’s references to ‘magic’ are thus limited and qualified, his use of ‘conjuration’ is completely absent. Prospero never enacts the elaborate conjuration rites of Faustus, Agrippa, Dee, and the grimoires; he

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simply asks Ariel to ‘come’ or ‘Come with a thought’ (1.2.187–8; 4.1.33–50, 57–8, 163–4; 5.1.102–3).168 Up to his final reference to ‘Spirits’ (magnified by capitalization) – “Now I want / Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant” (Epil.13–14) – we tend to identify Ariel’s volatile imaginative and intellectual force with Prospero’s own ‘spirit’. Only the tense master–servant relation, Ariel’s petitions for freedom, and our sense of Ariel representing a power not fully in Prospero’s grasp prevent the full identification. But if this spiriting is largely ‘outside’ Prospero and must finally elude him, how does he gain such masterful access to its power? While Shakespeare completely avoids ‘conjuring’ and uses ‘magic’ restrainedly and marginally, he capitalizes ‘Art’ and uses it eleven times. In his final boast, Prospero emphasizes not magic but ‘my so potent Art’ (5.1.50). Its main synonyms in the play – ‘enchant’ (encantare), ‘spell’ (spel, spiel), and especially ‘charm’ (carmen, used twelve times) – all emphasize the power of song or poetry, and thus underscore Shakespeare’s broad view of ‘Art’ as the power of spoken, enacted language.169 Ariel, spirit of the air, voices musical, poetic ‘airs’. Why, then, do many interpreters of The Tempest insist on restricting Prospero’s powerful Art to questionable modes of Renaissance ‘magic’? Unfortunately, many recent editions of The Tempest do not follow the Folio in capitalizing ‘Art’ (or ‘King’ and other key words). Kermode’s Arden edition is a notable exception. Thus many editors and critics have secularized Prospero’s Art before the interpreting begins – shrinking it with a lower-case a, then shrinking it further by focusing narrowly on special forms of ‘magic’. In contrast, Kermode and Young explore the central interplay of Art and Nature; Barbara Traister follows Rolf Soellner in viewing Prospero as a ‘Master of SelfKnowledge’; Mebane emphasizes ‘Magic as Love and Faith’.170 To match this range of options with the range of sources for Prospero, consider four favourite critical views of his Art, all suggesting aspects of Shakespeare’s career as playwright. Prospero’s Art is most commonly viewed as the magic of a conjuror and illusionist, establishing a literal, commonsense basis for the play’s wish fulfilments and connecting him with a host of romance and stage magicians. Robert West and Barbara Mowat wonderfully clarify the play’s appeal to this literal dimension, though I believe Shakespeare subjects it to radical reform. All prototypes, especially Faustus, disappoint us by using their magic in self-trivializing and devilish ways;171 and even the more respectable magicians like Dee and Agrippa, who invoke divine aid for their practices, never demonstrate a moral and communal purpose as comprehensive, meaningful, and compelling as Prospero’s. Second, Gary Schmidgall’s astute study of Shakespeare and Courtly Aesthetics views Prospero’s Art as the divine power of anointed kingship, exhibited in the courtly masques so popular at the time of The Tempest and providing an aesthetic of spectacle and wonder.172 Schmidgall, however, does not explain why Shakespeare presents the only anointed king, Alonso, as a disempowered moral bankrupt, beginning with the opening storm-scene, which evokes the need for a more authentic ‘master’. Nor does he explain how Prospero can develop such supernatural power while in exile, when the supposed ‘power of the king’s presence’ has no courtly community to reify it. Nor does he explain why Prospero’s masque is truncated by the clowns’ approach – why its presumed disclosure of royal pres-

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ence cannot simply resolve their vulgarity and treachery. When Caliban finally sues for grace on seeing Prospero in ducal garb (presumably like the clothing that deluded Stephano and Trinculo), we sense that this ‘royal presence’ is incommensurate with Prospero’s more authoritative power when he was invisible! As David Bevington observes, Shakespeare never followed Jonson and the rest in creating masques for James I. By having Prospero present the masque as ‘some vanity of mine Art’ (4.1.41) and dispelling it by sinful reality, Shakespeare demonstrates his withdrawal from this genre, subsuming its artistry in a broader purpose.173 Third, the learned view Prospero’s Art as a philosophic and educating power, drawing on the ‘liberal Arts’ (1.2.73) from both Neoplatonic and humanist sources to produce humane civility and self-governance. For Kermode, this contemplative effort can even achieve ‘the supernatural powers of the holy adept’ and can be a ‘means of Grace’; but, he adds, ‘the criterion of [such fulfilment] is not the Christian one of adherence to, or defection from, God, but of immateriality or submersion in matter’.174 This preference of Neoplatonic over Christian principles would problematize Prospero’s mirroring of the playwright, for Plotinus and Ficino’s intellectual withdrawal from material and passional experience seems antipathetic to the spirit of Prospero, Ariel, and Shakespeare. ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’ and ‘Merrily, merrily shall I live now / Under the blossom that hangs on the bough’ (5.1.88, 94): this embracing of the natural world, the Creation’s sensuous sweetness, is distinct from the goals and values of Neoplatonism, and, as we shall see, these natural images may contain deeper implications. Prospero’s Art may also serve a religious quest that implicitly, and at times explicitly, acknowledges the debilities of sin and the need of divine aid to achieve wonders, employing the spirit world to redeem Eden and to prepare for Apocalypse. Thus Prospero’s power is not adequately explained as popular conjuration, as royal presence, or as Neoplatonic astral invocation and philosophic transcendence. It also implies and at times parodies the divine power revealed in JudaeoChristian scriptures, both the punitive, prophetic, and law-giving feats of Elijah and Moses, and the restorative miracles and sacrificial atonement of Jesus and his followers. Prospero’s stagings seem most sacramental when they seek to transform souls, often in enchanted phrasing that one might call scriptural romance. The circle into which Prospero draws everyone as he invokes ‘heavenly music’ (5.1.52) may recall not only the necromancer and Neoplatonist but the Christian: Whoever seeks the beginning in an elegant form Will find here the beginning in the end. Thus whoever has true love in the veneration of Christ Will in his last hour end by beginning.175

Which dimension of Art best contextualizes Shakespeare’s parable of fully ­activated human powers, committed to personal and communal harmony, but eventually abjured? Prospero’s final boast (5.1.33–50), echoing Ovid’s Medea (Metamorphoses, 15.197–209), emphasizes two fearful skills: (1) raising tempests (or more generally, using the spirit-power of Art to disrupt Nature, like the ‘tempest’ by which

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God speaks to Job) and (2) reanimating the dead. Kermode notes that Shakespeare, in revising the speech, selects for Prospero only those elements consistent with ‘white’ magic.176 In The Tempest each spectacle is safely illusory and beneficently purposeful. Instead of the dread chaos evoked by Medea, Prospero’s tempest restores and improves both nature and human nature, always in emphatically Biblical phrasing: ‘not so much perdition as an hair / Betid to any creature in the vessel’ (1.2.30–1); ‘our garments … being rather new-dyed than stained’ (2.1.59, 61–2). The storm’s best effects, of course, are inward, bringing the lovers a cherished bond, Gonzalo a utopian paradox of ‘king but no king’,177 sinful Alonso a transfiguring penitence, Caliban an apparent quest for ‘grace’. Instead of Medea’s twisting of nature to inflict cruel dominion, each nature-transforming feat in Prospero’s boast alludes to favourite Shakespearean theatrical events that evoked wonder or thwarted evil. Making fairy rings by midnight moonshine recalls the joyous imaginative power in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and ‘by the spurs pluck’d up / The pine and cedar’ (5.1.47–8) recalls Nature overcoming tyranny in Macbeth. Eclipsing the sun and raising storms (both in full daylight) were common at the Globe, sometimes portentous and even demonic, as in Julius Caesar and Macbeth, but increasingly signifying a providential ‘baptismal’ purging and cleansing, as in King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. If Shakespeare’s theatrical disruptions of nature are managed so beneficently, his rousings of the dead likewise appear in positive, biblical phrasing. Medea’s ‘I call up dead men from their graves’ becomes Prospero’s ‘graves at my command / Have wak’d their sleepers’ (5.1.48–9). Reanimating the noble dead out of Holinshed and Plutarch (often more noble than in the chronicles, and shaped in moral parables) was daily fare at the Globe; or ghostly victims were roused to chide the conscience of evildoers (in Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth). In The Tempest, as in the other romances, the resurrection scenes occasion joyous epiphany: Alonso recovers from spiritual death, his son from the sea and sea-sorrow, the ship and its fraughting souls from dissolution – all better than before. In his eulogy for the play’s action, Gonzalo voices (‘Beyond a common joy!’, 5.1.207) many Biblicalcum-romance motifs in The Tempest ‘s restoration scene: lost–found, asleep– awake, blind–seeing, dead–alive (5.1.205–13); and Prospero, unlike his riposte to Miranda’s ‘brave new world’, tempers none of Holy Gonzalo’s remarks. Prospero’s Art is impressive, and so modestly understated as ‘rough magic’ that abjuring it recalls Chaucer’s ‘Retraction’, Virgil’s wish to burn the Aeneid, and Shakespeare’s apparent indifference to publishing his canon: ‘drown my book’ is deeply suggestive. Prospero’s artful struggle for personal and communal fulfilment need not be limited to necromancy or Neoplatonism if either is narrowly defined or presumes to be more than a metaphoric layer in the great palimpsest of The Tempest. Shakespeare here recapitulates his canon, refining it into a quasi-allegorical mode even more fully than in The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale, which also draw partly on Biblical models of atonement and wonder. The Tempest’s symbolism accommodates almost any moral-spiritual system – though elusively. The abjuring of ‘rough magic’ cautions not just against conjuration but against Art’s reductive and deluding imitations,

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especially its proudly tyrannic uses. It underscores Art’s inescapable wish-fulfilment, even in its most admirable formulations. Thus, though The Tempest has a broad political dimension, both in the play’s action and in its apparent desire to influence James I, his court, English society, and future audiences, it is none the less simply a work of art, such stuff as dreams are made on. The epilogue presents a further abjuration, beyond disposing of a grimoire and/or one’s own enchanting creations. Echoing Jesus’ prayer, Prospero enjoins humility and forgiveness to reconcile person with person, and persons with God. This scriptural message resonates through the play – in Prospero’s struggle to master his passions, both vengefulness and pride, and to show charity to others.178 If, however, The Tempest’s sacerdotal allusiveness implies need of the Messiah, why does Shakespeare present this ‘good news’ in symbolism so shrouded as to keep the mystery mostly intact for four centuries? Certainly the play’s symbolic opacity derives partly from the 1606 Act of Abuses against mentioning the Christian deity in stage plays.179 Great art, moreover, veils the sacred. Erasmus in the Adagia ‘infers that not only Socrates, Diogenes, and Epictetus, but also Christ and the Apostles, the Holy Scripture, and the very Sacraments of the Christian Church, reveal, if properly understood, a Silenus-nature’.180 The engaging depth of The Tempest, shimmering around its human characters, suggests a simulacrum of the ‘messianic secret’. In simple but indirect parables, Jesus explains a kingdom focused on ‘the least of these’ (humble Gonzalo’s ‘king but no king’) and empowered by suffering for others, yet he cautions apostles and recipients of healing not to share this mystery with those who do not seek it and are not ready to behold it.181 Equally challenging questions arise from postcolonial studies.182 Does The Tempest highlight a self-sacrificing Master who exalts ‘the least’, the ‘poor in spirit’? Or does Prospero’s ‘rough magic’ enforce a divine right imperialism that enslaves the sensual Caliban, roughly manages Ariel’s spirit-power and Ferdinand’s princely desire, and sternly lectures Miranda and arrests her consciousness in sleep, along with gentles like Gonzalo and Francisco, and commoners like the ship’s crew? As we have noted, The Tempest subsumes noble privilege and dynastic aspiration within a larger vision, expanding Shakespeare’s career-long testing of sovereignty to a supernatural and spiritual dimension. Prospero finally questions what his Art’s dream-stuff has achieved; he admits his fragile control of self and others, and even shares responsibility for Caliban’s being a ‘thing of darkness’ (5.1.275). Yet despite Prospero’s inadequate emulation of providential power, The Tempest discloses a Christlike nature in Gonzalo and Miranda, who comfort others, lovingly projecting on to them a divine beauty like their own: ‘I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer’ (1.2.5–6). Miranda’s ‘piteous heart’ is shaped partly by Prospero, who has tried to do ‘nothing but in care of ’ her (14, 16); and he, in turn, has been shaped not only by treasured books but by friends like ‘Holy Gonzalo’ (an astonishing rescension of Polonius) and by the divine image that shone in Miranda’s infancy. Despite Prospero’s harsh treatment of her and Ferdinand, of Caliban and Ariel, and of himself (parenting is ‘rough magic’), he persistently looks to that compassionate, forgiving nature – gained through divine grace, parental love, and sympathetic suffering – as his touchstone and goal.183

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To the end of his career, Shakespeare avoided the full explicitness of religious allegory.184 Despite the welling up of meaning in names like Prospero, Miranda, Caliban, and Ariel, none of them is significantly restricted by the names’ thematic suggestiveness. Each is free to express and accrue meanings, to grow experientially into widest identity. In this valedictory play, the intensely sensory and experiential linguistic medium gathers metaphoric power from many social and literary genres, including an implicitly religious dimension. If Ariel’s earliest song of ‘a seachange / Into something rich and strange’ and ‘pearls that were his eyes’ implies the baptismal mystery, it greatly expands our sense of baptism’s meaning. And his final song of merrily living ‘Under the blossom that hangs on the bough’ might suggest, not just an elemental spirit’s identity with the material world but the blossoming of that world by divine incarnation and by the crucifixion of one who ‘hangs on the bough’.185 As Northrop Frye intuited, Shakespeare in The Tempest (especially in Ariel’s songs) encourages a religious, spiritual dimension of allegory even as he leaves it submerged in metaphor. His richly allusive phrasings force audiences to brood more deeply on Ariel’s fathomless yet divertible powers, as on the more problematic nature of humans – both courtiers and clowns – who use and abuse that ‘spirit’. Appendix 1: Schematizing the seven deadly sins, and Spenser’s twelve virtues I. Gregory I: (1) Lust, (2) Gluttony, (3) Avarice, (4) Sloth, (5) Wrath, (6) Envy, (7) Pride. II. Dante, Inferno A. Upper hell (she-wolf): (1) Lust; (2) Gluttony; (3) Avarice; (4) Sloth [circles 2–5]. B. Middle hell (lion): (5) Wrath (heresy + murder/suicide) [circles 6–7]. C. Lowest hell (leopard): (6 & 7) Envy & Pride (simple + compound fraud)   [circles 8–9] III. Samuel Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (Yale University Press, 1961), co-­ordinates the seven sins with three ‘lusts’, the major sources of temptation (1 John 2.16). Matthew 4 and Luke 4 reverse the final two temptations: Milton in PR follows Luke, Spenser in FQ follows Matthew. The Flesh: (1) Idleness, (2) ­Gluttony, (3) Lust The World: (4) Avarice The Devil: (5) Wrath, (6) Envy, (7) Pride IV. Lucifera’s ‘progress’ of sins in the House of Pride (Spenser, FQ 1.4) Passive Active (1) Idleness (2) Gluttony (sensate [appetitive] sin) (3) Avarice (4) Lust (passional) (5) Envy (6) Wrath (intellective) (7) Pride (perverse synteresis: soul’s supreme power) [passive Lucifera+active Satan] Books 1–6: Woodhouse restricts providential salvation (‘grace’) to Book 1, with Books 2-6 exploring ‘nature’. But each pair of virtues (Holiness–Temperance, Chastity–Friendship, Justice–Courtesy) forms a transcendent-immanent polarity.

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Each odd legend orients a level of psyche to an absolute (mainly Christian) theology and morality, focusing on Briton protagonists; each even legend orients the same psychic level to pagan-natural theology and morality, focusing on Fairy protagonists. Transcendent Immanent Intellective 1. Holiness (Briton) 2. Temperance (Fairy) Passional 3. Chastity (Briton) 4. Friendship (Fairy) Sensate 5. Justice (Briton) 6. Courtesy (Fairy) This contemplative descent through the six wings of Isaiah’s  seraph implies an inverse ascent. Books 7–12: The final six legends would reverse the pattern: virtues alternate upward (immanent to transcendent), each pair ascending from sensate to passional to intellective. Fairy theophanies now occur in odd legends, ever-moreovert Christian theophanies in even legends. Immanent Transcendent Sensate 7. Constancy (Fairy) 8. Fortitude (Briton) Passional 9. Gentleness (Fairy) 10. Charity (Briton) Intellective 11. Prudence (Fairy) 12. Sapience (Briton) Each virtue holds its integrity despite the interplay of Briton and Fairy, and of six psychic levels, to form the ‘Goodly golden chaine’ of virtues.  Appendix 2: Elizabeth I as icon E.C. Wilson, England’s Eliza (Harvard University Press, 1939); R. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963); The English Icon (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); The Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977); Gloriana (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987); F. Yates, Astraea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); T.H. Cain, Praise in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (University of Nebraska Press, 1978); R.H. Wells, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983); C. Haigh, Elizabeth I (London: Longman, 1989); E.W. Pomeroy, Reading the Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1989); P. Berry, Of Chastity and Power (London: Routledge, 1989); J.N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton University Press, 1989); Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1990); P. McClure and R.H. Wells, ‘Elizabeth I as a Second Virgin Mary’, RenS 4 (1990), 38–70; A. and C. Belsey, ‘Icons of Divinity’, Renaissance Bodies, eds L. Gent and N. Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 11–35; S. Frye, Elizabeth I (Oxford University Press, 1993); H. Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen (New York: St Martin’s, 1995); S. Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony (London: Routledge, 1996); J.M. Walker, ed., Dissing Elizabeth (Duke University Press, 1998); The Elizabethan Icon, 1603–2003 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); J.M. Richards, ‘Love and a Female Monarch: The Case of Elizabeth Tudor’, Journal of British Studies 38 (1999), 133–60; K. Eggert, Showing Like a Queen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 1–53; J. Mueller, ‘Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the Self-

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Representations of Queen Elizabeth I’, Form and Reform in Renaissance England, eds A. Boesky and M.T. Crane (University of Delaware Press, 2000), 220–46; D. Hoak, ‘A Tudor Deborah? The Coronation of Elizabeth I, Parliament, and the Problem of Female Rule’, John Foxe and His World, eds C. Highley and J.N. King (New York: Routledge, 2002), 73–88; J. Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge University Press, 2002); The Spectre of Dido (Yale University Press, 1995); F.W. Brownlow, ‘Performance and Reality at the Court of Elizabeth I’, The Mysteries of Elizabeth I, eds K. Farrell and J. Swaim (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 3–20; L. Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth (University of Chicago Press, 2006). Appendix 3: Elizabeth’s learned intellect and capacity for rule L. Shenk, Learned Queen: The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); J.E. Phillips, ‘The Background to Spenser’s Attitude toward Women Rulers’, HLQ 5 (1941), 5–32; P. Johnson, Elizabeth I: A Study in Power and Intellect (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974); M. Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977); P.L. Scaligi, ‘The Sceptre or the Distaff: The Question of Female Sovereignty, 1516–1607’, The Historian 41 (1978), 59–75; W.T. MacCaffrey, Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572–1588 (Princeton University Press, 1981); Elizabeth I (Princeton University Press, 1992); Haigh, Elizabeth I; Berry, Of Chastity and Power; P.J. Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); C. Levin, ‘The Heart and Stomach of a King’ (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); J. Guy, The Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge University Press, 1995); S. Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony; Eggert, Showing Like a Queen; D. Hoak, ‘A Tudor Deborah? The Coronation of Elizabeth I, Parliament, and the Problem of Female Rule’, in John Foxe and His World, 73–88; Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England, and The Spectre of Dido; Brownlow, “Performance and Reality at the Court of Elizabeth I’; A. Walsham, ‘“A Very Deborah”? The Myth of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch’, in The Myth of Elizabeth, eds S. Doran and L. Freeman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 143–68; Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth. Appendix 4: Elizabeth’s marriageability and pacifism Yates, Astraea; Berry, Of Chastity and Power; H. Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994); S. Doran, ‘Juno versus Diana: The Treatment of Elizabeth I’s Marriage in Plays and Entertainments, 1561–1581’, Historical Journal 38 (1995), 257–74; Monarchy and Matrimony; P.E.J. Hammer, ‘“Absolute and Sovereign Mistress of Her Grace”? Queen Elizabeth and Her F ­ avourites, 1581–1592’, The World of the Favourite, eds J.H. Elliott and L. Brockliss (Yale University Press, 1999); J.M. Richards, ‘Love and a Female Monarch: The Case of Elizabeth Tudor’, Journal of British Studies 38 (1999), 133–60; J. Mueller, ‘Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the Self-Representations of Queen Elizabeth I’, in Form

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and Reform in Renaissance England, 220–46; Walsham, ‘“A Very Deborah”? The Myth of Elizabeth I as a Providential Monarch’; Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth.

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Appendix 5: Modes of ripening: natural and supernatural 1. Physical ripening (or rotting) of fruit, animals, humans – ready to slay or love: LLL 4.2.4: ripe as the pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo; KJ 2.1.473–4: yon green boy shall have no sun to ripe / The bloom that promiseth a mighty fruit; R&J 1.2.10–11: Let two more summers wither in their pride / Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride; R2 2.1.153: The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he; AYL 2.7.26–7: so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, / And then from hour to hour we rot and rot; 3.2.117: you’ll be rotten ere you be half ripe; 4.3.86–8: The boy is fair, / Of female favour, and bestows himself / Like a ripe sister; Ham 3.2.186–8: purpose …/ like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree; T&C 5.5.24: the strawy Greeks, ripe for his edge, / Fall down before him, like the mower’s swath. 2. Passional ripening, as shown in lips, ready for love, anger, drunkenness: R&J 1.2.10–11: See above; MND 3.2.139: O, how ripe in show / Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow! (cf. 3.2.208–12, 5.1.189, 327–8; R3 1.1.94; H8 5.1.169; Per 5.Gower.8); KJ 4.2.79: His passion is so ripe it needs must break; MV 1.3.60: Shylock, albeit I neither lend nor borrow …, / Yet, to supply the ripe wants of my friend, / I’ll break a custom; 2.8.40–4: Slubber not business for my sake, Bassanio, / But stay the very riping of the time; / … Be merry, and employ your chiefest thoughts / To courtship and such fair ostents of love; AYL 3.5.120–2: a pretty redness in his lip, / A little riper and more lusty red / Than that mix’d in his cheek; A&C 2.7.97–8: not yet an Alexandrian feast. – It ripens towards it; Cor 5.4.17–18: The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes; Per 4.Gower.16–17: a wench full grown, / Even ripe for marriage rite; WT 1.1.329–31: Give scandal to the blood o’ the Prince my son, / Who I do think is mine and love as mine, / Without ripe moving to ’t?; Tmp 5.1.282: Trinculo is reeling ripe. 3. Situational ripening – timely for willed acting, especially military or political: 1H6 2.4.96–9: My father was … not attainted … / And that I’ll prove on better men than Somerset, / Were growing time once ripened to my will; R3 2.3.13–15: In [Henry VI] is a hope of government / … in his full and ripened years; 3.7.158–9: As the ripe revenue and due of birth / Yet so much is my poverty of spirit …; MWW 4.6.43–4: when the doctor spies his vantage ripe, / To pinch her by the hand; MND 5.1.42: There is a brief how many sports are ripe; R2 2.1.153: The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he; 1H4 1.3.292: When time is ripe, which will be suddenly; 2H4 4.1.13: He is retired, to ripe his growing fortunes; H5 1.2.121: Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises; 3.6.121–3: we thought not good to bruise an injury till it were full ripe; JC 4.3.214: Our legions are brim full, our cause is ripe; Ham 4.7.63–4: I will work him / To an exploit, now ripe in my device; TN 5.1.127: My thoughts are ripe in mischief; Oth 2.3.371: fruits that blossom first will first be ripe. [Iago perverts a proverb]; Mac 4.3.239–40: Macbeth / Is ripe for shaking; Cor 4.3.23: they are in a ripe aptness to take all power from the people; Cym 3.5.22–3: It fits us therefore ripely / Our chariots and our horsemen be in readiness.

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4. Social-relational ripening – in political favour, or mutual love: R2 2.3.41–3: I tender you my service … / Which elder days shall ripen and confirm; 2.3.48–9: as my fortune ripens with thy love, / It shall be still thy true love’s recompense; R&J 2.2.121–2: This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath, / May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet; MV 2.8.39–44: see n. 23; Ado 3.1.8–11: Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun, / Forbid the sun to enter, like favourites, / Made proud by princes, that advance their pride / Against that power that bred it; 2H4 4.2.11– 12: That man that sits within a monarch’s heart / And ripens in the sunshine of his favour; 4.5.97–8: thou wilt needs invest thee with my honours / Before thy hour be ripe; H5 1.1.62–3: wholesome berries thrive and ripen best / Neighboured by fruit of baser quality. 5. Moral ripening or growing abuse: Unseasoned judgment: TGV 2.4.68: His head unmellowed, but his judgment ripe; Titus 1.1.228: ripen justice in this commonweal; R3 1.3.219: let them keep it till thy sins be ripe; 3.7.158–9: see n. 24; R&J 1.2.10–11: see n. 22; MND 2.2.123–4: Things growing are not ripe until their season; / So I, being young, till now not ripe to reason; AYL 3.2.117–18: see n. 22; 5.1.19–20: Five and twenty, sir. –A ripe age; Mature sympathy for suffering; or full-blown sin: AYL 4.3.86–8: see n. 22; Meas 5.1.120–3: O you blessed ministers above, / Keep me in patience, and with ripened time / Unfold the evil which is here wrapped up / In countenance!; Lear 4.3.19–22: those happy smilets, / That played on her ripe lip seemed not to know / What guests were in her eyes; 5.2.9–11: Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither; / Ripeness is all; Mac 4.3.239–40: Macbeth / Is ripe for shaking; Cor 3.2.81: correcting thy stout heart, / Now humble as the ripest mulberry / That will not hold the handling; Per 1.Gower.11–12: you, born in these latter times / When wit’s more ripe; 4.Gower.16–17: a wench full grown, / Even ripe for marriage rite; WT 1.1.332: see n. 23; H8 4.2.51–2: He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one; / Exceeding wise; 5.5.18–26: This royal infant – heaven still move about her! / … promises / Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings, / Which time shall bring to ripeness. She shall be / … A pattern to all princes living with her, / And all that shall succeed. Saba was never more covetous of wisdom and fair virtue than this pure soul shall be. [Elizabeth’s virtuous maturing]. 6. Providential ripening – beyond human causation: R2 1.2.7: the will of heaven, / Who when they see the hours ripe on earth, / Will rain hot vengeance on offenders’ heads; 2.2.10–11: Some unborn sorrow ripe in Fortune’s womb / Is coming toward me; TN 5.1.157: we intended / To keep in darkness what occasion now / Reveals before ’tis ripe; Meas 5.1.120–3: O you blessed ministers above, / Keep me in patience, and with ripened time / Unfold the evil which is here wrapped up / In countenance!; Lear 5.2.9–11: Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither; / Ripeness is all; Tim 4.1.23: Plagues, … / Your potent and infectious fevers heap / On Athens, ripe for stroke!; H8 5.5.18–26.

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Notes  1 ‘A Letter of the Authors’, in The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, 737. For debate over closure in The Faerie Queene, see B. Rajan, ‘Closure’, SE; Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished; J.B. Lethbridge, ‘Spenser’s Last Days: Ireland, Career, Mutability, Allegory’ in Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2006), 302–36; and pp. 37–40 above.  2 Steppat, Chances of Mischief: Variations of Fortune in Spenser (Colognr: Bohlau Verlag, 1990), especially ch. 7, ‘Turned by Transuerse: Mutabilitie’, 309–24.  3 Ibid., 316–24.  4 See Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. S. MacKenna, 2nd ed. (1917–30; rpt New York: Pantheon, 1954), 4.8, ‘The Soul’s Descent into the Body’; 5.1–3, ‘The Initial Hypostases’; R. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton University Press, 1966), 327–52.  5 L. Manley, ‘Spenser and the City: The Minor Poems’, MLQ 43:3 (1982), 203–27; 223.  6 For Spenser’s linking of Orpheus and David, see FQ 4.2.1–2; T.H. Cain, ‘Spenser and the Renaissance Orpheus’, UTQ 41 (1971), 24–47; P. Vicari, ‘The Triumph of Art, the Triumph of Death: Orpheus in Spenser and Milton’, Orpheus: The Metamorphoses of a Myth, ed. J. Warden (University of Toronto Press, 1982), 207–30, esp. 210 and n. 9; J.N. Brown, ‘Orpheus’, SE.  7 H. Tonkin, The Faerie Queene (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 191.  8 G. Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 1–109. Constancy, a Roman and Stoic virtue, was Christianized by Boethius and others.  9 E.V. Beilin, ‘“The Onely Perfect Vertue”: Constancy in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, SSt 2 (1981), 229–45. 10 R.H. Wells, ‘Semper Eadem: A Legend of Constancy’, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983), 146–57. 11 On women’s role in the Cantos, see R. Berleth’s dark view, ‘Fraile Woman, Foolish Gerle: Misogyny in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos’, MP 93 (1995), 37–53; A. Fletcher’s sunny one, ‘Marvelous Progression: The Paradoxical Defense of Women in Spenser’s “Mutabilitie Cantos”’, MP 100 (2002), 5–23. 12 S. Hawkins, ‘Mutabilitie and the Cycle of the Months’, Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, ed. W. Nelson (Columbia University Press, 1961), 76–102. 13 On titans as earthy-fleshly impulses, see Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, 2 vols, trans. J. Mulryan and S. Brown (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), VI.21–3: ‘On the Titans’, 538–42; ‘On the Giants’, 542–7; ‘On Typhon’, 547–54. 14 On Jupiter as reason, see Conti, II.1: ‘On Jupiter’, 66–95, esp. 85–9. 15 On Spenser’s Nature as God’s vicar, or God incarnate, see E.C. Knowlton, ‘Spenser and Nature’, JEGP 34 (1935), 366–76; M. Miller, ‘Nature in The Faerie Queene’, ELH 18 (1951), 191–200; S.E. Fish, ‘Nature as Concept and Character in the Mutabilitie Cantos’, CLAJ 6 (1963), 210–15; J. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1976), ‘The Analogy of Natural Plenitude’, ‘The Triumph of Time’, 626–51, 737–57; J.B. Oruch, ‘Nature’, SE; H.L. Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace: Patristic Theology in Spenser’s Allegory (University of Toronto Press, 1994), ‘Dame Nature’s Light’, ‘Spenser and Original Sin’, 76–94, 155–71. See n. 61 below. 16 The gods’ descent in earthly form to mate with humans thus parallels God’s Incarnation to reform and marry the human soul. See J. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (New York: Harper, 1953), ‘The Moral Tradition’, ‘The Science of Mythology in the Sixteenth Century’, 84–121, 219–78; M.D. Chenu, ‘Involucrum: le mythe selon les théologiens médiévaux’, Archives d’histoire Doctrinal et Littéraire du Moyen Age, 30 (1955), 75–9; E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1958), ‘Poetic Theology’, ‘Sacred and Profane Love’, ‘Pan and Proteus’, ‘The Concealed God’, ‘Pagan Vestiges of the Trinity’, 17–25, 141–51, 191–235, 241–55; W. Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century ­(Princeton University Press, 1972), 36–48; P. Dronke, Fabula: Explorations into the Use of Myth in M ­ edieval Platonism (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 48–9 n. 2; L. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh:

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­ etamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale University Press, 1986), 111–17, 311 n. 36; M T. Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love: Cupid in Renaissance Literature (University of Delaware Press, 1986), 13–44, 143–79, a fine study but neglecting Spenser’s important distinction between Christian and pagan theologies. 17 Pugh, ‘Spenser, Ovid, and Political Myth-Making: Mutabilitie’s Challenge to the Ideology of Power’, in Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 246–77. 18 ‘Iamque opus exegi: Ovid’s Changes and Spenser’s Brief Epic of Mutability’, ELR 6 (1976), 244–70. 19 On Spenser’s naming of Chaucer’s ‘Foules parley’ and Alan of Lille’s ‘Plaint of kindes’ as sources for ‘great dame Nature’ (FQ 7.7.9), see S.P. Zitner, introduction to The Mutabilitie Cantos (London: Nelson, 1968), 29–30, passim; and the sources in n. 15 above. 20 See J.J. Mogan, Jr, Chaucer and the Theme of Mutability (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1969). 21 A.K. Hieatt, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 1–149; J.H. Anderson, ‘“A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine”: The Chaucerian Connection’, ELR 15 (1985), 166–74; P. Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Completion of The Squire’s Tale: Love, Magic, and Heroic Action in the Legend of Cambell and Triamond’, JMRS 15 (1985), 135–55; A. Higgins, ‘Spenser Reading Chaucer: Another Look at the Faerie Queene Allusions’, JEGP 89 (1990), 17–36; A.M. Esolen, ‘The Disingenuous Poet Laureate: Spenser’s Adoption of Chaucer’, SP 87 (1990), 285–311; G.A. Steinberg, ‘Chaucer’s Mutability in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos’, SEL 46 (2006), 27–42, who exaggerates ‘the instability and unreliability of Nature’s resolution’ (37). 22 Higgins, ‘Spenser Reading Chaucer’, 31. 23 Lethbridge, ‘Spenser’s Last Days’, 302, 310–13, 331–3. 24 See Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans (Harvard University Press, 1960), Books 1–8; John Milton, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. 25 See M.O. Boyle, Christening Pagan Mysteries: Erasmus in Pursuit of Wisdom (University of Toronto Press, 1981), 3–61; Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, xxv–xliii; Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, ‘Metamorphosis in the Middle Ages’, ‘Fusions: Platonism and Spenser’, 94–136, 231–42; G. Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Cornell University Press, 1996), ‘A Genealogy of Agents: Christianity and Classical Culture’, ‘The Renaissance and the Classical Gods’, 32–55, 7797. 26 H.G. Lotspeich, Classical Mythology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (1932; rpt New York: Octagon, 1965), 23–8. 27 C.V. Kaske, ‘Spenser’s Pluralistic Universe: The View from the Mount of Contemplation (FQ I.x)’, Contemporary Thought on Edmund Spenser, eds R.C. Frushell and B.J. Vondersmith (Southern Illinois University Press, London and Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons, 1975), 121–49; Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Cornell University Press, 1999). Cf. J.B. Phillips, ‘Spenser’s Syncretistic Religious Imagery’, ELH 36 (1969), 110–30; D.C. Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970); Nohrnberg, Analogy, ‘In Daemogorgon’s Hall: The Forming Power of a Renaissance Imagination’, 735–91. 28 See H. Berger, Allegorical Temper (Yale University Press, 1958), ‘The Demonic Allegorist’, 211–40; Nohrnberg, Analogy, ‘The Pledging of Faith’, ‘The Beginning of Idolatry’, 102–35, 222–60; D. Gless, Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1994), ‘Constructing Evil’, 75–80. 29 On Spenser’s honouring pagan symbolism but privileging Christian symbolism, see n. 16 above. 30 See Rathborne, The Meaning of Spenser’s Fairyland (1937; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), vii, 203–6; Berger, Allegorical Temper, ‘Intellectual History: The Chronicles’; R.H. Wells, ‘Spenser’s Christian Knight: Erasmian Theology in The Faerie Queene, Book I’, Anglia 97 (1979), 350–66; Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics, 91–7; M. Woodcock, Fairy in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 88–140. 31 ‘Redcross Knight is … microchristus, but Guyon, and … the other heroes …, microcosmus alone’; ‘nowhere save in Book I … does Prince Arthur figure forth the grace that works inwardly upon the heart and will’: Woodhouse, ‘Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene’, ELH 16 (1949), 194–228; 198–200.

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32 On the ‘nature–grace’ distinction as a misleading shorthand, see D. Gless, ‘Nature and grace’, SE. Seen in its full complexity, however, this polarity is vital to The Faerie Queene’s design. See Berger, ‘A Secret Discipline: The Faerie Queene, Book VI’, rpt in Revisionary Play (University of California Press, 1988), 215–42; D. Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature (Yale University Press, 1966), 11–17; Horton, The Unity of The Faerie Queene (University of Georgia Press, 1978), ‘Complementary Association in Pairs’, 59–99; Wells, ‘Spenser’s Christian Knight’, 357. 33 Arthur’s, Britomart’s, and Artegall’s Christianity – partly veiled by romance and Egyptian symbolism and by ties to Gloriana’s immanental earthly fame – postpones their full sacramental commitment to Christianity until Book 10 (or incrementally in Books 7–12). 34 In this parabolic ‘golden chaine’ of virtue, Holiness is transposed to Sapience; Temperance (sophrosyne) to Prudence (phronesis); Chastity to Charity; Friendship to Gentleness (humanitas, mansuetude); Justice to Fortitude; Courtesy to Constancy. The remaining cardinal virtues (Fortitude, Prudence) are centred in each set of three. Cf. R. Kuin, ‘The Double Helix: Private and Public in The Faerie Queene’, SSt 16 (2002), 1–22. 35 FQ 1.9.1. 36 See A. Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time; S. Hawkins, ‘Mutabilitie and the Cycle of the Months’; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 82–6, 760–1; Lethbridge, ‘Spenser’s Last Days’, 313 and n. 37. 37 R. Tuve, ‘Spenser and the Zodiake of Life’, JEGP 34 (1935), 1–19; Hawkins, ‘Mutabilitie and the Cycle of the Months’. 38 Lust, though not called a titan, is gigantic and, like Orgoglio and Ollyphant, is depicted as monstrous genitalia. 39 Radigund occupies the middle third of Book 5 but is slain by Britomart after a ritual preparation in Isis’ Temple for defeating titans. 40 There are exceptions to positioning the titanomachias in cantos 7–8: (1) Maleger, gigantic and earth-nourished, appears in canto 11; (2) though Radigund is slain in canto 7, she is active in cantos 4–7, and she is not identified as a titan, though some see her as analogous (see C.S. Rupprecht, ‘The Martial Maid and the Challenge of Androgyny’, Spring [1974], 269–93; and her ‘Radigund’, SE); (3) in Book 5 giants proliferate throughout; but Radigund and the Souldan – like Orgoglio – form a turning-point, the vanguard for the monstrous antagonists in the final half of the legend. 41 Or in the case of Belphoebe, a fairy. 42 See Lethbridge, ‘Spenser’s Last Days’, 304, 313–16. 43 Book 1’s final six cantos neatly prefigure the proposed final six virtues of the epic: Orgoglio’s assault (1.7) shows the need of Constancy (Book 7); Arthur’s victory (1.8) prefigures Fortitude (Book 8); the Despair struggle (1.9) prefigures Gentleness (Mansuetude) (Book 9); training in holiness (1.10) prefigures Charity (Book 10); the Dragon fight (1.11) prefigures Prudence (Book 11); and the betrothal in Eden-City, resisting Archimago and Duessa’s final deceptions (1.12) prefigures Sapience (Book 12). 44 Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani An English Version, ed. A.M. O’Donnell, SND for EETS (Oxford University Press, 1981), 59. Cf. Wells, ‘Spenser’s Christian Knight’, 360–1. 45 Cf. Plotinus, Ennead V, tractate viii, ‘On the Intellectual Beauty’, 422–33. 46 Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 175; Hawkins, ‘Mutabilitie and the Cycle of the Months’, n. 12 above. 47 L.A. Montrose, ‘“The perfecte paterne of a Poete”: The Poetics of Courtship in The Shepheardes Calender’, TSLL 21 (1979), 34–67; ‘“Eliza, Queen of shepheardes,” and the Pastoral of Power’, ELR 10 (1980), 153–82; ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’, ELH 50 (1983), 415–59. 48 J.D. Bernard, Ceremonies of Innocence: Pastoralism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. 163–70. 49 See Cain, ‘Spenser and the Renaissance Orpheus’, 28–30; D.R. Shore, Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral: A Study of the World of Colin Clout (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), 3–6, passim; Shore, ‘Colin Clout’ and ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Again’, SE. 50 The Ruines of Time, 36–9. Cf. Ruines of Rome: by Bellay.

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51 Patricia Coughlan, ‘The Local Context of Mutabilitie’s Plea’, Irish University Review 26 (1996), 320–41; J.W. Moore, ‘Colin Breaks His Pipe: A Reading of the “January” Eclogue’, ELR 5 (1975), 3–24; H. Berger, Jr, ‘The Mirror Stage of Colin Clout’, Helios 10 (1983), 139–60; rpt in Revisionary Play, 325–46; R. Greene, ‘Calling Colin Clout’, SSt 10 (1989), 229–44; D.B. Alwes, ‘“Who Knowes Not Colin Clout?” Spenser’s Self-Advertisement in The Faerie Queene, Book 6’, MP 88 (1990), 26–42. 52 On Faunus as progenitor, see Conti, Mythologiae, V.ix.384–5. On his laughter, see L.G. Freeman, ‘Vision, Metamorphosis, and the Poetics of Allegory in the Mutabilitie Cantos’, SEL 45 (2005), 65–93. 53 Stampfer, ‘The Cantos of Mutability: Spenser’s Last Testament of Faith’, UTQ 21 (1951), 140–56. 54 W. Blissett, ‘Spenser’s Mutabilitie’, Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age Presented to A.S.P. Woodhouse, eds M. MacLure and F.W. Watt (University of Toronto Press, 1964); Lethbridge, ‘Spenser’s Last Days’, 302–36. 55 E. Fowler, ‘The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Works of Edmund Spenser’, Representations 51 (1995), 47–76; R.A. McCabe, ‘Edmund Spenser, Poet of Exile’, Proceedings of the British Academy 80 (1993), 73–103; A. Hadfield, ‘“Who knows not Colin Clout?” The Permanent Exile of Edmund Spenser’, in Literature, Politics and National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 170–201; Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 185–202; W. Maley, Salvaging Spenser (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 11–98; Maley, ‘“This ripping of auncestors”: The Ethnographic Present in Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland’, Textures of Renaissance Knowledge, eds P. Berry and M. Tudeau-Clayton (Manchester University Press, 2003), 117–34. 56 Berger, ‘A Secret Discipline: The Faerie Queene, Book VI’, 215–42; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 659–704; S. Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 321–2. 57 See A.F. Blitch, ‘Proserpina Preserved: Book VI of The Faerie Queene’, SEL 13 (1973), 15–30. 58 On the logoi spermatikoi, see J.E. Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 239–93; Nohrnberg, Analogy, 519–98. 59 Dante watches the angels draw loving essence from the Celestial Rose ‘like a swarm of bees that one moment dip in the flowers and the next go back to where their toil turns to sweetness, descended into the great flower that is decked with so many petals, and thence re-ascended where their love abides forever’. Dante’s Paradiso, trans. J.D. Sinclair (Oxford University Press, 1961), 31.7–12. Did Spenser share Dante’s expectancy of glorified change in an eternal perspective, or simply yearn for a time ‘when no more Change shall be’? 60 Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 175. 61 Cf. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936; rpt Oxford University Press, 1958), 44–156, 296–360; E.R. Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Pantheon, 1953), ‘The Goddess Natura’, 106–27; G.D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Harvard University Press, 1972); H. White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–109, 220–57. 62 Rosenau, The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution in Europe (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), 12–14; Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture (Yale University Press, 1993), 91–2, 163–5, 268–79, 311–17; Hawkins, ‘From Mythography to Myth-Making: Spenser and the Magna Mater Cybele’, Sixteenth Century Journal 12 (1981), 51–64; Manley, ‘Spenser and the City’, 211–27. 63 See Nohrnberg, Analogy, 127–8, 168n, 171, 211–18, 271–2, 277, 280–2; G.K. Paster, ‘City’, SE; Å. Bergvall, ‘The Theology of the Sign: St. Augustine and Spenser’s Legend of Holiness’, SEL 33 (1993), 21–42. Cf. D. Askowith, ‘Ezekiel and St. Augustine: A Comparative Study’, Journal of Bible and Religion 15 (1947), 224–7; T.E. Mommsen, ‘St. Augustine and the Christian Idea of Progress: The Background of the City of God’, JHI 12 (1951), 346–74; L.S. Mazzolani, The Idea of the City in Roman Thought: From Walled City to Spiritual Commonwealth, trans. S. O’Donnell (Indiana University Press, 1970), 125–200, 242–79; J. Dougherty, The Fivesquare City: The City in the Religious Imagination (University of Notre Dame Press, 1980); D.T.

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Runia, ‘The Idea and the Reality of the City in the Thought of Philo of Alexandria’, JHI 61 (2000): 361–79. 64 W.M. Kendrick, ‘Earth of Flesh, Flesh of Earth: Mother Earth in The Faerie Queene’, RenQ 27 (1974), 533–48; Hawkins, ‘From Mythography to Myth-Making’ 51–64. Cf. Rosenau, The Ideal City, 12–14; Manley, ‘Spenser and the City’, 211–27. 65 Biblical quotations for now are taken from the Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966), but in his ‘Sabbaoth’ phrasings Spenser seems to follow the Bishops’ Bible (‘The Lord of Sabbaoth’) rather than the Geneva Bible (‘The Lord of hostes’), alluding to James 5.4 and Romans 9.29. Yet Spenser’s references elsewhere to the ‘Lord of hosts’ (Mother Hubbard, 469; Hymne to Love, 40; Epithalamion, 289) show familiarity with Geneva as well. N. Shaheen in Biblical References in The Faerie Queene (Memphis State University Press, 1976), 171–2, 192–3, thinks Spenser ‘confused the word Sabbaoth, meaning “hosts”, with the word Sabbath, meaning “rest”’. ‘Lorde of Sabboth’ as ‘lord of hosts’ ‘is based on the frequent Old Testament phrase Yahweh tsevaoth’ (Shaheen, 172). 66 Since Spenser recommended starvation to reform Ireland’s populace (A View of the State of Ireland, ed. W.L. Renwick (London, 1934; rev. ed. Oxford University Press, 1970), I acknowledge the irony of holding charity to be the key for completing The Faerie Queene, for constructing an English Christian commonwealth, and for gaining access to the New Jerusalem. 67 Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (University of Georgia Press, 1988), 83–127. 68 M. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952), 241. 69 Dante’s upper hell perverts the soul’s basic appetites in circles of Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, and Sloth. The swamp of Sloth is the turning point, the culminating appetitive sin that bridges into the horrors of the City of Dis. Two circles of Wrath pervert the soul’s nobler passions, followed by the intellectual complexity of Envy and Pride in the circles of lowest hell. 70 On the much-debated structure of Dante’s Paradiso, see E. Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. R. Manheim (University of Chicago Press, 1961; orig. 1929), 104–8, 115–23. 71 ‘Spenser’s Inferno: The Order of the Seven Deadly Sins at the Palace of Pride’, JMRS 14 (1984), 203–18. 72 Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth (University of North Carolina Press, 1962). 73 See E. Moore, ‘The Classification of Sins in the “Inferno” and “Purgatorio”’, in Studies in Dante, second series (Oxford: Clarendon, 1899; rpt 1968), 152–209 and table 1. 74 Crossett and Stump place Chaucer’s Parson’s seven sins mid-way between Dante and Spenser. 75 For the throne vision: Ezek. 1, Isa. 6, Rev. 4. W. Anderson, Dante the Maker (New York: Crossroad, 1982), ch. 18, explains Dante’s use of the six-winged seraph to symbolize six stages of contemplative ascent to God, aided by the six main guides in the Commedia. 76 Nohrnberg, Analogy; Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace. 77 L. DeNeef, ‘Spenserian Meditation: The Hymne of Heavenly Beautie’, ABR 25 (1974), 317–34. 78 Berger, ‘A Secret Discipline’: Books 1–2 = poesis; Books 3–4 = poema; Books 5–6 = poeta. 79 J.H. Anderson, The Growth of a Personal Voice: Piers Plowman and The Faerie Queene. 80 The move from individual to social virtues might vie with Berger’s and Anderson’s emphasis on the poem’s contraction into a personal, individual perspective. Horton, The Unity of The Faerie Queene, chs 3–6, 10. Cf. S.L. Reames, ‘Prince Arthur and Spenser’s Changing Design’, Eterne in Mutabilitie: The Unity of The Faerie Queene, ed. K.J. Atchity (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1972), 180–206. 81 Nohrnberg, Analogy, esp. parts I, IV, V. 82 Besides the references to Bellamy, Frye, and Fowler in Chapter 5, n. 139, see S. Cavanaugh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene (Indiana University Press, 1994), 140–2, 152, 163; E.J. Bellamy, Translations of Power: Narcissism and the ­Unconscious in Epic History (Cornell University Press, 1992); and Harry Berger, Jr, ‘Orpheus, Pan, and the Poetics of Misogyny: Spenser’s Critique of Pastoral Love and Art’, ELH 50 (1983), 27–60.

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83 J. Collins, Christian Mysticism in the Elizabethan Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940), 82–7. That Gloriana mirrors a transcendent glory, see J.P. Fruen, ‘“True Glorious Type”: The Place of Gloriana in The Faerie Queene’, SSt 7 (1987), 147–73; and ‘The Fairy Queen Unveiled? Five Glimpses of Gloriana’, SSt 11 (1994), 53–88. 84 Spenser’s mystic literacy is also challenged by his failure to place cherubim and seraphim at the top of the nine hierarchic ranks of angels. Instead of the approved list of Pseudo-Dionysius (angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominions, thrones, cherubim, seraphim), Spenser in ‘An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie’ lists only eight, and in this order: Powres, Potentates, Seates [thrones], Dominations, Cherubins, Seraphins, Angels, Archangels. Cf. the ‘trinal triplicities’ in HHL 64 and in FQ 1.12.39.5. See Shorter Poems, eds Oram et al., 740; C.. Patrides, ‘“Quaterniond into their celestiall Princedomes”: The Order of the Angels’, in Premises and Motifs in Renaissance Literature (Princeton University Press, 1982). Spenser’s faulty ordering of angelic hosts, like other flaws in The Fowre Hymnes, suggests their creation in haste, perhaps as a clue to the epic’s overall plan: Cupid and Venus, exalted in The Faerie Queene’s Proem yet increasingly questioned in Books 1–6, will be transcended in the epic’s final half, as in The Fowre Hymnes. Though Spenser praises both Christian and Olympian deities, his epic methodically distinguishes the two types of heroes, always subordinating Fairy to Briton. 85 Prescott, ‘The Pearl of Valois and Elizabeth I: Marguerite de Navarre’s Miroir and Tudor England’, Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. M.P. Hannay (Kent State University Press, 1985), 61–76; the Letter to Raleigh; R.H. Wells, The Cult of Queen Elizabeth. 86 Several restraining vows of medieval mystics apply to Elizabeth only with qualification: (1) poverty: her opulent lifestyle, documented in iconic portraits and in Spenser’s poetics, might seem to obstruct mystic devotion; (2) submission to moral-religious authority: moderating between religious factions, Elizabeth listened patiently to corrective sermons, but kept her own authority in religious matters; (3) silence: ‘The strength of monks is their silence’,’ wrote Adam Scot, a twelfth-century canon, who imitates Gregory the Great by setting forth quies, silence of the soul, as the contemplative’s goal; Augustine viewed it as the highest rhetoric in dialogues with God. But poverty, obedience, and silence are not strictly necessary for mystic consciousness. 87 See S.L. Wofford, ‘Gendering Allegory: Spenser’s Bold Reader and the Emergence of Character in The Faerie Queene III’, Criticism 30 (1988), 1–21; but note Cavanagh’s dismissal of Britomart’s moral stature, both for her adopted ‘male identity’ and for her intellectual naivety. 88 Despite her brilliance and piety, Elizabeth, when frustrated by silliness and self-indulgence in courtiers and maids-in-waiting, occasionally vented torrents of vulgar invective. On Elizabeth’s swearing, see C. Erickson, The First Elizabeth (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 231, 251, 262, 309, 329. 89 Spenser, as part of the militant Protestant party, uses Mercilla’s hesitancy to execute Duessa to praise Elizabeth’s godlike mercy while also urging her to imitate Britomart in decisively executing power. Spenser does not seem fully aware of Elizabeth’s executive prowess – of how much she, like Britomart, became equal or superior to most men in wielding the lance of will and the sword of rational discourse. See M. Leslie, Spenser’s ‘Fierce Warres and Faithfull Loves’: Martial and Chivalric Symbolism in The Faerie Queene (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1983), 31–5, 40–5; J. Anderson, ‘Britomart’s Armor in S­ penser’s Faerie Queene: Reopening Cultural Matters of Gender and Figuration’, ELR 39 (2009), 74–96. 90 See Collins, Christian Mysticism in the Elizabethan Age, 82–7. 91 ‘Theological anthropology’ is B. McGinn’s phrase in his remarkable history of Western mysticism, The Presence of God, 7 vols. (New York: Crossroad, 1991–). 92 Merkavah mysticism (encounters of God by Enoch, Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel), and similar New Testament apocalypses of Jesus, Paul, and John of Patmos. 93 So we learn from Thomas Gallus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and others. 94 As when Redcrosse (fully armed?) experiences Una unveiled as ‘swimming in that sea of blisful ioy’. Also unlike Spenser’s depicting God in architectural imagery (New Jerusalem, instructive houses, ‘pillours of eternity’), Francis and his many followers turned away from monastic cells to mendicant errancy (imitated by St Claire of Assisi and other ‘poor Clares’).

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 95 Bennett, The Evolution of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960), 228.  96 Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene (Princeton University Press, 1967), 107–34.  97 Twelve for encyclopaedic completeness, but also to exploit the numerical symbolic meaning of each digit (one for wholeness/holiness; two for relativity and/or duplicity; etc.).  98 On Spenser’s elaborate number symbolism, see, e.g., A. Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964); A.K. Hieatt, Short Time’s Endless Monument (New York, 1960); and entries on number symbolism in SE. 99  See C.V. Kaske, ‘Spenser and the Bible’, in The Oxford Handbook for Edmund Spenser (Oxford University Press, 2010), 498–500. (See Kaske, ‘Bible’, SE.) See n. 27 above. 100 Each pair is informed by the grace–nature (transcendent–immanent) distinction: Holiness shows the quest of superior reason, Temperance the quest of inferior, prudential reason; Chastity perfects the heart (or will) through grace; Friendship perfects it through immanent gifts planted in the natural world; Justice, working on the sensate (or literal and historical) level, perfects the soul through grace; Courtesy, also working on that sensate level, perfects it through native gifts. 101 Books 1 and 2 present the epic quest of a hero who attains a high degree of doctrinal closure; Books 3 and 4 as passional quests are interlaced plots without a consistent hero, or with a protagonist like Britomart whose love quest (like that of her subtypes Florimell, Amoret, and Belphoebe) is left in flux; Books 5 and 6 give reprises of the epic and romance plots, but by entering the literal, sensate, historical dimension, both the epic hero Artegall and the romance protagonists of Book 6 are subject to the fluctuations of fortune and human errancy. 102 Horatio: ‘that fair and warlike form / In which the majesty of buried Denmark / Did sometime march’ (1.1.47–8). Marcellus: ‘We do it wrong, being so majestical’ (143). 103 Dante’s purgatory, refining souls for glory, is relatively joyous and optimistic. Why does King Hamlet’s militant spirit emphasize the unendurable anxiety of grotesque bodily torment? 104 Satanic flattery as metaphoric poison-in-the-ear is elaborately developed in Othello. 105 That is, without taking communion, preparing for death, and receiving extreme unction. 106 Debating salvation dominates the play. Like the castle watch, Hamlet begins to fear that the ghost might jeopardize his soul; Claudius haplessly prays for his soul after the Mousetrap, and Hamlet resists killing him as he prays; Gertrude is urged to cleanse her soul of incestuous bonding with a murderer; the gravediggers question the salvation of suicides after Ophelia’s ‘doubtful’ death; and the final scene evaluates the status of each dying person’s soul. 107 Summonings of Krishna, Buddha, Hercules, Siegfried, Muhammad (in Hindu, Buddhist, Classical, Celto-Germanic, and Islamic tales) differ markedly from the Jewish-Christian summoning in Everyman, Hamlet, and King Lear. See J. Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (New York: Penguin, 1968), ‘The Word Behind Words’, 84–171; ‘The Turning Wheel of Terror-Joy’, 405–15; ‘The Quest Beyond Meaning’, 428–32. Cf. W.S. Rahula, ‘The Doctrine of No-Soul: Anatta’ and ‘The Great Retirement’, Transformations of Myth Through Time, eds D. Eisenberg et al. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 203–7, 229–36. 108 Potter, The English Morality Play (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 123–70. But A. Dessen at the 2008 SAA said he has found no specific evidence of Everyman’s influence on English Renaissance drama. 109 On the ghost’s suspect nature, see E. Prosser, Hamlet & Revenge (Stanford University Press, 1967, 1971), 97–144; S. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton University Press, 2001), chs 4 and 5, ‘Staging Ghosts’, ‘Remember Me’. 110 McNamee, Honor and the Epic Hero (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960); Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor (Princeton University Press, 1960). 111 H. Bloom, in Hamlet, Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead, 2003) and in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), leads a resurgence of praise for the prince of eloquent questionings. Cf. W. Kerrigan, The Perfection of Hamlet (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 112 On Catholic and Protestant views of revenge, see F.T. Bowers, ‘Hamlet as Scourge and Minister’, PMLA 70 (1955), 740–9, and Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton University

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Press, 1960); Prosser, Hamlet & Revenge; Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, ‘Hamlet’s Evasions and Inversions’, 244–65; R. Waddington, ‘Lutheran Hamlet’, ELN 27 (1989), 27–42; R.C. Hassel, Jr, ‘Hamlet’s “Too, Too Solid Flesh”’, Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994), 609–22; S. Sohmer, ‘Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, and Martin Luther’, Early Modern Literary Studies 2 (1996), 1–51. 113 Col. 3.12: the chosen show compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness. Gal. 5.22: ‘the harvest of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, self-control’. 114 Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc, ed. C. Davidson, M.W. Walsh, and T.J. Broos (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2007), pp. 113, 134, 164, 181, 187, 276, 375–6, 502, 632–3, 664, 670, 712, 863–72, 886–90, 912–18. 115 Ibid., 20, 46, 70, 99, 101, 106, 113, 134, 137, 147, 160, 244, 333, 336, 344, 375–6, 406–7, 411, 419, 493–94, 501–5, 521, 529–31, 546–61, 580, 596, 610, 865–6, 898, 914. 116 Ibid., 104, 136, 244, 336–45, 375–6, 406–7, 420, 493–4, 501–5, 511–12, 580, 596, 865–6. 117 ‘Hamlet’s “first corse”: Repetition, Trauma, and the Displacement of Redemptive Typology’, SQ 54 (2004), 424–48. The endlessly re-enacted trauma of Original Sin, a Freudian ‘repetition compulsion’, displaces the ‘redemptive typology’ of Christ’s Passion. Cf. R.N. Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in Shakespeare (University of California Press, 1995). 118 Shakespeare’s scenes of imminent dying anticipate Judgment: Richard III: ‘’Tis a vile thing to die, my gracious lord, when men are unprepared’ (3.2.65); Measure for Measure: Claudio’s lustful unreadiness is matched by Bernardo’s drunken stupor: ‘a creature unprepared, unmeet for death’ (4.3.71); Othello: ‘I would not kill thy unprepared spirit. No; heaven forfend!’ (5.2.31). 119 Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy (Indiana University Press, 1969), 250–1. 120 Prosser, ‘The Readiness Is All’, in Hamlet & Revenge, 219–40; Hayden, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 634–6; Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 409–22, 428–30, 482–3, 505–13, and Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, 85–103, 117–21; Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy, 227–66, 277–302. The exhortation to readiness in Jesus’ summonings underscores the importance of both divine and human participation in the process of salvation. Matt. 22.1–14: Responses to the wedding invitation: ‘though many are called, few are chosen.’ Matt. 24.36, 42–51 (Mark 13.32–7): ‘Keep awake … Hold yourselves ready, … because the Son of Man will come at the time you least expect him.’ Matt. 24.45–51, 25.14–30: parable of talents. Matt. 25.1–13: Five of ten maidens kept oiled lamps for the wedding. Matt. 25.31–46: Christ finds ready those who have helped others in need. 121 As a metaphysical parable King Lear draws Hamlet’s themes to darker ends. The word ‘soul’, pervasive in Hamlet and Othello, appears only three times in King Lear: what is being readied or ripened? 122 As Jenkins notes in his Arden Hamlet, Juliet’s dying words in Painter’s Palace of Pleasure are ‘death the end of sorrow, the beginning of felicity’. But for Bloom Hamlet’s ‘felicity’ (‘Absent thee from felicity awhile’) is not heavenly bliss but acceptance of utter annihilation – making Horatio’s invocation of angels a deep misreading. Bloom praises Hamlet’s self-deification and nihilism in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 383–431 and in Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, ch. 20, ‘Annihilation: Hamlet’s Wake’. 123 On Nature in King Lear, see J.F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (London: Faber and Faber, 1949); D. Young, The Heart’s Forest (Yale University Press, 1972), 73–103; N.R. Lindheim, ‘King Lear as Pastoral Tragedy’, Some Facets of King Lear, eds R. Colie and F. Flahiff (University of Toronto Press, 1974), 169–84; R.B. Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (1923; rpt New York: Praeger, 1976),, 89-132. 124 See R. McCoy, ‘“Look upon me, Sir”: Relationships in King Lear’, Representations 81 (2003). 46–60. 125 But only in folio. The quarto line is quite dark: ‘O, o, o, o’, underscoring the theme of nothingness.

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126 Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 8, 273. 127 Tiffany, ‘Calvinist Grace in Shakespeare’s Romances: Upending Tragedy’, C&L 49 (2000), 421–2. 128 In ‘The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars’, ShS 41 (1989), 91–102, A. Gurr argues that The Tempest is the first play Shakespeare created specifically for Blackfriars. Cf. E. Law, ‘Shakespeare’s Tempest as Originally Produced at Court’, in The Tempest: Critical Essays, ed. P.M. Murphy (New York: Routledge, 2001; orig. 1920), 150–72; The Tempest, ed. C. Dymkowski (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–6. 129 D. Seltzer, ‘The Staging of the Last Plays’, Later Shakespeare, eds J.R. Brown and B. Harris (New York: St Martin’s, 1967), 127–65; P. Edwards, Shakespeare: A Writer’s Progress (Oxford University Press, 1986), 175–8; J. Jowett, ‘New Created Creatures: Ralph Crane and the Stage Directions in The Tempest’, ShS 43 (1990), 107–20; M. Hunt, ‘Visionary Christianity in Shakespeare’s Late Romances’, CLAJ 47 (2003), 212–30. 130 The Arden Tempest, ed. F. Kermode (London: Methuen, 1954), 4.1.120–2, 35–7. 131 C. Still, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: A Study of ‘The Tempest’ (London: C. Palmer, 1921); rev. as The Timeless Theme (London: I. Nicholson & Watson, 1936). 132 W.C. Curry, ‘Sacerdotal Science in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, in Shakespeare’s Philosophic Patterns (Louisiana State University Press, 1937), 163–99. 133 ‘The Relation of Religion to the Arts’, Northrop Frye’s Student Essays 1932–1938, ed. R.D. Denham (University of Toronto Press, 1997), 309–10. 134 ‘Religion and the Art Forms of Music and Drama’, Northrop Frye’s Student Essays, 334–7. See The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979–1990, ed. R.D. Denham (Indiana University Press, 1993), xv–xvi. I am indebted to Dr Denham for providing Frye’s recently collected works and for invaluable advice. Editing the play twenty years later, Frye was more guarded: ‘The Tempest is not an allegory or a religious drama: if it were, Prospero’s great “revels” speech would say, not merely that all earthly things will vanish, but that an eternal world will take their place.’ Yet Frye urges that the play ‘not simply … be read or seen or even studied, but possessed’, The Tempest, ed. N. Frye (Baltimore: Penguin, 1959), 24. He meditated persistently on The Tempest in sacerdotal contexts, and it focused his conclusion in four books: A Natural Perspective (1965), 145–59; The Secular Scripture (1976), 150–6; The Myth of Deliverance (1983), 150–9; and Northrop Frye on Shakespeare (1986), 171–86. He endlessly revisits the play, especially in Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts and Notebooks on Romance. 135 G. Hall, The Tempest as Mystery Play: Uncovering Religious Sources of Shakespeare’s Most Spiritual Work (Jefferson City, NC: McFarland, 1999). 136 Despite the impressive Henry VIII and mediocre Two Noble Kinsmen (the latter collaborative), many aspects of The Tempest suggest the playwright’s departing comment on his creative power. 137 K.M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in The Commedia dell’Arte, 1560–1620, with Special Reference to the English Stage, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 1, 201–12, 2, 442–53; Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 8, 310–28; Young, The Heart’s Forest, 148–53; R. Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (University of Delaware Press, 1997), 56–60, 94–106, 132–40, 146–53, 162–5, 191–8. 138 Curry, ‘Sacerdotal Science in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, 163–99; Kermode, The Arden Tempest, xlvii–li; C. Sisson, ‘The Magic of Prospero’, ShS 11 (1959), 70–7; R. West, The Invisible World: A Study of Pneumatology in Elizabethan Tragedy (University of Georgia Press, 1939), 115, 126–7, 247–50, and ‘Ceremonial Magic in The Tempest’, Shakespearean Essays, eds A. Thaler and N. Sanders (University of Tennessee Press, 1964), 63–78; H. Berger, Jr, ‘Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, ShakS 5 (1967), 153–83; D. James, The Dream of Prospero (Oxford University Press, 1967), 45–71; H. Craig, ‘Magic in The Tempest’, PQ 47 (1968), 8–15; H. Levin, ‘Two Magian Comedies: The Tempest and The Alchemist’, ShS 22 (1969), 47–58; R. Egan, Drama within Drama: Shakespeare’s Sense of His Art in ‘King Lear’, ‘The Winter’s Tale’, and ‘The Tempest’ (Columbia University Press, 1975),

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90–125; D. Woodman, White Magic and English Renaissance Drama (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973), 64–86; Young, The Heart’s Forest, 159–70, 183–4; K. Berger, ‘Prospero’s Art’, ShakS 10 (1977), 211–39; A. Kernan, The Playwright as Magician (Yale University Press, 1979), 129–75; B. Traister, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (University of Missouri Press, 1984), 125–49; B. Mowat, ‘Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus-Pocus’, ELR 11 (1981), 281–303, and ‘Prospero’s Book’, SQ 52 (2001), 1–33; J. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age (University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 174–99; K. Von Rosader, ‘The Power of Magic from Endymion to The Tempest’, ShS 43 (1990), 1–13. Cf. L. Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1923–58); K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribners, 1971); W. Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance (University of California Press, 1972); B. Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1984). 139 Mowat, ‘Prospero’s Book’, 3, n. 14; Curry, ‘Sacerdotal Science in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, 163–99; Kermode, The Arden Tempest, xlvii–xlviii; West, ‘Ceremonial Magic’, 63–78. 140 P. Brockbank, ‘The Tempest: Conventions of Art and Empire’, Later Shakespeare, eds J.R. Brown and B. Harris (New York: St Martin’s, 1967), 183–201; James, The Dream of Prospero, 45–71; Shumaker, The Occult Sciences, ch. 3, ‘White Magic’, 108–59; Kernan, The Playwright as Magician, 129–75; Egan, Drama within Drama, 90–125; Woodman, White Magic and English Renaissance Drama, 64–86; Traister, Heavenly Necromancers, 125–49; Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 174–99; C. Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1948), 3–50, 71–7. 141 J. Nosworthy, ‘The Narrative Sources of The Tempest’, RES 24 (1948), 281–94; J. Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer (Harvard University Press, 1934); M. Tudeau-Clayton, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Nohrnberg, Analogy, 29–30, passim; S. Marx, ‘Posterity and Prosperity: Genesis in The Tempest’, in Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2000), 25–46. 142 P.A. Cantor, ‘Prospero’s Republic: The Politics of Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, Shakespeare as Political Thinker, eds J.E. Alvis and T.G. West, rev. ed. (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000), 241–59. 143 See Augustine, Confessions, trans. H. Chadwick (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 16–17, and Opera, 10 vols (Paris, 1531), 10, 25, sermon 29. Gerard Kilroy kindly drew my attention to this reference. 144 G. Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (University of California Press, 1981), 217–62; Intro. to The Tempest, ed. S. Orgel (Oxford University Press, 1987), 43–50; Marx, ‘Posterity and Prosperity: Genesis in The Tempest’, 128–32, 140–3; R. Grudin, ‘Prospero’s Masque and the Structure of The Tempest’, SAQ 71 (1972), 401– 9; E. Gilman, ‘“All eyes”: Prospero’s Inverted Masque’, RenQ 33 (1980), 214–30; D. Lindley, ‘Music, Masque, and Meaning in The Tempest’, The Court Masque, ed. Lindley (Manchester University Press, 1984), 47–59, and ‘Staging the Spectacular’, The Tempest, ed. Lindley (London: Arden, 2003), 192–215; J. Knowles, ‘Insubstantial Pageants: The Tempest and Masquing Culture’, Shakespeare’s Late Plays, eds J. Richards and J. Knowles (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 108–25. 145 Curry, ‘Sacerdotal Science in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’; D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanello (London: Warburg Institute, 1958), 36–53; Kermode, The Arden Tempest, xlvii–li; F. Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 87–106, and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 127–33, 159–63; C.G. Nauert, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (University of Illinois Press, 1965), 222–321; James, The Dream of Prospero, 45–71; K. Berger, ‘Prospero’s Art’, 211–39; B.C. Copenhaver, ‘Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the De Vita of Marsilio Ficino’, RenQ 37 (1984), 523–54, esp. 528–33; Mebane, Renaissance Magic; F.L. Borchardt, ‘The Magus as Renaissance Man’, Sixteenth Century Journal 21 (1990), 57–76. 146 Curry, ‘Sacerdotal Science in Shakespeare’s The Tempest’, 197–9; Kermode, The Arden Tempest, xlvii–li; West, ‘Ceremonial Magic’, 63–78; Mowat, ‘Prospero’s Book’, 4–5.

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147 J.B. Bender, ‘The Day of The Tempest’, ELH 47 (1980), 243. See also R.C. Hassel, Jr, Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year (University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 166–71. 148 E.J. Devereux, ‘Sacramental Imagery in The Tempest’, Bulletin de l’Association Canadienne des Humanités 19 (1968), 50–62; R. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, 227–41; J. Doebler, Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures: Studies in Iconic Imagery (University of New Mexico Press, 1974), 141– 63; A.P. Slater, ‘Variations within a Source: From Isaiah XXIX to The Tempest’, ShS 25 (1972), 125–35; K. Berger, ‘Prospero’s Art’; A. Esolen, ‘“The Isles Shall Wait for His Law”: Isaiah and The Tempest’, SP 94 (1997), 221–47; G. Slover, ‘Magic, Mystery, and Make-Believe: An Analogical Reading of The Tempest’, ShakS 11 (1978), 175–206; Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 174–99; J.W. Velz, ‘From Jerusalem to Damascus: Biblical Dramaturgy in Medieval and Shakespearean Conversion Plays’, CompD 16 (1982), 311–26, and ‘Medieval Dramatic Eschatology in Shakespeare’, CompD 26 (1992), 312–29; P. Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (Indiana University Press, 1973); C. Marshall, Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 86–106; M.E. Rickey, ‘Prospero’s Living Drolleries’, RenP (1965), 35–42; R. Battenhouse, Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension (Indiana University Press, 1994), 250–79; Marx, ‘Posterity and Prosperity: Genesis in The Tempest’, 19–39; T. McAlindon, ‘The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest’, SEL 41 (2001), 335–55. 149 A late fourteenth-century rubric for extreme unction appears in John Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. E. Peacock (Millwood, New York: Kraus Reprints, 1902; rev. ed., 1975), 31, lines 1600–1748, 1839–92. That Hamlet’s murdered father was ‘unhouseled’ (not given the Eucharist) and ‘unaneled’ (unanointed) (1.5.77) suggests Shakespeare’s close attention to the rites for dying, and the inclusion of extreme unction underscores his memory of all seven sacraments of the old faith – and, as with Hamlet’s father, a grieving for their loss (The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Evans, 2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 150 The penitential office of commination contains ‘a recital of God’s anger and judgments against sinners, read in the Church of England especially after the litany on Ash Wednesday’. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam, 1971). 151 Bender, ‘The Day of The Tempest’, 246–7. 152 Devereux, ‘Sacramental Imagery in The Tempest’, 50–62; Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, 227–41; Doebler, Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures, 141–63. 153 Slater, ‘Variations within a Source’, 125–35; Berger, ‘Prospero’s Art’, 211–39; Esolen, ‘“The Isles Shall Wait for His Law”’, 221–47. 154 Velz, ‘Biblical Dramaturgy’, 311–26, and ‘Medieval Dramatic Eschatology’, 312–29. 155 G.W. Knight, ‘The Shakespearean Superman: A Study of The Tempest’, in The Crown of Life (Oxford University Press, 1947; rpt New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), 204. 156 M. Taylor, Shakespeare’s Imitations (University of Delaware Press, 2002), 142–70. 157 For ‘presence’, not ‘present’ (F), see Kermode, The Arden Tempest, 166. On the power of the king’s presence in The Tempest, see G. Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic (University of California Press, 1981), 228–34. 158 Hall, The Tempest as Mystery Play, 41–7. 159 Ibid., 49–71. 160 See n. 148 above. 161 Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 26, 29, 36, 93–4, 102. 162 V.A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), 124–236. 163 I’ve expanded Hall’s list of mystery-play vice figures, and added relevant Scriptures on spiritual death and godly sorrow, repentance, and transformation. Cf. Marshall, Last Things and Last Plays, 86–106. 164 N. Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (University of Delaware Press, 1999), 734–49. 165 Rickey, ‘Prospero’s Living Drolleries’, 35–42; W. Poole, ‘False Play: Shakespeare and Chess’, SQ 55 (2004), 50–70. Cf. Kermode, The Arden Tempest, note to 5.1.171; B. Loughrey and N. Taylor, ‘Ferdinand and Miranda at Chess’, ShS 35 (1982):, 116.

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166 See D. Aune, ‘Magic in Early Christianity’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der Neueren Forschung, ed. H. Temporini and W. Haase (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980), 507–23; and ‘The Apocalypse of John and Graeco-Roman Revelatory Magic’, New Testament Studies 33 (1987), 481–501; M. Smith, Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). 167 Hall, The Tempest as Mystery Play, 55; Marx, ‘Posterity and Prosperity: Genesis in The Tempest’, 19–39; McAlindon, ‘The Discourse of Prayer in The Tempest’, 335–55. 168 Also see Tmp 1.2.497–504, 2.1.292–4, 321; 3.3.83–8; 4.1.264–6; 5.1.83–103, 316–17. 169 Cf. A. Barton, ‘Shakespeare and the Limits of Language’, ShS 24 (1971), 19–30; M. Hunt, Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word (Bucknell University Press, 1990), 109–40; R. McDonald, ‘Reading The Tempest’, ShS 43 (1990), 15–28. 170 Kermode, Arden Tempest, xxxiv–lix; Young, The Heart’s Forest, 180–91; R. Soellner, Shakespeare’s Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Ohio State University Press, 1972), 356–83; Traister, Heavenly Necromancers, 125–49; Mebane, Renaissance Magic, 174–99. 171 D. Lucking, ‘Our Devils Now Are Ended: A Comparative Analysis of The Tempest and Doctor Faustus’, Dalhousie Review 80 (2000), 151–67. 172 For Shakespeare’s relation to courtly aesthetics in The Tempest, see n. 144 above. 173 D. Bevington, ‘Shakespeare and Public Patronage’ (paper at 2004 SAA); Egan, Drama within Drama, 106–8; Gilman, ‘“All eyes”: Prospero’s Inverted Masque’, 218–26; Lindley, The Court Masque, 47–59. 174 Kermode, The Arden Tempest, xlvii–xlviii, xli. 175 T. Beza, Icones, id est verae imagines virorum doctrina simul et pietate illustrium (Geneva: Joannes Laon, 1580), sig. Kk3v. Cited in Doebler, Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures, 159. For unholy uses of the circle, see West, Invisible World, 125–6, 129–31, 135, 250. 176 Kermode, The Arden Tempest, appendix, 147. 177 On Gonzalo’s truly wise folly, see J. Hunt, ‘Prospero’s Empty Grasp’, ShakS 22 (1994), 277–313. 178 M. Reiser, ‘Love of Enemies in the Context of Antiquity’, New Testament Studies 47 (2001), 411–27; Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, 227–41; cf. C. Corfield, ‘Why Does Prospero Abjure His “Rough Magic”?’, SQ 36 (1985), 31–48. 179 J. Clare, ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester University Press, 1990), 103–4. 180 E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), 172n. ‘The Language of Mysteries’, 1–16; ‘The Concealed God’, 218–35; and the maxim difficulia quae pulchia (the difficult is beautiful), 88–96. 181 W. Wrede, The Messianic Secret (Greenwood, SC: Attic Press, 1971), 80–1. 182 See V. Vaughan and A. Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1993); G. Graff and J. Phelan, eds, The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy (New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2000), 203–322. 183 For a fuller response to postcolonial questioning, see J.D. Cox, ‘Recovering Something Christian about The Tempest’, C&L 50 (2000), 31–51. 184 See A.D. Nuttall, Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ and the Logic of Allegorical Expression (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), esp. 1–48, 136–60. 185 Ariel’s final song, the first of his own creation, may, as Kermode says (appendix B, 142–5), characterize him simply as a daemon of the natural world: Where the bee sucks, there suck I: / … Merrily, merrily shall I live now / Under the blossom that hangs on the bough’ (5.1.88– 94). Yet Virgil envisions as bees both happy workers in Carthage (1.430–7) and blessed spirits in Elysium (6.706–9); see The Aeneid, trans. F.O. Copley (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965). This trope is also used by Homer and most suggestively by Dante, when he watches angels draw loving essence from the Celestial Rose: ‘like a swarm of bees that one moment dip in the flowers and the next go back to where their toil turns to sweetness, descended into the great flower that is decked with so many petals, and thence re-ascended where their love abides forever’ (Paradiso, trans. J. Sinclair [Oxford University Press, 1961], 31.7–12). That

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Ariel sleeps during the owl’s ominous cry and fearlessly rides the corpse-like bat suggests a triumph over death, a belief in endless summer. Such joyful immortality seems to derive from the culminating image, the Christlike ‘blossom that hangs on the bough’.

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Epilogue

Comparing contemporary poets of Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s stature is not just useful but necessary, for their disparate kinds of prowess underscores the acute diversity of this period of English literature and culture. The old labels, ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Reformation’, well suit Spenser’s focus on recalling and refining the written authority of the past; his formalist lyrics and allegorical epic masterfully draw classical and medieval wisdom into the combative hegemony of reformed Christianity. The period’s new moniker, ‘Early Modern Era’,1 accommodates Shakespeare’s focus on immediate oral-theatrical experience, playfully detached from bookish doctrines of the past and presaging a future of sceptical irony, humane passion, vulgar realism. Noting these poets’ extreme polarity – in ­selection of genre and in breadth of audience, in use of sources, in depictions of human nature and destiny – should deter simplistic stereotypes of the period’s extraordinary literary achievement. Exploring their polar difference clarifies by negation what each poet is about. Direct experience is the playground that specially inspires Shakespeare (and Chaucer). Though Spenser’s poetry also shows hyper-awareness of worldly ­experience (sensory, sexual and amorous, social and political), his goal is to shape and control these alluring-yet-demeaning realities in writings made authoritative by numerological, mythic, and doctrinal forms. In his magisterial biography Andrew Hadfield notes a radical change in Spenser’s later life and work, when ‘experience’, raw and uncontrollable, gets the upper hand (Edmund Spenser: A Life, 342–43, 403–4). Many critics2 believe Spenser’s engagement in the Irish plantations corrupted his moral vision, producing a ‘brutal and bigoted’ view of the ‘salvage isle’, thus partly invalidating his eidetic allegory of heroic aristocrats attaining virtuous perfection in the ideal ‘fairyland’ of Elizabeth’s realm. Yet evaluators of Spenser’s response to the harsh realities of Ireland and of patronage omit one of his most stunning and puzzling themes: compulsive truth-telling. Hadfield wonders at Spenser’s ‘acerbic’ treatment of ‘the good and the great’ (Edmund Spemser, 284, 365, 402). Mother Hubbard’s Tale criticizes Burleigh and his son for avaricious political cunning;3 The Shepheardes Calender glances at Leicester’s murderous lust for Lettys Knollys; Timias’s passionate affection for virginal Belphoebe, for her marriageable twin Amoret, and implicitly for wayward Serena depict Raleigh’s

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erotic boldness; and, most astonishing, Lucifera’s ‘progress’ of deadly sins, along with Philotime’s chain of envious ambition, critique the Queen’s spectacular modelling of vanity to her court. If, like Karl Marx, we curtly dismiss Spenser as an immoral ‘arse-kissing poet’, how do we explain these fables of misusing highest office? The Queen, Spenser’s most important reader, apparently understood his mixed message. Thus, in sharp contrast to Leicester’s and Raleigh’s distancing, and the outright reprisals of Burleigh and James VI, the Queen, on viewing Spenser’s balancing of high praise with moral warning, established for him a substantial annuity for life. Spenser’s lavish doctrinal epic impressed not only the Queen but Shakespeare, who transfigured his farcical early comedies into the grand mythic irony of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then created a stunning series of Elizabeth-analogues stretching from Portia to Cleopatra, and finally the haunting allegorical musings of The Tempest. In their early triumphs how differently Spenser and Shakespeare depict the same stirring events of Elizabethan culture. (1) Viewing a charismatic miracle-monarch, each devises a fairy queen – Gloriana and Titania, who perfectly exemplify the poetic divide! (2) A similar distinction characterizes the Queen’s heroic consorts. Spenser’s theocratic rendering of Prince Arthur outstrips the potency of Leicester, Essex, or any other aspirant; and Shakespeare’s Oberon fulfils Essex’s wish to master Elizabeth by making her dote on her commonest subject. (3) Sharing the nation’s joy at surviving threats of civil war, Alençon’s suit, and the Armada, each poet composes a national epic – Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s complementary Henriads. (4) Viewing the spectacle of rival lords, each poet critiques the problem of self-love, cautiously in Spenser’s epic, fully in Shakespeare’s mature tragedies. (5) The sharpest variance involves commoners: despite Braggadocchio’s compelling insolence, Faunus’ braying voyeurism, and the evolving role of satyrs and salvages, Spenser has nothing to match the instinctual rhythms of Bottom and Dogberry, of Juliet’s Nurse and Mistress Quickly. Such polarized depictions of ruler, nobility, and common folk are, however, less central to this study than contrasting each poet’s general conception of human nature: how each treats the passions that spring from humours and bodily spirits; how each depicts intellect’s engaging and managing the world in diverse fictive modes, or how the soul vaunts its powers before final judgment. Most challenging of all is to envision how these distinctive views of the human body, of psychic management, and of providential rescue, inform the holistic design of each poet’s work. Spenser’s numbered access to the mystic body The key to Spenser’s artistry and conception of psychology lies in his use of ancient idealizing principles of number and music to order society, the cosmos, the embodied soul’s hierarchic powers, the moral virtues of human nature, and the stylistic language of poetry. Christoph Wolff, celebrating the power and complexity of Bach, stresses his access to divinely ordained harmony, obscured to most people: ‘According to Pythagorean doctrine and medieval theology, the harmony

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of the spheres produced consonant (if hidden) music, reflecting the perfection of the celestial world.’ A major aspect of Bach’s exuberant power is contrapuntal blending of diverse elements: ‘God is a harmonic being. All harmony originates from his wise order and organization…. For beauty and perfection consists in the conformity of diversity.’4 This high-minded aesthetic is equally apparent in Spenser’s poems, especially The Faerie Queene. Plato, Pythagoras, Plotinus, Ficino are essential to this aesthetic, but their importance to Spenser is refocused by Augustine and the thirteenth-century Victorines who subordinate Platonic forms to the charitable descent and passion of Christ. Dame Nature in the Mutabilitie Cantos does not fully exemplify the poem’s goal, which is hinted at by comparing her to the transfigured Christ. Full disclosure of that visionary end was reserved by Spenser for the poem’s missing second half, when ‘dilation’ would be reversed by Arthur’s (and perhaps Gloriana’s) recovery from the most distressing passional errancies, returning human nature to the holy singularity of its ‘first estate’. Shakespeare’s experiential approach to mystic awareness The key to Shakespeare’s artistry and conception of psychology is the compelling allure of the sensuous body, especially when activated by the rhythmic power of the performative voice: Viola’s misguided rhapsody to Olivia, Bottom’s upstagings of royalty, and the comic threnodies of Mistress Quickly on Falstaff dying, the Nurse on Juliet’s weaning, Launce on his dog’s soiling of nobility. The impact of the performative body is made overwhelming by witty ironic consciousness, especially when elated or torn by despair over human bonds. As Shakespeare moves from Hamlet to Lear to Prospero – from Ophelia to Hermione to Miranda – he critiques the power of Spenserian idealism. The Tempest is deeply Spenserian in giving musical harmony optimal profundity, in having allegorical names contribute to character- and plot-development, and in making sacerdotal religious forms and eschatological goals central to the play’s meaning. Yet irony flickers around Shakespeare’s playful adoption of allegory. As Frank Kermode noted long ago, while Ariel charms us with adumbrations of the Keatsian ‘music with no sound’, Caliban keeps us in touch with the vulgar fundament. It is the same grounding offered to Hamlet by the gravedigger, who in revisiting Yorick’s riotous body-humbling foolery restores Hamlet’s most morally reliable self. For most of the audience (but not Hamlet) that graveyard scene builds on the poignant power of Ophelia’s lunacy, anticipating Lear’s ripening in stormy madness. The difference, however, is that Ophelia has no real fellowship, while Lear dialogues with a full range of exiles – a loyal fool, a godson enacting a demonized beggar, a self-abased counsellor, and later a blinded one. Lear’s descent into the natural world of his bodily self exposes him to the rigorous pain of these loyal subjects’ compassion, then to the fiery wheel of his daughter’s love, especially as he retrieves her body hanged on his behalf. King Lear is Shakespeare’s most challenging play, carefully and inspirationally composed, showing his most comprehensive vision of human nature. Prospero’s artfully managed tempest is a comforting postlude to the storm inflicted on Lear and his audiences. Like

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S­ penser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a mystical reflection on human nature as an imago Dei; but, as with Ariel’s haunting songs, Shakespeare enforces such meaning not by the intellectual authority of a controlled Platonism but by an intelligence working within passional experience, making The Tempest a compensatory retreat from Lear’s shattering darkness:

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To allow you to climb up to it by degrees, I first bade you to gnaw on the naked blind feeling of your own being until the time when by spiritual perseverance in this hidden work you might be made ready for the high feeling of God.5

Notes  1 In a deft Oedipal stroke ‘early modern’ severs the Tudor and Stuart poets, notably Shakespeare and Donne, from past authority and from an identity intrinsic to their own era, suborning them into a sophisticated ‘modernism’ whose purposeful indefinition often slithers into ‘postmodern’ parlour games. Classical Antiquity, the medieval era, indeed all that comes before, is now simply ‘premodern’ and need not concern us.  2 Notables include C.S. Lewis, Harry Berger, Jr, Bart von Es, Elizabeth Fowler, Andrew Hadfield.  3 See Bruce Danner, Edmund Spenser’s War on Lord Burghley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).  4 See the conclusion of Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New York: Norton, 2001).  5 The Book of Privy Counseling, ca. 1390.

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General index

Note: Key passages are in bold print for some entries Adelman, Janet 269n13, 273n66, n74, 274n76, nn79–80, 276n89 Alanus de Insulis 155n12, 184, 216, 227n17, 289, 294, 327n19 Allen, D.C. 67n83, 68n88, 127, 156n29, 227n9, 327n27 Alpers, Paul J. 175n12, 302, 332n96 Anderson, Judith 2, 44, 69n94, 70n98, 114n15, 189, 192, 206, 230n42, n45, 232n68, 236n107, n112, n114, 238n156, 286, 298, 327n21, 330nn79–80 Anderson, Ruth L. 1, 154n9, 155n10, 156n28, 196 Andrewes, Lancelot 169, 240–2, 251, 269n3, n22, 270n31 Aptekar, Jane 174n7, 230n42, n49, nn54–5 Apuleius, Lucius 41, 70nn105–6, 131 Aquinas, St Thomas 3, 24–7, 29, 47–8, 52–3, 58, 73n133, 74n146, 123–6, 128, 138, 155n13, n21, 157n32, n34, n41, 162, 187, 195, 229n35, 230nn37–8, 231n59, 233n74, n77, 234n84, 235n95, 236n108, 251, 254, 275n82, 302 Ariosto, Lodovico 4, 95, 130, 134, 204, 219, 220, 236nn102–5, 282, 299, 303 Aristotle 2–3, 24, 29–30, 35–9, 47–8, 52, 66n77, 78, 83–4, 87, 115n20, 118n59, 122–30, 154n5, 156n25, 158n58, 164, 192–3, 195, 219, 229n35, 231n59, n64, 232nn69–73, 282 Augustine, St Aurelius 24–5, 29, 47, 49, 52, 126, 128, 130, 138, 162, 164, 174,

174n3, 176n38, 181, 184–5, 187, 194, 219–20, 227n5, 228nn18, n20, 229n35, 232n68, 233n73, 234n90, 244, 262, 266, 269n15, 271n40, 279n124, 280n133, 283, 286, 294–5, 298, 302, 312, 327n24, 335n143, 341 Avicenna 123–4, 126–7, 154n5, 155n13, 195, 197, 200 Bacon, Francis 57, 77, 123–5, 154n7, n9, 155nn18–19 Baker, Herschel 1, 154n9, 156n25, n28, 196–7, 227n7 Bamborough, J.B. 1, 196 Barkan, Leonard 1, 68n83, 156n28, 326n16, 327n25 Baskerville, C.R. 1, 95, 121n100 Batman upon Bartolome (de Glanvilla, De Prop. Rerum) 86, 98, 108–9, 117nn48–9, 118n54, 119n68, n70, 120n90, n92, n94, 123–4, 126, 154n8, 155n15, 156nn24–5, n28, 157n32, 196, 234n84 Battenhouse, Roy A. 1, 28, 32–3, 58, 71n114, 139–40, 270n28, n34, n38, 271n49, 272n56, 308, 333n112, n120, 336n148 Bednarz, James P. 20, 45, 60n8, 70n104, 238n157 Bellamy, Elizabeth J. 1, 69n96, 73n137, 237n139, 299, 330n82 Bennett, Josephine Waters 150, 204, 236n102, n105, 280n130, 302, 332n95

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Benson, Pamela J. 189, 205, 236nn102–3, n106, Berger, Harry, Jr. 1, 73n139, 85, 122–3, 144, 155n10, 157n40, 192, 226, 228n21, 229n31, 231n58, 238n146, 258, 262, 273nn74–5, 277n96, 279n123, n125, 280n133, 298–9, 327n28, n30, 328n32, 329n51, n56, 330n78, n80, n82, 334n138 Bernard, John D. 236n11, 328n48 Bloom, Harold 68n8, 71n117, 94, 158n47, n49, 308, 332n11, 333n120, n122 Bloomfield, Morton 73n131, 297, 330n68 Boethius 260, 263, 267–8, 279n113, 283, 285–6, 289, 294 Bonaventura, St 184, 187–8, 195, 228n18, 229nn35–6, 230nn37–9, 234n90, 297–8, 302 Booth, Stephen 258, 277n95 Borresen, K.E. 229n35 Borris, Kenneth 69n94, 71n107, 237n141, n143, 238n144, nn146–7, Bradley, A.C. 168, 252, 258, 274n75, 277n94 Brentano, Franz 1, 114n5 Bright, Timothy 86, 98, 102, 123, 116n44, 117n48, 118n54, n66, 119n75, 154n7, n9, 155n21, 156n29, 164n5 Broaddus, James W. 1, 47, 189 Brooks-Davies, Douglas 70n107, 155n22, 231n58 Bryskett, Lodowyck 157n38 Bullough, Geoffrey 1, 310, 334n137 Burton, Ernest D. 2, 174n1 Burton, Robert 7, 18, 96, 102, 114n3, 117n45, 118n66, 123, 154n8, 155n11, n13, 156n25, n27, 196 Butler, Dom Cuthbert 157nn36–7, 239n90 Cain, Thomas H. 60n11, 326n6, 328n49 Calvin, John 2, 25–6, 66n69, 69n93, 74n147, 75n153, 82 Campbell, Lily B. 1, 77, 95, 115n32, 117n51, 120n93 Camporesi, Piero 80, 118n54, 119n68, 237n124 Carruthers, Mary 1, 131, 147, 157n44, 160n83 Carscallen, James 1, 85, 87, 115n22

Castiglione, Baldassar 47, 79, 234n90 Cavanagh, Sheila T. 81, 189, 230n46, n53, 236n113, 299, 330n82, 331n87 Cavell, Stanley 1, 158n47, 175n12, 266, 280n132 Cecil, William, 1st Baron Burghley 54, 56, 73n132, 150, 161n96, 339–40 Charron, Pierre 123, 125, 154n7, n9, 156n23, n25, 175n10, 182 Chaucer, Geoffrey 23, 64n46, 70n98, 95, 110–11, 127, 138, 156n27, 184, 193, 216, 231n60, 234n86, 250, 285–6, 294, 319, 327nn19–22, 339 Cheney, Donald 67n82 Cheney, Patrick 67n80, 76n166, 286, 327n21 Cicero 39, 47–8, 130, 162, 219, 233n74, 283, 286, 294 Coeffeteau, F.N. 86, 117n48, 154n6 Collins, Joseph 2, 160n89, 167, 231n58, 234nn88–9, 331n90 Conti, Natale (Natalis Comes) 20, 176n36, 286, 326nn13–14, 327n25, 329n52 Cornelius, Roberta D. 1, 156n27, 234n81, 232n65 Coughlan, Patricia 292, 329n51 Crooke, Helkiah 122, 154n8, 196 Crossett John M. 297, 330n74 Cullen, Patrick 231n64, 235nn93–4 Curry, Walter C. 176n33, 311, 334n132, n138, 335n145, 336n146 Curtius, Ernst Robert 294, 329n61 Dante Alighieri 26, 146, 155n21, 159n79, 187, 210, 234n86, n90, 246, 248, 251, 260, 270n35, 293–5, 297–8, 302, 329n59, 330nn69–75, 332n103, 337n185 Davies, Sir John 110, 120n97, 123, 129, 154n6, 156n25, n29, 175n10, 227n7 DeNeef, Leigh 227n11, 237n132, 238n148, n156, 330n77 Devereux, E.J. 72n125, 269n18, 336n148, n152 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex 40–5, 51, 53–4, 56–8, 71nn109–14, 75nn163– 5, 76nn166–75, 94, 150 Dollimore, Jon 262, 279n123, 280n128

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General index Donne, John 25, 65n68, 95, 156n27, n29, 164, 240 Draper, John W. 1, 77, 85, 95, 114n9, 115n19, n32, 116n43, 117nn50–1, 118n67, 119n76, 120n93, 121n101 Dronke, Peter 229n33, 326n16 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester 14, 40–2, 51, 339–40 Dughi, Thomas A. 51, 74n150 Du Laurens, Andre 123–4, 154nn8–9, 155nn18–19, 156n25, n29, 227n7 Dunlop, Alexander 48, 73n140, 74n148 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 11–21, 38–45, 50, 57, 60n11, 61nn17–20, 69n96, 71nn108–9, 72nn119–22, 73n132, 84, 89, 94, 131, 143, 148, 150, 160n85, 182, 190, 205, 207, 211, 215, 221, 224, 274n77, 283–6, 292–3, 299–301, 322–4, 331nn88–9, 339–40 Elton, William R. 120n93, 175n12, 176n29, 266, 270n34, 278n99, nn103–4, 280nn126–7, n130, n134, 281n137, 308 Elyot, Sir Thomas 81, 86, 96, 98, 117nn49– 50, 118n66, 119n70, 156n27, 196 Erasmus, Desiderius 41, 52, 70n104, 104, 116n35, 119n73, 138, 142, 150, 161n94, 164, 181, 184, 227n6, 263, 280nn126–7, n130, 286, 291, 320, 328n44 Esolen, Anthony M. 72n125, 286, 315, 327n21, 336n148 Everyman and Its Dutch Original, Elckerlijc 258, 266–7, 306–10 Felperin, Howard 2, 270n34, n39, 271n44, 272n59 Ferrante, Joan M. 157n36, 187, 227n15, 229nn33–4 Ficino, Marsilio 24, 130, 162, 194, 220, 313, 318, 335n145, 341 Filipczak, Zirka Z. 1, 77, 84, 115n24, 116n37 Fineman, Joel 1, 63n42, 275n82 Fletcher, Angus 188, 230n42, n43, n54, 237n141, 326n11 Fletcher, Phineas 118n54, 123, 155n13

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Fowler, Alastair 38, 68n87, 69n93, 75n166, 85, 87, 115n21, 128, 180–1, 227n12, 298, 328n36, 332n98 Fowler, Elizabeth 237n139, 299, 329n55 Freud, Anna 254, 274n80, 275n84, 277n90, 279n122 Freud, Sigmund 48, 107, 109, 113, 120n95, 121n112, 158n50, 251–7, 270n35, 272nn65–6, 274n77, 276n89, 277n90, 278n105, 279n124, 280n131 Fruen, Jeffrey P. 70n102, 331n83 Frye, Northrop 2, 85, 164, 174n4, 219, 246, 271n44, 272n66, 298, 311, 314, 321, 334nn133–4 Galen 79–80, 83–5, 89, 95–6, 100, 104, 111, 116n34, 117nn49–50, 118n56, n59, 119n68, 125, 156n23, 196 Girard, Rene 271n47, 275n82 Gless, Darryl 74n149, 142, 231n62, 270n36, 303, 327n28, 328n32 Goddard, Harold C. 71n114, 251, 272n56, 275n85 Goldberg, Jonathan 1, 119n69, 213, 235n98, 237n130 Green, Martin 71n113, 75n162 Greenblatt, Stephen 45, 121n106, 279n119, 332n109 Gregerson, Linda 1, 47, 76nn167–8 Guilfoyle, Cherrell 270n34, n38 Guillory, John 65n46 Hadfield, Andrew 71n107, n109, 74n148, 153, 207, 238n157, 329n55, 339–40 Hall, Grace 311–12, 315–16 Hamilton, A.C. 37, 229n28, 235, n97, 238n156 Hammer, Paul E.J. 71n109, nn112–13, 76n167 Hankins, John Erskine 1, 174n6, 192–3, 228nn23–5, 231nn58–9, 235n91, 329n58 Harvey, E.R. 1, 154n5, n9, 155n10, n13, n15, 156n23, nn25–6, 174n5, n7, 233n77, n79 Hawkins, Peter S. 294, 329n62, 330n64 Hawkins, Sherman 119n69, 120n93, 292, 326n12, 328n46

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Heale, Elizabeth 236n110, 237n123, 292, 294, 328n46, 329n60 Healy, Sister E.T. 229n35, 230n39 Heffner, Ray 75nn163–4 Hegel, Georg 27, 66n72 Heilman, R.B. 158n47, 252, 273n69, 278n100, 333n123 Heninger, S.K. 68n87, 69n93 Hieatt, A. Kent 1, 68n87, 182–3, 192–3, 226n2, 227n11, 235n94, 286, 327n21, 332n98 Hoeniger, F. David 1, 116n42, 118n59 Holahan, Michael 285, 327n18 Hooker, Richard 25, 65n68, 179, 182, 239 Horton, Ronald A. 38, 66n77, 298, 328n32, 330n80 Huarte, Juan de Dios Navarro 123–5, 138, 154n7, n9, 155n21, 156n25, 157n37, 184, 227n17 Hume, Anthea 76n172, 224, 238n150 Hunt, Maurice 41–2, 271n44, 334n129, 337n169 Hunter, Dianne 273n66, 274n76 Hunter, Robert G. 2, 140, 247, 269n8, 271n46, 336n148, n152, 337n178 Hyde, Thomas 176n35, 327n16 Johnstone, Nathan 159n74 Jones, Emrys 240, 247, 258, 260, 273nn71– 2, 277n94, n97 Jonson, Ben 45, 56, 73nn128–9, 77–8, 80, 82–4, 95–6, 110, 117nn46–7, 120n99, 121nn100–3, 306, 318 Jorgensen, Paul A. 1, 140, 158n47, 252, 258, 273n69, 275nn82–3, 277n96 Josephs, Lawrence 29, 66n74, 278n101 Jung, Carl G. 36, 78, 113, 115n20, 121n112 Kahn, Coppelia 119n69, 273n66, 274n79 Kaske, Carol V. 74n149, 87, 228n24, 236n111, n120, 238n144, 286–7, 303, 327n27, n30, 332n99 Kellogg, Robert & Oliver Steele 125, 155n20, n22, 226n2, 231n58, 233n74, n79 Kermode, Frank 2, 12, 237n141, 246, 271n44, 311, 317–19, 335n139, n145, 336n157, 337n165, n170, n174, n176, n185, 341

Kiefer, Frederick 267, 278nn102–3, 279n116 Kimbrough, Robert 114n10, 272n66, 274n79 Kirk, K. E. 2, 269n2, n23 Kirsch, Arthur 1, 35, 252, 264n20, 270nn36–7, 273n69, 276n89 Klein, Melanie 275n82, n84, 277n90, 279n122 Klibansky, R. (with E. Panofsky, F. Saxl) 100, 117n45, 118n55, nn61–2, 119n79, 120n84 Klubertanz, G. 1, 155n15 Knight, G.W. 2, 139, 158n46, 269n8, 314, 336n155 Knoepflmacher, U.C. 98, 118nn57–8, 120n93, n98 Kocher, Paul H. 1, 116n44, 175n12 Kohut,Heinz 262, 274n80, 276n89, 278n109, 279n124 Kuin, Roger 38, 70n97, 328n34 Langland, William 93, 124, 127–31, 156n27, 157nn34–9, 162, 179, 184–5, 193, 203, 228n20, 231n60, 234n85, n90, 298, 299 Leggatt, Alexander 62n31, 262, 279n123 Lemnius, Levinus 81, 86, 98, 102, 107–8, 117n50, 118n59, n66, 119n68, n75, 120nn81–5, n89, 121n104, 174n6 Leslie, Michael 73n138, 230n45, 331n89 Lethbridge, J.B. 68n91, 238n156, 291, 326n1, 328n36, n42, 329n54 Lewis, C.S. 196, 204, 229n28, n33, 235n97, 237n135, 294, 329n61 Loewald, Hans W. 272n65, 274n80, 277n90, 278n105, n109 Lorris, Guillaume de, & Jean de Meun 23, 64n46, 138, 184, 216, 285, 289, 294 Lottin, Odon 2, 157n32, 174n1, 234n84 Luther, Martin 2, 25, 66n69, 308 Lyly, John 13, 19–20, 63n40, 95, 110 Lyons, Bridget Gellert 1, 116n39, 117n45, 118n62 McAlindon, Thomas 118n63, 336n148, 337n167 McCabe, Richard A. 69n91, 224, 238nn145–50, 329n55

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General index MacCary, W.T. 63n42 McCoy, Richard C. 76n167, 334n124 McGinn, Bernard 2, 115n29, 236n108, 331n91 Mack, Maynard 113, 273n72, 278n100 McNamee, Maurice B. 47, 307, 332n110 Mallette, Richard 70n101, 72n120, 74n150, 76n170, 237n141 Mallin, Eric S. 42, 71n113 Malory, Sir Thomas 180, 219, 220, 299 Manley, Lawrence 283, 294, 326n5, 329n62, 330n64 Marcus, Leah S. 72n119 Marlowe, Christopher 19n37, 45, 53, 63n40, 83 Mary Queen of Scots 221–4 Mary, the Virgin 214, 218, 229n33, 237n121 Mebane, John S. 314, 317, 335n138, n140, 336n145, n148, 337n170 Miller, David Lee 1, 68n91, 73n139, 75n165, 116n41, 159n79, 236n115, 238n143 Mills, Jerry Leath 122, 125, 238n156 Milton, John 23, 45, 48, 64n46, 73n130, 93, 95, 138, 142–3, 156n29, 158n58, 180, 184, 193, 227n7, 231n60, 235n93, 286, 302, 327n24 Milward, Peter 270n34, 271n44, 315, 336n161 Montaigne, Michel de 25, 65n68, 83, 151–2, 161n94, n97, 280n127, n130 Montrose, Louis Adrian 12, 274n77, 328n47 Moore, Edward 330n73 Morgan, Gerald 66n77, 67n82, 237n138 Mowat, Barbara 312, 317, 335nn138–9 Muir, Kenneth 252, 271n44, 272n61, 273n69, n73 Nashe, Thomas 2, 11, 36, 95, 110 Nelson, William 49, 192, 231nn58–9 Neuse, Richard 153, 161n99, 192, 208 Nohrnberg, James 1, 38, 70n99, n107, 74n149, 85, 87, 95, 176n35, 209, 228nn22–5, 229n30, 231n59, 234n86, 235n97, 236nn110–11, n120, 237n123, n135, n143,

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238n144, n146, 326n15, 327nn27–8, 329n58, n63, 330n76, n81, 335n141 Nuttall, A.D. 1, 131–2, 158nn47–8, 337n184 O’Donovan, Oliver 1, 75n158, 279n124 Origen of Alexandria 138, 164, 181, 184, 227n4, 231n31 Ornston, Darius 275n84, 279n122 Ovid 16, 26, 36, 40, 67n80, n83, 83, 130–1, 141, 174, 204, 216, 220, 285, 289, 301, 318 Paglia, Camille 13, 36, 60n15, 62n28 Panofsky, Erwin 100, 119n72, 176n36, 234n87 Paster, Gail Kern 1, 77–85, 108, 114n1, n13, 118n54, n59, 329n63 Pelikan, Jaroslav 294, 329n62 Petrarch, Francis 41, 48, 130, 146, 158n45, 206, 210, 224, 246 Plato 2, 13–14, 16, 23–4, 35–9, 48, 62n25, 64n46, 65n52, 66n77, 69n93, 70n98, n103, 78, 82, 83, 87, 115n31, 122–30, 138, 147, 157n44, 162, 192–203, 231n59, n61, nn64–5, 232nn66–8, n71, 233n73, nn76–7, 234n90, 238n144, 283, 294, 340–1 Plotinus 24, 220, 313, 318, 326n4, 328n45 Pope, Elizabeth M. 158n58, 231n64, 235n93 Potter, Robert 306, 332n108 Prescott, Anne Lake 76n166, 299, 331n85 Primaudaye, Pierre de la 3, 24–5, 52, 86, 98, 116n44, 117n48, 118n54, n59, n66, 123–5, 154n8, 155n21, 162, 164, 174nn8–9, 274n77 Problems of Aristotle, The XXX.i 100, 115n18, 118nn61–2 Prosser, Eleanor 270n38, 308, 332n109, 333n112, n120 Pugh, Syrithe 67n80, 327n30 Quitslund, Jon A. 38, 68n83, 238n144 Rajan, Balachandra 326n1 Raleigh, Sir Walter 11, 56, 138, 184, 224–5, 227n17, 238n153, nn155–7 Rebhorn, Wayne 43, 71n114, 76n169

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Redwine, James D. 1, 120n99 Reid, Robert L. 1, 2, 231n63 Richard of St. Victor 88–9, 297–8 Ricoeur, Paul 22, 63n43, 258, 279n112 Riddell, James A. 1, 95, 120n99 Robertson, D.W. 157n36, 158n58, 228n18, 231n64 Robertson, David 1, 73n130 Robin, P.A. 1, 156n23, n25 Roche, Thomas P., Jr. 1, 62n30, 114n7, 131, 159n80, 176n35, 182–3, 212, 214, 227n11, 235n97, 236n103, n109, 237n121, n133, n136 Rose, Mark 119n71, 278n106 Rosenau, Helen 294, 329n62 Schafer, Jürgen 1, 95, 117nn49–50, 121n107 Schaner, Erich 117n50 Schiesari, Juliana 1, 114n14, 118n61 Schleiner, Winfried 100, 117n45, 118n62 Schmidgall, Gary 317, 335n144, 336n157 Schoenfeldt, Michael 1, 77 School of Salernum, The 86, 98–9, 101–4, 106–7, 109, 117n48, n50 Shaheen, Naseeb 330n65, 336n164 Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well 27, 44, 80, 94, 240, 243, 249 Antony & Cleopatra 29, 34–5, 44, 53, 57–9, 72, 80, 82–5, 93–4, 97, 118, 139–40, 244, 247–8, 250–1 As You Like It 35, 44, 72, 80, 84, 94, 96–7, 118, 243, 249, 251 The Comedy of Errors 12, 43, 118, 243 Coriolanus 22, 28–9, 45, 53, 57–8, 94, 97, 101–2, 127, 247, 249, 253 Cymbeline 27, 80, 140, 247, 249–50, 310 Hamlet 26, 32–3, 35, 45, 53–4, 57–9, 80, 82–5, 93, 96–7, 134–7, 150–2, 164, 169–70, 244–50, 253, 277, 304–10, 341 Henry IV 1–2 3, 26, 28, 35, 42–5, 56–8, 80–3, 85, 93–113, 134, 242–3, 247 Henry V 42, 53, 97, 110–13, 134, 249 Henry VI 1–3 28, 53–4, 249, 259 Henry VIII 140, 241 Julius Caesar 28–32, 43, 45, 57–8, 140, 247

King Lear 1, 3, 26, 33–5, 54, 57–9, 82–4, 94–7, 113, 130, 134–41, 151–3, 170–1, 242–51, 258–68, 304–10, 341–2 Love’s Labour’s Lost 12, 43, 55, 243 Macbeth 22, 28–9, 44–5, 53, 58, 82–3, 138–41, 144–7, 240, 247–8, 251–7, 258–68 Measure for Measure 44, 172, 246, 250 The Merchant of Venice 32, 44, 53, 71, 72, 75, 83–4, 94, 134, 243, 246–7, 250 The Merry Wives of Windsor 53, 110–11 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 11–21, 35, 40–5, 53, 58, 80–3, 85, 93, 241, 246–7 Much Ado about Nothing 35, 44, 53, 58, 84–5, 97, 118, 140, 151, 243 Othello 27, 33–4, 44–5, 52, 57–8, 80, 83, 97, 134, 140, 144–7, 151, 169–70, 244–5, 247–8, 251 Pericles 44, 80, 240, 247, 251, 310 Richard II 13, 30, 42, 56, 134, 139, 248, 259 Richard III 27–8, 53, 82, 96, 134, 240, 248–9 Romeo and Juliet 3, 13, 21, 26, 53, 58, 79–80, 85, 97, 102, 132–4, 246–8 Sonnets 1, 3, 22–3, 26, 54, 62, 175 The Taming of the Shrew 12, 35, 43–4, 53, 58, 77, 80–4, 96, 102, 118, 243, 247 The Tempest 26, 34–5, 44–5, 53, 72, 80, 82–3, 97, 139, 152–3, 172–3, 240, 245–51, 269, 310–21, 341–2 Timon of Athens 58, 97 Titus Andronicus 13, 26, 45, 53, 247, 249 Troilus and Cressida 26, 43, 45, 57, 140 Twelfth Night 26, 32, 44, 52, 72, 80, 98, 134, 243, 249 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 12, 26–7, 43, 53, 134, 140, 243 Venus and Adonis 30, 54 The Winter’s Tale 239–51, 310 Shenk, Robert 1, 120n99 Sidney, Sir Phillip 23, 45, 51, 53, 56, 63n44, 72n127, 192 Sirluck, Ernest 192–3, 231n58 Slover, George 314, 336n148

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General index Snyder, Susan 258, 277n95, 278n99 Soellner, Rolf 1, 117n48, 158n47, 278n103, 280nn126–7, 281n140, 317, 337n170 Spenser, Edmund Amoretti 37, 48, 156 Colin Clouts Come Home Again 153 Epithalamion 37 The Faerie Queene Book 1 38–40, 48–52, 54, 59, 90–3, 121–30, 179–203, 340 Book 2 18, 38–9, 44, 46–9, 82, 84–90, 121–30, 142–4, 179–203 Book 3 17, 23, 36, 38–9, 47–8, 54, 134, 204–20, 339 Book 4 17, 38, 204–20, 339 Book 5 38–40, 48, 54, 59, 74, 220–2, 304 Book 6 17–18, 38–40, 54, 59, 74, 94, 153, 220–6, 304, 339 Book 7 (Mutabilitie Cantos) 38, 40 Books 1–6 and 7–12 282–97 The Fowre Hymnes 1, 57, 76, 132, 162, 234, 285, 287–9, 297–8 Mother Hubbards Tale 339 Prothalamion 57, 76 The Ruines of Time 292 The Shepheardes Calender 1, 3, 45, 72, 153, 207, 290, 339 Teares of the Muses 20, 153 A Vewe of the Present State of Ireland 56, 191, 284, 330 Steele, Oliver see Kellogg, Robert Steppat, Michael 282, 326nn2–3 Still, Colin 311, 334n131 Stump, Donald 73n131, n139, 159n81, 224, 238n145, n150, 297, 330n74 Taylor, Gary 277n97, 278n100 Temkin, Oswei 1, 116n42 Teskey, Gordon 69n94, 327n25 Tonkin, Humphrey 68n90, 70n100, 71n107, 238n146, 283 Traub, Valerie 63n42, 64n46 Trevor, Douglas 1, 11, 74n144, 115n18, 116n39 Tuve, Rosamund 38, 69n94, 229n27

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Underhill, Evelyn 157n37, 234n89 Vendler, Helen 66n71 Verbeke, G. 1, 174n1, n5 Virgil 11, 36, 44, 47, 66n80, n83, 72n124, 130–1, 174, 182, 220, 227n9, 284, 286, 299, 302–3, 312, 319, 337n185 Walkington, Thomas 86, 96, 107–9, 117n48, 118n54, n59, 119n68, n75, 120n82, n84, n90, n94, 123, 154n7 Wall, John N. 74n150, 297, 330n67 Walls, Kathryn 214, 228n19, 229nn28–9 Watson, Robert N. 120n87, 121n112, 276n86, 333n117 Weatherby, Harold L. 74n149, 326n15, 330n76 Weiss, Paul 36–7, 68n85, 115n20, 272n63 Wells, Robin Headlam 60n11, 326n10, 328n32, n44, 331n85 West, Robert H. 2, 176n33, n37, 317, 334n138, 337n175 Wilde, Oscar 21, 140 Williams, George Walton 275n85, 276n86, 278n99, 279n117, 281n137 Williams, Kathleen 226n2, 228n25, 230n49 Wiltenberg, Robert 1, 64n46, 72n124, 73n129 Wind, Edgar 209, 212, 214, 224, 236n110, n119, 237n129, 238n154, 279n116, 326n16, 337n180 Wofford, Susanne Lindgren 189, 206, 331n87 Wolfson, H.A. 119n74, 139 Woodhouse, A.S.P. 288, 303, 327n31 Wright, Thomas 86, 116n44, 117n48, 118n54, 123, 154n6, n8 Wriothesley, Henry, Earl of Southampton 53–7, 75n162 Yates, Frances A. 1, 131, 147, 157n44, 160n83, 335n145 Young, David 62n31, 317, 333n123, 334nn137–8 Zweig, Paul 1, 23–4, 34, 66n76

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Index of themes and symbols

Note: Key passages are in bold print for some entries. Adam, Eve, Abel (or Adam, Eve, snake) 179–92 allegory 2, 13, 15, 35, 44, 71n118, 122, 130 androgyny (hermaphrodite, gender) 63n43, 93–4, 123, 142, 157n42, 168, 176n21, 182–3, 187–92, 201–20, 229nn33–36, 230nn37–53, 252–7, 274n77, 294, 299 animals 70nn105–7, 81, 161n96, 182, 189–90, 255–7, 284, 337n185, 340 arms, armor, militancy 16–17, 48, 51–2, 54, 91, 93–4, 123, 133, 142, 157n42, 160n84, 168, 17 179, 185, 189, 205, 230nn44–8, 290–1, 300, 304–5 art as architecture (figurative house, ruins) 2–3, 19–31, 37–8, 40, 44–5, 49, 67n82, 77, 89, 91–2, 122–31, 145, 147, 149, 152–3, 157n44, 161n99, 162–3, 194, 292 art as performing, staging 13, 83, 95, 105, 112, 133–4, 137, 144–7, 149, 157n44, 161n99, 162–3, 194, 261, 292, 310–21 Arthur 38–40, 44, 50–1, 69n94, 89–95, 128–30, 158n54, 180, 192, 205, 207–12, 221–6, 287, 290, 296–7, 328n33 ascesis Shakespearean self-stripping 170–1, 258–68, 302, 306 Spenserian self-abnegation 23, 46–52, 58–9, 89, 91, 93–4, 134, 136, 159n79, 160n84, 198–9, 208, 210, 215

being, becoming, ontology 4, 13, 79, 147, 162–74 see also epiphany Bible 147, 188, 241–3, 287, 297–304, 310–21, 330n65, 331n92 Acts 66n76, 316 Colossians 229n32, 231n61, 234n82, 333n113 Corinthians 192, 197, 231n61, 246, 315 Ephesians 51, 229n32, 230n44, 231n61, 234n82, 316 Exodus 126, 313, 315–6 Ezekiel 46, 85, 115n20, 121n112, 267, 283, 294, 297–8, 330n75 Galatians 333n113 Genesis 23, 64n46, 72n118, 73n130, 89, 138, 142–4, 179–85, 193–4, 200–3, 227n17, 316 Hebrews 230n44, 296 Isaiah 37, 72n25, 283, 294–6, 302–4, 315 James 251, 330n65 Job 265, 319 John 25, 51, 65n66, 230n44, 315–16 Luke 25, 191, 235n93, 307, 315–16 Matthew 87, 126, 137, 147, 231n61, 235n93, 257, 307–8, 315, 333n120 Psalms 283, 294, 296, 315 Revelation 51–2, 59, 62n24, 74nn149– 50, 85, 121n112, 199–200, 228nn2– 3, 230n44, 231n61, 234n89, 235n91, 268n1, 283, 294–8, 330n75 Romans 89, 229n32, 330n65 Timothy 169, 269n22

Index of themes and symbols

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Blake’s zoas as fourfold human nature 36–7, 85, 93, 113, 131n112 body 3, 16, 19–21, 133–7, 146, 183, 190–6, 208, 224, 228nn23–4, 251–7, 305, 340–2 chiasmus 5–6, 131, 158n53, 163, 259 Christ/church 2, 4, 36–40, 43–4, 49, 52, 63n43, 77–9, 83–4, 87–9, 92, 107, 111, 116n40, 126–7, 129–30, 136, 138, 143, 169, 172n125, 179–203, 214–15, 222–3, 228n23, 239–51, 253, 283, 310–21 city (Cleopolis, Troynovant, New Jerusalem) 50–1, 62n24, 283, 286, 293–7 closure in The Faerie Queene 6, 37–40, 204, 220–6, 282–304 Colin Clout 13, 207–8 conscience 18, 37, 79, 83, 129, 165, 254, 264, 274n77, 284, 307, 310 demons, Satan 87, 90–1, 93–4, 200, 254, 260–4, 279nn118–21, 286–7, 289 descent 18, 37, 39, 69n94, 74n157, 142, 148, 158n56, 160n84, 165, 215, 220, 222–3, 286, 293, 298, 301, 303 dilation (descent into materialism and plurality) 39, 69n94, 70n99, n103, 74n151, 148, 165, 217, 222, 283, 303, 341 disguise 190, 206, 219–20 dramaturgy, Shakespearean (five acts in three chiastic cycles) 37, 66n78, 134, 163, 251–68, 305–6 dreams 131, 166–7, 175nn14–16, Eden 14, 100, 138, 142, 187, 194, 201–3, 216 epic 2, 11, 14, 90, 94–5, 113, 121n112, 209, 219, 287, 307, epiphany Shakespearean (experiential, passional) 5, 14, 21, 35–6, 47, 59, 131–3, 136–7, 151, 162–74, 239–51, 261–8, 268nn1–2, 271nn44–53, 272nn54– 64, 307, 310–21 Spenserian (authoritative, intellective) 14, 36, 47, 59, 143–4, 162–74, 197–203, 212, 214, 218–19, 286–9, 293–304

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Ezekiel (enwheeled torah, four cherubs, merkavah vision of God enthroned) 267, 281n139 fairies (Spenser’s idealization vs. Shakespeare’s folk fairies) 2, 14–21, 49, 62nn27–32, 89, 173, 288–9, 303, 306, 321–2 glory (Gloriana) 38–41, 44, 89, 180, 188, 223, 225–6 God (Trinity, creation, providence, atonement) 159n82, 162–74, 180, 184, 189–90, 199–200, 205, 212, 253, 258, 261, 265–8, 280nn129–30, 282–304, 310–21 gods, pagan 6, 11, 13–14, 36, 40–1, 44, 48, 50, 58–9, 62n28, 67n83, 68n88, 105, 108, 140–1, 146–7, 173, 176nn35–6, 190–1, 197–9, 204, 207, 211, 215–19, 239, 282–95, 310–14 grace (vs. nature) 67n82, 75n160, 209–17, 287–8, 303, 328n32 332nn100–1 hierarchy, the problem of 3–5, 14, 35–6, 44, 51, 115n30, 131, 138, 141–4, 158n53, 162–4, 168, 207, 222–3, 288–9, 298 honour 73n134, 101, 114n8, 208–9, 224, 235n94 imago Dei 4, 13, 23, 37, 60n11, 74n146, 78–9, 87, 92, 142, 165–9, 179–203, 214, 216, 218–19, 229n35, 261, 299, 342 materialism 77–9, 83–5, 87, 215, 225–6, 282, 303, 318 metamorphosis (mutability, change) 16, 131–7, 167–9, 204–5 modernism 78, 282 mystic order (of soul, perception, art, allegory) 2, 14, 89, 92–4, 122–3, 126–7, 129–31, 136, 142, 149, 157n37, 159n75, 162–74, 179–203, 205, 231nn61–3, 232n67, 234nn85–6, n88, 287, 294–5, 297, 299–304, 309, 331nn83–6, nn90–3, 332n94

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352

Index of themes and symbols

narcissism 22–4, 26–8, 30, 33, 48, 53–5, 63n42, 64nn46–7, 73n137, 75n161, 300 see also self-love; Kohut, Heinz (in General index) Neoplatonism (triads, infolding, unfolding) 20, 36, 67n83, 84, 92, 193, 197–200, 206, 209–13, 216–18, 233n80, 236nn110–11, n120, 238n144, 313–14, 318, 319 numerology 37, 63n39, 68n87, 122, 127, 154n2, 162, 167, 175n18, 194–7, 289–90, 294, 298, 303 pastoral 283, 291–4 patronage 14, 38, 54–7, 60n11 psychoanalytic functions 78, 131–7, 144–7, 251–68 dissociation (doubling, multi-personae, splitting) 207, 244, 254–6, 261–5 identity formation 13, 35–6, 46, 52, 79, 132, 163–9, 260–8 identity loss (gender stereotyping, reversal, transference) 252–9, 264 introjection (internalization, identification) 256–7, 265–8, 277nn90–2, 280n131 narcissism and self-love 252–7, 259–60, 264–8, 276n84 Oedipal and pre-Oedipal conflict 252–4, 256, 258–60 projection and projective identification 254–6, 261–5, 275nn84–5, 277nn86–7



repetition compulsion 133, 252, 259, 278n105 sublimation 252–4, 259–60 superego-formation 252–4, 259–60 vagina dentata and penis dentata 256–7, 265–6, 277n92

readiness/ripeness for summons (Everyman, Hamlet, Lear) 79, 307–10, 324–5 salvage man, salvage nation; satyrs 40–1, 69n95, 70n107, 160n87, 191–2, 209, 219, 221, 225–6, 285, 340 self-love (contrary traditions) 2–3, 13, 21–35, 45–59, 63nn42–4, 64nn45–6, 65nn47–52, 133, 239–68 sins, seven capital (Gregory, Dante, Spenser) 38, 52, 58, 73n131, n133, 82, 84, 87–9, 142–4, 148, 159n76, 193–4, 223, 307–9, 321 temptation (Spenser’s Edenic hierarchy, Shakespeare’s depth psychology) 3, 87, 137–47, 193–4, 201–2, 235n93, n95 virtues (Spenserian design) Christian-Platonic triadic hierarchy 39–40, 70nn94–9, n103, 74n146, n151, 79, 89, 131, 141, 148–9, 158n53, n56, 179–203, 297–304 transcendent–immanent complements 49–52, 141, 173, 180–8, 192–203, 204–26, 286–9, 297–304