Spenserian Moments 9780674243514

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SPENSERIAN MOMENTS

SPENSERIAN MOMENTS ' Gordon Teskey

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts London, England 2019

Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Cover illustration: The Duchess of Devonshire as Cynthia from Spenser’s The Faerie Queen by Maria Hadfield Cosway © The Athenaeum, Chatsworth House (Devon­ shire Collection) Cover design: Lisa Roberts 9780674243521 (EPUB) 9780674243538 (MOBI) 9780674243514 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Teskey, Gordon, 1953–­author. Title: Spenserian moments / Gordon Teskey. Description: Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. Identifiers: LCCN 2019016963 | ISBN 9780674988446 Subjects: LCSH: Spenser, Edmund, 1552? –1599. Faerie queene. | Allegory. | Epic poetry, English—­History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR2358 .T47 2019 | DDC 821 / .3—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2019016963

In Memoriam Donald Cuthbert Teskey 1925–2011 RCAF 1943–1945

Contents

Note on References, Texts, and Quotations   ix Introduction

1

PA R T O N E : O N S P E N S E R 1 Other Poets

21

2 ­Toward Fairy Land

51

3 In Ireland

92

4 A Survey of The Faerie Queene

129

PA R T T W O : O N A L L E G O R Y 5 Allegory in The Faerie Queene

149

6 For a General Theory of Allegory

170

7 Death in an Allegory

199

8 Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh

213

9 Allegory and Re­nais­sance Critical Theory

228

10 A Field Theory of Allegory

241

PA R T T H R E E : O N T H I N K I N G 11 From Moment to Moment

265

12 Thinking Moments in The Faerie Queene

285

viii   Contents

13 Courtesy and Thinking

310

14 The Thinking of History in Spenserian Romance

327

PA R T F O U R : O N C H A N G E 15 Colonial Allegories in Paris

345

16 Courtesy and the Graces

368

17 Night Thoughts on Mutability

398

18 Mutability Ascendant

415

Afterword: The Colossi of Memnon

435

Notes   451 Acknowl­edgments   511 Credits   515 Index   517

Note on References, Texts, and Quotations

Textual references in this study are drawn from The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, text ed. Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki, rev. 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2007); The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and Ernest de Sélincourt (1912; repr., London: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1960); Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard Mc­ Cabe (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin, 1999); and The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al., 11 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), this last for its analyses of the plan and conduct of each book of The Faerie Queene and for its invaluable se­lections of Spenser criticism from the eigh­teenth to the ­earlier twen­ tieth centuries. For references to Spenser’s fascinating prose work A View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland (composed around 1595, not published u ­ ntil 1633), currently being edited by Elizabeth Fowler, I have used the tenth volume of the Variorum edition but modernized spelling and punctuation (hence View, not Vewe). I have also consulted W. L. Renwick’s notes, in A View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland by Edmund Spenser (1934; repr., Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1970); for specialists an indispensable modern edition is that of Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, Edmund Spenser: A View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). I have not, however, modernized spelling and punctuation of the other prose work by Spenser cited often in this study: the Letter to Raleigh, which ix

x   Note on References, Texts, and Quotations

accompanied the first installment (1590) of The Faerie Queene but was not printed with the second installment (1596). “A Letter of the Authors ex­ pounding his ­whole intention in the course of this worke: which for that it giveth ­g reat light to the Reader, for the better understanding is hereunto annexed.” In modern editions, as in the folio edition of The Faerie Queene that appeared in 1609, a de­cade ­after the poet’s death, the Letter to Raleigh follows the seventh book of The Faerie Queene and is brief enough not to require more detailed citation. In the Hamilton edition it appears on pp. 714–18; in the Smith and De Selincourt edition, pp. 407–8. For quotations of Spenser’s poetry I make the usual, modern adjustments of j to i and v to u. I also supply a grave accent for final -­èd when this syllable is sounded. Although I have been conservative in preserving punctuation and capitalizations, I have trusted common sense in places where ­these are merely obtrusive, for example, when a comma is placed at the end of a line before an en­ jambment. A new, multivolume edition of all Spenser’s works is being prepared by Oxford University Press, the first since the Variorum. Recent statistical analyses of Spenser’s orthography suggest it does not vary so far as was formerly supposed from the norm in his day (when spelling was not formally standardized). Such results may jus­ tify some modernization in the f­ uture. Care must still be used b ­ ecause Spenser did alter the spelling of words to draw out secondary mean­ ings and to enliven what he supposed to be deeper etymological truths, on the very freewheeling model of Plato’s Cratylus. For this aspect of Spenser’s poetry see what is one of the most widely cited articles on Spenser in the past half ­century, Martha Craig’s “The Secret Wit of Spenser’s Language,” in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul J. Alpers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 447–72. See also Catherine Nicholson, “Old Spelling and the Forging of Spens­ er’s Readers,” Modern Language Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2017): 173–204; and Dorothy Stephens, “Spenser’s Language(s): Linguistic Theory and Po­ etic Diction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 20. Such Crat­ ylan etymologizing was accomplished by spelling a word so that older and more venerable meanings, usually from ancient Greek and Latin, could show through.

Note on References, Texts, and Quotations  xi

If Spenser’s orthography is not so exceptional as was once supposed, his use of ostentatiously archaic language is indeed a mark of his style, as was noted by contemporaries no less judicious than Sir Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson, neither of whom approved. It is not always easy to dis­ tinguish between conventional orthography and enriched semantic ref­ erence for the sake of what Catherine Nicholson, in Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the En­glish Re­nais­sance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), has called “innovative strangeness.” In striving to enrich the word itself for further meaning, however, Spenser was not striving for newness—­innovation was not a positive word in his day—­but for connection with the past. That connection was in the first place intended to be with the En­glish poetic tradition reaching back two centuries to the poet’s acknowledged master, Chaucer, whom he called a “well of En­glish undefyled” (FQ IV.ii.32). But, as mentioned, Spenser was also striving for enrichment by the ancient languages, by the ancient epic poets, Homer and Virgil, and by phi­los­o­phers, especially Aristotle, whom the poet would have studied at Cambridge—­and of course Plato, the phi­ los­o­pher of poets. In the twentieth c­ entury such resonant use of language became common in poetry again, as it did in the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger and the prose works of James Joyce, especially Finnegans Wake, surely the most intensely etymological creative work ever. Spenser, how­ ever, was the first En­glish poet to do this, and it is at the level of language—­language understood as still being haunted by long-­occluded, residual meanings—­that he was the ­father of Milton. Such a use of lan­ guage is obviously well suited to the kind of active reading that is encour­ aged by allegory, as urged by Maureen Quilligan in The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). Shortly ­after it appeared I had the good fortune to read Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of “Finnegans Wake” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Worth consulting separately is Norris’s “The Consequence of Deconstruction: A Technical Perspective of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake,” ELH 41, no. 1 (1974): 130–48. It is not only in this ­matter of a destabilized lan­ guage that in striving to be more ancient and original than his contem­ poraries Spenser was actually being more modern.

xii   Note on References, Texts, and Quotations

Another reason to use caution when modernizing the text of The Faerie Queene is that Spenser appears to have collaborated with the printers— as he did formerly with The Shepheardes Calender—to manage the appear­ ance of the poem on the page. As splendid as Spenser’s acoustical effects are—­the famous “­music” of his verse—­his two greatest works are meant also for the eye, something that cannot be said ­either of Shakespeare or of Milton, hence the elegant layout of the individual stanzas of The Faerie Queene—­the ­middle seven lines of each stanza being carefully in­ dented—­the ornamental framing of the ballad-­measure canto-­headings, which are in italics, and the Letter to Raleigh. Spenser scholarship following the Variorum edition of the 1930s has been most helpfully or­ga­nized and abstracted in Foster Provost and Waldo F. McNeir’s Edmund Spenser: An Annotated Bibliography, 1937–1972 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1975). For work a­ fter 1972, see the ­r unning annotated bibliography in Spenser Newsletter, ­later the Spenser Review, which continues to this day. Like all Spenserians I make frequent use of the monumental Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). The same is true for Andrew Hadfield’s Edmund Spenser: A Life (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2012), a work that w ­ ill have changed the field of Spenser studies more than we can know at the pre­sent. I recom­ mend Willy Maley’s A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan; Lanham, MD: Barnes and Noble, 1994). I have long been and am t­ oday grateful for the online Spenser Review and its pre­de­ces­sor, the Spenser Newsletter, most recently edited by David Lee Miller, now by Jane Grogan and Andrew Hadfield; and for the regular volumes of Spenser Studies, recently edited by Andrew Escobedo and now by Susannah Monta and Bill Oram. References to The Faerie Queene (abbreviated FQ in citations) are in tra­ ditional form, denoting books in Roman upper-­case numerals, cantos in Roman lower-­case numerals, and stanzas by Arabic number. For ex­ ample, III.ii.4 means Book Three, canto two, stanza four. For proems, the word “proem” appears where lower-­case Roman numerals other­wise would, for example, II.proem.2. The word proem, denoting the introduc­ tory passages to each book of The Faerie Queene, is not used by Spenser himself and began to be applied to ­these passages in the eigh­teenth ­century. In Greek, the οἶμος ἀοιδῆς (oimos aoidês) is the pathway of song.

Note on References, Texts, and Quotations  xiii

A prooimion, literally a preface, is that which comes before or leads into a pathway or a road, the image of a long road and meandering path being one Spenser used of his own work. See the first stanza of the proem to Book Six, beginning, “The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde,  / In this delightfull land of Faery.” References to The Shepheardes Calender are by month and line number.

Ich hatte nichts und doch genug: Den Drang nach Wahrheit und die Lust am Trug. I had nothing and yet enough: the urge ­toward truth and the delight in illusion. —­Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Denken ist nicht die geistige Reproduktion dessen, was ohnehin ist. . . . ​ Offenes Denken weist über sich hinaus. Thinking is not the ­mental copying of what already exists. . . . ​ Open thinking points beyond itself. —­T. W. Adorno

SPENSERIAN MOMENTS

Introduction

about poetry as improvisation, in par­tic­u­lar, impro­ vised thinking. That is what is meant by the phrase in the second of its epigraphs, from T. W. Adorno: “open thinking.” The first epigraph, from Goethe’s Faust, suggests that if the poet—­for it is a poet that speaks—is to be drawn ­toward original truth by such thinking, it ­w ill be necessary to strike an alliance with what is arguably the greatest as well as the oldest power of the ­human mind and the most delightful: the use of lan­ guage for constructing imaginative illusion, that is, poetry. Open thinking does not, so to speak, look back at what already exists and strive to represent it in thought. Instead, it goes forward seeking t­ hose thoughts that are not yet in the world ­because they lie in the ­future of thinking, as coming moments of poetic truth. Such moments are not secondary repre­sen­ta­tions of what is more impor­tant than themselves; they arise into the world as energetic powers—­slight at the outset, perhaps, but real and growing in force—to change the world by changing how we feel and act. When a poet thinks in this way in the course of an emerging long poem, it becomes hard if not impossible to tell, to distinguish, when at any moment the truth is being gradually revealed—­the coming truth of the new thought—­and when the pleasures of illusion, of extravagant fantasy, are being indulged. For delight in illusion—­classically taken to be the opposite of truth—is the very means by which the truth of poetry is thought. Such a view is consistent with a resonant, open-­tuning sense of the word allegory as poetry that points beyond itself. T HIS IS A BOOK

1

2  S P E N S E R I A N

MOMENTS

The principal object of study in this book or, let us say, its principal concern, since treating poems only as objects of cognition is what I would argue against, is Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which is about three times the length of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and, unlike Paradise Lost, capable of indefinite extension, like the opening spiral of a nautilus shell. I prefer therefore to think of this work of Spenser’s not as a poem, a word that suggests an object that exists out of time, having been put to­ gether and fashioned by craft—or, as Spenser would say, framed—­but rather as an ongoing creative proj­ect into which the unpredictable en­ ters with time. Into such ongoing work the poet is “thrown forward,” as the word proj­ect implies, although not without a rough and inaccurate map—­based, as we ­shall see, on the Letter to Raleigh but subject to con­ tinual revision—­plus a handful of preconceptions and themes, practical equipment for a long journey of discovery. About two-­thirds of the chapters that follow on Spenser’s Faerie Queene ­were written as essays at vari­ous times over the past three de­cades and revised ­later in varying degrees, during which time I have also been teaching his poetry. It would be neither true nor probable for me to claim that I had a single, governing idea in mind over such a long period; nor have I been able altogether to avoid a certain amount of repetition, and for the same reason, the emergence of ­these studies in time and their arising by occasion. Even so—­frail or ingenious as the excuse may ­appear—it would not be faithful to the complexity of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, to its polysemous energies opening upon so many interpretative fields, to advance an entirely consistent argument in which ­every part efficiently contributes to the whole—in other words, an argument that exists out of time, which is to say, at only one arrested moment in time. But one thematic consistency can perhaps be claimed for ­these essays. I have always been interested in Spenser for reasons somewhat apart from how he reflects the society and politics of his own time and there­ fore anticipates ours, according to the new historicist paradigm still pre­ dominating in the field of Re­nais­sance literary studies and likely, for good reasons, to do so for the indefinite ­future. I have, however, long been interested in Spenser, almost from the beginning, in relation to aesthetic questions commonly associated with modern poetry and art and with modern m ­ usic. Largely ­because of the institution of the public

Introduction  3

museum and festivals such as the Venice Biennale, to say nothing of the academic environment for musical composition, which throws more emphasis on theory, attention to art in our culture has been decentered from the artwork as the ­thing in itself and displaced into the region of experiences around it, in short, into its field. The absurdities and ex­ cesses into which the con­temporary arts occasionally stray are by-­ products of a deeper re­orientation of art from its being a ­thing to be ap­ preciated aesthetically for its craft, on analogy to the perception of objects (aisthêsis, “perception”), to its being only the initiative for a cer­ tain kind of thinking that is closer to ritual initiation than to logic. Through such experiences the peculiar conditions of modern art awaken some very ancient, indeed immemorial questions connecting poetry with magical incantation, spellbinding enchantment, or thelxis, as it was called by archaic Greek poets, divination, mystery, and ritual—­all emphasizing the primordial ear over the rational eye. The acoustical properties of poetry are inimical to the epistemological assumptions and discursive norms of modern university research, which makes poems into ­things by regarding them as essentially texts, rather than as having texts. A text merely rec­ords a less tangible but more fundamental way of being for a poem, one that is only partly accessible through such academically low-­status activities as per­for­mance and memorization, or learning “by heart.” To adhere unquestioningly to pseudomaterialist textual reductionism is not unlike seeing a planet or a star as the phys­ ical body alone, its density and mass but not its gravitational and mag­ netic fields or, if a star, its radiance and solar wind, with their effects on other bodies (including life on earth), effects changing over time with the life of the planet or the star. While the poem remains an artifact passed down the generations, it lives also in the interpretative fields it opens and in par­tic­u­lar, since we are speaking of Spenser, in its genera­ tion of moments for thinking. This wavering lattice of moments, in which we feel ourselves in a state of arrested attention and cannot choose but hear, may be contrasted with the more static or architectonically rigid Aristotelian structures expected in epic poems of the Re­nais­sance and supremely exemplified by Torquato Tasso in Italian (in his theory as well as his practice) and John Milton in En­glish, poems that subordinate local effects to the

4  S P E N S E R I A N

MOMENTS

­ esign of the ­whole and the harmony of parts. Although the gold stan­ d dard for the classical epic in the Re­nais­sance is Virgil and, b ­ ehind him, Homer (Spenser knew Homer better than his En­glish contemporaries did), a stylistic analogy for The Faerie Queene would have to be found in the extravagant, late-­flowering glories of classical antiquity, such as the epi­ sodic and sensational Dionysiaca of Nonnus or in his very close baroque imitator, master of sensational longueurs, Giambattista Marino or, again, to mention the most usual comparison, in Spenser’s ­great chivalric pre­ de­ces­sor, whose narrative bravura is unparalleled and of whom Spenser was always intensely aware: Ludovico Ariosto. But Spenser, as he in­ tended to be, is more sage and serious than the worldly and suave, rapid, comic, and prodigiously gifted Italian. Spenser’s language is more classi­ cally rich and harmonious; and his meta­phors and similes are deployed not merely to astonish but to deepen meaning and provoke further thought. This last is above all impor­tant: Spenser’s poetry is an active and exploratory thinking. One image that keeps coming to mind when re­ flecting on how The Faerie Queene differs from the crystalline architecture of Paradise Lost is that of the metal lattice in chemistry, where the atomic nuclei are closely arranged in a repeating pattern, like a quincunx, while their electrons are delocalized and flow freely among them, giving flexi­ bility to the ­whole system. A metal can be very strong, but ­there is a fluid quality to it ­because a metal d ­ oesn’t shatter: it bends. Another image that comes to mind often is the memory of when I completed my first journey through the entire Faerie Queene. It was in the summer at Trent University in southern Ontario, where the Otonabee River—­ “wildest and most beautiful of forest streams,” as Susanna Moodie called it in the nineteenth ­century—­flows along the walls of the library as it rushes past, violently foaming in the spring, scraping with moving sheets of ice in the winter. When I reached the end of the Muta­ bilitie Cantos and Spenser’s “Sabbaoths sight,” it was still early summer and I could look down, as I had done often before, on the river r­ unning past and, despite the current, on the places where the green trees on the banks w ­ ere reflected in the stream. In that moment every­thing seemed, for just a moment—­the moving river below me and the finished poem before me—­gathered together and held, as if nothing had ended but had simply moved past into something other, as with allegory. So is it with

Introduction  5

the moments I speak of in The Faerie Queene, which are not in the poem alone, belonging to its objectified “text,” any more than we are entirely outside them, as detached observers: the moments flow together in that river of time where poems and readers are carried together downstream.

' to consider the plan Spenser describes in the Letter to Raleigh, that handful of enchanted dust the poet blows in our eyes as we begin reading Books One to Three of The Faerie Queene. An image we may abstract from this document is that of a clock face representing Fairy Land, with Fairy Court at the center. Each of the twelve quests of the twelve knights departs from that center on each of the twelve days of the Fairy Queen’s feast and reaches its goal at the periphery, at each hour marker, the place of the knight’s agon or strug­gle, before returning again to Fairy Court. Arthur is like the clock’s single hand, which sweeps around to encounter and aid each knight on the outward journey, al­ though by a contrary motion Arthur is also spiraling into the center in his quest for the Fairy Queen herself. In the end, when he reaches her, Arthur ­w ill lead the other twelve knights into her presence as well. So at least the eighteenth-­century critic John Upton i­magined what would have happened at the conclusion of The Faerie Queene, had the poem been finished, and I think he was right to do so, hard as it may be to reconcile this with Spenser’s plan also to narrate there the twelve-­day feast at which all the actions in his poem are supposed to begin. The masculine bias of the design, with the only female figure of au­ thority waiting at the center for the men to be heroic and return, like stamens bending to the pistil, must at an early stage have struck Spenser as disadvantageous in a poem dedicated to his queen, who was officially beautiful but also officially heroic, having borne arms herself when ad­ dressing her troops at Tilbury during the crisis of the Spanish Armada. He therefore introduced Britomart, a young w ­ oman, his most splendid knight, and gave her adventures to perform while she pursues an alto­ gether dif­fer­ent sort of quest, which is to find her love—­the misnamed Artegal, “equal of Arthur”—­and with him found the line of Briton kings. Britomart, not Artegal, is Prince Arthur’s true equal and is taking Arthur’s place in Spenser’s symbolic design, her magic spear corresponding with I P RO P O S E N OW

6  S P E N S E R I A N

MOMENTS

his magic shield and sword. Indeed, Artegal, who is intended for the knight of Book Five, is in this new and still-­emerging pattern hardly more than an attribute of Britomart, his equality with Arthur having been captured by her and surpassed. Much e­ arlier, Britomart revives the despairing Scudamour with a wise and considerate speech that reminds us of Arthur’s magnanimity in Book One. She then vows to deliver Scudamour’s lady or die in the attempt, at which, wonderingly, Scu­ damour asks her, “What huge heroicke magnanimity / Dwels in thy bounteous brest?” (FQ III.xi.19). Such language, and indeed such an act—­for Britomart accomplishes what she says she ­w ill attempt—­fit Spenser’s original and continuing conception of Arthur as the unifying princi­ple of The Faerie Queene. They betray how much of a threat to that design Britomart has already become. In what must surely be accounted an artistic lapse, Spenser responds to this spectacular growth of Britomart ­under his hand by abruptly subordinating her to Artegal in the seventh canto of Book Five—­after she has rescued him from Radigund—­and then banishing her from the remainder of the poem. That done, the eclipsed Arthur resumes his dominating role in The Faerie Queene as a w ­ hole, and the debased Artegal is recuperated to take up again his brutal meting out of justice in the book of that name. Its remaining five cantos are a transparent allegor­ ical justification, in the manner of the po­liti­cal cartoon, of En­glish for­ eign policy on the Eu­ro­pean continent and in Ireland. ­T hese cantos are certainly no less engaging for that, but ­there is a strong feeling in them that the poet is violently taking back control of his poem from forces associated with the genre of romance that threaten to undermine its masculine epic design. Spenser begins the Letter to Raleigh by describing his poem—he calls it “this booke of mine”—as “a continued Allegory, or darke conceit,” its “general intention” and “end” (telos or “purpose and goal”) being “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (note that the addition of “noble person” signifies w ­ oman). He w ­ ill do so by means of a “historicall fiction” concerning Prince Arthur “before he was king,” such fictions being based on historical truth, or supposed truth, but freely and fictively developed as to par­tic­u­lar events and de­ tails, as allowed in fash­ion­able Italian critical theory. Arthur having

Introduction  7

seen and been “ravished” by the beauty of “the Faery Queene”—­this in “a dream or vision”—­and having been trained up, or “throughly [thor­ oughly] instructed” to be a knight by Timon, an aged fairy knight expe­ rienced in war (his name suggests Greek timê, “honor”), and having been armed by Merlin with his magic sword and shield, goes forth to seek her “in Faerye land.” The Fairy Queen herself, Spenser writes, signifies “glory in my generall intention, but in my par­tic­u­lar I conceive the most excel­ lent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land.” Her name, as we find out elsewhere, is Gloriana, and her court is in the city of Cleopolis, “city of glory.” Hence what Arthur is seeking throughout the poem, as he searches for Gloriana, is renown for brave deeds—­his own, be it noted, not Gloriana’s and not Queen Eliza­ beth’s, although the poet would be glad to have her think so. Arthur himself signifies magnificence, which combines generosity and sympathy (qualities no other character in the poem except Britomart shows to this degree) with “greatness of soul,” or megalopsychia, which virtue is “the perfection of all the rest, and conteineith in it them all.” Therefore, says Spenser, “for the more variety of the history,” t­ here are to be twelve books, each book treating of a single virtue among the “twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised,” that is, ­those virtues “which they in Philosophy call Ethice [ἐθική], or vertues of a private man.” The twelve virtues are to be represented by twelve knights, their “patrones.” If such a poem, with such a plan, is “well accepted,” Spenser declares he may be persuaded to go on “to frame [“to make with design, to order”] the other part of polliticke [πολλιτική] vertues in [Arthur’s] person, ­after that hee came to be king.” In “the ­whole course” of the poem, therefore, Spenser adds, “I men­ tion the deedes of Arthure applyable to that vertue, which I write of in that booke.” This appears to mean that Arthur’s deeds are not only t­ hose that we see him perform but also, allegorically, ­those performed in­de­ pen­dently by each of the knights representing each of the virtues. Arthur is thus a shadowy presence throughout, even when he is not seen, as if the ­whole ­were in some vestigial and indistinct way happening inside him, as a “­battle in the soul,” or psychomachia. Spenser then goes on to describe the individual knights in his first three books, which is to say, ­those with which the Letter is published:

8  S P E N S E R I A N

MOMENTS

the Redcross knight, “in whome I expresse Holynes”; the fairy knight Guyon, “in whom I sette forth Temperance”; and “Britomartis a Lady knight, in whome I picture Chastity.” Express, set forth, and picture are verbs Spenser commonly associates with allegory. The first, express, sug­ gests the forcing of an abstraction out of the realm of ideas into the physical world; the second, set forth, the conceptual setting up of a thesis for contemplation (thêsis, from tithêmi, a “setting up” or “positing”); the third, picture, the lively and colorful repre­sen­ta­tion of abstract ideas in visual forms—­icones symbolicae, in E. H. Gombrich’s phrase—­ready to be put into motion. Another impor­tant term is conceit, which means “con­ cept,” something, or a cluster of t­ hings, grasped and held together in the mind, as when Spenser calls his allegorical program “the w ­ hole inten­ tion of the conceit,” which permits Raleigh “as in a handfull to gripe al the discourse,” the image of the grasping hand being an intentional ety­ mologizing of conceit. The general conception of the allegory having been set forth, Spenser now goes on to describe what he ­w ill at the end call “the wel-­head of the Historye,” the origin of the action of the poem as a ­whole. It is exposed ­here for Raleigh’s “better light in the reading thereof,” without which the poem may seem “tedious and confused”: “The beginning therefore of my history if it w ­ ere to be told by an Historiographer, should be the twelfth booke, which is the last, where I devise that the Faery Queene kept her Annual feast xii dayes, uppon which xii severall dayes, the oc­ casions of the xii severall adventures hapned, which being undertaken by the xii severall knights, are in t­ hese xii books severally handled and discoursed.” But why not begin at the beginning, at a ­great feast where a won­der appears, as is typical of less literary—­that is, more popu­lar and oral—­romances in the Carolingian and Arthurian traditions? The answer lies in Spenser’s higher literary and epic pretentions. He alludes to Horace’s advice that the epic poet start by thrusting into the ­middle of the action, in medias res, “into the midst.” A historiographer, he says, be­ gins at the beginning. But the poet “thrusteth into the middest, even where it most concerneth him, and t­ here recoursing to thinges forepast and divining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analy­sis of all.” Spenser means analy­sis in the fairly exact sense of a freeing or opening up of something that is complex and closed, thus revealing its parts to

Introduction  9

view. The word is implicitly opposed to synthesis, where ­things are linked together, as it w ­ ere, by agglutination. The former implies strong unity in the plot, a ­thing required by Aristotle in his Poetics and worshipped by his stricter Italian commentators. The latter, synthesis, is literally a “placing together” of diverse ele­ments and results in a looser structure, a mere assemblage, such as one sees in revered older En­glish poets or Spenser’s popu­lar con­temporary William Warner, whose very casual historical poem Albion’s ­England (1586) is composed in conservative and all-­too-­stately fourteeners. For the beginning of the first book, Redcross, a rustic youth unfit for knightly deeds, is nevertheless given “the armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul v. Ephesians,” thus explaining the riddle in the first stanza of that book, when we see the inexperienced knight in expe­ rienced armor. He is “pricking on the plaine” in arms with “old dints” bearing “The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde,” but as for him: “armes till that time did he never wield” (FQ I.i.1). This is the only ac­ count in the Letter to Raleigh that fits well with the ­actual poem. For the beginning of the second book, as we are informed in the Letter to Raleigh, inaccurately, a Palmer shows up at the court bearing an in­ fant with bloody hands (for which the child ­w ill be called “Ruddymane”), its parents having been killed by the wicked enchantress Acrasia. The knight Guyon is assigned the adventure, and off he and the Palmer go. But in the narrative Guyon and his Palmer are already traveling together at adventure when they encounter the infant playing in its d ­ying ­mother’s blood while the dead ­father lies in armor to one side. ­After hearing from the ­mother—­not from a groom and not at Fairy Court— of the cruel work of Acrasia, Guyon buries the pair and swears to take vengeance (FQ II.i.61). The Fairy Queen and her court are not involved at all. As for Ruddymane, he is not left at Fairy Court but at the House of Medina, who is enjoined to raise the child “In vertuous lore . . . ​And all that gentle noriture ensu’th,” including, of course, knightly prowess, so that one day he ­w ill “avenge his Parents death on them, that had it wrought” (II.iii.2). But of course Acrasia, who is responsible for t­hose deaths, w ­ ill be captured with her newest lover, Verdant, in a subtle net, which “The skillfull Palmer formally did frame” (II.xii.81). It is like the net in which, in the Odyssey (­there is hardly a Re­nais­sance narrative that

10  S P E N S E R I A N

MOMENTS

does not somewhere carry an allusion to this tale), Hephaestus captured his adulterous wife, Aphrodite, in flagrante delicto, with her lover, Ares. Acrasia is then bound in “chaines of adamant”—­shades of Milton’s “ada­ mantine chains”—­and led away, presumably to Fairy Court. All this is inconsistent with the account given in the Letter to Raleigh. And so it is with the wellhead of the third book as well, when a groom— he is other­w ise unidentified and untraceable—­arrives to complain that the “vile Enchaunter” Busyrane has taken in hand the beautiful lady Amoret and is torturing her ­until she yields to him “the plea­sure of her body,” although in the poem, with more poetic truth, Busyrane strives to win Amoret’s heart by literally exposing that organ, “transfixèd with a cruel dart,” and “figuring strange characters” with the blood (FQ III. xii.21, 31). The queen therefore assigns the quest to “Sir Scudamour the lover of that Lady,” who “presently tooke on him that adventure,” appar­ ently unaware u ­ ntil now of her plight, although she was kidnapped at their wedding (IV.i.3–4). Being, however, unable to break through the “hard Enchauntments,” in par­tic­u­lar, as we see in the poem, the first one, a barrier of fire, Scudamour is aided by Britomart, “who rescued his love.” From t­ hese inconsistencies it is hard not to conclude that the com­ pactly and intelligently phrased but perfectly commonplace opinions on epic lit­er­a­ture reflected in the Letter to Raleigh offended the poet’s sense of creative in­de­pen­dence.

' in the poem to the beauty of the queen (notably in the proem to Book Three) is not innocent: it is po­liti­cal beauty, the radiance of power. This is not the beauty of a mistress, as in the sonnet tradition, or of a shepherdess, as in romance, the beauty of a Serena or a Pastorella in Book Six. ­T here too, beauty—­the beauty of the vision of the dancing maidens, and especially the beauty of Spenser’s new wife—­begins to be pried away from the queen to become “another grace.” This moment of aesthetic in­de­pen­dence is only underlined by the immediate and abject apology for it: T H E C O N T I N UA L R E F E R E N C E

For which the Graces that h ­ ere wont to dwell Have for more honor brought her to this place,

Introduction  11 And gracèd her so much to be another Grace. Sunne of the world, g­ reat glory of the sky, That all the earth doest lighten with thy rayes, ­Great Gloriana, greatest Majesty, ­Pardon thy shepheard, mongst so many layes As he hath sung of thee in all his dayes, To make one minime of thy poore handmayd, And under­neath thy feete to place her prayse, That when thy glory ­shall be farre displaid To f­ uture age of her this mention may be made. FQ VI.x.26, 28

Elizabeth’s radiant beauty, shining like the moon at full with “beames bright” (III.proem.4), is the radiance of power and the beauty of the state, in the confused, Re­nais­sance sense of the word that binds the person of the prince to what we would call state apparatuses: the apparatuses of administration, of justice, of l­ imited repre­sen­ta­tion of males of the prop­ ertied classes, of command and control, of surveillance and punish­ ment. All this is coordinated by continued Allegory (in the assertive phrase of the Letter to Raleigh) u ­ nder a single and harmonious ethico-­political beauty. It is an intoxicating beauty that calls forth power­ful emotions, although tenderness is not one of them, emotions of adoration and awe and even of desire, although it is the deflected desire not for erotic pos­ session, even if the experience of it is as intense as erotic desire, but rather for social and po­liti­cal power—­and of course wealth. This is the desire of the Elizabethan courtier, of Leicester, Raleigh, and Essex, and of the Elizabethan poet. All Spenser’s expressions of hatred and contempt for the court—­notably in this, the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, but elsewhere too, for example, in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe—­reflect his disappointment that at the court ­there is no honor, no honesty, no no­ bility. His disillusionment has the intensity of the disappointed lover. And so it should, for erotic love and the love of power in this coordi­ nated system of aesthetics, ethics, and politics all flow together. Aesthetics, ethics, and politics: in The Faerie Queene as Spenser con­ ceived it t­hese are supposed to line up in harmony with one another through the medium of an allegory that is “continued” ­because it never lets up. Moreover, the aesthetic is not just first in that series, as a place to

12  S P E N S E R I A N

MOMENTS

begin. It is the ideologically integrating force among them, making the allegorical poem, the ethical reader, the just state with its wise prince all beautiful at once and as one. The poem is thus intended to be a total, coherent, and noncontradictory system revealed by and expressed through allegory’s ideological forms. It would be wrong to say The Faerie Queene is totalitarian art, but it would not be wrong to say it is an alle­ gory at war with its own incipiently totalitarian design. Allegories, as Angus Fletcher famously said, are the natu­ral mirrors of ideologies. They therefore can develop power­ful aesthetic appeal when in the ser­ vice of a carefully built ideological program.

' The Faerie Queene is a poet so very dif­fer­ent from the Milton of Paradise Lost (and the major works following it, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes) that the two may be said to stand for the opposite extremes of what is pos­si­ble in the long major poem with pretensions to epic. Spenser is ideologically incoherent and subversive, whereas Milton is not; Spenser is uncertain, tentative, and exploratory, whereas Milton never is; Spenser is distractible, whereas Milton is not; Spenser surprises himself by thinking new ­things, which Milton never does; above all, Spenser’s poem moves forward in pulsatile moments, whereas Milton’s poems are architectonic structures. Milton’s poems take time to read, of course, but they stand out of time, rigidly sublime and immobile, like mountains without weather. This is never so with The Faerie Queene. ­T here is plenty of weather in it. The Faerie Queene is also more receptive to engagements that used to be known u ­ nder the spacious term literary theory. Teaching Milton, one finds oneself naturally directing the attention of students to factual articula­ tions in the objective phenomenon, to the poet’s wildly brilliant achieve­ ment. Teaching Spenser—­and I have found students who want to study him almost always more speculatively inclined—­ one finds oneself joining with them in reflecting on the ways in which narrative and sig­ nification work and on the possibilities for engaging such questions in ways that leave the questions open and forever opening more. The cre­ ativity of students responds with more sympathy to the poet’s open en­ terprise of creative thought. T HE SPENSER OF

Introduction  13

Of passages in which the poet acknowledges we are launched on such a journey, one of the most memorable comes in the final stanza of Book One, which adopts the traditional topos of sailing, made famous by Dante: Now strike your sailes ye jolly Mari­ners, For we be come unto a quiet rode, Where we must land some of our passengers, And light this wearie vessell of her lode. ­Here she a while may make her safe abode, Till she repairèd have her tackles spent, And wants supplied. And then againe abroad On the long voiyage whereto she is bent: Well may she speede and fairely finish her intent. FQ I.xii.42

This beautifully ­shaped stanza comes at the end of the first and most architectonic book of The Faerie Queene. That book is so self-­contained that it threatens the continuance of the larger poem of which it is sup­ posed to be a part. Dante’s readers follow in their own boats, if they can: Spenser’s are on board with him, and some have been set down on land, doubtless to take ship for elsewhere. When the vessel is lightened and repaired, she sets forth again on her long voyage to “fairely finish her intent.” The tone of this passage, suggesting a journey, a search, and, to be sure, a distant but very indistinct goal or intent, could not be more dif­ fer­ent from that in which Milton speaks of flying through utter and through ­middle darkness, alone. Spenser’s readers are with him, as pas­ sengers, looking off into the distance from their place beside him on deck, rather than admiring from below. It is surely significant, although how exactly is difficult to guess, that this topos of the poem as ship should return at the head of the last canto Spenser published in his lifetime and at the end of the book that almost abandons its quest, even as it abandons allegory for romance. Since we last saw Spenser’s ship, many more passengers appear to have been let down on land, perhaps out of frustration at the continual divagations or the long and fruitless wait for a single sighting of the Fairy Queen. Who is left? Only ourselves and the poet:

14  S P E N S E R I A N

MOMENTS

Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde Directs her course unto one certain coast, Is met with many a ­counter winde and tyde, With which her wingèd speed is let and crost, And she herself in stormie surges tost; Yet making many a borde, and many a bay, Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost: Right so it fares with me in this long way, Whose course is often stayd, yet never is astray. FQ VI.xii.1

He w ­ ill shortly transfer to his truant hero Calidore, long distracted by Pas­ torella, any personal blame ­there may be for the necessity of tacking so much to get around ­counter winds and tides. Tyde prob­ably means deep-­ ocean currents rather than shoreline tides, despite borde, “coastline,” and bay. But is it significant that this word also means “opportunity”? Now the poet resumes his allegory, as his knight resumes his quest: “his atchievement of the Blatant beast” (FQ VI.xii.2), derived from Sir Thomas Malory’s Questing Beast, in the Morte d’Arthur, which Spenser prob­ably knew in a French source as well, where the beast’s name indi­ cates barking and horrible sounds. The wonderful word blatant is Spenser’s invention, indicating barking, yelping, and snarling, the Blatant Beast being his figure for slander and a cluster of related social sins com­ mitted with the tongue. The point of the association with animal sounds—­the beast has a g­ reat many dif­fer­ent animals’ tongues—­being that we are most like nasty beasts when we suppose, ­because we are using language for social aggression, or simply to laugh, that we are far­ thest from them. The description of the beast became a locus for complaint by eighteenth-­century critics against Spenser’s allegory for supposed in­ consistency, mingling the tongues of “mortall men,” which are the ob­ ject or tenor of the satire, with the tongues of beasts and serpents, which are the allegorical vehicle. The two “levels” should be kept clearly dis­ tinct from each other. But such logical separation, based on the ancient definition of allegory as the trope of extended or continued meta­phor, is of ­little interest to Spenser, whose vision of the Beast has ­great visionary power, each of the three stanzas ending with a shock: first, the huge hell

Introduction  15

mouth; next the sudden appearance of ­human tongues among the ani­ mals’; lastly the act of biting itself, rhyming infamy and injury: Him in a narrow place he overtooke, And fierce assailing forst him turne againe: Sternely he turned againe, when he him strooke With his sharpe steele, and ran at him amaine With open mouth, that seemèd to containe A full good pecke within the utmost brim All set with yron teeth in raunges twaine, That terrified his foes, and armèd him, Appearing like the mouth of Orcus griesly grim. And therein w ­ ere a thousand tongs empight, Of sundry kindes, and sundry quality, Some ­were of dogs, that barkèd day and night, And some of cats, that wrawling still did cry, And some of Beares, that groynd continually, And some of Tygres, that did seeme to gren And snar at all that ever passèd by: But most of them ­were tongues of mortall men, Which spake reprochfully, not caring where nor when. And them amongst w ­ ere mingled ­here and t­ here The tongues of Serpents with three forkèd stings That spat out poyson and gore bloudy gere At all that came within his ravenings, And spake licentious words, and hatefull t­ hings Of good and bad alike, of low and hie; Ne Kesars sparèd he a whit, nor Kings, But ­either blotted them with infamie, Or bit them with his baneful teeth of injury. FQ VI.xii.26–28

Even in this final canto, ­after apparently setting us on course again with Calidore’s resumption of the quest for the Blatant Beast (“But now I come into my course againe, / To his atchievement of the Blatant beast” [stanza 2]), Spenser diverts us into the Greek romance history of Pas­ torella, abandoned as a child (to save her life) but found again by her longing parents, Claribel and Bellamoure, identified by a rose-­petal

16  S P E N S E R I A N

MOMENTS

mole on her breast. Spenser w ­ ill do almost anything, except quit, to get away from his ideological plan. The reader, however, ­w ill not have for­ gotten the stanza opening canto ten, where the poet pointedly asks who now follows “the foule Blatant Beast.” Spenser ­w ill be forced to raise the question once again in this final canto, and once again too, in a startling reminder of the plan that has been all but abandoned, he makes mention of the Fairy Queen and her assignment of the quest to this knight at Fairy Court. Sir Calidore is “Asham’d to thinke, how he that enter­ prize, / The which the Faery Queene had long afore / Bequeath’d to him, forslakèd had so sore” (FQ VI.xii.12). Yet a­ fter Calidore leaves Pastorella in the care of her as yet unrecognized and unrecognizing parents, the Greek pastoral romance digression continues for eight more stanzas, before the quest is resumed in the final nineteen stanzas of the poem as it stood in 1596. It is then that we are accorded that remarkable vision straight into the mouth of the beast, spitting out, straight at us, the poison and bloody filth (gere) that we are inevitably covered with in our social lives—­when we are not spewing it ourselves. The beast is not killed—­who can kill slander and social injuries com­ mitted with the tongue?—­but it is muzzled and led by a chain attached to the muzzle, like a fearful dog (so ­great is Calidore’s authority and “strong hand”) throughout all Fairy Land. The two of them, chained together, courtesy and slander, are witnessed by all as a kind of iconographical puzzle. Courtesy alone masters the strong, indeed convulsive impulse we have to slander and gossip. But the impulse is muzzled and chained, not extirpated, b ­ ecause it is always with us and only temporarily restrained by ­those who, like Calidore, have the virtue of self-­control to do so. In Spenser’s view they are hardly in the majority. It is as necessary, therefore, that the monster break its chain, slip its muzzle, and escape “into the world at liberty againe” (FQ VI.xii.38). Other knights take up the quest, including Sir Pelleas, whose ­family in the Morte d’Arthur is devoted through the generations to hunting the Questing Beast, apparently forever and in vain. The last quest in The Faerie Queene is the only one that fails.

' thrown has two common senses, active and passive: ­there is throwing at, as with a javelin, with a target or goal, or what in philosophy T H E WO R D

Introduction  17

is referred to as a telos, an aimed-at ending; and t­ here is being thrown ­free, randomly ejected, as when rocks are thrown from a volcano or pollen from flowers. If we are to speak of the proj­ect of The Faerie Queene then we must find a sense of thrown that falls between ­these two familiar ones: ­there is a telos, an “intent,” although it seems to change as we go as a re­ sult of unplanned experiences and noetic constraints that arise in the course of the journey. ­T here is an improvising energy that responds and adapts to the unexpected storms and forced detours that reveal more than anyone could have expected. The poem develops, so to speak, in the ­middle voice between the active sense of throwing at a target and the passive sense of being randomly thrown. Occasionally, the plan has the gyroscopic power to correct the course of the poem at critical moments and put it back on track. But the poem also lives on opportunity and improvisation based on where the pollen happens to fall, which calls up another useful Greek word, one Aristotle used for the opposite of a tech­ nical procedure for attaining a goal: autoschediazein, literally, self-­ schematizing as opportunities and challenges arise. In this sense too, Spenser is a po­liti­cal poet and knows how and when not to keep prom­ ises or stick to a plan. When one is improvising—­a word that shows its genealogy from the Latin word for “unforeseen” (im-­pro-­visus)—­one is necessarily in the pre­sent moment, not seeing into the f­ uture and plan­ ning a structure but instead dealing with phenomena showing up now. That is why Spenser thinks not in structures but in moments. Getting from one moment to the next is a question of feeling one’s way, consid­ ering where one has come from before looking to where one should go next. Inside t­ hose moments t­ here is tension between, on the one hand, an inward-­turning, centripetal force, which we may call contemplation or reflection or even enchantment, a mysterious stillness, and, on the other hand, an energy that wants to move on, gathering that stillness and projecting it into the new. The Spenserian moments are like whirling eddies at a bend in a river, turning at once into themselves and releasing their energy downstream. One such moment is the sight of the wounded Marinell, strewn with flowers as if he ­were dead and then lifted by the nymphs onto his ­mother Cymoent’s sea chariot. The chariot is drawn by dolphins through the brackish waves to Cymoent’s underwater bower, wondrously described

18  S P E N S E R I A N

MOMENTS

as “built of hollow billowes heapèd high” (FQ III.iv.42–43), as befits her name, from Greek kuma, wave, or swell. Spenser’s formation of her name with -­oent suggests a verbal meaning, as in the Homeric epithet of the sea as “waving” or “swelling,” ponton kumainonta (Odyssey 4.510). Every­ thing is flowing and swelling around Cymoent, so that she is herself the whirling center of her being’s event. So power­ful is the moment that we can scarcely avoid embellishing the scene as we join the nymphs fol­ lowing the body, entranced at the sight of the chariot trailing blood and flowers in the sea. We have learned our astonishment from Neptune himself, who stood amazed at the sight of the pro­cession on its outward journey, while the “griesly Monsters of the See” stood gaping as well (FQ III.iv.32). But as a m ­ atter of fact ­there are in the text at this point no bloodstained flowers trailing Cymoent’s chariot as she carries her wounded son home. We see them b ­ ecause the bloody flowers have been carried ­here on the out­going tide from the “rich strond,” or seashore, where Marinell was speared and un­horsed by Britomart. Even ­there the flowers are not in the narrative proper but in a simile occupying an en­ tire stanza, which is like a magic trance in which we are taken some­ where ­else. In it, we watch the collapse of a sacrificed ox, its streaming gore soaking the flowery garlands that had decked its gilded horns: “So fell proud Marinell upon the pretious shore” (III.iv.17). In The Faerie Queene, what is in the text at any isolated point is not the same as what is ­there in any moment in the poem, any more than a quantity of ­water is what is in a river at any fixed point mea­sured in an instant from the shore. Every­thing flows together in the kinesis that presses downstream in the current of time.

Chapter 1

'

Other Poets

of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is an unfavor­ able one in a letter addressed to the poet in April 1580, a de­cade before the first installment of the poem appeared. It is the last of Three Proper, and Wittie, familiar Letters: lately passed between two universitie men (1580).1 The au­ thor is Spenser’s former Cambridge mentor and continuing friend Gabriel Harvey, a fellow poet and literary theorist and a quarrelsome popinjay but one who cared about art and knew a ­great artist when he saw one.2 Spenser had sent Harvey a number of works, or as is more likely, ideas for works, which ­were in the early planning stages. Among ­these ­were nine comedies, each named ­after one of the nine muses, and a portion of The Faerie Queene, although how substantial this portion was at the time is impossible to determine. It was prob­ably very slight. As to the nine com­ edies, which, as we s­ hall see, attracted Harvey’s partisanship, we may sup­ pose they existed at most in examples of verse and a sketch of some kind.3 But the total scheme of nine plays, each to be u ­ nder the patronage of one of the nine muses (­adopted from an ancient editor’s titles for the nine books of Herodotus’s histories, as Harvey does not fail to observe), re­ minds us of The Faerie Queene itself, with its principal knights serving as “patrons” of the twelve moral virtues beating down the vices and crimes against which they are ranged. At any rate, the scheme for comedies bears the poet’s telltale fascination with abstract numerological patterns and orderly ideologemes. They ­w ill be scattered liberally throughout The Faerie Queene. ­Here is Harvey: T HE FIRST M EN T ION

21

22  O n

S penser

I had once again nigh forgotten your Faerie Queene. . . . ​I have now sent her home at the last, neither in better nor worse case than I found her. . . . ​I am void of all judgment if your nine Comoedies, whereunto in imitation of Herodotus you give the names of the Nine Muses . . . ​come not nearer Ariosto’s comedies . . . ​than that Elvish Queene doth to his Orlando Furioso, which notwithstanding you ­w ill needs seem to emulate, and hope to overgo, as you flatly pro­ fessed yourself. 4

As Harvey testifies, testily, Spenser already intends to “emulate” (the fa­ vorable, Re­nais­sance sense of aemulari is meant, as with Vasari’s lodevole invidia, “praiseworthy envy”) and even to “overgo” Ariosto with an aero­ lithic scheme for the ­whole, a “continued Allegory,” as Spenser ­w ill call it, eschewing Ariosto’s lighter moments and his notorious sexy ones.5 The overgoing prob­ably also refers to a more sustained concentration on the person Spenser would praise ­under the figure of the Fairy Queen: Queen Elizabeth I. So Harvey advises Spenser not to proceed in emulation of the greatest work of the greatest poet of the age. (Ariosto was still undis­ puted king b ­ ecause Tasso’s epic had not yet appeared in full—­and in ­England, not at all—­when this letter was written.) Spenser should in­ stead, says Harvey, follow Ariosto in composing nine comedies to the master’s four and a half. At least one of them is bound to be good. The best modern intellects, including no less than Alberti and Machiavelli, have composed erudite comedies, and so should you, Spenser, or rather (to keep up the pseudonyms the authors adopt in this public corre­ spondence), so should you, Immerito, so that the world can at last do jus­ tice to your talent, if not your genius. 6 The muses are the d ­ aughters of Apollo and confer the laurel crown, sacred to that god, on the de­ serving. Do not let the ugly and mischievous hairy elf Hob­goblin, symbol of fairy romance, run away with the garland you deserve to wear: “If so be that your Faerye Queene be fairer in your eye than the Nine Muses, and Hob­goblin run away with the garland from Apollo, mark what I say, and yet I ­w ill not say that I thought, but ­there an end for this once, and fare you well, till God or some good angel put you in a better mind.”7 His prayer went unanswered: Spenser went ahead with The ­Faerie Queene.

Other Poets  23

Harvey’s implicit advice (aside from the vaguely unpleasant suggestion of sending the Fairy Queen back neither better nor worse for his ­handling) is that Spenser rein in his Pegasus and employ a safer means, preferably on foot, for his ascent of Olympus. In The Shepheardes Calender, published the previous year, our poet had already climbed above the littered lower slopes of the mount, emerging into sight, even for ­those who ­were viewing from afar, as E ­ ngland’s “new Poete” (as the commentator “E. K.” calls him) with the latest and most advanced climbing techniques.8 He is the worthy inheritor of the laurels of Chaucer, dubbed by John Lydgate (this is still E. K. speaking) “the Loadestarre of our Language.” ­T here is ­every expec­ tation that this new poet-­to-be is the new lodestar. All this was said in E. K.’s epistle to The Shepheardes Calender, which is addressed to none other than Gabriel Harvey, “orator and poet,” both of which he was. Harvey is honored highly by this epistle, as he is in The Shepheardes Calender itself, especially in the “April” eclogue, in which, ­under the his pseudonym Hobbinoll, he sings, at Thenot’s request, the poet Co­ lin’s beautiful “Lay of Fair Eliza”: Thenot. But if hys ditties bene so trimly dight, I pray thee Hobbinoll, rec­ord some one: The whiles our flockes do graze about in sight, And we close shrowded in thys shade alone Hobbinoll. Contented I: then w ­ ill I singe his lay Of fayre Eliza, Queene of shepheardes all: Which once he made, as by a spring he laye, And tuned it unto the w ­ aters fall. The Shepheardes Calender, “April,” lines 29–36

Hobbinoll is a complicated character in all his appearances in The Shepheardes Calender. But this one is in­ter­est­ing for its suggestion of deeper, homosocial tensions between Spenser and his generous but overbearing and overaffectionate mentor. The eclogue opens with Thenot asking Hob­ binoll why he is in such a state of woe, to which Hobbinoll replies that he is distressed at his friend the poet Colin’s emotional state, mistreated by “the Widdowes d ­ aughter of the glenn . . . ​fayre Rosalind.” Colin has

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foresworn all shepherds’ sports and has willfully broken his pipe (an act to which Colin is addicted): “which made us merriment.” Now, he is plunged in pain, tearing “his tressed locks”; and worse, he has foreborne “His wonted songs, wherein he all outwent” (lines 10–16). A deeper and more personal cause of distress emerges as ­these remarks unfold. Hob­ binoll laments his abandonment by “the ladde, whome long [he] lovd so deare” (line 10), a love he has caused to grow rapidly, as in a hot­house (I suppose that to be the meaning ­here of force), fertilized by gifts. Now, Colin has abruptly jerked his attention away from Hobbinoll and lavishes it on the scornful Rosalind, thus changing a friend—­Hobbinoll him­ self—­for a frenne, a stranger (as E. K. glosses the word) and an e­ nemy: Whilome on him was all my care and joye, Forcing with gyfts to winne his wanton heart. But now from me bys madding mynd is starte, And woes the Widdowes ­daughter of the glenne: So nowe fayre Rosalind hath bredde hys smart, So now his frend is chaunged for a frenne. The Shepheardes Calender, “April,” lines 23–27

The complaint of ingratitude is not hard to discern ­behind Hobbinoll’s distress at his Colin’s emotional state. Moreover, Hobbinoll is himself a poet: when they first meet, Thenot asks him if his bagpipe is broken. Yet Hobbinoll is forced to acknowledge Spenser to be (as T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, and in not dissimilar circumstances, graciously inscribed Ezra Pound), il miglior fabbro, “the better maker.” In cunning architecture of song, “he all outwent.” Given the extravagant praise of Spenser in E. K.’s epistle to The Shepheardes Calender—­the equal of Virgil and lodestar of our language, indeed!—­perhaps Harvey, as on other occasions, was not altogether proof against envy. It takes self-­k nowledge and confidence, neither of which Harvey possessed in abundance, to rejoice at a former student’s soaring higher than oneself—or worse, soaring with apparent ease above one’s own dogged and pedestrian steps. Harvey may therefore have been star­ tled by the language of flight employed by E. K. to describe Spenser, as “a bird whose principals [i.e., the long, adult pinions of the wing] be scarce growen out, but yet as that in time s­ hall be hable to keepe wing with the

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best.” 9 Clipped wings grow back. Perhaps it is not too late to clip ­these ones and keep the bird grounded for now. The resolution of ­these tensions comes a de­cade ­later, in the handsome and respectful praise of the commendatory poem “To the learned Shep­ heard,” addressed by “Hobynoll” to the author of The Faerie Queene. He does advise Spenser—­Collyn, as he still calls him—­not to let his usual good sense be overcome with conceit at this new and stunning accom­ plishment or distorted by envy and disdain, ­those vices of courts. But from what we see of Spenser l­ ater in his c­ areer, in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, with its condemnation of the court “Where each one seeks with malice and with strife, / To thrust downe other into fowle disgrace” (lines 690–91), and the illustration of this judgment at the conclusions to Book Five and Book Six of The Faerie Queene, not to mention the trou­ble the poet made for himself with Prosopopoia: or M ­ other Hubberds Tale, the advice is well meant and on target. Even the mention of how “Colin” no longer pipes in lowly shepherds’ strains for “­Those trustie mates, that loved thee so well,” is seen in positive terms. He has advanced nobly to his higher task, taking flight in song a­ fter all, like the lark ascending: Collyn I see by thy new taken taske, some sacred fury hath enricht thy braynes, That leades thy muse in haughtie verse to maske, And loath the layes that longs to lowly swaynes, That lifts thy notes from Shpheardes unto kings, So like the lively Larke that mounting sings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . So mought thy Redcrosse knight with happy hand victorious be in that faire Ilands right Which thou does vale in Type of Faery land Elysas blessed field, that Albion hight. That shieldes her friends, and warres her mightie foes, Yet still with ­people, peace, and plentie flowes. “To the learned Shepherd,” lines 1–6, 25–30

“The best” whom the poet of the Shepheardes Calender ­w ill be able to “keep wing with,” or most of them, are named by E. K.: Virgil, Mantuan (memorized by e­ very schoolboy in Spenser’s day, and virtually translated

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­ ere), Petrarch, Boccaccio, Clément Marot, Jacopo Sannazaro, “and also h divers other excellent both Italian and French Poetes, whose footing this Author e­ very where followeth, yet so as few, but they be wel sented can trace him out.”10 T ­ hese ­were heady comparisons in Spenser’s day, putting him in a class with some of the finest poets in the world. But any list of the best would normally include, on a Parnassian eminence far from but perhaps as high as Virgil’s, Lodovico Ariosto, although not without con­ tention by doctrinaire Aristotelians, who even now ­were raising their heads. Ariosto is not named ­here only ­because for some reason he did not write formal pastoral verse, even early on, when he was composing in Latin.11 But he was author of the vast and complicated serio-­comic ro­ mance epic Orlando furioso, completed only months before his death in 1533. Its ostensible subject—­which to modern eyes is nearly lost in the network of tales in which it is happily entangled—is the furia or “noble madness” (the allusion is to Seneca’s Hercules furens) of the g­ reat Christian hero Orlando, the paladin of Charlemagne and the bane of Saracens, in par­tic­u­lar ­those who ­were laying siege to Paris, commanded by the young and impetuous king Agramante. He is the model for the Pagan King that Spenser hoped—in vain, as it happened—to match against his Fairy Queen, she who would be aided, perhaps, by her lover Prince Arthur.12 The theme of militant Christian idealism had long been bound up with the character of Orlando, the hero of Ariosto’s direct pre­de­ces­sor, Count Matteo Maria Boiardo, whose unfinished narrative poem Orlando innamorato, “Orlando in Love,” Ariosto continued in the Orlando furioso—­and transformed into a more self-­consciously literary and neo-­Virgilian epic. The love theme is grafted to Christian heroism, as Boiardo confesses in a signal passage, and this grafting ­w ill be impor­tant for Spenser, who sees love as the source of heroic power.13 The theme of love is drawn, as Boiardo goes on to say, from the more ancient and famous legends of King Ar­ thur and his knights of the round ­table, Arthur’s court being both ­earlier and better than Charlemagne’s. The legends of Arthur, starting (if that is ever the right word for them) with Geoffrey of Monmouth, ­were made famous in the twelfth ­century in the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. (The term appears to come from mise en roman, meaning the translation of Latin texts into the vernacular language, since French was then called romanz.) Boiardo rightly says that love was never before associated with the severe

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Christian court of Charlemagne—­there ­were too many b ­ attles with pa­ gans to be fought—­but with the older and still more glorious court of King Arthur. It is Boiardo’s invention (although who is to say what he gathered from the lively oral tradition, which his poem imitates?) to make the rough-­and-­ready Orlando fall in love. This is startling, and not a ­little subversive, as Boiardo acknowledges, ­because the figure of Orlando, like his name, descends from the revered military martyr Roland in the twelfth-­century Old French Chanson de Roland. The subject of this epic poem was the b ­ attle of Roncesvaux (778), which took place in the pass through the Pyrenees Mountains from Spain into France, between the rear guard of Charlemagne’s army, commanded by Roland, and, as legend had it, an im­mense army of Saracens (quite con­ trary to what historical facts we possess: the attackers ­were Basque) with their exotic commanders from far and wide in the Islamic world, dressed in leopard skins, and so on. The Christians make a stand and die hero­ ically, while Roland, sounding his unmistakable horn, calls too late for reinforcements. It is a sacrificial victory, like that of the Spartans at Thermopylae. The array of Saracens described at the ­battle is a fine example, and surely one of the earliest, of what Edward Said called “orientalism,” the exotic view of the Moslem Near East and North Africa. The idea of a g­ reat set b ­ attle between Christian and “pagan” or Saracen armies such as we see in the Chanson de Roland haunts the strongly orientalist tradition of ro­ mance ever a­ fter and ­w ill haunt The Faerie Queene. In Spenser it is a con­ summation ever more about to be. Nor would it have occurred in some ­later, non­ex­is­tent portion of the twelve-­book epic that Spenser planned but did not complete. But we s­ hall see how earnestly he hoped for it as, in his eyes, the final vindication of his genius. We do at last get a ­great ­battle for Paris in Orlando furioso, and Tasso comes straight to the point by selecting the first crusade as the subject for his Gerusalemme liberata, an epic of b ­ attle in which the romance adven­ tures are caused for strategic reasons by Saracen magicians, the wily old Ismeno and the seductive Armida, types of Spenser’s Archimago and Duessa.14 Romance marvels and variety—­for the pedantic critics of Ari­ osto, indices of indiscipline—­are brilliantly subordinated by Tasso to his main action, as obstacles to the conquest of Jerusalem. In Spenser, as in

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Ariosto, the occasional adventures come out of the blue, as romance epi­ sodes should; ­there is no unifying strategic intelligence ­behind them, as in Tasso. The Faerie Queene is better for that ­because in the absence of a structural design as rigid as Tasso’s the adventures are loosely arrayed, as in a metal lattice, and hence more open to allegory, which is to say, po­ etic thinking. Although possessed of the facts, ­there is still no question for Tasso— or for his innumerable defenders and attackers—of the justice of this most sanguinary war in the name of Chris­tian­ity: the First Crusade. It is in­ter­est­ing that Spenser’s systemically dehumanizing view of Saracens—­ it’s unlikely he ever met one, and for him they are only symbols of the passions dressed in the accoutrement of Roman Catholic Spain—­should make it impossible for him ever to draw them out into b ­ attle. They are more in­ter­est­ing when encountered individually, in allegorical moments. The very nature of his poem—­thoughtful, subtle, exploratory—­made a large-­scale war between the dark side and the light impossible to bring into being. Yet so power­ful was the idea that for poetry celebrating war is the highest achievement, Spenser seems to have longed for it throughout The Faerie Queene. Much of the scattered and irrational vio­lence of Book Five is compensation for its having eluded him. The assumed conflict of civilizations between Christian Eu­rope and the Islamic Near East and North Africa (the g­ reat Christian empire of Byz­ antium, with its capital at Constantinople, modern Istanbul, is con­ve­ niently forgotten) went back some six centuries in the consciousness of Eu­rope. The assumed conflict goes back thirteen centuries ­today, changed in its general outline but undiminished in its power of expansion and in­ tensification. In Spenser’s day the deadly enmity continued, now in its Turkish or Ottoman manifestation, as it does powerfully in the back­ ground to Shakespeare’s Othello. The g­ reat naval b ­ attle of Lepanto, ­because of which, as was thought at the time, Eu­ro­pean and Christian civilization was saved, was fought in 1571—an early modern Salamis, over two millennia ­after. Throughout the sixteenth ­century ­there was re­ lentless Ottoman pressure also on land, in eastern Eu­rope, especially around Vienna and Budapest, one cause of the trou­bles in Serbia and Cro­ atia t­oday. In the Re­nais­sance the widely felt terror was that the Sara­ cens, gaining control of the Mediterranean, would overrun Eu­rope from

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the east, extinguishing Christian civilization and the Christian religion itself. So the background to the Re­nais­sance epic, and to The Faerie Queene, even in its most imaginative flights, is intense geopo­liti­cal anxiety of very long standing. The language associated with this supposed threat posed by Islam to Christian civilization represents one of the oldest continuing fears in the society, politics, and culture of the West. It is the same as that employed to characterize the barbarian atheist threat of the Axis powers in World War II—­not to mention the “Huns” of World War I—­and of the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the 1980s: the heartless and fanatical atheist horde pressing in from the east and the north. The language of the hid­ eous other is heard ­today in the po­liti­cal arena of ­every Eu­ro­pean country—to say nothing of the United States—in the tensions over Muslim immigrants, from the head­scarf in French schools to the teaching of Sharia law. The fears expressed in Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 speech on immigration—­called the “Rivers of Blood Speech” ­because he quoted Virgil on the Cumaean Sibyl’s foreseeing the Tiber foaming with blood (an image Ariosto realizes in the River Seine)—­resonates now with the Brexit campaign, the National Front party in France, and right-­w ing institutes for the defense of Western Christendom. The fear of the “other” is racial as much as it is religious and cultural, race being cited as the under­lying cause of t­ hese aberrations. Statements by celebrities on the fear of cultural infiltration—­I recall from years ago one mentioning, not unpoetically, that very soon in France one ­w ill hear in the eve­ning the Muslim call to prayer instead of the angelus—­are publicly condemned even as they receive a wide and sympathetic hearing from the, at the time, mostly po­liti­cally ­silent. When I entered gradu­ate school in the late 1970s, at the height of the US-­Soviet nuclear arms race, a professor who was a specialist on the Re­ nais­sance epic observed in an aside that if we think the image of Islam in ­these poems i­ sn’t serious (we ­didn’t) we should consider that the real chal­ lenge faced ­today by the culture of the West is not the Soviet Union, whose economy is weaker than it seems, but resurgent Islam. T ­ hese geopo­liti­cal animadversions seemed laughable at the time but ­were re­ membered in 1989 and 2001. At the time, I thought with callow amuse­ ment, who better to study the Re­nais­sance epic ­under than someone still

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possessed by the prejudices and po­liti­cal delusions of four centuries ago? I would learn more about t­ hose prejudices and delusions as I read more about the crusades and the traditions of romance.15 The point of course is not the challenge in itself of Islamic extremism or, over a longer period, since the Second World War, of the geopo­liti­cal consequences of an in­ creasingly assertive Arab world. The point is the orientalizing imagery into which t­ hese normal historical events are reflexively placed and iden­ tified with the entirety of Islam, soon to be the world’s largest religion. The false and yet strangely irresistible identification works ­because of the long history of the fear of Islam, and some of that identification’s greatest successes belong to the Re­nais­sance epics from Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser, with Spenser the most extreme of them all. Hostility to and fear of Islam—of an exotic and cruel other, freely generalized as circum­ stances dictate to include Chinese and Rus­sian communism, German and Japa­nese fascism—is, as I said, the deepest and most continuing po­liti­cal anxiety of the West, g­ oing back to the Persian wars, to Aeschylus’s The Persians, performed eight years a­ fter Salamis, in 472 bce, and Herodotus’s account of t­ hose wars in The Histories (ca. 440 bce). The terror of the “eastern horde” is in Spenser’s scheme held in reserve for his planned second epic, but his “paynim” knights in The Faerie Queene are daemonic allegorical vices (daemonic in Angus Fletcher’s sense of the term), not persons, as they certainly are in the Italian epic poets.16 It is of course wrong to call them pagans, which suggests polytheism, Islam being more rigorously mono­ the­ istic than Chris­ tian­ ity, and it is grossly wrong for Spenser’s paynim knights, when they die, to call not on Allah but on their god, Mahoun (i.e., Mahomet). Fear and hatred of the cultural other—­I have yet to mention the Irish— is per­sis­tent throughout The Faerie Queene and makes the poem more rel­ evant to the politics of our time, and to international politics of the last millennium, than Paradise Lost. By a curious irony, Milton intended his epics to be po­liti­cally relevant, but they turned out to be much more rel­ evant to morals; and Spenser intended his epic to be morally relevant, but it applies more to the volatile politics of our time. Even the history plays of Shakespeare, insightful as they are about the cunning of power and the turbulent dynamics of rebellion, have almost nothing to say on this wider theme of the cultural other.17 As I mentioned, Othello alone plucks that

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string—­and with terrifying insight, with re­spect to p ­ eople of color from the Magreb, in North Africa, and also with re­spect to the Ottoman civi­ lization with which, as a ­matter of historical fact, ­there was a ­great amount of cultural, economic, and ­human exchange ­behind normal tensions—­and conflicts—­between ­great powers sharing the same sphere of action. One hears now with a shudder, not intended by Shakespeare, Othello’s happy announcement that “the Turks are drowned” (II.i.216). We are dealing with an atavistic image of a looming and implacable foe, one waiting on the periphery and yet also, subtly, infiltrating the center—­invading, indeed, our very minds and anchoring itself even more securely t­ here, such that the imaginary outer threat is more tena­ ciously believed in if employed as an image for the moral strug­gle in­ side us, as when Sir Thomas Browne says, “Let me be nothing if within the compass of my self I do not find the ­Battle of Lepanto.”18 That is why the imagery of crazed and wicked Saracens, Spenser’s paynims, is so effective in the species of allegory, psychomachia, that purports to show us our internal nature in an external form. It strengthens our belief in the real­ity and malignancy of the signifier. We may note ­here that Spenser consistently refers to his Saracen vice-­ figures as pagans, very inaccurately but effectively. In this he follows Tasso, who always calls the adherents of Islam pagani. Of course, the term paganus denoted a countryman, from pagus, a rural town or district, and ­later someone who continued to practice the old Roman religion, worshipping many local gods instead of giving up one’s crude idols and sacred groves to adopt Chris­tian­ity instead. Real paganism—­the true religion, if it is one, of the agnostic—is easygoing and uncommitted and is anything but fanatical. The pagan is not so much godless as god-­indifferent and w ­ ill accept many gods, or none, depending on the weather. The pagan ­w ill practice superstition when d ­ oing so feels right and condemn it when it does not—or when asked. Nothing could be further from Islam, which as a religion is more strictly mono­the­istic than Chris­tian­ity and far more opposed to idolatry and ­every form of superstition. Calling Muslims “pa­ gans” is a shocking insult. But the conjuncture of the religious otherness of Islam to its opposite—­ paganism—­manufactures the flexibility needed to extend the fearful imagery of the Muslim foe to all other threats, including moral and

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psychological ones arising from within us. For external threats, tarring with the brush of Islam was useful above all ­else for the superstitious and idolatrous Roman Catholic religion, as Spenser and the En­glish saw it, Roman Catholicism being, as Milton would l­ater hold too, not a reli­ gion at all but a po­liti­c al conspiracy, specializing in infiltration and subversion—­much as Islam is seen in some quarters t­ oday. For Spenser the discourse and imagery of the Saracen applied to the Roman Catholic threat to E ­ ngland, especially ­after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. ­England was surrounded by a shadowy foe very like Islam in the East and in the Mediterranean: Spain to the south, a short distance by sea; Ireland to the west, where the poet would spend his ­career attempting to pacify the country and draw it away from Roman Catholi­ cism; Scotland to the North, where French Roman Catholic influence was strong in the circle around Mary, queen of Scots, whom Roman Catho­ lics believed was rightfully queen of ­England; and, to the east, France and the low countries (Belgium and Holland), which provided the best plat­ form for the invasion of ­England, as was actually planned in 1588. In the last five cantos of Book Five, Spenser ­w ill be concerned with ­England’s war on two fronts, with Ireland to the west and Belgium to the east, and always with Spain to the south, Philip II being Spenser’s Saracen king. In­ deed, in one episode, the allegorical identity is drawn between Philip II and Suleiman the Magnificent, represented as the Soldan, godless, fanat­ ical, cruel, and fi­nally ridicu­lous (FQ V.viii.27–45). In The Faerie Queene, the nonsensical but highly effective po­liti­cal equation is clear: Roman Ca­ tholicism and Islam are one and the same.19 Italians lived in closer proximity and cultural exchange with Muslims than the En­glish did, and this is doubtless one reason the Italian poets hu­ manize their foes, especially the w ­ omen. The famous conversion of Ag­ ricane in Boiardo and of Clorinda in Tasso are unthinkable in Spenser.20 However clichéd the general view of the Saracen warriors is—­the figure of Rodomonte in Boiardo and Ariosto comes to mind first, whence our word rodomontade—­they are represented as ­human characters. In Spenser they are not. A scene from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata must have interested Spenser especially, for itself and for what he could use—­and also for what he would not use. It is the noble defiance and death, at the hands of his

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personal ­enemy Tancredi, of the fiercest of the Saracen warriors, the Cir­ cassian Argante, an arrogant fatalist whose only law is the sword. The ­battle is personal ­because each holds the other responsible for the death of Clorinda. It is one of Tasso’s finest, set-­piece monomachias, intention­ ally recalling and striving to “overgo” the death strug­gles of Hector and Achilles in the Iliad, of Turnus and Aeneas in the Aeneid, and of Rodomonte and Ruggiero at the conclusion to the Orlando furioso. The city has fallen, and Argante alone resists, pointlessly, awaiting Tancredi in a narrow and dark valley where their duel ­w ill have the char­ acter of a nightmare. Tancredi ­orders his men to stand back and not in­ terfere, and when one sees the other without his shield, he throws away his own, a fact accounting for the g­ reat quantity of blood that is shed be­ fore the ­battle ends, so much that the victor himself nearly succumbs afterward. As the combat goes on, Argante is hopelessly weakened, his blood flowing out of his wounds like a torrent, his blows enfeebled, and he is driven down on one knee, barely able to hold his sword. Yet he re­ mains defiant to the end and twice refuses—­fi rst arrogantly and then treacherously—­the opportunity he is offered to surrender on respectful terms. He dies when Tancredi, infuriated at the treachery—­Argante man­ aged to wound him in the heel when he was offering peace—­repeatedly drives his sword through the visor of his e­ nemy’s helm. Even then, Ar­ gante expires not fainting away but uttering threats with his last breath: minacciava morendo e non languia. His final actions and words, as Tasso re­ lates with a certain awe, ­were proud, terrifying, and ferocious: “Superbi, formidabili e feroci / gli ultimi moti fur, l’ultime voci” (19.26). We feel ­there is a larger consciousness b ­ ehind ­these convulsive defiances, the con­ sciousness of one whose martial spirit is heroically undiminished and whose nobility, for a moment, outshines that of his victor. Even so, the mad per­sis­tence of Argante is in keeping with Spenser’s allegorical paynims and is useful to him. Not so useful, however, is the humanizing exchange that occurs before the combat begins. Argante turns from his e­ nemy to gaze on the city of Jerusalem, which is soon to fall to the Christians. Only when asked to ex­ plain himself does he admit he is thinking of that city as the ancient queen of the kingdom of Judea, which is now defeated and falls to her enemies: “Penso, risponde, a la città del regno / di Giudea antichissima

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regina, / che vinta or cade” (19.10). Such a moment is all but unthinkable for Spenser’s allegorical paynims, who die like crazed machines, only then acquiring souls, for the purpose of being punished forever in Hell. So dies Sans Foy, “Lack Faith”: He tumbling downe alive With bloudy mouth his m ­ other earth did kiss, Greeting his grave: his grudging ghost did strive With the fraile flesh; at last it flitted is, Whither the soules do fly of men that live amiss. FQ I.ii.19

So dies Cymocles, a figure of lustful depression: He tombling downe on ground Breathed out his ghost, which to th’ infernall shade Fast flying, ­there eternall torment found For all the sinnes wherewith his lewd life did abound. FQ II.viii.45

So dies the Seneschall of the tyrant Gerioneo, whose corpse tombling downe upon the senselesse ground, Gave leave unto his ghost from thraldome bound, To wander in the griesly shades of night. FQ V.x.33

So dies the three-­bodied Gerioneo himself: Enwallow’d in his owne blacke bloudy gore, And byting th’earth for very deaths disdaine; Who with a cloud of night him covering, bore Downe to the h ­ ouse of dole, his daies ­there to deplore. FQ V.xi.14

And for what is meant to be a more satisfactorily complete annihilation, so dies the Souldan, a “pagan hound” caught in his own iron hooks and sharp grapples: Torne all to rags, and rent with many a wound, That no w ­ hole peece of him was to be seene,

Other Poets  35 But scattered all about, and strow’d upon the greene. FQ V.viii.42

A similar fate is met by Guyle—­the Irish Malengine—­crying for help as he is ground into pieces, his carrion reduced to a mere paste for “beasts and foules” to feed upon (V.ix.19). All cultural o ­ thers—­the Irish, the Roman Catholics, the Spanish—­tend to be assimilated to the Saracen and psy­ chologized as vices. We saw, however, that this psychologizing of the Sar­ acen makes the imaginary threat of the real, external ones seem more strong, not less.

' T H E I D E A O F composing a continued allegory, not an intermittent one (intermittent and mostly satirical allegories are strewn about in Orlando furioso), or a dark conceit, where this word means a hidden “concept” under­ lying the ­whole, would have been caught by Spenser from allegorizing commentaries on the Orlando furioso almost two de­cades ­after its author’s death.21 ­These came in the course of the literary debate of the ­century over ­whether modern epic poems should follow the “rules” of Aristotle’s Poetics (of which an influential text with commentary was published in 1548)22 —­including the princi­ples of unity and of verisimilitude, which Ariosto violates at ­every turn—or ­whether romances, being digressive and highly imaginative and caught up in very large, hard-­to-­control ­matters such as the conflict of civilizations, are an au­then­tic modern ex­ pression of the genre. Torquato Tasso became more embroiled than anyone ­else in this debate, trying to square the circle of the digressive and imaginative romance form with the sacred princi­ples of Aristotle—­unity and verisimilitude—­ ­and make the ­whole into a Christian poem in unapologetic cele­bration of aggressive war. He was anticipated, however, by Gian Giorgio Tris­ sino, who wrote one of the earliest Aristotelian treatises on poetics (1529, completed 1562) and the first regular, Aristotelian tragedy, Sophonisba (1515). But his hopes w ­ ere dashed by his greatest attempt: an unsuccessful but experimentally in­ter­est­ing epic poem in twenty-­seven books of “blank verse,” versi sciolti, on Belisarius and Justinian’s liberation of Italy from the Goths, L’Italia liberata da Goti (3 vols., 1547–48). Trissino

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very accurately describes the character of this poem when he says he fol­ lowed the “idea” of Homer (many episodes of the Iliad are ingeniously transmuted) and the precepts of Aristotle, fashioning the ­whole on a single action decorated with subordinate digressions and allegorical fic­ tions. Of the latter, of which ­there are many, the most elaborate is the al­ legory of the witch Acratia (intemperance)—­who becomes Spenser’s Acrasia—­and the lady Areta, “noble virtue” (Gr. arêtê).23 Spenser may have heard of Tasso’s pastoral romance Aminta (1573, but not published u ­ ntil 1581, the same year as the Gerusalemme liberata) and would have heard something of his theories of poetry. But at the time he was conceiving The Faerie Queene, in 1580, he would already have been aware of the com­ promise position taken by some of Ariosto’s defenders and exemplified in practice by Trissino. The compromise was allegory. The solution, to put the long explanations briefly, was to explain Ari­ osto’s “veiled morality” as excuse for his poem’s apparent want of gravity and verisimilitude, in par­tic­u­lar its disunity, or varietà, and its generous deployment of magic and marvels, or maraviglie.24 Variety, marvels, and a third term, verisimilitude—­this one from Aristotle’s insistence on imitating the ­really pos­si­ble and “probable” or likely (eikos)—­were the key terms of discussion.25 The variety was explained away as concealing an under­lying unity residing partly in the action and partly in the allegorical meaning. The magic and marvels, though not at all probable in the real world, w ­ ere explained as purely allegorical and so commenting on the principal ac­ tion. The marvels do not violate verisimilitude ­because they are in fact an imitation, a mimesis, but not of physical real­ity. They are an imitation of ideas, of conceptual truth. This solution, which is of course Neopla­ tonic and entirely foreign to Aristotle, nevertheless sallied out u ­ nder the Stagirite’s banner—­not that it mattered, since the purpose was to defend Ariosto’s romance epic at all costs and in all ways, and the prestige of Ar­ istotle over Plato was then at its height. All three princi­ples ­w ill quietly and deeply inform the allegory of The Faerie Queene. The continual variation and interruption of episodes, or moments, force the reader to think, building interpretative bridges between episodes and divining conceptual vibrations within them. The magical and marvelous ele­ments (though they are less extravagant in Spenser than in Ariosto), such as the windbag ­giant Orgoglio, whose name means

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“pride,” are, as allegorical signs, accessories to the work of this thinking through and within episodes. Lastly, wherever we feel we are not being given straightforward history (for Spenser does suggest at several points that his narrative is from ancient Briton legend), we are to understand the ­whole poem as an allegorical discourse on the moral virtues, an imita­ tion of conceptual truth—in par­tic­u­lar, as he would say in the Letter to Raleigh, “the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised,” to be followed (“if I finde to be well accepted”) by the “polliticke vertues.” The presence of Aristotle in this formulation may have less to do with the phi­ los­o­pher’s ethics than with his poetics, a distant echo from the Italian debate over romance. All the vari­ous actions of the proliferating knights in Ariosto (so say his neo-­A ristotelian defenders) fall ­either ­under the Pagan King Agramante or the wise old Christian Emperor, Charlemagne—­Carlo Magno—­and therefore contribute to a single, unified action: the youthful and impetuous Agramante’s crossing the Mediterranean Sea to lay siege to Paris, and the raising of that siege by Orlando—­after his wits are re­ stored. As for the marvels, such as Astolfo’s flight to the far side of the moon to recover ­those wits, stored in a ­bottle, ­these do not violate prob­ ability, or verosimilitudine, “likeness to truth,” ­because, although they cer­ tainly fail as imitations of physical real­ity, they do imitate conceptual truth—­allegorically. So also do the adventures of Ruggiero, who ­w ill be converted from “paganism” and marry Bradamante (the prototype of Spenser’s Britomart), as he progresses from imprisonment by the witch Alcina to moral instruction by Logistilla, whose name suggests “reason” (Gr. log­os). The idea of having a complex allegory with its multiple knights issue forth in a ­great series of straightforward ­battles between a Fairy Queen and a Pagan King long haunted Spenser, as we have seen, and has its ori­gin ­here, in Ariosto, or in commentary on him. In Book One, before the climactic b ­ attle between the Redcross knight and the dragon, that “dread­ full Beast” (FQ I.xi.8)—­a truly astounding agon equal to any in epic—­ Spenser very appropriately calls for aid from the muse of epic poetry, Cal­ liope, the child of Phoebus and Memory, who ennobles “warlike hands” with “immortal name” (I.xi.5). But oddly, in the stanza following, he asks the muse to come “­gently, but not with that mighty rage, / Wherewith the

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martiall troupes thou doest infest, / And harts of ­great Heroës doest en­ rage.” It is a rage that awakens the god of war himself, Mars, who w ­ ill ter­ rify and astound the nations with “horrour stern” (I.xi.6). This is pretty clearly what Spenser wants to be d ­ oing. But a­ fter all this huffing and puffing Spenser ­doesn’t blow: Faire Goddess lay that furious fit aside, Till I of warres and bloudy Mars do sing, And Briton fields with Sarazin bloud bedyde, Twixt that ­great faery Queene and Paynim king, That with their horrour heaven and earth did ring, A worke of ­labour long, and endlesse prayse: But now a while let downe that haughtie string, And to my tunes thy second tenor rayse, That I this man of God his godly armes may blaze. FQ I.xi.7

He is saving “Briton fields with Sarazin bloud bedyde” for ­later. The epic poem of ­battle that Spenser ­here imagines ­w ill be a work “of ­labour long, and endlesse prayse,” making heaven and earth ring with the “horrour” of it, horror in the Virgilian sense of bristling with arms. But for the time being the poet asks his muse to “lay that furious fit aside”—is ­there a lin­ gering trace of Orlando in that word furious?—so that he may expatiate his moral allegory, which at the moment is concerned with holiness. The allegory is “second tenor” to the heroic and ­w ill remain so implicitly throughout The Faerie Queene, in which the epic poem of war, which is by its nature thoughtless—­because heroism ­doesn’t reflect—is continu­ ally deferred by the activity of thought, almost as if thought ­were not itself action. The hope of getting past thought into ­battle is still vanishingly pre­ sent in the Mutabilitie Cantos, when the poet abates the sternness of his style “To sing of hilles and woods, mongst warres and Knights” (VII.vi.37).

' of Spenser’s plan as it prob­ably existed when he showed it to Harvey was given by the poet two years l­ ater, in Ireland, in what appears to have been his own words. He had now completed his ser­v ice as secretary to his greatly admired Lord Grey, the model for A FU LLER DESCR IP T ION

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Artegal in Faerie Queene, Book Five, and was a rising man in the colonial administration. The occasion on which he described his work in pro­ gress was an informal gathering over three days of mostly British colo­ nial officials at the residence of Lodowick Bryskett just outside Dublin, the topic for discussion being training in the moral virtues at successive stages of life, from childhood and youth to early adulthood and matu­ rity.26 Bryskett, being a loyal servant of the Protestant En­glish state in its drive to suppress rebellion and pacify Ireland but descending from an Italian f­amily with Roman Catholic connections—­his ­mother was En­ glish and his ­father, Antonio Bruschetto, Italian—­was a complicated and sinister figure who appears to have worked not only as an adminis­ trator and secretary but also as a provocateur and spy.27 Bryskett had been in Ireland for some time and would outrank Spenser in the colo­ nial administration, having served as secretary to the skillful and bloody Lord Deputy Sir Henry Sidney, perpetrator (in addition to more casual and continual slaughter) of the massacre of Mullaghmast, of 1578. Brys­ kett was also a close friend of Spenser’s (he is portrayed as Thestylus in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe) and was doubtless the source of much of the poet’s information about Italian letters a­ fter 1580, including, as we may allow ourselves to imagine, the g­ reat and very serious epic of Tor­ quato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, “Jerusalem Liberated,” published in 1581, which in the spirit of the Counter-­Reformation promised to cor­ rect the lighthearted excesses of Ariosto. One of Tasso’s solutions, the prose “Allegoria del poema” appended to the epic in the 1581 edition, was closely studied by Spenser. He surpasses it in the far more sophisti­ cated, and elusive, Letter to Raleigh. The gathering was contrived to give Bryskett an occasion to read from what would become his book A Discourse of Civill Life (1606), an adapta­ tion of three dialogues by Giovan Battista Giraldi (a Ferrarese man of let­ ters known more widely by his nickname, Cinthio): Tre dialoghi della vita civile (1565). Cinthio’s subject is the raising and training of sons for civic life. The dialogues w ­ ere published with Cinthio’s much-­better-­k nown work Gli Hecatommithi, “the one hundred stories,” which, incidentally, pro­ vided the plots of Mea­sure for Mea­sure and Othello.28 The clear ideological frame within which ­these gentlemen gathered to discuss the virtues is not ethical in Aristotle’s sense—­that is, for the sake

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of “­human flourishing,” or eudaemonia—­nor is it spiritual, for the good of one’s immortal soul. The frame is po­liti­cal, a point to bear in mind when considering the moral allegory of The Faerie Queene. What are the virtues that need most to be cultivated for building an ordered and civil society? The subject is of considerable interest to men charged with “civilizing” Ireland on En­glish terms, transforming its Gaelic ­legal and administrative culture and settling ancient lands—­cleared by the extreme suppression of rebellion—­w ith imported En­glish “planters,” a challenging operation we would now call “genocide and ethnic cleansing.” In Bryskett’s account, which is the prelude to his own dialogues, the ­great poet Spenser is asked to expatiate on the virtues as training for public life but declines to do so ­because he is engaged with that subject on dif­fer­ent terms: in a poem in “heroical verse” entitled Faerie Queene. In this he would endeavor “to represent all the moral vertues, assigning to ­every virtue a Knight to be the patron and defender of the same: in whose actions and feates of arms and chivalry, the operations of that virtue . . . ​ are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose them­ selves against the same, to be beaten down and overcome.” The poet adds, “which work, as I have already well entred into, if God s­ hall plea­ sure to spare me life that I may finish it according to my mind, your wish (M. Bryskett) ­w ill be in some sort accomplished, though perhaps not so effectually as you could desire.” It seems likely, as I mentioned, that this much of the plan existed two years previous, when Spenser showed what he had done to Gabriel Harvey. But the careful expression of the plan does suggest a certain defensiveness a­ fter Harvey’s warning, even though the poet appears to have gone straight ahead with his proj­ect: “which work, as I have already well entered into . . . ​I may finish it according to my mind.”29 It has been noted that in the Letter to Raleigh, Spenser’s statement on virtue includes both genders: “The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle disci­ pline.” He is thinking more broadly than in terms of a male administra­ tive and military elite willing to do what is necessary to make peace or a desert. He is thinking of an entire social order planted in the savage soil of Ireland and replacing the very dif­fer­ent and, as he saw it, degenerated one already t­ here.30

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That means bringing in En­glish historical myth and if pos­si­ble linking it with Celtic culture through the ancient Britons and especially through their legendary leader, King Arthur, dux bellorum, “captain of the wars.” Accordingly, in the mature plan for The Faerie Queene, which ­w ill be, as noted, second tenor to the heroic, the virtues ­will be united by Prince Ar­ thur’s encountering in turn each of the knights patronizing the virtues, Arthur having entered Fairy Land from Britain in quest of the Fairy Queen, who signifies the glory he w ­ ill l­ ater win, her name being Gloriana and her city Cleopolis (Gr. kleos, “glory” + polis, “city”). Arthur w ­ ill, so to speak, gather to himself each virtue as he goes, and each virtue ­w ill be fulfilled in him, in his magnificence; each w ­ ill also be fulfilled in u ­ nion with the o ­ thers. So Spenser ­w ill indicate, with further elaboration, in the Letter to Raleigh, in which Arthur is “magnificence in par­tic­u­lar”: “which virtue, for that . . . ​it is the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all, therefore in the ­whole course I mentione the deedes of Arthur applyable to that vertue, which I write of in that book.” In ­doing this with Arthur, Spenser understands himself to be following “all the antique Poets historicall,” including Homer and Virgil in antiquity and the Re­nais­sance Italian poets of epic romance, Ariosto and Tasso. His purpose is to make a “pleasing analy­sis” of the private and public virtues of the ideal prince. Although the poem is intended to praise Queen Elizabeth I as the Fairy Queen, and the point is made often, the active subject is the ideal Re­nais­ sance prince symbolized by Arthur. This means that e­ very one of the deeds of the knights in The Faerie Queene—of the knight of holiness, Red­ cross; of the knight of temperance, Guyon; and even of the female knight of chastity, Britomart—is allegorically Arthur’s deed and “applyable” to him by the reader. We are reminded of how, in the allegorizations of Ari­ osto, the actions of the knights are likewise “applyable” to superordinate figures, Charlemagne and Agramante. ­There is an exchange of complete­ ness between the many and the one that the superior figure also tran­ scends, ­because he is more than the sum of ­those parts, necessary as they are to him. The mirror-­like reflection of Queen Elizabeth I in The Faerie Queene—­and in the Fairy Queen—­gives the poem its princi­ple of exis­ tence in a larger surround, its being in the world: “In this faire mirrhour maist behold thy face” (II.proem.4); “In mirrours more then one her selfe to see” (III.proem.5). The relation between the many figures of Queen

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Elizabeth inside the poem and the queen herself is an analytic one: they open up and reveal to us what is already ­there, as if the narrative ­were only an afterthought, a decoration, or an extension by analy­sis of a static state. But the relation between the several knights and Prince Arthur is a synthetic one: they are “put together” in him dynamically through the ac­ tion of the narrative. The relationship of governing and control between Arthur and the several knights keeps the poem from losing its integrity as its many narratives proliferate, as may seem to happen in Ariosto or in Boiardo. If reflection between Queen Elizabeth I and the Fairy Queen gives the poem its princi­ple of existence in the larger surround, interac­ tion between Arthur and the knights gives the poem its actively self-­ regulating princi­ple of dynamic order within.

' is arguably—­and the argument would grow very hot—­the greatest long poem of the Italian Re­nais­sance and the most influential long poem of the modern era. Its competitor, Torquato Tas­ so’s Gerusalemme liberata, which Spenser was to study and imitate carefully, was not, as was noted, be published in complete form u ­ ntil 1581, the year following the letters between Harvey and Spenser and a year preceding the symposium in Dublin. Unlike Milton, who claimed to transcend the ancient poets Homer and Virgil with a subject “Not less but more heroic than the wrath / Of stern Achilles . . . ​or rage / Of Turnus for Lavinia dis­ espoused,” Spenser names this modern and at least nominally Christian work by Ariosto as the one he w ­ ill improve on and “overgo.”31 He w ­ ill not do so by turning directly to the Bible, as Milton would do. Instead, Spenser ­w ill adopt similar materials from the traditions of romance (but Arthu­ rian, rather than Carolingian, romance) and employ them for a more se­ rious purpose, as symbols in a “continued Allegory, or darke conceit.” That is how Spenser refers to his method in the Letter to Raleigh, which is dated 23 January 1589 (i.e., 1590, for the year then changed in March) and which, as we have seen, was published with the first installment of The Faerie Queene, in 1590, following the text of the poem, as Tasso’s “Al­ legoria del poema” followed the text of Gerusalemme liberata. Spenser, like many before him and too many a­ fter (but by no means every­one, not Galileo, for example, and not Byron), finds the brilliant achievement of the Orlando furioso disconcertingly weightless, ­because its T HE OR L A N DO F U R IOSO

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tone—to say nothing of its luxuriant inventiveness—­varies freely from irony and satire to dry wit, sexiness, travesty, and farce, all of t­ hese sur­ passed, when and only when the poet is in the mood, by high heroic gran­ deur and noble disdain, disprezza, following creatively that paradigm for aspiring epic poets of the Re­nais­sance: the Aeneid. Does the multiform and decentered structure of the Orlando furioso more truly represent life’s unpredictability, in defiance of theory and prescriptive rules? Or does the narrative freedom of such a poem—­its indulgence of super­natural mar­ vels as well as sudden digression, cantus interruptus, to use Daniel Javitch’s term—­betray the de­cadence of what ­people in the Re­nais­sance ­were al­ ready calling the “modern” age?32 Was this an age, as was feared by the sterner critics of the day, in which strong dramatic tension could no longer be kept up, b ­ ecause our slack standards and characters are capable of appreciating only momentary and transient thrills? The interwoven narrative is like the deceptive palace of the enchanter Atlante, in which captured knights endlessly pursue their desires. Javitch’s in­ter­est­ing and I think true point is that the continual interruption of the narrative line by other, intercut narratives, a structure the Italians call intratessuto, or “interwoven,” has the effect not of raising the tension but of decreasing it, giving to each episode a more relaxed style of attention, diverting en­ ergy away from the syntagmatic axis of the narrative line.33 The same is true of The Faerie Queene, but the relaxed style of attention it creates by this means has the added dimension of allegorical thought. Our emotional connection with the narrative is relaxed by interruption so that we reflect on what the moment means and how this meaning might be coordinated with ­others. Since the Orlando furioso is in itself a won­der of sustained poetical in­ vention, t­ here must be a way to turn it to some still nobler purpose—so thinks Spenser—as befits the high seriousness of poetry. Allegory was Spenser’s answer, and not only his. A ­ fter Ariosto’s death, as we have seen, the Orlando furioso was subjected to sustained and deadly serious allegor­ ical interpretation, notably at midcentury, in the learned, compound tome of Simone Fornari: La spositione sopra l’Orlando furioso.34 Spenser very prob­ably knew of ­these efforts as well. But he did not believe, as Fornari and o ­ thers claimed, that Ariosto is allegorical from top to bottom, that nothing in the Orlando furioso is intended to mean only itself but always an invisible and more sublime other ­thing. Spenser’s intention, at least as

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he expresses it in the Letter to Raleigh, is to do this for real. Yet in prac­ tice, his own allegory tends to be intermittent. But he assumes—­such is the convention of the form—­that even where his allegory has lapsed into narrative his readers, having been put in the state of mind, ­w ill continue to allegorize. We must understand continued allegory in an extended and environmental sense, as the climate of mind in which the poem breathes as a w ­ hole. For the minds of the poet and of the reader do not stand isolated from one another and from the text between them, each mind in its own cranial prison. The mind of Spenser is extended into the poem he creates, which is an extension, not just a product, of his mind; and the poem he creates is extended into readers’ minds inter­ acting with the poem and recycling ­mental energy back into the poem.35 The ­whole system runs in a cir­cuit. Or, to speak imagistically, the poem is the radiant, central axis of an environment of mind. It has a temporal axis as well. ­T here can be no doubt that Ariosto expected his readers to be better persons for reading his poem: more humane in sensibility, larger in spirit, and finer in thought. But it is perhaps hard for a critic, in ­those days as well as in ours, to discern exactly how we are improved by a poem that has no obvious design on us except to entertain with its variety and won­der. Like the knight-­prisoners of Atlante chasing their will-­o’-­the-­ wisp hopes through the endless chambers of his enchanted palace, we vainly pursue a serious “undermeaning” through the entangling and ab­ sorbing adventures, the fine speeches and extravagant passions, the super­natural marvels and magic spells, the imaginative flights that com­ plement down-­to-­earth portraits of ­human nature, the moments of high seriousness that continually fade before irony and satire, and the wild, moment-­to-­moment unpredictability of the plot. As the perfect Italian courtier and gentleman, however, Ariosto would not have been inclined loudly to insist on his philosophical seriousness or to have declared any higher intention than that of celebrating the heroic descent of the House of Este—­the rulers of Ferrara and his patrons—­from the lovers who are married at the end of his poem. ­T hese are Ruggiero, formerly a Saracen, whose moral divagations are like ­those of the Redcross knight, and Bra­ damante, the w ­ oman warrior on whom Spenser modeled one of the two most absorbing characters in The Faerie Queene, Britomart.36 More earnest than Ariosto, Spenser in the same Letter to Raleigh declared his “generall

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end” to be the fashioning of the members of a new society “in vertuous and gentle discipline.” This aim is perhaps not so far from Ariosto’s as might be supposed. But the method of a “continued Allegory,” spelling it out, certainly is.

' how many famous Italian intellectuals and scholars, in addition to Ariosto, distinguished themselves in the writing of comedies, including Cardinal Bibbiena, Niccolò Machiavelli, Pietro Aretino, and Pietro Bembo, all of them following the ancients—in par­ tic­u­lar, as he helpfully adds, “Aristophanes and Menander in Greek” and “Plautus and Terence in Latin.”37 He is a reliable index of the intellectual fashions of the day originating in Italy, where for a time the writing of learned comedy in imitation of the ancients, commedia erudita, enjoyed higher prestige than any other literary form, certainly higher than popu­lar romance. Now classical tragedies ­were in vogue, nine of them by Giraldi Cinthio, for example; but in the quattrocento it was comedy that exercised correct literary tastes.38 Other humanist stars of the ­earlier Re­nais­sance who wrote comedies ­were Petrarch himself, Leon­ ardo Bruni, Leone Battista Alberti, and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. Even Galileo, in the following c­ entury, having studied Ariosto’s come­ dies, made an attempt. Approving the fashion, Politian taught courses in Florence on Terence’s Andria and contributed a polemical epistle and Latin verse prologue for a per­ for­ mance by students of Plautus’s Menaechmi that took place on May 12, 1488, in the presence of Lorenzo the Magnificent: “Comediam Menaechmos acturi sumus, / Lepidam et iocsam et elegantem ut nihil supra!”39 ­Behind all this activity was Nicolas of Cusa’s discovery in 1429 of twelve lost plays of Plautus—­one of which was the Menaechmi—­ and Giovanni Aurispa’s discovery shortly ­a fter, in 1433, of Donatus’s commentary on Terence. ­T hese events started an intense round of theorizing on correct comic struc­ ture and incited the fashion, maturing in the early sixteenth ­century, for classically structured comedies in the Italian language as well, in­ cluding Ariosto’s own comedies, which incorporate material from the popu­lar novelle and from con­temporary life. 40 Hence, long before the power­ful influence of Aristotle’s Poetics was felt in the m ­ iddle of the following ­century, the example of ancient comedy H A RV E Y P O I N T S O U T

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provided literary intellectuals of the quattrocento with a model of rational control over the imaginative space in which stories of h ­ uman actions un­ fold. The model was analogous to, and doubtless inspired by, the rational control over physical space—­linear perspective—­that was emerging at the same time in architecture and the visual arts. It is not surprising that artists painted stage sets at Ferrara, a center for the per­for­mance of com­ edies, or that the ­great architectural practitioner and theorist Leone Bat­ tista Alberti should himself have written a comedy. The power­ful idea of continuity and concinnitas (a word Alberti fished out of Cicero via Ficino), of a smoothly homogeneous and uninterrupted spatio-­temporal field, one in which even the smallest event is coordinate with e­ very other and with the w ­ hole, emerged at this time in lit­er­a­ture and the visual arts. It made the courtly romances of the M ­ iddle Ages, however modernized they might have been by Ariosto’s ­great fifteenth-­ century pre­de­ces­sor Matteo Maria Boiardo, seem, by comparison, naive. This is oral storytelling, whose power is in the moment. It is not lit­er­a­ ture in the architecturally planned sense of the word. In the eyes of the more doctrinaire humanists, romance is frivolous, chaotic, impulsive, and whimsical. It is highly episodic and occasional; it ranges wildly over time and space, especially space, and its events arise not in a chain of ­causes but by pure chance, coming out of nowhere. Romance makes un­ licensed use of marvels—or maravigle—­including monsters, enchanters, magic rings, swords, shields, and palaces, all of them, we may note, to appear in The Faerie Queene. ­T hese ­things, it was said, relying on a super­ ficial understanding of the Poetics, cannot at all be counted as “imita­ tions” of real life, however heightened. Of perhaps under­lying importance to this hostility is the concern of romance with characters from a far-­higher social class—­benevolent and irascible kings; beautiful princesses; stern, mounted barons; noble and fierce Saracens; even Roman senators (as Boiardo calls Orlando)—­than the bourgeois inhabitants of small, self-­contained cities, the city having become, as Jacob Burckhardt clearly saw, the driving image and ideal for the culture of the Re­nais­sance in Italy. 41 Whereas romance is about indi­ viduals, the city is about citizens as parts of a system. I think of Claude Lévi-­Strauss writing on ­music when I say that the attraction of the image of the city, like the attraction of the coordinate poetics that was sought

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a­ fter in literary theory, is undergirded by the basic attraction of the mind to system and structure. System and structure effect the partial conver­ sion of raw, irreversible time into symmetrical order. 42 The princi­ples of concinnity in art are careful mea­sure­ment, clearly de­ fined bound­aries or outline, and the smooth functioning together of all parts in a w ­ hole by their relative positions. 43 The result is a homogeneous and harmonious, bounded and articulate field, ­whether it appear in a clas­ sical play or in the proportions of the facade of a palace or church. With the help of Horace’s precepts and Aristotle’s analytic model—­and per­ haps even without them—it is pos­si­ble to imagine a field of this kind for the classical epic. An epic plot can be complex, as Aristotle said of the Odyssey, and still be a “one.” The wondrous adventures of Odysseus, with their monsters and enchantments, are enframed by a retrospective nar­ rative that occupies a small and carefully positioned part in the ­whole. Making the allowances Aristotle himself made for the difference of scale between tragedy and epic, the Odyssey as much as the Iliad could be a model for that dream of the ­later Re­nais­sance in Italy of discovering “what the laws are of a true epic poem.” 44 Romance, based not in the escape from time into space but rather in the punctuated rhythms of temporal movement, is an altogether dif­fer­ent affair. Its appeal is to the highest and the lowest social classes, and it is suspect from the point of view of the literary pretentions and adminis­ trative interests of the bourgeoisie. Boiardo presented his poem as if it ­were being read in installments at the court of Ferrara; even ­today peasant poets sing improvised tales adapted from the Italian romances, and pup­ peteers in Sicily still perform episodes from them. 45 Won­der tales, how­ ever, give life even to the more aridly classical forms, adding moments of freedom for experimentation and fantasy and for pos­si­ble transformation of the work from within. This is true even of classical comedy, as Shake­ speare well knew. His most classically structured play, the early The Comedy of Errors, is framed by the world of Greek, Mediterranean romance, in which, as Northrop Frye remarked, a standard means of transportation is by shipwreck.46 Shakespeare’s last plays return to this world of Medi­ terranean romance; and his final, single-­authored play, The Tempest, is a unique fusion of rigorous classical form and extravagant magic and adventure.

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But The Tempest, in establishing its unified field, moves out of the realm of what is essential to romance, which is the moment. Without mea­sure­ ment or boundary or coordination of its parts, romance moves from moment to moment, each one a crisis. What­ever logic ­there is to romance is (unlike allegory) bound up in the interiors of ­these individual and tem­ porally successive moments rather than in the control of a total envi­ ronment enclosing them all. A question that this book tries to ask is how allegory, understood as the projection of an interpretative “field,” depends on the randomizing power of romance as its unstable, narrative basis, and how, in turn, ro­ mance acquires from the allegorical ele­ments seeded within it the faint, background feeling of coordination among the moments in a lattice, one that is pinched from b ­ ehind and pulled inward, so to speak, so that the moments become points on lines leading in to a transcendental singu­ larity, one to which all the moments point and ­toward which they tend. In this uneasy synthesis, which is the synthesis of The Faerie Queene, the systems of allegory and romance, which is to say, of transcendental ref­ erence and momentary crisis, are at once necessary and inimical to each other. The continual exertion of force needed to keep them bound up with each other—­a force that we feel in the moment, as we read—is what ­causes The Faerie Queene to create in us its peculiarly dynamic form of aes­ thetic plea­sure. As with much modern art, it is a work that demands the collaboration of the reader. For example, one of my favorite paint­ers is Chaim Soutine, whom I learned about ­because he was Willem de Kooning’s favorite painter. The plea­sure of Soutine’s painting is in the violent strug­gle between the pure romance of painting in time—in the wet and flowing viscosity of paint—­and the otherness of the figurative repre­sen­ta­tion. It does not seem as if the repre­sen­ta­tion floats in the distance, believable and dreamlike despite the vis­i­ble presence of paint (as with, for example, Tintoretto). That would be the analogue of the normal account of alle­ gory, that the medium of signs is visibly pre­sent and the meaning is far off in the distance. What is exciting about Soutine is the feeling that the representation—­a village, a portrait of a baker boy, a strangled chicken, a beef carcass, a cook’s assistant—­has raced in from the distance and collided with the paint, getting stuck in it, like the flies hatched from the rotting beef carcasses he kept in his studio. The repre­sen­ta­tion is half

Other Poets  49

immersed in its medium, trapped ­there and waving its limbs. The alle­ gory of The Faerie Queene lives in the collision of the notionally unified field of pos­si­ble meanings and the liquid viscosity of romance.

' of telling the complex story of the intellectual fashion for literary theory in the Re­nais­sance is to say that it began in the early 1400s with consensus on comedy and reached its apogee in the ­later 1500s in fierce disagreement over the question of the role of romance in the epic. The debate had largely exhausted itself by 1638, when Milton visited Italy, although the memory of it was very much alive at the time, enough to influence his thinking about the form and substance of the epic poem he was hoping and expecting to write. Horace’s Ars poetica had reinforced the princi­ple of homogeneity originally discovered in comedy, transferring it to written, narrative texts. Then came the sensational effects of the dis­ semination of Aristotle’s Poetics ­after 1548, an event that was outwardly dramatic in the way it intensified the discussion over the key points of verisimilitude—­approximate likeness to life, even if heightened—­and unity, neither of which romance seemed to have. Instead, romance delighted in “marvels,” maraviglie, and the continual introduction of the unexpected, of varietà, that is, of what is disconnected from anything that has gone be­ fore. But so far as essentials are concerned, the text of Aristotle affirmed much the same princi­ples that the theory of comedy was affirming a ­century before. Nothing should be illogical or unrelated to anything e­ lse; nothing should be in outright defiance of the laws of the natu­ral world as we know it (exaggeration was allowed but not absurdity), and the se­ quence of events in the action should be capable of being raised out of time and shown to be “a one,” as Aristotle says, however many ele­ments this singleness has, b ­ ecause the events stand in causal relation to one another. From the beginning, the aim of such theorizing was always to extend this continuous field that was achieved in the small space of comedy—­its stock characters, its ­limited scene (the ­house and the street in front of it), and its mechanical action—to the largest forms of imaginative lit­er­a­ture, especially ­those inherited from the ancients. That of course included the largest and most ambitious genre of all: the epic poem. Horace had al­ ready shown Italian intellectuals of the day how the ancients achieved A S­ I M P L E WAY

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rational control over the sprawling, mythic materials of this encyclopedic genre. The poet must not begin in leisurely fashion from the origins of the tale in the twin eggs of Leda but should “hasten” in medias res “into the middest,” as Milton carefully rendered this phrase, plunging in at a moment of crisis and using retrospective narratives and foreshadowing prophecies to capture remoter events. The prob­lem was that the long, heroic poem as it was practiced in the Re­nais­sance by Spenser’s pre­de­ces­sors, by Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, owed much—­indeed, in the first two of ­these cases it owed very much indeed—to the chivalric romances of the ­Middle Ages. If you list all the desiderata of classically styled comedy—­adding realism, bawdy humor, low monetary and sexual calculation, nasty but amusingly comical char­ acters, prostitution, slavery, the mockery of military virtue, of idealism, and of titled authority (all of ­these eternally appealing to intellectuals)—­and then automatically list their opposites alongside, the second list w ­ ill give a fairly good picture of the ideology and form of romance. Two features in par­tic­u­lar put romance out of fashion with the more prescriptive of literary intellectuals: discontinuity and transcendence, both of which belong to the internal architecture of the moment. Like the period, which, as the word implies, goes round in a circle, as on the inner surface of a sphere, always turning back on itself, the moment is discon­ tinuous with its neighbors in time, with what went immediately before and with what is soon to come ­after.47 But this self-­reflexiveness does not mean that the moment escapes temporality: it modulates its local region in time by making it continually return on itself, like the w ­ ater in an eddy at the edge of a stream. In breaking ­free, however—­and for only a moment—­from linear, chronic temporality, that is, from the strong cur­ rent in which romance narrative swims, the moment also suggests some­ thing higher, an outside to chronic temporality, above, so to speak, and also below, in the heavens and in Hell, where chronic temporality no longer exists. This is the moment (in the moment) of transcendence, of pointing upward, usually by means of allegory, and this face of the mo­ ment coexists with its opposite, which is circulating time. Each supports the other for a period in time against the unrelenting pressure of time; but narrative wins in the end.

Chapter 2

'

­Toward Fairy Land

with the garland from Apollo.” Gabriel Har­ vey’s condensed phrase captures the terms of an aesthetic debate that can hardly be said to have existed in ­England before Spenser; but it would develop largely out of him over the next two centuries, creating the romantic period out of romance. On one side t­ here is the fairy Hob­ goblin, spirited, energetic, and unpredictable—­and always stealing. On the other side is Olympian Apollo, beautiful, ideally proportioned, and sublime—­and always sufficient in himself: the ­great eighteenth-­century art historian Johann Winckelmann’s aesthetic ideal of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. The one is always ­r unning away ­because like a ro­ mance narrative it is always arriving somewhere ­else and becoming something ­else, making it suitable for allegorical treatment or for allego­ rization. Romance belongs to the party of movement, and in Spenser’s hands the fleeing Hob­goblin ­w ill become the fleeting Florimell. The other is always standing in place, balanced and poised, the object of pro­ longed and delighted contemplation in apparent freedom from time, from what Spenser would call mutability. The or­ga­nized princi­ples of form to which Harvey alludes in his letter, displayed to best advantage, as he supposes, in erudite comedies, show his preference for classical form over “the fairy way of writing,” to use Dryden’s phrase, one that would become a key term in eighteenth-­ century debates over romance, from Joseph Addison to Richard Hurd and Thomas Warton.1 Harvey’s preference is in keeping with Spenser’s “ H O B ­G O B L I N RU N AWAY

51

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own fascination, from a much broader perspective, with intellectual trends that for the preceding ­century had been arriving in E ­ ngland from the Continent, at first slowly and then rapidly and intensely, in educa­ tion, conduct, art, architecture, politics, and literary theory. The move­ ment as a ­whole, extending over three centuries, from Petrarch to Milton, has been called the Re­nais­sance, Michelet’s term for what Giorgio Vasari, in his g­ reat history of modern Italian paint­ers, sculptors, and archi­ tects, characterized as a rinascimento dell’ antichità, a “rebirth of antiquity.”2 The more recent term of art for this period and this movement is early modern, which captures something essential to the Re­nais­sance itself: the tension between imitating what is old and established and inno­ vating with an eye to the f­uture. This conflict between classical form and romance—in the ­f uture, between the ancients and the moderns, as in Swift’s ­Battle of the Books, and between classicism and romanticism, as in Victor Hugo’s polemical preface to ­Cromwell—­arises out of romance itself. In Italy this conflict can be said to date from Giraldi Cinthio’s Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi, “Discourse on the Composition of Ro­ mances” (1554), which defended the Orlando furioso from critics who said Ariosto’s poem failed to obey classical standards, particularly as ­these are embodied in Aristotle’s Poetics. (In chapter one, we met Giraldi, whose Discourse on Civil Life was the subject of discussion in Lodowick Bryskett’s cottage.) Unlike apologists such as Fornari, who sought reconciliation, Cinthio made no effort to “save the phenomena” with ingenious argu­ ments to make Ariosto an Aristotelian. Instead—­and in ­these points stand his importance for modern criticism—­Giraldi took history and genre into account, claiming that the romances of Boiardo and Ariosto are a uniquely modern kind of poem not pos­si­ble in antiquity and quite unknown to Aristotle. Art is not continually looking to an unchanging aesthetic ideal, which can be abstracted in rules: it is always changing in time and with the times. Moreover, as ­human efforts tend to improve over time (this argument is not quite consistent with the last), t­ here is no reason to think the modern romance epic such as Ariosto wrote is not an im­ provement over ancient epics. Romance arose in the M ­ iddle Ages and continues to develop, responding to the needs and tastes of the time (which include ­those proscribed super­natural won­ders and the rapid

­Toward Fairy Lan  53

variation of episodes), rather than attempting to conform to aesthetic standards laid down eigh­teen hundred years before. We are still in this debate, as we are still living amid the moral and aes­ thetic terms—­and, of course, though we may see it less clearly, the po­ liti­cal ones—­created by romanticism. Romanticism in politics is simply what we call the Left. That term derives from the seating of opposed sides in the National Assembly during French revolution, with the adherents of the party of movement and reform seated to the left and the adherents of the party of stability and order to the right. Movement and order: ­these are the po­liti­cal manifestations of Hob­goblin ­r unning away and Apollo standing in place. The Romantic Movement (a point that was still more obvious on the other side of the En­glish Channel, in France, ­under the name Victor Hugo) is oppositional in a way that classicism is not or ­doesn’t want to be. Classical art wants to be sufficient to itself; romanticism wants to be against every­thing classicism stands for or can be made to stand for. ­T hese ­were all associated in one or another way with the revival of the arts and values of classical antiquity, still properly known as the Re­nais­ sance or, perhaps, to cover the other tendency of the age, Re­nais­sance mo­ dernity. Spenser had, at the time of his epistolary exchange with Harvey, given ample proof of his interest in the debate in the work he had just pub­ lished, in 1579.

' a collection of twelve pas­ toral eclogues for the months of the year. Seen even at the time as a new beginning in En­glish poetry, a first step ­toward the heights reached in the 1590s, The Shepheardes Calender was republished four times before the turn to the seventeenth c­ entury. In addition to its ample classical pre­ce­dents, The Shepheardes Calender is a virtuosic demonstration of vari­ous poetic forms and complicated, half-­discerned allusions to an­ cient and con­temporary subjects and themes, accompanied by learned notes and commentary for each eclogue by one “E.  K.,” apparently Spenser’s friend Edward Kirk—­although Spenser and Harvey may well have collaborated with him. Nothing remotely near to this level of lit­ erary sophistication—in par­tic­u­lar, the command of classical authors in Latin and Greek and of Re­nais­sance authors in Italian and French—­had T H AT WA S T H E S H E P H E A R D E S C A L E N D E R ,

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been seen in E ­ ngland since the time of Chaucer, two centuries previous. For contemporaries, it bore the markings of what we would now call avant-­garde art, being experimental, allusive, dauntingly learned, techni­ cally complex, and directed to members of a knowledgeable elite or to persons who aspired to join it and would study to do so.3 The complex cultural message of The Shepheardes Calender was conveyed in the physical character of the volume. It was printed with learned com­ mentary accompanying the text and woodcuts at the head of each ec­ logue (which hardly merit comparison to Michelangelo) so as to resemble the more luxurious Re­nais­sance editions of the classical poets, especially Virgil.4 Learned mottoes, duly if sometimes vaguely explained by E. K., accompany each eclogue. The implicit claim was that the classical tradi­ tion and its standards had returned to ­England and that the En­glish lan­ guage was as suitable for high poetic expression as ­were Latin and Greek for the lit­er­a­t ure of antiquity, at least in the hands of E ­ ngland’s “new 5 poet,” as E. K. described Spenser. The impact of The Shepheardes Calender must have been not wholly unlike that of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or James Joyce’s Ulysses on their appearance in 1922. Few understood, many admired, and all knew something impor­tant had been done, although what it was exactly, or even inexactly, was difficult to say. But it was obvious nothing would be the same ­after. The easy grace, the popularity, and the brilliant natu­ ralism of Shakespeare’s art in the mid-­to late 1590s was fostered by a literary culture that owed to Spenser its confidence in itself as the equal of any, ancient or modern. That was largely due to what Spenser had done a de­cade and a half before, in The Shepheardes Calender, and to what he was ­doing in the early years of Shakespeare’s ­career, in The Faerie Queene.6 A calendric succession of poems went back to antiquity, in par­tic­u­lar to the uncompleted Fasti of Ovid, a work replete with learning, lore, and myth. Although neglected ­today and ranked below the poet’s other works, Ovid’s Fasti or “marked sacred days” was especially impor­tant to Re­nais­ sance authors and paint­ers and not least to Spenser.7 But the twelve-­ month calendar design for a collection of pastoral poems is Spenser’s invention. Collections of pastoral poems had however been traditional since the ancient Greek poet Theocritus, author of “idylls,” who gathered the bucolic muses, formerly “scattered,” into one fold and one herd, that

­Toward Fairy Lan  55

is, in a book. So an ancient commentator and epigrammatist seems to suggest, u ­ nless several poets are meant by this phrase. 8 For in the same ancient collection ­were Moschus and Bion, the latter of whose influence is felt in Spenser’s “March” eclogue, with its pretty picture of the boy Cupid, winged and armed. (Moschus’s “Runaway Love,” imitated in Tor­ quato Tasso’s Aminta, ­w ill become one of the plot threads in the third book, canto six, of The Faerie Queene.)9 All this and more, including a debt to Propertius, is duly mentioned in the commentary to The Shepheardes Calender, so that the presence of classical learning ­w ill not fail to be ad­ mired by the inadequately vigilant reader—­and ­every reader is inade­ quately vigilant. This feeling of readerly inadequacy, of not being equal to the text, which we may call hermeneutic anxiety, belongs to the avant-­garde aesthetic of Spenser’s poem and is something comparatively new in the culture of the book. The princi­ple of mystery is pre­sent in allegorical works from late antiquity but not this closely related but distinct princi­ple of difficulty. It is not in Chaucer, Skelton, Wyatt, or Surrey, who wrote to be heard—to whom may be added the mellifluous William Dunbar and the allegorical Gavin Douglas; it is not even in “moral Gower,” Hoccleve, Lydgate, or Henryson, whose works are more self-­conscious about their medium as books. For them, the world of learning is opened to the reader as soon as the pages of their books are opened: the access is easy, and the wel­ come is gracious. Langland, an allegorist as g­ reat in his own way as Spenser—­and it is very much his own way—­may be thought to be the exception, b ­ ecause he is certainly difficult, and the difficulty belongs to the plea­sure.10 But the difficulty of interpreting a dream vision is not the same as the difficulty of interpreting a text. The difference is in the ele­ment of visionary mystery that dream allegories arouse and the more purely transcendental character of the meaning. ­T here is ­little sense in dream visions that unveiling the mystery is a ­matter of referring to other books. It is the culture of printed books that creates (perhaps I had better say greatly amplifies) this sense of a meaning that is distributed in an ever-­widening system of textual differences (Hob­ goblin r­ unning away at top speed, like the expanding universe) while a total, hidden meaning awaits a return. I think of Jacques Derrida’s reso­ nant phrase from the g­ reat essay “la différance,” for the “trace,” a richly

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Spenserian word: “une structure de renvoi généralisé.”11 A sufficient trans­ lation of this phrase demands an expansion of its concentrated form, having, in Baudelaire’s words (in the ­great sonnet “Correspondances”), the power of expansion in infinite ­things (“Ayant l’expansion des choses in­ finies”). Textuality, the phenomenon of communication by text, creates a structure throughout which all parts lean back t­ oward an origin and center, one that feels more au­then­tic than where they find themselves now, rigidly fixed in place in the structure. But the happier origin and center does not exist, just as the places we long for in moments of nos­ talgia—­the pain of longing for nostos, “return”—do not exist, b ­ ecause time has changed them. Readers of romance may think of the magic palace of Atlante, in Ariosto, where knights are trapped endlessly pursuing their desires from one phantasmatic room to the next, or even, in The Faerie Queene, the Fairy Queen herself and Fairy Court. We never see them, and yet every­thing depends on the prospect of returning ­there, to the court, and into the presence of its queen. It is, as Jonathan Goldberg said, using Spenser’s phrase, “endlesse worke.” It is also, to use another, the piteous—­ that is, pitiless—­work of mutability.12 The Shepheardes Calender is a rehearsal for this larger structure of longing that is The Faerie Queene, the longing that frames the work as a ­whole: Co­ lin’s longing for Rosalind. Spenser himself instinctively makes this con­ nection, in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, when the happier Colin is piping for the g­ reat ring of dancing maidens and classical graces, with his own new love at the center, an episode sometimes described as Spenser’s signature on The Faerie Queene, although it celebrates his new wife, Eliza­ beth Boyle. The fairy ring of dancing maidens—­they are naked as Apollo and as fleeting as Hob­goblin, thus marrying aesthetic opposites—is com­ pared to Ariadne’s crown, the ring of the Pleiades, which shines through the heavens, “And is unto the starres an ornament, / Which round about her move in order excellent” (FQ VI.x.13). Colin cannot enter the circle; but he can make the ­music that conjures it up. When Calidore emerges from his place of astonished observation in the cover of the wood, ­those dancing maidens, the poem’s starry crown, vanish: But soone as he appearèd to their vew They vanisht all away out of his sight,

­Toward Fairy Lan  57

And cleane w ­ ere gone, which way he never knew; All save the shepheard, who for fell despight Of that dis­plea­sure, broke his bag-­pipe quight, And made ­great mone for that unhappy turne. FQ VI.x.18

Colin’s erotic longing is distributed throughout The Shepheardes Calender as textual longing, in the terms I have just described from Derrida’s essay. That essay performatively enacts its own subject, tricking us again and again into trying to seize the definition of trace, while the writerly phi­los­ o­pher escapes again and again, r­unning off with the garland from Apollo but stopping repeatedly to wave it in front of us, luring us on. That is how Spenser writes The Faerie Queene, teasingly waving the garland be­ fore us, to draw us into Fairy Land. As to the Shepheardes Calender, looking into it for the first time, and not only the first time, is less like being presented with a mysterious allegor­ ical mist—as in medieval dream allegory—­than it is like gazing for the first time on the mechanism of a Swiss watch: dizzying and dazzling. One has the sense that a temporal sequence of words has been translated into a spatial array that exists above, on a higher plane. The quest for meaning entails, on both sides—­the reader’s as well as the author’s—­the rearrange­ ment of narrative experience in time from the acoustical into the visual field.13 And yet all such arrangements fall back into the text. The only pre­ce­dent to the feeling Spenser arouses with The Shepheardes Calender is the somewhat ritualized obscurity that belongs to the tradi­ tion of medieval allegorical interpretation of ancient pagan texts, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (in the Latin and vernacular traditions of the Ovide moralisé) and of medieval allegorical writing, such as the Roman de la r­ ose, the first part of which, by Guillaume de Lorris, was brilliantly translated by Chaucer.14 Continued allegory would of course be Spenser’s chosen medium in The Faerie Queene—or so he says in the Letter to Raleigh. But the effect ­here is subtly dif­fer­ent from that of the Roman de la ­rose and its imitators, following in Chaucer’s wake. ­T here, the atmosphere is one of pleasingly dispersed erotic mystery surrounding figures that are not hard to understand, such as Leisure, Danger, and the pools that represent the Lady’s eyes—­a mood or atmospheric tone, a Stimmung, beautifully

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captured in C. S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love.15 Jean de Meun’s gigantic con­ tinuation of the Roman, done in the generation ­after Guillaume, captures another side of allegory that would be even more influential: the use of the dialogue between speaker and learned instructor to convey as much information and intellectual speculation as pos­si­ble.16 This is in the tra­ dition of Martianus Capella’s late ancient encyclopedia On the Marriage of Mercury and Philology, which was im­mensely influential in the lit­er­a­t ure and visual arts of the M ­ iddle Ages up into the Renaissance—­even in that most sensuous and musical of Re­nais­sance artists, Botticelli, as in the fresco now in the Louvre.17 Allegory becomes an encyclopedic literary form—an encyclopedia wrapped in a mystery. Although The Shepheardes Calender is not in the full sense an allegorical work, or an encyclopedic one, it does in places reflect both sides of the genre: erudition and mystification. We have the feeling that the text re­ quires from us hard ­mental work at which one is likely to fail without the help of the learned commentary that is eagerly and amply supplied by “E. K.”—­not that such commentary ensures, or could ever ensure, full success: it belongs to the expanding structure de renvoi généralisé. Contrary to the ostensible purpose of commentary, the effect is to multiply the questions and deepen the mystery. John Gower, Robert Henryson, and John Lydgate pre­sent their works as books, but they do not treat what is inside t­ hose books as primarily text in the full and intense meaning of the word, as a system of differential play, one requiring decoding while setting what it refers to off in the distance, destabilizing the illusion of presence, which is promised for l­ater. It feels instead as if, when they want to be, they are pre­sent and talking to us. In allegory the full pres­ ence of meaning—­even at the climax of Dante’s Commedia (where the passion for Beatrice is at last displaced onto the Trinity)—­has something to do with a promised but elusive erotic fulfillment, as in that most prac­ tical and En­glish of allegorists, Gower. In Gower’s Confession Amantis the recognition that he has grown old brings the lover’s futile quest for ful­ fillment not to its conclusion but to its sad end. We have seen how in The Shepheardes Calender this elusiveness is given h ­ uman form in the longing of Colin, that is, of the poet, for the inaccessible Rosalind, to whom, at the end, he says his final adieu. But the sense of a deferred presence is also a product of the new technology of printing with moveable type,

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replacing the more intimate medium of script. The conclusion of The Shepheardes Calender amplifies and enriches Gower’s conclusion. But what is striking in Spenser’s expansion is that the entire world of the lover has grown old as he has, and it is to this world in its entirety, with Rosalind at its absent center, that he addresses his sad adieus. For all the hopeful attendance in lines of verse that he has sewn on her behalf from his youth, he has reaped in old age “a weedye crop of care”: Which when I thought have thresht in swelling sheave, Cockel for corne, and chaffe for barley bare. Soone as the chaffe should in the fan be fynd, All was blowne away of the wavering wynd. The Shepheardes Calender, “December,” lines 123–26

The Gower moment comes with his description of his own face: The carefull cold hath nypt my rugged rynde, And in my face deepe furrowes eld hath pight: My head besprent with hoary frost I fynd, And by myne eie the Crow his clawe dooth wright. Delight is layd abedde, and plea­sure past, No sun now shines, cloudes han all overcast. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Winter is come, that blowes the ­bitter blaste, And a­ fter Winter dreerie death does hast. The Shepheardes Calender, “December,” lines 133–38, 142–43

He then addresses his sheep, as Virgil does, as he puts them in the fold at eve­ning, but with none of Virgil’s subtlety: “And ­after Winter commeth timely death.” It is almost as if this repeated mention of death is meant as compensation for the absence of any other closure. But the poem opens up at the end with ­those adieus, ­because they represent an effort to achieve a happier closure by means of this communicative act, one that might even stir the heart of the love he never won: Adieu delightes, that lulled me asleepe, Adieu my deare, whose love I bought so deare: Adieu my ­little Lambes and loved sheepe, Adieu ye Woodes that oft my witnesse w ­ ere:

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Adieu good Hobbinol, that was so true, Tell Rosalind, her Colin hids her adieu. The Shepheardes Calender, “December,” lines 151–56

This deferred sense of presence belonging to a text, putting us into a lab­ yrinth from which the center is continually deferred, is what makes The Shepheardes Calender aesthetically new. We saw how interpreting the text so as to collect on this promise, which is beauty, tends to translate the temporality of narrative into an arranged space or “field” of meaning. Spenser w ­ ill practice this textual art of labyrinthine entanglement and perpetual promise in The Faerie Queene—­a promise not unrelated psycho­ logically to Stendhal’s definition of beauty as nothing other than the promise of happiness.18 The Faerie Queene itself, like the endlessly celebrated and longed-­for beauty of the queen that it celebrates, is an enormously drawn-­out and unfulfillable promise. Certainly Stendhal’s remark should bear on how we read of The Faerie Queene, how we ­can’t help reading it, concerned as the poem is with beauty as an almost metaphysical radiance, a far-­shining, irresistible, and all-­ penetrating glory that eludes every­one’s grasp and so eludes every­one’s use, although beauty remains for them a metaphysical promise, a parousia or revelation of the god, that might be fulfilled. It is noteworthy that the only truly striking moment of fulfilled erotic happiness in the epic—­the embrace of Amoret and Scudamour at the end of the 1590 installment—­was excised, thus allowing the narrative to proliferate in Book Four and also to turn back on itself temporally, undoing teleology.19 The famous hermaphrodite simile by which Amoret and Scudamour are described as “growne together quite” is less power­ful and less in­ter­ est­ing than the straightforward description, in the previous stanza, in which the lovers remain separate bodies but in a bliss as perfect as that of Milton’s angels (“we enjoy / In eminence and obstacle find none”):20 Lightly he clipt her twixt his armes twaine, And streightly did embrace her body bright, Her body, late the prison of sad paine, Now the sweet lodge of love and deare delight; But she faire Lady overcommen quight Of huge affection, did in plea­sure melt,

­Toward Fairy Lan  61 And in sweete ravishment pourd out her spright: No word they spake, nor earthly t­ hing they felt, But like two senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt. FQ III.xii.43–47 (1590 edition)

­ here is nothing close to the erotic and emotional happiness of this T moment in the existing Faerie Queene, not even the Redcross knight’s melting heart and blissful joy at possessing Una’s love, “when his eye did her behold.” That is a more distant appreciation, even when the knight is “swimming in [a] sea of blisful joy” in Una’s “com­pany” and “presence” (FQ I.xii.40–41). In this abstraction of bliss, no touch, certainly no em­ brace, is described. The absence of any strong embrace, any fulfillment of the promise of beauty, even Florimell’s, who is beauty itself, certainly appears to be deliberate. This is so even if Spenser’s dropping the narra­ tive thread at the obvious moment to unite Scudamour and Amoret ­later on in Book Four—­which would allow him to redeploy ­those ex­ cised stanzas describing their embrace—is not deliberate. I think it is, or partly is. Amoret has come ­under Arthur’s protection ­after he has made peace and set off again on his quest, “as with chylde, / of his old love,” and, setting forth, “with him did beare / Faire Amoret, whom Fortune by bequest / Had left in his protection whyleare” (IV.ix.17). Arthur then quells a general affray among six knights, including Scudamour and Britomart. Scudamour is attacking Britomart ­because he supposes she is a man and has taken his love, Amoret. Once the fight is ­stopped and its cause explained, Britomart says that she has not taken Amoret for her­ self but left her “to her liking” (IV.ix.36). This is the moment, if it ­hasn’t come sooner, for Arthur to pre­sent Amoret to Scudamour and for us to see them embrace. Instead, Arthur ­gently rebukes Scudamour for breaking the peace over a ­woman who has, ­after all, chosen for herself, as Britomart has testified. Amoret, he says, is exercising the natu­ral right of ladies: “To whom the world this franchise ever yeelded, / That of their loves choise they might freedom clame” (IV.ix.37). In response, Scu­ damour sighs deeply, insisting that Amoret is indeed his by “right,” “wherever she be straide,” and then proceeds to tell the story how he won her (IV.ix.38), as if the story ­were evidence of her having lost her freedom to him. But why is she not presented at this moment and the

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power­ful stanzas describing the embrace rescued? The lapse springs from the same source as the flurry of contradictions and embarrass­ ments with which the story of Britomart and Artegal meets its end, as we s­ hall see. Having looked at beauty from the position of the observer and saying it is nothing other than a promise of happiness to that observer, Stendhal offers a second statement on beauty that sees it now as in itself it ­really is. He says that beauty is the expression of character or, more precisely, of moral habits and is therefore exempt from all passion. Beauty may be nothing more than a promise to its viewer, that is, when this beauty is seen as an object; but from the subject position, from the center, beauty is virtue. What­ever the truth of this claim may be in our lives, it certainly bears on how we read The Faerie Queene, in which the primary concep­ tual articulation is the identity of beauty and virtue—as it is generally in high Re­nais­sance art. Beauty is more than the outward sign of the inner truth of virtue: beauty is virtue’s fully embodied expression, its parousia and revelation. It is small won­der that Florimell is so fleeting, is so hard actually to see, and that the ideal beauty, the Fairy Queen herself, is never seen at all, except through “colourd showes,” reflections, and shadows: “But ­either Gloriana let her chuse, / Or in Belphoebe fashionèd to bee: / In th’one her rule, in th’other h ­ ere rare chastitee” (III.proem.3 and 5). In The Faerie Queene beauty seems a mysterious, unifying power, its promise drawing us into the pure, intoxicating ether of metaphysics, alluring us with that far-­shining, irresistible and overpowering glory, which is per­ haps greatest in power when farthest off, promising but not delivering meaning.21 Beauty therefore, by its nature, cannot be possessed. It was mentioned that the single moment in The Faerie Queene of fulfilled passionate love—­the embrace of Amoret and Scudamour at the end of the 1590 installment—­was excised and that it has nothing to do with Amoret’s beauty, which is a f­ actor only when she is being gazed on from a distance, as she is when Scudamour first sees her at the T ­ emple of Venus, sur­ rounded by the seven womanly virtues, “Shyning with beauties light, and heavenly vertues grace” (FQ IV.x.52). Indeed, Amoret’s beauty is occluded by the hermaphrodite image, as if she is disappearing into that embrace, as Daphne dis­appears into a the bark of a tree.

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This spectacular quality of beauty, this spacing or espacement marking the distance between it and happiness, is of course most powerfully enacted in Busyrane’s ­house, when Amoret (if it is she) is a violent ex­ hibit in the triumph of Cupid: “Her brest all naked, as net ivory . . . ​ Entrenchèd deepe with knife accursèd keene . . . ​was to be seene, / That dyde in sanguine red her skin all snowy cleene” (FQ III.xii.20). We expe­ rience horror but no sympathy, b ­ ecause Amoret’s beauty—­and is she ever more beautiful than ­here?—is a ­thing entirely to be seen, as an object set at a distance, untouched by the observer. Even the god Cupid, riding ­behind Amoret on a ravenous lion, has unbound his traditional blindfold to gaze on her as “his proud spoyle” (III.xii.22). The word spoil evokes a Roman triumph, in which the spolia of captured cities are shown, along with images, paintings, of t­ hose cities, or the spolia opima, “the rich spoils” of a captain defeated in single combat. Beauty is a ­thing to be captured and conquered, an imposed promise. But as Cupid himself surely knows and Busyrane finds out, beauty is never enjoyed as such. Passion may be enjoyed—to return to Stendhal’s discussion—­but beauty is not.22 Arthur’s quest for Gloriana, whom he seems almost to avoid despite his professions to the contrary, is an ever-­receding promise of happiness typified in his dreamlike pursuit of the fleeting Florimell (FQ III.iv.51). For characters in the poem beauty may indeed be a promise of happiness—­a promise that is never fulfilled, and when it is fulfilled, excised and ban­ ished. For readers, this beauty is nothing more than the promise, ever more feebly offered yet never quite extinct, that we w ­ ill reach the final and central presence of meaning, the allegorical singularity, the telos of all the quests in Cleopolis, and the u ­ nion of Arthur and Gloriana, mag­ nificence and justified fame. But if Gloriana is to be the glory of Arthur, on any scene where they might embrace she would dis­appear into him, as Amoret, during that excised embrace, dis­appears into Scudamour. Instead, where we do have moments of reunion, the male is curiously enfeebled and very far from giving the strong embrace with which Scu­ damour tightly (streightly) surrounds Amoret’s body (FQ III.xii.45, in the 1590 edition). Marinell, so hardy a fighter, is languishing for love and on the point of death when Florimell is brought to him, his condition not unlike that in which Britomart left him on the strand, skewered and wal­ lowing in gore. But he is healed from that wound and is now laid low by

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another. Unable even to stand up, he shows “chearefull signes . . . ​ outwardly”—­which I take to mean feebly, in comparison with his inner joy—­while Florimell modestly conceals the fact of her being “in secret hart affected,” so she ­won’t be ill thought of by Marinell or by ­others (IV. xii.35). She is still fearfully aware of how she is watched, and we never see her embraced. For who can embrace beauty? This is a very strange scene, and its strangeness, its shying away from the happiness of so much as an embrace, can only be deliberate. We are hardly surprised when, instead of seeing the marriage of Florimell and Marinell, we see only the bloody tournament that follows it, as a cele­bration (IV.iii.1–3). We are afraid to think it b ­ ecause the poet of The Faerie Queene is also the poet of the Amoretti, culminating in the “Epithalamion,” the greatest poem of fulfilled, pas­ sionate, and yet stately and dignified love in En­glish and perhaps not only in En­glish. But something in the poet of The Faerie Queene distrusts and fears the frank and emotional expression of love. We see this espe­ cially in his greatest lovers, Britomart and Artegal. Britomart and Artegal’s first meeting is in ­battle. Britomart is only a ­little friendlier a­ fter the fighting has ­stopped. She recognizes the suppliant Artegal’s face as the one she saw in the magic glass and fell in love with. Betraying contradictory emotions that are shared by the poet, her sword repeatedly rises to strike him and then falls without effect, like an autom­ aton (FQ IV.vi.26–27). We hear of Artegal’s long siege of her heart—­“so well he woo’d her”—­until he wins her consent to be his love, upon which he immediately abandons her. His reason is the need to pursue his “hard adventure yet in quest,” although why Britomart c­ an’t accompany and aid him is unclear, given that she has proven herself the better fighter (IV. vi.41–43). Unlike her fierce pre­de­ces­sors, Camilla or Marfisa or Brada­ mante, the martial maiden is not given any serious fighting to do, although of course she finds plenty of her own accord. Stranger still, by far, is their reunion, when Britomart comes to rescue Artegal from the fearsome amazon Radigund, whom she dispatches without parleying for terms beforehand or showing mercy a­ fter. Artegal, who showed inopportune mercy, to his own undoing, has been impris­ oned by Radigund and forced to wear w ­ omen’s clothes, so that Talus must run to Britomart for help. Britomart’s breaking into and searching the prison in all its parts ­until she finds Artegal—­and a “loathly uncouth

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sight” Artegal is to her in his female attire—is a reprise of Arthur’s thor­ oughly searching Orgoglio’s prison ­until he finds the abject and patheti­ cally weakened Redcross knight (FQ I.viii.37–41). In a touching and painful moment, Britomart is so abashed with “se­ cret shame” at such a “spectacle so bad” she turns her head aside” (FQ V.vii.38). Yet she asks Artegal, rather pointedly, given that t­ hese defects in his manliness should have nothing to do with his dress, “Where is that dreadful manly looke? where be / ­T hose mighty palmes, the which ye wont t’embrew / In bloud of Kings, and ­great hoastes to subdew?” Brit­ omart’s questions are framed in the style of the ubi sunt trope—­the “where have they all gone?” theme—as the closing of her speech shows: “Could so ­great courage stoupèd have to ­ought? / Then farewell fleshly force; I see thy pride is nought” (V.vii.40). If many ­things are gone, all must go. The poet appears to be trying to say, unconvincingly, to be sure, that it is not Artegal’s fault he’s in w ­ omen’s clothes and has apparently been feminized by them. All ­things, including the manliest manhood, must pass—or pass into their opposites. The rhetorical contortions Spenser ­here assigns to Britomart w ­ ill strike any open-­minded reader as evasions—­which of course does not mean they are less in­ter­est­ing for that. But ­there is something unfinished and irresolute about the poem at this moment, its gestures unsettling and vaguely wrong to the poet himself. Why is the reunion of Spenser’s ­great lovers, whose marriage ­will bring forth the line of Briton kings culminating in Elizabeth Tudor, Spenser’s queen, presented first as an embarrassing “spectacle so bad” and then as the occasion for impertinently melancholy reflection on the vanity of all ­things? ­T here is something awry at the heart of the Spenserian ideology, the Arthuro-­Trojan genealogy of the Tudors, in which the poet displaces the symbolic values associated with Arthur and Gloriana onto this strange ­couple, Artegal and Britomart. He gives Britomart the character of Arthur, the strong liberator, and Artegal, notwithstanding his name, the unmanly stasis of a fairy queen. Spenser himself is so embarrassed by the spectacle of his beautiful monarch Elizabeth, who has the heart and stomach of a king, that he is driven at e­ very turn to cut Britomart down and emphasize her emotional weakness, though at other moments he shows her ­mental strength, as with her contemptuous dismissal of

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Radigund’s terms. But his discomfort with his own disfiguring preju­ dice against females with power provokes him, on the one hand, to rep­ resent such power, in the figure of Radigund, as tyranny and, on the other hand, to travesty (the word means cross-­dressing) the righ­teous force—­that manly look and ­those mighty palms—by which such a monstrous tyranny should be destroyed. For any strength or power what­ever in a female looks to the sexist hysteric like tyranny. Poets ­will tell the truth, despite themselves, and Spenser’s treatment of Artegal ­here—­and ­later in Book Five, when Britomart is gone and Talus has taken her place, as sheer vio­lence—­points to his desire to undo the in­ complete structure he has been trying to raise. Strong w ­ omen make men effeminate. So Spenser appears to say, and one can only feel that the unrestrained vio­lence of Artegal in Book Five, even when it is displaced onto Talus, to make it less shocking, is compen­ sation for this episode when Artegal was transformed into a ­woman. For even then Artegal could be returned to his natu­ral shape only by a ­woman who is stronger than he is and who must therefore be punished for this strength. It gets worse or, if you like the strangeness and are intrigued by it, better. Britomart is suffering from wounds ­after her stern combat with Radi­ gund. Artegal, of course, has no such wounds. But it is he who needs Britomart’s care as she gives him new clothes and arms, being apparently unable to get them himself. His debility and enfeeblement recall that of Marinell: “when as she [Britomart] him [Artegal] anew had clad, / She was reviv’d, and joyed much in his semblance glad” (FQ V.vii.41). It’s good to see him smile again. Britomart and Artegal immediately reform Radigund’s kingdom, but their reform goes to the opposite extreme, a Thermidorian reaction: they do not just ­free the other imprisoned and travestied, captive knights; they also utterly repeal “the liberty of ­women,” restoring them “To mens sub­ jection” as an act of “true Justice.” All the while Britomart is adored as a goddess by t­ hese newly reenthralled w ­ omen. They admire her wisdom and hearken to her “loring” (FQ V.vii.42), the nature of which lore Spenser does not stay to enlighten us. But it would seem she has nothing to say to other w ­ omen, nothing to promote for their good, except total submis­ sion to men.

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Again, Artegal leaves. He goes “Upon his first adventure” without Brit­ omart’s help, ­because, ­after all, she is a w ­ oman, although, once again, she has shown herself the better knight. At his departure, to cut her down more, Spenser tells us Britomart restrains her “womanish complaints” ­because she knows Artegal needs to do this for his honor, hers being of ­little concern. A ­ fter some time enduring Artegal’s absence, her woe in­ creasing, she leaves the former realm of Radigund. But she no longer has anywhere to go or anything to seek: “She parted thence, her anguish to appease” (FQ V.vii.44–45). That is the last we see of Britomart, Spenser’s liveliest character, in The Faerie Queene. Her very strengths, which ­earlier he has delighted in elaborating through her adventures, notably at the ­castle of Busyrane, have proven too much for the poet to ­handle, espe­ cially as they begin to encroach on the authority of the totalizing ideal of Arthur, the male hero whose magnificence enfolds the achievements of all his knights into himself. Britomart, enfeebler of Artegal, threatens that design. So the poet has done with her. We cannot but feel that Spenser’s brilliant invention of the character Britomart proved too good for his design and that when it came to it, he preferred to save the design, if he could. If so, he no longer deserved her. But lest that seem too much to personalize a literary character (and yet why not?), let us say that the episode at Radigund’s realm, especially at its close, is a moment that shows us the disintegrating energy at the heart of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, exposing a chasma, a gap or break, not only in the poet’s vision but also in his heart. Where he might have built, Spenser tears down. Whenever interpretation seems to draw near to this beauty that prom­ ises happiness, ­whether that of the unseen and inaccessible Rosalind of The Shepheardes Calender or that of the unseen and inaccessible Fairy Queen, we feel the promise’s force. It is like a gravitational field formed around the expectation that two centers in two remote objects ­w ill at last coin­ cide, as they almost do in an embrace. We likewise suppose that beauty and truth can and ­w ill coincide, even when, as they seem to draw nearest to each other, the shadow of an infinitesimal difference slides in between them. We find much the same open conclusion—­now raised up onto the plain of metaphysics—in the penultimate stanza of The Faerie Queene, be­ fore its final prayer:

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When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare Of Mutability, and well it weigh: Me seemes, that though she all unworthy ­were Of the Heav’ns Rule; yet very sooth to say, In all ­things ­else she beares the greatest sway. Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle, And love of t­ hings so vaine to cast away; Whose flow’ring pride, so fading and so fickle, Short Time ­shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle. FQ VII.viii.1

The learned commentary accompanying The Shepheardes Calender bal­ ances the impression of naive rusticity that is given by Spenser’s use of archaic and countrified diction. Why does he do this? Spenser’s word choice connects this poem to its ­great En­glish precursors, John Skelton, William Langland, and especially Geoffrey Chaucer (Spenser borrows for his self-­portrait the Skeltonic name Colin Clout), suggesting rugged integ­ rity. The En­glish language is still, as was supposed at the time, rude and rough; but with the literary Re­nais­sance started—or restarted— by Spenser, it was ­r unning off with the garland of classical form. Spens­ er’s diction drew censure even at the time, notably from the man to whom the work was dedicated, the other­w ise complimentary Sir Philip Sidney: “The Shepheards Kalender hath much Poetrie in his Egloges, in­ deed worthy the reading, if I be not deceived. That same framing of his style to old rustic language I dare not allow: since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sanazara in Italian did affect it.”23 Actually, Theocritus did. The language of t­ hese pre­de­ces­sors in En­glish poetry was markedly dif­ fer­ent from that of Spenser’s day ­because of dramatic changes in the phonology of En­glish, the most well-­k nown of which was the “­Great Vowel Shift,” as the linguist Otto Jespersen called it, by which vowels w ­ ere formed farther forward in the mouth; nor was the pronunciation of the final e in Chaucer’s verse—as in Aprille, with three syllables—­understood. Chaucer’s verse therefore seemed less metrically sophisticated and con­ sistent than in fact it was. The changes in En­glish phonology ­were already well advanced by the ­later 1500s. Chaucer’s “Chancery En­glish,” spoken around Westminster and at the court, would be the ancestor of Spenser

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and Shakespeare’s En­glish and remotely of ours. But by Spenser’s day even Chaucer was hard to read. That was so notwithstanding his being uni­ versally admired as the f­ ather not only of En­glish poetry but also of the En­glish language. Spenser calls him the “well of En­glish undefyled” (FQ IV.ii.32). The studied roughness of the language of The Shepheardes Calender—­and of its woodcuts—is like the emblem that Erasmus made famous in one of the Adagia that was often published separately, Sileni Alcibiadis, “The Si­ leni of Alcibiades.”24 The ugly, aged, pug-­nosed and fat-­bellied, drunken Silenus—he is an impor­tant figure in Ovid’s Fasti, as the discoverer of honey—is the tutor of Bacchus and accompanies the god on his drunken revels, often riding on an ass. Although associated with satyrs, he is not a satyr himself but seems related to h ­ orses and often is depicted with ­horse’s ears. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades mentions the Sileni—­small, toy statues of Silenus—as being like Socrates, ugly and rough on the out­ side, beautiful within. For most of the essay Erasmus uses this image for ecclesiastical satire. He points up the contrast between the sumptuous­ ness of the princes of the church, who lack any inward, spiritual worth, and the humility and poverty of the apostles of Christ and of Christ him­ self. T ­ hese ­were like the Sileni in being ridicu­lous in the sight of the world but divine within. For the purposes of Erasmus’s moral, every­thing starts to look like a Silenus or rather its inversion: outwardly sumptuous and inwardly ugly. ­T hese are inverted Sileni, praeposteri Sileni. A similar, more extreme figure is that of Marsyas, whose flaying by Apollo is inter­ preted in the iconographic tradition as a mystery for drawing out the di­ vine soul within the ugly satyr.25 Erasmus also compares the Sileni to sacred scripture. As the greatest humanist scholar of the Re­nais­sance and the first modern editor of the Greek text of the New Testament, Erasmus knew well how h ­ umble the Greek of the New Testament is in compar­ ison with language of Athens in the classical age. But when Scripture is opened, which is to say, meditated upon, its inner, spiritual truth is re­ vealed. Spenser does not make quite so exalted a claim for The Shepheardes Calender. But he is strongly attracted by the Erasmian irony by which an unsophisticated appearance without covers the beauty of a truth that is hidden within, in contrast with specious worldly glory that is not, to use Spenser’s phrase, “inward sound” (FQ I.i.9; cf. VI.vi.1–14).

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' borrowings, and augmentations in The Shepheardes Calender proclaimed Spenser’s status as a doctus poeta, a “learned poet,” in the tradition of the French poets of the Pléiade, who made clas­ sical erudition the sine qua non of the serious poet. But this was also in the tradition of Chaucer, who more than once portrays himself staring on books late into the night. As the ea­gle in the Hous of Fame chides him, “Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon, / And also domb as any stoon, / Thou sittest at another book / Tyl fully dawsed ys thy look.”26 Since the Hel­ lenistic age the image of the elite poet was of a bookish scholar—in medieval language, a clerk—­because the roles of scholar and poet, of philologist and wordsmith, w ­ ere not so distinct as they are now and as they have been since the m ­ iddle of the eigh­teenth ­century. The Roman poets took the necessity of erudition for granted, since their lit­er­a­ture was built on the careful study and imitation of Greek models. In Spens­ er’s day—­and long before it, as we have seen—it was a commonplace that anyone deserving the name of “poet” must be a student of ­great pre­ de­ces­sors in the art and more broadly of traditional lore and myth—to which must be added, especially in the Re­nais­sance, history. To name only the greatest of the models who ­were impor­tant to Spenser, Catullus, Ovid, and above all Virgil ­were poets for whom the very term doctus poeta would have been a pleonasm. ­Every true poet is learned in the myth, legend, and lore of the past and especially in the grandest poets of the past. Vis­i­ble borrowing, or what we may call ostensive appropriation—­ borrowing that points to its source—­was not only permitted but re­ quired. The aim was to preserve, augment, update, and transform the ­great stories and thoughts of the past. ­After Theocritus the pastoral collection would be made still more fa­ mous in Latin by the Eclogues of Virgil. Petrarch and Boccaccio joined in the early Re­nais­sance, and by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many ­others had as well: Clément Marot, several of whose shepherds’ names Spenser adopts; Jacopo Sannazaro, author of the famous, pastoral ro­ mance Arcadia and of “piscatory” eclogues in which shepherds are sup­ planted by Neapolitan fishermen; Alexander Barclay, the first composer of pastorals in En­glish; and Baptista Spagnuoli, born in Mantua and T H E C L A S S I C A L A L LU S I O N S ,

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therefore known as Mantuanus, or Mantuan, a poet whom Elizabethan schoolboys studied and memorized. To the pastoral tradition, famous for its limpid grace, Mantuan adds roughness, realism, and especially satire, ecclesiastical as well as cautious po­liti­cal satire, often half concealed by allegory. Satire and partial allegory with allusion to ­actual persons—­ Bishop Young of Rochester (Roffy), the unfortunate Archbishop Grindal (Algrind), Spenser’s friend Gabriel Harvey (Hobbinol), and of course the queen herself, although by no means satirically—is an impor­tant ele­ment of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. It remained so in The Faerie Queene.27 In E. K.’s epistle to The Shepheardes Calender, he lists the principal figures in the tradition as assaying their new and tender wings before attempting the “greater flight” of epic. “Our new Poete,” he says, having just grown out his pinions, ­w ill in time “keep wing with the best,” that is, compose an epic poem. In the meantime, in the pre­sent work, he follows in the footsteps of previous pastoral poets, although only learned readers ­w ill be able to tell: So flew Theocritus. . . . ​So flew Virgile, as not yet well feeling his winges. So flew Mantuane, as being not full summed. So Petrarque. So Boccace; So Marot, Sanazarus [Sannazaro], and also divers other excellent both Italian and French Poetes, whose footing this Author ­every where followeth, yet so as few, but they be wel scented [able to follow tracks by their scent, like hounds] can trace him out. So fi­nally flyeth this our new Poete, as a bird, whose principals be scarce growen out, but yet as that in time ­shall be hable to keepe wing with the best.28

The Calender closes with an envoi, or “send-­off,” bowing to each of its old En­glish masters in turn. Langland is remembered as the pilgrim-­ ploughman who is the hero of Piers Plowman, if it is Langland who is meant and not the author of the pseudo-­Chaucerian “Plowman’s Tale,” in which the ploughman goes on pilgrimage and tells a tale of debate be­ tween a griffon representing the Roman Catholic Church and a Lollard pelican representing the poor.29 Chaucer is still more highly honored by being crowned with Virgil’s pastoral name for himself, Tityrus: Goe, lyttle Calender, thou hast a f­ ree passeporte, Goe but a lowly gate emongst the meaner sorte.

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Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus his style, Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde a wyle: But followe them farre off, and their high steppes adore: The better please, the worse despise; I aske no more. The Shepheardes Calender, “December”

The full poem is twelve lines with twelve syllables per line, known as a “square poem” to indicate permanence, thus supporting in its form what it says in ­those opening lines—­ostensive appropriations of the boasts of Horace and Ovid—­that the poet’s works ­w ill endure forever: “Loe I have made a Calender for ­every year, / That steele in strength and time in du­ rance s­ hall outweare.”30 The second to last line of the poem translates the famous words of the ancient poet Statius, which that poet addresses upon parting to his own poem, the epic Thebaid, advising it not to match itself with Virgil’s Aeneid but instead to follow from afar, venerating its footsteps: nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta / Sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora.31 Set at the end of The Shepheardes Calender and apparently looking back on that achievement, this poem is also looking forward—­the quotation from Statius signals as much—to the next and more ambitious stage of Spenser’s ­career: the epic. Before leaving t­ hese lines we may note that some impor­tant features of Spenser’s lasting disposition as a poet are indicated in them, perhaps reflecting status anxiety in the Merchant Taylors’ School scholarship boy and Cambridge sizar who aspired to be Elizabeth’s court poet or, with no greater success, to be a secretary of some kind to the mighty Earl of Essex, bearing messages to France, as he vainly expected to do and unwisely told Harvey he would do.32 ­These features of Spenser’s character include a fa­ vorable disposition to “antiquity”; a reverence for g­ reat poetic forebears amply displayed by vis­i­ble borrowings, or “footings,” from Homer and Virgil as well as from Chaucer and Langland (if ­there is any agon with the masters, it is effectively concealed); a complex mixture of genres and perspectives, including the heroic, the devotional, the allegorical, and the satirical; and the all-­important division of the audience between the insightful “better” and the ignorant and despicable “worse.” E ­ very reader wants to be in the first category, not the second, and ­w ill there­ fore strive to interpret vigorously, to discover secret meanings, to l­abor

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over the text, continually uncovering what is only vaguely suggested or not ­there at all. For allegory, the inculcation of such a habit of reading is its primary aim: the arousal of hermeneutic anxiety. The thought of Spenser’s envoi returns, much complicated in structure but in origin the same—­including a recollection of ­those vestigial “high steps,” now be­ come “fine footing”—in the proem to Book Two of The Faerie Queene: Of Faerie land yet if he more inquire, By certain signs, ­here set in sundry place, He may it find; ne let him then admire But yield his sense to be too blunt and base, That n’ote without an hound fine footing trace. And thou, O fairest Princess ­under sky, In this fair mirror mayst behold thy face, And thine own realms in land of Faery, And in this antique image thy ­great auncestry. FQ II.proem.4

Although The Shepheardes Calender was officially anonymous, the secret was leaking out (as no doubt was intended) in literary London, aided by the Harvey-­Spenser correspondence. It won Spenser a reputation that would steadily grow. Still a young man in his twenties, conscious of his powers and also of his obscurity, contemptuous of the low standard of En­glish poetry of the day (as the posturing in the letters displays, although that is more amply exhibited by Harvey), Spenser was enjoying his first taste of literary reputation, if not of the fame that he craved. The darker side of his brilliant ambition was this continuing sense that his merits ­were overlooked and unrewarded and that he, Immerito, was the victim of unmerited slander, which of course he may well have been and which he perhaps naively attracted. In 1579, however, this resentment had not had time to ­settle in. The question for the young poet at this moment (it is crucial to all major poets when young) was in which direction his vaulting ambition should vault.

' we have seen, w ­ hether to write the nine com­ edies or press on with The Faerie Queene. ­There was an ele­ment of literary

SPENSER H AD TO DECIDE ,

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patriotism in the choice not unlike the starker dilemma Milton faced half a c­ entury ­later, which was ­whether to compose an epic poem in Latin for a Eu­ro­pean audience or commit himself to En­glish, taking, he says, “­these British Isles as my world.”33 Even for this dilemma ­there was pre­ce­dent, one that Milton mentions and that Spenser knew. The ­great Ariosto, though surrounded by fine Latin poets and being a Latin poet himself, justified his composing in Italian by saying he preferred to be among the first of poets in Italian (or, rather, in Tuscan, then emerging as the literary language of Italy) than barely in the second rank among the Romans, adding that the Tuscan language suited his genius. So runs the account of Giovan Battista Pigna, rendered by Sir John Harington: “that he had rather be one of the principal and chiefe Thuscan writers then scarce the second or third among the Latines, adding that he found his humor (his Genius, he called it) best inclining to it.”34 For Spenser, it was not a choice of language but of cultural style, a choice between, on the one hand, the glamorous if superficial international standards of the Re­ nais­sance, with their emphasis on correctness and following rules, and, on the other hand, homespun British traditions that ran deep—­less glam­ orous but more inwardly sound. In the event, Spenser would make his subject the Arthurian legends and fairy lore of Britain and decorate them with Re­nais­sance learning. More decisively than Milton, Spenser took “­these British Isles” as his world. Even so, the high culture and standards that ­were imported into ­England from Italy and France w ­ ere of no l­ittle importance to Spenser. The excitement of the return to the standards and aesthetic ideals of clas­ sical antiquity, real and ­imagined, began in Italy and spread north in Eu­ rope, reaching E ­ ngland first in the form of humanist education based on Latin and Greek language and lit­er­a­ture, and classical morals orientated ­toward effective po­liti­cal life rather than the good of the soul. To com­ pose an allegorical poem on the virtues—­and in The Faerie Queene, ­every virtue is po­liti­cal, which is to say, concerned with the state—is very much an enterprise of the Re­nais­sance, not of the ­Middle Ages. The first school in ­England based on humanist princi­ples was Saint Paul’s, whose master was John Colet, the friend of Erasmus. Spenser’s school, Merchant Taylors’, ­under Richard Mulcaster, the champion of

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En­glish as a literary and especially as a scientific and administrative lan­ guage, modeled its curriculum on Saint Paul’s. Mulcaster had been a member of Elizabeth’s first parliament and in his two educational trea­ tises gave full expression to the humanist idea that education should be for practical use in the world, especially for governing and public ser­vice. His advanced ideas, following Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, included (though still to a ­limited degree) the education of girls. Spenser was fully a product of the new learning, not only of its technical achievements (he read and imitated Greek and Latin authors) but also of its ideology. He believed in the equality of w ­ omen, pointing to their martial achievements in the past and claiming that envious men have suppressed the memory of them: “Where is the Antique glory now become / That whilome wont in ­women to appeare?” (FQ III.iv.1). In the Letter to Raleigh, he specifies members of both sexes as readers of The Faerie Queene, a poem intended for the moral education of a po­liti­cal elite. For a culture that regarded itself as nearly on a par with antiquity, it was necessary to produce an epic poem at least comparable to ­those of Homer and Virgil. T ­ hese ­were some of the ideas about the heroic poem: that it is the highest and most challenging of the literary genres, to which only the very rare, ­great poets may aspire; that the poet ascends to it through lower genres; that its purpose is to celebrate heroic deeds from the past as moral examples for the pre­sent; that it should also celebrate the accomplish­ ments of the prince to whom the poet is attached by patronage; and that it should do so by drawing out a line of descent to this prince from the epic hero in the past.35 But Spenser’s patron (we may call her that, since she awarded him a pension) was a ­woman, Queen Elizabeth, to whom The Faerie Queene is dedicated in fulsome style. (The second dedication, that of 1596, is still more fulsome than the first, in 1590.) That Spenser’s master was his mis­ tress would render more in­ter­est­ing the bare ideological form of dynastic epic on the Virgilian model, which is rigorously masculine. It meant (to put a complex m ­ atter in the simplest pos­si­ble way) that passionate and desiring love, or eros, rather than being repudiated in f­ avor of heroism, is integrated with heroism, in keeping with the popu­lar, Re­nais­sance asso­ ciation of the words for erotic love and heroism, eros / heros:36

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Most sacred fire, that burnest mightily In living brests, ykindled first above, Emongst th’eternall spheres and lamping sky, And thence pourd into men, which men call Love; Not that same, which doth base affections move In brutish minds, and filthy lust inflame, But that sweet fit, that doth true beautie love, And chuseth vertue for his dearest Dame, Whence spring all noble deeds and never d ­ ying fame. FQ III.iii.1

The relation between eros and heroism in Spenser is, so to speak, syn­ thetic rather than disjunctive. In the prototypical disjunctive case of Vir­ gil’s Aeneas, the hero renounces passionate love of Dido to follow the ­will of Jove and establish a ­great nation in a new land. True, Italy is referred to at the outset as the “Lavinian shores,” b ­ ecause Aeneas’s marriage with Lavinia—­which never occurs in the poem but is taken for granted—is necessary to inherit the kingdom of Latium. But Lavinia is a cipher. She never speaks, she appears only four times, and her only act, if it is one, is for her hair to catch on fire from the altar, thus prophesying war: Yet more, when fair Lavinia fed the fire Before the gods, and stood beside her sire, (Strange to relate!) the flames, involv’d in smoke Of incense, from the sacred altar broke, Caught her dishevel’d hair and rich attire; Her crown and jewels crackled in the fire: From thence the fuming trail began to spread And lambent glories danc’d about her head. This new portent the seer with won­der views, Then pausing, thus his prophecy renews: “The nymph, who scatters flaming fires around, ­Shall shine with honor, s­ hall herself be crowned; But, caused by her irrevocable fate, War ­shall the country waste, and change the state.”37

­ fter Dido, Aeneas’s only emotional relationship is homosexual, A as  expressed in his love for Pallas, a fainter reflection of the openly

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homosexual pair Nisus and Euralyus, in which it is apparent that eroti­ cism and heroism can coincide, on the model of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, but only in men. (Although the heroism consists in killing men in their sleep.) Aeneas’s final act, which is the final act of the epic, is killing his adversary Turnus. That concludes the strug­gle for the posses­ sion of Italy and the hand of Lavinia, as the supplicating Turnus points out: Aeneas has won, and the Italians have seen this defeated claimant to Lavinia’s hand holding up his palms in supplication; so ­there is no reason for hate to go any further: “vicisti et victum tendere palmas / Au­ sonii videre; tua est Lavinia coniunx, / ulterius ne tende odiis.”38 But Ae­ neas happens at this moment to catch sight of the baldric that Turnus took from Pallas ­after he killed the young man and is seized with furor: In deep suspense the Trojan seemed to stand, And, just prepared to strike, repressed his hand. He rolled his eyes, and e­ very moment felt His manly soul with more compassion melt, When casting down a casual glance, he spied The golden ­belt that glittered on his side, The fatal spoil which haughty Turnus tore From ­dying Pallas and in triumph wore. Then roused anew to wrath, he loudly cries (Flames, while he spoke, came flashing from his eyes), “Traitor! Dost thou, dost thou to grace pretend, Clad, as thou art, in trophies of my friend? To his sad soul a grateful off’ring go! ’Tis Pallas, Pallas gives this deadly blow.” He raised his arm aloft and at the word, Deep in his bosom drove the shining sword. The streaming blood distained his arms around, And the disdainful soul came rushing through the wound.39

Turnus’s limbs grow cold and are loosed, and his life-­spirit, indignant and groaning, leaves him and flies to the shades: “Vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras.” Dryden’s disdainful seems just right: the de­ feated Turnus enjoys at least the moral victory of holding his victor in contempt.

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Spenser’s radical revision of this scene at the end of the Mutabilitie Cantos gives the same feeling of epic finality, but with all the difference that difference of gender can make. The goddess of change is “put downe” below the sphere of the Moon and “whist”—­silenced—­being no longer permitted to plead her case for dominion in the court of the heavens: “So was the Titaness put downe and whist, / And Jove confirm’d in his impe­ riall see” (FQ VII.vii.59). At the beginning of the episode, in an inversion of events at the end of the Aeneid, Jove himself took up the thunderbolt with the intention of destroying Mutabilitie, as Aeneas destroys Turnus, but turns from his intention upon noting the beauty of her face (change is, a­ fter all, often beautiful), promising marriage, or perhaps concubinage, in the ­future: ­Will never mortall thoughts cease to aspire, In this bold sort, to Heaven claime to make And touch celestiall seates with earthly mire? I would have thought, that bold Procrustes hire, Or Typhons fall, or proud Ixions paine, Or ­great Prometheus, tasting of our ire, Would have suffiz’d the rest for to restraine; And warn’d all men by their example to refraine: But now this off-­scum of that cursèd fry Dare to renew the like bold enterprize And chalenge th’heritage of this our skie; Whom what should hinder, but that we likewise Should ­handle as the rest of her allies And thunder-­drive to hell? With that, he shooke His Nectar-­deawed locks, with which the skyes And all the world beneath for terror quooke, And eft his burning levin-­brond in hand he tooke. But, when he lookèd on her lovely face. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Then cease thy idle claime thou foolish gerle, And seeke by grace and goodnesse to obtaine That place from which by folly Titan fell; There-to thou maist perhaps, if so thou faine Have Jove thy gratious Lord and Soveraigne.

­Toward Fairy Lan  79 So, having said, she thus to him replide; Cease, Saturnes sonne, to seeke by proffers vaine Of idle hopes t’allure mee to thy side, For to betray my Right, before I have it tride. FQ VII.vi.29–31, 34

The mythological comedy of the episode does not alter the seriousness with which it transforms the scene of power with which the Aeneid con­ cludes. Mutabilitie refuses to be a supplicant like Turnus, ­either for her life or for her right (as she conceives it) to rule the heavens. She recognizes Jove’s offer for what it is—­a po­liti­cal, sexist, and efficient solution to his tem­ porary prob­lem—­and refuses him disdainfully: “Cease, Saturnes sonne”! What happens at the end, when she is “put downe” by a higher power than Jove, and a female one, by that deliciously metaphysical line, “For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire” (FQ VII.vii.59)? We may well imagine that her spirit has not been tamed, and we may wish to hear her reaction to Nature’s judgment. Presumably Mutabilitie goes down below the shadow of the moon like Turnus’s spirit, indignans.

' IN THE GREATER part of The Faerie Queene, although especially in the glo­ rious Book Three, as we have seen in the stanza just quoted, in which love is the source of “noble deeds and never ­dying fame,” heterosexual love is not an enervating distraction from heroism, as it is still in the epic poets of the Italian Re­nais­sance. It must be said, however, that Ariosto’s Orlando furioso does end in heroic and erotic reconciliation, a g­ rand dynastic mar­ riage of the fighters, male and female, Bradamante and Ruggiero, thus founding the ­house of Este. Moreover, Ruggiero was originally a Saracen. But when the pagan Rodomonte bursts in on the wedding feast and chal­ lenges Ruggiero for betraying the side, it is as if the pull of the Latin tradi­ tion and of the Aeneid ­were irresistibly exerting its force. Ariosto wants to raise up the tradition of romance to the dignity of epic, and for him an epic poem cannot end with a marriage, although Spenser’s can or could have. A tremendous fight therefore ensues. It is modeled on the end of the Aeneid but is more savage. When Ruggiero reverses the advantage that Rodo­ monte briefly enjoys in order “to make that impious Saracen die”—­“di far

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quel empio Saracin morire”—he stabs him in the face three times and, raising his arm as high as he can, buries his sword up to the hilt, thus freeing himself of further trou­ble (e si levò d’impaccio). When the Rodomonte’s soul, loosed from its icy corpse, goes down to the shades—or, rather, in this nas­ tier account, to the fetid, filthy shores of Acheron, redolent of the Christian Hell—it does so not disdainfully, like Turnus’s, but blasphemously cursing, bestemmiando. This is the final stanza of the forty-­sixth canto and of poem: E due e tre volte ne l’orribil fronte, alzando, più ch’alzar si possa, il braccio, il ferro del pugnale a Rodomonte, tutto nascose, e si levò d’impaccio. Alle squalide ripe d’Acheronte, sciolta dal corpo più freddo che giaccio, bestemmiando fuggì l’alma sdegnosa, che fu sì altiera al mondo e sì orgogliosa. 40

As usual, Harington gives a spirited rendering of t­ hese lines: And lifting his victorious hand on hie, In that Turks face he stabd his dagger twise Vp to the hilts, and quickly made him die, And rid himselfe of trou­ble in a trise: Downe to the lake, where damned ghosts do lie, Sunke his disdainful soule, now cold as Ise, Blaspheming as it went, and cursing lowd, That was on earth so lustie and so proud. 41

Despite the imitation of the conclusion of the Aeneid, the tone is greatly altered to mark the difference between, on the one hand, the milder ten­ sion between invading Trojans and native Italians, “Ausonians,” and, on the other hand, the irreconcilable hatred of Christians ­toward Saracens. Ariosto’s poem ends in the mode of romance, with a marriage; but he in­ terrupts this conclusion in order to raise his poem to the level of epic. Even for Ariosto, love and marriage can never quite belong in the higher sphere of the epic. How dif­fer­ent is the general spirit of The Faerie Queene! Where Ariosto (and, even more so, Tasso) feels the disjunction between romance and epic, Spenser d ­ oesn’t seem to feel it at all, even if at times he signals an intention to get around to set ­battles with massed armies. But he treats

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the largely solitary and episodic encounters of romance—­Redcross’s fight with the dragon; Guyon’s assault on the isle of Acrasia; Guyon’s Odys­ sean nekuyia, or descent to the dead, in Mammon’s delve; Britomart’s pen­ etration of Busyrane’s c­ astle and her l­ ater fight with Radigund; even the marriage of the Thames and the Medway—­w ith a gravitas belonging to the dignity of epic. He ­doesn’t need to pull himself up for a ­great siege of Paris or of Jerusalem; he ­doesn’t strive to escape the gravitational tug of romance for the higher sphere of epic. Every­thing breathes noble love and high heroism at once. ­T hese are blended powers, even when they show themselves distinctly and at dif­fer­ent times. We see Britomart’s tender and intense love for Artegal and her exqui­ site embarrassment on his behalf when she finds him forcibly dressed “in womanishe attire” (FQ V.vii.37): At sight thereof abasht with secret shame, She turned her head aside, as nothing glad, To have beheld a spectacle so bad . . . . . . . . . . . . . She sought with ruth to salve his sad misfortunes sore. FQ V.vii.38

Artegal got into this state—­the dress is the least of its hardships—­because of his fatuous compliance with the pretty messengers who recited the silly conditions “word by word”: “Which he accepting well, as he could weete, / Them fairely entertaynd with curt’sies meete, / And gave them gifts and ­things of deare delight” (V.iv.51). Far more impressive than Brit­ omart’s embarrassment at Artegal’s humiliation is her severity with Ra­ digund upon hearing the same nefarious conditions proposed: But ere they rearèd hand, the Amazone Began the streight conditions to propound, With which she used still to tye her fone; To serve her so, as she the rest had bound. Which when the other heard, she sternly frownd For high disdaine of such indignity, And would no lenger treat, but bad them sound. For her no other termes should ever tie Then what prescribèd ­were by lawes of chevalrie. FQ V.vii.28

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Not only her courage but her ­legal mind as well outclasses that of the knight-­patron of Justice.

' this Spenserian elevating of gendered passion to the heroic, u ­ nder every­thing in the Iliad are the values of aretê and kudos: “excellence” and “majesty.” In the Aeneid the under­lying values are simi­ larly masculine, although they are now the work of time: pietas, maiestas, and imperium, the last being the work of founding begun by Aeneas and completed by Augustus, who ­w ill establish the ages of gold: “aurea condet / saecula.” 42 For Virgil, it is the phenomenon of command that holds up the world and demands the rejection of the feminine. The conclusion to Book One gives a better idea than any other book of how Spenser intended to conclude The Faerie Queene. T ­ here, we have the betrothal ceremony of Una and Redcross, “swimming in that sea of blissful joy” (FQ I.xii.41), before Redcross must return to Cleopolis. ­There is an interruption h ­ ere, too, engineered by Duessa and Archimago, the latter of whom, disguised as a groom, bears a letter from Duessa urging Redcross’s e­ arlier transgressions and unfaithfulness to her. He is un­ masked and imprisoned, from which, of course, he escapes. Spenser seems to be following Ariosto’s rhythm—­for one ­thing, Redcross, like Ruggiero, requires a conversion, but without a heroic fight. Instead, in the figures of the witch and the enchanter, we have a return to romance. The heroism has already been exercised in Redcross’s tremendous fight with the dragon, a scene far more impressive than the final strug­gle of the Aeneid or the final fight of the Orlando furioso. But Spenser is per­ fectly comfortable putting the heroic moment b ­ ehind him and con­ cluding with a loving betrothal, in keeping with the mood and style of romance. It is hard to imagine Ariosto or even Tasso writing a stanza like this: I N CON T R AST W I T H

During the which t­ here was an heavenly noise Heard sound through all the Palace pleasantly, Like as it had bene many an Angels voice, Singing before th’eternall majesty, In their trinall triplicities on hye; Yet wist no creature, whence that heavenly sweet

­Toward Fairy Lan  83 Proceeded, yet each one felt secretly Himself thereby reft of his sences meet, And ravishèd with rare impression in his sprite. FQ I.xii.39

Spenser displaces the heroic from this scene by putting the final heroic ­battle—­between the armies of the Pagan King and of the Fairy Queen—­far off in the f­ uture.43 The suspension of the a­ ctual marriage of Una and Red­ cross belongs to the self-­correcting structure of the poem, which at this moment recenters itself on Cleopolis. This is the closest Spenser w ­ ill come in The Faerie Queene to a prematurely definitive conclusion. To avoid it, he must take more obvious steps than he does in l­ ater books, where he sees the danger sooner. The point is that by deferring the ultimate strug­gle in­ def­initely, Spenser opens a space for romance to expand, making eros the under­lying value of his poem, the ground of the heroic, and also its destination.

' of The Faerie Queene is Prince Arthur, in the lost years before he was king. He has come into Fairy Land in search of its queen, whom he met and fell in love with in a dream vision—if that is what it was, for he woke and found it real. Arthur’s heroic deeds, like ­those of Redcross and Britomart (though not of the other knights), are impelled by pas­ sionate love. Heroic actions are directed ­toward a telos that is ­union with the beloved issuing in historical destiny. This change of outlook from that of the ancient world is in large part the result of medieval chivalry, the story of which is told so well in C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love. But it be­ longs to Re­nais­sance iconography as well, in par­tic­u­lar the “symbolic icon” of Venus overmastering Mars, a theme invoked by Spenser in the proem to The Faerie Queene. A temporary surrender to love—if it is noble love—is necessary for the highest heroic achievement:44 “Fierce warres and faithfull loves ­shall moralize my song,” he says, invoking Clio, the muse of epic poetry, for a story that begins in love and chivalry: T H E H E RO

Helpe then, O holy Virgin chiefe of nine, Thy weaker novice to performe thy ­w ill, Lay forth out of thy everlasting scryne

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The antique rolles, which ­there lye hidden still, Of Faerie knights and fairest Tanaquill, Whom that most noble Briton Prince so long Sought through the world, and suffered so much ill, That I must rue his undeservèd wrong: O helpe thou my weake wit, and sharpen my dull tong. And thou most dreaded impe of highest Jove, Faire Venus sonne, that with thy cruel dart At that good knight so cunningly didst rove, Lay now thy deadly Heben bow apart, And with thy ­mother milde come to mine ayde: Come both, and with you bring triumpant Mart, In loves and gentle jollities arrad, ­After his murderous spoiles and bloudy rage allayd. FQ I.proem.2–3.

' love embodied in the person of Una, or “Truth,” is the engine of the first book of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of Holiness. It is indispensable to the Redcross knight’s defeating the dragon, ­after which he is solemnly betrothed to Una. We have seen how this must be a betrothal, not a marriage, so that Redcross may return to Fairy Court to take up another heroic adventure and ultimately become Saint George for ­England. His betrothal has prepared him for ­these deferred tasks. In the ­grand logic of the program of The Faerie Queene, no knight’s love can be completed—­not Redcross’s for Una and not Britomart’s for Artegal—­ until Arthur’s quest for the Fairy Queen has interacted with all the lesser knights’ adventures. Countercenters for love are temporary and unstable, giving way at last to Fairy Court, or falling back into nature. T ­ hese coun­ tercenters are, in Book One, the betrothal of Redcross and Una; in Book Two, the islands of Phaedria and of Acrasia, both scenes of lust; in Book Three, the garden of Adonis; in Book Four, the marriage of the Thames and the Medway and the u ­ nion of Marinell and Florimell; in Book Five, the po­liti­cal order set up by Britomart and Artegal, which overturns Ra­ digund’s disordered polity, with Britomart eagerly repealing “the liberty of w ­ omen” (FQ V.vii.42); and in Book Six, the romance of Calidore and Pas­ torella. This last is seen in ambivalent terms. Calidore’s love is a natu­ral S E RV I N G A N I D E A L

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good, as befits the earthier scene in Book Six, and partly a distraction from the quest assigned to him at Fairy Court. Of all the virtuous loves in the poem, this one between Pastorella and Calidore bends a ­little in the direction of lust: “Who now does follow that foule Blatant Beast, / Whilest Calidore does follow that faire Mayd?” To underline the point, we are re­ minded that the pursuit of the beast is a duty imposed from the true center, at Fairy Court, by the Fairy Queen: “Unmyndfull of his vow and high beheast, / Which by the Faery Queene was on him layd” (VI.x.1). The divagation is saved from bending too far from the center-­seeking plan by the regression in Book Six from the sternness of epic to the gentler tones of pastoral and of romance. As to the lesser c­ ouples in The Faerie Queene—­ Florimell and Marinell, Scudamour and Amoret, Serena and Calepine, even Timias and Belphoebe—­they are all fascinating regressions from the high artifice of epic to the condition of nature. Only with the principal knights—­and only, in truth, with Redcross, Britomart, and Arthur—is erotic love an energy that is harnessed for something higher than itself. That higher ­thing is history. Prince Arthur ­w ill become King Arthur, reigniting the flame of Trojan Britain and con­ tinuing the line extending from Brutus, the Trojan who settled the island (exterminating the ­giants), to Queen Elizabeth herself, in Spenser’s time. More obscurely, but also more emphatically, Britomart’s passion for Artegal has been imposed on her by fate—as we see in Merlin’s ­great vision—to found a line of British kings that ­w ill culminate in Elizabeth. Spenser never straightens out the overlap of t­hese seemingly distinct but actually converging lines of descent. His purpose, largely for narrative reasons, is to displace the values of the first onto the second, with Prince Arthur generating an “equal” in Artegal. The point is the development in three stages (a fourth ­will be the queen herself) from eroticism to heroism to history, each stage being essential to the next and preserved—­ sublated—in it. Heroism exists b ­ ecause of love; history exists b ­ ecause of heroism; and the telos of history, Queen Elizabeth herself, exists b ­ ecause of the “fatall deepe foresight” (FQ I.ix.7) that is history’s inner logic and Spirit: Oh! sacred Fire, that burnest mightily In living Breasts, ykindled first above, Emongst th’ eternal spheres and lamping sky, And thence pourd into men, which men call Love;

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Not that same, which doth base affections move In brutish mindes, and filthy lust inflame, But that sweet fit, that doth true beautie love, And chuseth vertue for his dearest Dame, Whence spring all noble deeds and never d ­ ying fame: Well did Antiquitie a God thee deeme, That over mortall mindes hast so ­great might, To order them, as best to thee doth seeme, And all their actions to direct aright; The fatall purpose of divine foresight Thou doest effect in destinèd descents, Through deepe impression of thy secret might, And stirredst up th’ Heroës high intents, Which the late world admyres for wondrous moniments. But thy dread darts in none doe triumph more, Ne braver proof in any, of thy powre Shewd’st thou, then in this royall Maid of yore, Making her seek an unknowne Paramour, From the worlds end, through many a b ­ itter stowre: From whose two loynes thou afterwards did rayse Most famous fruits of matrimoniall bower, Which through the earth have spred their living prayse, That fame in trompe of gold eternally displayes. FQ III.iii.1–3

This progression from eros to heros to kudos—­love to heroism to fame—­ requires a false form to be decisively cast off, as the tainted and parodic remainder, so that the true form may be purified. That is of course lust, with its attendant passions and effects, uncontrollable rage and ener­ vating lassitude, symbolized by the pairs, Pyrocles and Cymocles, and Sansloy and Huddibras. Purification seems to be the point of Spenser’s entire second book and may explain why the knight of Temperance—­the fairy, Guyon—­has no lady love and ­doesn’t seem to care. Guyon’s status as a fairy suggests not that he is other than ­human but that he is more than ­human. The psychic makeup of his character is a purification of en­ ergies more subtly distributed in ­humans and harder to discern in them. Guyon’s greatest trial is not the final defeat of the lustful predator, the witch Acrasia—­whose name oddly signifies “intemperance” (Gk. a +

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krasis, “mixture”)—­even if he experiences in her garden two vanishingly brief episodes of lust. She is defeated by subtlety and sleight. The episode is absorbing but is also anticlimactic a­ fter the Redcross knight’s direct, violent, and nearly unendurable agon with the dragon in the penultimate canto of Book One: “The knight himself even trembled at his fall, / So huge and horrible a masse it seem’d” (FQ I.xi.55). The witch’s name, signifying intemperance, is, as I suggested, curious. Temperance is represented tra­ ditionally as a maiden mixing ­water and wine—­thus “tempering” or di­ luting the wine. With the other virtues and vices, she is so depicted by Giotto on the walls of the Arena Chapel in Padua. Why is Acrasia’s mur­ derous lust—­she is a sexy serial killer, like the heroine of Basic Instinct—­ weakly called intemperance? We do however think of intemperance in connection with anger, which would allow us to add its opposite, sloth. It is moreover impossible not to think of intemperance in connection with greed, the avarice of money and power. For greed is simply about having more than enough, and then more than more than enough, and then more than that, and so on. In its tendency to cybernetic runaway greed it closely resembles sexual lust, which never has enough and requires ever more stimulus—­and ever more sexual objects—­briefly to appease a craving the intensity of which it aug­ ments by appeasing. The phenomenon is brilliantly captured in one of Milton’s most Spenserian episodes: the serpents in Pandemonium, driven by b ­ itter thirst to eat fruit that turns to dust and ashes in their jaws, which worsens the thirst, compelling them to bite the fruit again in hope of re­ lief, in an ever-­worsening cycle, one in which the very quest for relief deepens the pain. Lust and greed—­especially, as we ­shall see, greed for power—­are so closely related they can stand as allegorical figures for each other. They are not merely distinct in their closeness, like asymptotical lines. Naively appetitive lust—­there is something childlike in all lusting figures of romance—­leads on to deformity, the appetitive lust for power, when the amusing boy grows into a monster. Guyon’s greatest trial is in the Cave of Mammon, and Mammon is the most physically alarming character in Book Two of The Faerie Queene, a true monster, for all his eloquence. In his cave, or “delve”—so called ­because it seems to have been made with h ­ uman hands—­Guyon is tempted by much more than wealth. He is tempted by ambition. Despite the conclusion, it would appear that the allegory of Book Two as a w ­ hole

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culminates in a lesson on how sexual lust is consumed in the larger lust for power. It is one of the ­great differences between Milton and Spenser that while Milton in some ways seems more “modern” to us—­having, as he does, the advantage of publishing seventy years ­after his pre­de­ces­sor and without any knights—we are not reminded of Milton in our daily lives or in the news e­ very day, as we so often are of Spenser. The habit of seeing Spenserian characters and situations everywhere is strangely per­sis­tent in anyone who has read The Faerie Queene with enthusiastic attention. We would be right to suspect that this was Spenser’s intention. It is what he meant in the Letter to Raleigh by fashioning a person, which is to say, im­ printing the ­mental habit of thinking about moral questions in the terms he has provided. ­T here is of course for Spenser a more specific referent for the Cave Mammon episode. It is an allegory of the nasty scramble for distinctions and offices among the members of the new, bourgeois administrative class to which Spenser belonged. ­Whether the creation in nuce of the British Civil Service—an administrative structure distinct from the prince’s personal household—be attributed to Henry VII’s genius or to his son Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas ­Cromwell, or to ­later developments in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, it remains true that the Tudor system of rule depended much less on the nobility than on “new men” chosen for their intelligence, industry, and education (and of course their social connections).45 This solicitation of the lower ­orders for intellectual and administrative talent is powerfully revealed in Christopher Marlowe’s ­great plays about the aspiring mind of a Scythian shepherd, Tamburlaine, who became the tyrant of Asia. Such ideas, exaggerated as they are in Marlowe, are the foundation of the commoner Edmund Spenser’s as­ piring mind. One obvious reason for Henry VII’s favoring for office the educated and wealthy ­middle classes was efficiency. Another was safety. In order for Henry VII to pacify the country and consolidate his authority a­ fter the Wars of the Roses, for they did not truly end at Bosworth Field, August 22, 1585, he had to deprive the aristocracy of its menacing power. (Henry had at his disposal other, more devastating means to that end, in par­tic­u­lar, attainder.) Bourgeois administrators, like Shakespeare’s Malvolio—­who,

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though vain and unkind, shows high competence u ­ ntil he is gulled—­are never direct or violent aspirants to rule, in contrast to what Elizabeth would learn from the revolt of the northern earls in 1569. With the no­ table exception of the handsome and disastrous Earl of Essex, executed in 1601, Elizabeth would depend on the new men like Francis Walsingham and the Cecils, William and Robert, and Sir Walter Raleigh himself, su­ perbly educated, diligent men on the make who learned to rise by ruth­ lessness, energy, and skill—­and by bowing very low and professing deep love for their queen. They knew how to keep bowing low once they reached the top. The queen knew well how to take full advantage of ­these hopes of sliding into power by exaggerated deference to her. “Louting low” is something Spenser does often in The Faerie Queene, to our modern sensibilities with startling abjection. Exaggerated deference marks the other extreme of his instinct for discontented satire and complaint. In the perilous reign of Henry VIII, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, both victims of the king’s increasingly tyran­ nical suspicion, led the first generation of En­glish Re­nais­sance poets. They modeled themselves on the new aesthetic standard established by Petrarch and enriched by French poets. The “stigma of print” was still a real t­ hing—­print itself being new, having come to ­England in the ­previous century—­and the works of Wyatt and Surrey ­were circulated in manu­ script for years before being published twice in the summer of 1557, in the last year of Mary’s reign. This book, the most famous and influential anthology of En­glish poetry—­until Palgrave’s Golden Trea­sury, published in 1861 and still in print t­ oday—­was entitled, simply, Songs and Sonnets. The much-­altered second edition (rearranging the ­whole and drastically re­ ducing the contribution of the dreary Nicholas Grimald in order to fore­ ground Wyatt and Surrey) was the influential one. 46 It has been known since as Tottel’s Miscellany, ­after its publisher, Richard Tottel, who made his money across three reigns with a mono­poly on law texts but took a lively and patriotic interest in En­glish poetry. In the same year as the two Songs and Sonnets volumes, Tottel published Surrey’s blank verse translation of two books of the Aeneid, the standard mea­sure of En­glish verse ­until the end of the nineteenth c­ entury. Lesser poets in the next generation—­ indeed, for the next three decades—­were loyal followers of the trend, keeping Songs and Sonnets to hand while absorbing Continental and

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classical influences ever more widely. Blank verse appeared first in Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey’s translation of Books Two and Four of the Aeneid around 1640, published in 1657, in Thomas Sackville’s “Induc­ tion” to the Mirror for Magistrates (1563), and in the play Gorboduc, by Sack­ ville and Thomas Norton.47 When Shakespeare appeared in London ­toward the end of the 1580s, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets ­were among the En­glish works he studied early to de­ velop his craft—­and to parody. In the medieval university, where theology and philosophy reigned su­ preme, lit­er­a­ture was extracurricular. Ethics and po­liti­cal theory ­were non­ex­is­tent, church doctrine supplying all that was needed for both. In the new humanistic movement of the Renaissance—­beginning, unsur­ prisingly, in the in­de­pen­dent and violent city-­states of Italy—­morals, po­ liti­cal theory, and lit­er­a­ture (and, with lit­er­a­ture, philology) ­were now the dominant forces in education. In this context—­the context of the Renaissance—­the intellectual aim of The Faerie Queene was the literary ­union of morals with po­liti­cal theory. The purpose of morals was not to warn against the seven deadly sins, for which one is answerable at the Last Judgment, but instead to create effective rulers and administrators in this real and pre­sent world. The purpose of lit­er­a­ture was to acquire knowl­ edge of virtue and vice not by abstract precepts but by emotionally in­ spiring example, or what Spenser called ensample.48 Spenser’s knights are therefore not abstract personifications of the virtues: they are t­hose virtues’ exemplary patrons. By arousing the passions through stories, lit­ er­a­ture could regulate ­those passions and direct them ­toward public ser­ vice and the good of the state. The purposes of po­liti­cal philosophy and of humanist moral thought flowed together into lit­er­a­ture, especially heroic poetry in the highest of the genres, the epic. Such was the ideological framework b ­ ehind the pro­ gram of The Faerie Queene as described in Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh and implied in his reading and culture. The framework included teaching by moral example rather than by precept, improving society one person at a time; teaching also by allegorical mysteries conveyed in “symbolic icons”; praising the queen and supporting her legitimacy by connecting her with King Arthur as her dynastic forbear; and of course elevating Spenser himself as courtier and civil servant, as moral teacher and epic

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poet in the line from Homer and Virgil through Dante and Chaucer. That is much. But the intensity of Spenser’s art may be mea­sured by the extent to which he achieved many of t­ hese ­things. He was also at the same time engaged in a creative proj­ect of an excep­ tional kind, one that was more original—­more “modern,” as we would now say—­than perhaps, in his conscious mind, he could have known. It would be like an epic poem but not quite the t­ hing in itself, like Milton’s Paradise Lost. It would be like romance but lacking the brio of his pre­de­ ces­sors in the genre ­because he was striving for something higher than romance, or at least outside the realm of romance. It would be very like an allegory, continual if not continuous, an allegory presenting itself in the manner of that genre as a textual surface that is nearer to us, though secondary with re­spect to its meaning beyond. But it would not be through and through an allegory e­ ither, ­because of the interference of the other two generic systems at work in the poem. Allegory is the poetry of absence, of an “other” that withdraws b ­ ehind the veil of signs, provoking the reader to interpret. Epic is the poetry of presence, of splendid exis­ tence pressing forward to astonish us, like a winter star shining all around as it rises from the ocean—­Homer’s description of the onset of Diome­ des’s aristeia, a noble, divinely given, slaughtering rage that is seen as in ­every way splendid, an unveiling of divine magnificence and power. 49

Chapter 3

'

In Ireland

a­ fter that witty and familiar letter from Ga­ briel Harvey, on or just ­after August 10, 1580, Spenser was bound to a far rougher place than any he had known before: Ireland. He went as a sec­ retary to Lord Grey, who was charged with the pacification of the island, in which of course Grey did not succeed, although not for lack of bloody trying. His campaigns are alluded to in episodes of the fifth book of The Faerie Queene, Grey himself being figured in the knight of justice Artegal, who is abetted by the robotic killing machine Talus, a figure of the En­ glish army executing justice and of soldiers run amok. With Talus, we have come a long way from the divine light shining around Diomedes. The line between executive action and chaos is difficult to see. And so it is on campaign. Spenser found himself almost immediately on the march in challenging and hostile terrain, experiencing military de­ feat and ­later, in the fall, witnessing the dreadful conditions prevailing in Munster (the province in which he eventually settled, at Kilcolman), as Grey’s army made its way westward to the Dingle peninsula to confront the Spanish expeditionary force lodged in Smerwick harbor. Events ­there tran­spired from November 7 to 10, 1580. As Grey’s secretary, Spenser witnessed and duly recorded the siege and unconditional surrender of that force, followed by its slaughter, com­ manded by Grey and supervised by Captains Mackworth and Raleigh (­later, Sir Walter), an act that brought criticism (which Spenser called cal­ umny) down on Grey’s head—­for the cruelty of the slaughter itself but ALMOST FOU R MON T HS

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also for the allegedly deceptive and hence dishonorable terms for ac­ cepting unconditional surrender.1 What Spenser witnessed en route to Smerwick he remembered vividly over fifteen years l­ ater, in the most famous passage of his View of the Pre­ sent State of Ireland, which was not published ­until 1633. Only months be­ fore t­ hese appalling sights and rough experiences, Spenser, now in his late twenties, had been the delicate and understandably conceited, socially aspiring Cantabrigian, already up several rungs on the ladder of a secre­ tarial and poetic c­ areer, aspiring to an easy life at or near the court to realize his arduous literary ambitions.2 The shock must have been ex­ treme, and perhaps some of the poetry of The Faerie Queene shows the effects of posttraumatic stress disorder. Richard McCabe is surely right to say that Ireland is not so much represented in the poem as it is “ines­ capable within it,” permeating its very language and entering into its os­ tensible themes.3 At any rate, his description of the consequences of war in that formerly wealthy province is worthy of Goya’s ­etchings on the same subject, but with the hard-­eyed and one-­sided conclusion that de­ population by starvation was both the fault of the victims and the only means of civilizing the country: Out of e­ very corner of the woods and glens they came creeping upon their hands for their legs could not bear them. They looked like anat­ omies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves, they did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them. Yea, and one another soon ­after . . . ​in a short space ­there ­were almost none left and a populous and most plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast, yet sure in all that war ­there perished not many by the sword but all by the extremity of famine, which they them­ selves had wrought. 4

Spenser saw Ireland and the Gaelic-­speaking Irish, with their quite dif­ fer­ent system of customs and laws, through the eyes of the colonial administrator that he became. The extensive comparative learning displayed in the View—­for example, in Spenser’s remarks on other tradi­ tional cultures, notably the Scythians—­never displays the sort of nostalgia for au­then­tic culture we might sometimes observe in twentieth-­ century anthropology and in twentieth-­century arts.

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Among many scenes suggesting traumatic disorder the following may be noted as symptomatic, b ­ ecause the physicality and extremity of the vio­lence exceeds the allegorical requirements of the scenes. ­T hese are quite unlike the allegorical visions and dreams of Spenser’s e­ arlier poetry. But far from making the allegory worse, the violent excessiveness makes it better. As I said in chapter one when speaking of Soutine (who stages a collision between the represented figure and the viscous, flowing sub­ stance of paint), the meaning does not float far off in the distance but instead falls into and mixes with the narrative medium. In the opening episode of The Faerie Queene we see the wriggling brood of the serpent-­woman Errour. Having been vomited out of her womb, they now eagerly feed on their eviscerated ­mother’s blood and burst like bal­ loons a­ fter ­doing so, their “bowels gushing forth,” splattering more blood and vomit around. This scene is called a “well worthy end,” language that may remind us of the View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland, as does the final cou­ plet of the stanza, recalling the scenes of famine from Munster, and the account of the Irish d ­ oing more harm to themselves than even their ene­ mies could contrive to do: “Now needeth him no lenger l­ abour spend, / His foes have slaine themselves, with whom he should contend” (FQ I.i.26). Books and papers are floating about in the liquid filth. The meaning is that error is fertile and begets more errors, in profusion, and that error explodes itself at length ­because of its uncontrollable avidity for false­ hood, which is its very lifeblood. It is not a question of the ele­ments of this scene being unsuitable for representing the meaning intended. They are very suitable, and indeed witty, with the scintillating ferocity that John Freccero has described so well in Dante’s allegory.5 But the sign does not, so to speak, dis­appear into the meaning or get used up by it. Left ­behind by the pro­gress of the meaning, like waste, it is a residue of vio­lence and of disgusting materiality that remains before our eyes, like a traumatic image that cannot be willed away. Possibly the most shockingly violent spectacle in the entire Faerie Queene takes place in Book Four, as the central tableau in that book’s allegory of friendship, of philia, the virtue Aristotle sees as being pos­si­ble only be­ tween gentlemen who are rich and so ­free to engage in politics. ­There was a wide array of writings on friendship in the Renaissance—­friendship be­ tween men—as a virtue on which the state might be founded, replacing

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the murderous competition for power. Elite men with similar tastes, ed­ ucation, accomplishments, and riches should be capable, through this virtue, of transcending their po­liti­cal differences and ruling together in peace and harmony, a social harmony founded on the idea of each friend in the ruling class being the alter ego of the other. The theory is frequently undone and factitiously put together again by the narrative representing it, as in Boccaccio’s story of Titus and Gisuppus, beautifully retold in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book of the Governor. This book stages the undoing of friendship as a ground for po­liti­cal order. In the second installment of The Faerie Queene Spenser’s Book of Friend­ ship is the most incoherent—or, let us say, to be cautious, the most difficult—of the entire poem. It seems altogether pos­si­ble, from the core episode in canto three, which is intended to reveal metaphysically what friendship is, that Spenser ­didn’t believe in true friendship between men or, what is much the same ­thing, that he had no earthly conception of what it might be or if t­ here was any good in it. He therefore represented it—­most unusually for him—as the result of transcendental intervention, when Cambina appears in her lion-­drawn chariot, brandishing her ca­ duceus wand and bearing the cup of Nepenthe, the drink of the gods. With ­these Cambina brings to an end the nightmarish and seemingly interminable fight between Cambell and the b ­ rothers Priamond, Dia­ mond, and Triamond, with its rivers of “disentrailed blood” (FQ IV.iii.28). The adversaries hack at each other’s plated armor with axes so fiercely that the plates buckle and give way like rotten wood. Out of rifts in the armor made by the axes the blood showers forth among the sparks made by steel grating on steel: With that they both together fiercely met, As if that each meant other to devour; And with their axes both so sorely bet, That neither plate nor mail, whereas their pow’r They felt, could once sustain the hideous stowre, But rivèd ­were, like rotten wood, asunder; Whilst through their rifts the ruddy blood did show’r, And fire did flash, like lightening ­after thunder, That fill’d the lookers-on at once with ruth and won­der. FQ IV.iii.15

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­T here is also the episode, early in a book rich with senseless vio­ lence, in which Lady Munera, the ­daughter of the slaughtered “Paynim” (FQ V.ii.12) Pollente, is besieged in her c­ astle and throws bags of riches to repel the invader, the Knight of Justice, to no avail. Symbolizing for­ eign pay used for sedition in Ireland, she is dragged by Talus out of her hiding place beneath a pile of gold and stripped (if that is the meaning of “foully did array / Withouten pity of her goodly hew” [V.ii.25]) so that Artegal himself rues her unseemly plight. Yet he watches impassively as she is dragged along by Talus “without remorse,” begging for mercy with her golden, “suppliant hands.” Talus chops off t­ hose hands and, for good mea­sure, the feet, “Which sought unrigh­teousness, and justice sold”—an odd ­thing for feet to do. The severed limbs are “nayld on high, that all might them behold” (V.ii.26). Talus then throws Munera over the ­castle wall into the stream below and drowns her in the mud: Herself then took he by the sclender wast In vain loud crying, and into the flood Over the c­ astle wall adown her cast, And t­ here her drownèd in the dirty mud. FQ IV.ii.27

Commentators have noted some similarities to the siege at Smerwick, fol­ lowed by the slaughter of some six hundred papal troops. This may be so, but Spenser’s account surely captures the traumatic memory of many such scenes he would have seen on campaign. Two details, one obvious, the other perhaps more subtle, have the ring of truth about them, prompting us to think that this is the archetype of scenes observed often: the “loud crying,” which is to say, the terrified screams, and that slender waist. 6 Lastly (although examples could be multiplied), to mention again the horrors of the famine in Munster, one may suppose that a simile from Book Six, of dogs fighting over “some carcase,” which is meant to enhance the intensity of the fight of the brigands, carries the memory of dogs fighting over ­human carcasses or, worse, of ­humans fighting over ­human carcasses. It is as if the under­lying and suppressed horror of the remem­ bered scene, which is concealed from sight by t­ hose fighting dogs, ­were a malign radiance illuminating the vis­i­ble scene from ­behind. The scene becomes intermittently transparent, so that the a­ ctual memory breaks

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through for a moment, ­because the comparison is, ­after all, to fighting ­humans: Like as a sort of hungry dogs ymet About some carcase by the common way Doe fall together, stryving each to get The greatest portion of the greedie pray; All on confusèd heapes themselves assay, And snatch, and byte, and rend, and tug, and teare; That who them sees would won­der at their fray, And who sees not, would be affrayd to heare. Such was the conflict of t­ hose cruell Brigants ­there. FQ VI.xi.17

' following such sights—­and they w ­ ere not the last, for much hard campaigning followed in the next year and a half—­ Spenser composed the first installment, which is to say, the first three books, of The Faerie Queene, d ­ oing so amid the pressing demands of his rising ­career as an administrator in Ireland. To the sleek fashions of the Continental Re­nais­sance he had preferred the rougher, more homely, deeply rooted En­glish traditions reflected in The Shepheardes Calender and planned for The Faerie Queene, based on the medieval prose epic of the Britons, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. But circum­ stances led to the semirustic British traditions becoming something rather less quaint. He called the first installment of the poem “wilde fruit, which salvage soyl hath bred.” This is from the dedicatory sonnet to the Earl of Ormond and Ossory, the only Irish lord so honored in the first in­ stallment of The Faerie Queene.7 The phrase refers to the land that was now Spenser’s home, although its inhabitants would never agree and would drive him out in the end, beginning a chain of events that prob­ ably led to the poet’s early death: D U R I N G T H E D E ­C A D E

Receive most noble Lord a ­simple taste Of the wilde fruit, which salvage soyl hath bred, Which being through long wars left almost waste, With brutish barbarisme is overspred. FQ dedicatory sonnets 7

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Spenser goes on to say that in all Ireland t­ here is no place for the muses, the graces, and the nymphs, except in the earl’s “brave mansione.” It must be said, however, that the poet who first presented one of his most prom­ inent heroes, Artegal—­the “equal of Arthur”—as a wild man overgrown with moss and bearing on his shield the words Salvagesse sans finesse (“sav­ agery without dexterity or refinement”—­not a bad description of this par­tic­u­lar knight) is instinctively drawn t­ oward what his higher cultural aspirations reject, as a real source of poetic power. Ireland, with its sav­ agery (no small part of it on the En­glish side and approved of by the au­ thor of The Faerie Queene), was the making of Spenser as a poet in a way that the somewhat arid theorizing and neoclassicism coming from his beloved Italy and France never could do, if he was to take the next, ­giant step beyond the achievement of The Shepheardes Calender. 8 Ireland called forth the finest and most sustained arc of poetic inspiration in The Faerie Queene: the Mutabilitie Cantos.

' W H AT M O D E R N I D E A S did Spenser bring to The Faerie Queene—­however

modified by circumstances and his own eccentricity? It was in the Re­nais­ sance that the term modern began to be used to speak of the pre­sent age as a self-­contained temporal span definitively separated from the past. For Petrarch, the pre­sent age of revived humanism and the rediscovery of classical texts was a return, a­ fter the darkness had been dispelled, to the light of antiquity.9 It was a new concept of history as divided into periods, instead of being merely accumulative and linear. L­ ater, in fourteenth-­ century Florence, the influential humanist historian Leonardo Bruni wrote of the ­M iddle Ages as an intermediate time (media tempestas) be­ tween the pre­sent age and classical antiquity.10 Re­nais­sance modernity therefore had a double aspect, which we may name ­after its two leading spirits, Petrarch and Bacon. On the one hand, from the Petrarchan perspective, Re­nais­sance modernity looked to clas­ sical antiquity retrospectively and nostalgically. His positive view of the ­future was that it would accomplish the better recovering of the past, by dispelling the darkness of our ignorance of and indifference to the past. On the other hand, from the Baconian perspective, Re­nais­sance moder­ nity looked to the ­future, to the exciting prospect of a new world and a

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new science, symbolized as a resurrected Atlantis, which would emerge from the enterprise of the empirical research and experiment. Another, portentous but less successful manifestation of ­future expectancy came from the Protestant Reformation, which of course looked back to the sup­ posed purity of the Early Christian Church and forward to the shortly expected return of Jesus Christ. Its main thrust went beyond religious renewal to moral and po­liti­cal transformation. “Hallowed antiquity,” sacrosancta vetustas, in Petrarch’s phrase, drew wondering attention for its architecture, philosophy, poetry, and sculpture—­not to mention its government, its administration, and its law.11 But early modern thinkers regarded themselves as the students of classical antiquity, not as its mere imitators. On a subject that may look narrowly specialized ­today but had wider, symbolic authority then, the poet Samuel Daniel, in his “Defense of Rhyme,” opposed the very enterprise that Spenser in his ­earlier years, following Sir Philip Sidney’s example, supported and experimentally practiced and slyly intruded into The Shepheardes Calender: the imposition of classical, quantitative meter on En­glish poetry. If the classical forms—­ tragedy, comedy, and epic, followed by satire, verse-­epistle, elegy, and epyllion—­could be revived in the modern languages, why not the ­actual structure of classical verses as well? Like Cinthio in Italy, Daniel has a lively comparative sense of the differences of times, cultures, and lan­ guages; and he understands the importance of long-­established tradi­ tions. With an insight that is exceptional for that age, he grasps the for­ eignness of quantitative mea­sure not only to the spirit and traditions of poetry in ­England but also to the En­glish language itself. To attempt an imposition by force is to make our verse “captive to the authority of an­ tiquity.” In a striking phrase he adds, “we are the ­children of nature as well as they.”12 The point of being a student is to learn as much as you can of what is already known and then to go beyond what you have learned. Spenser’s younger con­temporary Ben Jonson, whose classical learning was deep, was following Eu­ro­pean humanists in saying that the ancients “opened the gates and made the way that went before us, but as guides, not commanders.” We should exercise the same “­free power” that they did.13 Thoughtful ­people, aware of the gross superstitions, absurdities, and brutalities of the classical world as well as of its cultural glories, intended to make a better one, based on the emerging idea of the state and of the

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ideal state, drawn out from the depths of po­liti­cal philosophy in the second book of Thomas More’s Utopia.14 Spenser bows to the ancients on many occasions. He composes a dynastic epic on the model of Virgil; he continually imitates episodes from Homer; he deploys much of the fur­ niture of ancient epic, notably in his invocations and in his use of the epic simile; he claims his design follows schematically the moral virtues of Ar­ istotle “and the rest.” He goes so far as to imagine that his fairy knights, and Prince Arthur himself, notwithstanding their medieval appurte­ nances, belong to a hallowed antiquity as remote from his own degen­ erate time as the heroes of the Iliad are superior, so Homer says, to men of this day. From the rhetorical and decorative point of view, the nostalgia is extreme. But in The Faerie Queene’s ambition to teach and inculcate virtue and to unite Britain around the central figure of the queen, it is intended to contribute to the utopian proj­ect of modernity. It may now be observed that the debates and discussions, the polemics and the magisterial treatises of Italian critical theory of the sixteenth ­century ­were unconscious discussions of politics and exercises in po­ liti­cal theory. ­T hose who supported strict adherence to the “rules” of Aristotle (“instructions” and “advice” would be better words for the phi­ los­o­pher’s intentions in the Poetics, recognizing the ­great variety of Greek tragedies) are imagining a creative literary work as a geometric polity. They reflect the temperament of the overarching idea of the Re­nais­sance, which is the ideal city, such as was frequently designed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in the instances of the Gonzaga town of Sab­ bionetta, near Mantua, and of Pienza, near Siena, actually built, the latter by the g­ reat humanist pope Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II). Treatises ­were written on architecture and the ideal city by Alberti and Filarete, and the idea is shadowed in any Re­nais­sance art that shows architecture, notably Raphael’s School of Athens. The most famous image of such a city is a panel in the Ducal Palace of Urbino, attributed (prob­ably incorrectly, but one can see why the attribution is made) to the geometer-­painter Piero della Francesca. It has been attributed also to Luciano Laurana, the archi­ tect of the Ducal Palace in Urbino, itself an image of the ideal state. All lines are straight or are regular curves, sight lines are clear, and every­thing is open to view. Only the attractiveness of the design can conceal from us, for a moment, the similarity to the famous prison design of Jeremy

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Bentham called a panopticon, famously discussed as a model for the disci­ plinary society in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.15 The harsher, more pedantic and inflexible of the Italian literary critics saw their role with re­spect to literary art as the administering of discipline and punish­ ment on geometrical princi­ples. The defenders of romance, such as Cin­ thio and Pigna, advanced their arguments in terms of accommodating structure to the demands, tastes, and accidents of ­human nature and ­human interaction. The supporters of romance w ­ ere the party of move­ ment, anticipating romanticism; of Aristotle’s rules, the party of order, of standards, anticipating classicism. And h ­ ere it may be mentioned, lest it be thought t­ hese questions have l­ ittle bearing on Spenser’s being in Ire­ land, that a good deal of his reading in Italian critical theory, as he con­ templated his own epic, must have been done ­there. It was also ­there that he would prob­ably have gained his first substantive experience of Tor­ quato Tasso, since the Aminta and Gerusalemme liberata ­were published in the same year, 1581. It is impossible he could have read this debate as a purely aesthetic or abstractly theoretical one. It was for him a veiled dis­ cussion of politics, of how to pacify a country and make it fruitful, the two stages seemingly in contradiction to each other: cutting off and nur­ turing. But gardeners know better. And in the Re­nais­sance gardening was as impor­tant as the other arts. The spirit of the strict Aristotelian theo­ rists, who would become the partisans of Tasso—­himself a partisan of the strictures of the Counter-­Reformation—is reflected in the command-­ and-­control model for pacifying Ireland exposed in Spenser’s View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland. Another view, not unrelated to this one but less optimistic, ­because more accommodating to nature and natu­ral growth, is The Faerie Queene itself.16 This debate became the ground on which was fought the first of the ­battles between adherents of the ancients and the moderns in France and ­England at the turn of the eigh­teenth ­century, famously rendered in the allegory of Jonathan Swift’s ­Battle of the Books, published with The Tale of a Tub in 1704. The books in the royal library in Saint James Palace come down off the shelves and fight an epic ­battle in mock-­Homeric style, with monomachias and suitable harangues. Inside the tale is the fable of the spider and the bee, the former representing the moderns, the latter the ancients. The spider’s web is significantly located inside the library, in a

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corner above the bookshelves. The bee flies in the win­dow from outside and inadvertently damages the spider’s web, which incites the altercation between them. The bee has the better of the debate. Whereas the spider digests ­great quantities of flies—­the books of other authors—­and from them produces dirt and poison, the bee goes directly to nature and from its flowers produces honey and wax, which is to say, “sweetness and light,” the sweetness of beauty and the light of philosophical wisdom.17 In the debate over ­whether the “rules” of Aristotle’s Poetics must be taken as absolute or newer forms and practices allowed, in par­tic­u­lar, ro­ mances, it is the partisans of antiquity who come off looking like the spider, chewing up Aristotle and weaving from his substance fantastic webs of geometrical speculation and then giving laws, some of which we have already observed: the modern epic poem must be a single, unified action (Aristotle’s allowance for complex plots—­“among plots ­there are both the s­ imple and the complex”18 —­such as the Odyssey is grudgingly allowed, only if ­there is clear and always perceptible unity beneath the multiplicity); it can heighten but not alter real­ity, imitating only events that could conceivably happen in nature (no magic rings, enchanted pal­ aces, horrible sea monsters, or winged griffons allowed); and its single ac­ tion must be founded on some real event in history that is more or less known to all readers. If it is simply not pos­si­ble for ­people to enjoy poetic creations that are too strictly ancient, is it inevitable that super­natural won­ders, or “mar­ vels,” and wildly proliferating stories must be given their head? Or might a compromise in practice, like Fornari’s compromise in theory, be pos­ si­ble, such that the narrative material of romance is severely reined in and managed, like a ­horse in dressage? What cascading questions, what sub­ tleties of distinction and combination, what refinements of judgment, follow from t­ hese forking paths? An answer to all questions at once was attempted in the second ­great epic poem of the Italian Re­nais­sance, which, as is the way with h ­ uman nature, would solve nothing it intended to solve and bring not peace but a sword, further embittering the debate. This was the Gerusalemme liberata of Torquato Tasso, which appeared in 1581, although its preparation was long coming and, as it grew, much discussed. A complete manuscript existed by 1574 and was exposed by the poet to an array of socially

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prominent pedants, exciting the long correspondence known as the “Po­ etic Letters,” in two of which Tasso admits that when he began his poem he had no idea of making an allegory but that as he progressed he saw allegory as a way of keeping himself out of trou­ble with the authori­ ties—­a tactic Spenser employed very ineptly—­and also of solving his theoretical difficulties. But, he adds, as he went on developing this pru­ dential smoke screen, he found every­thing fitted so well to his scheme that he must have had it in mind from the start.19 The poem was pub­ lished, or rather pirated, while the poet was in the mad­house of Santa Anna, in Ferrara, and while it might never have seen the light of day without such an intervention, Tasso received none of the proceeds.20 Tasso’s epic was, ­needless to say, very impor­tant to Spenser—he even translates a song, in Book Two—­and so too was the discussion that sur­ rounded it in relation to the Orlando furioso and allegory. To make ­matters more complicated in the debate that the appearance of the Gerusalemme reignited, a principal neoclassical discussant was none other than Tasso himself, in the “Poetic Letters,” which he wrote to expert correspondents as he was composing the poem. In them he wavers not only, as we have seen, on the question w ­ hether the poem is or is not allegorical but also on the question ­whether being allegorical can in some way be made to accord with Aristotle’s rules. The somewhat desperate solution offered up as long ago as 1550, by Simone Fornari, in his commentary on Orlando furioso, would be ­adopted by Tasso: to wit, that magical episodes ­going beyond probability or likelihood must contribute to the unity of the ac­ tion, as allegorical commentary on it. Likewise, variety of episodes t­ here may be, but t­ hese contribute, e­ ither by their action or by their meaning, to the single and unified action. For Fornari that unified action was the attack of the Pagan King Agramante on Christendom u ­ nder Charlemagne. For Tasso, it would be the conquest of Jerusalem u ­ nder the Christian knight and ­future king of Jerusalem, Godfredo. Tasso’s Discorsi or “discourses” on the poetic art, Discorsi dell’ arte poetica (1561–62)—­revised in the conservative direction, as discourses on the heroic poem, Discorsi del poema eroico (1594)—­was composed when the poet was working on the Gerusalemme liberata and studying for the first time Aristotle’s Poetics, from which he believed he saw the possi­ bility of a science of literary production. Tasso takes the view that the

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epic poem should be based on a historical action—­history being mere ­matter ready for the imprint of poetic form—­that this action should be manifestly single and unified, and that super­natural marvels should be excluded b ­ ecause they are not “probable,” in Aristotle’s somewhat technical sense of the word eoikos, “likely,” which is to say, elevated beyond the normal but not in contradiction with the laws of nature or with what a heroic personage might or might not do in a given situa­ tion. Tasso admits that some marvels may be necessary all the same, as a concession to ­these degenerate times, and likewise that romantic plot complications—­although they are undesirable on princi­ple, ­because they distract from the main action and incite lust—­may be inevitable ­because ­people like them. You cannot drag the public into good taste. This is very dif­fer­ent from Spenser, for whom love is a positive and indeed a heroic force, and dif­fer­ent as well from Boiardo and Tasso. But it is not so dif­fer­ent from Spenser’s plan for civilizing Ireland, ­because of its fertile soil and im­mense possibilities, conceived in very abstract terms. In such passages Tasso is looking over his shoulder at the deserved popularity of Ariosto’s poem, replete with both ­these proscribed ­things, variety and marvels; but he is also looking at the dismal midcentury failure of Gian Giorgio Trissino’s regular and superclassical epic poem L’Italia liberata dai Goti. One of Tasso’s more frequent observations is that it is not pos­si­ble in ­these times to compose an entirely regular, Aristote­ lian epic. Holding such views he hardly deserved to be what in fact he was: a very ­great poet, in despite of the theories with which he tor­ mented himself—­not to mention the poem, when he revised it as Jerusalem Conquered.

' not see the Discorsi dell’ arte poetica, he certainly shared the view that an epic poem should be based on history, in his case the his­ tory of the Trojan settlement of Britain and the line of Briton kings coming down to Queen Elizabeth. The formulaic “prose allegory,” as it is called, or “Allegoria del poema,” which Tasso appended (if he had any control over the publication of his poem at this time) to the first, 1581 edi­ tion is clearly an inspiration for Spenser’s livelier Letter to Raleigh. And IF SPENSER DID

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then again, t­ here is Tasso’s contribution to the debate in the a­ ctual poem he wrote—­twice, as it happened, although only the first version ­matters for our purposes. As was noted in chapter one, the Gerusalemme liberata is on the conquest of Jerusalem in the first crusade, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, that crusade being one of history’s more con­spic­u­ous and protracted crimes against humanity, something Tasso knew from his sources but d ­ idn’t care about. In the “Allegoria del poema” Tasso ostentatiously asserts the unity of the poem’s action as the Christian army’s agonizing and distracted but fi­nally victorious conquest of the city. All subordinate, romantic actions suggesting varietà, ­these being initiated by the magician Ismeno and es­ pecially the enchantress Armida, are to be understood (a) as moral de­ viations from the unified action that w ­ ill be corrected in the end and (b) as moral allegories commenting on the action, which has a total alle­ gorical meaning: the attainment of Jerusalem, which is (cioè) “civil fe­ licity” (la felicità civile). Blackening the characters of Ismeno and Armida even further, Spenser would bring them back in The Faerie Queene, as noted, in the characters Archimago and Acrasia. Spenser’s allegory darkens Tasso’s coloring—no one in Tasso’s epic is as purely and entertainingly pernicious as Archimago and Acrasia or the many other horrific villains and monsters Spenser invents. But on the other side Tasso’s gravitas is countered in Spenser by an admixture of the noble lightness and moral simplicity of Ariosto, notably in that po­ et’s wonderful Bradamante, who becomes Spenser’s Britomart. Both ­these very dif­fer­ent and very ­great Italian epics would strongly influence Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Yet in the end it is Ariosto’s variety, his super­natural marvels and monsters (his controversial “marvels,” or maraviglie), his brio at varying the narrative along several lines in a pattern of differences (d’errar sempre), his interest in individual persons and momen­ tary events to which Spenser remains loyal in The Faerie Queene.21 He does so despite his periodically expressed ambition to elevate his song, as Tasso had done, to the dignity of epic. The Faerie Queene is a poem of individual knightly adventures, like much of the Orlando furioso, though not all of it. But Spenser longs to emerge at last from the tangled undergrowth of his romance narrative and sing, like Tasso, of massed armies and bloody war between pagans and Celtic-­Christian Britons led by the Fairy Queen and

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Arthur. We never see the Pagan King, and except by report, we never en­ counter the Fairy Queen. Spenser has this prospect in mind when the Redcross knight, patron of holiness, whose ­human name ­will be Saint George, is about to fight the dragon. For this the culminating strug­gle of Book One, the poet invokes Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. We have been waiting for this ­battle through the first ten cantos of the first book of The Faerie Queene, passing through episodes that have the familiar involutions and sudden changes of scene characteristic of Italian romance, some of them ostensively ap­ propriated from Ariosto. Perhaps now the time has come to raise the tone to epic. Yet the epic ­battles in Ariosto—in the scenes around Paris, be­ sieged by the armies of the Pagan King Agramante—­themselves devolve again into romance, as if they belonged to the general weather of that mode of writing, although, to be sure, to its stormier episodes. As if sensing this inescapability of romance (as Patricia Parker calls it, with a bow to Wallace Stevens), 22 no sooner does Spenser invoke Calliope than he asks her to defer the high tones of epic and adopt her second register, or tenor. The neighing steed and shrill trump can wait: Faire Goddesse lay that furious fit aside, Till I of warres and bloudy Mars do sing, And Briton fields with Sarazin bloud bedyde Twixt that ­great faery Queene and Paynim king That with their horrour heaven and earth did ring, A worke of ­labour long, and endlesse prayse: But now a while let downe that haughtie string, And to my tunes thy second tenor rayse, That I this man of God his godly armes may blaze. FQ I.xi.7

Spenserian allegorical romance seems always to be in a dream state and intermediate region of unlikeness between the timeless world of pastoral shepherds and the historical world of the epic. Both of ­these worlds have their moral certainties firmly in place. It is the region in between them, where nothing is certain, that is open to thought—­the world of moral re­ flection, as inescapable as the romance form from which it never breaks ­free, never opening on the field of ­battle where massed armies meet. We

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­ on’t especially want it to, if we are seriously engaged in the proj­ect of d reflection that is The Faerie Queene. But Spenser seems to have wanted it to, and his continual longing for that higher tone contributes to the as­ piring energy, and even to the force and power of thought, in this long and splendid poem.

' to press on with The Faerie Queene, he seems to have been freed from the anx­i­eties ­under which Tasso labored and ag­ onized. At the same time Spenser appears to have seen that history as it is left to us now—as archaeological deposits at dif­fer­ent strata in the depths of the past—is not mere and indifferent ­matter, like cement, to be s­ haped as one pleases and in accordance with higher-­order rules. He opened himself to the rich world being explored by the antiquaries of his day, the true, document-­based historical researchers into E ­ ngland’s past, notably John Stow and William Camden, whose Britannia was pub­ lished in 1577. Spenser began to delve into the copious and tangled storytelling, the rich mixture of legend and shadowy fact, from the insular past of the British archipelago. That past held the won­der tales of the Celtic narra­ tive traditions, which a­ fter the Saxon invasions of the fifth ­century (in the wake of the Roman withdrawal in 410) had been largely reduced to the cultural substratum and also, more importantly, displaced from the cen­ tral territory of E ­ ngland to the geographic periphery, or the “Celtic fringe,” as it used to be called: Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and the peninsula of Brittany extending t­ oward ­England from the Eu­ro­pean mainland, containing the magical forest of Brocéliande, which is, as Victor Hugo said, reserved to the fairies.23 Even t­ oday, Brit­ tany is regarded locally as the true site of Fairy Land. Brittany was not in­ corporated into France ­until the sixteenth ­century; it retains a distinct Celtic language, Breton; and its mingling of fairy and Arthurian tales is especially rich. ­T hese prob­ably arrived from Cornwall and mixed with local fairy traditions, inspiring the lais of Marie de France and the Arthu­ rian tales of Chrétien de Troyes. But for Spenser, the most immediately impor­tant of ­these regions, de­ spite their crisscrossed oral and literary history, was Ireland, to which he W H E N S P E N S E R D E ­C I D E D

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was headed in the summer of 1580 and in which he would spend the last two de­cades of his life, with only brief visits to ­England.

' of Brittonic origin—­that is, from the culture of the British Celtic languages—­underlay the strata of Anglo-­Saxon and, ­later, Norman lit­er­a­ture and occasionally poked through, as often hap­ pens in The Faerie Queene, despite the conservatism with which Spenser treats the super­natural, preferring to characterize himself in more ra­ tional terms as a dynastic poet in the classical (and Italian) tradition. Even so, his poem is titled The Faerie Queene and is set in Fairy Land, which increasingly looks like Ireland as he saw it through En­glish, colonial eyes: as savage but fertile soil from which a civilization could be made to grow—­given sufficient weeding out of autochthonous rebel energies by knightly patrons of the moral and po­liti­cal virtues, for which Artegal–­ Lord Grey, with Talus as the En­glish army at his command, becomes the type of all the rest, equaling Arthur himself. I trust this point can be made sufficiently clear if I am blunt. Although it ­w ill never be every­one’s favorite book—­the best candidate for that is Book Three—­Book Five is the brutal, beating heart of the poem Spenser wanted to write. In it, Fairy Land, thinking, and vio­lence are one and the same. But for the poet to arrive t­ here it was necessary to work through a long series of ideas about fairy, which curiously resolve into the real world. The very first of Spenser’s fairy knights turns out to be h ­ uman, a changeling, whom the fairies took from a furrow in a ploughed field. Redcross him­ self thinks he’s a fairy u ­ ntil just before his culminating fight with the dragon. Despaire and Orgoglio in Book One, despite their nonfairy names, resemble figures from Celtic fairy tales, as does Mammon in Book Two, Merlin and Busyrane in Book Three (despite his name), the three ­brothers of Book Four, and the g­ iant of Book Five, with Talus corre­ sponding to Corineus, a­ fter whom Cornwall was named, and the ­giant corresponding to Gogmagog, whom Corineus threw over the cliff at Land’s End. ­There is the circle of dancing “maidens,” that is fairies, in Book Six, and the quasi-­personified hill, Old ­Father Mole, in Book Seven. If we look through the Graeco-­Roman, Olympian surface of Jove himself in FA I RY WO N ­D E R TA L E S

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Book Seven, it is not hard to catch his resemblance to the fairy king Oberon sooner than to the majestic Roman Jove, the f­ ather of fate, or the Homeric Zeus, high thundering and deep counseled. ­T hese gods would hardly have consented to submit their ­w ill to the judgment of a higher authority—­for ­there is none—­still less to a female goddess of Nature. Seated on the peak of Olympus, which touches the empyrean, the clas­ sical Jove is above nature. Not so the king of the fairies. Above all Spenser’s qualified allegiance to Celtic and Breton myth is declared in his hero, Prince Arthur, “before that he came to be king,” as the poet says in his Letter to Raleigh. The British legends show an Arthur who is emerging from the Celtic won­der tales to a position in history, as we see in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, when the pro­cess of emer­ gence into history is nearly complete but fairy ele­ments survive, not least ­after Arthur’s death. Spenser’s sending Arthur into Fairy Land for training, before the events in Malory unfold, threatens to reimmerse Arthur in this sea of originative tales. In spite of every­thing, Spenser is at once cautious of fairy lore, which he actively tries to suppress, and irresistibly drawn to it. He is drawn to it ­because he senses the bloodlessness of being a thoroughgoing dynastic “poet historical,” even as he aspires to its gran­ deur. Fairy provided him with a region of allegorical potential, of dynamis, allowing readers to engage with his text more energetically and interactively. On the other side, a purely historical trajectory, one telling of Eliza­ beth’s descent from Cadwallader, the last of the Briton kings, himself a lineal descendant of Arthur, would have given the reader too ­little to do. Dreams and fairy tales—­paradoxically enough—­open the door to intel­ lectual seriousness, if the ­handle on that door is named allegory. Chaucer’s tale of Sir Thopas is one very modest example of this opening, impor­tant as it appears to have been for Spenser ­because Sir Thopas dreams of the fairy queen and rides off in search of her, as does Spenser’s hero, Prince Arthur.24 Something of the richness of this under­lying and largely repressed tra­ dition of stories involving uncanny appearance may be gathered from works Spenser is unlikely to have known directly, although he knew many like them that are hard to isolate now: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the marvelous Breton lays, some of them derived from the lais of Marie de

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France, and Gawain Douglas’s Palace of Honour. The fairies appear suddenly and are frightening; they are even, in the case of Sir Gawain, terrifying. In John Gower’s sober and vast collection of tales, The Confessio Amantis, the face that Narcissus sees in the pool is described as faie, that is, fairy-­like; faie too is Jason’s resolution to undertake the adventure of the Golden Fleece, for no ordinary ­human would do so; and the super­natural beauty of a troop of ladies that suddenly appears also is called faie.25 The mirac­ ulous appearance of a strange troop of mounted, beautiful ­women or of a dancing fairy circle or of a grim ­giant or of a swarthy and nasty cave imp, sunning fairy gold, such as Spenser gives the name Mammon to, is a common-­enough event in tales of fairy. It is only Spenser’s allegorical plan of using Mammon to represent the conjunction of money, bourgeois administration, and power in modern society that obscures Mammon’s altogether traditional appearance as fairy troll: At last he came unto a gloomy glade Cover’d with boughs and shrubs from heavens light, Whereas he sitting found in secret shade An uncouth, salvage, and uncivile wight Of griesly hew, and fowle ill favour’d sight; His face with smoke was tand, and eyes ­were bleard, His head and beard with sout w ­ ere ill bedight, His cole-­black hands did seem to have been seard In smithes fire-­spitting forge, and nayles like clawes appeard. His yron coate all overgrowne with rust, Was under­neath envelopèd with gold, Whose glistring glosse darkned with filthy dust, Well yet appeared, to have beene of old A worke of rich entayle, and curious mould, Woven with antickes and wild Imagery: And in his lap a masse of coyne he told, And turnèd upsidowne, to feede his eye And covetous desire with his huge threasury. FQ II.vii.3–4

He is secret, “salvage,” grisly, his face burned and his beard sooty from his l­ abor at the forge as he coins the means to enchant h ­ umans with the fetishism of the commodity. He is caught in his own magic, concealing

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and caressing his gold, and he wears ancient fairy armor of the highest quality, that is, better than h ­ umans can fashion, richly decorated with magic characters and “wild imagery,” although ­these are now obscured, degraded, and rusty, like his mind. As h ­ ere, the uncanny appearance occurs often at the beginning of a tale, when the mortal narrator or hero (although Guyon is himself a fairy) first catches sight of this fleeting and secretive p ­ eople, larger, stronger, and more beautiful than h ­ umans, or e­ lse, as ­here, more hideously ugly than the ugliest of ­humans, but very often, too, smaller (they are still referred to with careful circumspection as “the ­little ­people”) but possessed of weird powers. Consider Florimell, bursting into sight and in motion, her yellow locks flying like a comet, “At sight whereof the p ­ eople stand aghast,” her face “as cleare as Christall stone,” her white palfrey glittering with “tinsell trappings” and her own garments, which surely only a fairy could stand wearing, “wrought of beaten gold” (FQ III.i.15). Spenser passed most of his adult life in Ireland and the best years of it outside the Pale, at New Abbey and then at Kilcolman; and his work re­ quired him to travel widely, often in regions—at that time, most of the country outside the Pale—­where the ­people spoke Gaelic Irish and where Gaelic poetry (to Spenser, one of the ­causes of sedition) was a living and vigorous concern, deeply aware of its past while continually renewing itself.26 Even ­today, although mostly in the west of Ireland, books of po­ etry in the Irish language are plentiful, and Irish poets such as Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill are honored public figures. But my point is the near coinci­ dence of Ireland and Fairy Land in Spenser’s imagination, a magical con­ junction the spell of which ­isn’t broken ­until the Mutabilitie Cantos, when Ireland is Ireland, though it retains the ancient echo of Fairy Land sounding faintly from the top of Arlo Hill. Nor is the belief in fairies and leprechauns—­belief is not the right word, and perhaps psychological engagement is closer to the truth—­extinguished, as a Gaelic-­speaking student of mine attested (on her year abroad she worked as a barmaid in Conne­ mara), and as I experienced myself, in a whiskey pub that opens for twenty minutes a­ fter Christmas midnight mass (at which the words of Christ ­were spoken in Gaelic), the local authorities (a single policeman) having tacitly agreed to walk the other way. Among the men who slipped in for a tot before rejoining their families I overheard discussion in concerned,

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lowered tones of a leprechaun sighted at night beside a turf bog in the area. The tales awaken a half-­pleasurable sense of the uncanny and fearsome but ­will not do so without a modicum of suspicion that they are true. How much more often must such whispers have reached Spenser’s ears four centuries ago!

' of such an uncanny scene is the first action in the chronology of The Faerie Queene. Prince Arthur describes how he was slumbering outdoors at night a­ fter a day of exercise, his head resting on his helmet for a pillow, when a royal maid of supernal beauty lay down at his side, charming him—­putting a spell on him—­w ith her words of love. Arthur’s is a more active, heroic enchantment than that of Keats’s knight, the victim of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” based on the poem by Alain Chartier (d. 1430), as translated by Sir Richard Ros and printed in William Thynne’s (1532) and John Stow’s editions of Chaucer.27 Seduced by the Belle Dame sans Merci, the knight-­at-­arms is doomed to wander sleeplessly by a forlorn lake, the shores of which are haunted by her pre­ vious victims: A N AT T E N UAT E D V E R S I O N

O, what can ail thee, knight-­at-­arms, Alone palely loitering? The sedge has wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.28

In her fairy cave he ­w ill shut her “wild wild eyes” with kisses four (lines 29–32), but it is she who ­will lull him to sleep, in which sleep he ­will dream his last dream—­“ The latest dream I ever dream’d” (line 35)—­because he ­won’t sleep again. The dream is not an illusory but a true one, a dream-­ vision of kings, princes, and warriors, all pale as death, who cry to him in warning: “La Belle Dame sans Merci / Hath thee in thrall!” (lines 39–40). He sees, as in a horrible close-up, “gaping wide,” the starved lips that pre­ sumably kissed the fairy before and still hunger for her kisses, even as they cry out their warning: “And I awoke and found me ­here, / On the cold hill’s side” (lines 43–44). The knight appears not yet to know or to have accepted that he is a ghost like t­ hose o ­ thers he saw in his dream. Nor does he appear to know or to have accepted that he ­w ill never leave the shore of this wintery lake. He still supposes he sojourns, not stays:

In Ireland  113 And this is why I sojourn h ­ ere Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge has wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing. (lines 45–48)

This pale loitering could hardly be more dif­fer­ent from Arthur’s vig­ orous waking activity, something we ­w ill be reminded of when Arthur, in Book Three, having failed in his pursuit of Florimell, delivers his star­ tlingly violent condemnation of “Night”—he calls her “foule ­Mother of annoyance sad” (FQ III.iv.55)—­and his joyous cele­bration of day: “For day discovers all dishonest wayes, / And sheweth each t­ hing, as it is indeed,” two lines that enact his character perfectly, not so much as a lover but as a seeker a­ fter truth: “Truth,” he says, is d ­ aughter not of time but of light (III.iv.59). Upon waking and finding the queen of fairies gone—­and “nought but pressèd gras” where she lay—­Arthur resolves to seek her out in Fairy Land itself. It is almost as if his primary motivation is to discover the truth of his ravishment, ­whether it was a deluding dream such as one encounters at night or ­whether its promise is true. He has been d ­ oing so for the past nine months: Most goodly glee and lovely blandishment She to me made, and bad me love her deare, For dearly sure her love was to me bent, As when just time expirèd should appeare. But ­whether dreames delude, or true it ­were, Was never hart so ravisht with delight, Ne living man like words did ever heare, As she to me delivered all that night; And at her parting said, she Queene of Faeries hight. When I awoke, and found her place devoyd, And nought but pressèd gras, where she had lyen, I sorrowed all so much, as earst I joyd, And washèd all her place with watry eyen. From that day forth I loved that face divine; From that day forth I cast in carefull mind, To seeke her out with ­labour, and long tyne, And never vow to rest, till her I find: Nine monethes I seeke in vaine yet ni’ll that vow unbind. FQ I.ix.14–15

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Legends of Arthur, mingling over time with the Celtic fairy stories, de­ scended from early allusions to a Romano-­Celtic captain of the wars, or dux bellorum, of the early sixth c­ entury, who in twelve b ­ attles preserved Britain or Logres, though only temporarily, from pagan Saxon invaders. Milton’s first ideas for an epic poem, with the example of Spenser before him, ­were on the subject of King Arthur and included—in asides in two of his more substantial Latin poems—­both the pseudohistorical and the magical events that the tradition wove together: the keels of the Trojan ships in the seas off Britain, led by Brute, the first leader of the Britons and the ancestor of Arthur himself; the magical trick or dolos perpetrated by Merlin, by which Uther Pendragon (dragon head) got access to Igrayne and fathered Arthur on her; the ­great series of twelve ­battles led by Ar­ thur against the Saxons, the culminating one on Mount Badon; the noble fellowship of the round ­table; and the intriguing idea, perhaps drawn from Welsh legend (John Carey mentions the “Spoils of Annwfn,” poem thirty in the Book of Taliesin), of Arthur moving his wars even ­under the earth.29 The plan, if it ever developed much beyond the poet’s mention of it in Mansus and Epitaphium Damonis, was rejected with the coming of the En­glish Revolution, when Milton had other ideas about kings, leg­ endary or real. His growing animus against Arthurian tradition was due not to its fictiveness alone but to the usefulness of such fictions for roy­ alist ideology, since the Stuarts continued the Tudor claim of descent from King Arthur. Milton’s last direct reference to Arthur is in the first book of Paradise Lost, when the army of rebel angels is far more magnificent than “what resounds / In fable or romance of Uther’s son” (1.579–80). Resounds suggests mere rumor and wind, as in the Limbo of Vanities in Paradise Lost—­all that is left of Ariosto’s journey to the Moon. Yet Milton’s skepticism may alert us to something in Spenser’s treat­ ment of the Arthurian story as well. For none of the events to which Milton alludes are mentioned by Spenser, who carefully describes Ar­ thur’s adventures as a prince, not a king, and as taking place in Fairy Land, before he returned to Britain to be crowned, ­after which his leg­ endary story begins. With the exception of his magic shield and sword, both of which are given allegorical significance, Arthur has ­little to do with magic and with the more romantic ele­ments of his legend. Spenser employs the ­free space of Fairy Land to imagine knightly adventures for

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Arthur characterized by exemplary moral goodness and marshal vigor befitting a knight-­errant, a role largely denied to him in the legends. (In Sir Thomas Malory, Arthur is easily un­horsed.) Arthur is also, in Spenser, a remarkably h ­ uman and humane figure. Far more than any other char­ acter in the poem, he sympathizes with o ­ thers. As the legend of Arthur grew, it was transmitted from Nennius to Giraldus Cambrensis and o ­ thers to the famous and fundamental work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1136), a startling mixture of fact, pseudofact, and fiction that would carry im­mense au­ thority for the next three hundred years. “No work of imagination, save the Aeneid, as E. K. Chambers said, “has done more to shape the legend of a ­people than the Historia Regum Britanniae [by] a writer who describes himself . . . ​as Galfridus Monumetensis.”30 This work sets forth a bizarre fictive appendage to the web-­work of Arthurian legend, striving to im­ pose some kind of rational order on it. It is ­here we first encounter the legend, which would be a­ dopted by other nations and come to define in large part Eu­rope’s consciousness of itself, that the Britons w ­ ere descended from the escaped Trojans through Brute—­the eponymous conqueror of Britain—­himself a descendant of Aeneas, the original escapee from the destruction of that g­ reat city of Troy and the legendary founder of Rome. As a result, all the Eu­ro­pean countries ­were ­imagined to have arisen from the ashes of Troy, as we read in the opening stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It is the euhemerist or pseudohistorical version of the story of Zeus’s abduction of the Levantine princess Europa. Defeating ­giants on the white island, Albion, Brute founds the nation of Britain and the city of Troynovaunt, “New Troy,” often referred to by Spenser. He is a distant ancestor of Arthur, and through Arthur of Cad­ wallader, the last of the Briton kings, whose sign was the red dragon, the same banner u ­ nder which, in 1485, Henry Tudor, Elizabeth’s grand­ father, marched from Milford Haven through Wales, making his way, in 1485, to Bosworth Field and the founding of the Tudor dynasty. In Book Two of The Faerie Queene, in the tower of the House of Alma, in the library room of Eumnestes, Prince Arthur reads the book entitled Briton moniments, extending through fully sixty-­six stanzas—its sequence of kings, and many of its episodes, taken directly from Geoffrey of Mon­ mouth. Spenser frames it to heighten its importance. The conclusion is

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dramatic. Prince Arthur is reading of the final king, Uther Pendragon, his own, but unknown, ­father, when the chronicle breaks off: ­After him Uther, which Pendragon hight, Succeeding ­there abruptly it did end, Without full point or other cesure right, As if the rest some wicked hand did rend, Or th’author selfe could not at least attend To finish it. FQ II.x.68

Prince Arthur, silently filled with the “won­der of antiquitie,” at last breaks out in a paean to his nation: At last quite ravisht with delight, to heare The royall offspring of his native land, Cryde out, Deare countrey, O how dearly deare ­Ought thy remembrance and perpetuall band Be to thy foster Childe, that from thy hand Did commune breath and nouriture receive? How brutish is it not to understand, How much to her we owe, that all us gave, That gave unto us all, what ever good we have. FQ II.x.69

From what has been said ­earlier about Spenser’s desire, expressed in The Faerie Queene’s opening stanza, to sing above romance, and blow the trumpet of war, it is noteworthy that the narrative of British history, ­here deep in Book Two, is preceded by the longest and grandest of the invoca­ tions in The Faerie Queene, extending through four stanzas and evoking Homer (the son of Maion: hence Moeonian quill) and the god Apollo, as chief of all nine muses, his “learnèd d ­ aughters.” Apollo himself is the au­ thor, in Spenser’s account of the original epic poem, on the ­battle of the gods and the g­ iants on the burning field of Phlegra (FQ II.x.1–4). Since neither Homer nor Hesiod recounts this ­great war (though they mention ­giants) and it is only alluded to ­later (in Pindar, in the first and seventh Nemean odes, and, in Euripides’s Ion, a thirteen-­line description of a repre­ sen­ta­tion of the war on the ­temple of Apollo at Delphi), it was natu­ral enough to imagine that, rather than being late, the story was one of

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immemorial antiquity, sung not by any bard but by the god of epic po­ etry himself.31 In the first stanza Spenser speaks of his “lowly verse” that must now “loftily arise” with “More ample spirit, then hitherto was wount” b ­ ecause he must now recount the “famous auncestries” of his “most dreaded Soveraigne,” who “farre surmount[s]” “all earthly Princes.” Saving the major invocation for ­later in his poem—­not at the beginning—is some­ thing Spenser learned from his reading in the Iliad, and in other re­spects too ­these ­great four stanzas resemble the tremendous invocation in Iliad, Book Two, before the cata­logue of the ships (2.485–93, 494–759), an as­ tounding tour de force by which the poet authenticates the real­ity and truth of his poem. Surely a similar intention was in Spenser’s mind. Hom­ er’s cata­logue of Achaean ships is followed by a shorter cata­logue of the Trojans and their allies (Iliad, 2.816–877), which Spenser may be paral­ leling in his much-­shorter Antiquitee of Faerie lond, or “Elfin Chronicle” (FQ II.x.70–76). Queen Elizabeth’s lineage is derived “from earth,” he says in stanza two, but stretches up to Heaven and overspreads the world with won­der—­language, especially in the first phrase, that recalls Homer, as does more obviously Spenser’s imitation of Homer’s statement that he could not name all together (linking them in due order, with their numbers of men and places of origin) all the ships that went to Troy without the help of the muses, even if he had a heart of bronze and a tongue of brass:32 A ­labour huge, exceeding farre my might: How ­shall fraile pen, with feare disparagèd, Conceive such soveraine glory, and g­ reat bountihed? FQ II.x.2

Then follows the third stanza, which “overgoes” Homer and pretends, if not to equal, then to imitate the song of Apollo himself on the ­battle with the ­giants, which all the gods heard with delight, if only Apollo’s ­daughters, the muses, can “report” or other­w ise transmit to him some “relish” or Stimmung, some sublime tone, of that greatest heroic poem of all: Argument worthy of Moeonian quill, Or rather worthy of g­ reat Phoebus rote, Whereon the ruines of ­great Ossa hill,

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And triumphs of Phlegraean Jove he wrote, That all the Gods admird his loftie note. But if some relish of that heavenly lay His learnèd ­daughters would to me report, To decke my song withall, I would assay, Thy name, O soveraine Queene, to blazon farre away. FQ II.x.3

The fourth and last stanza, before the narrative begins, in which Spenser tells Elizabeth that she derives her name, her power, and her race from King Arthur, is surely one of the very finest in The Faerie Queene. It is so at least to ­those whose ears are open to the heroic pretentions of the poem, to that much-­desired, warlike tone Spenser longed to rise to and remain in but never could quite do so, b ­ ecause other poetic energies, as we have been observing, drew him away. Even so, ­there is no finer tribute to Queen Elizabeth in The Faerie Queene: Thy name O soveraine Queene, thy realme and race, From this renowmèd Prince derivèd arre, Who mightily upheld that royall mace Which now thou bears’t, to thee descended farre From mightie kings and conquerours in warre, Thy ­fathers and ­great Grandfathers of old, Whose noble deedes above the Northern starre Immortall fame for ever hath enrold; As in that old mans [Eumnestes’s] book they w ­ ere in order told. FQ II.x.4

To return to the legendary sources descending from Geoffrey of Mon­ mouth from which Spenser was drawing, Arthur was king once and ­w ill come again to rule, according to one of the many celebrated prophecies of Merlin (an entire chapter of ­these most unintelligible prophecies fills Geoffrey’s account). It is repeated in Sir Thomas Malory’s account of the inscription on Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury Abbey: Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.33 In other traditions his body, having been borne away in the custody of three w ­ omen, sleeps ­under a hill in the keeping of the fairies, awaiting the time of his return.

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The story has immediate po­liti­cal importance to the queen to whom Spenser would dedicate his epic poem. Arthur may not return from Fairy Land, except in the form prophesied (in Spenser) of his descendant, Eliz­ abeth. The queen is Arthur redivivus, “come back to life”: Renowmèd kings, and sacred Emperours, Thy fruitfull Offspring, ­shall from thee descend; Brave Captaines, and most mighty warriours, That ­shall their conquests through all lands extend, And their decayèd kingdomes ­shall amend: The feeble Britons, broken with long warre, They ­shall upreare, and mightily defend Against their forrein foe, that comes from farre, Till universal peace compound all civill jarre. FQ III.iii.23

This is from another chronicle and prophecy, that given by Merlin in his cave to the confused and love-­struck Britomart, who learns her purpose ­here, in a history that she discovers to be hurtling ­toward her and past her to her descendants. It culminates in Queen Elizabeth, whose power ­w ill be felt in Belgium, where the threat of invasion gathered in 1588 and is gathering now. It w ­ ill also be felt in Castile, that is, in the royal heart of Spain, which is ­behind all efforts to unseat her from her throne: Thenceforth eternall ­union ­shall be made Between the nations dif­fer­ent afore, And sacred Peace ­shall lovingly perswade The warlike minds, to learne her goodly lore, And civile armes to exercise no more: Then ­shall a royall Virgin raine, which s­ hall Stretch her white rod over the Belgicke shore, And the ­great ­Castle smite so sore with all, That it s­ hall make him shake, and shortly learned to fall. FQ III.iii.49

The nations “dif­fer­ent afore” are t­ hose of the British isles including most emphatically Ireland, which for this reason is not named ­here as ­under the white rod of Elizabeth’s power (with which, l­ ater, in a dream vision,

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she beats down a crocodile): only Belgium is, although she is fighting on two fronts, in Belgium and in Ireland. But peace in Ireland ­w ill be, so Spenser understood it, the true conclusion to the Wars of the Roses, since the rebels (as he saw it) ­were united to the old Yorkist cause.

' of Bosworth Field, the Welshman Henry Tudor, grand­father of Queen Elizabeth, extricated himself from the hopelessly entangled genealogical claims and counterclaims of the ­houses of York and Lancaster (though he was a Lancastrian) by proclaiming descent from an older and more august forebear than Edward III, who died in 1377. This was none other than King Arthur. The idea caught on. As he marched through Wales from Milford Haven, u ­ nder the banner of the red dragon of Cadwallader, the last of the Briton kings, Henry Tudor was cheered from the town streets as Arthur, which is what he would name his first son by Elizabeth of York.34 This prince Arthur died, and his younger ­brother, Henry VIII, the f­ ather of Elizabeth I, ruled in his stead. Spenser uses the ancient legends concerning Britain to reinforce the popu­lar myth of Tudor legitimacy. Spenser’s epic poem is meant to lend further legitimacy to this Arthuro-­ Trojan genealogy of the Tudors and for this reason is a dynastic epic on the model of the Aeneid and t­ hose sleekly modern, epic romances, to mention them again, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. The old Arthurian tales, mixed with their Celtic pre­de­ces­sors and marvels, ­were overlaid in turn by Norman and French traditions of chivalric romance. But the tone of Spenser’s accounts of mounted knights and of ladies who are ­either in distress or are mounted and fear­ some themselves—­for Spenser holds that ­women in ancient times ­were heroic fighters as much as men—is not derived from the sternly realistic prose of Malory. Should Spenser manage to integrate all ­these compli­ cated sources—­fairy magic, British history, Italian romance, Homeric and Virgilian epic, Chaucerian copiousness and diction, and, to mention another impor­tant source, medieval allegory updated to express Re­nais­ sance concerns with virtue and the state—­and should he manage to el­ evate this compound to the level of heroic epic, he would still be fulfilling an eminently classical design and the highest goal of a Re­nais­sance poet. I N 14 85 T H E V I C T O R

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' was established by none other than Virgil, who opened his c­ areer, as Spenser did in imitation of him, with pastoral poems. Virgil then ascended to georgic poems about farming and fi­nally to the heroic, sublime, and mythic-­historical Aeneid. Such, approximately, was Spenser’s ambition as he expressed it in the proem to The Faerie Queene.35 The “October” eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender openly displays the am­ bition to ascend from pastoral to heroic poetry and identifies this explic­ itly with Virgil, “the Romish Tityrus.” So Piers advises the poet, Cuddie: T HIS HIGHER DESIGN

Abandon then the base and viler clowne, Lyft up thy selfe out of the lowly dust: And sing of bloody Mars, of wars and giusts, Turne thee to t­ hose, that weld the awful crowne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ­ here may thy Muse display her fluttryng wing, T And stretch herself at large from East to West: Whither thou list in fayre Elisa rest, Or if thee please in bigger notes to sing, Advaunce the worthy whome shee loveth best, That first the white bear to the stake did bring. And when the stubborn stroke of stronger stounds Has somewhat slackt the tenor of thy string: Of love and lustihead tho mayst thou sing, And carrol lowde, and leade the Myllers rownde, All ­were Elisa one of thilke same ring. So mought our Cuddies name to Heaven sownde. The Shepheardes Calender, “October,” lines 37–54

In the “Argument” to the “October” eclogue, which prepares for t­ hese lines, E. K. writes of Spenser’s book, entitled The En­glish Poete, which he intends shortly to publish and which we may be forgiven for supposing is e­ ither a pure fiction or a proj­ect that never reached completion. But we are told that in it Spenser says—­this is far from inconsistent with Sidney’s Apology for Poetry—­that poetry is not chiefly a craft but rather, as it says in the prefatory “Argument” to the “October” eclogue, “a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to bee gotten by laboure and learning, but adorned

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with both: and poured into the witte by a certaine ἐνθυσιασμός and ce­ lestiall inspiration.” I say following Virgil’s three-­phase ascent was “approximately” Spens­ er’s design ­because he leaves out the intermediate stage represented by the Georgics (from the Greek word georgos, “plowman”). Yet the interme­ diate stage of development suggested by the ancient meta­phor of farming, of cultivation—so impor­tant to the colonial undertaker who would bring En­glish “planters” into the Munster “Plantation”—is the peculiar territory of The Faerie Queene and of Fairy Land itself. It is an intermediate and dy­ namically mediating realm of developmental passage from one stage of existence to another. It is not, however, as for Virgil, or at least from the Re­nais­sance interpretation of Virgil, about the growth of civilization, that is, about movement t­ oward the city, the urbs, which is the scene of the epic. The Aeneid is about the passage from one city destroyed to another one founded. But Spenser’s Faerie Queene is about ethics, the movement t­ oward an ideal society by means of cultivating virtue in its leaders. As Prince Ar­ thur’s history shows, Fairy Land is this intermediating region of passage, with an entrance and exit, from the moral chaos of this world to the moral striving of Fairy Land and back into this world with the power to trans­ form it—­which is just what Arthur w ­ ill do when he is king. Having l­ ittle sense of liberal pro­gress and what we would now call social justice, the transformation Spenser has in mind, following Virgil’s example, is to take place by means of war, the heroic action not of individuals alone—­ knights on adventures—­but of armies. Spenser proclaimed his epic intentions for The Faerie Queene in his opening lines: Lo I the man whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds, Am now enforst a far unfitter taske, With trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; Whose prayses having slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broad emongst her learnèd throng. Fierce warres and faithful loves ­shall moralize my song. FQ I.proem.1

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The signals of high seriousness in this opening stanza would be even more apparent to Re­nais­sance readers ­because editions of Virgil from the period regularly printed, usually but not invariably in the commen­ tary, the supposedly canceled opening lines of the Aeneid, beginning, Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena / carmen, loosely rendered in Spenser’s opening two lines. Inferior in style, the lines w ­ ere imperfectly mortised into the opening of the Aeneid, italicized in the following trans­ lation: “I  am he who once tuned my song on a slender reed pipe and then, coming forth from the woods, compelled the neighboring fields to comply with the w ­ ill of the husbandman, however avid for gain, a work pleasing to farmers. But now the god Mars’s dreadful, bristling arms and the man I sing who from Troy’s shores, driven by fate, came to Italy, Lavinia’s shores.”36 In an improbable tale, the ancient grammarian and commen­ tator Donatus, in his “Life of Virgil,” followed by Servius, mentions that ­these lines w ­ ere struck out by Varius and Tucca when editing the poem ­after Virgil’s death, the emperor having commanded t­ hese men to cut what­ever they judge proper to cut but to add nothing. If the lines them­ selves ­were not generally credited in the Re­nais­sance as the proper opening of the Aeneid, this story at least carried more weight than it should have. It was supposed that Virgil himself described his ­career as an ascent imitating the ascent of h ­ uman civilization from the pastoral poetry of the Eclogues to the farming poetry of the Georgics, and fi­nally to the Aeneid, the epic of war and of the founding of Roman civilization. With the stronger cult in the Re­nais­sance of the poet as vates, and the feeling, so evident in Spenser’s opening stanza, that a part of the meaning of an epic poem is the personal drama of its creation, Re­nais­ sance editors and authors saw the worth of t­ hese lines, even if the an­ cients, like their modern editors, did not. Although Spenser must leave out the intermediate stage of farming poetry, that is, of georgic—­a point to which we ­shall return—­his first four lines capture Virgil’s portrait of his c­ areer as he, Spenser, changes his pastoral reed for a war trumpet and sounds the charge. But Spenser immediately shifts from evoking scenes of massed armies, told in the second half of the Aeneid, to the world of medieval romance and the individual adventures of knights and ladies: the world of Arios­ to’s Carolingian romance and of Malory’s Arthurian tales, based on

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French models Spenser also knew. The word gentle does not ­here bear our narrower sense of the word: it means noble, and the deeds are heroic. It is the poet’s task, commanded by the sacred muse—­not just the muse but the sacred muse, of whom he is the priest—to recover t­ hose ­great deeds from oblivion and blaze them, which is to say, praise them extravagantly and in detail, to the learned throng. This phrase calls up in the mind a gowned university pro­cession rather than a popu­lar audience and indi­ cates another side of the Re­nais­sance idea of the poet, which is not alto­ gether dif­fer­ent from ancient ideas but is rather an exaggeration of them, one that continues t­ oday. In addition to being sacer, set apart from o ­ thers and inspired, the poet writes for the learned and must therefore be diffi­ cult, as T. S. Eliot, for example, would continue to insist: “It is not a per­ manent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civi­ lization, as it exists at pre­sent, must be difficult.”37 Eliot is writing of the metaphysical poets, led by John Donne, Spenser’s successor to fame, and of course he is speaking of modern civilization, a­ fter the First World War. But what he points to is of longer duration than he meant and includes the civilization of the Re­nais­sance as well. The emphasis on the sacred­ ness of the poet as a repository and transmitter of learning is impor­tant in antiquity, especially among the Latin poets, b ­ ecause they had to study the Greeks and ­because they had an archaeological fascination with their history and their own native Italic lore. But t­ hese proclivities are aug­ mented in Re­nais­sance poets. Of course the most striking difference from the ancient war epic is the elevation of the status of w ­ omen from that of chattel to the equals of men in “derring-do” (a Spenserian phrase, nominalized from Chaucer) and also the elevation of love.38 Spenser was dedicating his poem to a queen, and a queen who long before t­ hese lines ­were published had appeared in full armor at Tilbury, in 1588, when she made her famous address to the troops who ­were still expecting invasion from the Low Countries. Eliza­ beth is as much a martial hero as any knight in The Faerie Queene, and Spenser w ­ ill emphasize the derring-do of ladies in the past, including the heroine of Book Three, Britomart, “the British Mars.” But she is not a virago, like Virgil’s Camilla or Ariosto’s Marfisa.39 Love is impor­tant as well and is in some indistinct sense, in the ideology of the

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poem, the province of ­women: men can offer love, but only ­women can accept it, and once accepted love constitutes an almost metaphysical bond, one to which unfaithfulness would be as shameful as cowardice in combat. In Virgil, a crucial and very praiseworthy act is Aeneas’s aban­ donment of Dido. In the gender ideology of the Aeneid, Aeneas’s real love for the Cartha­ginian queen is a plea­sure he can no longer afford to indulge if he is to exhibit pietas with re­spect to the w ­ ill of the gods and to his own destiny, for ­these are one and the same. For Spenser, and in the chivalric tradition he inherits, love is never a mere plea­sure, a temporary indul­ gence of passion to be set aside at last for one’s duty. If one is noble, love is one’s fate, and faithfulness to it is as decisive for the self as fierce wars are decisive for history. In the final balanced line of Spenser’s opening stanza, he makes love and war concerns that are of equal importance. That is surely b ­ ecause— as the Romans knew very well—­when invaders bring their w ­ omen with them, they intend to stay.

' Spenser intends by this georgics of the self is seen early in The Faerie Queene and given its best example in the Redcross knight, who develops far more than any other knight in the poem. This was prob­ably ­because Spenser’s aims became at once broader and less clear as he went on. But the history of Redcross is for that reason a good indication of the kind of ethical transformation (however more extreme Redcross’s is) Spenser intended when, in the Letter to Raleigh, he spoke of his aim “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” But did he intend to fashion individuals or a par­tic­u­lar nation? In the first book of The Faerie Queene, ­after the Redcross knight has been rescued by Arthur from Orgoglio’s dungeon and then by Una from De­ spair, he is conducted by Una to the House of Holiness, governed by Coelia, “heavenly,” and her ­daughters Faith, Hope, and Charity (Fidelia, Speranza, and Charissa). Una and Redcross pass the porter, Humilità, and are then conducted by Zele to Coelia’s presence hall, where a “gentle Squire” named Reverence keeps order. The spiritual instruction of the knight is undertaken by Fidelia, who holds in one hand a golden cup filled T H E M O R A L T R A N S F O R M AT I O N

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with wine and ­water both and containing a serpent as well, folded within. The mystery of the Eucharist is mysteriously meant. In her other hand Fidelia holds a book “signed and seald with blood” (­later we w ­ ill learn it is written entirely in blood), which is clearly the Bible, “wherein darke ­things w ­ ere writ, hard to be understood” (FQ I.x.14), the main one being that the entire text, in this formulation, Old and New Testaments, is cen­ tered on the blood of Christ shed at the Crucifixion. Fidelia teaches Red­ cross the meaning of the book to such a fullness that the “weaker wit of man could never reach,” telling him, “Of God, of grace, of justice, of ­free ­w ill, / That won­der was to heare her goodly speach” (I.x.19). More figures are now introduced, not so much to instruct Redcross as to heal the “soule-­diseased knight” of a lingering and “festering sore . . . ​ Close creeping twixt the marrow and the skin” (FQ I.x.24–25). He under­ goes a rigorous course of purification by mortification that includes Amendment with hot pincers, Penance with an iron whip, Remorse with a sharp instrument for pricking the heart, and Repentance, who bathes him in salt w ­ ater, to make all his wounds sting at once. Only a­ fter this mortification of his flesh is complete does Redcross meet the third of the ­sisters, charity, or Charissa, represented traditionally with infants all about her and hanging off her. Despite this evidence to the contrary, “Cupids wanton snare / As hell she hated.” Her ivory throne and attending turtle doves suggest that her iconographic and psychological origins are in the pagan Aphrodite-­Venus: “And by her side t­here sate a gentle paire / Of turtle doves, she sitting in an yvorie chaire” (I.x.30–31). The message is that one cannot do good for o ­ thers u ­ ntil one is purified of lin­ gering sin. Charissa calls Mercie to proceed with this new stage of in­ struction: helping other persons in bodily distress. Mercy takes Redcross to a “holy Hospitall” where he meets her seven “Bead-­men,” the seven acts of corporeal mercy, each with a stanza of de­ scription to himself. The more clearly to limn a simultaneous structure within the sequential design, each stanza begins with the number of the corporeal mercy in question: “The first . . . ​T he second . . . ​T he third . . . ​ The fourth . . . ​T he fift . . . ​T he sixt . . . ​T he seventh . . .” (FQ I.x.36–43). Mercy instructs Redcross ­until “from the first unto the last degree, / His mortall life he learnèd had to frame / In holy righ­teousnesse, without re­ buke or blame” (I.x.45). Instructed in the mysteries of faith, purified of

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lingering and original sin, trained up in charitable works, Redcross is pre­ pared for a higher discipline still: that of mystic contemplation. For this purpose Redcross is conducted to a high hill on which stands a remote hermitage inhabited by a single, “aged holy man” named Con­ templation. Contemplation then leads Redcross up a still-­higher moun­ tain (it is compared to Sinai, Pisgah, Gethsemane, and Helicon) to gaze on what “never yet was seene of Fairies sonne” (FQ I.x.46–55). T ­ here Red­ cross is accorded a sublime vision of the heavenly Jerusalem, or Hieru­ salem, to suggest the Greek word for “holy,” hieros. Then something still more surprising occurs. This heavenly Jerusalem from the end of the Bible, the city that descends from God ­after the end of time, is compared to the fairy city—­may we call it a utopia?—­that is in time. It is named ­after earthly glory, Cleopolis (kleos, “fame” + polis, “city”), the capital of Fairy Land and the seat of the Fairy Queen: Till now, said then the knight, I weenèd well, That ­great Cleopolis, where I have bene, In which that fairest Faerie Queene doth dwell, The fairest Citie was, that might be seene. FQ I.x.58

“George” turns out to be the name of the Redcross knight, so called by a ploughman who found him in a furrow (FQ I.x.61, 66). He becomes Saint George of merry ­England. Thus Spenser thought of his poem on the private moral virtues as ethical cultivation, a georgics of the self. But how private is this, ­really? If we look back through the stages of the purifica­ tion of Redcross, and especially at the violent torments of the mortifying early stages, it can appear that this “man of earth,” this ploughman, also stands somewhere in range of the poet’s associations with the “salvage soyl” of Ireland. Saint George has gone to Fairy Land with Una, Truth, as the En­glish have gone to Ireland with Truth and an army and ­later with colonists, “planters.” What Saint George discovers when he is t­ here, and what he makes more true by his conquest of the dragon, as the En­glish did with an army, is that the two nations are—or they should be!—­one and the same. And yet they are not. In a well-­known scene, the ­people, the “rascall many,” come to gaze on Redcross ­after his victory but soon turn in won­der to the dead dragon

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before them “Stretcht on the ground in monstrous large extent” (FQ I.xii.9). They are dismayed with idle fear and warn one another not to ap­ proach or touch the beast, which may have some “lingring life” deep in its breast; some see the eyes sparkle, and ­others see them move. But one warns that “in his wombe might lurke some hidden nest / Of many Drag­ onets, his fruitfull seed” (I.xii.10). That swarming presence, even its pos­ sibility, would make the dragon female as well as male, notwithstanding the consistently used masculine pronoun to describe him. The profusion of offspring hiding in the wombe—­the word in Spenser’s day referred more broadly to the stomach and the belly, the abdominal cavity of male or female—­recalls the serpent monster Errour from this book’s opening canto. May we imagine ­those lurking spawn in the dead dragon’s belly as a poet’s intuition of a re­sis­tance to civilization (as the En­glish under­ stood it) which is incapable of extirpation?

Chapter 4

'

A Survey of The Faerie Queene

feature of the En­glish colonial proj­ect in Ireland, one that became inevitable ­after Henry VIII’s Crown of Ireland Act of 1542, by which he declared himself King of Ireland, having been formerly its “Lord,” was the surveying and mapping of the country and dividing it into English-­style counties. That pro­cess was of course highly realistic and technical, being a military and administrative necessity, and also challenging, much of the country, especially the boggy forests and mountainous wildernesses with their inhabitants, being hostile to pre­ cisely this enterprise. But the enterprise was also highly abstract and ide­ ological, and in that sense poetical, creating an illusion of control over a region of unlikeness with its own traditional laws and systems of land tenure and use. ­T hese circumstances, in par­tic­u­lar the always incomplete but ambi­ tious mastery of terrain, so amply described in the View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland, are also the conditions of the ­great poem Spenser wrote in Ire­ land, his major recommendation being the strategically placed garrison towns throughout the country, to surround or block communications (of weapons and fighters as well as of information) between wild territories held by rebels and brigands. This is the most intellectually impressive part of Spenser’s View. Increasingly, since the 1980s, in the work of Nicholas Canny, Willy Maley, Patricia Coughlan, Richard McCabe, Elizabeth Fowler, Julia Rein­ hart Lupton, and Joanne Woodway Grenfall—­I am far from naming P E R H A P S T H E M O S T I M P O R­T A N T

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every­one—­such down-to-earth matters have attracted attention. Critics began to see reflected in the imagery of The Faerie Queene the vio­lence that the proj­ect of colonialism and settlement in Ireland occasioned, and not only in the l­ater books of the poem.1 But the approach has been highly particularized, selecting individual moments of reflected vio­lence to focus on, without attending to the nature of The Faerie Queene as a ­whole. For surely the fate of Spenser’s plan for the poem—­the one he announces in the Letter to Raleigh and employs in a self-­corrective, dynamical, and cybernetic way throughout (with the idea of Fairy Court, which is never seen, acting as a kind of “governor” for regulating romance)—­bears com­ parison to the huge social effort being made in his day, with the poet himself as one of its functionaries, to reduce Ireland to perfect and intel­ ligible, civilized order. Spenser succeeds no better with The Faerie Queene than the Elizabethan soldiers, administrators, and colonists ­will do with Ireland. The fragment called the Mutabilitie Cantos has the only explicit treatment of Ireland in The Faerie Queene, beautifully describing and animating its landscape and skillfully evoking the gathering forces that w ­ ere to drive Spenser out of Kilcolman at last. It would perhaps be g­ oing too far to see the Mutabilitie fragment as an analogous rebellion against the poem’s system of com­ mand and control, if only ­because metaphysical decay, what Aristotle called phthora, is deeper than any social or po­liti­cal events, ­these being sur­ face manifestations of its power. But of course manifestations are just that: they make manifest what other­w ise could not be seen. The signs of disorder are themselves allegorical, although they point not to a final and encompassing truth but rather to its opposite—­until, of course, Dame Nature’s Neoplatonic judgment captures disorder at last, naming it dilation, and gathers it back to the center. What Nature describes in her judg­ ment is what Spenser wanted to do but never could with the g­ reat system of The Faerie Queene. In any event, ­these reflections are intended to express what I think must surely be the drawbacks of any attempt to survey The Faerie Queene, al­ though that is what I now attempt ­here. Much of the poem—­perhaps the best of this g­ reat and complex poem—­w ill escape the net of county lines and straight roads I s­ hall draw in what follows. But the enterprise of extreme abstraction can still help readers—­are not all readers colonists

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and “planters” too?—­keep their bearings in the boggier wild lands of Spenser’s savage soil. We know that in 1588, eight years a­ fter Spenser left for Ireland, a man­ uscript of the first installment of The Faerie Queene (i.e., Books One to Three) was circulating in London. A stanza is quoted in the poet Abraham Fraunce’s rhetorical treatise Arcadian Rhetorike; and Christopher Marlowe adorned his Asiatic conqueror, Tamburlaine, with a helm inspired by Spenser’s splendid comparison of the hairy crest of Arthur’s helmet to “an Almond tree ymounted hye / On top of greene Selinus all alone,” its dainty blossoms trembling at ­every breath from Heaven (FQ I.vii.32; cf. Marlowe, 2 Tamburlaine IV.iv.119–21). The first installment of The Faerie Queene was entered in the Stationer’s Register in December 1589 and published in quarto in 1590 by Edward Ponsonbie, with the apt printer’s device ubique floret, “it flowers every­ where.”2 As it does. When Ponsonbie published the next installment, his device would be the same one as Richard Field’s when he published Shake­ speare’s “Venus and Adonis,” anchora spei, “the anchor of hope,” with per­ haps an Italian pun on ancora, “again, still.” This too reflects on the poem, unintentionally: ­there is still hope for completion. The title page of the first, 1590 edition reads as follows: “The Faerie Queene. Disposed into twelve books, fashioning XII. Morale vertues.” Each book is to be divided into twelve cantos of varying length but planned to average around fifty stanzas.3 In the 1590 volume three virtues are treated: Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity, each with a knight as its “patron.” T ­ hese are the Redcross knight (who turns out to be h ­ uman, not a fairy), the fairy knight Guyon, and the Briton princess Britomart, who disguises herself as a knight and is equipped with a devastating magic spear, though she is fearsome with the sword as well, as Artegal learns, and as Radigund learns too, to her cost. In addition to the principal adversary met with at the climax of each book—­the g­ reat dragon, or original sin; the witch, Acrasia, or intemper­ ance; and the enchanter, Busyrane, or perversion—­the knights have to face wholly unexpected adversaries, among whom some of the most prominent are Orgoglio (pride), Mammon (riches), and Malecasta (un­ chastity). Against t­ hese adversaries the knightly “patrons” of the virtues need help, which is given in the first two books by Prince Arthur as he

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travels in search of the Fairy Queen. Book Three breaks the pattern, how­ ever. Britomart must take over Scudamour’s quest to defeat Busyrane; and in other re­spects Britomart uncannily resembles Arthur. She is a royal infant with a magic weapon; her destiny is guided by Merlin; she pursues a lover seen in a vision; and she is frequently drawn off course to aid ­others in distress. Even her first adventure, when Malecasta lies down at her side, appears to be a parody of the Fairy Queen’s lying down at Arthur’s side (FQ III.i.61; cf. I.ix.13–15). All this is part of a larger design, beginning in Book Three, to displace the symbolic values associated with Arthur and Gloriana onto Britomart and Artegal. 4 The abstract design of The Faerie Queene, as described in the Letter to Raleigh, does not provide for our seeing the central figure of the Fairy Queen in propria persona ­until the long-­deferred end (indeed, we never do see the Fairy Queen) or for our seeing Gloriana and Arthur together, as found­ers of the royal line descending to Queen Elizabeth. By the time Spenser was embarked on Book Three, this prob­lem had become apparent to him. He therefore began to treat Britomart as an avatar of the Fairy Queen herself, one in whom he may, so to speak, incarnate in the action of his poem. On the verso of the title page of this first, 1590 installment is the dedi­ cation to Queen Elizabeth (it was expanded in 1596), who is allegorically represented in the poem as the Fairy Queen herself, “the argument [theme] of mine afflicted stile [unworthy pen]” (FQ I.proem.4). The volume is accompanied, at the end, by numerous dedicatory sonnets to the ­great and good, mostly the former. Putting ­these sonnets at the be­ ginning would have detracted from the prominence of the dedication to Queen Elizabeth. Preceding t­ hese sonnets and following the end of Book Three is a prose passage, Spenser’s famous Letter to Raleigh, “expounding,” as it says in the headnote, his “­whole intention in the course of this worke.” Before the displacement of the symbolic values of Arthur and Gloriana onto Britomart and Artegal, the Fairy Queen is the “glorious type” (I.proem.4) of Elizabeth, anticipating the ­great queen to come in the ­future, who ­w ill subdue Ireland and extend the rod of her power over the Low Countries (present-­day Belgium and Holland), thus rolling back Roman Catholic and Spanish aggression on both ­England’s flanks. Spanish aggression includes, of course, the fearsome Spanish Armada,

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with its castle-­like ships, sent against ­England in 1588 by Philip II of Spain, the king of Castile. His fall is foreseen in this prophecy by Merlin, in which the ancestor of Elizabeth is now not the Fairy Queen but Britomart: Then ­shall a roiall virgin raine, which ­shall Stretch her white rod over the Belgicke shore, And the ­great ­Castle smite so sore with all, That it s­ hall make him shake, and shortly learne to fall. FQ III.iii.49; cf. V.vii.21–23

In the Letter to Raleigh, Spenser promises to declare openly “the general intention and meaning, which in the w ­ hole course thereof [he has] fashioned.” The reason Spenser’s intention needs explaining in a letter—­one Spenser says he was “commanded” by Raleigh to write—is ­because the poem is officially, which is to say generically, obscure, “a con­ tinued Allegory, or darke conceit.” Even so, as we have seen, some of this obscurity is dispelled by the title page of the volume, where it says the poem ­w ill be an allegory representing twelve moral virtues in as many books, one virtue per book. Prince Arthur is to be “perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised.” Any resemblance to Ar­ istotle’s three treatises on ethics is approximate. As Rosemond Tuve ob­ served, Spenser’s idea of “Aristotle” in this m ­ atter is as likely to derive from commonplaces on Aristotle dating from the M ­ iddle Ages.5 In fact, all the virtues Spenser considers, even chastity, harmonize with Aristotle’s system, which Spenser would have internalized at Cambridge. The impor­ tant ­thing is that ­these virtues be personal and preparatory to public ser­ vice. The private virtues lead on, therefore, to the public or, as Spenser calls them, the “polliticke” virtues. Although Spenser prob­ably takes t­ hese public virtues also to be twelve in number, for symmetry’s sake, he does not in fact specify their number. To continue with the passage just quoted: “the which is the purpose of ­these first twelve books: which if I find to be well accepted, I may perhaps be encouraged, to frame the other part of polliticke vertues in his [Arthur’s] person, ­after that hee came to be king.” The second installment of The Faerie Queene, Books Four to Six, was published in 1596, again by Edward Ponsonbie. The first three books ­were reissued at this time, without the Letter to Raleigh but with a new ending to Book Three, allowing the story of Scudamour and Amoret to be spun

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out longer in separate adventures. Now, instead of being re­united with Amoret at the end of Book Three, as recounted in the beautiful lines Spenser originally wrote, Scudamour leaves the scene with Britomart’s nurse (disguised as her squire), hoping to find further aid, both of them believing Britomart perished in the flames before the gate to the h ­ ouse. It looks as if Spenser intended to re­unite the ­couple ­toward the end of Book Four, when Amoret is ­under Arthur’s protection and Scudamour tells Arthur and ­others the tale of his wooing. However, Spenser drops this thread (see FQ IV.ix.38 and n). Instead, we have the beautiful and long-­ expected reunion of Florimell and Marinell, when Marinell is still gravely ill: “Which to another place I leave to be perfected” (IV.xii.35). In that other place we hear not of their marriage but of the eventful tour­ nament that followed, at which, among other surprises (e.g., Guyon’s recovery of his stolen h ­ orse), the False Florimell, a robotic beauty con­ trived by a witch and inhabited by a wicked sprite, is placed beside the true Florimell, “like the true saint beside the image set.” The False Florimell immediately melts like snow, leaving Florimell’s lost magic girdle ­behind: “Her snowy substance melted as with heat, / Ne of that goodly hew re­ mayned ­ought, / But th’emptie girdle, which about her wast was wrought” (IV.iii.24). Other ladies try to wear the girdle, the talisman of chastity, but it slides off them all—­“Such power it had, that to no ­womans wast / By any skill or ­labour it would sit”—­until Florimell herself puts it on (IV.ii.27–28). The virtues treated in ­these new books are Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. The books of Justice and Courtesy are comparatively straight­ forward, for Spenser. Their structure resembles that of the first two books of the poem, Holiness and Temperance. Like Redcross and Guyon, their respective knights, Artegal (whose name, with French for “equal” in it, evokes Justice’s scales) and Calidore (golden gift), are in or near the fore­ front of the action most the time. Book Four, on Friendship, placed alongside Book Three at the center of The Faerie Queene, is very unusual, only partly b ­ ecause it continues and elaborates the already unusual themes and stories begun in Book Three, where, as mentioned, Britomart and Artegal have displaced onto them the symbolic values of Gloriana and Arthur. 6 The two knights who are supposed to exemplify friendship in Book Four, Cambell and Triamond

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(or Telamond), dis­appear ­after the third canto. Their chief action in canto three is the bloodiest fight in the poem. They are magically reconciled at last when Cambina arrives in a chariot drawn by lions, strikes them sense­ less with the caduceus of Mercury, and gives them to drink from a cup containing Nepenthe, the nectar of the gods, instilling forgetfulness. At this they kiss each other and swear “for ever friends to be” (FQ IV.iii.49). This seems an odd idea about friendship, as a magical departure from sus­ tained, under­lying hostility; but it looks forward to Hobbes. It is quite out of the way of the considerable thinking on friendship by ­earlier, Eliz­ abethan authors, not to mention Aristotle, although in the popu­lar lit­er­ a­ture on friendship—­male friendship, of course—it is seen as a pos­si­ble basis for an aristocratic, benign, and benevolent polity, as if the emotional ties of male friendship would override competition for power, riches, and ­women. If Spenser is dubious about what friendship is, and stays not to enquire, he at least knows what it i­ sn’t: dissention, or discord, symbolized in the first canto of the book by the Homeric figure of Ate, “­mother of debate.” (Homer’s Eris, or hate urging on b ­ attle, seems closer to what Spenser means. In the Iliad, the goddess Atê is the madness or hubris causing di­ saster. In Hesiod, Atê is the ­daughter of Eris, although the relationship might be more logical the other way around.) Spenser’s Ate is a mali­ cious hag whose feet go in dif­fer­ent directions, whose hands do contrary ­things, whose tongue is divided, and so on. She sews discord and hate wherever she goes. The description of her is the longest of any character in The Faerie Queene (IV.i.19–30), closely followed by that of Belphoebe (II iii.21–31), as if the poet ­were moved unconsciously to represent in ­these descriptive moments—­and they are classic Spenserian “moments”—­ ­the most beautiful and the most hideous of creatures. The rest of Book Four is taken up with completing stories spilling over from Book Three, with surprising extras, such as Spenser’s making his knights of friend­ ship part of a continuation of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale (IV.ii–­iii). ­A fter Scudamour has told of the ­Temple of Venus and how he won Amoret ­there, the remainder of the book goes underwater, to Proteus’s submarine cave, whither Marinell has been brought by his wailing m ­ other and her sea nymphs to be healed of the wound Britomart gave him long ago, leaving him on the beach to wallow in his gore (FQ III.iv.16). Now in

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that hall—­beneath which, still lower, in the dungeon, as the recovered Marinell does not yet know or care—­Florimell is imprisoned by Proteus (since III.8.43), the length of the imprisonment occasioning an Ariostan transition: “But all for pittie that I have thus long / Left a fayre Ladie lan­ guishing in payne” (IV.xi.1). The final two cantos complete the story—­ hardly, as yet, begun, at least on Marinell’s side—of Florimell and Mari­ nell. But the frame and occasion for it is an im­mense wedding of the rivers Thames and Medway, with all the rivers in the world attending, plus no less than fifty-­one sea nymphs, d ­ aughters of old Nereus (IV.xi.48–51), each one of them named in t­ hese four virtuosic and vari­ous stanzas (“Lagore, much praisd for wise behests; / And Psamathe, for her brode snowy brests”). In the final canto Marinell happens to wander through the dun­ geons, hears Florimell’s despairing lament and her love for him, touching “his stony heart with tender ruth” (IV.xii.13) and causing him to languish again—­this time for love. Finding himself unable to ­free her from her prison, his usual martial braggadocio deserts him, and instead of de­ manding her release he falls into an adolescent depression, ­until his ­mother discovers the reason, negotiates with higher powers to force Pro­ teus to ­free the prisoner, and gets her son the girl. We first saw him as a madly competitive and bellicose male, with his ­mother ­behind him, bringing him new riches on e­ very tide and (at least in his own mind) egging him on. Now he lets his ­mother do the fighting, which he is in no condition to do, being nearly dead of frustration and shame, ­until Flo­ rimell comes to his bedside—­whereupon he is revived like a plant that feels the warmth of the spring: Right so himself did Marinell upreare, When he in place his dearest love did spy; And though his limbs could not his bodie beare, Ne former strength returne so suddenly, Yet chearefull signes he shewèd outwardly. Ne lesse was she in secret hart affected, But that she maskèd it with modestie, For feare she should of lightnesse be detected: Which to another place I leave to be perfected. FQ IV.xii.35

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As usual, Florimell is the strong one and the adult in this pair. Marinell seems still the child he was when we first saw him—­touching as the scene of reunion is intended to be. But what has it to do with friendship as a foundation for social order? If anything, an order residing in nature is sug­ gested, governing, for example, the rivers of the world and leaping over anything po­liti­cal. Nor is ­there any trace of sentimental attachment to ho­ mosocial male bonds. The Book of Friendship is Spenser’s second most violent book. Although Book Five may not appear so at first and certainly ­isn’t rep­ resented this way in the critical tradition, it is a transitional book, the first seven cantos presenting a subtle and complex series of episodes with the purpose of theorizing at an intermediate level of abstraction—­ intermediate ­because Astraea has gone from the world—­about the na­ ture and application of justice, right up to Radigund’s capturing Artegal ­because he shows mercy in inappropriate circumstances, where ­there is no remorse, no true surrender, and no desert. Talus w ­ ill bring Britomart to ­free him, and ­after a hard fight with the beautiful Amazon, whom she regards with “high disdaine” (FQ V.vii.28), she cleaves her head and helmet at a stroke (V.vii.34). Artegal is released from bondage and from his ­women’s clothes (“At sight thereof abasht with secrete shame, / She turnd her head aside” [V.vii.38]); the clothes are the least of his shame. Britomart is slowly healed of her wounds—­Artegal had none—­during which time she is worshipped as a goddess by Radigund’s former subjects as she dis­ penses “true Iustice,” which amounts to restoring ­women “To mens sub­ jection” and repealing “The liberty of ­women” (V.vii.43). It is an odd ­thing for a ­woman knight to do or to be praised for d ­ oing. Artegal abruptly leaves to pursue his first quest, to f­ ree Irene, ­after which, for the remaining five cantos, the book is not engaged in intermediate abstraction about jus­ tice but in something more like po­liti­cal cartoons about En­glish wars and foreign policy in Ireland on one side and Belgium on the other. But one episode preceding this second part bears mentioning, when Britomart was on her way to rescue Artegal from Radigund. It is her visit to the very unexpected and bizarre Isis’s Church, which some critics re­ gard as one of the deepest moments in the poem and, locally, the critical moment in the allegory of justice and equity. I am unconvinced by the

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latter, although the poet himself wants us to think so, but the former seems true if only b ­ ecause the symbolism is so shocking and the range of pos­si­ble interpretations so wide. What Spenser at first describes in his homely way as a church is actu­ ally a ­temple, as he also terms it, with stately pillars of gold. But the t­ emple and its priests are devoted to the worship of an idol of the Egyptian god­ dess Isis, an ancient queen raised to divine status a­ fter death, as was her husband, Osiris. Her priests wear linen robes traced with silver and mi­ tres ­shaped like the moon, for the moon is what Isis, like Diana, signifies, while Osiris signifies the sun. Britomart is brought to the idol and—­ another surprise—­prostrates herself before it. The idol of the goddess is made of silver covered with a linen mantle, and on her head is not a moon miter but a crown of gold. She stands with one foot on the ground and one on a serpent-­crocodile—­this too an image—­the tail of which is wreathed around the goddess’s waist, symbolizing Osiris. In the right hand the idol holds a white rod, which suddenly moves in acknowl­ edgment of Britomart. The rod, a scepter of power, perhaps recalls the one from Merlin’s prophecy: “Then ­shall a royall virgin raine, which ­shall / Stretch her white rod over the Belgicke shore” (FQ II.iii.49). This is not a goddess of justice but of regal power. Britomart sleeps on the floor before the altar and dreams she is sacri­ ficing to Isis attired in a linen stole and bearing a moon miter on her head; but the stole turns suddenly to scarlet red and the miter to a crown of gold (FQ V.vii.13). Then suddenly, from below, a tempest breaks through the floor and fills the hall—an allusion to the destroying god of chaos, Typhon—­scattering the embers from the sacred fire at the altar and set­ ting the ­temple alight. At that, the crocodile comes to life, devours the flames, and then threatens to devour Isis herself, who beats him back with her rod. At this, his pride is subdued and he throws himself at her feet, begging for her love. He is successful, as it appears, b ­ ecause “she soone enwombed grew / And forth did bring a Lion of ­great might” (V.vii.16). At this, Britomart wakes, ­silent but so troubled by what she has seen that the priests draw from her what has tran­spired in her dream. One of them, with his hair standing on end in astonishment and shock, utters a prophetic interpretation of the dream, being “fild with heavenly fury” (FQ III.vii.20). It is a short version of Merlin’s prophecy (III.iii.25–50), and it is

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remarkably po­liti­cal, instead of philosophical or religious, as if the po­ liti­cal, the power of command and control, sprang not from rational sources—as in utopian thinking—­but from the sexually strange, as Me­ lissa Sanchez has argued, where power and eroticism are mixed, as so often in The Faerie Queene.7 The priest says Artegal, the knight of Justice, is represented by Osiris the crocodile, as Britomart is by the goddess Isis, “To shew that clemence oft in ­things amis, / Restraines ­those sterne be­ hests, and cruell doomes of his” (V.vii.22). The storms he quells and the flames he devours are historical turbulence, during which she, Brit­ omart, ­w ill give birth to their son, “That Lion-­like ­shall shew his powre extreame” (III.vii.23). What is of course striking about the entire episode is the, so to speak, overdetermined character of the imagery, to say nothing of its being far wide of Spenser’s normal range of reference in classical, Christian, and to a lesser extent Celtic lore. Spenser’s sources for Egyptian my­thol­ogy are Plutarch and perhaps Diodorus Siculus, not perhaps Herodotus; but a mania for Egyptian imagery had sprung up in Italy in the fifteenth ­century and could be found in the handbooks. Few of Spenser’s details can be traced to ­these sources, but their general spirit, especially that of Plutarch, pervades The Faerie Queene. ­T here is a ­great deal of syncretistic speculation in Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris and a certain amount of cultivated mystery, as if Egyptian myths ­really ­were older than the classical ones de­ rived from them. Sphinxes w ­ ere placed before the ­temples to signify the ambiguous and riddling truths they contain, and the statue of Isis her­ self, ­under the form of Athena, bears the famous inscription, “I am all that has been, and is, and s­ hall be, and no mortal has ever drawn back my robe.”8 The overdetermined character of the imagery means that many more meanings than t­ hose the priest identifies for Britomart radiate from this conjuncture of dynamic images in this moment, including, for Sean Kane, “the emergence of fulfilled spiritual personality from the dilemmas of classical ethics,” even if classical ethics are hard to discern at this par­tic­ u­lar point.9 It is an argument that emerges from a deeper reading of the book as a w ­ hole. Indeed, Kane offers in another context a series of possi­ bilities that seems to me to describe the episode well, as so much of Spens­ er’s art. Possibility one: Spenser is criticizing “con­temporary politics from

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the point of view of moral vision.” Possibility two: Spenser is criticizing “the moral ideal from the point of view of po­liti­cal expediency.” Possi­ bility three, the most likely, “arises out of the pressure of not being able to respond with complete range to the other two w ­ hether for reasons of 10 tact or dogma.” This is allegory that wants to suggest a ­great deal without saying anything definite. A fourth possibility might then be that the representative function of the allegorical sign is fi­nally, for poetry, not about a world we already know but rather about one we ­don’t know.11 One marked contrast between, on the one hand, Books One and Two and, on the other hand, Books Five and Six is that ­these ­later books both end on an inconclusive note of failure or of temporary but grave setback and also of disillusionment with regard to the court—­Queen Elizabeth’s court, not the Fairy Queen’s. In the first three books, which are concerned with individual virtues, holiness, temperance, and chastity, the conclu­ sions remain a l­ ittle open and disturbing. Redcross keeps his promise to return to Fairy Court as soon as he has defeated the dragon, which he does, or did, “and Una left to mourne” (FQ I.xii.41). Guyon destroys the “pleasant bowres” and the “Pallace brave” (II.xii.83) of the witch Acrasia, whom he has bound in adamantine chains, and the Palmer restores to their proper ­human forms the beasts who have been enchanted by the witch; but one beast, Grill, is displeased to be restored to h ­ uman form, forgetting or despising “the excellence / Of his creation” and delighting “in filth and foul incontinence.”12 It is best to leave him in this state and simply leave: “Let Grill be Grill, and have his hoggish mind, / But let us hence de­ part, whilest wether serves and winde” (II.xii.87). Such a laissez-­faire at­ titude may be wise in the real world, but it is an oddly temperate way for the Book of Temperance to end, a­ fter the destruction of the garden, not to mention the forcible application of “counsell sage” to the young man Verdant, who was dozing happily in the witch’s embrace before he was rudely awakened (II.xii.82). Temperance is militant, but only up to a point, a limit made vis­i­ble by Grill: it cannot touch the abject mind. The Book of Chastity ends, in the 1590 version, with Britomart “much empassiond” at the sight of the sexual bliss of Amoret and Scudamour (III.xii.49, in 1590 version). T ­ here is no reason for the knight of Chastity not to feel sexual desire—­chastity is not frigidity—­even if the moment is strange. In the 1596 version Britomart returns with Amoret successful from the

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adventure of the House of Busyrane and is “stonisht sore” that Amoret’s husband, Scudamour (and Britomart’s nurse, Glauce), are gone (III.xi.44 and canceled stanza four). T ­ hese events are, as I said, disturbing conclu­ sions, but none of them is wholly inconsistent with deeper thinking on the virtue in question. But is this so with the second installment of three books, which are not on private but rather on social virtues in a descending scale of increas­ ingly fundamental questions, t­ hose concerning Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy? When Artegal, the knight of Justice, is attacked by Envy and Detraction, urged on by the Blatant Beast, or Slander, the poet is recalling the treatment of Lord Grey, the general whom Spenser served on his first ­going into Ireland (FQ V.xii.28–43). Artegal’s robotic companion, Talus, who represents automatic justice, prepares to chastise Detraction with his iron flail. But he is restrained by Artegal, whose only recourse is to keep a stiff upper lip u ­ nder such abuse as he returns to Fairy Court: “So much the more at him still did she scold, / And stones did cast, yet he for nought would swerve / From his right course, but still his way did hold” (V.xii.43). Of course, it would be unjust for him to punish Envy and De­ traction in the real world, where they would be persons, nasty as they are. But surely envy and detraction are among the most unjust of social forces ­because they cannot be answered, ­because they enjoy impunity, like the guerrilla fighter Malengine, of whom Artegal and Talus make short work. Should an idealizing book on justice allow envy and detraction to flourish at the end? Such a question occasions the deeper search that takes place in the following book. As for the Book of Courtesy, it ends with a ­bitter and, however true, discourteously blanket condemnation of courtiers and courts. Does it, and should it, include the court portrayed by Castiglione, in The Courtier, which ends ecstatically and then affably? In Spenser’s legend the Blatant Beast, Slander, breaks the iron chain in which the knight of Courtesy, Cali­ dore, has restrained it and now runs amok through the world “Barking and biting” all worthy persons, “Ne spareth he the gentle Poets rime” (FQ VI.xii.40). Indeed, as we are told in the final stanza of Book Six, the Bla­ tant Beast has brought Spenser’s own poem “into a mighty Peres dis­plea­ sure,” the peer in question being, again, almost certainly Elizabeth’s ­great minister, Lord Burghley. Spenser therefore exhorts his own verse

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not to speak the truth, as in the past, but merely to flatter the g­ reat, as wiser poets do: “Therefore do you my rimes keep better mea­sure, / And seeke to please, that now is counted wisemens threasure” (VI.xii.41). ­Because such bitterness has been a ground note of Spenser’s poetry from the start, we should not be altogether astonished at ­these unhappy lines. Yet they remain a startling way for the most idealistic poem in En­glish to end—­and for the Book of Courtesy to end. ­T hese are last lines of The Faerie Queene that the poet published in his lifetime. He died on the thir­ teenth of January 1599. However, a de­cade ­after Spenser’s death, in 1609, a new publisher, Mat­ thew Lownes, brought out a large, folio volume containing the entire Faerie Queene, based on the edition of 1596. (Instead of the stately pages of the quartos, the folio prints the stanzas in smaller print and in two col­ umns per page.) But something new was added to follow t­hose ­bitter lines ending Book Six: “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie: which both for Forme and M ­ atter, appeare to be parcell of some following Booke of the Faerie Queene, ­under the legend of Constancie. Never before imprinted.” The spec­ ulative tone of this heading indicates that it does not originate with the poet but with an editor or publisher, u ­ nless we are to suppose a deliberate ruse on Spenser’s part, making his poem an example of the ruins of time. The possibility is alluring but doubtful. The Mutabilitie Cantos differ from the rest of The Faerie Queene ­because their theme is not ethical but metaphysical. Spenser addresses what was at the time the deepest of metaphysical issues, made more urgent by re­ cent observations of apparent disorder in the heavens, which since the ancients w ­ ere regarded as the home of metaphysical permanence and order, as in Aristotle’s De Caelo, “On the Heavens.” Galileo’s observations with the telescope ­were still a de­cade in the ­future. Although all ­things on earth are subject to change and decay, the bodies that we see in the heavens, though they move, continually return to their original positions. They never change into anything e­ lse, and they never decay. This is the Ptolemaic system of planetary spheres enclosed by an outer sphere of fixed stars, on which the constellations move in a stately pro­gress around the night sky, each constellation distinct and equidistant from the o ­ thers beside it. Even before the invention of the telescope, this view of perfect heavenly recurrence and harmony was known to be

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untenable. In the proem to Book Five, Spenser describes the constella­ tions r­ unning into one another, as in a traffic pileup: the Ram has shoul­ dered the Bull, which has butted the twins, Gemini, which have crushed the Crab and shoved him into the constellation of Leo: “So now all range, and doe at random rove / Out of their proper places farre away.” It is small won­der that all ­things in this, our lower world are tending the more rapidly to “ruinous decay” (V.proem.6). In Book Five, however, Spenser focuses the prob­lem of cosmic disorder on the moral prob­lem of justice, personified by the constellation Astraea, who once reigned on earth but ­after the golden age fled to Heaven. The issue is ethical, not metaphysical. In the Mutabilitie Cantos the question becomes w ­ hether the decay that we see in the sublunary world is, as was long supposed, an exception to the under­lying self-­identity of t­ hings and the order among them, vis­i­ble in the self-­identity of the heavenly bodies and their orderly motions. Or are even t­ hese highest manifestations of self-­ identity and order, as the titaness Mutabilitie argues, merely temporary ab­ errations from the true state of their being, which is decay and dissolution. Which princi­ple, then, is the foundation of being: order or disorder? This weighty m ­ atter is discussed in a court case before the judge, Dame Nature, with the chief of the Olympian gods, Jove, arguing on one side for permanence and order and with Mutabilitie arguing on the other side for universal change and disorder. Nature ­w ill at the end pronounce in Jove’s f­ avor. But we cannot help feeling—­nor can the poet help feeling it ­either—­that Mutabilitie makes the better case. She does so by intro­ ducing Hesiodic genealogy into steady state cosmology. We do not know for certain that the numbering of the two cantos, six and seven, is authorial, although it is more likely than not that it is. The point may be significant ­because six and seven are followed by an eighth canto amounting to only two stanzas. The number eight may signify the eighth day Sabbath, which is eternity, the “Sabaoths sight” described in the poem’s final words. The two stanzas fall ­under the heading “Canto, unperfite,” or “incomplete.” As is Spenser’s manner throughout The Faerie Queene at the beginning of new cantos, both t­ hese stanzas are retro­ spective and reflective. That they are also concerned with thinking, in keeping with the self-­interpreting manner of The Faerie Queene, is sug­ gested by the repetition in them of the word think.

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The poet thinks, or thoughtfully recalls, the titaness Mutabilitie’s speech (“When I bethinke me on that speech whyleare . . .”; FQ VII.viii.1), in which she claims that all t­ hings, even the heavens, are subject to change and decay. So far as the heavens are concerned, the poet d ­ oesn’t agree, or at least he does not think Mutabilitie is “worthy” to rule over the heavens, which is not quite the same as saying she ­doesn’t. In any event, when the poet thinks of Mutabilitie’s dominion or “sway” in “all ­things e­ lse,” his gorge rises at the thought, filling him with loathing of our ­human state of life, in all its “flowring pride.” We have another sad conclusion shaping up. In the final stanza of The Faerie Queene as we have it, the poet reflects on Nature’s reply to Mutabilitie (“Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd . . .”). Nature has affirmed that “all ­things . . . ​doe their states main­ taine” (FQ VII.vii.58), a metaphysical assertion without theological con­ tent. It is an entirely suitable ­thing for a pagan goddess to say, even with the dark prophecy that follows: “But time ­shall come that all ­shall changed bee, / And from thenceforth none no more change ­shall see” (VII.vii.59). Nature’s understanding may rise as far as that, without illumination from the Bible, which is utterly foreign to her. But in this final stanza the poet reads a ­little more into what she says: all ­things ­will be “firmely stayd / Upon the pillours of Eternity” (VII.viii.2). He goes on, and the preposition for suggests he is no longer recalling what Nature said but following through its theological consequences. That further thought raises the final prayer, addressed to the God of Hosts (“Sabbaoth”: armies of angels): Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd, Of that same time when no more Change ­shall be, But stedfast rest of all ­things firmely stayd Upon the pillours of Eternity, That is contrayr to Mutabilitie: For, all that moveth, doth in Change delight: But thence-­forth all ­shall rest eternally With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: O that g­ reat Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight. FQ VII.viii.2

On the status of the Mutabilitie Cantos with re­spect to the main body of The Faerie Queene critical opinion has varied and prob­ably always ­w ill.

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Even our difficulty knowing ­whether to refer to them in the singular or the plural is an indication of their unsettled status. Their form indicates they belong to the continuing proj­ect The Faerie Queene, as the poet him­ self declares at one point (FQ VII.vi.37). Even so, ­there are remarkable dif­ ferences. The main action, unpre­ce­dentedly, takes place in the heavens, among the Olympian gods. And if it constitutes the “allegorical core,” to use C. S. Lewis’s term, of a f­ uture Book of Constancy, it is far longer and grander than ­others of its kind, as if Spenser ­were in no hurry to get on with the larger structure of another book. What is more, the digression elaborates beautifully on the local, Irish landscape, personifying its streams and even the mountain Galtymore—­ old ­ father Mole—­ overlooking Spenser’s home. With the high philosophical theme of ­these cantos, ­there is a certain grandeur and even sternness to them that sets them apart. Yet they manage to be comical, too, as if their grandeur called for the lightest touch. It comes in that inset tale of the stream nymph Molanna, who for her transgression is overwhelmed with stones, being a mountain stream, but who at last marries, flows into, the river in the valley, Fanchin, which her current longs to join. It is at once a death and a marriage. If we turn back from the poet’s loathing and dismay at the end, we catch sight again of Nature’s cheerful glance and ­behind that the Daoist wisdom of Molanna’s happy ac­cep­tance of change.

Chapter 5

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Allegory in The Faerie Queene

to Raleigh—­printed, as we have observed, as an ap­ pendage to the first installment of The Faerie Queene in 1590—­Spenser re­ fers to his poem as “a continued Allegory, or darke conceit,” one that portrays in the figure of Prince Arthur “the image of a brave knight per­ fected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised.” In his further account of this program Spenser explains that each principal knight in each of the twelve books of his poem, which takes place in Fairy Land—­the perfect realm for such an allegory to unfold in, b ­ ecause it is what Coleridge called “­mental space”1 —­w ill be the “patron” and exem­ plar of one of ­these virtues. By the spacious word patron Spenser implies that the knights are real persons, not personifications, and that the rela­ tion of each knight to one of the “private twelve morall vertues” is fos­ tering, propaedeutic, and aspirational. The values implied in each virtue are ­under the protection of its knightly patron; but the knight’s adven­ tures, and the logical order in which t­ hese unfold, are themselves an ed­ ucation in that virtue, an education in the course of which the knight strives to complete himself in that virtue so far as to embody it perfectly, that is, “completedly,” teleologically. The lady knight, Britomart, is an exception in this as in every­thing e­ lse. From the outset, her virginal chastity is perfect in itself, unassailable, as the virtue of any other knight is not. Yet she seeks another telos, which is her husband, so that her virginal chastity may become the altogether other, married kind, married chastity. Yet even this new, in-­itself-­perfect IN THE LETTER

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state has a further projection, which is into history, in the line of princes culminating in Queen Elizabeth, who corresponds with Britomart as Au­ gustus corresponds with Aeneas. Each of the male knights must at some point fail, so as to show in an external form the internal workings of virtue on the soul. All do fail, therefore, except Britomart. Yet Britomart is the most projected, the most “thrown forward,” among them ­T here is then a deliberately vague connection between the existence, so to speak, of each knight and the abstraction or idea represented and developed in the knight’s quest and story. The knight is not fully real without the idea, and the idea in itself is half effaced, like a palimpsest, ­until the knight traces it out in his quest. Neither is quite real without the other. Such are the curious, ecological exchanges that underlie the world itself—so says any serious and deep allegorical poet—­although they are concealed by our per­sis­tent adherence to the illusion of ­things as ­things in themselves. But in the ­mental and metaphysical space of Fairy Land the truth of universal interpenetrability among beings and thoughts is ex­ posed to view. This is the meaning of Coleridge’s characterization of Fairy Land, which may now be quoted in full: “You w ­ ill take especial note of the marvellous in­de­pen­dence and true imaginative absence of all par­tic­ u­lar space or time in the Faery Queene. It is in the domains neither of his­ tory or geography; it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obstacles; it is truly in the land of Faery, that is, of m ­ ental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep, and you neither wish, nor have the power, to inquire where you are, or how you got ­there.” Understood in this way but taking a further step beyond Coleridge’s consciousness-­bound conception, Fairy Land is not less but more true than our everyday, mundane existence, which we tellingly refer to as objective, that is, as that which is “thrown against” consciousness. For what consciousness receives from the impact, the onslaught of the senses is not what is true but what is useful to survival. For ­human consciousness of the external world evolved to make always more effective the close in­ teraction of the brain with the hand and the eyes—­brain, hand, and eyes having coevolved in mutually accelerating development.2 ­T hings in general—­a mountain, a stream, a fish, a hill—­are what the eyes outline as ­things and the brain grasps with its imaginary hand. But deeper, more temporally aware reflection on the world, the environment, the system

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of enclosure we call ecol­ogy, is removed from this bias of the eye and the hand. Such reflection understands t­ hings in time as fluid in themselves and as fluid in relation to one another and as being entirely subject to change or to what Spenser w ­ ill call mutability. Mutability, the mysterious subject of the uncompleted, last book of The Faerie Queene, is the deepest truth to which allegory’s open thinking points. Arthur is completed, or perfected, by appropriating serially the virtue of each knight who “patronizes” one of the twelve. But his magnificence, or megalopsychia, his “greatness of soul” (the Aristotelian term that Spenser prob­ably alludes to), transcends ­these virtues and is reflected back on them. Arthur perfects the virtues that perfect him, and he does so in two ways: by uniting them in himself and by conferring on each a superordi­ nate greatness of soul and glory—­the very glory he is in quest of, in his search for Gloriana, the Fairy Queen. ­There are then two binding and originative ele­ments for Spenserian al­ legory that the poet intends us, at least in the Letter to Raleigh, to regard as implicit in the phrase continued Allegory, or darke conceit: (a) a reciprocal exchange of ­actual being between the individual knights and Prince Ar­ thur and (b) the ­mental and physical environment of Fairy Land itself, the receptacle where this exchange and other, more localized ones can take place. Fairy Land is the metaphysical region where hard-­surfaced, in­de­ pen­dent entities lose t­ hese properties, melding and interacting with one another and with what is around them. Returning to the Letter to Raleigh, Spenser goes on to say that should ac­cep­tance greet ­these “first twelve books” on the moral virtues, ­those “which they in Philosophy call Ethice” (he uses this phrase to refer par­ ticularly to Tasso’s Rinaldo and as the model for his own treatment of ethics), he “may perhaps be encoraged, to frame the other part of polli­ ticke vertues in [Arthur’s] person, ­after that hee came to be king.” Spenser died in his mid-­to ­later forties (about the age when Milton began Paradise Lost), having completed only six books of this huge, twenty-­four-­book projection. The program described in the Letter to Raleigh may therefore be supposed to afford us “­great light,” as the printer says, or perhaps just some light, by which to see the poet’s “­whole intention in the course of this worke.” But can such a work as The Faerie Queene have a “­whole in­ tention”? When the Letter appeared in 1590, it was already inaccurate on

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some impor­tant details of the poem; and in 1596 the Letter went unpub­ lished with the second installment of the poem, which reprinted the first three books and added three new ones. We do not know why. But we have seen that Spenser may have had moral and aesthetic objections to his own, original plan. The Letter to Raleigh is more elaborate than its probable model, Tor­ quato Tasso’s “Allegoria del poema,” the prose text that Tasso composed in 1576 and appended to the first, 1581 edition of the Gerusalemme liberata, ex­ plaining that the Christian army besieging Jerusalem is a single body, of which Godfredo is the head and Rinaldo the right arm. Tasso’s incorpora­ tion of the army in this image feels and is perfunctory, a largely retrospec­ tive imposition on comparatively realistic characters in a comparatively (and despite the enchantments) realistic work. Spenser’s implication of the twelve knights in his Arthur, supported by their vital and frequent in­ teractions, is far more metaphysical. One point in par­tic­u­lar in Tasso’s al­ legory, as noted by Michael Murrin, would have caught Spenser’s eye: the statement that the allegorical goal of the Christian army in conquering Jerusalem is not religious, despite the intense religious associations of Je­ rusalem, but aggressively secular and utopian.3 It is “civil felicity,” la felicità civile, that is the ­great theme of the Re­nais­sance: the creation of ideal con­ ditions for h ­ uman flourishing on the model of the ideal city, the goal, as Burckhardt saw, of the culture of the Re­nais­sance in Italy, sought ­after by humanists, popes (at least one pope, the humanist Pius II), visual artists, architects, and poets.4 In the kingdoms to the north of Italy, and especially in E ­ ngland, the civic ideal would become a courtly one, with the all-­ important addition of the monarch. For Spenser, therefore, the vision of The Faerie Queene, and the goal of its allegory, is to be the ideal kingdom centered on an ideal court—­Fairy Court at Cleopolis—­illuminated from above by the radiant ideal of the queen.5 Earthly, male leaders are to serve ­under this celestial, female one. The more immediate purpose of the alle­ gory of The Faerie Queene, therefore, is to “fashion” (OED: “to form, mould, shape”) such leaders through active reading, thus provoking them as they think about virtue to fashion themselves from within. It is noteworthy, however, that at this moment Spenser introduces gender-­inclusive language, if that is what is meant by the phrase “noble person”: “The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a

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gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.” That makes sense, given the importance of w ­ omen in his allegory, espe­ cially Britomart, and the impossibility of thinking about civil society without taking half its members into account. But at least in the Letter to Raleigh, and in keeping with the epic tradition he describes ­there, Spenser is more interested in fashioning an image, a pourtraict, as he calls it, but using it as a verb, of the ideal male leader. That is Prince Arthur, before he returned from Fairy Land to ­England to become King Arthur: “I ­labour to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised, the which is the purpose of t­ hese first twelve bookes.” ­There are, however, two sides, a private and a public, to the ideal prince, as captured in the phrase “a good governour and a vertuous man.” Pri­ vate virtue must be developed first: it is “that part [of the ­whole man] which they in Philosophy call Ethike, or vertues of a private man.” The public virtues required to be a “good governour” are the concern of what they in philosophy call “Politice,” or the “polliticke vertues.” Spenser is thinking of the transition in Aristotle indicated at the end of the Nichomachean Ethics in which the phi­los­o­pher declares that the consideration of ethics leads naturally into politics, the subject of his Politics. This was stan­ dard fare in university education of the day, but Spenser shows some orig­ inality (so far as I am able to discern) in his retrospective mapping the two sides of virtue onto the epic tradition. He knows from Tasso’s prose alle­ gorization of his own poem that the Italian poet identified private moral virtue, or ethics, with his knight Rinaldo; in Jerusalem Liberated the ethical is “colourd in his Rinaldo,” where colourd means allegorically figured or, to use a ­later phrase from the Letter, “clowdily enwrapped in Allegorical de­ vises.” It is the word Spenser uses in the proem to Book Three for his indi­ rect and allegorical way of ­going about to represent the queen; Thus farre forth ­pardon, sith that choicest wit Cannot your glorious pourtraict figure plaine That I in colourd showes may shadow it, And antique praises unto pre­sent persons fit. FQ III.proem.3

(Note the use of pourtraict ­here in the nominal sense.)

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The po­liti­cal virtues are represented, so Tasso says and Spenser ­here repeats, in the leader of the first crusade and f­ uture king of Jerusalem, Godfredo, who cannot attain his end without the right-­armed force of the wayward Rinaldo. From Spenser’s analytical point of view, this divi­ sion of the ethical and the po­liti­cal represents a separation of what was formerly, though it never is in Aristotle, a one: “and lately Tasso dissev­ ered them againe, and formed both parts in two persons, namely that part which they in Philosophy call Ethice, or vertues of a private man, coloured in his Rinaldo: The other named Politice in his Godfredo.” Spenser proj­ ects this design, which is conscious and deliberate in Tasso (at least in his prose allegorization), back into the epic tradition from the start. For Spenser sees Tasso as only one point along the noble line of “an­ tique Poets historicall” leading from Homer to Virgil and Ariosto in which private and public virtue are represented, with the goal of attaining to civil felicity. W ­ hether Spenser always thinks of t­ hese poets as allegorists, which I doubt, he does so for the purposes of the design he sketches h ­ ere with such brio. Homer was an allegorist who separated the private and public virtues into the persons of Odysseus and Agamemnon, it being tra­ ditional since late antiquity to see Odysseus’s adventures as allegorical, figuring the growth of virtue or, Neoplatonically, as the journey of the soul through the world. It is perhaps still more of a stretch to claim that in Agamemnon Homer intended to figure the “good governour,” al­ though his eventual submission to Achilles, with a public apology, and his willingness to listen to Odysseus do perhaps suggest the virtues Spenser had in mind. But of course ­there is ­little reason to suppose Homer had such a schematic view of his heroes in mind or that what Homer had analytically separated Virgil put together again, uniting the private and po­liti­cal virtues in Aeneas, and so on. All this is retrospective interpre­ tation of the epic tradition from the hint given in Tasso’s prose allegory. Spenser’s tentative plan is not merely to separate the private and public virtues in two persons but to do so in two poems, or two halves of a single, vast poem in twenty-­four books, if the first twelve meet with public ap­ proval. The second half would deal with the po­liti­cal virtues as repre­ sented in the person of the Fairy Queen herself—­possibly, though not certainly, attended by Arthur (who may by that time have returned to ­England). As we can infer from Book One, in the invocation of the muse

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before Redcross’s fight with the dragon, the Fairy Queen ­w ill exhibit the po­liti­cal virtues by leading a ­great war against the Pagan King. Armada year was 1588. Spenser is pretty clearly supporting through his allegory the war party at Elizabeth’s court, with the Earl of Leicester as its former head (he died in 1588) and his nephew Sir Philip Sidney its sacrificial hero (he died in 1586, fighting the Spanish in the Low Countries). They both favored and w ­ ere the symbols of a more aggressive and indeed all-­out war with Spain and its king, Philip II, “colourd” by Spenser’s Pagan King. The lesson—­one not quite taught by any of ­these ­earlier poets “historicall,” at least so far as Spenser was concerned—is that he who would be a “good governour” must first become a “vertuous man.” Allegory is the force ­behind this becoming; and Fairy Land—­let us call it, instead of “­mental space,” the region of reading—is this realm of ethical becoming. To summarize: The twelve books Spenser plans for The Faerie Queene ­w ill be a pilgrimage and quest allegory, a suitable form for representing virtue in a state of becoming. They ­w ill describe Arthur’s perfection in the moral virtues while he is still a prince and not in Britain but in Fairy Land. The next twelve books in the half-­imagined second poem take place once Arthur is king in ­England fighting Saxon pagans, and the Fairy Queen is leading a war of massed armies against the Pagan King. This second series of twelve books on the po­liti­cal virtues would be a war al­ legory like the Psychomachia (or the final, conquest phase of Jerusalem in Tasso’s account), or it may not be intended to be an allegory at all. On this point—­whether the po­liti­cal virtues need to be represented in allegory or can be portrayed directly, in an epic like the Iliad—it is reasonable to conclude that Spenser had not made up his mind by the time he’d finished the first three books of The Faerie Queene and turned to write the Letter to Raleigh. What Spenser wrote in the first book of The Faerie Queene might incline us to think he plans a straight heroic poem, conceiving it to be higher in generic terms than allegory, which is merely preparatory to the heroic, as the Georgics (in the Re­nais­sance conception of Virgil’s ­career) are pre­ paratory to the Aeneid. We have already taken note of this passage at the beginning of the climactic strug­gle, or agon, in the first book of The Faerie Queene, when the Redcross knight is about to engage the dragon. The poet invokes the “sacred Muse” of epic poetry, who kindles the martial

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courage of heroes. But no sooner has he done so than he asks the muse to “lay that furious fit aside,” reserving her more violent transports for a ­later heroic poem, “a worke of l­ abour long, and endlessse prayse.” The subject of this poem w ­ ill be a g­ reat war between the Fairy Queen and the Pagan King, but the war ­w ill be fought in Britain, not in Fairy Land: Faire Goddesse lay that furious fit aside, Till I of warres and bloody Mars do sing, And Briton fields with Sarazin bloud bedyde, Twixt that ­great faery Queene and Paynim king, That with their horrour heaven and earth did ring, A worke of ­labour long and endlesse prayse: But now a while let downe that haughtie string, And to my tunes thy second tenor rayse, That I this man of God his godly armes may blaze. FQ I.xi.7

Since we have just learned at the end of the preceding canto that Redcross, the ­future Saint George, was given his name ­because as an infant he was found by a ploughman in a furrow (Gr. georgos, from gê, “earth,” and ergeia, “work”), it is not unreasonable to think the poet had at least some­ times thought of allegory as what Francis Bacon called a georgics of the mind. Allegory is a farmer-­like cultivation of the intellect and character, like plowing fields to build up one’s wealth, in preparation for highest achievement of the heroic epic. Such an achievement is heroic for the poet as well as for the hero of his poem. 6 In that case, therefore, the aim of his allegory must always be secular, concerned with good government and leadership in war. Instead of rep­ resenting, in the manner of medieval allegory, a pilgrimage of life through this world to the next, in which the difficult path of moral virtue leads ultimately to Heaven, Spenser falls in with the reigning intellectual con­ cern of the Re­nais­sance, based on Plato’s Republic. It is with how to build the perfect state in this world—or at least to imagine one by fashioning it “in words” (en logois), as “a paradigm, or model in the sky” for humanist governors to follow (Republic 592a–­b). However much moral concern is expressed in medieval, Christian allegory, its telos, or “developed goal,” is salvation of the soul and transcendence in Heaven. But the telos of

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Spenser’s allegory is po­liti­cal justice and social peace in this world, al­ though a social peace achieved ­after war and by means of war. Nowhere is this more evident than where we should least expect it, in the first book of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of Holiness, in which the ideal Re­nais­sance city, Cleopolis, “the city of fame,” is contrasted with the heavenly Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation, that telos of all Christian effort in this world. The knight who is the patron of holiness sees the heavenly Jerusalem in a hilltop vision to which he has been brought by Contemplation, and he acknowledges with fervor that this Jerusalem far surpasses Cleopolis, the “fairest city,” “In which that fairest Faerie Queene doth dwell” (FQ I.x.58). It is left to Contemplation, of all persons, to argue the case for privileging Cleopolis, the “city of fame,” over the heavenly Jerusalem: Most trew, then said that holy agèd man; Yet is Cleopolis for earthly frame, The fairest peece, that eye beholden can: And well beseemes all knights of noble name, That covet in th’immortall booke of fame To be eternized, that same to haunt, And doen their ser­v ice to that soveraigne Dame, That glorie does to them for guerdon graunt: For she is heavenly borne, and heaven may justly vaunt. FQ I.x.59

Worldly duty, worldly ser­v ice, and even an “immortall” worldly fame are preferred to eternity in the heavenly Jerusalem. Nonetheless, in properly Christian fashion the Redcross knight ­will ask not to return to the vanities of this world, and not even to Cleopolis, but instead to remain in place, gazing on Jerusalem, or to start immediately ­toward Jerusalem by seeking the salvation of his soul, as Christian does at the outset of The Pilgrim’s Pro­g ress. Again, it is the aged hermit Contem­ plation, of all persons, who denies this contemplative and prayerful re­ quest, commanding the knight of the Red Cross to resume his original intention and duty, which is to serve the “royal maid” Una, “Truth,” by sub­ duing her foe, the serpent in Eden, who over time, in ­human history, has grown into a ­great dragon:

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That may not be (said he) ne maist thou yit Forgoe that royall maides bequeathèd care, Who did her cause into thy hand commit, Till from her cursèd foe thou have her freely quit. FQ I.x.63

Redcross is then informed by Contemplation that he is not a fairy knight but was born of the ancient race of Saxon kings, that he was stolen as an infant by a fairy. But “prickt with courage” this man of the earth came to Fairy Court to become a knight and “seek for fame” (FQ I.x.66). Thus it is that the knight of Holiness must turn away from the holiest place and the telos of Christian allegory, the heavenly Jerusalem, which appears at the end of the Bible. He must do so to f­ ree h ­ uman nature from the effects of sin in this pre­sent world by liberating Eden, which appears at the beginning of the Bible. (Milton’s highly po­liti­cal Paradise Regained, which shows “Eden raised in the waste wilderness” [1.5], is perhaps more inspired by Spenser’s first book than is usually supposed.) The transcendent claim of Jerusalem is never denied, nor could it be, but it is perpetually deferred, thus opening a space for utopian allegory, a thinking of the po­liti­cal prob­lem based on the Garden of Eden and its “earth man,” Adam. The Edenic and original state of humanity can and has been an image, indeed it has long been the image, for the achievable condition of h ­ uman perfection, arrived at by po­ liti­cal wisdom. That is something the heavenly Jerusalem can never be. Hence Eden is for Spenser, as it ­will be for Milton and as it has been already for Dante, the place where po­liti­cal perfection can be thought. It is to be expected, therefore, that Spenser ­w ill go on in the Letter to Raleigh to speak of po­liti­cal thinkers as models, in par­tic­u­lar (having al­ ready dealt with Aristotle) Xenophon and Plato—­a theme sounded in Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (1579; published in 1595). Plato’s Republic is regarded as too abstract for poetry—­although, of course, the poet can gain much from its study—­whereas Xenophon gives a lively image of the just state, an “effigiem iusti imperii, the pourtraiture of a just Empire,” as Sidney says, amounting to “an absolute heroicall Poem.”7 Oddly, but with striking ingenuity once we see it, Spenser justifies his using allegory as an embodied image of perfection on analogy to Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, ­because it shows the state as it “might best be” rather than, like Plato, as it

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“should be.” Some graver persons—­one may fairly suppose Lord Burghley is never far from Spenser’s thoughts when he speaks thus—­would prefer “good discipline” to be “delivered plainly in way of precepts.” D ­ oing that is said to be following the example of Plato’s Republic (which is perhaps not so plain as is ­here implied), instead of representing virtue in lively, sto­ ried images, “clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall devises.” This passage of Spenser’s thinking appears to be intended for the one purpose of jus­ tifying the medieval “Methode” of allegorical repre­sen­ta­tion for the ­mental grasping of the po­liti­cal prob­lem: “To some I know this Methode ­w ill seeme displeasaunt, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they use, then thus clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall devises.” ­A fter the discussion of Arthur, and of Xenophon, another side to Spenser’s allegory is disclosed in the Letter to Raleigh: the feminine side, which concerns the object of Arthur’s love, the Fairy Queen, Gloriana: “In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my par­tic­u­lar I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our sover­ aine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land. And yet in some places els, I doe other­w ise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady, this latter part in some places I doe expresse in Belphoebe, fashioning her name according to your owne excellent con­ ceipt of Cynthia [Phoebe and Cynthia being both names of Diana].” As Arthur has his projections or avatars in the twelve patrons of the virtues, so Gloriana has hers in Belphoebe, as the poet mentions also in the proem to Book Three: “But e­ ither Gloriana let her chuse, / Or in Belphoebe fashioned to bee: / In th’one her rule, in the other her rare chastitee” (FQ III.proem.5). In the poem itself, it is pretty clear that, in addition to Gloriana and Belphoebe, the dynastic person of the martial Britomart is an avatar of Gloriana and hence of Elizabeth, representing, as we s­ hall see, the queen’s po­liti­cal wisdom u ­ nder the figure of Britomart’s martial prowess, recalling Elizabeth’s appearance in full armor at Tilbury, defying and thinking “foul scorn” of King Philip of Spain and the Spanish Armada. Indeed, ­every positive female figure in the poem—­Mercilla, for example, as the female symbol of justice—is an avatar of Gloriana and therefore of Queen Elizabeth. This is notably so with Florimell, the personification

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of natu­ral beauty, and also—­though set apart at a cautious distance from the aged queen—­the marriageable Amoret. In classic allegorical form, the main characters in the poem, Gloriana and Arthur—­they are the main characters at least in the poem’s theory of itself—­are broken up into parts and projected into their avatars: “in some places els, I doe other­w ise shadow her.” Since Gloriana is the prime symbol of Queen Elizabeth, to whom the poem is dedicated and intended to praise as a w ­ oman monarch, this side is certainly no less po­liti­cal than the masculine model of twelve knights enfolded into Arthur’s repre­sen­ta­tion of magnificence, the virtue that is “the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all.” Indeed, Glo­ riana is herself the perfection of perfections, although she is remoter than Arthur and must therefore be more decisively displaced into the poem, in the person of Britomart. In a drastic scaling up of Chaucer’s “Tale of Sir Thopas,” Prince Arthur has seen the Fairy Queen in a dream vision (recounted more fully in canto nine of Book One) and has now come to Fairy Land to find her, motivated by love. We are again in the territory of medieval allegory, the form of which in this instance is not pilgrimage but rather what C. S. Lewis called “the allegory of love,” on the model of the Roman de la r­ ose. In both ver­ sions of this ­great poem—­its early part by Guillaume de Lorris and the ­later, massive extension by Jean de Meun—­the ­rose is the desired object that cannot be obtained or even seen ­until the end. But projections of this personage, the ­rose, are seen and encountered, Doubt, Delay, and Daunger, for example, who make their appearance in The Faerie Queene as ele­ments in its allegory of love at the well-­defended ­Castle of Venus, “seated in an Island strong,” thus declaring the poet’s allegiance to the rich medieval tradition of the Roman de la ­rose (FQ IV.x.6, 12–16). Gloriana, the Fairy Queen, is just such a projector of her parts. Her dif­ ference from Arthur in this regard, as I mentioned e­ arlier, is that her composition of parts is understood analytically—­that is, as the opening out of a fullness that is already pre­sent at the start—­whereas Arthur’s composition is presented synthetically, that is, as a “putting together” of ele­ments originally outside him. Gloriana is that ideal whom we do not encounter in the poem and whom we would not have encountered u ­ ntil the end, when Arthur would have come into her presence—so, as we have seen, the eighteenth-­century

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commentator John Upton i­ magined it, not without discernment—­leading a pro­cession of the twelve knights personifying, or rather patronizing, the twelve moral virtues. We are ready for a marriage of Magnificence to Glory and for the attainment of “civil felicity.” Or ­else we are ready for a war. I have said that Gloriana is more po­liti­cal than Arthur b ­ ecause, in the first instance, she represents the En­glish head of state, Queen Elizabeth, to whom the poem is dedicated. More impor­tant, so far as the internal work­ ings of the poem are concerned, Gloriana is the central figure for the posi­ tive politicization of love, in sharp contrast to the Latin tradition from Virgil to Tasso, in which eroticism and heroism are divergent, not conver­ gent, values. Aeneas must leave Dido if Rome is to be founded; Rinaldo must leave Armida if Jerusalem is to be conquered. It is other­wise in The Faerie Queene. Love, as the poet says in the proem to Book Four, thinking back to the previous, Book Three, with its elaborate treatment of the erotic, is the root of martial achievement: “For it of honor and all vertue is / The roote, and brings forth glorious flowres of fame” (FQ IV.proem.2). This convergent view of love and martial valor is announced in the proem to Book One, which is also the introduction to The Faerie Queene. The power of love infused into Arthur by Cupid, causing him to seek out Gloriana (glory) in Fairy Land, kindles in his breast—so the allegory indicates—­a desire for martial glory. The subjection of Mars to Venus—­a theme usually presented humorously, in connection with marriage, as in Botticelli’s ­great painting on the subject, is now offered, although still with a trace of humor, in an allegorically serious vein, as the foundation of Arthur’s martial glory: And thou most dreaded impe of highest Jove, Faire Venus sonne, that with thy cruell dart At that good knight so cunningly didst rove, That glorious fire it kindled in his hart, Lay now thy deadly Heben bow apart, And with thy ­mother milde come to mine ayde: Come both, and with you bring triumphant Mart, In loves and gentle jollities arrayd, ­After his murdrous spoiles and bloudy rage allayd. FQ I.proem.3

(Triumphant is not an adjective modifying Mart, or Mars, but an adverb modifying bring: “lead Mars in your triumph.”)

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The validation of love is an impor­tant theme in Book One ­because it is Redcross’s love of his lady Una, “truth,” that inspires him to his glorious deed. In Book Two, exceptionally, eroticism is always suspect. It is fi­nally disastrous for the victims of Acrasia, who is “intemperance,” as the ety­ mology of her name implies (a, “privative” + krasis, “mixture,” as with un­ tempered wine, wine not mixed with ­water) and even more emphatically “incontinence,” b ­ ecause her primary means of destroying her victims is by alluring them into erotic oblivion. At the climax of Book Two, Acrasia is seen with her newest victim naked in her arms a­ fter lovemaking, her breast moist “though langour of her late sweet toyle,” the drops of perspi­ ration ­running down her skin “like Orient pearls,” while her eyes shine “like starry light / Which sparkling on the ­silent waves, does seeme more bright.” Through her bewitching gaze and even more her “kisses light” she draws forth her victim’s soul: “And through his humid eyes did sucke his spright, / Quite molten into lust and plea­sure lewd; / Wherewith she sighed soft, as if his case she rewd” (FQ II.xii.78, 73). A man who can write like that (as ­women have too) knows whereof he speaks. The Venus mastering Mars theme, ultimately derived from the comic tale in the Odyssey, is h ­ ere expressed in its most unambiguously negative terms, which the Latin culture of the Re­nais­sance happily afforded, with eroticism and martial valor being explic­itly incompatible and divergent: The young man sleeping by her, seemd to bee Some goodly swayne of honorable place, That certes it g­ reat pittie was to see Him his nobilitie so foule deface . . . . . . . . . . . . His warlike armes, the idle instruments Of sleeping praise, ­were hong upon a tree, And his brave shield, full of old moniments, Was fowly ra’st, that none the signes might see; Ne for them, ne for honour carèd hee, Ne ­ought, that did to his advauncement tend, But in lewd loves, and wastfull luxuree, His dayes, his goods, his bodie did he spend: O horrible enchantment, that him so did blend. FQ II.xii.79–80

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In a variation on the much-­imitated Homeric tale in which Ares and Aph­ rodite are caught in the net of Hephaestus, the Palmer and Guyon catch the witch and her lover, Verdant, as he is called, indicating green youth, in “A subtile net, which onely for the same / The skilfull Palmer formally did frame”: “The faire Enchauntresse, so unwares opprest, / Tryde all her arts, and all her sleights, thence out to wrest. / And eke her lover strove: but all in vaine” (II.xii.81–82).8 The one feature that aligns the Book of Temper­ ance with the legitimation of female rule is the figure on Guyon’s shield, which is of Gloriana. It has apotropaic effect when noted by Redcross, who, given his e­ arlier erotic aberrations, narrowly avoids fighting the knight of Temperance: his “hastie hand so farre from reason strayd, / That almost it did haynous vio­lence / On that faire image of that heavenly Mayd, / That decks and armes your shield with faire defence” (II.i.28). It is in Book Three that the legitimation of a ­woman’s authority to be head of state is vindicated in full, as is the validation of ­women generally for the exercise of po­liti­cal wisdom (although this is emphatically undone in Book Five, when Britomart herself, reforming the polity of Radi­ gund, establishes true justice by restoring w ­ omen “To mens subjection” [FQ V.vii.42]). The validation is affirmed on almost the only terms avail­ able to Spenser, t­ hose of martial prowess (I say “almost” thinking of the dedicatory sonnet to Lord Burghley, “on whose mightie shoulders most doth rest / The burdeine of this kingdomes gouvernement” [lines 3–4] and whose “rugged forhead . . . ​Welds kingdomes ­causes, and affaires of state” [IV.proem.1]): ­ ere have I cause, in men just blame to find, H That in their proper prayse too partiall bee, And not indifferent to w ­ oman kind, To whom no share of armes and chevalrie They do impart, ne maken memorie Of their brave gestes and prowesse martiall; Scarse do they spare to one or two or three, Rowme in their writs; yet the same writing small Does all their deeds deface, and dims their glories all. But by rec­ord of antique times I find, That ­women wont in warres to beare most sway, And to all ­great exploits themselves inclind:

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Of which they still the girlond bore away, Till envious Men fearing their rules decay, Gan coyne steight lawes to curb their liberty; Yet sith they warlike armes have layd away, They have exceld in artes and pollicy, That now we foolish men that prayse gin eke t’envy. FQ III.ii.1–2

In the narrative, t­ hese stanzas are introduced in praise of Britomart, who has been surprised at night in her smock and, unarmed except for her sword, has just defeated in fight, with Redcross as her ally, the six treach­ erous knights at Malacasta’s ­castle. It is a terrific ­battle, by candlelight: On th’other side, they saw the warlike Mayd All in her snow-­white smocke, with locks unbownd, Threatening the point of her avenging blade, That with so troublous terrour they w ­ ere all dismayde. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wherewith enrag’d she fiercely at them flew, And with her flaming sword about her layd, That none of them foule mischiefe could eschew, But with her dreadfull strokes ­were all dismayd: ­Here, ­there, and ­every where about her swayd Her wrathfull steele, that none mote it abide; And eke the Redcrosse knight gave her good aid, Ay joining foot to foot, and side to side, That in short space their foes they have quite terrifide. FQ III.i.63, 66

We have seen before that Britomart is Spenser’s way of getting the sym­ bolic values he associates with Gloriana into the action of the poem. In the old days, w ­ omen ­were fighters as much as men. But since then, having been legally compelled by men to put aside arms, ­women have distin­ guished themselves “in artes and pollicy.” This latter praise is not di­ rected at Britomart, of course, though it might be said to apply through her to Gloriana. But its real object is Queen Elizabeth, as Spenser now makes clear:

Allegory in The Faerie Queene   165 Of warlike puissance in ages spent, Be thou faire Britomart, whose prayse I write, But of all wisdome be thou pre­ce­dent, O soveraigne Queene, whose prayse I would endite. FQ III.ii.3

It is also in Book Three, in its proem, that Spenser makes his fullest statement outside the Letter to Raleigh on the female side of his allegor­ ical program, balancing the pre­sen­ta­tion of Arthur in the Letter to Ra­ leigh as the perfection of the twelve private moral virtues. In this book, the virtue to be celebrated and analytically displayed is chastity: it is “The Legend of Britomartis. Or, Of Chastitee.” Chastity turns out to be a com­ posite virtue, including qualities that are themselves composites to be di­ vided up in turn in the narrative to come: beauty (Florimell), allure (Amoret), glory (Britomart), and splendid activity (Belphoebe). But the central issue of the proem to Book Three is expression by “ensamples” drawn from “Faery” (1) or from antiquity (3) and, above all, by repre­sen­ta­ tion or mimesis, understood visually as portraiture, multiple portraiture, and as the proliferation of images when multiple mirrors reflect an orig­ inal that cannot be found among them, ­because they are secondary. In all cases the issue is the separation of the person signified from the nar­ rower signifier, which represents only one of the qualities of this orig­ inal. This separation is of the essence of allegory: the pre­sen­ta­tion of the written work or picture as secondary with re­spect to a meaning (“Chas­ tity”) or a presence (“dred Soveraine”) that remains inaccessible, notion­ ally concealed b ­ ehind the veil of fiction. Allegories unfold in this fertile region of secondariness. It is fertile not only b ­ ecause images proliferate within it—­the fleeting beauty of Florimell, the tortured integrity of Amoret, the martial valor of Britomart, and the swift, violent grace of Bel­ phoebe—­but also ­because the feeling of secondariness calls for further interpretation of ­these figures in the extended realm of secondariness, which is commentary, the “field” of allegorical interpretation. In the opening stanza the poet announces his subject, chastity, and asks why he should seek for remote instances of it in Fairy Land (“Forreine en­ samples”) when its presence is nearer to home, enshrined like a small

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statue within the queen’s breast. This nearer presence, of course, turns out to be remote, ­because even though the quality represented by the stat­ uette of chastity informs the queen’s “each perfect part,” for ladies to learn this emblematic example ­w ill require that they consider and reflect on the interior region, in her heart, where chastity is lodged. But they ­will need to consider this region through its repre­sen­ta­tion in a portrait, “If pourtrayd it might be by any living art.” On that if hangs the rest of this complex proem on the epistemology of allegory: It falls me h ­ ere to write of Chastity, That fairest vertue, farre above the rest; For which, what needs me fetch from Faery Forreine ensamples, it to have exprest? Sith it is shrined in my Soveraines brest, And formd so lively in each perfect part, That to all Ladies, which it have profest, Need but behold the pourtraict of her hart, If pourtrayd it might be by any living art. But living art may not least part expresse, Nor life-­resembling pencill it can paint, All ­were it Zeuxis or Praxiteles: His daedale hand would faile, and greatly faint, And her perfections with his error taint: Ne Poets wit, that passeth Painter farre In picturing the parts of beautie daint, So hard a workmanship adventure darre, For fear through want of words her excellence to marre. FQ III.proem.1–2

In this second stanza the enshrined image of chastity, which cannot be portrayed by mimesis, or “living art,” has proliferated into the visual arts in general, represented by the painter Zeuxis and the sculptor Praxiteles. This direct, mimetic way of proceeding fails everywhere, tainting spiri­ tual perfections by substantial repre­sen­ta­tion, in paint and marble. The more spiritual medium of words, employed by the poet, is far superior to inert substances employed in the visual arts. For language is usually capable of describing exemplary chastity and its radiance in the body, that

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is, through all the “parts” of beauty, and poetry is usually capable of achieving this by mimesis. But not in this instance. In this instance the poet’s predicament is the same as that of the visual artist, although on a higher level: all mimetic words ­w ill taint and mar the excellence of her chastity and beauty. In the next stanza the poet laments his predicament, being only an ap­ prentice in the skill formerly wielded by the most divinely gifted prac­ti­ tion­ers, such as Homer and Virgil. But they w ­ ere lucky, ­because as hard as their task was, their subject ­matter was inferior to Spenser’s (one sees perhaps ­here the seed of Milton’s idea that the subject of his epic is higher than any epic written before). Spenser’s unfortunate lot is to be constrained to write of a queen whom even the greatest and most gifted of poets of the classical age (“choicest wit,” where “choice” implies, as in Milton, classical) could never hope to portray directly, in “figure plaine,” that is, by mimesis. Even t­ hese classical poets, though their wits are divine, would have been constrained to compose indirectly, in allegory, using what Spenser calls, in perhaps the most impor­tant phrase he employs to refer to his art, “colourd showes.” Although they are colored, ­these shows stand in the shadow of the presence they refer to, just as ancient heroes and heroines, captured for this poem as allegorical symbols, are put into the shade by the presence (“pre­sent persons”) to which they now refer: How then ­shall I, Apprentice of the skill, That whylome in divinest wits did raine, Presume so high to stretch mine ­humble quill? Yet now my lucklesse lot doth me constraine Hereto perforce. But O dred Soveraine Thus farre forth ­pardon, sith that choicest wit Cannot your glorious pourtraict figure plaine That I in colourd showes may shadow it, And antique praises unto pre­sent persons fit. FQ III.proem.3

In apparent contradiction to this subordination of mimesis to allegory, the following stanza praises Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem Cynthia, a ­little strangely to be sure, as representing the queen “in living colours, and right

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hew” as the moon. Our poet is ravished by the “melting sweetness” of Ra­ leigh’s complaints as the ocean longing for the moon and being attracted to it physically, as seen in the rising tides—­a suitable image for a coasting sailor who knows much about tides. He is also lulled almost into uncon­ sciousness by the beams of the moon as Raleigh describes them: “That with his melting sweetnesse ravished, / And with the won­der of her beames bright, / My senses lullèd are in slomber of delight” (FQ III. proem.4). The final stanza of this proem continues the compliment to Raleigh, praying him, as a courtly and sophisticated poet (the classical meaning of delicious), to “lend / A ­little leave” to Spenser’s “rusticke Muse.” If this ­were m ­ usic—­and in the deeper, structural sense, not just for its sound, Spenser’s poetry is musical—­one might call Spenser’s allusion to his rus­ ticity a remote key with re­spect to the tonic, which is the difficulty of repre­sen­ta­tion. (The dominant key would then be the difference between the visual arts and poetry.) But he now returns with unexpected swift­ ness to that tonic key when he asks that the queen—­still referred to as Raleigh’s Cynthia—­condescend to see herself in his poem, although she ­w ill see herself only as she is analyzed allegorically into her qualities, which are, to name only two of them, her authority to rule and her super­ natural chastity: But let that same delicious Poet lend A ­little leave unto a rusticke Muse To sing his mistresse prayse, and let him mend, If ­ought amis her liking may abuse: Ne let his fairest Cynthia refuse, In mirrours more then one her selfe to see, But ­either Gloriana let her chuse, Or in Belphoebe fashionèd to bee: In th’one her rule, in th’other her rare chastitee. FQ III.proem.5

“Colourd showes” that “shadow” and “mirrours more then one” that re­ flect dif­fer­ent and proliferating images have fundamentally the same meaning. They characterize the allegorical way of proceeding in this poem as always secondary with re­spect to an absent presence to which

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they refer as signs. It is in the nature of allegory always to do this: to pre­ sent itself as secondary. The effect of such a pre­sen­ta­tion is to draw forth from the reader a more active kind of engagement with the text, which is interpretation. It is not just a m ­ atter of seeing and admiring a resemblance, as with mimesis, but rather of finding that resemblance in the course of one’s interpretative work. As I said, one effect of Spenser’s allegory, which he describes in this proem by means of ­those plurals—­“colourd showes” and “mirrours more then one”—is poetic proliferation in the text, into figures like Belphoebe, Amoret, and Britomart, with the numerous com­ plications of their stories. But another effect is to extend the field of al­ legorical proliferation beyond the text of the poem into its larger social presence in the culture and in the f­ uture. That presence is expressed through ­those interpretations that have already been executed and ­those, unimaginably numerous, that are yet to come. This larger, social devel­ opment is the goal Spenser seeks when he refers to content of his poem as “clowdily enwrapped in Allegorical devises.”

Chapter 6

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For a General Theory of Allegory

so far as ­these may be specified, on which allegories—­that is, self-­consciously allegorical works—­are composed, that is, “put together” and assembled? And how are such works employed—­ ­how are they read, interpreted, transmitted, and taught—in varying cultural circumstances, spreading out in space and ­going forward in time? ­T hese are synoptic, or nonhistorical, questions about allegory, with the advan­ tages in clarity and the considerable limitations in accuracy with re­spect to par­tic­u­lar cases that go with such a point of view. It should be said at the outset, however, that allegory, like its imaginary opposite, the symbol, has existed more in the minds of interpreters and critics than it ever has in the many literary works that have been called “allegorical” or “allegories.” But in many works t­ here are allegorical moments, usually involving transparent personifications and usually enframed by the spoken discourse of someone inside the narrative who is teaching a lesson, as in Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield. Sometimes such figures appear as agents in the narrative, as with Virgil’s fury Ira or Sin and Death in Paradise Lost. Often in t­ hese instances, however, the figures in question are meant to be taken not as signs but as ­really existing beings, or daemons, rather like such figures in Hesiod. It would be vain to suppose that critics and teachers ­will ever stop following the eighteenth-­century critics of Milton, culminating in Dr. Johnson, in referring to the allegory of Sin and Death and then criticizing the allegory, which should be purely ideal, for actually d ­ oing ­things in the physical world, such as building a bridge W H AT A R E T H E P R I N C I ­P L E S ,

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across chaos, thus committing “a work too bulky for ideal architects.”1 But for the purposes of close criticism it is an error to call ­these Hesiodic daemons “allegorical” ­because they are not secondary signs with re­spect to any meaning beyond them. They r­ eally are the t­ hings that they are called. She is Sin, and he is Death. They are not signs for ­these ­things but their a­ ctual ­causes and agents. Our prob­lem in The Faerie Queene is the difficulty of drawing a line—it is difficult, b ­ ecause it ­can’t be done—­between the ontic and the signifying functions of such characters, such as Error and Despaire in Book One, Furor and Occasion in Book Two, Malbecco / Jealousy in Book Three, Ate in Book Four, Munera and Pollente in Book Five, and the Blatant Beast in Book Six. From all ­these figures, and many more, it is clear that Spenser, like William Langland before him in Piers Plowman (for example, in his de­ scription of the pathetic, self-­punishing vices), does not wish us to think of them purely as signs constructed by him to point to something ­else, that is, to think of them as personifications. The poet in Spenser wants ­these figures to be terrifyingly real. What we can say at the outset is that the presence in large numbers of such undecidable figures—­self-­referring, ontic signifiers—is a strong in­ dication that the work in question is one of ­those rarer but impor­tant examples of the genre allegory. Such a work is not an allegory in the weak, factitious, and illusory sense of the allegorical interpreters of Homer and Virgil, and of many another a­ fter them, but in the peculiarly intentional sense of the author who says that his entire work is “clowdily enwrapped in allegorical devices,” a “continued Allegory, or darke conceit.” It is one ­thing for figures or even episodes in a literary work (or personifications in paintings) to be constructed allegorically and so intended. It is another ­thing for the entire work to be presented as a text, secondary to a discur­ sive meaning floating beyond it, in the critical ether. The claim is for sig­ nifying consistency throughout, a claim that became an expectation in eighteenth-­century notions of allegory. But this claim does not need to be actually true. What is impor­tant is the invoking of a convention, of a contract between reader and author as the latter is represented by his or her text (“her,” for example, in the case of Christine de Pizan), by which the reader agrees to interpret every­thing as pointing to a meaning, a log­os beyond, and the author agrees to pre­sent the poem as at ­every moment

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secondary with re­spect to this log­os. But the effect is to throw into brighter appearance the figures pointing to it. The literary and artistic genre that dominated the art and lit­er­a­ture of the ­Middle Ages and, to a lesser degree, the Re­nais­sance emerged in the early ­M iddle Ages: Prudentius’s early fifth-­century Psychomachia is usu­ ally given as the start date.2 But t­ here are Greek works from the second ­century reflecting the ­earlier, stoical tradition of interpreting myths alle­ gorically. ­T hese are the Tablet of Cebes, a pseudonymous work not by the fourth-­century bce phi­los­o­pher of that name, describing a painting of the journey of life as the ascent of a mountain, a work popu­lar and influ­ ential in the eigh­teenth ­century, especially in the allegories of Johnson (compare his Vision of Theodore: The Hermit of Teneriffe); Lucian’s Calumny of Apelles, a description by that late but classically minded phi­los­o­pher and satirist of a painting (possibly imaginary) by the ­great fourth-­century painter, brilliantly re-­created by Botticelli; and the complex, Christian visionary allegory The Pastor, or Shepherd, of Hermas (i.e., “The Shepherd,” by Hermas). Early allegory, especially Christian allegory, emerged from the conver­ gence of three historical currents in the ancient world: (1) the formaliza­ tion of rhe­toric at Alexandria, which introduces the word allegory and treats it as an instrument of persuasion, as with Aesop’s fables; (2) herme­ neutics, or “interpretation of the poets” (ἡρμηνεία τῶν ποιήτων), the al­ legorical interpretation of Hesiod, of the Orphica, and especially of Homer, a practice mentioned dismissively by Plato, which came at length to regard the reading of literary texts as analogous to participation in the ancient, religious mysteries themselves (τα μυστήρια, from a verb meaning “to close”) and placing some emphasis on the justification of ob­ scure allegorical expression as concealing the truth from profane eyes; (3) personification or, more primitively, what Angus Fletcher called “dae­ monic agency,” which appears to belong in some form to all ­human cul­ tures and to the nature of language itself.3 In the classical age daemonic figures like t­ hose so abundantly encountered in Hesiod begin to take on a more rational and less terrifying form. Rather than being in­de­pen­dent agents that actually exist, like the gods, though on a lower plane and as lesser divinities, the di minuti, they come to be seen as pure inventions by the author for the purpose of representing thought.

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' c­ entury ce Roman rhetorician Quintilian to the pre­ sent day, almost twenty centuries ­later, the usual definition of allegory— at least in reference works and handbooks of literary terms—­has been “continued meta­phor”: ἀλληγορίαν facit continua μεταφορά, “continued meta­phor makes allegory.” It is perhaps the most successful meme of lit­ erary theory outside Aristotle’s Poetics, with its notion of catharsis. But the context of this definition of allegory is the narrow one of Alexandrian rhe­ torical theory, in which the best examples of allegory are s­ imple fables that help to persuade crowds or to win over juries, such as Jotham’s par­ able of the trees, spoken in public to the men of Shechem, who have just made the useless Abimelech king. The trees seek to name one of them king, but the useful trees—­the olive, the fig, and the vine—­all decline; only the bramble agrees (Judges 9:7–16). Although Quintilian discusses allegory in the eighth book of the Institutio oratoria as a species of inversio, or inversion, his successful definition occurs in the ninth book of the Institutio oratoria (9.2.46), in the course of a discussion of irony: “so that in the same way that continued meta­phor makes an allegory, a joined se­ ries of tropes [reversed meanings] makes this scheme [of irony]” (ut, quem ad modum ἀλληγορίαν facit continua μεταφορά, sic hoc schema faciat tropos ille contextus). Quintilian gives a fuller treatment of allegory in the eighth book, translating the Greek word, somewhat tendentiously, as inversio, so as to associate it with irony. The etymology of the Greek word allegoria, meaning to speak something other than what one means and to mean something other than what one speaks (allo, “other” + agoreuo, “I speak”), would have been evident to Quintilian’s audience and also signaled the origin of the term in Hellenistic rhetoricians such as Aelius Theon, also a first-­century writer, in his preparatory lessons in rhe­toric, Progymnasmata. As ­these three influences came together, they ­were united by another, which is the emergence in the M ­ iddle Ages of what may be termed the culture of the sign, that is, a religious culture in which every­thing in na­ ture, ­because created by God, has a secret significance pointing back to the Creator. A striking example from Pope Gregory the G ­ reat is the vulture that descends from the skies to devour carrion, bearing the carrion F RO M T H E F I R S T

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in its stomach up into the heavens again. 4 This is an image of the Incar­ nation, of Christ’s descent upon our carrion flesh and his bearing us up again to Heaven. Every­thing in nature bears such secondary and unex­ pected meaning: white roses signify virgins, red roses martyrs. The system was given encyclopedic form in the high ­Middle Ages in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum naturale, the “Mirror of Nature,” as Emile Mâle dem­ onstrated in his analy­sis of the allegorical symbolism in the medieval cathedrals. The w ­ hole is expressed in the single phrase of Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, which can still be seen on the abbey doors: mens hebes ad verum per materialia sugit, “the frail mind rises to truth by material t­ hings.”5 Within this transcendentalizing enframement it was reasonable also to regard works of lit­er­a­ture—at least works with high prestige, such as ­those of Virgil and Ovid—as referring beyond themselves to invisible spiritual truths. It was only natu­ral that ambitious Christian authors such as Prudentius should take up the challenge of transcendental writing, of “saying the other,” using conventional personifications that are emphat­ ically not daemons or powers, potentiae, like Aphrodite, goddess of love, but are signs entirely distinct from the abstract concepts for which they stand. Entirely? That is certainly what was intended, to avoid the idolatry of as­ suming minor gods. The allegorical mind-­set, which took all t­ hings as signs pointing, ultimately, together to a single truth, meant that personi­ fications w ­ ere supposed to be entirely in the realm of signs and intended as such by their authors.

' return to our opening questions: what is allegory, and how is it used? The answer to the first is that allegories are loosely assembled or “composed” works of art. They capture their ele­ments—­symbols, char­ acters, stories, quotations, and iconic structures—­largely from the material remains of the past. Where they do not, they still cultivate the ap­ pearance of being an assemblage of heterogeneous materials. One thinks also of the Northwest Coast art of the Haida and other groups, the as­ sembled character of which is in continual allusion to a vast body of sto­ ries in the spirit world. 6 Allegory has also a largely unexplored heritage in fragmentary and al­ lusive modern lit­er­a­ture, especially poetry, from high modernist works—­ L E T U S N OW

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­ he Waste Land (1922), Harmonium (1923), the Duino Elegies (1923, espe­ T cially the tenth), the Cantos (1925–70), and Paterson (1942–58)—to work by con­temporary poets when this work fulfills three conditions, as it so often does: (a) it must be long; (b) it must be fragmentary; and (c) it must be mysterious. Such works are not allegories—or they are, perhaps, sprung allegories—­but their character, the kind of involved, commentary reading they are intended to draw forth from readers, is drawn from the thousand-­year prestige of the allegorical tradition. The first, length, has to do with scale and requires sustained and se­ rious effort from the reader. The second, fragmentariness, has to do with surface, requiring the reader to build in a higher degree of unity among the parts by means of interpretative intervention. The third has to do with the unavailability and yet, as it seems, the omnipresence of floating intention, a sense of pervading mystery, so that no interpretation can be final. E ­ very interpretation is therefore a per­for­mance and has itself a ritual character. The ele­ments in such art retain a sense of their former heterogeneity, of not quite belonging all together without some extra, unseen force to unite them, to make them “stand together,” as with the Aristotelian systasis. But for Aristotle the systasis is a ­matter of plot, of making the series of events fit tightly together in a chain of ­causes with the feeling of ne­ cessity. In the looser system of allegory the unity in question is less like a chain of ­causes than it is like an electromagnetic field: events and objects are deployed by the author as signs in this directional field, in which they point all together to a meaning beyond them. The further effect on the reader—­may we call it the source of allegory’s aesthetic pleasure?—is to elicit an interpretative response, which is pleas­ur­able ­because it reduces hermeneutic anxiety and makes one feel wise. The soul of tragedy is mythos, that of allegory, log­os.

' of the Philosophical Investigations Ludwig Wittgenstein states his opposition to the Augustinian view of language, also known as the picture theory of language, according to which words have meaning by virtue of their standing for ­things individually, as in a picture or as if one w ­ ere pointing. In combination, the words make up a picture of a AT T H E O P E N I N G

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world. To this Wittgenstein countered that the meaning of a word is not a logical picture: the word’s meaning is its use in language, its function in a language game, in which the impor­tant ­factor is not logical structure but social relations.7 It makes more sense to think of a word as a hammer or a screwdriver than as a picture of an object or action it stands for. While I do not pretend to follow Wittgenstein through his entire argument about meaning in the Philosophical Investigations—­although at some dis­ tance in the past I read hard in this hard book with a view to its signifi­ cance for the study of allegory and believe t­ here is much more to draw from it than I have—he inspires an approach to allegorical signs that con­ siders them not in terms of their abstract significations but rather in terms of their effects on readers, their use in reading. The reader of an allegory is meant to suppose that she or he is putting together pictures of meaning, the pictures in this instance being allegorical signs, and combining those pictures—­those icones symbolicae—­into higher-­order structures of meaning. But in fact the reader is using the allegorical signs in what Wittgenstein calls a language game, which in the study of lit­er­a­ ture is known as a convention, an agreement into which the reader en­ ters to do certain ­things, combining and recombining ele­ments of the text—­often out of sequence and with ­little re­spect to their literal use— to construct a coherent and if pos­si­ble polyvalent interpretation—­one such as Sir Kenelm Digby constructed from Spenser’s numerological stanza describing the proportions of the House of Alma. Before Digby is done, he has made us believe the stanza somehow contains virtually all knowledge. Instead, what the stanza has been cunningly constructed to do is to draw forth from readers just this sort of response. The frame thereof seemd partly circulare, And part triangulare, O worke divine; ­Those two the first and last proportions are, The one imperfect, mortall, foeminine; Th’other immortall, perfect, masculine, And twixt them both a quadrate was the base Proportioned equally by seven and nine; Nine was the circle set in heavens place, All which compacted made a goodly diapase. FQ II.ix.22

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It may be easier, if less satisfying, to play this game with nonallegor­ ical works such as the Iliad or the Song of Songs. Allegorical interpreta­ tion of nonallegorical works, such as the Iliad, or of highly meta­phorical works, such as the Song of Songs, has an obvious use in culture. An old and revered but morally alien work can be made to reflect what­ever it is turned t­ oward in the world, like Stendhal’s moving mirror, sometimes reflecting the azure sky, sometimes the mud and puddles of the road. That is what happened with Homer in the successive stages of Greek thought. 8 Allegorical writing seeks to take up this role of mirroring ide­ ology directly. As Angus Fletcher said, allegories are the natu­ral mirrors of ideology.9

' of intentional allegory appear in the early ­Middle Ages, the author is preoccupied with turning the reader’s atten­ tion in a par­tic­u­lar direction or in dif­fer­ent par­tic­u­lar directions at dif­ fer­ent moments, as when Spenser calls one of his books “The Legend of Temperance” and another the “The Legend of Friendship.” Turning the viewer’s attention in a par­tic­u­lar direction is perhaps even more obvious in allegories in the visual arts. This sense that the author and the work have designs on the reader, that they somehow bully their readers instead of leaving them as f­ ree as the air, was the chief romantic charge against allegory—­not all romantics, by any means, if Blake and Baudelaire are romantics. One still hears it t­ oday, almost a c­ entury ­after Walter Benja­ min’s liberation of allegory from the oppressive regime of the symbol and the fetish of organic form, the symbol that privileges the non-­or the antitranscendent.10 Two responses to this objection are pos­si­ble. The first is, what author or artist is ever without a design on the reader or viewer? Such designs vary with genre. This objection is in truth to the ce­re­bral character of al­ legory, its intention to make the reader interpret, although such inter­ pretations are extremely vari­ous, expanding nearly out of control and for the most part away from this immediate world. But if we wish to change this immediate world, bending it in the direction of justice, we w ­ ill have look beyond, as Delacroix does and as Baudelaire does. The second re­ sponse to the objection follows from this. It is that the real objection to O N C E E X T E N D E D WO R K S

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allegory is this calling us away from the immediate, material world, of which we are so fond and to which we are so committed, ­because it is tan­ gibly, reassuringly pre­sent. Allegory calls us into the spiritual realm, the realm of pure ideas and thought. It sometimes affirms, as Plato did, that ­these spiritual ­things govern our material world from above and hold the keys to it. This may be a dream, but if so, then it is a dream from which ­human beings never have been and never w ­ ill be able to wake, try as they might. ­T here is a word for the literary despising of allegory, and it is a harsh one: complacency, happiness with the world as it is. That is b ­ ecause what makes us h ­ uman (it doubtless played its part, for example, in the evolution of language, driven by the telling of stories) is this sense of an other, of a yonder, of an invisible realm inhabited by the gods but also by our own ideas, our techniques yet to be in­ven­ted, our stories, our sacra­ ments, our songs. In Ariosto, the far side of the moon is a ­giant heap of every­thing h ­ umans have lost in the past. In a truly allegorical poet a com­ parable realm of the other contains every­thing that is yet to be found. As Yves Bonnefoy said, allegory is not of this world, “l’allégorie n’est pas de ce monde,” and ­things not of this world can be useful in this world as well.11

' more speculative stage of the theory of allegory, about which I ­w ill say a ­little more now, it is asked ­under what circumstances allegories are read, how they are used, what social apparatuses they imply and by what procedures of reading, what rituals, ­these apparatuses are reinforced. What social role do allegories perform? I cited Angus Fletch­ er’s remark that allegories are the natu­ral mirrors of ideology. This is a deep statement and is certainly true. But the word ideology can mislead if, following its etymology from a verb for seeing, it is taken to denote some­ thing contemplated from a distance, as the souls in the Phaedrus are whirled around in the heavens to contemplate the forms. Ideology, on Louis Althusser’s account in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970)—­this is surely the best insight in that milestone essay—is material in its workings, based in practices, by which he means that the “ideas” in ideology are not in themselves visual and abstract but are instead performed, as when one does a school exercise. They belong to material practices (e.g., attending school), which are the scene of material I N T H E S E C O N D,

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actions (e.g., the individual, or “subject,” ­doing an exercise), which are gov­ erned by rituals engaged in by all (e.g., every­one ­doing the same exercise). The similarity to what Wittgenstein said about the meaning of words being their use should be apparent. For Althusser, the school is the most impor­tant of the ideological state apparatuses, having the purpose of un­ consciously reproducing the dominant class’s ideology through the repe­ titious per­for­mance of such rituals.12 Schools in France are much more ritualized than in North Amer­i­ca, more centralized, and more obviously an arm of the state. This makes the point perhaps easier to see from France but no less true elsewhere. One thinks of British education in Egypt, Africa, and India—­perhaps an even better illustration of Althusser’s thesis—­with its narrow reproduction of colonial ideology and its broader appeal to British cultural ideals. If we extend the scene of ideology beyond the school to the university, in the classroom and in term assignments but more importantly in what we call research, we can see how the interpreta­ tion of an allegory as a ritual practice reinforces ideology, usually but not invariably the ideology of the dominant class, that is, ­those who have at least a chance at striving for wealth and po­liti­cal influence. The ideology in question could be a liberal-­humanist worldview in which lit­er­a­ture is all impor­tant ­because liberating and in which canons of lit­er­a­ture are therefore impor­tant for ­free individuals to debate and contest and for de­ partments to debate and discuss, supposing that to do so is po­liti­cally pro­ gressive. From this liberal-­humanist point of view (to which, to be frank, I largely adhere, if not religiously, then at least po­liti­cally) interpretation is an epistemological practice, a quest for true knowledge. I think the fit between cultural practices beyond the institution of the school, from reading Spenser to attending concerts and ­going to galleries, is not so tight as Althusser claims. But, to be sure, he sees culture and even the school, in par­tic­u­lar the École Normale Supérieur, where he taught and lived, as dialectical scenes where the ritualized effects of ideology can be contested. Even so, dialectical opposition implies linear alignment and is therefore simpler than a cultural field or region into which commen­ tary on texts may expand. It is always necessary for theory to simplify. The truth of the ­matter is however more complicated, more open to unexpected effects and varying interests than a dialectical account can allow, as, for example, in Stephen Greenblatt’s “To Fashion a Gentleman:

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Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss,” in which the inter­ pretation is not the opposite of what the poet intended, a cele­bration of libidinal freedom instead of its condemnation, a reversal by no means unpre­ce­dented in commentary on this scene. Instead, Greenblatt’s reading is a reinscription of the episode’s allegorical force, and its erotic force, in the field of colonialism.13 His reading does not invert Spenser’s intention but displaces it into another region of the text’s propagated field. All interpretations of an allegorical work may therefore be understood to extend the space of the work’s field into the cultural field propagated by it. It is impor­tant to see the kind of interpretation that allegory calls forth from its readers as a ritual per­for­mance for reinforcing social norms as well as for mixing ideas in unusual ways, and not least for teaching. Young ­people need and usually want to be taught, to receive a cultural “for­ mation.” Part of this formation—­how much is where the devil is—­w ill always be ideological, as is the case also, and perhaps more so, with humanities research. But that is hardly a reason for abandoning the one or the other or for seeing the one or the other as relentlessly ideological. Culture, b ­ ehind its ideological screen, may be a social and po­liti­cal bat­ tleground. But it is also an inherent ­human good (says this humanist) for the ­simple joy it brings in the exercise of m ­ ental powers and in reflection on the astonishing variety and coherence of ­human life—­coherence, that is, consistency, even in strug­gle.

' (allo, “other” + agoreuo, “I speak”) is a confection of the first ­century bce and was calqued into Medieval Latin as alieniloquium, “other speaking.” In Cicero’s account from the third book of his dialogue on oratory, allegory, ἀλληγορία as he calls it in Greek, lends bril­ liance to one’s style not by the figurative use of single words, as with meta­phor, but rather by a series of many words linked together in series, so that as one ­thing is said, another is to be understood: “aliud intelli­ gendum sit.”14 The term allegory thus comes from ancient Hellenistic rhetorical theorists writing on tropes. The l­ater ones speak of allegory (repeating almost verbatim one another’s definitions) as an expression (phrasis) in which one ­thing appears (heteron men ti dêlousa) and another ­thing is thought alongside it (heteron de ennoian paristôsa). An example given T H E WO R D A L L E G O R I A

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more than once is when Callimachus in a brief iambic poem speaks of a burning fire and then of a chariot race ending in a crash, but what he’s thinking of is love: ­don’t ignite the fire and go back for a second turn around the racecourse: you’ll crash. It’s the hidden thought that is impor­tant, not the consistency of the meta­phors used. But consistency is preferred, at least it is by the ancient rhetoricians and by the eighteenth-­ century literary critics who thought that allegory is a purely rhetorical term. It is small won­der that they had trou­ble approving of Spenser. From the earliest uses of the term, allegory is associated with mystery, with veiled, cryptic tales. Indeed, even for the rhetoricians, a fable is de­ fined, as Aelius Theon famously expressed it, as “a false discourse imi­ tating truth.” The more ridicu­lous or repellent the tale, the more likely it is to be concealing an allegorical meaning.15 Quintilian’s inspired definition, “continued meta­phor,” removes alle­ gory from its direct association with mysterious tales and inscribes it more deeply in the context of rhetorical tropes. Although it was in­ven­ted before the rise of complex allegorical works in the ­Middle Ages, it says something impor­tant about allegory as a literary genre, even if it does not define it. In antiquity, allegoria, which was closely related to ainos, “hint, riddle,” and ainigma, often referred to brief comparisons or fables meant to persuade, such as the famous one of Menenius Agrippa in Livy, repro­ duced by Shakespeare in Coriolanus, when Menenius compares the organs of the body to dif­fer­ent classes in the state, the stomach being the nobles. In John Milton, writing against the bishops, the roll played by the stomach in Menenius’s brief allegory is played instead by “a huge and monstrous Wen.”16 A biblical example of such an ainos or hinting discourse, as men­ tioned, is Jotham’s parable of the trees. Such tales may be found at all times in all cultures, oral and written; and it is surely significant that they all have po­liti­cal force. “Continued meta­phor” thus implies a series of connected meta­phors carefully aligned or one meta­phor carried on at length. In the ancient rhetoricians, notably Quintilian, allegory is closely related to irony, which one might at first suppose to be absent from medieval allegory, although the closeness of irony to allegory reemerges in modern forms of the po­ liti­cal parable, as in Slawomir Mrozek’s “The Elephant” or Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose. But William Langland would certainly be an exception to this

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statement about medieval allegory and irony, not least for the fable of the belling of the cat in the first passus of Piers Plowman. In Dante’s Commedia the punishments in Hell have a certain infernal wit that is fiercely ironic, as John Freccero has observed.17 And Jean de Meun’s vast, encyclopedic extension of the allegory of Guillaume de Lorris, the Roman de la r­ ose, con­ tains passages that are broadly ironical, notably at the conclusion, with its pornographic encoding of foreplay, cunnilingus, and intercourse through the signifiers of Christian piety. The w ­ hole is an ironical com­ mentary on the sentimental norms of amour courtois and the art of loving nobly (De arte honeste amandi), with its high-­class pretentions. The implied criticism is that it is all a cover for male lust.18 This proximity to irony ensures that the commonest understanding of “continued meta­phor” is of a single meta­phor pursued at some length, as in the example Quintilian cites, from Horace’s Odes 1.14, “O navis ref­ erent in mare te novi fluctus . . . ,” in which the state is addressed as a ship threatened by new waves (renewed civil war) threatening to carry it out to sea and advised to make immediately for the port. More than the two ship poems in Alcaeus on which it is modeled (for in ­these the poet is in the threatened ship), Horace’s poem has considerable irony mixed in, especially in its addressing the ship as a proud ­woman in which the fearful sailor puts no confidence, for all the pride of her poop, which is elaborately painted: “nil pictis timidus navita puppibus fidit” (lines 14–15). Quintilian quotes the opening lines up to the ­middle of the third: “O ship! new waves threaten to bear you again out to sea. What are you ­doing? Beware! Strive with all your might for the port.” He then explains that the entire description of the ship in trou­ble represents the state, with the waves and tempests standing for civil war, the port for civil peace and concord. He does not need to show how the remainder of the poem fol­ lows through with frightening particulars, all of them excessively inter­ preted since for their pos­si­ble bearing on po­liti­cal events ­after the civil war. But t­ hese do give the poem more power than the ancient ainoi or “fa­ bling examples” that ­were ­later termed allegories, ­because each par­tic­u­lar gives at least the feeling of referring to something: the shearing off of the oars on one side; the fierce, southwest wind that has damaged the mast; the yards and the cables; the straining hull in danger of breaking up; the rent canvas; the terrified sailors; the futility of the ship’s proud lineage

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from Pontic pines. None of t­ hese ­will keep her from being the mere sport of the winds, unless she takes care: “Tu, nisi ventis / debes ludibrium, cave.” Only in the fifth and final stanza is it made clear that this is an allegor­ ical fable referring to something e­ lse. Horace says the ship has long been his anxious care but is now his delight. It is a very slight breaking of the frame, showing he means the state and prompting us to go back over what we have read, looking for similarities between the fictive ship and the real events during and ­after the civil war.19 For all the limitations of the narrow definition of allegory as continued meta­phor, it captures something of the magic of this genre, b ­ ecause it multiplies the magic of meta­phor. Continued meta­phor implies more than a single direction of reference, from the figure to its meaning. T ­ here is a double reflection between them when the figure becomes aestheti­ cally prior in importance to the meaning, the meaning in re­spect of which it is supposed to be secondary. As with meta­phor, which means a transfer or “carry­ing across” (meta + phero, pherein, L. trans. + fero, ferre), we are never at rest in the literal or in the figurative meaning. The direction of refer­ ence is not one way, from sign to signified, but is both ways at once or in rapid oscillation. One cannot in practice—­and the practice in question is reading—­sustain the official priority of the meaning to its figure ­because this priority is unstable and is continually reversed.20 Can we say that when we read of the Redcross knight’s ­battle with the serpent Errour we are thinking at ­every moment away from the strug­gle before us ­toward its theological meaning, even when the monster vomits books and papers? Or are we not in truth taking the image for our primary focus as an in­ strument for reading the world, a light shone in the darkness? Therewith she spued out of her filthy maw A flood of poyson horrible and black, Full of ­great lumps of flesh and gobbets raw, Which stunck so vilely, that it forced him slack His grasping hold, and from her turn him back: Her vomit full of bookes and papers was, With loathly frogs and toads, which eyes did lack, And creeping sought way in the weedy grass: Her filthie parbreake all the place defilèd has. FQ I.i.20

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The double reflection between tenor and vehicle is what gives allegory its special appeal, its dazzling effect, like a l­aser beam flashing between mirrors for the detection of gravity waves. The mirrors are the figure and its meaning. The invisible wave passing crosswise between them is the sense of ineffable mystery that allegory creates, a third t­ hing we divine on the periphery of attention but can never quite see or understand. This back-­and-­forth reflection, at once dazzling and deepening, is preserved in the best of the longer and more complex allegorical works that ­w ill emerge in the ­Middle Ages. So power­ful and consistent is this effect in Dante that it spawned, in the twentieth ­century, a successfully naive theory that the Commedia is not allegorical at all but is instead figural re­ alism. But all allegory is figural and real at the same time.21

' observing one of the ancient ingredients that went into medieval allegory and that also gave the genre its name: the rhetorical definition of allegory in the first ­century bce as the trope of continued meta­phor. Another ingredient was much older, a staple of ancient Greek culture from before the classical age. We have taken note of it already and can give it more attention now. It is the more or less arbitrary procedure of allegorizing the poets in moral, physical, cosmological, and spiritual senses, although it was not called “allegorizing” but “interpretation of the poets,” hermêneia tôn poiêtôn, from whence we have the word hermeneutics.22 The interpreters ­were engaged in the discovery of what they called hyponoiai, “undermeanings” (hypo, “­under” + nous, “mind, thought”) in Hesiod and Homer, and in the more mystical corpus of the Orphica, poems at­ tributed to the shadowy figure of legend, “famous Orpheus, ­father of song,” as Pindar calls him. Orpheus is song for Pindar, but for ­others, such as Aristophanes, Orpheus is the originator of mystery rites, or teletai.23 Ancient song, ancient religious mysteries and rites, and hidden meaning all come together in this tradition, making interpretation a quasi-­religious activity. A famous manuscript found in 1962 at Derveni in northern Greece, at a burial site (the man buried had the manuscript placed in his hand), con­ tains an elaborate allegorical commentary on an Orphic poem dating from the pre-­Socratic era, although the manuscript itself—­t he oldest W E H AV E B E E N

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papyrus we possess—­dates from the fourth ­century bce. The commen­ tator uses the verb ainô, “to hint, to riddle,” for the poet’s practice, justi­ fying his commentary, which interprets a startling and monstrous Orphic Theogony in terms of pre-­Socratic physics, putting interpreta­ tion in the category of ritual initiations. He says that Orpheus speaks throughout this poem in a riddling and mythical manner about real ­things, the truths of the physical world. What is striking about the com­ mentary, as recent investigations confirm, is the extent to which the act of interpretation is blended with magic, divinatory, and ritual practices. The doors to the sanctuary are closed b ­ ehind us as we enter the space of the text with this interpreter, who unlocks the secrets concealed in the poem. Although so far as we can tell it is not said in so many words, en­ tering into the text is like the Pythian oracle ­going into a discrete space reserved for prophecy.24 So far as we can tell, hermeneutics of the poets began in the last quarter of the sixth ­century bce with Theagenes of Rhegium, in response to the moral and rationalist objections of phi­los­o­phers, notably Xenophanes of Colophon (Plato would join in ­later, banishing the poets from his ideal Republic), who said, famously, that Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods every­thing that is a shame and a scandal among men, thieving, adul­ tery, and deception. The interpreters claimed that all such episodes had deeper, unseen meanings that ­were uniformly elevating and instructive, not immoral. As I mentioned before, t­ hese interpretations changed along with the society in which they ­were performed, mirroring social concerns at each stage, from moral to physical to philosophical to Christian, each new stage including the previous ones. In the l­ ater, Byzantine stages, Od­ ysseus at the mast becomes Christ on the cross.25 The adultery of Ares and Aphrodite, for example, in a notorious tale from the Odyssey, is exposed when they are caught in flagrante delicto in the subtle net fashioned by her husband, Hephaestus, and laid over the marital bed. When Hephaestus catches the lovers in the net, he hoists them up and displays them to all the other gods. This is affirmed to be a mysterious repre­sen­ta­tion of the ­union of the forces of concord and dis­ cord, eris and eros, in the net of the log­os, or reason princi­ple, for the cre­ ation of the world. The raucous laughter of the gods at the sight of Ares and Aphrodite caught and struggling in the net is in truth divine laughter

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signifying cosmic approval at the creation of the world. The episode is also an allegory of the forge, the combining of unlike metals. Or again, when Zeus, in the Iliad, reminds Hera how, on a previous oc­ casion on which she disobeyed him, he hung her from Heaven with an­ vils on her feet, so that her body stretched down as far as the earth, one of the myths to which Plato objected, the hidden meaning is that at the creation of the world the “air” (aêp, an anagram of Hêra) was stretched out between the heavens and the earth. The ­battle of the gods in Iliad 20, which seemed impious to a ­later age, was interpreted as an allegory of the strug­gle of the heterogeneous ele­ments in nature. Spenser would have known of this tradition from a number of sources, chiefly the account of its enthusiastic inheritors, the stoics, such as Cornutus in Cicero’s De natura deorum. In Plutarch’s treatise on how poetry should be read for the education of youth, composed around the turn to the second ­century ce, he main­ tains, despite his own allegorizing of Egyptian my­thol­ogy elsewhere, that the plain moral examples provided in poetry are more effective at edu­ cating youth than the elaborate justifications that have been contrived to rescue from impropriety the unedifying passages in Homer. ­T hese justi­ fications w ­ ere done, Plutarch says, by recourse to what used to be called “undermeanings,” hyponoiai, but are now called allegories. By “now” he means within the half c­ entury or so, and he is prob­ably referring to the Homerica problemata of Heraclitus (not the g­ reat pre-­Socratic phi­los­o­pher but a much ­later figure), in which many older interpretations of Homer are preserved. The practice of allegorizing would pass over into biblical interpreta­ tion at Alexandria, first of the Hebrew Scriptures by Philo Judaeus and then of the Christian Bible by Origen.26 But it is pre­sent in Saint Paul him­ self, in the Epistle to the Galatians, 4:22–31, where he interprets the story of the half ­brothers Ishmael and Isaac, the first born to Abraham of the bondwoman Hagar, the second born by Abraham’s legitimate wife, Sarah. “Which t­ hings are an allegory”—­hatina estin allêgoreumena—he says, to sig­ nify the contrasting testaments of Jewish Law and Christian Grace. But the signification is of course unavailable to the original audience, the an­ cient Hebrews and pre-­Christian Jews. God inscribes in ­actual historical

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events an obscure but prophetic allegorical meaning. Such meaning can come forth only in the fullness of time, with the coming of Christ and with Paul’s help. The fourfold interpretation of the Bible in the M ­ iddle Ages—­a vast en­ terprise demanding the vast, learned, and judicious history of biblical exegesis by Henri de Lubac—­would proceed from such beginnings.27 The fourfold system was put into a mnemonic jingle by Nicholas of Lyra around 1330, doubtless as an aide-­mémoire: Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.

Freely interpreted: “The letter teaches the events that actually happened as recounted in the text of the Bible; the allegorical meaning teaches what you should believe (regarding Christ’s salvation of humanity); the moral meaning what you should do as a Christian; and the anagogical meaning where you are ­going, where we are all ­going, at the end of the world and the Last Judgment.” The difference of biblical exegesis from the broader tradition of allegorical interpretation is that the literal meaning is not sup­ posed to be a mere shell, a deception, a veil. It is instead the foundation on which all the other senses are raised. As biblical interpretation became the central textual practice of Chris­ tian Eu­rope, a less continuous but impor­tant tradition went alongside it: the allegorical interpretation of the pagan poets Ovid and Virgil. They ­were regarded as allegorists who encoded Christian meanings in their texts, knowing of ­these ­things, and indeed knowing all ­things, ­because they ­were divinely inspired. Beneath its cortex or shell, its covering veil or integumentum—­beneath its wrapping, its involucrum—­one may discern in the story of Zeus taking the form of a bull to carry off Europa the Son of God assuming ­human nature to come down to earth and rescue the soul. Such ideas ­were aired in the vast, fourteenth-­century commentary on Ovid called the Ovide moralisé.28 Similar interpretations are given in the late Roman Christian author Fulgentius’s account of the “­things covered over and hidden in Virgil,” the Integumenta Vergilii. John of Salisbury, in his highly classical Policraticus, says Virgil “­under the guise of fables ex­ pressed the truths of all philosophy” (poeta Mantuanus, qui sub imagine

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fabularum totius philosophiae exprimit veritatem).29 The Platonist allegorical poet of the school of Chartres Bernardus Silvestris considered Virgil to be as much a phi­los­o­pher as a poet. To prove it, he wrote an allegorizing commentary on the first six books of the Aeneid as the journey of the ­human soul through this world. Dante’s view of Virgil as a poet who com­ manded all moral wisdom is a more mature version of ­these ideas. In De monarchia, in a passage that is in effect the allegorical program for the Commedia, Dante says that happiness in this life is attained through the ex­ ercise of virtue, which is figured by the terrestrial paradise, meaning the Garden of Eden. In the Commedia the Garden of Eden is situated on the top of the Mountain of Purgatory, and it is Virgil who guides and accompa­ nies Dante through Hell and, ­after that, up the mountain to Paradise.30 Neoplatonist allegorical interpretation, coexisting with early Christian interpretation, became especially mystical in character, recalling the Or­ phic commentator of the Derveni papyrus. Such interpretation becomes a species of divination and cosmic speculation, not always without lit­ erary power, as in Porphyry’s De antro nympharum, “On the Cave of the Nymphs” (around 300 ce), a beautiful commentary on a brief mythical episode in the thirteenth book of the Odyssey, in which the cave is this world into which souls enter and from which they leave.31 The practice of such poetic allegorizing borrows from the immemorial association of poetry with magic, shamanism, and ritual initiation.

' phenomenon essential to the formation of alle­ gory (­after rhe­toric and mystery) may well be the most impor­tant of all. It is also the least evident of all, although, to confuse m ­ atters, it is more extensive than allegory in the narrower, generic sense. In vari­ous forms it belongs to all ­human cultures and, broadly understood, is the very sub­ stance of poetry. This is of course personification. Wherever t­ here is alle­ gory we find personification, and in some cases, notably in the visual arts including sculpture, the entire work consists of a personification. The impor­tant distinction (and ­because it is impor­tant, it is hard to make and can perhaps only be remembered) is between personifications that are constructs of the mind and t­ hose that belong to the culture, as A T H I R D C U LT U R A L

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super­natural beings. The first class may be called, as they tend t­oward deliberate contrivance, allegories; the second class, as they tend ­toward beings that are divined by the poet, rather than made, may be called daemons or spirits or gods. Examples of the first would be personifications in the comedies of Aristophanes; of the second, the figures of Power and Vio­lence who chain Prometheus to the cliff in the Caucasus at the opening of Prometheus Bound. But of course, once this distinction has been made, one must immediately regard it as a sliding scale between non­ ex­ is­ tent extremes. The comic personifications in Aristophanes have real daemonic force; the figures of Power and Vio­lence are brilliant poetic inventions and are seen as such. Personifications in Spenser, as we s­hall see, oscillate, sometimes violently, between daemonic being and poetic conception. The mild, cognitive dissonance that this creates—­ like a faint hum or drone ­behind the bright figures, an agitated “Brownian motion” (the random agitations of microscopic particles in a fluid or gas, bombarded by much-­smaller molecules)—­generates the aesthetic radiance of t­ hese figures. Personification allegory begins for the Eu­ro­pean and Latin ­Middle Ages with the Psychomachia, as mentioned, in which a ­battle between forces in the soul of the individual—­that is, of the virtues and vices—is a Chris­ tian version (at least so far as its title is concerned) of the ­battle of the gods in Iliad 20, an episode traditionally known as the theomachia, “­battle of the gods.” The gods ­were allegorized in Greek, but they became allegorical in Latin. Another impor­tant work not yet mentioned is Martianus Capella’s im­ mensely influential De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, “On the Marriage of Mercury and Philology,” with its figures of the seven liberal arts. T ­ hese figures with their attributes would be reproduced faithfully and often in medieval art, especially in carvings on cathedrals (notably at Chartres) up into the Re­nais­sance, when they ­were represented in a fresco by Bot­ ticelli. The mythical part is in the first two books. Philology, or learning, learns from Immortality that she is to be married to Mercury (Intelli­ gence) and must ascend to the heavens for the wedding, at which the Seven Liberal Arts, her bridesmaids, w ­ ill each discourse in turn on their disciplines, at encyclopedic length.

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To marry Mercury, Philology, laborious earthly learning, encumbered by its very strength, must ascend to the heavens. To ascend, Philology must become lighter, by drinking an emetic from Immortality’s cup and vomiting up heaps of books and papers written in e­ very kind of script, including hieroglyphics. At Immortality’s command, ­those hieroglyphics that rec­ord the genealogies of the gods are with caring, pious attention gathered up and hidden in caves in far regions of Egypt. They thus be­ come the legendary, sacred writings of the Egyptians, in which knowl­ edge of the higher worlds and of higher beings is concealed. The Seven Liberal Arts, soon to be bridesmaids, make their appearance ­here below to gather up books relevant to their disciplines; and t­ hese books w ­ ill be placed in libraries more accessible than t­ hose distant ones in Egypt. We are reminded of the serpent Errour in the opening episode of The Faerie Queene, who also vomits books and papers, although the point ­there is that ­these writings are of no worth, proceeding from theological delu­ sion. Rather more strange, although not entirely unintuitive to ­those, like Nietz­sche, who may feel encumbered by their own learning, is the idea that for Philology to become divine she must expel what she knows. But stranger still is it that Philology’s nauseous expectorant becomes the basis of ­human knowledge, of both divine and earthly worlds.32

' cultures personifications always have something of the divine about them, and it is surely an error to think that they do not anymore. Yet the very word suggests they are mere abstrac­ tions given ­human form by the poets, which is what is meant by the Lati­ nate word personification and its Greek equivalent prospopoia: “fabricating (L. facere) a persona,” a mask; “making (Gk. poiein) a covering for the face (prosôpon).” (In fact, in Greek rhe­toric prosopopoia often means nothing more than giving speech to a mute object.) ­T hese terms betray their cur­ rency in ­later ancient culture, in an age when reason holds sway over myth and divinity holds sway over reason. The words personification and prosopopoia imply that the abstract thought comes first—­justice as in itself it ­really is—­and the figuration of this thought follows a­ fter, being nothing more than a poetical invention: the goddess Dikê, and even the constellation Astraea. The attributes of the IN A NCIEN T OR T R ADIT IONAL

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personification, for example, the roses, rabbits, and doves that accompany Aphrodite, goddess of love in Petrarch’s Triumph of Love, are not revelations of the divine but are entirely conventional, the proper subject of iconog­ raphy, which is the study of images and their attributes as passed down in time. But are they, in Petrarch’s triumph, merely conventional, merely witty inventions? We cannot believe it is so. Many personifications in allegorical works such as The Faerie Queene have this fabricated and arbitrary character, displaying the poet’s wit as well the knowledge of traditional icons. Oiseuse, for example, in the Roman de la r­ ose, whose name Chaucer translates as Ydelnesse, is a beau­ tiful young ­woman who keeps the small gate of the walled Garden of Plea­ sure, the master of which garden is Sir Mirth. He has painted allegorical images on the exterior walls of this garden, to ward off Hate, Poverty, Age, Sorrow, Religious Hy­poc­r isy (“Pope-­Holy”), and other impediments to courtly love. The mind reels a ­little at an allegorical personification painting allegorical personifications. Inside the garden are more agree­ able persons than ­those portrayed on its exterior walls: Gladness, Cour­ tesy, Beauty, who seem artificial enough but are irresistibly charming all the same, like human-­faced robots currently being made at MIT. They are designed to make us think of them as persons, not as artifacts. But among such figures t­ here is also Cupid, the god of love, accompanied by Swete-­ Loking, “sweet glances,” bearing two bows and ten arrows, the first five arrows being Beauty, Simplicity, Frankness, Com­pany, or Society, and Faire-­Semblaunt, or the welcoming gaze, this last arrow being the least grievous of the five. Each is capable of inflicting a deep wound, causing one to fall in love at one momentary and innocent glance from the lady. ­T hese are Cupid’s golden-­tipped arrows. The other five, discharged from a knotty and twisted bow, are black and venomous: Pride, Villany, Shame, Wanhope (despair of success), and New-­Thought, which last follows log­ ically from Wanhope and means turning one’s attention elsewhere, which is not always unwise.33 We may note how easily the poem can pass from conceptual persons to conceptual objects. The very arbitrariness of the change underscores the arbitrariness of the original, ­human fig­ ures, but far from vitiating the numinous energy of the poem, it fills us with a sense of pervading mystery and delight: mystery ­because the meaning seems always to be one step beyond us, or ahead of us, delight

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­ ecause we are continually recognizing the ele­ments of the thought that b seems to float in the distance, just beyond ­these figures, even as the fig­ ures themselves are absorbing. As I said, they charm us, like robots. The long description of Ydelnesse, for example, is exceptionally alluring, down to the description of her lovely, ivory neck, which is so long and white that you could not find another like it between Burgundy and Jerusalem. With t­ hese examples past us, all of them known to Spenser, let us now consider his Occasion. She is based on the traditional icon of Fortune, who stands unsteadily on a globe and has a forelock hanging from her otherwise-­bald head. In Dürer’s famous and very complex engraving of “Nemesis, or Good Fortune” (1502), soaring in the clouds over a city, yet balanced on a small globe, the hair is bound tightly ­behind. A lock in front has come loose and is driven forward by the wind. She bears a sword, a bridle (for restraint), and a chalice. She has wings, to indicate how swiftly she passes, yet she is regally corpulent and heavy, and middle-­aged, to indi­ cate her substantial effect in the world. In typical Re­nais­sance images of Fortune, such as in Alciati’s Emblemata, the swiftness of her passing is in­ dicated by her holding a sail as she stands on her globe. Her thinness in­ dicates youth, a sharp contrast with Dürer’s majestically solid titaness. Occasion’s or Fortune’s hair arrangement signifies that an opportunity must be seized as it is coming t­ oward you ­because it c­ an’t be seized once it has past: hence the expression “seize occasion by the forelock.” Spenser, with his brilliance and poetic insight, makes something very dif­fer­ent out of this figure. But the hair arrangement survives, being turned for its meaning in a dif­fer­ent direction: stop a quarrel before you are in it. Guyon sees a furious madman dragging a youth by the hair along the ground and beating him savagely. That is Furor, and ­here comes his ­mother, Occasion: And him b ­ ehind, a wicked Hag did stalke, In ragged robes, and filthy disaray, Her other leg was lame, that she no’te walke But on a staffe her feeble steps did stay; Her lockes, that loathly w ­ ere and hoarie gray, Grew all afore, and loosely hong unrold, But all ­behind was bald, and worne away, That none thereof could ever taken hold,

For a General Theory of Allegory  193 And eke her face ill favourd, full of wrinckles old. And ever as she went, her tongue did walke In foule reproch, and termes of vile despight, Provoking him [Furor] by her outrageous talke To heape more vengeance on that wretched wight; Sometimes she raught him stones, wherewith to smite, Sometimes her staffe, though it her one leg w ­ ere, Withouten which she could not go upright; Ne any evill meanes she did forbeare, That might him move to wrath, and indignation reare. FQ II.iv.4–5 (emphasis added)

It belongs to the magic of poetry, and the magic of prosopopoia, that such confabulations are not transparently significant as thoughts. They have a density and power that realistic narrative cannot approach. It is not so much a question of our passing through Spenser’s pre­sen­ta­tion of Furor and Occasion to the thought that t­ hese figures represent (since it is s­ imple in comparison with them) as it is of the thought setting off into poetry and inspiring the vision. We are not just seeing how furor is ignited by occasion but how furor, once ignited, is sustained by new and chimerical provocations, the full horror of which cannot be felt without the night­ marish scene the poet places before our eyes. In short, it is a ­great error to look slightingly on the most obviously fab­ ricated allegorical persons and scenes. In the hands of g­ reat artists—­ Dante, Langland, Spenser, Bunyan—­they strike us with exceptional power.

' it must be observed that many of the traditional, Greek “per­ sonifications” that we find in Hesiod and Homer, and in Greek culture generally, as late as the Hellenistic age, are not presented as fabrications pointing to more real abstractions. They are presented as divinities, al­ though divinities narrowly confined to their interests: Hate (Eris), Justice (Dikê), Fortune (Tychê), the three Fates (the moirai), Liberty (Eleutheria), Victory (Nikê), and so on. It is therefore inaccurate, for example, to speak of certain figures in the Iliad as allegorical, since Homer is not “saying something other” with them but is revealing the hidden powers of the E V E N S O,

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world. The alarming figure of Strife (Eris), in the Iliad, is small at first but grows larger as the two armies draw near to each other, ­until her head strikes the sky, rejoicing in b ­ attle and tumult. L­ ater, Eris rejoices at the onset of new b ­ attle, all the other gods remaining on Olympus, a detail that indicates she is understood to be a divinity, a goddess, not just a repre­ sen­ta­tion of the abstract idea of strife. ­Later still Eris is pre­sent among the spectacular decorations on the shield of Achilles. She appears in the scenes from a city at war, accompanied by Kudoimos, or tumult and con­ fusion, and Kêr, the goddess of death, who determines the fate of each fighter. Kêr seizes variously on the wounded and the (as yet) unwounded, while dragging a corpse by the feet through the melee, the cloak over her shoulders soaked in blood. The three of them fight among the mortals as if they w ­ ere mortal themselves and drag away the corpses of the slain.34 Another Homeric figure, Atê, ruinous folly and pride (not unlike the ­later term hybris), is personified along with the Prayers, the Litai, the d ­ aughters of ­great Zeus. We meet them in the speech Phoenix gives during his em­ bassy to Achilles. As the Prayers go onward, says Phoenix, anxiously fol­ lowing the swift steps of Atê, they are wrinkled and lame, and their eyes are always humbly downcast. But Atê, strong and swift, outruns them all, blinding men’s judgment everywhere on earth. The Prayers come b ­ ehind, seeking to heal (as Phoenix does now). He who honors ­these ­daughters of Zeus as they approach, they bless him and hear him with f­ avor. But when one spurns and refuses to hear them, then they go to Zeus praying that Atê overtake him and strike him with blindness, bringing him down.35 Similar figures appear, of course, in the Aeneid, notably the god­ dess Allecto, who thrusts her torch into Turnus’s breast.36 The Litai, Atê, and Eris are all conceived as real, daemonic beings; and what we think of as their prior, abstract meanings are in fact their effects. If the Italians of the Re­nais­sance drew their habit of abstraction from philosophy, from reading Plato and Plotinus, the legally minded En­glish w ­ ere more likely to form a more subtly embodied habit of abstract thinking from the char­ acter of law itself. As Andrew Zurcher has written, “It is peculiarly the practice of law to join forms of action to universal princi­ples, and of En­ glish law to believe that ­these relations exist as legitimately in what has been done, as in what ­ought to be done.”37

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' female—­usually but not always—­ because the Indo-­European languages generally give the feminine gram­ matical gender to abstract qualities. This fact is necessary to observe if we are to understand personifications, at least in the lit­er­a­ture of the West. But it is surely not sufficient, especially at the pre­sent time, when what we call the culture of the West is blended with ­others. We have been con­ ditioned for thousands of years against seeing personified abstractions as “naturally” male, although t­ here are such figures, of course, especially wicked or terrifying ones, preeminent among them Death, familiar to modern audiences in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal. But it is al­ most impossible to imagine a male statue of Victory, who is traditionally female. An example is the gigantic statue The Motherland Calls (1967), by Yevgeny Vuchetich and the engineer Nikolai Nikitin, erected on the hill near Volgograd (formerly Sta­lin­grad) where some of the fiercest fighting took place during the siege of the city in the Second World War. That sculpture is inspired by the Winged Nike (Victory) of Samothrace, now in the Louvre and recently, brilliantly, restored. With her high small breasts, her voluptuous stomach, her partly exposed thigh, the Nike car­ ries the mild erotic charge that frequently accompanies personifications, so that their allure is easily translated as the radiance of the divine. ­T here is an inherent and deeply traditional sexism—so traditional as to be all but invisible—in the imprinting of abstractions on the female body. ­There are exceptions, notably at Rocke­fel­ler Center in New York City, where the cele­bration of machine-­age industrial power calls for masculine bodies in the best Soviet style. But in general male bodies tend to be individuals, female bodies abstractions. To describe the Victory of Samothrace, which celebrates a naval victory, is to understand something of the power of allegorical personifications and in par­tic­u­lar the truth that they are never conventional signs for ab­ stractions, except when created by incompetent artists. This g­ reat mas­ terpiece of Hellenistic sculpture, which proj­ects dynamism and motion within an i­ magined surround, on the rising and falling bow of a ship, is speedily, even violently in motion, having just descended from the P E R S O N I F I C AT I O N S A R E U S UA L LY

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heavens to alight on the moving prow, represented in some nautical de­ tail by the marble plinth. Or rather, she has just been in motion and is now in this moment suddenly still, while motion, almost as a pure abstraction, seems to flow all around her, in her drapery and wings, in the power­ful stance that she takes, resembling a stride. Her wings are still spread to steady her in the strong sea breeze as she balances on the prow of her ship, rising and falling in the chop. Although her arms have been lost, the re­ cent discovery of her hand shows that one arm was raised to cup her lips in a victory shout.38 A final allegorical personification leads us into the modern world. It is by an older con­temporary of Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix. Patrick Labarthe has written powerfully of Baudelaire as a Janus-­like figure me­ diating between the allegorical tradition of Eu­ro­pean poetry and a sup­ posedly disenchanted modern world. It is difficult to see this modernity apart from the allegorical vision in which Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil was steeped. “Baudelaire,” Labarthe concludes, “is the first poet of modernity, perhaps just to the extent that he is the last of the ­grand allegorical poets.” ­After the Re­nais­sance, from the seventeen ­century onward—­following Walter Benjamin’s account of the de­cadent and demystified art of this period—­allegory effects a peremptory tearing apart of that organic con­ fidence that once belonged to the Christian, hierarchically arranged, sym­ bolic view of the world. For Baudelaire, allegory is a scalpel with which to open and expose the suppurating wound at the heart of existence. Yet ­because of its origin in faith, and in despite of what it now does to this faith, allegory still invites us to go in quest of spiritual sustenance, al­ though now from the encensoirs of an unknown and sinister religion. We have been brought ­these effects, ­these experiences, ­these sensations that are indistinguishable from emotions, by the allure of the strangest of the poet’s “flowers of evil”: allegory.39 This double-­consciousness associated with allegory—­the tendency to remystify on new and stranger terms what it has just demystified, its search for ever-­stronger intoxicants—is best seen in personification itself, allegory’s strongest intoxicant. In referring to an other, an allo, and so directing our attention past its own pro­cesses of figuration, allegory intensifies the power­ful effect of a solid or viscous presence at the level

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of the repre­sen­ta­tion, as with Occasion’s filthy forelock hanging over and half veiling the ruin of her face. If the return of an immediate and carnal presence is at the heart of Baudelaire’s paradoxical vision, it is also at the heart of what is, so far as I can judge, the greatest allegorical painting of the modern world: Dela­ croix’s Liberty Leading the ­People. Together with his other stunning master­ piece, The Barque of Dante, which depicts Virgil and Dante in Charon’s barque, crossing the river Styx into Hell, Liberty Leading the P­ eople seems to transcend not only the beautiful but also the sublime, b ­ ecause t­ here is nothing natu­ral about it. For all my long experience of this work I do not believe I could approach the brief description of it in Marina Warner’s Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of Female Form.40 I mention this book not only for its account of Delacroix but also for its wide-­ranging and learned account of personification. The painting is striking for the way it combines an essentially statuesque goddess of Liberty, or an idealized figure like the Victory of Samothrace, with the realistic repre­sen­ta­tion of a barricade during the July Revolution of 1830. Liberty strides forward over the barricade with corpses underfoot, her right hand holding the tricolor high, her left grasping a flintlock with a long, fixed bayonet. She is bare­ foot and bare-­breasted, both of which indicate her allegorical status; and her robe, which Warner perhaps hastens to call a “lemony chiton,” is a common fishwife’s dress, which was one of the unintentional compli­ ments paid to the work. But the crude working ­woman’s dress is also a classical garment, ­whether peplos or chiton. It is rhythmically billowing, just b ­ ecause of her violent activity, activity that takes the traditional form of the stride of the Victory of Samothrace. Indeed, the transformation seems to occur along the length of her body, as Warner points out, b ­ ecause her head, although wearing the Phrygian cap (Delacroix may have softened, at a ­later date, its brilliant red, so like the red of Dante’s headwear in the other painting), looks like a classical head that does not belong on her body. The breasts are larger than ­those on classical sculptures—­they are the breasts of a ­woman who has nursed—­and as Warner says, we see “a smudge of hair in her armpit.” Her thighs, especially the right, which we can see better, are not the elegant and alluring limbs of the classical Nike but power­ful engines, heavy and strong: “Her feet, like an ethereal

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being of the sky, are bare. But t­here her resemblance to antiquity ends, and Delacroix’s brilliant invention begins. That bare foot is large, the ankle is thick, the toes grip the rubble of the barricade over which Lib­ erty leaps; her arms are muscly, her big fists grip the flag and the gun, she has a smudge of hair in her armpit. She surges forward over a heap of bodies.” 41 The dynamic of transcendence and embodiment, each one adding power to the other, even as it contradicts the other, is at the very center of our experience of the allegorical personification and indeed of allegory. This is at it should be: we are looking at ourselves.

Chapter 7

'

Death in an Allegory

the moment of finality and loss, cannot be rep­ resented in an allegory, as it can be in a tragedy or a novel. The death of Antigone, of Othello or of Lear or, for that ­matter, of ­little Nell, leaves us with the feeling that the world has changed, that our common life has be­ come thinner, has become more pinched and mean, b ­ ecause something vital has left it. As Donne says in Meditation XVII, “any man’s death di­ minishes me, ­because I am involved in mankind.”1 Nor do we have any strong feeling, even in the context of Christian belief, that the dead person has gone anywhere in par­tic­u­lar, to a place better or worse than the world. From where we stand the emotional focus is instead on the finality of the departure and the completeness of the loss. In an allegory, however, the event of death is not even an event, if by “an event” we mean a moment when the world is significantly changed. Death in an allegory is instead so rapid, like the smashing of a particle in an accelerator, that it functions as a revelation of the truth of the allegor­ ical character’s being—or perhaps I should say of the allegorical charac­ ter’s meaning. Death leads not to the feeling of loss but rather to a feeling of clarity gained. I mean the feeling that what an allegorical character ac­ tually is, what an allegorical character means, has at last attained its de­ finitive form. In an oddly paradoxical way an allegorical character’s death is the moment when that character is most alive as meaning, since meaning is supposed to be that character’s essence. Considered as pure meaning, the allegorical character lives most in death. T H E E V E N T O F D E AT H ,

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­T here are of course scenes in which allegorical characters undergo something that resembles the death of a person, and I ­shall be examining one of t­ hese scenes shortly. But t­ hese characters do not undergo death as an essential event. (Such statements should not go entirely unqualified. I confess I find in the allegorical play Everyman one of the most moving repre­sen­ta­tions of death as an existential event. But the intensity is the result of our being made to feel with Everyman as if he ­were an individual.) Death itself can be, and often is, represented in an allegory and with ter­ rifying intensity. But this very capacity for reifying and representing Death as an individual removes the concentrated weight of seriousness and mystery that is achieved when we see a person, such as Lear, die. We experience death—­when we are in its presence and when we undergo it—­ existentially, not as a ­thing but as an event. Yet the feeling we have when we read an allegory is that death is somehow more active in it than in any other literary form. We read an ode of Keats and are seduced by the poet to feel, as he does “many a time,” half in love with easeful death.2 But when we read an allegory, and espe­ cially when we read Spenser, we have the uneasy suspicion that death is mysteriously, imperceptibly, disturbingly pre­sent in the working of the poetry itself. The very liveliness of the allegorical figures, their frenetic, jerky, galvanic life, makes us think of dead bodies through which an elec­ tric current is passed. The figures move with something that is less than life but also with force, with a single-­mindedness that is greater than the living can achieve. The effect I referred to ­earlier, where what appears to be the moment of death in an allegory is actually the moment of the revelation of meaning, is programmatically developed from the beginning of the al­ legorical tradition, from the Psychomachia of Prudentius. We see this ef­ fect in ­every subsequent conflict allegory, from the Old French Tourneiment Antichrist to Bunyan’s Holy War. (Allegories tend to fall into one of two narrative forms: conflict or quest. Spenser’s quest allegory is traversed by conflicts; but it is also directed imaginatively to a second part wherein conflict would dominate—­the greater war between the Fairy Queen and the Pagan King.) In the Psychomachia each of the vices is killed by the cor­ responding virtue in such a way that the death becomes a revelation of what the vice essentially is. For example, the character Worship of the

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Pagan Gods is beheaded by Faith, so that her priestly fillets are laid low; her mouth, flowing with the blood of sacrificed beasts, is crammed with dust; and her eyes—­since pagan rites, and the pagan gods themselves, are pleasing to sight—­are squeezed from her head and trampled underfoot. In a reading of the Psychomachia, Carolynn Van Dyke remarks of the even more impressive figure of Luxury, “she is killed by her own physical na­ ture, in revoltingly vivid detail.”3 Bunyan pre­sents contrasting scenes of death so that we may see contrary states of the soul. But the event of death is imperceptible as anything other than a revelation of what ­these char­ acters are in their spiritual essence. T ­ here is joy and t­ here is terror when they die, but t­ here is no sadness and no sense of loss. T ­ here is only change of place. The last t­ hing we hear of Mr. Valiant-­for-­Truth is this: “When the Day that he must go hence, was come, many accompanied him to the River side, into which, as he went, he said, Death, where is thy Sting? And as he went down deeper, he said, Grave, where is thy Victory? So he passed over, and the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side.” 4 When we turn to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, to the rare moments when death, or something like it, is represented in that poem, we find much the same effect: the moment of death is a moment of revelation in which the allegorical character is disclosed in its essential meaning. But Spenser is more subtle. Spenser is also interested, as few other allegorists are, in maintaining the sense of concreteness, of real, essential, and physical being in characters who are also to function as signs. Spenser’s greater emphasis on the living provokes a conflict around the rift within each character between the living and the significant. The result is an allegor­ ical composition that is not a static arrangement of arbitrary signs, com­ posed in accord with a ­simple, didactic intention mechanically applied, as romanticism would characterize allegory. Instead, we have the feeling that the allegorical characters have been instituted, like Nietz­schean meaning, by force. We also have the feeling that the allegorical narrative is sustained by the continuing exertion of this force by w ­ ill. Nor is this ­w ill that is so exerted simply the personal ­w ill of the poet. Consider Arthur’s fight, in the eighth canto of Book Two, with t­ hose contrastingly significant b ­ rothers Cymocles and Pyrocles. Their signifi­ cance can be read in their names, which mean w ­ ater and fire, or rather “wave” (kuma) and “fire” (pur): the lustful and the sensuous Cymocles has

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a character like ­water that flows away in waves. What­ever resolution Cy­ mocles forms is dissipated in waves of sensual plea­sure, in rising crests of excitement and descending troughs of satiety. Using Guyon’s shield for his defense, the shield which bears the portrait of the Fairy Queen, Cy­ mocles withstands Arthur’s onslaught ­because Arthur is enchanted by the image of his love: “His hand relented, and the stroke forbore, / And his deare hart the picture gan adore, / Which oft the Paynim sav’d from deadly stowre.” The poet then immediately forebodes Cymocles’s death and does so in language that belongs more to the spirit of heroic epic than to alle­ gory: “But him henceforth the same can save no more; / For now arrived in his fatall howre, / That no’te avoyded be by earthly skill or powre” (FQ II.viii.43). So strong is this embodied, epic moment, the moment of the evil hour, that delay is required before the pagan knight can be dispatched. It is h ­ ere that Cymocles, “prickt with guilty shame, / And inward griefe,” manages to wound Arthur slightly, forcing the prince to “reele, that never moov’d afore” (FQ II.viii.44). Arthur now returns the blow, with devastating effect: Whereat renfierst with wrath and sharp regret, He stroke so hugely with his borrowd blade. That it empierst the Pagans burganet, And cleaving the hard steele, did deepe invade Into his head, and cruel passage made Quite through his braine. FQ II.viii.45

The wound is too swift and traumatic for ­there to be a moment in which the d ­ ying Cymocles might speak, e­ ither to curse his fatal adversary or, like the d ­ ying Hector, to foretell the ­future. Nor is ­there, to speak more dramatically and also improbably, time for Cymocles to repent his sins and ask to be baptized, as King Agricane does in Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, in one of the most moving episodes in romance lit­er­a­ture. From a Christian point of view t­ here is something shocking—­there is at least something dismaying—in the swiftness of the death, which leaves no opportunity for repentance and therefore no chance of saving a soul. Spenser is savagely final:

Death in an Allegory  203 He tombling downe on ground, Breathd out his ghost, which to th’infernall shade Fast flying, ­there eternall torment found, For all the sinnes, wherewith his lewd life did abound. FQ II.viii.45

Can we even say that Cymocles has died? Was t­ here a moment of death, an event of death? Or was ­there not instead a swift transition from a charac­ ter’s becoming what he is to that character’s final fixity as what he is, self-­ tormentingly lewd? Death is a moment of departure and of loss. As what I have called an existential event, death is a moment that occurs in a pause, an interruption in the continuum experienced by ­those who witness the death as well as by the person who undergoes it. But in this scene ­there is no departure but a homecoming: Cymocles comes home, so to speak, to himself. ­There is no sense of loss ­because no soul is lost; Cymocles’s “ghost” is never a real soul, that is, a being at risk, on the knife edge between one state and another. Cymocles’s ghost is an allegorical soul, an essen­ tial and immutable meaning. ­There is no loss ­because this meaning flies swiftly to its home, where it is itself most truly and completely. Nor does Cymocles’s death occasion any sense of loss in his ­brother: it occasions only fear and rage, a chilling, immobilizing fear kindling into uncontrolled rage. One moment Pyrocles feels “stony feare” ­r unning in his heart, leaving all his senses “dismayd” (FQ II.viii.46); the next moment he “strooke, and foynd, and lasht outrageously, / Withouten reason or re­ gard” (II.viii.47). Arthur weathers this storm, looking to his defense in the knowledge that his opponent ­w ill tire. Spenser summarizes this in one of his typical, iconic moments: “So did Prince Arthur bear himselfe in fight, / And suffred rash Pyrocles wast his idle might” (II.viii.48). Now something even more in­ter­est­ing happens. ­After a series of events unnecessary to recount h ­ ere, Arthur defeats Pyrocles and has him at his mercy. Instead of dispatching Pyrocles with the same brutal swiftness, Spenser gives us a scene in which Arthur, being “full of Princely bounty and g­ reat mind,” offers to spare Pyrocles b ­ ecause of his “valiaunce,” on condition Pyrocles ­w ill renounce his evil ways, his “miscreaunce,” and swear allegiance to Arthur (FQ II.viii.51). It is a condition Pyrocles ­w ill of course defiantly and wrathfully refuse. This is easy enough to explain

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away as the poet’s need to diversify the episode, to have one pagan die suddenly while the other dies only ­after contemptuously refusing offered grace. But it seems to me ­there is more in this than the impulse to please with variety. I would guess that Spenser himself, who was, ­after all, a Christian, was shocked by the death of Cymocles, by the brief impression that a real person dies ­here, in his sins, and that his soul flies to eternal punishment. It is true that as an artist Spenser would have sought to achieve that very shock and enjoyed delivering it. For it is also the shock of watching what appears to be a living person seized and converted into an allegorical sign—­the shock that makes us realize again that Cymocles is not a person like other persons, with a soul like other souls, but rather an allegorical character being violently fixed in its meaning. Now the scene where Pyrocles is offered grace is surely meant to allay the shock to any Christian sensibility of Cymocles’s sudden and unrepen­ tant death. I said when Pyrocles is offered “grace,” but the scene is so de­ liberately secular that the word grace, although it would have a secular meaning in this context, is avoided at first: Arthur says “Life ­w ill I graunt thee for thy valiaunce” (FQ II.viii.51; my emphasis). Pyrocles chooses death and does so, as he says, “in despight of life”: Foole (said the Pagan) I thy gift defye, But use thy fortune, at it doth befall, And say, that I not overcome do dye, But in despight of life, for death do call. FQ II.viii.52

Spenser is answering an implied criticism of his staging of Cymocles’s death by creating a scene in which other, more elevating possibilities from romance lit­er­a­ture might come crowding in, if it w ­ ere pos­si­ble for them to do so. But ­these opportunities are open only to ­human agents and to ­human souls; and at this moment, the moment of death, Spenser must expel the very possibilities of life that he has so assiduously built up in his allegorical characters. He must expel ­those possibilities of life—­for life is vital, and hence always changing, always unstable, always capable of becoming other—so that the significance can come forward and de­ clare itself as the unchanging, the stable, the self-­identical, and, in Walter Benjamin’s memorable terms, the petrific.5

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Note that Pyrocles does not say, as would a living person who chose defiance in the end, “in despite of you I call for death.” B ­ ecause he is an al­ legorical character who is, like most allegorical characters, formed from a symmetrical opposition—of the fiery to the watery and of the wrathful to the lustful—he can only think in such symmetries. He therefore calls for death in despite of life. In Spenser’s dynamical system Pyrocles is forced back violently into the state of being an allegorical character by speaking in opposites that can mean nothing when they are apart from each other. He calls for death in despite of life b ­ ecause without having life to despise he c­ ouldn’t call for death or even know, in the most rudi­ mentary sense, what it is he calls for. Nor does he know ­until Arthur tells him that he is alive. Only at this moment does Spenser introduce the word grace, as some­ thing Pyrocles refuses: Wroth was the Prince, and sory yet withall, That he so wilfully refusèd grace; Yet sith his fate so cruelly did fall, His shining Helmet he gan soone unlace, And left his headlesse body bleeding all the place. FQ II.viii.52

­ hose first three lines seem to restore to Pyrocles a kind of specious hu­ T manity. Pyrocles is willful in refusing grace, a grace that means literally no more than the “life” that was offered before (on condition of repen­ tance and swearing an oath of allegiance). But the word grace also implies theological grace, the saving of a life for the purpose of saving a soul, of preventing a man from ­dying unrepentant and ­going to Hell. Spenser gives a ­little theological scene in which we are allowed to feel that Pyro­ cles is a real man who is offered a chance at Christian repentance, a chance that could save his soul from Hell, thus sparing us the distressing sight of another soul ending like Cymocles’s: “fast flying [to] eternal torment” (II.viii.45). The following three verses—­beginning, “Yet sith his fate so cruelly did fall”—­brutally snatch this fantasy away, reducing Pyrocles to the inhuman, to the merely significant. This reduction is so complete that Pyrocles’s death, unlike his b ­ rother’s, is represented in entirely, and hor­ rifically, corporeal terms. It is also represented with Stendhalian swiftness.

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But is the death actually represented, or is it skipped over? We see Ar­ thur unlacing the helmet, and then we see, in a moment recalling the terrible image in the Aeneid of Priam’s headless body, a headless trunk befouling “all the place” with blood: “His shining Helmet he gan soone unlace, / And left his headlesse body bleeding all the place.” 6 We note that it is Cymocles who, at the beginning of the episode, in stanza seven­ teen, is unlacing Guyon’s helmet when Arthur arrives. This is the same body that, when it had a head and was “inflam’d with rage,” addressed the Palmer as a “dotard vile” and warned the Palmer, in the following terms, to abandon Guyon’s prostrate body: “Abandone soone, I read, the caitive spoile / Of that same outcast carkasse” (II.viii.12). The irony is that Pyrocles becomes what he describes, an outcast carcass, headless and spewing forth blood, as once he spewed forth bloody words. It is a spec­ tacular final image of Pyroclean rage as mindless effusion. H ­ ere too, then, the allegorical character seems not so much to die—if death is the loss of what we are—as fully to become what he is. The entire canto plays an in­ter­est­ing game with death and with the lan­ guage of death. The most impor­tant “carcass” in it, although it is spoken of as dead, is not in fact dead. I refer of course to Guyon’s “fallen flesh,” which, as A. C. Hamilton reminds us in his edition of the poem, is what the word carcass means etymologically (FQ II.viii.12n5). The fallen Guyon seems dead to almost all pre­sent—to Archimago, to Cymocles, to Pyro­ cles, and to Prince Arthur. (Atin, a male version of Atê, the strife-­stirrer, arrived on the scene with Archimago and the Saracen ­brothers but is not mentioned again u ­ ntil the final line, when he flies with Archimago.)7 He seems dead to all, that is, except the Palmer, who has felt Guyon’s pulse and seems intent on concealing from the murderous b ­ rothers that Guyon is alive, lest they kill him in his helpless state rather than merely lamenting that they cannot kill him ­because someone ­else has. Guyon revives only when the b ­ rothers are dead: “By this Sir Guyon from his traunce awakt, / Life having maistered her senceless foe” (II.viii.53). It is almost as if Guyon has been allowed to trade places with Pyrocles and Cymocles, to be upright again once they are laid low. The Palmer tells Guyon how Arthur defended him against “­those two Sarazins confounded late, / Whose carcases on ground w ­ ere horribly prostrate” (II.viii.54). I said that Guyon is not in fact dead. But in Spenser the factual and the figurative are not easy to distinguish. When the factual and the figura­

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tive can be distinguished, they are opposed to each other wherever we find adjacent intensities of meaning. We know from the narrative that Guyon is alive, but the language keeps speaking of his death. At the conclusion of the seventh canto, when Guyon escapes Mammon’s delve and reaches the upper world again, it is by breathing “vitall aire” that he is thrown into a “deadly fit”: But all so soone as his enfeebled spright Gan sucke this vitall aire into his brest, As overcome with too exceeding might, The life did flit away out of her nest, And all his senses w ­ ere with deadly fit opprest. FQ II.vii.66

A surfeit of vital spirits nearly kills him. 8 At the beginning of this canto the Palmer is drawn to Guyon’s side by a guardian angel who charges him with Guyon’s safety, for “evill is at hand” (FQ II.viii.8). The Palmer feels Guyon’s pulse and rejoices at “finding life not yet dislodgèd quight.” The Palmer then broods protectively over this frail remaining life like a chicken protecting her hatchling: “He much rejoyst, and courd it tenderly, / As chicken newly hatcht, from dreaded destiny” (II.viii.9). The evil comes as a foursome: Pyrocles and Cymocles, the sons of Acrates (the name means “intemperance,” more literally “un­ mixed,” anticipating the final villain of this book, Acrasia), accompanied by Atin and Archimago. Both Pyrocles and Cymocles assume that Guyon is dead and that his death is proof that he lived an evil life: “Loe where he now inglorious doth lye, / To prove he livèd ill, that did thus foully dye,” says Pyrocles. To this, with more seeming philosophy, Cymocles adds, “The worth of all men by their end esteeme, / And then due praise, or due reproach them yield; / Bad therefore I him deeme, that thus lies dead on field” (II.viii.12, 14). To protect the defenseless Guyon, the Palmer speaks of him as if he ­were dead, knowing all the while that he is not: To whom the Palmer fearlesse answerèd; Certes, Sir Knight, ye bene too much to blame, Thus for to blot the honour of the dead, And with foule cowardize his carkasse shame, Whose living hand immortalized his name.

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Vile is the vengeance on the ashes cold, And envie base, to barke at sleeping fame: Was never wight that treason of him told; Your selfe his prowesse prov’d and found him fiers and bold. FQ II.viii.13

The speech has no effect. Pyrocles is enraged that Guyon’s death has left unsatisfied his own “greedy hunger of revenging ire” and decides to strip Guyon’s armor: “For why should a dead dog be deckt in armour bright?” (II.viii.15). At this the Palmer delivers the second of the two speeches to Pyrocles in which he speaks of Guyon as dead. The Palmer exhorts Pyrocles not to disgrace himself by seeking revenge on a dead body, and he implores Pyrocles not to commit the sacrilege of taking the clothes of the dead. Fi­ nally, the Palmer asks that Pyrocles leave Guyon the accoutrements of knighthood so t­ hese can be displayed on Guyon’s hearse and steed at his funeral—­a remarkable image of Guyon as dead. In reply, Pyrocles con­ jures an alternative and classically Homeric image of the destiny of the body: to be eaten by (entombed in) birds: Faire Sir, said then the Palmer suppliaunt, For knighthoods love, do not so foule a deed, Ne blame your honour with so shamefull vaunt Of vile revenge. To spoil the dead of weed Is sacrilege, and doth all sinnes exceed; But leave ­these relicks of his living might, To decke his herce, and trap his tomb-­black steed. What herce or steed (said he) should he have dight, But be entombèd in the raven or the kight? FQ II.viii.16

As Pyrocles and Cymocles begin to despoil Guyon, Arthur arrives and greets them, to which they respond churlishly. Only then does Arthur, as he turns to the Palmer, see Guyon: Then turning to the Palmer, he gan spy Where at his feete, with sorrowful demaine And deadly hew, an armèd corse did lye, In whose dead face he red g­ reat magnanimity. FQ II.viii.23

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Of course, by “dead face” we are to understand the face of Guyon as it ap­ pears to Arthur and as it does to all the ­others, excepting the Palmer. But even with this knowledge the sight is, for us too, a grimly heroic image of death. Arthur asks the Palmer how the man before him died and learns now that the man is not dead yet “cloudes of deadly night / A while his heavie eylids cover’d have” (FQ II.viii.24). When informed of Pyrocles and Cymocles’s intentions, Arthur takes his turn at dissuading them, entreating ­pardon for “this dead seeming knight” without, as he says, debating the issue of their presumed right to despoil him. Would not they like to show mercy on a “carcasse” that is already in the lowest state of fortune—­ “Whom fortune hath already laid in lowest seat?” (II.viii.27). They would not. Cymocles’s reply is violently morbid, speaking of Guyon as “vile bodie,” as “outcast dong,” and as “dead carrion” on which, nevertheless, he is determined to wreak vengeance: “The trespasse still doth live, albe the person die” (II.viii.28). To this Arthur replies—­again, with skillful mildness—­that Cymocles is of course right on that point, “So streitly God doth judge” (II.viii.28). The entire ethical calculus of revenge, including the proposition that it is noble to take revenge on a living man but ignoble to take revenge on a dead one, is undone by this phrase, although of course it is for God to take revenge on the dead, to judge the dead. Still, t­ here is reason to appeal to Cymocles’s self-­interest: he should consider how his honor ­w ill be stained “with rancor and despight” by raising his hand against the dead (II.viii.29). At this, Pyrocles calls Arthur a felon and “par­ taker of his [Guyon’s] crime” (II.viii.30) and strikes at Arthur with his, Arthur’s, own sword, Morddure. The fight ensues, and Cymocles and Pyrocles are killed, as we have seen. Cymocles’s soul flies swiftly to Hell, and the headless trunk of Pyrocles is left on the ground. What are we to make in this canto of the ferocious, death-­fi xated lan­ guage and imagery, directed to a person who is not in fact dead? I men­ tioned that the narrative point of this misdirection onto the living of lan­ guage for the dead is the palmer’s intention of concealing from the despoilers that Guyon is alive, lest they kill him. But by the time Arthur arrives and attempts to dissuade them, ­there is no further tactical reason for this subterfuge. Instead of debating the knightliness of raising one’s hand against the dead, Arthur might more reasonably say that Guyon is alive, though helpless, and now ­under his, Arthur’s, protection. But

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Spenser is interested in the question of taking revenge on a dead body. He is also interested in how the psychological energies of rage and concupis­ cence have deep somatic consequences, how they fasten on the body and ­will not leave it easily even at death. We realize now that the point of put­ ting Guyon on the brink of death, keeping him unconscious throughout, is to isolate and emphasize ­these somatic consequences—­the unconscious power of rage and concupiscence as habits—­which take hold on the body at a level deeper than the senses themselves: “By this Sir Guyon from his traunce awakt, / Life having maisterèd her sencelesse foe” (FQ II.viii.53). The “sencelesse foe” is death, which is beaten back when Guyon returns to his senses; but it is also, as Hamilton remarks in his edition, the morbid effects represented by Cymocles and Pyrocles. While rage and concupiscence manifest themselves in the senses, they fasten on the body addictively, on a level deeper than the senses themselves. Mammon’s delve, in the preceding canto, was about ambition and greed, and the power­ful connections be­ tween them, fueling the desire that fixes on a goal outside itself, moving the body ­toward it. This canto is about vices that become fixed deep within the body, establishing needs that regularly announce themselves in the senses, crying to be appeased. But they are anchored much deeper than the senses, which is why rage and concupiscence do not diminish when the external objects by which they are excited are removed. ­T here is, however, a further point to Guyon’s being in this canto both alive and dead. This point is concerned not with Spenser’s specific inten­ tion in moral theorizing but with the character of Spenser’s art, with the status of death in an allegory. As I said at the outset, death cannot be rep­ resented in an allegory as an existential event, as a rupture in the con­ tinuum and a moment of absolute loss. If Guyon ­were dead, the entire mood of the poem would change from the theoretical and the moral to the tragic. We see in the Mordant and Amavia episode with which the second book of The Faerie Queene opens the risk that a­ ctual death poses to the stability of the allegorical narrative—­though it is a risk Spenser brilliantly takes and wins. Spenser obviously cannot take such a risk with Guyon, for that would not be a risk at all but a certainty of failure. Spenser has instead taken a dif­fer­ent and perhaps more challenging risk in having the hero of this book in a divided or even paradoxical state: death is in Guyon, but Guyon is not in death.

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It is just this state of the body—as having death at work within it but not being dead—­that characterizes the allegorical sign and especially the allegorical personification. I have spoken elsewhere of the vio­lence of al­ legorical idealism, whereby abstractions abduct, seize, and tear open physical bodies in which to represent themselves as embodied and there­ fore as real. A model of this vio­lence be found in the idealistic but obses­ sively meditative language of Neoplatonism, in which the material world is an emanation of the ideal. But this emanation becomes resistant to its origin and has to be violently “seized” by the ideal in a moment of raptus. Only then may it be turned back to its source, converted—­the term is conversion—­into a meaningful realm in which ­every physical ­thing is a sign of something higher.9 In each allegorical body, as in an allegorical text itself, ­there is a rift be­ tween the material and the ideal and a strug­gle occurring around it. The rift is seen in the very word allegory (allo + agoreuo, “other” + “speaking”), the precise meaning of which oscillates continually to ­either side of the rift. For the other can denote e­ ither the ideal meaning, which is “other” with re­spect to the physical sign, or the physical sign in itself, which is “other” with re­spect to the meaning. An allegory says something other than it means and means something other than it says. This, then, is the significance of Guyon’s paradoxical state, of his being at once dead and alive. The boundary within him between the living and the dead is not so much a boundary as a rift between his meaning as a pure allegorical sign and his meaning as a narrative figure in quest of the wisdom that comes from struggling with meaning and striving for truth. In Cymocles and Pyrocles we see the destiny of pure allegorical signs, which become fixed emblematically. This emblematic fixing is at once the fulfillment of what Cymocles and Pyrocles are, as signs, and the expul­ sion of every­thing in them that is vital: “­those two Sarazins confounded late, / Whose carcases on ground ­were horribly prostrate” (FQ II.viii.54). But once an allegorical sign becomes fixed in this way, it can no longer function in the narrative. It can only be observed for a moment before the observer—­the “Dante,” for example, who travels through the Commedia or the Guyon who travels through Mammon’s delve—­passes on. In the eighth canto of the Legend of Temperance something like death seizes upon Guyon and holds him in a state that brings him as near as he

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can come to being himself an allegorical sign. The allegorical poet is al­ ways in danger of allowing what­ever it is in the poem that keeps it alive, that keeps the poem’s narrative moving, and that keeps us caring about the characters who move in that narrative, to fall into the shadow of absolute, determinate meaning. Recall the verses in which the Palmer finds that Guyon has a pulse: At last him turning to his charge behight, With trembling hand his troubled pulse gan try; Where finding life not yet dislodgèd quite, He much rejoyst, and courd it tenderly, As chicken newly hatcht, from dreaded destiny. FQ II.viii.9

We might see in this moment an image of what I suppose to have often been Spenser’s state of mind as he contemplated where to turn next in the evolving proj­ect of The Faerie Queene. He won­ders for a moment, a­ fter each lucid formulation of meaning, if ­there is any life left in the game. He finds that t­ here is, rejoices at its presence, and fosters it protectively as he goes on. The life in this game needs that protection ­because it works in proximity to death.

Chapter 8

'

Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed (My bed stood with its foot ­towards the win­dow; in front of the win­dow ­there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter time when I had the dream, and night-­time.) Suddenly the win­dow opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves w ­ ere sitting on a big walnut tree in front of the win­dow. ­T here w ­ ere six or seven of them. The wolves w ­ ere quite white and looked more like foxes or sheepdogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked up like dogs when they are at­ tending to something. In ­great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.1

the most famous in the lit­er­a­ture of psychoanalysis, is discovered in the course of the analy­sis to be a neurotic encoding by Freud’s patient, the Wolf Man, of an event actually observed by the Wolf Man as a child, when he was awake. As Freud describes it, the break­ through in the treatment occurs when the Wolf Man interprets the opening of the win­dow as the opening of his own eyes.2 What the Wolf Man saw he saw when he was awake. In the course of further analy­sis it is discovered that the event he observed while awake and l­ater encoded as a vision of wolves is what Freud terms the primal scene. Every­thing in Freud’s subsequent analy­sis hangs by this thread: the in­ terpretation by the Wolf Man himself of the opening of the win­dow as the opening of his eyes, which means that the patient saw something while waking that actually occurred. Yet it is impor­tant to note, as Stanley Fish has remarked, that the Wolf Man does not recall waking but interprets T HIS DR EAM,

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one ele­ment of the dream as such: the opening win­dow.3 By interpreting his dream from within, the Wolf Man decides what the opening of the win­dow must mean—­that he is no longer dreaming—­and he does so without the external corroboration that a clear recollection of waking may be thought to provide. The Wolf Man’s statement is at once an inter­ pretation assisting in the detached work of analy­sis and a disclosure ren­ dering up to that analy­sis a secret buried inside his psyche. Why is this moment of self-­interpretation by a neurotic, an interpretation coming out of the neurosis itself, given so much authority? In Fish’s analy­sis, the answer to this question would seem to be that the self-­interpretation of a diseased mind is given just so much authority as is necessary to relieve the pressure on psychoanalysis, which is accused of constructing both the disease and its cure. It is therefore essential to Freud’s method, if the charge of suggestion is to be avoided, to legitimate the patient’s interpretation of his dream as a function of the original code, something that spontaneously rises out of the “text” (in this case the psyche of the Wolf Man, w ­ hether it is dreaming or interpreting), without having been placed t­ here by the analyst. For the analyst, as the word ety­ mologically implies, releases something tied up or concealed without af­ fecting what is freed. The role of the analyst is therefore more detached from and superior to that of the mediator, or interpres, whose task is to re­ encode the message of the text by seeming to decode it. To get some­ thing out, the interpreter must put something in, but in an analy­sis only the patient can be allowed to do that. What the analyst releases from the interior is a pro­cess of reencoding that is already nested in the original code and that follows its natu­ral course without, he assures us, interfer­ ence from him. In this way he fulfills the oldest wish-­fantasy of herme­ neutics: that the text interpret itself—­even if it is necessary for the cir­cuit of interpretation to take in the analyst in its arc. That is the wish Freud intends, in his analy­sis of the Wolf Man, to come true. Fish asks how the stigma of interpretative intervention can be taken away from the analyst and inserted back into the text as its self-­disclosure. The princi­ple of self-­interpretation is vindicated, and is made to vindi­ cate psychoanalysis, when Freud considers the merits of psychoanalyzing ­children instead of adults. Anticipating the criticism that the search for traces of infantile neuroses in adults is vitiated by the interference taking

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place over the intervening years (­after so many years, the Wolf Man ­can’t recall if he actually woke), Freud states that the analy­sis of a child would introduce an even more serious kind of interference: the necessary lending of words and thoughts to the child by the analyst. As Fish puts it, the accusation of intervention by the analyst is allowed to surface only to be redirected at the analysand: “it is presented as an accusation not against Freud but his patients, including, presumably, this one.” 4 This statement does not seem to me exactly correct. For in deflecting the charge of intervention away from analyst to patient the accusation becomes something quite dif­fer­ent: a symptom. It is changed from the stigma of inauthenticity in the analyst’s method to an au­then­tic symptom of the condition to be cured. The Wolf Man’s interpretation—­that the opening of the win­dow “of its own accord” is the opening of his eyes—­ must be valid ­because it proceeds out of the same psyche that witnessed the primal scene. Yet just this authenticity—­the authenticity of an inter­ pretation that has its fons et origo in the interpreted ­thing—­undermines the authority of the interpretation as knowledge. By interpreting the opening of the win­dow as the opening of his own eyes and the cessation of dreaming the dreamer is caught determining the status of the ­whole from a position inside that ­whole. By the same princi­ple that a set cannot be a member of itself or that the contained cannot enclose the container, the one t­ hing the dreamer ­can’t decide is ­whether he was dreaming or neurotically encoding the primal scene to look like a dream ­after the fact, a conclusion Freud himself would eventually arrive at. It is by a similar fondness for originative authenticity in lit­er­a­ture that we prefer a text to interpret itself or that we credit with special authority the gesture by which an author interprets the text from a position some­ where inside or alongside or even outside that text—­depending on which position is most persuasive for the purpose at hand. Even in the last case, where the author seems to have stepped outside the self and then turned back to look in from without, we feel that this perspective, however de­ tached it may be, is the perspective of one who has nevertheless been at the center. If we do not watch Spenser too closely, he w ­ ill have it both ways. Spenser w ­ ill have it one way when he assumes by his externality a position of a higher logical type. In that case, no one can then accuse the interpreter

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of attempting in one part of the work to determine the status of the ­whole in which that part is contained. Spenser ­will have it the other way when insinuating, by a magisterial nod, that he enjoys a peculiar inti­ macy with the interior of the text that no mere critic can have. Like Milton’s Spirit, Spenser has been pre­sent from the first as a witness of the scene of creation and also as a participant in it. Such a double role—of laying open an original intention now buried at the work’s center and of offering a belated and detached commentary on the work from its margins—is frequently observable in the work of t­ hose who claim, from a position outside the text, to declare what is hidden inside it. We see this in the Epistle to Can Grande (which is not certainly attributed to Dante), in Tasso’s Poetic Letters, as they came to be called, and in the unreliable (to put it mildly) prose allegory Tasso appended to the 1581 edition of his poem. And of course we see this entanglement of original intention with ­later reflection—­closely related to what Freud in the Wolf Man case calls Nachträglichkeit—in Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh, which declares, as we are told, his “­whole intention in the course of this work.”5 The sentence may well be the printer’s, approved by Spenser, who speaks in the Letter, in perhaps more nuanced language, though to the same effect, of his “gen­ eral intention and meaning, which in the ­whole course thereof [he has] fashioned.” His intention, unrecoverable in its original state (if that state, that moment, can even be said to exist except as accumulating recollec­ tions of it), is reinscribed and reor­ga­nized in the Letter to Raleigh—­and also at moments in the course of the poem. The phantasmatic event of an original conception, an original grasping or taking in hand of the idea for the poem as a whole—­what Walter Raleigh in his dedicatory sonnet calls Spenser’s “conceipt of the Faery Queene”—­exists in the strata of its recollections, including that of the Letter to Raleigh. Caught in this dou­ bleness, the Letter belongs to the continual, retrospective revision of an origin that is felt to exist in the past—­Spenser’s original conception, em­ bodied in the twelve-­day feast at Cleopolis, where and when all the quests begin—­and a telos that lies in the ­future of the writing that the poet is ­doing in the pre­sent: the return of the knights to Cleopolis and the ­union of Prince Arthur and Gloriana. Such a ­union would seem to be pos­si­ble ­because of Arthur’s other and l­ater history as king, as we know it in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.

Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh  217

' that this doubleness can be observed in the text of the Letter to Raleigh without any reference, as yet, to its position. For even inside itself, regardless where it is placed in any edition of the poem, the Letter to Raleigh tends to opposite sides of the issue at once, so as to have it both ways. On the one hand the Letter to Raleigh seems to escape out of the center of The Faerie Queene and to bring with it an account of the primal scene occurring at the “wel-­head of the History”: Gloriana’s twelve-­day feast and the assignment of quests. On the other hand the Letter to Raleigh seems to invade the text of The Faerie Queene from its mar­ gins, analyzing the poem by elegantly applying the commonplaces and protocols of Re­nais­sance critical theory. Thus, the Letter to Raleigh comes out of the interior of the poem, bearing witness to its primal scene, and the Letter to Raleigh is an interpretation that is written, and dated, as the last t­hing composed. By this double movement within the Letter to Raleigh itself, an oscillation that may be thought of as a cir­cuit, the text of The Faerie Queene seems to extend a part of itself outside itself so as to turn around and interpret itself without interference from us. We seem not to construct but merely to recognize analogies and patterns that are already hidden inside the poem as its meaning. Once the cir­cuit is closed, the analyst’s interpretative per­for­mance seems to come not out of him—­ ­out of Spenser as critic—­but out of the very poem he has made. Such is the effect produced by James Nohrnberg, Spenser’s most massive and resourceful commentator to date: “what began as a criticism of the poem, in the sense of an analy­sis of its ostensible total form, evolved into a commentary, a divulging of the form’s hidden allegorical content.” 6 But this hidden allegorical content is in fact produced by the commentator’s own remarkable improvisatory powers. Just as Freud pre­sents himself as merely analyzing the Wolf Man’s self-­ interpretation, so readers of The Faerie Queene imagine themselves standing back from the text, refraining from any interfering suggestions as to what The Faerie Queene means but simply allowing the text to draw its own meaning out of its center and then, through the narrower pas­ sageway of the Letter to Raleigh, to curve back into itself, like a Klein ­bottle. We recognize analogies and their interconnections, the complex W E M AY N O T E

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web of the poem’s meaning, but we do not construct them. Above all, we do not interfere with the text by putting anything in: we merely assist at its self-­disclosure. In offering an interpretative disclosure (the oxymoron captures its equivocal role), it is the task of the Letter to close the cir­cuit by which the poem can be at once itself and a commentary on itself. Com­ mentary thus becomes an objective procedure that is done from a posi­ tion of objective detachment. It is the making of what Spenser calls “a pleasing Analy­sis of all.”

' material difficulty with this paradigm for in­ terpreting The Faerie Queene, a difficulty that arises not within the field of interpretation but rather in place where the bound­aries of that field must be drawn. I refer to the position of the Letter to Raleigh, which is not set at the front of the text published in 1590 but rather at the back, even though it is meant to be read first so as to show the reader how to “gripe al the discourse.” We know, further, that although the Letter is presented as an original intention, setting forth Spenser’s design or idea, it was written ­after the first three books of the poem had been entered in the Stationers’ Register. And in the 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene, in which Books Four to Six ­were added and One to Three reprinted, the Letter to Raleigh does not appear. If editors are to reprint the Letter to Raleigh with The Faerie Queene, they must determine its status with re­spect to the poem in order to determine where it w ­ ill stand. And they must do so in the absence of an authoritative repositioning by Spenser in 1596. Where should a modern editor of The Faerie Queene position the Letter to Raleigh? This is not just a bibliographical prob­lem to which ­there is a positive solution. ­There is no question of restoring the Letter to Raleigh to its orig­ inal place. We may see why this is so by plotting the coordinates of its position in 1590: (a) at the end of Book Three, as an irruption of commen­ tary into the poem at this moment in the course of the writing and (b) at the end of every­thing that has been written, as a recollection and dis­ closure of the author’s original intention. ­Because, as I said, the Letter to Raleigh was not authoritatively repositioned by Spenser in 1596 (we s­ hall see that this would have been very hard even for Spenser to do), l­ ater edi­ tors are inclined to position it according to their assumptions about its ­T H E R E I S A S T U B B O R N LY

Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh  219

interiority with re­spect to The Faerie Queene. What they cannot do is take a neutral or objective view by positioning where its author did. For if the Letter to Raleigh is placed at the end of Book Seven (satisfying coordinate b without satisfying a), the editor has favored the idea of the Letter as rep­ resenting the interior of the poem and its original intention. But if it is placed ­after the Third Book (thus satisfying a without satisfying b), the editor w ­ ill have de­cided in ­favor of its exteriority as commentary. The Letter happened ­here, at this point in time, January 23, 1589 (old style, i.e., 1590), and now it is over. No editor has done so. It should not take much reflection to see why, in a tradition of scholar­ ship that is more comfortable with the idea of the author fulfilling a uni­ fied, original design than with the idea of the author standing back to im­ provise a plausible scheme for the moment, editors have chosen to position the Letter to Raleigh at the end of the poem, a­ fter the Seventh Book, as the authoritative plan for the w ­ hole. They have occasionally en­ hanced this effect by moving the Letter to Raleigh to the beginning of the poem, notwithstanding the original description of it as being “hereunto annexed.” The motive for this transposition from the back to the front— as for the habit of referring to the Letter to Raleigh as prefatory—is to make the physical position of the Letter to Raleigh coincide with the positional claim made inside the Letter, where we are told it discloses the “wel-­head of the History” and the primal scene of Spenser’s “darke conceit.” This issue was first recognized and attended to by the Reverend Alex­ ander Grosart, in his deluxe Victorian edition of The Faerie Queene (1882– 84). Deprecating the practice of placing the Letter to Raleigh before the text of The Faerie Queene, Grosart announced his intention of restoring it to its correct place. This place he declares to be ­after Book Three. But ­because the poem was continued, he “necessarily” places the Letter to Raleigh a­ fter the Seventh Book, “at the close of the w ­ hole”: “Dr. Morris, though his text is that of 1590, prefixes ­these appendices [the Letter to Raleigh and the dedicatory poems], herein following the bad example of ­later editions. I unhesitatingly recur to the original arrangement of ap­ pending (though necessarily at the close of the ­whole).”7 We have seen, however, that even if Grosart had temerariously positioned the Letter to Raleigh a­ fter Book Three, a choice that would reflect a more writerly con­ ception of its status, he would still not have got it right. 8 The original

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position of the Letter to Raleigh was effaced when Spenser wrote Books Four to Seven. In bibliographical terms, therefore, the prob­lem where now to position the Letter to Raleigh is formally undecidable: no conceivable evidence could solve it. Yet by examining the circumstances surrounding the po­ sitioning of the Letter to Raleigh in the early folios, we can bring into clearer focus the significance for The Faerie Queene and perhaps for literary theory in general (in par­tic­u­lar, the authority of authorial commentary), of what may be called the positionality of Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh.

' some of the facts. The Letter to Raleigh was printed once in Spenser’s lifetime, when it appeared at the end of the 1590 quarto of The Faerie Queene (containing Books One to Three) on signatures 2Pr–2P3r. The Letter is followed, on signatures 2P3v–2P8v, by a collec­ tion of commendatory and dedicatory sonnets and poems, by a list of “Faults Escaped in the Print,” and by four unpaginated leaves (sigs. 2Q1–4) with further dedicatory sonnets. In the 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene, which adds Books Four to Six in a separate quarto, the Letter to Raleigh does not reappear. The two commendatory sonnets by Walter Raleigh and the poem by Gabriel Harvey are however reprinted a­ fter Book Three in the 1596 quarto, presumably to fill up the eighth leaf of signature Oo. This edition, the two quarto volumes published in 1596, was the last in the poet’s lifetime. For this 1596 edition Spenser introduced some cor­ rections to Books One to Three on a copy of 1590, which became the copy text for the first volume of the new edition. But Spenser did not see the work through the press—­the “Faults Escaped” listed in 1590 are still at large in 1596—­and it is not impossible that the decision to omit the Letter to Raleigh in 1596 was made by the printer rather than by Spenser. I mention this hypothesis—­that the decision to drop the Letter to Raleigh in the second, 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene was not made by Spenser but by his printer—­only to add that it is of no use to us h ­ ere. For even if we w ­ ere to find out that the suppression of the Letter to Raleigh in 1596 had not been authorized, that knowledge would simply reintro­ duce the question in a new form. Would Spenser have revised and redated the Letter to Raleigh before placing it at the conclusion of Book Six? Or if LET ME REVIEW

Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh  221

he ­were to leave it in its original form, would he have placed it in what is now the ­middle of the text, between Books Three and Four? Even for Spenser the prob­lem where to position the Letter in 1596 would be far from ­simple. We cannot know for certain ­whether Spenser’s intentions ­were carried out by its suppression. Nor can we submit to any reliable test such propositions as have been advanced, on the assumption that they ­were, to explain Spenser’s motives. Was the Letter to Raleigh omitted ­because it was no longer consistent with the poem in its expanded form (the Letter was already inconsistent enough on its first appearance)? Or was the Letter to Raleigh omitted b ­ ecause the additional books made it no longer necessary to provide “light to the reader.” 9 Neither explana­ tion is plausible. One elementary point that does bear insisting on is that the Letter to Raleigh is dated January 23, 1589 (o.s.), some seven weeks ­after the entry of The Faerie Queene in the Stationers’ Register (December 1, 1589). It is therefore strange that it should conform so imperfectly with what had al­ ready been written when it was composed. Of the three books it follows, only the action of the first book remains uncontradicted by the account given in the Letter to Raleigh. Guyon is not assigned the adventure of Acrasia at Fairy Court. Scudamour is not the patron of the virtue repre­ sented in Book Three. Yet with some insistency the Letter is presented to us not as being a retrospective interpretation of the epic, as Tasso’s prose allegory was, but as a “foreconceit,” to use Sidney’s famous term, the orig­ inal idea being even more excellent than its execution: “for any under­ standing knoweth the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-­ conceit of the work, and not in the work itself.”10 This idea was thought out by the poet before he began his poem and only belatedly recorded on that January 23rd, in “a Letter of the Authors expounding his ­whole intention in the course of this worke.” If we consider the inconsistencies between the Letter to Raleigh and the poem in the light of this claim that the Letter discloses Spenser’s original and guiding intention, we may suspect that t­ hose inconsistencies have been contrived, or at least allowed to stand, for a purpose: they tend to confirm the authenticity of the plan as Spenser’s original intention. An intention does not suggest rigorous adherence to e­ very article of a pre­ ordained scheme but a more loosely conceived bending of the narrative

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around a general form, something that would make the inconsistencies we find in the Letter to Raleigh surprising but not incredible. What would scarcely seem credible is the proposition that Spenser, having referred in­ directly in the first three books to the scheme that is now more fully de­ scribed in the Letter, nevertheless did not think out the scheme in detail ­until ­after t­ hose books ­were complete. For in that case he would surely have taken care to avoid inconsistency with a narrative that was already complete. Yet unlikely as it may appear, this is what I suspect Spenser did. It makes better sense in the total design for Guyon to receive his quest against Acrasia at Fairy Court instead of finding it by happenstance when he encounters Acrasia’s victims. It arguably makes better sense in the de­ sign for Scudamour to be the principal knight of the quest against Busy­ rane. But in the narrative of the poem ­these ideal ele­ments of its plan are inferior to what the poet creates. By introducing ideal inconsistencies jar­ ring with the narrative he has already written, the poet persuades us that the schema described in the Letter to Raleigh was devised before the first three books ­were written. The ideal inconsistencies become tropes of authority. The foreconceit is obviously original, the poem’s primal scene, just ­because it d ­ oesn’t quite fit the poem as it has developed since. The play between the intentional plan and the a­ ctual poem allows a certain freedom of movement in the interpretative game. As a result, the prob­lem of discovering the true relation of the Letter to Raleigh to The Faerie Queene—is it a plan of the ­whole or a part of the process?—is repo­ sitioned for us as its readers. Do we take the Letter to Raleigh to show the foreconceit to which all the narrative of The Faerie Queene must be referred for its meaning? Or should we describe the relation of the Letter to Raleigh to the three books that precede it as William Blissett has described the relation of the Mutabilitie Cantos to the six books Spenser had com­ pleted in 1596: as “a detached retrospective commentary” emerging at that point in the writing but also serving, for the moment, as a finale?11 The subtlety of Blissett’s analy­sis lies not in his demonstration of the fi­ nality of the Mutabilitie Cantos as a coda but in his allowing for the pos­ sibility of that finality being effaced ­were Spenser to have lived to incor­ porate the cantos in “some following Booke of the Faerie Queene,” as is said in the inscription at their head. The Letter to Raleigh offers a parallel case, but one in which Spenser’s “detached retrospective commentary”

Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh  223

is incorporated into what follows and so no longer necessary. But is it in­ corporated, or is it abandoned? Before turning to this question, we may examine how some of Spenser’s editors have confronted the prob­lem. The 1609 folio of The Faerie Queene, in which Matthew Lownes prints for the first time the Mutabilitie Cantos, does not print the Letter to Ra­ leigh, b ­ ecause Lownes used 1596 as his copy text. However, in many copies of Spenser’s Works printed in folio by Lownes between 1611 and 1617, the Letter to Raleigh (with the poems adjacent to it in 1590) appears on an uncommitted quire signed with the pilcrow (¶-­¶8, ¶8 wanting in some copies and blank in ­others). Of this quire ­there are two separate printings, with identical signatures, conjecturally dated 1611 and 1617—­ when Lownes printed title pages for his collected editions. Generally speaking t­ hese editions ­were put together at need throughout this period using separate printings of individual works. Thus, in many copies of the Lownes Works, The Faerie Queene appears in the pages of the 1609 folio, bound with ­later printings of the minor poems. In one copy of the 1611 folio of Spenser’s Works, a copy that uses The Faerie Queene of 1609 and prints the minor poems on separate signatures ending with the “Visions of Petrarch,” t­ here appears at the volume’s end an uncommitted quire signed with the pilcrow (¶-­¶7, ¶8 wanting), in which the Letter to Raleigh is separated from The Faerie Queene by all of Spenser’s minor poems. In other copies this signature migrates from the back of the book to a posi­ tion immediately following the colophon on the verso of the last page of the epic, that is, where a modern editor would be most likely to place it. But in a copy of a ­later edition, that of 1617, the Letter to Raleigh appears ­after The Shepheardes Calender and before the remaining minor poems. And in ­others it remains in the back of the volume. With the assistance of the nonalphabetical and hence nonsequential pilcrow the Letter was signed, in effect, to have no position. The purpose of printers’ marks such as the pilcrow and the asterisk was to signify material that might be bound anywhere in the volume once it was printed, although usually such marks ­were employed for preliminary material (“prelims”) bound before signature A. A remarkable exception is the signatures for Troilus and Cressida in the Shakespeare first folio. Prob­ ably ­because permission to print the play was obtained only late, it had to be inserted a­ fter the other plays w ­ ere set into signatures. The pilcrow

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came to the rescue. The pilcrow thus indicates a certain freedom of move­ ment possessed by any quire that is signed with it. Instead of under­ writing a fixed position in the text, as alphabetic signatures do, the pil­ crow offers mobility within the text and even between texts. Alphabetic signatures lock each quire into its place so that one can instantly tell when a quire is out of its place in the interior of the text. But the pilcrow signi­ fies the externality of the leaves in its quire, as we readily see when prelims are used for pages of dedications, contents, and the like added to the be­ ginning of a volume, pages that ­were the last to be composed. We see the same ­thing t­ oday in books with prefatory material paginated with the lower-­case Roman numerals. But even this externality of the quire signed with the pilcrow is not definitive b ­ ecause such a quire may be bound any­ where inside the volume, as Troilus and Cressida was bound between the histories and the tragedies. So too was the Letter to Raleigh bound into copies of the Works in vari­ous places among the minor poems. ­Because the Letter to Raleigh is neither inside nor outside the volume, we can imagine it entering the text at any point to affirm its authoritative design in that place alone or standing apart from the text to affirm its governance over the w ­ hole. Or it might oscillate between the two positions. B ­ ecause it has no fixed position, it draws attention to its positionality, its capacity to interfere with the poem in dif­fer­ent ways according to where we happen to place it. We have seen, however, that ­there is at least one position into which the Letter to Raleigh cannot be conveyed by the pilcrow b ­ ecause that po­ sition no longer exists: the original position in which Spenser placed it. For even when the Letter is placed in the Lownes texts (as sometimes it is) in what now seems the normative position, ­after the Mutabilitie Cantos, that placement does not lie on the b axis of the original position: at the end of every­thing that has been written. When in the Lownes editions the Letter to Raleigh follows The Faerie Queene, it is placed ­after the colo­ phon on the verso of the last leaf of the separate folio containing The Faerie Queene, that is, on the outside. And it is placed before the first sig­ nature of the minor poems. The Letter thus becomes quite literally an external segment of text inserted into the space between the two inward-­ turning folds of Spenser’s oeuvre.

Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh  225

This as-­yet-­unanchored position of the Letter to Raleigh may be con­ firmed if we note in passing the only other edition in the seventeenth ­century, that of Roger L’Estrange in 1679, in which the Letter migrates back to the m ­ iddle of the minor poems, following the “Visions of Petrarch” and preceding “Brittains Ida” (now known to be by Phineas Fletcher). It is in this peculiarly unclassified position that the Letter is at last given a signature (4A, misprinted as 3A) that fixes, or nearly fixes (I say nearly ­because of the misprint), its position in one place. In the first scholarly edition of The Faerie Queene, that of John Hughes in 1715, the ambiguity is strikingly resolved in f­ avor of the interiority of the Letter to Raleigh. The Letter is placed at the front, a­ fter a few prelims and a glossary, and separated from the opening lines of The Faerie Queene by the commendatory and dedicatory poems associated with it.12 By this strong positioning of the Letter at the “wel-­head” we think of it not as mere commentary arising from a belated occasion—­that of Raleigh’s request for an explanation—­but as what Spenser says it is: an original intention pre­sent at the beginning and active from this “center” throughout—­the center of Fairy Land and the center of the allegorical text. It is small won­der that eighteenth-­century criticism of The Faerie Queene was uniformly preoccupied with Spenser’s design. In Thomas Birch’s edition of 1751 we find an in­ter­est­ing adjustment of this arrangement, or rather an in­ter­est­ing qualification of the strong as­ sertion that Hughes makes by it. Like several other editions of the period, Birch places the Letter to Raleigh at the front of the poem but insulates it from the epic by following the Letter with a lengthy apparatus of col­ lation t­ ables, glossaries, and a memoir of the poet.13 Thus the assertion made by placing the Letter at the start—­that it reveals the “foreconceit”— is qualified by surrounding it with material the status of which is obvi­ ously marginal. It is thus suggested that the Letter to Raleigh belongs as much to the external realm of commentary as it does to the internal realm of intention. In another edition of the period, that of Ralph Church (1758), some­ thing still more remarkable occurs.14 The Letter to Raleigh is again posi­ tioned at the front of the volume, but the dedicatory and commendatory poems, which had always followed the Letter since their first appearance

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in 1590, are now placed before it. This is the final adjustment necessary for transposing the Letter to Raleigh from the end to the beginning of The Faerie Queene and confirming Hughes’s strong statement with a stronger one. When Hughes moved the Letter to Raleigh with its associate poems to the front of the text, he inadvertently permitted t­ hose associate poems to intervene between the Letter and The Faerie Queene. By placing the as­ sociate poems before the Letter to Raleigh in the linear sequence of the text, Church restored them to the position they had always held with re­ spect to the Letter, that is, on the opposite side of the Letter from The Faerie Queene. Once more the Letter to Raleigh can lie alongside the text of the poem as the true rec­ord of its primal scene.

' of Grosart’s criticism of displacing the Letter to Raleigh and of his imaginary restoration of it to an original position, which is in fact the position given to it by Matthew Lownes: ­after Book Seven. Even if Grosart had placed the Letter a­ fter the third book, he would still not have got it right ­because Spenser effaced the original position of the Letter to Raleigh simply by continuing the poem. We have seen that Spenser’s omission of the Letter to Raleigh in 1596 has been explained as an ab­ sence, that is, a loss of relevance to the developing poem, and as a pres­ ence, that is, that the Letter had become so completely internalized that the design was now obvious for all to see. Was the Letter to Raleigh in­ corporated, or was it abandoned? I wish to state now why we can approve neither of t­ hese alternatives. If we position the Letter to Raleigh at the beginning of The Faerie Queene—­a practice that fell into disuse with Grosart and definitively with J. C. Smith’s Oxford edition of 1612—we imply that it fully and unambiguously rep­ resents the poet’s “fore­conceit” and telos. And if we position the Letter to Raleigh at the end of the poem or ­after Book Three (as no one to my knowledge has done) or even if we position it nowhere, we imply that the Letter is a moment of criticism arising in the course of composition, ex­ temporarily, currente calamo, with the pen ­r unning on, but subsequently pushed into the margins and then out of sight. The Letter to Raleigh can never be definitively and wholly one or the other: extemporary commen­ tary by the poet or an informing idea. It is both, and it is neither. It seems I H AV E S P O K E N

Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh  227

that in a practical editorial sense, as well as in a metaphysical one—­since it is neither inside nor outside, neither essential nor accidental, neither a source at the origin nor a downstream addition—we can position the Letter to Raleigh nowhere.15 Yet we are not at all justified in positioning it nowhere if by that we mean leaving it out. Like the musical compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, in which the order of the parts may be changed with each per­for­ mance, the Letter to Raleigh may be allowed to move where it ­w ill— where we w ­ ill—­and to declare by the indeterminacy of its position the more power­ful fact of its positionality, its ability to oscillate between in­ side and outside according to the vicissitudes of interpretative play. The positionality of the Letter to Raleigh forces us to relinquish the notion, a perhaps slightly idolatrous one, that The Faerie Queene is an object—­a large one—­that despite its incompletion is enclosed in itself, and in relation to which all commentary is an eliciting of what is inside it, instead of an en­ ergy proceeding from us.

Chapter 9

'

Allegory and Re­nais­sance Critical Theory

lived in the first age of literary theory, a cultural movement that began in Italy in the sixteenth c­ entury, when the founda­ tions of modern literary criticism ­were laid. ­T here ­were theoretical trea­ tises on poetry in the ­Middle Ages, but ­these tended to be elementary manuals of instruction in the ars poetriae, “the art of poetry,” the most fa­ mous being the Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf: how to make verses, how to or­ga­nize discourse, how to distinguish figures in words from fig­ ures in thought, what tropes are, and so on.1 ­T here is l­ittle if any conti­ nuity from t­ hese works to Re­nais­sance literary exegesis and theory and ­little sense in the medieval manuals that poetry is dif­fer­ent from rhe­toric, except in the deployment of verse. Poetry is versified prose. Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford, in the prologue to his tale, describes his auctor or source, “Franceys Petrak”—­that is, the ­great, early Italian Re­nais­sance poet Petrarch—as “the lauriat poete . . . ​whos rethorike sweete / Enlu­ myned al Ytaille of poetrie.”2 For the Clerk, if not for Chaucer, poetry and rhe­toric are synonymous terms. Both can be taught. The aphorism quoted by Sidney, orator fit, poeta nascitur, “an orator is made, but a poet is born,” would have made ­little sense to the medieval theorists of poetry.3 Of course, the poets knew dif­fer­ent; certainly the greatest of them did. But so ­great was the prestige of literary theory in the Re­nais­sance that no author of a long narrative poem—­prose fiction was still in its infancy—­ could avoid being influenced by such theory and in many cases intimi­ dated by it. The g­ reat epic poet Torquato Tasso, himself a major theorist, EDM U ND SPENSER

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is the most egregious example of intimidation by theory, including self-­ intimidation. 4 Spenser is one of the clearest examples in the period of a poet influenced through and through by the literary theory of the day and yet uninhibited by it, preserving his freedom but bowing in the direction of abstract princi­ples wherever it was suitable or requisite to do so. Even Milton, in the following ­century, despite his sturdy in­de­pen­dence, had to fight his way out from ­under the domineering prestige of Italian literary theory.5 That is a situation very dif­fer­ent from what we have t­ oday, when for the most part writers of fiction and poetry pay no attention to literary theory or hold it in contempt. But from the upsurge of literary theory in the sixteenth ­century in Italy to ­later developments in France in the sev­ enteenth c­ entury and in E ­ ngland and Germany in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, literary theory has gone hand in hand with poetic production. ­Until the advent of mostly French theory in the 1960s (Northrop Frye, though not French, may be counted in ­here), the twen­ tieth c­ entury saw the more abstract questions of nineteenth-­century, ro­ mantic literary theory reduced to the prob­lems of practical criticism. On the w ­ hole, literary theory was no longer the concern of the poets themselves—­T. S. Eliot is the major exception to this statement—­but of university professionals. If we date the beginnings of Re­nais­sance literary theory from the appearance of Francesco Robortello’s translation and commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, in 1548, literary theory has been de­ veloping for four and a half centuries. 6 It is not pos­si­ble to guess at the pre­sent time w ­ hether this movement is experiencing a hiatus or has run its course. But the disinterest of the poets themselves in the twentieth ­century has perhaps been a f­ actor in this decline. Spenser stands close to the beginnings of this movement and was continually preoccupied with self-­reflection as part of the pro­cess of creation. In the Re­nais­sance, two changes occur in ­people’s ideas about poetry, in contrast with the ­M iddle Ages. First, poetry is treated as something qualitatively dif­fer­ent from rhe­toric. Poetry is much higher than rhe­toric. It is even divine, although we may discern traces of this sublimation of poetry already stirring in Chaucer’s Clerk, when he says that Petrarch’s poetry has illuminated Italy. Second, the theory of poetry ­w ill become to a considerable extent an object of theoretical speculation in its own

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right, instead of serving the entirely practical and, indeed, propaedeutic ends of medieval treatises. This second point is a question of degree. Lit­ erary theory in the Re­nais­sance still remains essentially prescriptive in its aim: to discover the right rules for making a heroic poem or a tragedy or any other revived ancient form and the right sort of language in which to do so. But the aim is to discover the rules, not merely to teach them, as if ­there ­were no disagreement. The existence of disagreement, often strongly felt and expressed, detaches literary theory from instruction and gives it that autonomy that is proper to theory. Literary theory occurs when new thoughts are developed out of an already existing body of speculative thought, instead of by continual reference to literary texts.7 The first change, the elevation of poetry to a divine practice, comes from the golden-­age Latin poets, Ovid, Horace, and Virgil, who have it from much-­older sources. The poet is a prophet or priest of the muses, a vates (the hill of the roman priests was called mons vaticanus, where the Vat­ ican is ­today). The poet has a god in him, stirring him from within and heating his brain, impelling him to speak, which pro­cess makes his person sacred as well as what he sings. 8 This last sentence is a loose para­ phrase from Ovid’s Fasti (6.5–8), a passage obliquely referred to by Spenser in the “Embleme” concluding The Shepheardes Calender’s “October” eclogue: “agitante calescimus illo &c.”: “by his stirring we grow warm,” the un­ stated subject of this stirring being the divine power that is in the poet: est deus in nobis. E. K.’s gloss of this emblem to “October” says it signifies what is implied “in the w ­ hole course of this AEglogue”: that “poetry is a divine instinct and unnatural rage passing the reach of comen reason.” The “Argument” to the “October” eclogue is still more explicit. E. K. states that poetry is more than a “worthy and commendable . . . ​art.” Poetry is “a divine gift and heavenly instinct not to bee gotten by laboure and learning, but adorned with both: and poured into the wit by a certain ἐνθουσιασμὸς and celestiall inspiration.” That Greek word, enthousiasmos, “having a god within,” whence we derive enthusiasm, is fished from Plato, who speaks of the poet, though not entirely to praise him, as in a state of mania, possessed by a daemon that ­causes him to rage, like the priestess of Delphi “in the tripod of the muses.” 9 The Re­nais­sance term for this, in­ ven­ted by Marsilio Ficino for his commentary on Plato’s Ion, is furor poeticus, Spenser’s “goodly fury” (FQ VI.proem.2). ­Great poetry is inspired, that

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is, “breathed in,” as if by a super­natural power. In the Re­nais­sance this super­natural power is usually—­with some degree of conventionality and hence of deniability—­one or more of the classical muses on Mount Hel­ icon or Mount Parnassus. Rarely is this divine power associated with the Christian God and the Holy Ghost, although Milton would take that bold step in the invocation to Paradise Lost. Spenser invokes the muses as “ye sacred ymps, that on Parnasso dwell” (FQ VI.proem.2). But not even in the Book of Holiness does he call on the Holy Ghost for aid. The only time Spenser addresses the Christian God in The Faerie Queene is in its final line, “O that ­great Sabbaoth God graunt me that Sabbaoths sight” (VII.vii.2). By this time, he has no need to ask for poetic aid: he is finished. He turns from poetry and its theory to final salvation. But poetry, being quasi-­ divine, has taken him that far. In the Re­nais­sance, the divinity of poetry opens up a subtheological space that w ­ ill become the aesthetic. The second change is that by which poetry or, more properly, the theory of poetry becomes an object of speculation in its own right. This development awakens any number of highly impractical ­because funda­ mental questions. What is poetry? What is it for? What does it tell us of ourselves? What does poetry say, or what should it say, about the purpose or end—­the telos—of ­human life? What does poetry say, or what should it say, about civilized life and about civilization itself? Such questions, which are philosophical in nature, tended to generate more specialized, technical ones. What is the relation, if any, of poetry to rhe­toric? What is the relation of poetry to language? What sort of language—­that is, what word choice, or diction (lexis)—­should be used for poetry? Are some lan­ guages, for example, En­glish, unsuitable for the highest sort of poetry? Are modern languages in general inferior to Latin and Greek for literary purposes? Or are the romance languages suitable and all ­others not? If only the romance languages are suitable for the highest kind of lit­er­a­ ture, is that ­because climate is a f­ actor? Milton, for one, was seriously con­ cerned by this question. The Scandinavian and Germanic languages, including En­glish, developed in northern climates, far from the sunny lands of the Mediterranean. It was in the Mediterranean world that the Greek and Roman civilizations arose, to say nothing of the Christian religion. ­These civilizations conferred their institutions and culture— in other words, the princi­ples of civilization itself—on northern lands.

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If northern civilization is secondary, therefore, is it not reasonable to suppose that the lit­er­a­ture of northern p ­ eoples, especially their poetry, must also be secondary, derived, and inferior? What chance, then, is ­there for En­glish poetry to become one of the preeminent lit­er­a­tures of the world? As to verse itself, is the Anglo-­Saxon tradition of rhythmical stress, blended with the French medieval tradition of rhyme, another impediment? Can En­glish verse be civilized if reduced by force to quan­ titative rules, a question seriously meditated on by Spenser in his pub­ lished correspondence with Gabriel Harvey? (The final, eleven-­syllable line of The Shepheardes Calender reads roughly in En­glish meter but smoothly as quantitative verse: “Tell Rosalind her Colin bids her adieu”: TELL, Ros a LIND HER COL IN BIDS her a DEEW.) Such questions about language and versification agitated En­glish poets and theorists from Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, to Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Campion, Samuel Daniel, and especially Spenser’s schoolmaster, Richard Mulcaster, who held the En­glish language to be capable of all t­ hings, even of the highest poetic expression.10 With Spenser’s first major publication, The Shepheardes Calender, all ­these questions are shadowed in vari­ous ways, direct and indirect. But one clear indication of their force is the elaborate apparatus of paratexts— arguments, glosses, emblems, and epistles—­accompanying the verse and standing, so to speak, in the margins of the text, as its threshold or seuil, as Gérard Genette would call it.11 ­These paratexts provide continual reference to the literary-­theoretical questions of the day.

' to each of the months of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, plus the theorizing epistle to Gabriel Harvey—­all ­these supposedly by “E. K.”—­are a testament to the fashionableness of ab­ stracted discourse on poetry, as is the body of published letters ex­ changed between Spenser and Harvey on versification and above all that catena of commonplaces of Re­nais­sance literary theory, Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh, published as an appendix to the 1590 edition of the first three books of The Faerie Queene. “E. K.” also mentions a book by Spenser called The En­glish Poete (see “Argument” to October), which may or may not have T H E G L O S S E S A N D A RG U M E N T S

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actually existed in some form, as a manuscript. If it did, no trace has sur­ vived. The treatise may have been something Spenser intended to write, or thought he should have written, to show how En­glish poetic practice can keep up with the latest developments and standards on the Continent and above all with the ancients. In any event, the mention of such a book indicates how power­ful was the idea that a poet should command a so­ phisticated knowledge of the latest thinking on lit­er­a­ture. It was impor­ tant to be theoretically correct. Something of this attitude appears in the most famous work of literary theory written in E ­ ngland in Spenser’s day: Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poetry, mostly likely composed in the winter of 1579–80 and not published u ­ ntil 1595.12 The Shepheardes Calender, published in 1579, is mentioned with mea­sured praise—­Spenser had dedicated the work to Sidney—as an example of En­glish poetry ­going in the right direction: “The Shepherds’ Calendar hath much poetry in his eclogues, indeed worthy the reading, if I be not deceived. (That same framing of his style to an old rustic language I dare not allow, since neither Theocritus in Greek, Virgil in Latin, nor Sannazzaro in Italian did affect it.) Besides ­these I do not re­ member to have seen but few (to speak boldly) printed that have poetical sinews in them.” In the same place Sidney speaks approvingly of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey’s sonnets as containing “many t­ hings tasting of a noble birth, and worthy of a noble mind” and of the Mirrour for Magistrates as being “meetly furnished of beautiful parts.” This is mea­sured praise, suitable at least for the sprawling, multiple-­authored, generally low-­quality Mirrour for Magistrates, with its fine “Induction” by Thomas Sackville. The moderate and qualified approval of Spenser is in the con­ text of Sidney’s observing the general decline since Chaucer: “Chaucer, undoubtedly, did excellently in his Troilus and Criseyde; of whom, truly, I know not ­whether to marvel more, ­either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age go so stumblingly ­after him.”13 We note that The Canterbury Tales did not yet enjoy the highest place in the general estimation of Chaucer’s achievement. It was the magnificent long poem Troilus and Criseyde, in rhyme royal, the seven-­line stanza (rhyming ababbcc) on which Spenser built his still-­more-­splendid nine-­line stanza (rhyming ababbcbcc), the stanza of Sackville’s noble “Induction” to The Mirrour for Magistrates. George Puttenham, in the landmark work The Arte of

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En­glish Poesie, speaks of rhyme royal as “the chief of our ancient propor­ tions [verse mea­sures]” used for ­matters that are “historical” or “grave” and gives as examples Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde alongside John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. He mentions the nine-­line stanza in passing as “rare but very grave.”14 Sidney’s Apology is too broadly humane and intelligent—it has been called the best-­written work of literary criticism in the language—to take such a narrowly progressive position on poetry all the time.15 For Sidney, poetry is imaginative lit­er­a­ture, for which verse is not strictly required. (He regarded his prose romance Arcadia as essentially a poem; and Milton in Eikonoklastes would do so as well, though with no friendly voice.)16 Sid­ ney’s principal idea is that poetry is fictional writing that represents, or imitates, lively examples of virtue and exaggerated pictures of vice, in­ spiring readers to imitate the former and be repelled by the latter. The point is not realism, the imitation of life as it is. The point is instead to figure forth a somewhat purified idea of virtue and vice, based on the real and the probable but enhancing real­ity so the lesson is clearer. The pur­ pose of poetry, as for almost every­one ­else in the Re­nais­sance, is funda­ mentally moral. Such mimetic enhancement—­the purified vision of real­ity, which shows virtue and vice in their own feature—­clearly under­ writes Spenser’s poetics in The Faerie Queene. Allegory is an extreme form of mimetic enhancement and ideological purification whereby the ideas themselves come into view. As they do so, mimetic verisimilitude fades into the background.

' of literary theory took its start in the Re­ nais­sance from three recently recovered ancient texts: Aristotle’s Poetics; Horace’s Ars poetica, “art of poetry”; and the late Greek text attributed to one “Longinus,” entitled Peri hypsous, “on the sublime.” Each of t­ hese came into prominence a­ fter the other, with Peri hypsous influencing eighteenth-­ century thought on the sublime. But for the Re­nais­sance the most impor­tant by far was the first, Aristotle’s Poetics, which by the m ­ iddle of the sixteenth c­ entury was translated into Latin and Italian and widely dis­ seminated in Eu­rope, along with voluminous commentaries on it, no­ tably t­ hose of Francesco Robortello and Lodovico Castelvetro.17 The T H E E U ­R O­P E A N M OV E M E N T

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Aristotelian term (adapted from Plato) mimesis, “imitation,” was employed everywhere, although with a thin understanding of its original Greek meaning. It was even used to denote the imitation of the style of other authors.18 Aristotle’s idea that the action of the story, the mythos, is more impor­tant than character and that this mythos should be represented by a skillful “putting together” (systasis) of events in a sequential unity—­a “one,” as he calls it—­was especially influential.19 Unity, unità, became the watchword. A poetic work should be a unity of narrative events founded on truth and verisimilitude. The obvious prob­lem was how to reconcile this unity with narrative change, or varietà. How much variety, how much change, how much complexity, or multiplicity (molteplicità) can be con­ sistent with this overriding demand for unity? In exactly what does this systasis or “standing together” consist? ­T hese questions ­were at the center of the famous debate that sprang up around the m ­ iddle of the sixteenth c­ entury and continued well into the seventeenth concerning Ludovico Ariosto’s long and exceedingly complicated, multiply plotted epic romance Orlando furioso, “Orlando Insane,” a work that had a major influence on Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The completed version of Orlando furioso was published in 1532, a year before the poet’s death. (Ariosto’s Cinque canti, “Five Cantos,” appeared posthu­ mously.)20 Although Ariosto himself had ­little if any interest in theoret­ ical questions, this was not so for his major successor in the Italian epic—­and another major influence on Spenser—­Torquato Tasso, whose celebrated Lettere poetiche, “Letters on Poetry,” subsequently gleaned from his voluminous correspondence; his Discorsi del poema eroica, “Discourses on the Heroic Poem” (1567–70); and the allegorical commentary (with much Aristotelian terminology) that he appended to the first edition of his Gerusalemme liberata, “Jerusalem Liberated” (1581), made Tasso one of the most impor­tant literary theorists of the age.21 His influence on Spenser was profound, both as a poet and as a theorist. The debate over the language of the Orlando furioso—­Italian at the time existed in numerous dialects—­over its multiplotted, interlaced structure and over its deployment of miraculous creatures and events (maraviglie, “marvels”) developed into a loud public contest between the parti­ sans of Ariosto’s ­great work, including no less a figure than Galileo, and the partisans of Tasso’s more soberly Christian, unified, and realistic

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epic, Gerusalemme liberata.22 Objections to the obvious disunity of Orlando furioso, its delight in variety, and its many marvels ­were met with the claim that the unity exists on a higher plane, the allegorical, such that the ­great variety of episodes fit together in a conceptual unity, a unity of meaning. As for the marvels, wherever an event in the poem fails to conform with verisimilitude, it is to be understood allegorically too and ­will thus take its place as one ele­ment in the larger allegorical design. T ­ hese solutions ­were put forward in the large, two-­volume allegorical commentary on the Orlando furioso by Simone Fornari, published in Florence in 1549 and 1550.23 Fornari’s work was almost certainly familiar to Spenser. Nor was Tasso’s theoretically informed epic, Gerusalemme liberata, al­ together ­free of reproach, even by him. In his “Poetic Letters” Tasso ago­ nized over the prob­lems of unity and verisimilitude ­because the central cantos of his poem w ­ ere replete with magical episodes and multiple ac­ tions derived from romance, instead of from epic.24 The main action of Gerusalemme liberata is the siege of Jerusalem by the Christian crusader army ­under Godfrey of Bouillon, Tasso’s “Godfredo,” the leader of the first crusade. This s­ imple action, however, required complications and delays if the epic was to hold any interest or to go on at any length. Also, Tasso had continually before him the warning example of Gian Giorgio Trissino, whose rigorously classical epic L’Italia liberata dai Goti, “Italy Lib­ erated from the Goths” (1547–48), fell stillborn from the press ­because it was not like Ariosto (of whose poem Trissino strongly disapproved, on theoretical grounds) and allegedly not entertaining. (It is.)25 Hence, in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, a forest has to be cut down for siege engines but is defensively enchanted by the pagan magician Ismeno, frustrating that design. The chief Christian knight, Rinaldo, is the only man who can overcome the enchantment and cut down the forest. But Rinaldo has been seduced by the witch Armida—­who has transformed other amorous knights into parrots—­and is carried to a remote island in the Southern Hemi­sphere. Two knights, Carlo and Ubaldo, are sent on a magic boat to disenchant Rinaldo and fetch him back, a scene wonder­ fully illustrated in several works by Tiepolo. Other subplots involving love and enchantment abound. In sum, the dilemma is as follows: if the theo­ retical requirements of unity and mimetic verisimilitude are strictly ad­ hered to, the poem is dull; but if ­these requirements are not adhered to,

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the poem is deemed incorrect and unsophisticated and is subject to scorn as a mere romance, not a worthy revival of classical epic. Tasso’s solution in the “Poetic Letters” and also in the Discorsi recalls Fornari’s apology for the Orlando furioso: ­those parts of Gerusalemme liberata that are not verisimilar are allegorical, and t­ hose parts that are verisim­ ilar are based on historical truth. Thus, e­ very part of the poem is true in one way or another: e­ ither it is historically true or it is conceptually true. ­Because of the obvious factitiousness of such a design—­can ­there be two distinct species of truth, and if so, how do they ever enter into correspon­ dence with each other?—­Tasso’s solution is more radical, more abstract, more intellectually satisfying. It is also much more implausible, although it is almost certain Tasso believed it himself. (As he was locked up and suffering from delusions at the time, what he actually believed is difficult to say.)26 In fact, Tasso began almost immediately rewriting the poem—­the ­later version w ­ ouldn’t influence Spenser—to correspond better with his abstract design for a classical epic. Tasso’s solution to the prob­lem of com­ posite truth (the realistic truth of mimesis plus the conceptual truth of allegoria) appears in the prose document appended to the first, 1581 edi­ tion of the Gerusalemme liberata, entitled “Allegoria del poema,” “The Al­ legory of the Poem.” In this text, Tasso retains the princi­ple of unity of action, citing Aristotle: the action consists in the single movement of the Christian army from outside Jerusalem into the city. But this action, not­ withstanding the historical Godfroi de Bouillon’s ­actual capture of the city, is no longer grounded in mere historical truth. It too is allegorical, just as much so as are the delaying enchantments and erotic divagations. The ­whole body of the Christian army is a single man, with Godfredo as the head and Rinaldo the right arm, that is, the faculties of reason and ­will. The romance episodes in the ­middle compose a psychomachia, a ­battle of virtues and vices in the soul of this one man. But Jerusalem is not the heavenly Jerusalem of the Bible, the place to which the victorious Chris­ tian soul is bound ­after this life. It is instead a secular state, that of “civil felicity” (la felicità civile). In this Tasso expresses the spirit of the Re­nais­ sance, which finds the purpose of virtue in a po­liti­cal telos, that is, in the fashioning of an ideal state, a perfect republic.27 Spenser was influenced throughout The Faerie Queene by Ariosto’s and Tasso’s poems. But he was also influenced by the allegorizing commentary

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on Ariosto by Fornari and by the commentary on Tasso by Tasso him­ self. The very fact of the Letter to Raleigh’s being appended to the 1590 text, rather than standing as a preface, suggests that Spenser is imitating Tasso’s appended “Allegoria del poema.” Characters in The Faerie Queene such as Archimago, Una, the dragon at the end of Book One, Abessa and Kirkrapine, Sans Loy, Cymocles, Phaedria, Acrasia, Merlin, and above all Britomart are more or less built up out of characters in Ariosto. But they are also colored by Fornari’s allegorical filter and by Tasso’s similar alle­ gorizing of such episodes in his own poem, notably the episode already mentioned: the witch Armida’s seduction of Rinaldo and her keeping him in a magic garden of delight on a remote island, perilous of access. Spenser studied the episode closely for his entirely allegorical reprise in the final canto of Book Two of The Faerie Queene, the Legend of Temperance. Ar­ mida has become Acrasia (Gr. a + krasis, “mixture,” i.e. “unmixed”), an et­ ymological code word for intemperance, and Acrasia’s erotic plea­sure garden is destroyed by the knight of Temperance and his Palmer, who rep­ resents the moral theory required to supplement temperamental mod­ eration and restraint. His presence is not required in the Cave of Mammon episode, ­because it is about practice and discipline and ­because ­there is no sexual ele­ment. But the Palmer is necessary for this final episode of destruction, to insist on force where it is required (as the allegory requires), despite Guyon’s inclination to be seduced by the beauty of the garden and its inhabitants. In the Letter to Raleigh, Spenser follows Tasso’s solution, which is to make the entire poem allegorical and hence a unity with re­spect to truth. The Faerie Queene, he says, is “a continued allegory, or darke conceit.” But Spenser also follows Tasso and other Re­nais­sance literary theorists in saying that his poem is founded in history, in this case the history—­ considerably more dubious than the first crusade—of Prince Arthur be­ fore he was king, when he went to Fairy Land to find the Fairy Queen, with whom he had fallen in love in a dream or vision. ­Because her name is Gloriana and her capital city is Cleopolis, “city of glory” (Gr. kleos, “glory” + polis, “city”), the movement of the narrative has an allegorical structure similar to that which Tasso i­ magined for his own poem: as Godfredo pur­ sues civil felicity, so Arthur pursues glory or renown for knightly prowess. And that, we are to believe, fulfills the theoretical requirement

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that the work be a unity with re­spect to its action. Arthur’s quest for Glo­ riana, in the course of which he lends aid to all the other knights, is the unity of The Faerie Queene. Or so its paratext, the Letter to Raleigh, teaches. In practice, Britomart does not require Arthur’s aid or anyone e­ lse’s, ex­ cept perhaps Merlin’s and Glauce’s. She too has come to Fairy Land to find her love, seen, however, in a mirror, not in a dream. He is of course Artegal, “Arthur’s equal,” thus retaining the princi­ple that each knight has some contact with Arthur. Spenser’s poem is dedicated to a queen, a heroic queen. But his plan is excessively masculine. In the m ­ iddle of his poem, therefore, he displaces the values associated with Arthur and Gloriana onto Britomart and Artegal. This is a highly abstract kind of unity, suit­ able to allegory. But how is Arthur himself allegorical, in the way Tasso supposes God­ fredo to be the head and princi­ple of reason? On this point, as on o ­ thers, we see how much more sophisticated Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh is, for all Tasso’s subtlety on theoretical questions. Spenser’s Arthur is allegor­ ical in a way that accords with the long tradition of the heroic poem de­ scending from Homer and Virgil and passing through Ariosto and Tasso. Arthur symbolizes the “good governor and virtuous man” that Homer represented in two persons, Agamemnon and Odysseus; that Virgil united in Aeneas; that Ariosto dissevered in Carlo Magno (Charlemagne) and Orlando; and that Tasso likewise represented in two persons, God­ fredo and Rinaldo. Of course, to make ­these categories work requires considerable theoretical abstraction and considerable allegorizing, espe­ cially in the cases of Agamemnon and Odysseus. But although Spenser read Homer in Greek, he still saw the Iliad and Odyssey through the filter of many centuries of allegorizing.28 It was a commonplace of Re­nais­sance critical theory—­one derived from the ­M iddle Ages rather than from antiquity—­that the ancient epics of Homer and Virgil ­were perfectly moral b ­ ecause perfectly allegorical. In short, the style and structure of Spenser’s Faerie Queene—­the con­ ception, plan and conduct of the poem as a whole—is strongly influenced by the literary theory of the Re­nais­sance, a body of thought about the pur­ pose and nature of poetry, plus certain princi­ples of composition, which was imported from Italy and took root in ­England, where its finest and densest expression is in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry. ­After Sidney’s essay,

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the next finest adaptation in ­England of the princi­ples of Italian literary theory is Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh. The gravity and high seriousness of The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene—­something quite new in En­glish poetry—­are conse­ quences of the first of the changes I mentioned: the elevation of poetry above rhe­toric, as a sublime art aided by super­natural power. The eleva­ tion of poetry as a sublime art opens the way for other developments to come, beginning in the eigh­teenth ­century: the conception of poetry as a spiritual discipline, as organic and symbolic, and of the poet as creative. Poetry, and more broadly culture, comes to occupy the quasi-­sacred realm of the aesthetic, a secular theology. The allegorical complexity of The Faerie Queene—­something that is also quite new and indeed sui ge­ neris in En­glish poetry—­anticipates the development in E ­ ngland, on the one hand, of literary theory as a relatively autonomous field of specula­ tion and, on the other hand, of a quasi-­religious radiance, a halo, sur­ rounding the figure of the poet.

Chapter 10

'

A Field Theory of Allegory

of The Faerie Queene opens when Guyon and Prince Arthur, having rested their limbs a­ fter their ­labors and recovered from their wounds—­though Guyon seems not to have received any—­leave the ­house of Alma to seek praise in the world by deeds of arms. Guyon has sent the witch Acrasia ­under strong guard to Fairy Court, “for witnesse of his hard assay” (FQ III.i.2); and so, disencumbered of the witch, and also of Alma’s kind attentions, the two knights with their squires (though ­these appear only when needed), Timias and the Palmer, are now seen by us at a g­ reat distance, or from far above, riding “through wastefull wayes / Where daungers dwelt . . . ​To hunt for glorie and renowmed praise.” In a scene where Fairy Land seems to coincide with the earth, they pass through many countries (not po­liti­cal states, in the modern sense of the word countries, but vari­ous regions of the earth) from far in the east to far in the west, “From the uprising to the setting Sunne.” Relieving the oppressed and dealing justice wherever they happen to go—­for their movements are random and erratic—­they heap up honor from their “many hard adventures” (III.i.3). For honor, not justice, is the final pur­ pose, the telos, of every­thing they do. It is so with Britomart as well, or so she ­will say l­ ater, not entirely truth­ fully, when giving an account of herself to the Redcross knight. (Spenser mistakenly calls him Guyon and a Faerie at III.ii.4 but corrects himself twelve stanzas ­later.) She has left her home in Britain “To hunt out perils and adventures hard . . . ​Onely for honour and for high regard” (FQ III.ii.7). T HE T HIR D BOOK

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In answer to Britomart’s question where she may find Artegal—to pay him out, as she untruthfully affirms, for having done her “foule dis­ honour and reprochfull spight” (III.ii.8)—­Redcross, defending him, de­ scribes Artegal’s movements as similarly random and uncertain: “For he ne wonneth in one certaine stead / But restlesse walketh all the world around, / Ay ­doing ­things, that to his fame redound” (III.ii.14). Redcross is himself the lover of “th’Errant Damzell,” as Una is now retrospectively called, as if errancy ­were the most impor­tant ­thing about truth (I.i.24). What catches our attention is how a general and indistinct phenomenon such as fame exists everywhere without a medium, for it cannot be re­ duced to the voices, or mouths, in which it is sounded, any more than it can be to brains or to badges, trumpets, and monuments. Fame is acti­ vated not by g­ oing to any par­tic­u­lar place but instead by random move­ ments in a field, the field of honor, of fame, of glory. What is honor for the characters within The Faerie Queene is, for readers of The Faerie Queene, meaning. This is the field theory of allegory. Fame or glory (kleos, as Spenser knew the word from Homer), with the quieter and all-­but-­synonymous complement honor, is also, of course, the telos of Arthur’s entire quest for Cleoplis (kleos + polis), “city of glory,” and its queen, Gloriana. His squire’s name is Timias (in Homer, timê means honor, too). Hence honor is the telos of The Faerie Queene, Arthur’s quest sewing together the enterprises of all the other knights in the self-­ organizing system of the poem as a ­whole. Yet honor, like the famous “cunning of reason” in Hegel, which also operates invisibly in a field, cannot be pursued by taking the most direct and obvious route.1 Like al­ legorical meaning, it must work concealed in events that can differ widely from its final form, its last embodiment and realization, when Fairy Land collapses into its Fairy Queen. In any realistic narrative, curiosity would surely have prompted Arthur to inquire where Guyon was sending that witch ­under strong guard; and Arthur would happily have taken on that duty for himself, thus reaching the Fairy Queen in a short time. For she is his object, and his benevolent deeds, unlike the deeds of the other knights, are incidental on the narra­ tive plane, although essential on the allegorical. But as everywhere ­else in The Faerie Queene, realism or, in Aristotle’s terms, likeliness, probability,2 gives way to structure or, rather, to connectivity and relationship. The

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structure is not a static but rather a dynamical one of self-­organization, in which the system undergoes continual change, not only as a result of the composition of the poem but also as a result of its interpretation, its engagement by readers in its ­future. Instead of ­going directly to his telos—­ Gloriana, the center of Faery—­Arthur accumulates glory by erratic and random movements in a vaguely defined region of propagated energy, a field. Spenser calls this field or region Faery. How far does it extend? We s­ hall see that this field of propagated en­ ergy, ­because it has no formal bound­aries, as a substantial object does, reaches as far as its energy is felt beyond e­ ither the real bound­aries of the poem or the imaginary bound­aries of Fairy Land; in other words, the en­ ergy is propagated to readers of The Faerie Queene in ­every subsequent age in which the poem is read. Allegory occurs in the interactions that take place in this field between the dynamical signifying structures of the poem and the innumerable engagements with them at distances farther than the east and the west: distances in time. None of t­ hese interpreta­ tive events need be accurate or true, in a philological and historical sense, a credible account of what the poet intended at any par­tic­u­lar moment, or a reasonable inference from historical context. The interpretative event, however fanciful or excessive, simply needs to occur to manifest the propagated energy of the text, this energy being awakened, turbu­ lently distorted, and above all amplified, made louder—if only as static and feedback—by its reciprocal effects in other minds. This too is the field theory of allegory. Let us return to its ground in the random but tightly packed adventures of Guyon and Arthur, a copper coil of stories through which the current of the poet’s thinking is passed. It is a classic narrative ploy of romance, in contrast, for example, with epic, to compact in small space unspeci­ fied but very numerous adventures (events that “come at” you) before a par­ tic­u­lar one is closely described at some length, as if the ground of ro­ mance ­were an under­lying, subtle, and intricate network of stories—­that is, of potential stories, stories in an embryonic state—­extending without limit in all directions, from the rising to the setting sun. Any par­tic­u­lar story is, as it ­were, activated from the under­lying reticulations of the ground and so raised up to our attention: from the differing many into the immediate one—or, rather, to the this one. The Spenserian moment is

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always a this one trailing other ones, a presence connected by many nearly invisible threads to the absent presence of all other stories capable of un­ folding within its field. By the apparent contradiction, absent presence, I mean the peripheral presence of other stories on the fringes, ready to spring into fuller narrative life, and so pre­sent in that qualified sense, even as ­t hose other stories are absent from the immediate moment of the poet’s attention and ours. They need not ever come to life—­most of them do not—­but it is impor­tant we feel they are peripherally ­there. This narrative ploy of romance, the feeling of deep connectivity, indi­ cates what prob­ably lies ­behind the renewed vigor in the interwoven nar­ rative that greets us at the outset of Book Three of The Faerie Queene: a more sophisticated engagement by the poet with the Italian romances of Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto—­from whom, to select one small detail, the enchanted spear of Britomart has come, although Spenser gives a dif­fer­ent account of its origin and provenance (FQ III.iii.60). More famous still is “O goodly usage of ­those antique times” (III.i.22), Spenser’s step-­by-­step imitation (pedisequa, as an Italian critic calls it) of Ariosto’s famous and famously ironical line “O gran bontà de’ cavallieri antiqui!”3 But more impor­tant than par­tic­u­lar details for Spenser’s new engage­ ment with the Italian romances is his treating the immediate narrative event not as a s­ imple appearance but as an emergence, a pinching and pulling forward of one of the interstices in the network of pos­si­ble sto­ ries such that the event retains at its borders its connectivity with ­others, although ­these happen at the moment to be out of sight. That is what now happens as the two knights cross an open plain, a clearing, on which they descry a knight and an aged squire riding, the poor squire being bent double over the h ­ orse ­under the weight of the knight’s massy shield. The stranger knight sees them, halts, and now takes that shield in hand, preparing to fight. This allows us, as it does Guyon and Arthur, to see the device on the shield, which is “a Lion passant in a golden field” (FQ III.i.4), the lion being red (gules) against a golden ground and seen from the side as if it is “passing” but looking t­ oward us with one front paw raised in greeting or warning or both. The device belongs to the royal arms of Brute, 4 the eponymous founder of Britain and ancestor of Britomart (for this is she). Her device is meant to be seen as a primitive version of the En­glish royal coat of arms, the lions increased to three and

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the colors reversed, with three now golden lions passant on a field gules. Britomart is armed like a man wandering abroad in Fairy Land with her aged nurse Glauce, who is so unhappily disguised as the squire. We note that for a brief period the Briton prince and this British prin­ cess are in the same place in the book. Arthur first permits Guyon to at­ tack Britomart—or to meet her attack—­and then makes peace between her and Guyon. Spenser has grasped the slowly appearing prob­lem with a poem in which the central action is Arthur’s quest for the Fairy Queen and in which the Fairy Queen is the central figure for praise, a point we are stunningly reminded of (lest we have, understandably, forgotten) in the brilliant proem to this book. The prob­lem is that Arthur cannot go to Fairy Court the most direct way—as we have just seen, when he takes no interest in where Guyon has sent the witch Acrasia—so that other ac­ tions, ­those of the twelve knights, must largely displace him in our at­ tention. That is of course Spenser’s design—­that Arthur help each of the knights—­but the consequence of it in the ­actual telling is that Arthur’s appearances must be intermittent and Gloriana’s appearance must be perpetually deferred. Just as impor­tant, perhaps, is the fact of Gloriana’s being of no pos­si­ble narrative interest. As the shining telos of the allegory, she is sublimely still. Spenser’s solution is to displace the values associ­ ated with Gloriana, chiefly her beauty and her ancestry but also her no­ bility of spirit, her heroic virginity, and her magnanimous mind, onto the figure of Britomart, who is armed and dangerous and on a quest of her own. This solution had lain open to Spenser in the pages of Ariosto, whose Bradamante (from whom Spenser also took the magic spear) is a warrior maiden and the ­mother of the Ferrarese House of Este, as Brit­ omart is a warrior maiden and the ­mother of the line of kings leading at last to Henry Tudor, who is Henry VII, to Henry VIII and to Elizabeth I. Even as Spenser introduces his martial maid as a displaced Gloriana, he also introduces the knight she falls in love with when she sees him in Venus’s looking glass, as it is first called (FQ III.i.8). Spenser ­w ill greatly improve this by changing it to Merlin’s looking glass. The knight whom Britomart now seeks in Fairy Land is Artegal, whose name means “equal of Arthur,” although he i­sn’t, and whose continual wandering, like Ar­ thur’s, ­w ill be noted by the Redcross knight (III.ii.14). Prince Arthur has magnificence, or magnanimity, as the most con­spic­u­ous of his private

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virtues. But his f­ uture is to be the greatest king of Britain, and the most impor­tant public virtue for a king is justice. Artegal ­w ill be the knight or patron of justice in Book Five. He represents the quality that the prince ­w ill most need in the ­future, when he is king. Artegal may be nominally the equal of Arthur, but he represents a l­ater stage in Arthur’s develop­ ment. His vio­lence and brutality—he first appears as a savage knight, with the motto Salvagesse sans finesse (IV.iv.32)—­suggest he has yet to ac­ quire the humane and magnanimous part of himself that Prince Arthur is in the course of developing. Let us now pass rapidly over some following events, to take note of the quickened pace of the narrative and also of Spenser’s seeming purpose, at the moment Britomart is brought into the poem, of concentrating his resources by recapitulating in this place the heroes of the two previous books; and by keeping in play the major figure of Prince Arthur, whom he ­w ill eventually leave in futile and sad pursuit of Florimell: “Oft did he wish, that Lady faire mote bee / His Faery Queene, for whom he did complaine: / Or that his Faery Queene ­were such, as shee” (FQ III.iv.54). Guyon charges Britomart and, un­horsed, draws his sword. But his palmer discerns the magic of Britomart’s indomitable spear, yielding the excellent line “for death sate on the point of that enchaunted speare” (FQ III.i.9). Arthur reconciles Guyon and the stranger knight, Britomart, and all r­ ide forth together to exercise themselves, seeking hard adventures “Through countries waste, and eke well edifyde” (I.i.14). As they pass through the horrid shades of a wide and grisly forest, Florimell bursts into view on her white palfrey, pursued by a grim forester (her coming into appearance is discussed in chapter eleven). She is immediately pursued by Guyon and Arthur, who hope to win “the fairest Dame alive,” while Timeas more sensibly goes ­after the “griesly Foster” (III.i.18). They thus all leave Britomart to r­ ide on alone (Glauce is not mentioned for some time), u ­ ntil she comes to a c­ astle with a large field before it, on which six knights assail a single one, who bravely fights them all, though he is “sore beset” and is losing much blood (III.i.21). He is the Redcross knight. Who his six opponents are, attacking him like “dastard Curres” (III.i.22) biting from ­behind, is to be ­later revealed: the six stages of seduction. The ­castle is the “­Castle Joyeous” (III.i.32)—­the word in its French context means plea­ sure and even orgasm, jouissance—­and ­after Britomart has beaten down

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the six knights, with Redcross’s help, we learn the custom of the c­ astle, which is for e­ very arriving knight to fight t­ hese six champions in defense of his own lady or to yield himself and admit Malecasta, the “Lady of delight” (III.i.31), to be the most beautiful and to devote himself to her ser­vice. The delight in question signifies intense, even delirious plea­sure but also crime or offense, as in French délit.5 So begins the first major epi­ sode of Book Three, at Malecasta’s ­castle. The lady’s other, less formal name, Malecasta, means “bad chastity,” a somewhat awkward designation that shows Spenser trying to set up this book of the poem in his usual way by pitting the virtue in question against what is inimical to it. The C ­ astle Joyous with every­one in it is an allegory of lust, which Malecasta partly personifies. I see her in the extraordinary drawing of lust by Pisanello that incarnates the idea and yet shows a real person inhabited by the vice and inhabiting it. For ­there is something rather touching about her mistaken passion for Britomart, so like Brit­ omart’s passion for Artegal, burning inwardly and relentlessly. Her inva­ sion of Britomart’s bed is not violent but tentative (however improper) and, so far as is pos­si­ble in such a situation, ner­vously polite, not at all touching Britomart, who discovers the intruder when she rolls over, leaping from the bed and bounding to her sword. It is the same with the ­castle as a w ­ hole and its inhabitants, who exhibit lust not with the furious rage and contempt associated with that vice in its extreme state but like vain and ex­pec­tant partygoers. We notice two new t­ hings about lust: that it is closely allied to vanity and that it is social. As usual, Spenser starts out with a s­ imple idea, perhaps intending to keep it s­ imple, but the more he develops the scene—­a traditional one from romance—­the more com­ plicated this ­simple idea becomes. This is allegory, profitably distorted by romance, thinking. ­After that episode Britomart rides off with Redcross and hears from him of Artegal, whom she first saw when she went into her ­father, King Ryence’s closet and looked in Merlin’s magic glass, which the magician had given to the king to warn against invaders of his Briton kingdom, De­ heubarth, in South Wales (III.ii.18). In the glass Britomart ­w ill have a vi­ sion of Artegal’s face and fall agonizingly in love with him. This is the event that fi­nally sets her forth on her quest, disguised in a man’s armor and with her nurse Glauce as her squire, to find Artegal.

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The description of the glass itself has often seemed to critics to be over­ determined with regard to its place in the narrative of the poem, where it serves only this ­limited role, to initiate Britomart’s quest. Yet it has seemed to represent the enchanted world of Fairy Land or of The Faerie Queene itself. ­Here is Spenser’s description of Merlin’s glass: It vertue had, to shew in perfect sight, What ever ­thing was in the world contaynd, Betwixt the lowest earth and heavens hight, So that it to the looker appertaynd; What ever foe had wrought, or frend had faynd, Therein discovered was, ne mote pas, Ne ­ought in secret from the same remaynd; For thy it round and hollow shapèd was, Like to a world it selfe, and seem’d a world of glas. FQ III.ii.19

The surprising part is not its magic power to see what is unknown and to discern at a distance, for we expect this. What surprises is its modula­ tion from a looking glass and “mirrhour plaine” (III.ii.17), suggesting a flat or slightly convex surface, to one of the crystal balls of Celtic fable and medieval romance and, what is more, at least to appearance, a world of glass: “For thy [“therefore,” M ­ iddle En­glish forthi] it round and hollow shapèd was, / Like to a world it selfe, and seem’d a world of glas.” It is to be expected that postromantic literary criticism, and indeed since Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), would be inclined to see works of lit­er­a­ture as other worlds, or heterocosms, and that it would take up this sphere and compare it to the world of Spenser’s Faerie Queene: “In the fairyland of fancy, genius may wander wild; ­there it has creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chi­ meras.” 6 The comparison would surprise Spenser, who likens the glass instead to the tower lurked in unseen by the maiden Phao. It was built by her lover Ptolemy, “all of glasse,” from which she could view “all men” without being seen herself: But who does won­der, that has red the Towre, Wherein th’AEgyptian Phao long did lurke

A Field Theory of Allegory  249 From all mens vew, that none might her discoure, Yet she might all men vew out of her bowre? ­Great Ptolomae it for his lemans sake Y’builded all of glasse, by Magicke powre. FQ III.ii.20

We can see Merlin’s glass as an image of Fairy Land so long as we imagine ourselves looking into it from the outside, as Britomart does, and as her ­father, King Ryence, did to discern enemies approaching his kingdom. We look into it, as we look into a book: the association is so easy that we hardly notice it is an association at all. But on this view, the scope of Fairy Land is contained within the scope of the orb into which we gaze, and even if we proj­ect its surface outward to the size of a world, its outer bound­aries, its surface, w ­ hether concave from within or convex from without, w ­ ill still be too definite an image of the shape of Fairy Land, which we are comparing to a field and not to a sphere. It ­w ill be better if we put ourselves in the position of Phao, inside the sphere (or the mirror or the tower) looking outward. For when we read and interpret The Faerie Queene, we are not looking down into it, as a book: that is merely how an observer of us reading would see us. It is not our experience. When we read The Faerie Queene, we are inside the work and ­either attending to what is all around us or looking outward from the poem into the world from which we came, a world—­and all persons in it—­transformed by our point of view. Nor, as we do so, can we see the bound­aries of the sphere in which we are contained, for its circumference, if it has one, is transparent, like a crystal, so that every­thing we see beyond the poem, being transformed by our vision, seems as if it is inside the poem, being captured in its field. This too, and once again, is the field theory of allegory. Kathleen Williams published Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”: The World of Glass in 1966.7 It is a rounded and classically proportioned reading of the en­ tire Faerie Queene, rising above the local complexity of the poem to remain accessible to nonspecialist readers, in the humane tradition of such dis­ tinguished Spenserians as W.  L. Renwick, Janet Spens, C.  S. Lewis, Thomas P. Roche, Graham Hough, William Nelson, and Paul J. Alpers, to which may be added, from the following de­cade, A. Bartlett Giammatti and Isabel MacCaffrey. 8 Alpers’s book appears to differ from ­these ­others,

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and indeed its tone is polemical, by attending to the surfaces of the poem, to its immediate rhetorical structures, rather than to deep, uni­ fying themes for the ­whole, ­these being, in his view, illusory. Williams’s book was completed within the last de­cades that such a reading was pos­ si­ble, although the tendency culminates in James Norhnberg’s massively learned and intellectually dazzling Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (1977), some nine hundred pages in length, which analyzes the poem’s total form and allegorical content. Yet one feels upon completing it how much more ­there is to be done by an ideal reader with an ideal insomnia: gazing into Nohrnberg’s Merlin-­like globe from the outside, one feels one is only glimpsing the infinity of Spenser. But The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” could not be called, nor did it aspire to be, classical. Williams achieved that classically balanced standard during what I often hear referred to as the golden age of Spenser criticism. The implication is not, of course, altogether favorable to us more than fifty years ­later, as we may learn from our poet: For from the golden age, that first was named, It’s now at earst become a stonie one; And men themselves, the which at first w ­ ere framed Of earthly mould, and formed of flesh and bone, Are now transformèd into hardest stone. FQ V.proem.2

Hesiod said the men of the golden age continue invisibly among us as tu­ telary spirits, like the daemons of ­later Greek lit­er­a­ture and the ­house­hold manes or di penates of the Romans. As a benevolent spirit in our h ­ ouse “of goodly forms and fair aspects” (III.vi.12), Williams provides reassurance to anyone who is uncomfortable with allegory: “Our impression,” she wrote, “is not at all of an inhuman world of abstract moral order but of a world of tentative movement in the half-­dark of sublunary life.” 9 It’s this latter experience of reading allegory, “tentative movement in the half-­dark of sublunary life,” that I ­shall explore by heuristic analogy to the physical concept of the field. In classical physics, objects are in mo­ tion or at rest in absolute space and are the ­bearers of force as well as being subject to forces acting on them. Change the word object for character and you get a fair description of the classic phase of the novel. Char­

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acters move through social and geo­graph­i­cal spaces where they act and are acted on, their consciousness locked up inside them. It’s all bodies in motion. That’s realism for you, bodies in motion plus their consciousness, which is transmitted to us by privilege, the magic of fiction. Modern physics began in the nineteenth c­ entury with the invention, by Michael Faraday, of the concept of the field—­a directed region of force. He was investigating the electromagnetic phenomena, which cannot be accom­ modated in the classical system b ­ ecause the Newtonian model assumes the neutrality of absolute space and the priority of objects in motion. As we all learned in high school, Faraday’s field is propagated around elec­ trical or magnetic objects, as when passing a magnet over a wire coil. But electromagnetism, generating spooky action at a distance, was an excep­ tional case that could be treated with re­spect to the classical model merely as an outstanding prob­lem, to use Thomas Kuhn’s language. But by the mid-­twentieth c­ entury ­there ­were fields everywhere, and mass it­ self was a field. On the largest, cosmic scale, Einstein showed how space is a field that curves and bends around bodies according to their mass. As Arthur Eddington wrote in 1920, the effect of departing from New­ ton’s standard frame is the introduction into cosmology of the field of force, as a result of which “relativity theory must be largely occupied with the nature of fields of force.”10 Enter gravitation as curvature of space in the rippling and pooling fabric of spacetime. When quantum mechanics is added to this, every­thing in nature is fundamentally a network of in­ teracting fields of force—­the four fundamental forces propagated around carrier particles. J. Robert Oppenheimer pointed out that Einstein’s most radical contribution was to place the concept of the field, as opposed to the body having mass, as foundational to the natu­ral world.11 Every­thing must be seen in terms of the field or, if you prefer, the environment, the energy invisibly propagated in the surround. The field exists in what I would call, with some vio­lence to En­glish and to Saint Augustine, the re­ gion of aboutness. I make no claim ­here for any real connection between the field in this physical sense and the phenomenon of allegory, beyond the model’s heu­ ristic value. What I do claim is that allegory looks a lot more like the modern field theory of nature than it does like the classical model of bodies in motion. Novels give us conscious bodies in motion, and the

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consciousness is the impor­tant part. But it has long been noted that in allegories consciousness seems to be distributed throughout the system rather than bound up within bodies—or, rather, personae. And not only consciousness: Britomart, as the knight of Chastity, is a field of thought entering and interacting with another field, that of the eros-­environment propagated by that unhappy trio, Amoret, Scudamour, and Busyrane. Busyrane’s enchantments, u ­ ntil they collapse, make a very strong field of force. He has a only a moment of dismay at the sight of his extinguished fiery porch before he himself dis­appears. He ­doesn’t escape: that would be a classic, novelistic view. He is simply no longer ­there when his en­ chantments are no longer t­ here. It is this distributed, field character of allegory, with its under­lying energies of intention on the one side and in­ terpretation on the other, that makes it a scene for the enactment of thinking, which I ­shall treat as speculative energy and direction in a field. We can detect this when we stop supposing the text and the poem to be one and the same (the interpreted object) and we suppose the reader (the scientific philologist is his or her model) to be a detached observer, having no effect on the poem / text. Instead, we need to understand in a new way what the poem is. The poem is the totality of the system created by the very dif­fer­ent but complementary energies of reader and text. A text in itself is full of information, waiting to be awakened, but it remains a dead ­thing—­like the fragments of Sappho on papyri used to wrap corpses. It’s readers that bring a text to life as a poem.

' we’d agree that the reader’s experience of allegory, certainly of Spenserian allegory, is more like what Williams called “ten­ tative movement in the half-­dark of sublunary life” than it is like what she also called “an inhuman world of abstract order.” Indeed, “tentative move­ ment in the half-­dark of sublunary life” is not a bad description of thinking, which in Spenser’s day went ­under the name allegory. We are in­ clined to think of allegory as the expression, the formalization in signs, of a thinking that has already been done, instead of as a field in which a dynamic pro­cess can unfold—­for the reader as well as for the poet. But an inhuman world of abstract order—to wit, thinking that has already been done—is how allegory appeared to Enlightenment authors and then N OWA DAY S I T H I N K

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to Coleridge and his numerous intellectual progeny, Coleridge for whom allegory is the shallowest expression of David Hartley’s mechanical psy­ chol­ogy.12 For the eigh­teenth ­century, the ­castles and ­houses of Spense­ rian allegory, with all their decorations, their fabulous tapestries, their disturbing, bisexual and panerotic statues, their dragons with both eyes pierced, their caves and labyrinths, their privy chambers, their magic glasses, their frightful dungeons, their crowded and magnificent throne rooms, and their high towers lined with books draped in cobwebs, are the work of what Samuel Johnson called “ideal architects” working only with the gossamer materials of thought—an insubstantiality that includes the personae, the conceptual masks, that move through ­these scenes, as Chastity advances through the rooms of Busyrane’s ­house. ­Because of this noetic insubstantiality, it was requisite, according to the critics of the eigh­ teenth ­century, to keep consistency and perspicuous order between ve­ hicle and tenor, the literal sense and its implied “other,” the tale and its meaning. This was required quite self-­consciously, having in mind figures such as Lucian, author of “The Calumny of Apelles,” in the spirit of the Hellenistic, rhetorical definition of allegory. It was classically summarized by Quintilian and continually repeated in handbooks and encyclopedias up to the pre­sent day: allegory is the trope of “continued meta­phor.” It may seem a small point, but we should note that what Quintilian says is more active: “continued meta­phor makes an allegory,” “ἀλληγορίαν facit continua μεταφορά.” ­T here’s work involved, for the reader as well as for the author, although it’s the author on which Quintilian is focused. In any event, this rhetorical definition of allegory in terms of meta­phor is far too restrictive, as we might expect of one devised before any total works of allegory ­were composed, allegory being a medieval literary form. The per­sis­tence of a conception of allegory based simply on meta­phor has had contrary effects since Spenser’s day. The eighteenth-­century critics con­ demned Spenser’s allegory for its inconsistency; and the nineteenth-­century critics condemned allegory as a w ­ hole for its consistency, calling it mechan­ ical. Despite an ineffectual revival of the word allegory some de­cades ago, which was also based on the narrow conception of the trope, I’d say the romantic condemnation of allegory as the mechanical formulation of commonplace thought is ­today taken for granted. Unlike realist novels, which are, as our students say, relatable, allegory, it is supposed, ­doesn’t

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entice the reader to become deeply engaged. But allegory does engage the reader in a pro­cess that has many of the features of a game, or what I have called interpretative play. Such play is the energy that raises up the alle­ gorical field of The Faerie Queene.

' Edmund Spenser published the first installment of The Faerie Queene, he added, at the end, a document intended to leave us in no doubt as to the kind of poem The Faerie Queene is and how one is to read it. The document is of course the celebrated Letter to Raleigh declaring the poem to be an “Allegory” and a “darke conceit.” So far as the Letter is concerned—­and the poem bears this out, from its opening stanzas—it ­won’t do to say The Faerie Queene is partly allegory, partly heroic epic, and partly romance, much as t­ hese last two genres contribute to the texture of the work. The Letter makes this perfectly clear in its opening sentence and indeed in the first, limiting clause: “Sir, knowing how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed, and this booke of mine, which I have en­ titled the Faery Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit, I have thought good as well for avoiding gealous opinions and miscon­ structions, as also for your better light in the reading thereof (being by you so commanded), to discover unto you the general intention and meaning, which in the w ­ hole course thereof I have fashioned.” ­Those two locutions, “continued allegory” and “darke conceit,” with an ambiguous coordinate conjunction between them, “or,” look like dif­fer­ent ways of saying the same t­ hing or dif­fer­ent t­ hings whose natures overlap. Spenser means the latter, ­because while the two terms converge and overlap in his poem, they arise, in their origins, from dif­fer­ent intellectual traditions, as he more or less knew. The first, allegory, is from the Hellenistic rhetor­ ical treatises, which is why Quintilian, as we have seen, cites the word in Greek, as he does “meta­phor.” The second, “darke conceit,” means liter­ ally a hidden thought and is not a bad translation of the Greek term used for allegorizing scandalous passages in Homer and eventually, inevitably, for allegorizing all of Homer. That word is hyponoia, “undermeaning.” Plato used this word hyponoia, long before allegoria was heard of, when he said that such t­ hings as the castration of Cronus and the b ­ attle of the gods are unsuitable for educating the young in the ideal city, w ­ hether or not W H E N I N 159 0

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t­ hese episodes are constructed with “undermeanings,” hyponoiai. Plato clearly thought—­like Cicero and other skeptics ­after him—­that they ­were not so constructed and that claiming the stories w ­ ere mysteriously meant is an implausible excuse for their immorality. The historical convergence of the two terms occurs in a well-­known passage of Plutarch, in which he says that what used to be called “hyponoias” are now called “allego­ ries.”13 From that point on, hyponoia dropped out of sight, and allegory ab­ sorbed its residual and mysterious, mystagogical powers. Allegory was no longer merely a rhetorical device but rather the instrument par excel­ lence for transmitting mystery, including Christian mystery. In the latter the word denoted both the Christological level of meaning in biblical typology—­quid credas allegoria—­a nd also all three levels of meaning beyond the literal: the allegorical properly so called, the moral, and the anagogical. The logocentrism of the Christian culture of the sign made allegory pos­si­ble—­allegory of the poets and not just of the theologians—­ because everywhere in the natu­ral world as well as in Scripture, every­ thing refers ultimately back to the Word. Even locally, everywhere, more is meant than meets the ear. This general sense of the secondariness of the surfaces of all t­ hings was of course operative in higher secular po­ etry, too. Taking up the hoary theme, Sir Philip Sidney refers to “the sa­ cred mysteries of poesy.”14

' at length about Book Three, cantos eleven and twelve: the House of Busyrane episode. But instead of adding to the many interpretations of the spectacular scenes—­surely they rise to heights of intensity beyond anything Spenser had accomplished before—­I am trou­ bled by small details, which are like ­r ipples in the field of intentional and interpretative spacetime. The scenes are worth recounting for themselves, to indicate how the entire episode can be read as a system of interacting fields. ­T here is the magical h ­ ouse with its sulfurous, flaming porch, a formidable obstacle, momentarily personified as Mulciber, the Latin version of Hephaestus, who actually increases his flames to drive Scudamour back. But Britomart has already passed through, like a thunderbolt, in one magnificent stanza: “through she passed as a thunderbolt / Perceth the yielding ayre . . . ​So to I’D IN T ENDED TO SPEAK

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her yold the flames and did their force revolt” (FQ III.xi.25). We can travel out along the orthogonal vector of this moment, seeing it first as the power of chastity to brush aside the fires of lust and then, if we choose to travel out farther, seeing this as limning virginity’s ascent through the em­ pyrean up to Cynthia’s sphere. But why do the flames themselves choose to yield to Britomart when they do not to Scudamour? To ask what seems the most naive of questions, how do the flames know the difference be­ tween Scudamour and Britomart? How is such information propagated? Without any transition Britomart finds herself in a room lined on all sides with fabulous tapestries showing the loves of the gods and especially of Jove. The gold thread in them, like the seed of the gods, “lurked privily” but is intermittently disclosed: Yet h ­ ere, and ­there, and ­every where unwares It shewd it selfe, and shone unwillingly; Like a discolourd Snake, whose hidden snares Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht backe declares. FQ III.xi.28

One is especially taken with the figure of Neptune, sadly yet gloriously driving his chariot over the waves: His sea-­horses did seeme to snort amayne, And from their nosethrilles blow the brynie streame, That made the sparckling waues to smoke agayne, And flame with gold, but the white fomy creame Did shine with silver, and shoot forth his beame. The God himselfe did pensive seeme and sad, And hong adowne his head, as he did dreame: For privy loue his brest empiercèd had, Ne ­ought but deare Bisaltis ay could make him glad. FQ III.xi.41

At the upper end of this room is a gold statue of the blind god Cupid, insulting a dragon underfoot and, as it seems, discharging arrows all about the room. More startlingly, the dragon has been pieced in both eyes and the shafts with their fletching are still sticking out. Cupid’s long wings are brilliantly colored, like the peacock’s tail, thus connecting him with

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Juno, the queen of the gods, who is continually outraged at her husband’s infidelities with mortal ­women, as pictured ­here. What does that mean, or rather, what is it about? Suddenly the empty room is peopled with idol­ aters worshipping the statue: “And all the ­people in that ample hous / Did to that image bow their ­humble knee, / And oft committed fowle Idola­ tree” (FQ III.xi.49). The ­house is of course hauntingly empty ­until the masque of Cupid appears. This crowd of idolaters is t­ here and then not, as we ­shall see is the case with Busyrane, too. What are we to make of all this? The point, I would say, is not to aim at the bull’s-­eye of any definite meaning but to move about in the aboutness of general meaningfulness. It is a question not of what the episode means but of what it is about, what cluster of concerns the allegory is circling around in its propagated field. The decorations in the next room are openly sinister, when the subtle gold thread of the tapestries is nakedly shown depicting grotesques or, as Spenser calls them, “Antiques” “in a thousand monstrous formes”—­ which Spenser now explains far enough to give us a cue to travel out on another vector of interpretation: “For loue in thousand monstrous formes doth oft appeare” (FQ III.xi.51). The third room, the sanctum sanctorum, is the chamber of horrors where Amoret is tortured by the wicked en­ chanter, Busyrane himself. The masque of Cupid is put on in the second room at night, a­ fter much belching of sulfurous smoke out of the iron door through which the masque issues. That is, the masque emerges from the smoke of lust itself. The masque represents the stages of illicit love, a more sophisticated version of the knights whom Britomart encounters in Malecasta’s c­ astle. This unrivaled allegorical masque—­t he perfect illustration of allegory as a trope, of allegory as continued metaphor—is a ­thing to which anyone interested in the theory of allegory should attend closely, though I must pass it by ­here. I turn instead to two inconspicuous questions—­and perhaps a third—­ that the reader, pressing on, is likely to pass over. First, to go back to the very beginning of the canto, before the pre­sent episode begins, how does Ollyphant know who Britomart is? How does he know that alone of all beings, he ­can’t face up to her? Second, how does Scudamour know, in detail, of Amoret’s torment when he’s locked out of the c­ astle by fire? Third, who is the unnamed, tormented lady in the masque? Is she Amoret herself, as is usually and not unreasonably assumed? Or is she instead just

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one of the masquers who appeared at Amoret’s wedding, which we hear of only l­ater, in the following book. That would mean Amoret actually saw her own fate, though of course unwittingly, represented in another, this lady. The spectacle Amoret sees is all about her, as she stands ­there in her bridal finery, sympathizing and not knowing that this sympathy ­will collapse into identity. You can ask such questions as t­ hese, and many more, when you are reading the poem as a novel; you can answer them when you read it as a field. Canto eleven opens when Britomart and Satyrane see the monster Olly­ phant chasing a young boy, a variation of the ­earlier episode in which Florimell is chased by a forester and then by Prince Arthur and Guyon, ­until t­ hese two, in hot pursuit, are separated on diverging paths. Britomart and Satyrane likewise give chase and are separated in the woods where the monster takes cover. He is terrified of Britomart but not of Satyrane, ­because he knows—he has a solemn sympathy for this—of Britomart’s power as knight of Chastity, or ­here as Chastity tout court. T ­ here is an in­ visible, perhaps I should say an occult, connection of some kind be­ tween Britomart and Ollyphant. We hear in Paradise Lost—­this is Sin speaking, and she should know—of “some connatural force, / Pow’rful at greatest distance to unite / With secret amity ­things of like kind.”15 But the field of connatural force, like a magnetic field, can be reversed, creating not attraction but repulsion. So it is with Ollyphant, that incestuous and monstrously expanded fetus, now escaped from the womb and wan­ dering the world with his prehensile organ in search of victims to rape, imprison, and, when he feels like it, kill. Ollyphant knows who Britomart is ­because they are energized in the same field. ­A fter Ollyphant successfully evades Britomart, she carries on in the woods ­until she encounters the knight “Shield of Love,” to wit, Scu­ damour, scudo d’amore, lying abject on the grass and bouncing his head on the earth. His arms are scattered about him, including his shield, bearing the first and most innocent of the depictions of Cupid that we ­w ill see in this canto and the next: “the winged boy in colours clear / Depeincted was” (FQ III.xi.7). Scudamour is induced to tell the knight of Chastity of Amoret’s plight, kidnapped and imprisoned by Busyrane in his magic “house.” Scudamour followed and, barred by the sulfurous fire in the porch, has been waiting outside for months, unable to get in or

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learn of the fate of his love—­except that, strangely, he does learn or, rather, he just knows of “the sharpe steele [that] doth rive her hart in tway” (III.xi.11). How does he know this? In a novel it would be a ­simple ­mistake. In a psychologically accurate narrative, Scudamour’s ago­ nizing uncertainty should be played up. But h ­ ere, in the allegory, it is Scudamour’s certainty of what Amoret is undergoing that is the indis­ pensable ­factor. Trained by the novel, we may be inclined, as indeed the editors have been, to read Scudamour’s prescient remark meta­phor­ ically. We are then shocked at the end of canto twelve when we see that it is literally so—­whatever “literally so” may mean at this point. But in­ stead of imposing a figurative sense on Scudamour’s words, we should understand this as a case in which, though the two are physically sepa­ rated, his field and hers interact. At the climax and center of the masque of Cupid we see Cruelty and Despite leading a ­woman forward and torturing her whenever she slows or is about to faint. As well she might, for her breast is bared and cut open, her white skin is stained with her blood, and her heart is actually drawn out of her, resting in a silver basin and lanced with steel: At that wide orifice her trembling hart Was drawne forth, and in silver basin layd, Quite through transfixèd with a deadly dart, And in her bloud yet steeming fresh embayd. FQ III.xii.21

But is this Amoret? Her torment is nearly identical to Amoret’s, and the ­matter would appear to be de­cided by the reference to Amoret in the inner chamber as “that same woeful Lady.” This would seem to establish nar­ rative continuity from one appearance of the tortured lady to the next, the continuity that a body has in space, transported from one location to another. But is it pos­si­ble that the tortured lady in the masque was once separate from Amoret and a performer? At one strange moment the poet seems to refer to this figure as a skilled player, performing her agony with lively force, yet d ­ oing so with elegant grace: “Yet in that horror shewd a seemely grace, / And with her feeble feet did moue a comely pace” (III. xii.19). When Britomart follows the masque of Cupid into the chamber of horrors, it is suddenly gone: only Amoret and Busyrane are t­ here. The

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field of the masque has collapsed. We could say that when it does, Amoret alone remains and is immediately attached to the pillar, although t­ here is ­little time for that physical operation to be done. It seems to me pos­ si­ble to say that the lady in the masque and Amoret are at first dif­fer­ent and then, as Spenser puts it, the same, a region of the field folding over on itself. ­ fter all t­ hese ­there marcht a most faire Dame, A Led of two gryslie villeins, th’one Despight, The other clepèd Cruelty by name: She dolefull Lady, like a dreary Spright, Cald by strong charmes out of eternall night, Had deathes owne image figurd in her face, Full of sad signes, fearefull to living sight; Yet in that horror shewd a seemely grace, And with her feeble feet did move a comely pace. Her brest all naked, as net iuory, Without adorne of gold or silver bright, Wherewith the Craftesman wonts it beautify, Of her dew honour was despoylèd quight, And a wide wound therein (O ruefull sight) Entrenchèd deepe with knife accursèd keene, Yet freshly bleeding forth her fainting spright, (The worke of cruell hand) was to be seene, That dyde in sanguine red her skin all snowy cleene. At that wide orifice her trembling hart Was drawne forth, and in silver basin layd, Quite through transfixèd with a deadly dart, And in her bloud yet steeming fresh embayd: And t­ hose two villeins, which her steps upstayd When her weake feete could scarcely her sustaine, And fading vitall powers gan to fade, Her forward still with torture did constraine, And euermore encreasèd her consuming paine. Next a­ fter her the wingèd God himselfe Came riding on a Lion ravenous, Taught to obay the menage of that Elfe,

A Field Theory of Allegory  261 That man and beast with powre imperious Subdeweth to his kingdome tyrannous: His blindfold eyes he bad a while unbind, That his proud spoyle of that same dolorous Faire Dame he might behold in perfect kind; Which seene, he much rejoycèd in his cruell mind. FQ III.xii.19–22

' a reading proceeds along two axes, as we have done in this episode. One follows the narrative, and indeed each letter of the text, from beginning to end, from the top left corner of the first page to the bottom right corner of the last page, but at a deep level the mind pro­cesses the experience of thousands of lines of verse as moving along a single, uninterrupted line, which in our culture runs from left to right. We are unconscious of the turning of pages, as we are of our rapid saccades across the field of the page from the end of one line to the start of the next. Perhaps the long line of the entire text twists at some point, or at several points, like a Möbius strip, so that inside and outside, hidden meaning and surface, are impossible to determine. But we still think of the text as one-­dimensional pro­gress along a very long line. Still, our pro­gress keeps interacting with our imaginations, continually stretching our awareness beyond. We seem to see worlds on this line or at least one world, Fairy Land, which Coleridge, intuiting this pro­cess of expansion, called “­mental space.” We may call this pulsating narrative line a field ­because it has direction and force, the one-­way direction of reading and the force of the reader, who, as we say, pushes on. The other axis is orthogonal to the readerly and narrative one. It is continually stretching off to the side from innumerable points, following vectors that extend out farther and farther from the narrative axis. T ­ hese lines too have direction, of course, b ­ ecause the contexts encountered, starting with classical and biblical allusions, moving out a l­ittle farther to more general moral en­ gagements, farther still to historical contexts, and again farther out to ­matters of more concern to us than to Spenser, say, anthropology and psy­chol­ogy, but that are genuinely raised by the reading of him, by thinking within the field of the poem. Like the inverse square rule in gravitational T O S P E A K V E RY B ROA D LY,

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fields, ­these contexts are diminishingly compelling so far as making sense of the poem is concerned, but they augment our sense of its rich­ ness. They are not less true; they are just less strong, less tightly bound into that first axis I mentioned: the text and its narrative. ­T here’s a lesson to be learned from this. It’s not quite that all readings are equally legiti­ mate, relevant, and expert. It’s that the difference between legitimacy and illegitimacy—­that is, accordance with or departure from a law—­may be a less useful frame for thinking about readings in allegory than the differ­ ence between strong and weak, not as a value judgment but as an esti­ mation of distance from the text ­r unning through the ­middle of the poem’s field. Besides, as Milton said more than once, weakness in the long run can overturn strength or, to use his word, subvert it. Can we bring Astraea with her balances back? I mean for the purpose of speaking about The Faerie Queene as an allegory and, at the same time, as an act of thinking to which the reader is indispensable and to which the field as a concept is the result. For this to occur we need to see the phe­ nomenon of the poem, especially this poem, as a dynamic compound of its text and its reading. As Astraea returns, we can therefore ask her to place the text of the poem on one side of her scales and the reader of the poem on the other. When that is done, the poem ­w ill no longer be iden­ tical with the text of the poem. It ­won’t go onto ­either side of the scale, to be weighed against anything ­else. The poem ­w ill be the field created by the interaction of the reader with its text. Astraea’s balances now become a compass in a magnetic field and begin to rotate.

Chapter 11

'

From Moment to Moment

TA K E A M O M E N T

to read this:

Long they thus travellèd in friendly wise, Through countries waste and eke well edifyde, Seeking adventures hard, to exercise Their puissance, whylome full dernely tryde: At length they came into a forrest wyde, Whose hideous horror and sad trembling sound Full griesly seem’d: Therein they long did ryde, Yet tract of living creatures none they found, Save Beares, Lions, and Buls, which romèd them around. All suddenly out of the thickest brush, Upon a milk-­white Palfrey all alone, A goodly Ladie did foreby them rush, Whose face did seeme as cleare as Christiall stone, And eke through feare as white as ­whales bone: Her garments all ­were wrought of beaten gold, And all her steed with tinsell trappings shone, Which fled so fast, that nothing mote him hold, And scarse them leasure gave, her passing to behold. Still as she fled, her eye she backward threw, As fearing evill, that pursewd her fast; And her faire yellow locks ­behind her flew, Loosely disperst with puffe of ­every blast: 265

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All as a blazing starre doth farre outcast His hearie beames, and flaming lockes dispred, At sight whereof the p ­ eople stand aghast: But the sage wisard telles, as he has red, That it importunes death and doleful drerihed. So as they gazèd a­ fter her a while, Lo where a griesly Foster forth did rush, Breathing out beastly lust her to defile: His tyreling jade he fiercely forth did push, Through thicke and thin, both over bank and bush In hope her to attain by hooke or crooke, That from his gorie sides the bloud did gush: Large ­were his limbes, and terrible his looke, And in his clownish hand a sharp bore speare he shooke. Which outrage when t­ hose gentle knights did see, Full of ­great envie and fell gealosy, They stayd not to advise, who first should bee, But all spurd ­after fast, as they mote fly, To reskew her from shamefull villany. The Prince and Guyon equally bylive Her selfe pursewd, in hope to win thereby Most goodly meede, the fairest Dame alive: But a­ fter the foule foster Timias did strive. The whiles faire Britomart, whose constant mind, Would not so lightly follow beauties chace, Ne reckt of Ladies Love, did stay ­behind, And them awayted t­ here a certaine space, To weet if they would turne backe to that place: But when she saw them gone, she forward went, As lay her journey, through that perlous Pace, With stedfast courage and stout hardiment; Ne evil t­ hing she fear’d, ne evill t­ hing she ment. FQ III.i.14–19

If Paradise Lost is a poem of episodes, The Faerie Queene is a poem of moments. The episodes of a narrative poem constitute a plot, which is itself an arrangement of the story or myth. The moments of The Faerie Queene

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constitute not a plot but an array. The array is the field of allegory, and the connections made between the parts of this array, so that it seems to be one and not many, are interpretations, which is to say, just the sort of readings that an allegorical work is designed to elicit. I do not mean to say The Faerie Queene has no episodes or that Paradise Lost has no moments. The entire passage at the beginning of this chapter is an episode, with the first and last stanzas playing transitional roles into and out of it, connecting episodes before and a­ fter. The word episode denotes something more than a static portion of a larger ­whole. Episode denotes something forceful, a coming up against (epi) and an entering into (eis) a path or way (hodos). Indeed, the event you have just read, the vio­ lent coming into appearance of Florimell and the forester, could stand as a literal illustration of the word episode. The two of them burst forth from the bushes and strike against (epi) the consciousness of the com­pany en route, creating outrage, envy, and jealousy. Florimell and the forester then actually go into (eis) that same route, or “perlous Pace” (hodos), that the ­others have been traveling on. They even ­r ide ahead on this route, com­ pelling their emotionally charged gazers to follow, Guyon and Arthur ­after Florimell, Timias a­ fter the forester. The route itself is transformed by this irruption. Formerly, it was a wandering way, a slow path on which the slow search for adventure takes place. Suddenly, it is the path of pur­ suit. This path w ­ ill soon divide into three ways, ­those of Arthur, Guyon, and Timias. Guyon and Arthur w ­ ill take dif­fer­ent forks in the road, and Arthur’s ­w ill turn out to be the one Florimell took. At this point, as in The Thousand and One Nights, Guyon leaves the story: At last they came unto a double way, Where, doubtful which to take, her to rescew, Themselves they did dispart, each to assay, ­Whether so happy w ­ ere, to win so goodly pray. FQ III.iv.46

On the one hand, inasmuch as Florimell is a figure in the tale, the in­ tention of Guyon and Arthur is to rescue her, in which intention their interests are shared. On the other hand, inasmuch as Florimell is an al­ legorical figure of beauty, the intentions of Guyon and Arthur are in competition with each other, each wanting to win beauty as his “goodly

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pray.” The divisive power of beauty—­Spenser ­will be thinking l­ ater in this book of Helen of Troy—is ­here marked by that fork in the road, a “double way.” The divisiveness is marked by the narrative line; but it is anticipated ­earlier. At the first sight of Florimell, Guyon, Arthur, and Timias all spurred “To rescue her from shamefull villany.” But if that is their inten­ tion, then Arthur and Guyon are somewhat irrational to pursue Florimell instead of the forester, “in hope to win thereby / Most goodly meed, the fairest Dame alive.” It is Timias who makes the right move if rescuing Flo­ rimell from danger is the only concern: “But ­after the foule foster Timias did strive” (FQ III.i.18). As a poetical invention, Florimell hovers most in­ terestingly between an abstract universal, beauty, and one par­tic­u­lar person, “the fairest Dame alive.” But this doubleness too is indicative of the truth about beauty: it always feels scarce, or indeed unique, and for this reason is always divisive, like Helen of Troy. Helen is herself divided, or reduplicated as an eidôlon, a false image, according to Euripides; and Spenser ­w ill follow when he has the witch create the False Florimell. But that comes ­later and is not my concern ­here. I am concerned with the instant, or the moment, of Florimell’s appearance. The appearance of beauty on the road has a scattering effect, like a collision in a particle ac­ celerator, with Guyon, Timias, and Arthur flying off on dif­fer­ent roads. Only for Britomart, who does not follow the chase, does the road re­ main ever the same as it was, a road leading at last, as she hopes and trusts, to Artegal. The entire episode is an event, a rupture, and once it occurs, every­thing is changed. We are in a new sort of poem from the one we knew in Books One and Two, and this rupturing episode is the point at which it changes. Almost from the beginning, indeed from this par­tic­u­lar episode, Book Three feels radically dif­fer­ent from Books One and Two. It is more com­ plicated and vari­ous, in thought as well as in plot; it is more intratessuto, “interwoven.” Spenser seems to want the contrast between the first two books and the third to be marked in this canto, not from the beginning but part of the way in. As we read them, stanzas one through thirteen of the first canto feel as if we are still in Book Two. Arthur and Guyon go forth from Alma’s House, looking for more adventures. They encounter an unknown knight, t­ here is a joust, and then ­there is a reconciliation achieved in language that belongs to the ­earlier books: “Thus reconcile­

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ment was between them knit, / Through goodly temperance, and affec­ tion chaste” (FQ III.i.12), “goodly temperance” being Guyon, “affection chaste” being Britomart. As has been Spenser’s habit up to now, he names the allegorical significance of characters ­after an action has been com­ pleted so that our interpretation of the action’s meaning ­w ill be briefly retrospective. The first two books especially advance in this way, making us read forward and then pause, to think back over what we have read, before reading onward again. The moral summary in stanza thirteen, which ends, “Let ­later age that noble vse enuy / Vyle rancor to avoid, and cruell surquedrye,” sounds like many such retrospective stanzas with which a new canto opens. The new episode now begins, with the passage I quoted at the outset, and in this new episode we feel we are in a dif­fer­ent sort of world, a dif­fer­ent Fairy Land, from what we have known. The pace is faster, more violent, more scattering. But the rupture effected by this episode is like a knife cut in grafting, an opening in the side of the narrative so as to convey something into it from the outside. What is introduced in this way is a new allegorical mo­ ment, a moment being an effect of stillness in motion. This occurs in stanzas fifteen and sixteen, which give the first appearance of Florimell, and it is a moment of won­der. An episode simply moves, carry­ing us from one state into the next. But a moment inside an episode si­mul­ta­neously moves and is still: “as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its still­ ness.”1 When a Chinese jar does that, it does not move to the left or to the right: it rotates; it moves around a center. As we ­shall see, so too does the moment.

' The Faerie Queene is a ­matter of encoun­ tering and storing up moments of won­der like this one, which I ­shall name the Florimell moment. Such moments appear to raise the narrative out of time and into ­mental space, giving every­thing around them a center. ­Every competent reader of The Faerie Queene knows t­ hese moments and remembers them better than the episodes, better than the stories, better than the plan or “fore-­conceit,” and better than the w ­ hole. Reading from one moment to the next gives the impression of a poem with no clear outer bound­aries, as if it could be extended in­def­initely in all directions. T HE EXPER IENCE OF R E ADING

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Wherever one happens to be in The Faerie Queene, one is surrounded on all sides by an array of such moments of won­der. They are like shining per­ simmons hanging among the fo­liage of the boughs of the tree ­under which one stands. The essential character of ­these moments, which enables the won­der they create, is their curious combination of stasis and movement. The first and last stanzas of the passage at the beginning of this chapter are trav­ eling stanzas such that, in the first, even the bears, lions, and bulls of the forest are merely beasts of passage. As soon as they are spotted in the un­ derbrush they are already fading from sight. In the last stanza of the pas­ sage, Britomart waits for a period of time, as if mechanically arrested, and then she moves on as before, unchanged. At no time in this stanza does Britomart seem to be moving and still at the same moment. She is first one and then the other. At no time in the first stanza, during the passage through the forest, do the travelers seem at once to be in motion and at rest. They float through the horror, and the horror floats by them. Yet Florimell is seen very differently: violently in motion and still, like the Chinese jar. This binding together of stasis and kinesis is the very ground of the possibility of a moment. The flying Florimell is still in our minds, like a picture, or a symbolic icon—­not a religious icon, of course, but an eikôn, as in iconography, the study of icones symbolicae. Florimell herself does not feel like an icon, of course, nor does she even feel how she is vi­ olently in motion. She feels instead violently pursued. So at least Flo­ rimell is presented to us. Therefore, the binding together of stasis and kinesis belongs in large mea­sure to the subjective experience of reading, although the text has created the conditions for this peculiar experience. This strange linkage of stasis and kinesis, each remaining separate from but also entangled with the other, is the typical surface feature of The Faerie Queene.

' at the episode more closely. It begins with the ap­ pearance of Florimell, a character based on Ariosto’s Angelica but of course dif­fer­ent from her. Ariosto’s Angelica is a fleeing beauty, and Flo­ rimell is Fleeting Beauty. T ­ here is nothing angelic about Angelica, except her looks. Florimell’s name goes deeper. It associates her with the sweetest L E T U S N OW L O O K

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t­ hings nature produces, flowers and honey. She is floral and blooming. One thinks of the printer John Wolfe’s device for the 1590 installment of The Faerie Queene: a fleur-­de-­lis with the inscription, ubique floret. Stanza fourteen is a transition to this new episode, completed for the pre­sent in stanza eigh­teen. Stanza nineteen is transitional to the next episode, which is Britomart’s arrival at the ­Castle of Malecasta, or “unchastity,” a typically formulaic adventure at the outset of a book. At the ­Castle Joyeous we ­will see beauty perverted, as it easily is. Outside the c­ astle, Britomart finds six knights attacking one, surrounding him like “dastard Curres” ­until Britomart, having commanded them to desist, rushes in and breaks up their “compacted gyre” (FQ III.i.23). Gyre (from Greek gyros, a circle) means a turning motion, a whirl. L­ ater, ­these b ­ rothers ­w ill be stretched out, as it ­were, in a line, indicating the successive stages of a seduction: looking, speaking, joking, kissing, drinking, and . . . ​night (III.i.45). But at this moment they are drawn around in a circle as they all attack the Red­ cross knight, the hero of Book One, who is once again assailed by seduc­ tion. In this first canto of Book Three we have all three knights from the first three books, all of them fighting. That is what happens ­after the episode I have quoted. What happens before? The episode preceding the appearance of Florimell is the begin­ ning of the third book of The Faerie Queene, titled “The Legend of Brit­ omartis. Or Of Chastitie.” Note that the two parts of this title are distinct: ­either the book is the Legend of Britomartis, or the book is a treatise on Chastity: De Pudicitia, “Of Chastity.” The proem gives instructions on how to read the book allegorically, but it says nothing what­ever of its hero, Brit­ omart. She w ­ ill arrive without any introduction. She w ­ ill rush in and fight. When the first canto opens, as I mentioned, Prince Arthur and Guyon leave the House of Alma, taking their congé, as Spenser puts it. Guyon sends the witch Acrasia back to Fairy Court u ­ nder a strong guard, so that he might join Arthur searching for deeds of arms to perform, which they both do, achieving many “hard aduentures” (FQ III.i.3). They are now a party of four, ­because Timias, Arthur’s squire, and the Palmer, Guyon’s adviser, accompany them. They meet an armed knight with an aged squire bent double u ­ nder the weight of the shield, which has on it “a Lion passant in a golden field” (III.i.4). This is Britomart, proclaimed with a he­ raldic lion from the En­glish royal arms, which was also the escutcheon

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of Brutus, the Trojan founder of Britain (III.i.4). The strange knight pre­ pares for b ­ attle, and Guyon, having asked Arthur’s permission to “ronne that turne” (III.i.5), rides against this knight, only to be un­horsed. Guyon furiously draws his sword but is dissuaded by the Palmer and Arthur from further attack, for the Palmer has divined the magic power in the strange knight’s spear: “For death sate on the point of that enchaunted speare” (III.i.9). Only ­here (in stanza eight) is Britomart named by the narrator, although her identity remains concealed from the rest. Guyon’s anger is assuaged by the Palmer and also by Arthur’s blaming Guyon’s h ­ orse and his page for the upset. Without any word spoken by the strange knight (at least none we are permitted to hear), all are now at peace, being “with that golden chaine of concord tyde” (FQ III.i.12). They r­ ide forth together as a party of six: Arthur, Timias, Guyon, the Palmer, Britomart, and Glauce, the aged squire. The closure of this first episode is marked by a retrospective, mor­ alizing stanza: “O goodly vsage of ­those antique tymes” (a line fished ­whole from Ariosto), ending with the lapidary moral I have quoted. We now arrive at the beginning of the passage I quoted, with its transition to a new episode, in which the party passes through many countries, both waste and “well edifyde,” before entering a grisly forest full of savage beasts and an unexplained, ominous “trembling sownd.” Now Florimell appears, or rather, her milk-­white Palfrey appears, breaking into view an instant before she does, as she flashes by. With all the bears, lions, and bulls about, this is the last t­ hing we readers might expect. Florimell flashes by so quickly that she cannot be clearly seen or contemplated at leisure (as is the nature of beauty). They see a face like crystal, white with fear, and they see golden garments and tinsel accou­ trement, flashing in the light as they emerge from the dark. They then see Florimell’s beautiful eyes struck with terror, turned b ­ ehind her on a pur­ suer who has not yet emerged. Her glorious yellow hair (anticipating Brit­ omart’s at FQ III.i.43) is spread out b ­ ehind her in the wind, like a comet. The comet simile takes up fully five lines. The simile reproduces in ­little the effect of the scene in which it is contained, showing us first the phe­ nomenon itself, blazing forth into sight, and then ­those who see it and react. T ­ here is the comet, its beams spread out ­behind it, like long hair

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on fire. Then t­ here are the ­people watching it in won­der and taking it to be portentous, as the wizard explains what disasters it portends. Only now, a­ fter this considerable delay, which further sets Florimell apart, does the “griesly Foster” rush forth from the bushes on his jade, shaking his boar-­spear and making his intentions clear: “Breathing out beastly lust her to defyle” (FQ III.i.17). Does he intend to spear her or rape her? Like the cannibals in Book Six, he seems not to have made up his mind on this delicate point. Despite the episodic linkage of Florimell and this forester, they are quite separate as moments. She has appeared “All suddenly,” in stanza fifteen; but in the final five lines of stanza sixteen she is allowed to fade from sight more gradually, disappearing ­behind the image of the comet.

' few accounts in modern criticism of what it is like to read The Faerie Queene, episode by episode and moment by mo­ ment. We commonly think of reading in the most abstract way as ful­ filling very broad expectations within literary genres, or “kinds,” a word that betrays a high level of abstraction and, indeed, unreality. A lyric ­w ill do certain lyrical t­ hings, a novel certain novelistic t­ hings; or they w ­ ill not do t­ hose t­ hings in a con­spic­u­ous way, and ­isn’t that bold on their part and in­ter­est­ing for us? In fact, we have not been told much when we are told a work is an example of a genre or a work transgresses the conventions of its genre. The concept of genre has its uses, which are mostly for literary-­historical classification. What are we to do, then, with works we refer to as mixed genres, such as tragicomedy? In such cases genres may appear less abstract if we think of them as braided codes, as is often the case in The Faerie Queene, but this too can lead to illusions indulged in by the likes of Polonius, who has learned his school lessons and literary fashions too well. However com­ plicated we make our account of genres, they in the end ­w ill tell us ­little about what it is like to read any work of lit­er­a­ture from one moment to the next. When I first read Virgil’s Eclogues, having no experience or con­ ception of pastoral lit­er­a­ture, I had no idea I was reading a genre. When I am reading ­those poems from moment to moment, I still ­don’t. ­T H E R E A R E S U R P R I S I N G LY

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This explanatory poverty of genre is notorious with a poem like The Faerie Queene, which overloads us with aesthetic expectations and then obliterates ­these with continually unexpected events, with eruptive epi­ sodes. In the Letter to Raleigh, Spenser calls the poem an allegory, a “darke conceit.” Throughout the work we are given local instructions on how to read allegorically and how to apply t­ hese instructions to otherwise-­ straightforward events. But the poem also has the structure of chivalric romance, inherited from Malory and the courtly poems of Boiardo and Ariosto. Spenser’s Fairy Court may be a distant dream, an allegorical des­ tination where the meanings ­w ill come home at last, joining all together in the sacred marriage of Arthur’s magnanimity and Gloriana’s glory. But the court is also part of the standard furniture of romance. Recurring, episodic adventures such as the Florimell tale tend to exceed in our ex­ perience any interpretative directions concerning them. Florimell may be the beauty of the earth in the spring, with its flowers and honey—­the honey made by the bees visiting the flowers—­and Marinell may be the potential of the sea to send clouds and life-­giving rain to the land. He also revives like a plant, as if what he mediates to Florimell is in turn medi­ ated to him. But we recognize such a meaning in a moment—in an in­ stant of certain duration—­before experiencing the tale as a romance. I have not mentioned the codes of the epic genre, which are also enacted at con­spic­u­ous moments in The Faerie Queene, sometimes to affirm that we have an epic in hand—­thus raising the poet’s status to that of Homer or that of Virgil—­sometimes to defer the epic theme u ­ ntil l­ ater, when the Pagan King is fought. If this deferral of epic is taken seriously, then The Faerie Queene falls into the generic space of Virgil’s Georgics and becomes, by a stretch of the imagination, a moral poem about cultivating—­ farming—­the self. And so we are back to allegory again and none the wiser for our journey through the cir­cuit of the genres. Thinking in generic terms about poetry gives literary critics plea­sure and work. But at some level of awareness even t­ hose who are most com­ mitted to the enterprise of genre criticism feel they are moving among shadows “which romed them around” (FQ III.i.14) while the poem waits for them out in the light. One critic who resisted with some polemical force this strain of generic criticism was Paul Alpers. He did so in several places, but the first was in

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his power­ful study The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene.” Alpers’s argument rests on the division in the poem between phases of composition, which is what he takes the canto to be. The unit of composition in the poem, and therefore the unit of interpretation, is not the book, as might be assumed by reason of the clear thematic names given each book. The unit of com­ position, and therefore of interpretation, says Alpers, is the canto. Hence, any interpretations that extend beyond the length of the canto—­one thinks in par­tic­u ­lar of Alastair Fowler’s Spenser and the Numbers of Time (1964), a probable target, and of Northrop Frye’s “Structure of Im­ agery in The Faerie Queene,” a certain target—is ruled out of court ­because its very ingeniousness is out of touch with the experience of reading, an experience that, Alpers contends without much support for the claim, corresponds with the experience of composition.2 The expe­ rience of composition is taken to be a function partly of time and partly of structural signals, notably the canto headings, but also the tendency to comment retrospectively at the beginning of each canto on what has occurred in the last, thus sealing off each canto in turn as a discrete unit. Alpers’s arguments had ­great success for their philological rigor. They brought close reading and the school of New Criticism to The Faerie Queene, a poem long thought unsuitable to ­either. Yet the very positiveness of Alpers’s claim—­its neglect, in short, of any account of reading or of writing—­left the assertions he had made about The Faerie Queene as em­ pirical ones. Why not divide the poem up further? ­After all, as has been pointed out in recent work by several scholars, the unit of composition is the stanza, the nine-­line, compact, phonically and typographically dis­ tinct energy quantum, complete with its extra, two-­syllable final line and terminal couplet.3 From this point of view, it would be pos­si­ble to argue that each stanza, and not each canto, constitutes a moment of the poem.

' that contains two opposite meanings at once, a fact most useful to Hegel, who spoke of partial ele­ments of a larger pro­ cess as “moments,” for example, the three consecutive moments of the concept: abstraction, particularity, and individuality. Hegel seems to have been attracted to the term by its use in physics, where it has to do with turning force, or torque. What caught his attention was the use of the M O M E N T I S A WO R D

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word in connection with the lever, in par­tic­u­lar the incommensurability of the two forces involved: distance from the fulcrum and the downward force of the weight. Something similar can be said of the incommensu­ rability of kinesis and stasis in the picture of Florimell, making her appear­ ance a moment. She is kinetic ­because the story says she must be; she is static—­for a moment—­because we have to see her. In Latin, the noun momentum is a substantive formed from the verb movere, “to move,” and it already has this double meaning. It is a movement, an impulse, and a decisive stage in a pro­cess, for example, in a ­battle. But it is also a brief space of time, an immea­sur­able instant, a particle, or an ele­ment of something. In Lucretian philosophy the momina are tiny mo­ tive powers in the tiny round particles composing the mind. This minute quantity of energy c­ auses the body to move. But in Statius’s Thebaid they are tiny motive impulses in events that have enormous impact at a ­later time, the tiny beat of the butterfly’s wings that starts a chain of events leading to a hurricane. I refer to the moment when the mad Capaneus, lusting for war against Thebes, abuses the prophet Amphiaraus’s warning against it, saying that Amphiaraus’s words, purporting to be from the gods, draw from the mere empty sky a suppositious knowledge of the ­future, in par­tic­u­lar, of the ­causes and abstruse motive powers in ­things, causas abstrusaque momina rerum. 4 Momentum also means importance, as when something is of ­great importance, magni momenti, or of no impor­ tance at all, nullius momenti.5 One of the more in­ter­est­ing senses—­when we recall Hegel’s fascina­ tion with the lever—is the early-­medieval use of the word for a set a bal­ ances weighing small amounts of precious metal, a momentana. ­T here is weight on both sides, equidistant from the fulcrum, but ­after an instant the level arm starts to move as one side goes down and the other goes up. One of the most famous moments in the Iliad is that of the scales, which are held out by Zeus over the ­battle, weighing the fates, the kêres (they are vestigially personified), of the Trojans in one and of the Achaeans in the other, and ­later, the kêres of Achilles and Hector. 6 ­T here is a moment of pause before the beam turns around the center by which Zeus holds it, carry­ing the fate of one on high, to victory, and the other down to death. We observe in this scene how weighing in a scale enacts a binding together of kinesis and stasis, capturing movement through time in a mo­

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ment; and indeed the scene was referred to traditionally as the kêrestasia, “the poising of fates.” Often in ­battle a single instant is the turning point for ­great events: “puncto saepe temporis maximarum rerum momenta verti.”7 Imagine e­ very moment of arrested attention in The Faerie Queene with a set of balance scales superimposed on it, or rather just ­behind it, just out of sight. ­There is the subtlest, moving inertia in the arrested scene, a inner momentum that means it is dynamically pressing outward from within the interior of this moment to disperse it. The brief but very real stasis gives way to its inner kinesis, like whirling eddies in a stream. The sight of Florimell is an example of such torque, like one of t­ hose eddies, and of what I ­shall now venture to term kinestasis, a moment of motion held still before us for contemplation. Spenser frames the first sight of Florimell with phrases that draw attention to how difficult it is to see motion, especially very swift motion. Our first and last impression, in stanza fifteen, is of speed. The third line of the stanza reads, “A goodly Ladie did foreby them rush.” and the last reads, “And scarse them leasure gave, her passing to behold.” Of her face we are told only what it is like—­ crystal and whalebone—­but what lurks ­behind ­these comparisons is a moment of stillness at the center of all the rushing motion around it. We understand the motion as linear (the palfrey cannot be held back, even if Florimell wanted to hold it), but we perceive it as rotational, like the Co­ riolis effect, swirling around the still center of her face, the eye of the storm. The flashing gold garments on her body and the tinsel trappings on the h ­ orse make this swirling movement more vis­i­ble. In the following stanza, the last five lines of which are the comet simile, we are allowed to look more closely into this center: Still as she fled, her eye she backward threw, As fearing evill, that pursewd her fast; And her faire yellow locks ­behind her flew, Loosely disperst with puffe of ­every blast.

The first line is set up like a balance: she flees in one direction, and her eyes are turned back opposite to the direction of her flight. Next, the bal­ anced system of eyes and flight is itself made to balance on one side of the scales a force that is still outside the frame: the evil that pursues her fast. Florimell remains isolated before us as a system of her own, but the

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­ hole system is motivated by a force pressing on it from the outside: the w pursuer. That external pressure is the reason for the momentum inside. We lastly see her yellow tresses, which are loosened to the wind and fly ­behind her, seeming to reach out in the direction opposite to her flight, as her eyes did before. Yet of course her tresses remain attached to her head and carried along with it and are perpendicularly extended by the combination of motions. But they w ­ ill eventually be seen from b ­ ehind by Prince Arthur as he falls into her track and sets off in pursuit. It is as if Arthur, and of course Guyon too, has been caught in the rotational en­ ergy of the Florimell system and drawn t­ oward its center, while Guyon is at last spun off and away from this system. Never the idealist, even in m ­ atters of beauty, Guyon strives for the rectilinear ­middle way between opposite attractive forces, such as the “Gulfe of Greedinesse,” another rotational system, and the “Rock of vile Reproach” (FQ II.xii.3 and 8), plus the extraor­ dinary “Whirlepoole of decay” met with l­ater on the same voyage (II.i.20). Arthur is swept around ­behind Florimell and drawn onward with her, without ever catching up with the eye of the system. Even had Arthur got very close, he would have been whirled in a tight circle around the center without ever getting into the eye. Such is the system of beauty.

' to think of his moments as in motion, each one sub­ lated by the next. They flee forward with the balance scales of the dialectic inside them, like gyroscopes. To read Hegel on any moment of his thought, that of aristocratic freedom, for example, is to experience t­ hese moments not as moving but as static dioramas. They give us a view into par­tic­u­lar phases—­appearances—of Spirit in time, for example, when aesthetics is emerging from religion. Of course, each Hegelian diorama ­w ill be made slowly to expose its contradiction, which is the engine of change, thus forcing us to walk over to the next diorama and to pause once again, to see what the last diorama has surprisingly become, the latent force or mo­ ment in the former becoming fully expressed in the latter. For Hegel, it is the logic of change that is impor­tant, the driver of metamorphosis. But the metamorphoses tend to happen in an instant, and the experience for us as readers is to see the moments as successive, stable w ­ holes, rather than as moments in the dynamical sense of the word. H E G E L WA N T S U S

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Reading is not so linear a pro­cess as the nature of typography may lead us to suppose. It is extraordinary in how many ways the linear order of the type line on the densely packed Elizabethan page is broken up and spatialized in The Faerie Queene. The original editions of Elizabethan prose works are fatiguing just to look at. But the pages laid out in the quartos of The Faerie Queene are beautiful and restful to the eye. This is only in part ­because of the stability of the stanza to the eye, the Italian word stanza—­ adopted to Spanish, Portuguese, and French—­being derived from the Latin verb for “to stand” (stare). The stanza is a prosodic binding together of kinesis and stasis, like the moment. In the single-­episode, Italian tele­v i­ sion production of the Orlando furioso, released in February 1975, one tracking shot shows knights and ladies on mechanical h ­ orses traveling along straight rails from one palatial room to the next. They are filmed from directly in front as the camera recedes before them, the riders com­ pleting one stanza per room, the space between stanzas being marked by the passage through the doors between rooms. The Italian word for a ­great room in a palace is stanza, stanze in the plural, as in the series of rooms, the Raphael stanze, in the Vatican. Mesmerized by the exquisite timing of the recitations, each stanza coordinated with the speed of the ­horses and the tracking camera in front, I d ­ idn’t think of the second meaning of the word u ­ ntil the person beside me said, “stanza per stanza.”8 On a larger scale we have “episode by episode.” But the heartbeat of The Faerie Queene is in the rhythm of its pro­gress “moment by moment.” Spenser thinks from one scene to the next and is less interested in the transitions between his grander tableaus than he is in the tableaus them­ selves and the thinking that develops within them. Once we are above the level of the stanza, we may never be able to say objectively, in ­every instance, where one scene ends and another begins, although the passage we have been considering certainly marks them: the passage through the wood and Britomart’s waiting alone on the road before riding on. E ­ very moment in the poem turns in on itself and draws us deeper into its local and contained region of thought. But e­ very moment in the poem is also incomplete and, so to speak, subtracted from itself, its inner force driving the reader beyond it.

'

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I N T H E S I X T H book of The City of God—­the full title is of course City of God against the Pagans—­Saint Augustine turns to the worldly uses of the pagan gods.9 He examines the three categories into which the g­ reat scholar Varro has divided his theology of the uses of the gods: the fabu­ lous, the philosophical, and the civil. The fabulous use is the depiction of the gods for entertainment in poetry and stage plays. The philosoph­ ical use, commonly called “physical” or “natu­ral,” is the rationalistic (mostly stoic) interpretation of the gods as signs of natu­ral phenomena and pro­cesses. The civil use is the worship of the gods in Roman civil rites, although the one that ­w ill interest Augustine in this chapter is marriage. Augustine sets aside for the time being the philosophical interpretation of the gods, already treated with skepticism in Cicero’s De natura deorum. Instead, he concentrates his fire on Varro’s line of distinction between (a) the fabulous or, as we might now say, literary use of the pagan gods in poems and stage plays and (b) the civil or, as we might now say, ritual use of pagan gods in Roman rites, particularly in marriage. Varro is clearly scornful, Augustine says, of the obscenities and follies foisted on the gods by the poets, just as Plato was in the Republic. But the target is nothing so exalted as Homer. The theater, and in par­tic­u­lar, the pantomime, plays an impor­tant role in this condemnation, for the the­ ater in Rome was not what it was for the Greeks: a religious institution. The Roman theater existed for entertainment. What was chiefly repre­ sented on the stage, or in pantomimes, at least by Augustine’s account, ­were the pagan gods in ridicu­lous and obscene situations. It should be re­ membered that the scorn of the classical gods as they appear in ancient poetry—­a scorn exhibited by high-­minded Romans such as Varro, Cicero, and Seneca, almost as much as by the Christian F­ athers—­had much to do with the comical and de­cadent repre­sen­ta­tion of the gods on the stage. For the purposes of Augustine’s argument about Varro’s inten­ tions, poetry and the theater are one and the same b ­ ecause the theater ex­ poses what the noble gods of poetry truly are: ridicu­lous, undignified, and obscene. We saw that Varro separates this fantastic use of the gods in the the­ ater from the allegorizing use of the gods by the natu­ral phi­los­o­phers and from the civic and social uses of the gods in public rites. The natu­ral phi­ los­o­phers’ interpretations are then set aside by Augustine, who observes

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merely, for the moment, that for Varro this is a legitimate use of the clas­ sical gods. Augustine ­w ill of course disagree ­later on, but that is not his purpose ­here. His purpose is to examine closely Varro’s distinction be­ tween the use of the gods for base entertainment and the dignified use of the gods in public rites. He examines it closely in order to destroy it. This distinction of Varro’s, Augustine argues, is merely formal and prudential, an avoidance of condemnation for impiety and irreligion. Varro is a pa­ triotic man of astonishing erudition, the most learned of the Romans, and he wants Romans to understand the origins of the rites that they celebrate. But in ­doing so Varro admits, if only implicitly, that the social practices came first and the divinities celebrated in them came a­ fter. The gods of civic rites are the inventions of men and so are just as poetical, just as fan­ tastic, as the gods of the poets and stage plays. Augustine admits that Varro is not perfectly clear on this point. Varro is perhaps holding in reserve the prophylactic qualification that of course the gods celebrated in civic rites preceded ­those rites. But the minutely functional character of the gods treated by Varro shows him to believe that social forces created the gods. Moreover, Augustine goes on, the grotesque, obscene, and stupid acts of the gods celebrated in public and social rites are so carefully documented by Varro as to show he has no higher opinion of them than he does of the gods on the stage and in poems. The civic and the fantastical are one and the same. They know, Augustine says of the more circumspect pagans, including Varro, that the theatrical and fabulous theology hangs from the civil theology and that this civil theology, in all its pontifical gravity, has its true nature re­ flected back to it, as from a mirror (tanquam de speculo), from the baseness, triviality, untruthfulness, ridiculousness, and licentiousness of the poets’ songs. Varro does not say so, but he has no more re­spect for the gods produced by civic and social ceremonies than he does for the gods of the poets and of the theater. The difference is only that he is professionally preoccupied, like an anthropologist, by ­these civic and social gods and believes they should be recorded, so that Romans ­w ill know where their ceremonies come from. So much for the civic gods of pontifical rites. Closely allied with them by Augustine, b ­ ecause they too are celebrated in religious rites, are the tiny gods specialized for par­tic­u­lar functions, the di officiali, to one of

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whom, for example, you might pray to have a full beard, although such prayers ­w ill not help, and ­those who have full beards without praying for them ­w ill, says Augustine, ridicule you for ­doing so. Other gods are taken more seriously, as showing the depravity of the imagination when affected by dev­ils. Of ­these ­there are the three who are required—­ Augustine reports Varro’s account of their rites with care—to prevent a matron who has just given birth from being raped by Priapus. Augustine reserves his special scorn, however, for an account of the role of the di officiali at marriage rites. The passage is well known for its satiric comedy, but it is also of some philosophical interest ­because it describes how the mind breaks down stages of an event into separate moments. Each moment represents a kind of ek-­stasis in which the action is s­ topped briefly so that its ele­ments of this continuous action may be considered separately as t­ hings or, rather, as persons. How do you get a bride home ­after the ceremony is complete? ­T here is a god for that, Domiducus, and another, Domideus, the god of the ­house, for receiving the bride, ­because, of course, Domiducus can do nothing once he gets to the h ­ ouse and ­can’t put her in it or prevent a last-­ minute escape. Domideus must take custody of her. Yet another god, Manturna, is needed to ensure that the bride stays in the h ­ ouse, instead of fleeing. But ­shouldn’t all ­these gods now take their leave, along with the groomsmen? Not at all. Even in the privacy of the marriage chamber ­there is, Augustine says, a ­great crowd of gods, a turba numinum, assisting with the consummation of the marriage. They are necessary to overcome virginal terror. Venus is ­there, ­because her name signifies force, vis, which is needed to take the bride’s virginity. So too is Priapus, since an erection is needed as well for this task; and indeed the bride ­w ill be made to sit in the lap of a statue of Priapus, to excite her and give her an idea of what is required. ­T here is a goddess to loosen the girdle, a god to put the bride down on the bed, another to hold her u ­ nder the bridegroom, lest she es­ cape sideways, and ­there is even a goddess Pertunda, “pierce-­through,” for breaking the hymen. Of this last Augustine says surely the bridegroom should not stand idly by but should be allowed to do something. He is at least fortunate that Pertunda is a feminine goddess and not Pertundus, a male, in which case he would be more inclined to protect his bride against violation than be thankful for the aid of deflowering her.

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Of course, Augustine is attacking the folly and lasciviousness implicit in belief in ­these gods. But even where belief is absent, Augustine is at­ tacking the psychological disease of performing rites to such gods, since even the per­for­mance is diabolically inspired. Augustine holds that the pagan gods are dev­ils in disguise, attracting worship to themselves and away from the true God, in order to lead souls to damnation. But in this chapter he frequently suggests that the dev­ils encourage ­humans to in­ vent out of nothing t­hese proliferating gods of minor functions. No person in his or her right mind could believe in such gods. They are there­ fore the products of psychological interference by dev­ils, although the aim of ­those dev­ils is the same: to lead souls into damnation by perverting the natu­ral impulse to worship, to break down worship itself into infini­ tesimal fragments, into a mise en abîme. Illogic is portrayed as m ­ ental disease. Yet it might be said in defense of the pagans that they ­were at least trying to analyze into separate stages or moments an unbroken, continuous pro­ cess. Students of fluid dynamics do much the same ­thing, as does anyone navigating a river. A continuous process—­downstream flow—is broken into parts separated not by hard bound­aries but by boundary regions, for example, where an upstream eddy meets the downstream flow, creating a region of turbulence that has an identity of its own, although it is ca­ pable of further partition. This brings us to a final point to be made about the kinestasis of the Flo­ rimell moment. T ­ here is a disturbing ele­ment of sacrality to such mo­ ments in The Faerie Queene as in the two stanzas describing Florimell, the second of them ending with the long comet simile: All as a blazing starre doth farre outcast His hearie beames, and flaming lockes dispred, At sight whereof the p ­ eople stand aghast: But the sage wisard telles, as he has red, That it importunes death and doleful drerihed.

In the Christian system b ­ ehind Spenser’s poem, comets are dim survivals of the pagan gods, and of pagan portents, and the “sage wisard” is a sur­ vival of the pagan priest, the bird diviner, and the learned inspector of en­ trails. ­T hose of course would have to be generally condemned, as they

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are in the infernal practices of Duessa, a child—to speak figuratively— of the Witch of Endor. But of course on some occasions—in Merlin’s cave, for example, and at the vari­ous ­temples, notably that of Isis—­pagan prac­ tices are translated into the realm of the aesthetic. They give to The Faerie Queene the glow of numinous power that belongs to the aesthetic as a form of unacknowledged idolatry. But since this poem is an allegory, such mo­ ments as the sight of Florimell are also translated into the realm of inter­ pretable meaning—­not simply as meaning, or static signification, for what Florimell merely signifies is clear enough. She is beauty. But the tem­ porary balancing in her of kinesis and stasis—­this momentary balancing— is what makes her something more and something other than a paste­ board sign for an abstraction. She is beauty plus something ­else, let us say, the presence and the essence, the ousia of beauty. But she is also beauty tending kinetically elsewhere, higher up and beyond and almost beyond beauty itself. She is beauty with torque, a rotational force around a still center that is the essence of beauty. This effect in allegory may be termed anagogical spin. If we think back to Augustine’s minute gods, we might say ­there is a sacrality to ­these moments in The Faerie Queene, a feeling that they pos­ sess a sort of numinous power. But I say “a sort of numinous power” and “a feeling” of it b ­ ecause the sphere of this power is not religious or ritual but aesthetic. The spiritual in anything is a movement beyond, a tran­ scending that does not quite transcend, having anagogical spin but spin­ ning in place. This is true for the aesthetic as well. In the aesthetic regime of allegory, all signs are possessed of this anagogical spin that is hidden inside them and yet reaches beyond them. What do they reach or “tend” ­toward? The absolute? Not in the first instance. The spinning signs tend ­toward one another, as if they w ­ ere longing to join together first in one transcendental sign the face of which is black and so illegible, a singu­ larity. This is the higher meaning that embraces them all—­from below— and it is what Spenser means by “darke conceit.”

Chapter 12

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Thinking Moments in The Faerie Queene

in Spenser’s Faerie Queene is not what it would be for poets in a ­later age. Even Donne, who was of the next generation, made thinking differently from Spenser the intellectual program of his verse: brittle where Spenser is supple, caustic where Spenser is cool, fiercely ar­ ticulate where Spenser is mythopoeic and obscure. We might ask, brittle, caustic, and articulate at what? Supple, cool, and obscurely mythopoeic at what? What is poetic thinking? The grammar of the phrase “poetic thinking,” in which poetic is the qualifying adjective, suggests one is speaking of a nonstandard, dubiously legitimate species of thinking pe­ culiar to poetry. It would seem reasonable to proceed by defining unmod­ ified, proper thinking first, philosophical thinking. Only when that has been done are we ready to examine proper thinking’s impure imitation in verse: poetic thinking. But as readers of The Faerie Queene know, the ob­ vious starts are often the false ones, leading to early and easy but un­ fruitful conclusions. The early and easy conclusion is that the thought of The Faerie Queene is a bastard blend of inexactly remembered Aristotle, crude Calvinist polemic moderated by the Anglican via media, vacuously complicated star-­lore, and second-­rate Neoplatonism, which, as its prefix suggests, is already second-­rate. That, or something like it, is what we get by supposing that thinking is not proper to Spenser’s poetry, is not its very substance, but finds its way into the poetry—­Spenser’s poetry, with its bright, daytime, primary colors—in a belated and secondary way, on the gray wings of the owl of Minerva. POET IC T HI NK I NG

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“The poet’s poet,” as Leigh Hunt called Spenser, is hardly someone we are likely to regard as a thinker, as we might, say, George Chapman or Sir John Davies, neither of whom anyone would ever call a poet’s poet.1 ­There is in them too much admixture of prosaic thinking for us to be able to regard their works—as Spenser’s are so often and easily regarded—as ef­ fusions of the purely poetical. A poet’s poet, we suppose, ­doesn’t think, for thinking is something that may be in poetry but is always other with re­spect to poetry. B ­ ecause ­there can be no identity of poetry and thinking, a poet may indulge in the one to the neglect of the other. Like the painter of deliciously sensuous color-­field paintings, Spenser’s pursuit of his art is so pure, so airborne, that t­ here can be no place in it for pedestrian dis­ cursiveness. His feet are never on the ground or in the world. Such is the Spenser who is unjustly but beautifully evoked by Words­worth in the third book of The Prelude: “that gentle Bard, / Chosen by the muses for their page of state, / Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven / With the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft pace.”2 The unthinking aesthetic purity that is still associated with Spenser ­today—­not by professional Spenserians, who may have their own prej­ udices but not this one—­was fastened on him by William Hazlitt in the second of his Lectures on the En­glish Poets (1818), when he said that “of all the poets [Spenser] is the most poetical” b ­ ecause “the love of beauty . . . ​ and not of truth, is the moving princi­ple of his mind.” Spenser “takes us and lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature. . . . ​He waves his wand of en­ chantment—­and at once embodies airy beings, and throws a delicious veil over all a­ ctual objects.” The wish to f­ ree Spenser from the burden of philosophic song (and from the more onerous burden of commentary on the song) motivates Hazlitt’s famous attack on the allegory of The Faerie Queene. ­After an enthusiastic litany of splendid pageants and mysterious, symbolic loci, Hazlitt says, “But some ­people ­w ill say that all this may be very fine, but that they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them: they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think it w ­ ill strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory w ­ ill not meddle with them. Without minding it at all, the ­whole is as plain as a pike-­staff.” Hazlitt does not deny that The Faerie Queene is an allegory, or at least that it has allegory in it. But he de­

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motes the importance of the allegory and passes over in silence the poet’s calling his poem “this booke of mine, which I have entitled the Faery Queene, being a continued Allegory, or darke conceit” to promote the image of Spenser as a fantasist: “Spenser was the poet of our waking dreams, lulling the senses into a deep oblivion of the jarring noises of the world, from which we have no wish to be ever recalled.”3 Twentieth-­century criticism has taken the allegory of The Faerie Queene very seriously indeed and has had ­little time for Hazlitt’s pages on Spenser, except as the most eloquent example of a wrongheaded but per­sis­tently romantic conception of the poet. But perhaps we should be cautious about slighting a ­great critic who, while castigating mystagogic supposi­ tions about Spenser’s allegory, can write the following sentence about The Faerie Queene, capturing one of its moments of Botticellian glory: “Is t­ here any mystery in what is said of Belphoebe, that her hair was sprinkled with flowers and blossoms which had been entangled in it as she fled through the woods?” Well, yes, I think, t­ here is mystery in that flower-­strewn hair, although we have ­little hope of unveiling it by direct exegesis. Hazlitt draws this reference from the long and complex blazon with which Spenser’s introduces Belphoebe into the poem: And w ­ hether art it w ­ ere, or heedlesse hap, As through the flouring forrest rash she fled, In her rude haires sweet flowers themselves did lap, And flourishing fresh leaves and blossomes did enwrap. FQ II.iii.30

Hazlitt’s question appears to be rhetorical. But perhaps he r­ eally does want to know if ­there is any mystery in ­these lines and to raise the ques­ tion for us. If that is what he is ­doing, then perhaps he has caught some­ thing vital to the way The Faerie Queene thinks, which is why I s­ hall return to Belphoebe and perhaps also to the flowers in her rude hair. Inasmuch as Spenser was regarded by the romantics as being even learned, he is learned in the quaint way Robert Southey describes, or rather the fictional Southey we encounter in Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations relishing Spenser’s allegory, though with much con­ descension, as a spacious but low-­ceilinged chamber copiously furnished in charming disarray, a cabinet of curiosities. Southey’s interlocutor, who

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serves as the mouthpiece for Landor’s own tastes, is the g­ reat classicist Richard Porson: Porson. But your ­great favourite, I hear, is Spenser, who shines in al­ legory, and who, like an aerolite, is dull and heavy when he descends to the ground. Southey. He continues a ­great favourite with me still, although he must always lose a ­little as our youth declines. Spens­ er’s is a spacious but somewhat low chamber, hung with rich tap­ estry, on which the figures are mostly disproportioned, but some of the f­ aces are lively and beautiful; the furniture is part creaking and worm-­eaten, part fragrant with cedar and sandalwood and aromatic gums and balsams; ­every ­table and mantelpiece and cabinet is covered with gorgeous vases, and birds, and dragons, and ­houses in the air.

This is marvelous (although that ­house in the air is Ariosto, not Spenser); but it is not long before Porson has badgered Southey into admitting Spenser’s “vast exaggeration and insane display”—­the inevitable result of ­great poetical power ungoverned by truth. As to the allegory, it sparkles like a meteor descending through the atmosphere but is dull and heavy when it descends to the ground of prosaic explanation. 4 If Milton, a towering fortress of thought, inhibited the romantics, Spenser was to them a friendly, enabling presence, like Keats’s teacher Charles Cowden Clarke, “who had,” as his grateful pupil said, “by Mulla’s stream / Fondled the maidens with breasts of cream.”5 No one ever com­ pared reading the sage and serious Milton to fondling maidens with breasts of cream. But still we should remember that “sage and serious” was Milton’s description of Spenser. Spenser is a friend to the romantics ­because he makes it easier for them to write, inspiring rather than intimidating them, and this power to aid is the best reason for calling him “the poet’s poet.” He is evoked as such by Shelley, in an aside in the introduction to The Revolt of Islam, when he almost confesses that he composed that enormous poem in Spenserian stanzas ­because they caused the poem more or less to write itself without a plan, whereas you ­can’t write blank verse—­and by “blank verse” Shelley means “Milton”—­unless you know what you are ­going to say: “I have ­adopted the stanza of Spenser (a mea­sure inexpressibly beautiful), not

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­ ecause I consider it a finer model of poetical harmony than the blank b verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but b ­ ecause in the latter t­ here is no shelter for mediocrity; you must ­either succeed or fail. This perhaps an aspiring spirit should desire. But I was enticed also by the brilliancy and magnificence of sound which a mind that has been nourished upon mu­ sical thoughts can produce by a just and harmonious arrangement of the pauses of this mea­sure.” 6 “A mind that has been nourished upon musical thoughts.” At first, we may suppose Shelley is falling in with the rest of our romantics, reducing Spenser to a poet who offers pure imagination without thought and al­ most to one who offers mere sound for sense. But in the phrase “musical thoughts” Shelley means us to hear the full, Greek sense of mousikê: deep learning, bright inspiration, agile and vari­ous rhythm—­all moving to­ gether into the discovery of what has not been thought before and of what is thinkable only through Spenser’s “harmonious arrangement of pauses.” In such thinking, as James Merrill said of verse, the feet go bare: “Since it had never truly fit, why wear / The shoe of prose. In verse, the feet went bare.”7 It is still a popu­lar error (one hears it among students and, increasingly, colleagues) to suppose that Spenser is purely poetical, where poetry has nothing to do with thinking. The opposite error, into which professional Spenserians are more in danger of straying, is to suppose that The Faerie Queene consists almost entirely of its thinking but that the thinking in question consists of philosophical content that has been conducted into the poem and can be led out again by exegesis, which means “a leading out.” I have mentioned a Platonism that is already neo-­neo before Spenser takes it in hand, to which may be added—­from the Letter to Raleigh— an Aristotelian poetics so much elaborated by Italian critical theory that the Stagirite would scarcely recognize it as his own. In The Faerie Queene itself, we see the Aristotle that Spenser acquired at Cambridge, where the phi­los­o­pher was central to a curriculum that a ­later gradu­ate of that uni­ versity, Milton himself, would deride as “an asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles.”8 This Aristotle, derived from commentary on the Ethics, lies b ­ ehind what we think of as the most simplistic allegorical episodes, such as the House of Alma, in which the teeth bow to the soul, or the setup episode

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for the Legend of Temperance, in which three s­ isters inhabit the ­castle of Medina, “an ancient worke of antique fame” (FQ II.ii.12); which is to say, the ancient ­ castle represents the accumulated moral thought of generations—­unaided, however, by Christian revelation—on the wisdom of keeping to the golden mean. The ­c astle is therefore inhabited by Medina herself and the extremes of excess and defect that her ­sisters represent: her younger ­sister, Perissa, and her older ­sister, Elissa, Miss Too Much of Every­thing, including Sex, and Miss Too ­Little of Anything Good, including Love: Therein three s­ isters dwelt of sundry sort, The ­children of one sire by ­mothers three; Who ­dying whylome did divide this fort To them by equall shares in equall fee: But strifull minde, and diverse qualitee Drew them in parts, and each made o ­ thers foe; Still did they strive, and dayly disagree; The eldest did against the youn­gest goe, And both against the middest meant to worken woe. FQ II.ii.13

Elissa and Perissa (we ­w ill not learn their names for another twenty-­two stanzas) are courted by another pair of opposites: the melancholy Hud­ dibras, suitably matched with Elissa, she of “froward countenance” and sullenly unassailable virtue (II.ii.35), and Sans Foy, that “boldest boy,” as Spenser calls him, for “warlike weapons” and for “lawless lust” (II.ii.18). The latter boldly enjoys Perissa’s lavish ­favors, she being “quite contrary to her s­ isters kind” (II.ii.36): “a mincing minion, / Who in her looseness tooke exceeding joy.” Even at ­table, she is to the ­eager hands of Sans Loy a “frank franion” or wanton sharer “of her lewd parts,” a spectacle that is grievous to poor, unrelieved Huddibras, who “hardly could . . . ​endure his [Sans Loy’s] hardiment, / Yet still he sat, and inly did him selfe torment” (II.ii.36).9 The moral setup in the ­castle of Medina is permutatively unstable and mindlessly repetitive, like the game of scissors, paper, and rock.10 ­After all, the core princi­ple of classical morals, which goes back to the wise­ acre choruses of Greek tragedy—­“not too ­little, not too much!”—­leaves

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us in perpetual uncertainty. Are we, at any given moment, too near the Gulf of Greediness (overspending) or just near enough to it to be secure from the Rock of Vile Repreoach (bankruptcy)? Like the advice “buy low and sell high,” it may be true in theory, but it is nearly useless in practice: we oscillate between extremes as we search for this non­ex­is­tent ideal, the ­middle way, which is non­ex­is­tent ­because our circumstances are always open and always in flux. Circumstances in the c­ astle of Medina, however, are hermetically sealed, like the Second Empire décor of the room in Sartre’s play Huis clos (“No Exit” or, literally, “­behind closed doors”). As in Huis clos, where Hell is other p ­ eople (“L’enfer, c’est les Autres”), b ­ ecause the hatred of the other is needed to constitute the self, alliances change continually and predictably with vicious alteration.11 When Guyon ar­ rives and Huddibras and Sans Loy rush out to fight him, urged on by their ladies, they fail to reach their common antagonist b ­ ecause they start fighting with each other instead: But when they heard, How in that place straunge knight arrived late, Both knights and Ladies forth right angry far’d, And fiercely unto battell sterne themselves prepar’d. But ere they could proceed unto the place, Where he abode, themselves at discord fell, And cruell combat joynd in ­middle space: With horrible assault, and furie fell, They heapt huge strokes, and scornèd life to quell, That all on uprore from her settled seat The ­house was raysd, and all that in did dwell; Seemd that lowd thunder with amazement ­great Did rend the rattling skyes with flames of fouldring heat. FQ II.ii.19–20)

When the “straunger knight,” Guyon himself, hears the uproar, he rushes to the scene and attempts by “goodly meanes” to pacify the combatants. They immediately turn on him “without remorse, / And on his shield like yron sledges bet” (II.ii.22). Guyon defends himself so well that Huddibras and Sansloy must take out their frustration on each other; but when Guyon again tries to make peace, they turn again on him:

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Whose grievèd minds, which choler did englut, Against themselves turning their wrathful spight, Gan with new rage their shields to hew and cut; But still when Guyon came to part their fight, With heavie load on him they freshly gan to smight. FQ II.ii.23

“Straunge sort of fight,” Spenser says, as well he might, a­ fter three more stanzas of inextricable altercation between parties whose alliances con­ tinually and mechanically change. It is evidently intended as a psycho­ logical allegory, but if we think of the stages of the fight as unfolding over de­cades instead of minutes, and between nations instead of individuals, it begins to look less strange. It begins to look rather like Eu­rope from the seventeenth ­century to the twentieth or, in Spenser’s day, like the contin­ ually changing alliances of two parties against one in the foreign rela­ tions of France, Spain, and E ­ ngland, it being Elizabethan policy wherever pos­si­ble to keep the other two at each other’s throats and always to side with the weaker. In any event, it appears at this moment as if nothing can ever enter into the ­castle of Medina and alter the structure of its inter­ locking, violent compulsions. The changes are rung endlessly, but the under­lying circumstances are always the same. Yet s­ imple as the episode appears (and I confess to taking much plea­ sure from its applicability to life, what­ever “Porson” says about dull aer­ olites), it is richly entangled in its widening contexts and flows into them like the ­r ipples from a stone dropped in a pool. It is entangled with the ­earlier history of Sansloy, who in the Legend of Holiness attacks Una. It is entangled with the b ­ rothers of Sans Loy, especially Sans Joy, whose character is recapitulated in Huddibras. It is entangled, moreover, with what we suppose lies outside it, the history of the En­glish Church and of the Elizabethan via media, not to mention the permutations of foreign al­ liance, which I have already mentioned. The episode is of course entan­ gled with Guyon himself, with Guyon’s Palmer, and perhaps even with Guyon’s hobbled ­horse and the events of the canto to follow, in which the thief of Guyon’s h ­ orse, Braggadocchio, showing defect and excess, is ter­ rified of Belphoebe at first but soon attempts to rape her. The episode is

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most peculiarly entangled with Ruddymane, the child whom Guyon and the Palmer leave at the ­castle, whose hands cannot be cleansed of its ­father’s blood, even by ­water from the fountain of the maiden turned to stone. The child is a vision of original sin, caught red-­handed at birth and left with Medina to be trained up “in virtuous lore . . . ​And all that gentle noriture ensu’th” (FQ II.iii.2). Our stained nature is to be amended by nur­ ture. Before Spenser’s meteor reaches the ground, it shatters into a thou­ sand fiery particles that reach the ground burning with new light. Inserted into the episode of the ­castle of Medina at its conclusion, almost as an afterthought, Ruddymane nevertheless symbolizes the prob­lem to which mediation between extremes is supposed to be the clas­ sical solution: “virtuous lore” manages the consequences of original sin, even if it cannot eradicate them. Despite this normalizing interpretation, however, Ruddymane continues as a foreign ele­ment, a negative presence, a moment in the shape of the situation as a w ­ hole that cannot be assimi­ lated to its existing moral structure. For what­ever the prob­lem is with the blood that sticks to Ruddymane’s hands, moderation ­isn’t ­going to solve it. The episode at the ­castle of Medina is therefore strangely entangled with the preceding episode, in which Ruddymane’s parents, Mortdant and Amavia, die. ­Dying is not a moderate or an immoderate act: it is in­ commensurable with moderation. Yet temperance is entangled with so­ matic death, for it is the means of putting off death and decrepitude as long as pos­si­ble by keeping the body in balance and so achieving what gerontologists call “compression of morbidity.”12 But is that what temper­ ance is for, shortening the period of helplessness in extreme old age? That is a sensible aim, but it hardly makes temperance a heroic virtue. The allegory of Temperance in the c­ astle of Medina is still more strangely entangled with events in the following canto (three), when Brag­ gadocchio, who seems to have been assembled from warring ele­ments in Sansloy and Huddibras, encounters that paragon of moral complete­ ness, Belphoebe. I leave aside Belphoebe’s blood lust and its pos­si­ble rel­ evance to the blood on Ruddymane’s hands. I leave it aside ­because I d ­ on’t understand it. What I think I do begin to understand is that Belphoebe, who represents the perfection of the body as the apex of nature, celebrated in the ­great stanza opening the canto on the House of Alma—­“Of all

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God’s workes, which doe this world adorne” (FQ II.ix.1)—­shows us how the virtue with which Spenser is truly concerned in Book Two is not tem­ perance ­after all. He is thinking a­ fter what is sublimely in excess—if that is the right word—of the moderation we strive to achieve throughout life, a moderation for which Medina, not Belphoebe, is the model. In the very effort to think temperance as moderation, something beyond modera­ tion is revealed when Belphoebe unexpectedly enters the tale, though she has ­little to do t­ here except to be gazed on in won­der. She is gazed on ­because she is what temperance-­as-­moderation hopelessly aspires to. She herself indicates another path altogether from that which seeks the m ­ iddle way: “Who seekes with painfull toile,” she says, “­shall honor soonest find” (II.iii.40). The thrusting yet cowardly Braggadocchio, burning in “filthy lust” (II.iii.41) as he reaches for what he knows he is unworthy of, while being comically terrified of it too, is a devastating parody of aspiring moderation. As I hope this example has shown, in Spenserian allegory ­matters be­ come complicated and deepened not by looking farther into them where they are and analyzing them microscopically, by close reading. T ­ here is no poet for whom the techniques of close reading are more unsuitable if relied on exclusively or mechanically applied. When we read The Faerie Queene, we need a long memory and a distanced, somewhat-­relaxed at­ titude ­toward its intricacies even more than we need the capacity for paying minute attention. ­Matters are complicated and deepened in Spens­ er’s verse by continually widening contexts and by what I have called entanglement, a term I prefer to the medieval, hermeneutic notion of polysemy, “having many significations,” and to Bishop Butler’s term analogy, which has so much enriched Spenser studies in the monumental work of James Nohrnberg and which has also, like Butler’s work, been a sup­ port against skepticism and unbelief.13 But like polysemy, analogy suggests a harmoniousness and logocentric order, like combed hair, that is untrue to the real conditions of thinking in The Faerie Queene. The conditions of thinking in The Faerie Queene are more material, and therefore more com­ plex, than abstractions such as polysemy and analogy imply. Meaning in The Faerie Queene is like meaning in life: it is always entangled with the real. Such entanglement in Spenser is the condition of the possibility of meaning. It may therefore be asked, what larger, more flexible concept of

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system could embrace both the scale of The Faerie Queene, its sheer big­ ness, and the noetic entanglement of the episodes in it? How may we speak of the poem thinking?

' to answer such a question I take as my point of depar­ ture one of the most celebrated passages of critical writing on Spenser’s Faerie Queene: “The clashing anti­theses which meet and resolve themselves into higher unities, the lights streaming out from the g­ reat allegorical foci to turn into a hundred dif­fer­ent colors as they reach the lower levels of complex adventure, the adventures gathering themselves together and re­ vealing their true nature as we draw near the foci, the constant reappear­ ance of certain basic ideas, which transform themselves without end and yet ever remain the same (eterne in mutability), the unwearied and seam­ less variety of the whole—­all this is Spenser’s true likeness to life.”14 This is of course C. S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love (1938), from the chapter on Spenser that I suspect has done more than any other to draw three generations of Spenserians into the study of their poet. That attractive force may be es­ pecially strong when Lewis says, just before the passage quoted, that “the ­things we read about in [The Faerie Queene] are not like life, but the expe­ rience of reading it is like living”—or, perhaps, thinking. In an entertain­ ingly evasive remark following the passage I have quoted, Lewis seems at once to acknowledge and deny the Hegelian inspiration of his vision of The Faerie Queene when he says that reading it affords “a sensation akin to that which Hegelians are said to get from Hegel, a feeling . . . ​that this is not so much a poet writing about the fundamental forms of life as t­ hose forms themselves spontaneously displaying their activities to us through the imagination of a poet.”15 Lewis began his academic ­career not as an En­glish but a philosophy tutor with an interest in Hegel, En­glish Hegelianism being the dominant school of philosophy at Oxford at the time, although the logical positiv­ ists had appeared on the scene and Lewis himself was meditating a thesis on Bertrand Russell. Writing about this period of his life, Lewis is fairly ironical about his youthful, “watered Hegelianism” but leaves no doubt what­ever that the thrilling “sensation which Hegelians are said to get from Hegel” is a thrill he had experienced himself.16 Even so, the distance is real. I N AT T E M P T I N G

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Where Lewis speaks of Spenser’s “images of life,” the title of another book by him on Spenser, Hegel would have said “forms of consciousness” and of self-­knowing. The difference is captured in the emphasis on unthinking, exuberant life. For the Hegelian, Spirit, or Mind, envelops and informs life, directing life ­toward its consummation in the Mind, when the rational and the real coincide. For the Christian, life, the gift of God, informs and envelops our capacity for thought, which is but a small and, fi­nally, an uncompre­ hending part of life’s force. Thought does l­ittle more than collect shells along the shore of the sea of life. Lewis wished through lit­er­a­ture to put thought back in its place, as what Hotspur called “the slave of life,” and he is fond of showing how the most ce­re­bral pretensions turn out to be ­either grossly sensual or maniacally arrogant in their under­lying moti­ vation. Note the irony with which he speaks of a “sensation akin to what Hegelians are said to get from Hegel”—as if the Hegelian philosophy ­were not about transcending the illusion of sense-­certainty, which affords what Hegel calls the most impoverished, b ­ ecause the most abstract, form of knowing.17 From Lewis’s fiction we know how well he thought of the senses and of the plea­sure of the senses, to which he accords something like a moral force. For him, the ­simple folk who enjoy a good breakfast are in this wiser than all the phi­los­o­phers in the world.

' inclined to Lewis’s robust preference for images of Life over some watery neo-­Hegelian Spirit, which in Spenserian studies has its analogue in Neoplatonism. But ­there is danger in this position as well, for it moves back in the direction of what we have seen in the romantics: an unthinking but technically consummate Spenser, whose poetry in­ dulges at the highest level of art the very sensationalism Lewis sees as Hegelianism’s opposite danger. ­A fter all, Spenser’s images of life must mean or teach something, and not only b ­ ecause they are deployed in an allegorical poem. In the first instance, they mean or teach something simply by their being in the plural: we are not dealing with a unified spec­ tacle, a panoramic mimesis of life such as we get, for example, in a g­ reat realist novelist like Tolstoy. We are dealing with images or forms, in the I A M FAVO R A B LY

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plural, and images must be taken in combination. We must speak, there­ fore, not only of ­those images but of the relations between them, and ­those relations, considered apart from the bare narrative from which they so casually emerge, can only be relations of thought. How are they connected? Thus far the term or the image (it is a l­ ittle of both) that I have used for ­these relations is noetic entanglement. But if we examine the nodes of en­ tanglement closely, we begin to see them as what in the title of this chapter I have called moments, thinking moments. Moment is admittedly a Hegelian term, but it belongs to Hegel’s logic and not his metaphysics. It is not the Absolute or anything like it, such as Spirit, and we can use it in the plural without supposing this plurality would be better if it would lead us to the One. The entangling of the moments is a plurality that leads away from the one, branching out in all directions and becoming reen­ tangled with one another ­later on, in fantastic complexity and with no isolated or common destination in view for any par­tic­u­lar filiation or path, like the vast entanglement of neuronal dendrites. This is thinking that does not try to get out of itself at its destination, disembarking, so to speak, on an answer to thought that is not itself part of the thinking, that is, of continual questioning. The entangled moments are on paths that lead nowhere b ­ ecause the idea of a destination to thinking is foreign to the wisdom that is gathered on ­these paths. By “thinking moments in The Faerie Queene” I mean moment in the two senses of the word that are distinguished in Hegel’s German by the use of the neuter and the masculine articles: first, ­there is a moment in our usual sense of the word, a moment of arrest, an instant within which, so long as it lasts, nothing seems to move or change, inviting us to grasp a state of affairs before it slips away. “Just a moment,” we say, when we are in the heat of discussion. “Hold on. Not so fast!” We wish to make time stand still (and in a sense we do) so that we may examine the argument synchronically at one of its stages, its moments. This arresting moment is, of course, not peculiar to Hegel but rather to philosophy: it happens all the time in Plato’s dialogues, which is why Socrates was compared to the torpedo fish, with its paralyzing sting. Reading philosophy is unlike other kinds of reading ­because it is discontinuous and at times painfully

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slow: we have to keep stopping to think, and this thinking is the grasping of a structure we conceive to stand out of time. That paralysis of atten­ tion is also one side of what it is like to read Spenser’s allegory. It is the other sense of moment, the more technically philosophical term for a destabilizing ele­ment in a totality, that has peculiar force in the Hege­ lian philosophy. It derives from the Latin moveo and implies motion or development within a larger ­whole, effecting some change in that ­whole. The two meanings of moment twist together opposite ­things in a dynamic situation: instability and stasis, movement and arrest. This is hardly pe­ culiar to Hegel’s philosophy. It is what ­every moment in any poem feels like, where each image, each word, each syntactical unit, each rhythm, may seem to be perfectly itself even as it is becoming something other than itself. But it is especially true of The Faerie Queene, with its continual oscillation between narrative movement and symbolic tableau. What does it mean to say Spenser thinks in this way or, more strangely still, to say that The Faerie Queene thinks in and through such pulsatile moments? ­These moments may be captured in the form of the stanza, with its longer final line forcing us to hear each stanza as a unit, in contrast with the headlong rush of the ottava rima used by the Italian narrative poets.18 This brings us back to the question raised at the outset. Does it make sense to say that poets think as poets and not in some secondary, decorative way? To put the question more fully, how may it be pos­si­ble to speak of a poet “thinking” in a way that is dif­fer­ent from scientific thinking and from philosophic or conceptual thinking? The prob­lem of the relation of po­ etry to philosophical knowledge goes back to Plato. (It goes back farther of course, but my point is that in Plato it becomes a prob­lem: in Pindar, for example, poetry, knowledge, and wisdom converge unproblemati­ cally.) The question of the relation of poetry to philosophical knowledge was revived in the mid-­twentieth ­century by Martin Heidegger and The­ odor Adorno and has recently become a subject of interest again in lit­ erary criticism.19 Heidegger and Adorno come to dif­fer­ent conclusions about the relation of poetry to philosophy. Heidegger says that the phi­ los­o­phers are too busy ­doing highly technical philosophy to “think,” in his primordial sense of the word, which is related to thanking the gods and dwelling on earth: it is only the poets who remember to think. Adorno holds that although philosophy and art are dif­fer­ent ­things, with neither

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being subordinate to the other, Hegel’s subordination of art to the theory of art shows “prophetic” understanding of “art’s needs of philosophy for the unfolding of its own content.”20 Both t­ hese writers ­were concerned with German lyric poetry in the tra­ dition of Friedrich Hölderlin, that is, with dithyrambic poetry for which the ­great and inimitable model is Pindar. The case is much altered with Spenser, and perhaps the first t­ hing that alters the case is length. A long poem, and certainly a very long narrative poem, allows freedom of move­ ment and room for development. A long poem forces the poet to work on the poem from within, without being able ever to consider the poem as a ­whole in a moment out of time, like a well-­w rought urn. The Faerie Queene is very much in time, and its “form” is of continual, dynamic ad­ justment to its changing understanding of itself. If the experience of The Faerie Queene is like Hegel’s thought thinking itself, it is thought thinking itself while continually changing its mind and giving itself ampler room in which to explore. When I speak of thinking in Spenser, therefore, I mean a kind of work that first opposes and then enlarges on the con­ cept, or Begriff, which grasps t­ hings, like tools, and holds t­ hings together. Spenser’s thinking is more in the nature of a “letting-go” or what Hei­ degger called Gelassenheit.21 Such “letting-go” is also a probing of mystery that approaches the strange, treating the strange not as it is treated in mathe­matics or physics or biology: as an object that fully exists but is yet to be known. In the sci­ ences, the strangeness of any manifestation must be reduced to an ab­ stract but persisting object, such as a number, a force, an organ. But in poetry the strange manifests itself as another consciousness the very strangeness of which—or, to speak allegorically, the “otherness” of which—must be respected. Spenser’s poetic thinking works away from its original questions: What is holiness? What is temperance? What is chastity? What is friendship? What is justice? What is courtesy? What is constancy? The form of ­these questions is the philosophically traditional one of definition—­“ti esti?”—­treating the ­things questioned as ­things that already exist, rather than as thought in still motion. Spenser’s poetic thinking does not strive to make the questions dis­appear into answers that tell us what ­these ­things are. Instead, it strives to make ­those ques­ tions stranger than we had ever supposed.

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Let me attempt an overview of the themes of the seven books and of some of the transformations of ­those themes, transformations that make us feel by the end of a book that we know less, rather than more, about the virtue in question. The impoverishment we suffer at Spenser’s hands makes us wiser about the questions he asks. What begins as thinking about holiness becomes thinking about substance, purity, and danger. What begins as thinking about temperance as a ­middle way becomes thinking about the mysterious boundary between the living and the dead. What begins as thinking about chastity becomes thinking about sexual vio­lence but also, more importantly, about the paralyzing fear of all sexual feeling, indeed of all touching, as vio­lence. What begins as thinking about friendship becomes thinking about nature, exchange, and ecol­ogy. What begins as thinking about justice becomes thinking about what we would suppose to be quite irrelevant to justice, courtesy. What begins as thinking about courtesy becomes an anthropological thinking about culture. What begins as thinking about constancy and mutability—­the two senses of moment—­becomes thinking about thinking itself.

' suppose two t­ hings about thinking. The first, as I sug­ gested ­earlier when I spoke of a destination to thinking that is not itself thought, is that thinking is about something outside itself; thinking is ori­ entated ­toward that which is not itself thought. The second ­thing we suppose is that thinking takes place in the head, from which executive commands are sent through unthinking nerves to mechanical organs and limbs. When we consider Spenser’s poetic thinking, both t­ hese state­ ments must be reversed so as to affirm, first, the identity of the poem with its thinking and, second, the identity of this identity with the move­ ment of thinking in cir­cuit between the head, the hand, the text, the ma­ terial remains appropriated by this text, and ultimately with the thinking of readers. How could Spenser’s thinking be confined to his head if the poem he is making is not a repre­sen­ta­tion of his thinking but simply is his thinking? A still more impor­tant issue follows from this circulatory movement of Spenserian thought through its moments. It is that Spenser’s poetic thinking is material, in the sense that every­thing the poet tears away from W E C O M M O N LY

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the past and subsumes in his poem is composed of the material remains of this past. What I would call the objectifiable but nonobjectified other in Spenser’s creative pro­cess is composed of all previous poems, commen­ taries, and historical documents—in short, texts—­w ith which the poet is concerned. I have used the word texts, but Spenser’s word for them was ruins and, ­later, moniments, a word that makes the passage of time vis­i­ble in the materials with which the poet is engaged. The material remains of the past with which Spenser worked included classical and medieval po­ etry, the spiritual and intellectual culture of the Christian tradition, and the imaginary, Arthurian lore of Britain. By deploying ­those materials ka­ leidoscopically to represent such abstract ideas as holiness, temperance, chastity, and friendship, Spenser repeatedly found his dead materials seeming to take on a life of their own and speaking to him, driving his thoughts into unexpected channels. Spenser was a prophetic poet ­because he was willing to listen to the voice of a material other emerging from the remains of the past that ­were caught up in the pro­cess of making his poem. This voice told him more than he expected to hear, and almost certainly more than he wished to hear, about the emerging conditions of ­human existence in the built environment of a postcivilized world. Spenser ­didn’t see just past ruins as static monuments to a lost time, nor did his model, Joachim Du Bellay.22 Instead, he heard the energy of col­ lapse, disarticulation, and fall in the Latin verb ruor. Through that he saw an emerging world, ours, that despite its confident newness is already ru­ ining, like a trash vortex forming in the ocean.

' that Spenser’s poetic thinking is self-­identical and that it is material. We may see Spenser’s manner of thinking more clearly when we contrast it with Milton’s, first ­because Milton worked out every­thing he would ever think before he wrote Paradise Lost. This claim is not always heard favorably by Miltonists. But it does him honor and is perhaps the reason he is regarded—­wrongly, in my judgment—as more intellectually serious than Spenser. The thought of Paradise Lost is not created in and through the poem: it is represented in the poem. But in The Faerie Queene Spenser does his thinking as he goes along, arriving often—as it seems, by accident, as a result of some par­tic­u­lar instance he has seized on—at I H AV E S A I D

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a deeper formulation than that with which he began but also a stranger formulation. Milton’s thinking is classically symmetrical with re­spect to time. What he says he w ­ ill say at the beginning he has said by the end. You cannot run Spenser’s thinking backward in this way. He takes us into regions of thought the existence of which Milton would never have suspected—­nor would we have suspected them ­either. To Spenser him­ self they come as a surprise. Milton thinks by g­ oing back to first princi­ples, to the archai or, as they are called in a dedicatory poem to Paradise Lost, the primordia rerum, ­those first ­causes by which all ­things are determined, so to speak, in advance of themselves.23 That is why Milton’s ­great epic looks back ­behind divine Creation to its very substance, or ousia, in the body of God, and that is why Milton’s epic explains the catastrophe of h ­ uman history—­more particu­ larly the failure of the En­glish revolution—by ­going back to the Garden of Eden. He does not go back to weakened Protectorate of Richard ­Cromwell or to the dictatorial Protectorate of Oliver ­Cromwell. He does not go back to the Barebones Parliament, to the Rump Parliament, or to the Long Parliament. He goes back to the Garden of Eden. The scriptural account of the Fall is for Milton an axiomatic primal scene, and his view of the Fall is not obscured by anything between him and that event; it is not obscured by history. As in linear perspective, where the glance of the eye seems to travel across a fixed and empty distance, all of h ­ uman history between Milton and the Garden of Eden becomes perfectly transparent. History does not appear ­until the end of the poem, ­after the Fall, so that it can be shown to derive from the Fall as from a first princi­ple, its archê. Spenser, by contrast, is not an archaic but an archaeological thinker. He is temperamentally an investigator and a haunter of ruins, the remains of high cultures, marked and indeed half effaced with the passage of time. I ­don’t believe Spenser ever held a book—­whether it was Homer or Petrarch or Sidney—­without thinking of it as an index of the passage of time and without finding the poetical spirit in a certain temporal aura that the book seems to exhale. Spenser is not a seeker of origins, therefore, but a seeker without a def­ inite goal. Starting from where he is, he works patiently through the strata of historical remains ­because turning them over and meditating on

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them stimulates his thinking and sends it down unexpected, improvisa­ tory, and even super­natural paths, to places where he encounters, in the deposits—to use David Jones’s vital term—­a consciousness that is hard to distinguish from his own.24 So it seems, for example, in The Ruins of Time, when the genius of a place—of Verulam and Troynovant and Rome—­appears among its ruins and speaks. The overriding tone of lament—­Spenser published an entire volume called Complaints—is the registration in consciousness of the passage of time. The tone of lament is also the registration in consciousness of the material remains of the past, for it is by lament that ­those remains are made conscious and so ab­ sorbed into thinking. In such thinking Spenser does not direct his eye to an object set at a fixed distance across which nothing intervenes. T ­ here is for him no “object,” no t­ hing impinging on consciousness from without (as the word object implies), ­because the material remains of the past al­ ready belong to consciousness. Whose consciousness? We may call it the consciousness of the Muses, who are ­daughters of Memory, or the mind of the poetic tradition into which Spenser’s mind enters and with which it blends.

' ­T H E R E I S O N E especially con­spic­u­ous thinking moment in The Faerie Queene. It comes at the end. Mutabilitie is winding up her spectacular case against Jove, in which she has shown us the pageant of the seasons and months, followed by a survey of changeableness in the heavenly bodies, in the planetary spheres, and in the sphere of the fixed stars, which “even itself is mov’d, as wizards saine” (FQ VII.vii.55). Mutabilitie could have read about ­those wizards in the proem to the fifth book of the very poem she is in: “­those Egyptian wizards old, / Which in Star-­read w ­ ere wont have best insight” (V.proem.8). In ­every motion—­and I remind you that this word, from Latin moveo, lies ­behind the word moment—­Mutabilitie spies a moment of arrest, when her trophy might be raised:

Then since within this wide ­great Universe Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare, But all ­things tost and turnèd by transverse: What then should let, but I aloft should reare My Trophee, and from all, the triumph beare?

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Now judge then (O thou greatest goddesse trew!) According as thy self doest see and heare, And unto me adoom that is my dew; That is the rule of all, all being rul’d by you. FQ VII.vii.56

Mutabilitie wants a swift, unthinking, favorable decision from Dame Nature, having told the goddess not only what to think but how to think: judge from what you see, from what appears, and you ­will see that appear­ ance itself is uncertain and wavering: “within this wide ­great Universe / Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare.” Such a statement would seem to discredit seeing, but for Mutabilitie seeing is the guarantee of truth: “But what we see not, who s­ hall us perswade?” (VII.vii.49). Spenser is the greatest poet of appearances, of manifestation. He is, for example, the poet who brings before our eyes as vivid personifica­ tions all the rivers of the world, “­Great Ganges, and immortall Euphrates, / Deep Indus, and Maeander intricate, / Slow Peneus, and tempestuous Phasides, / Swift Rhene, and Alpheus still immaculate” (FQ IV.xi.21). Even so, I am hardly the first to remark that from the earliest episodes in The Faerie Queene, certainly from the introduction of Archimago, Spenser harbors a distrust of his own as well as o ­ thers’ power to make manifest.25 In another thinking moment in The Faerie Queene, the episode of the ­giant with the scales, the ­giant repeatedly urges Artegal to see, to judge with his eyes. The scales with which the g­ iant tries to weigh all t­ hings are a means of verifying what is observed before it is corrected. In this sense, the ­giant is the moral and epistemological opposite of Mutabilitie, who thinks the wavering unsteadiness and in­equality of all ­things is delightful—­because it is the manifestation of her power. In beautiful verse that could almost be spoken by Mutabilitie, Artegal challenges the g­ iant to “weigh the winde, that ­under heaven doth blow; / Or weigh the light, that in the East doth rise; / Or weigh the thought which from man’s mind doth flow” (FQ V.ii.43). Notice that this thought, “which from man’s mind doth flow,” flows from the mind rather than within the mind. Thought moves through the world, rather than being confined to the head. It is true that Artegal summarizes his argument with the ­giant by stating that “in

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the minde the doome of right must bee” (V.ii.47), but it is the thought, not the mind, that flows out of itself. Thought flows into the world to animate and transform it creatively. Especially striking is Artegal’s statement that “the eare must be the bal­ ance, to decree / And judge” (FQ V.ii.47). The ear as a balance, or a set of scales, is a wonderful image ­because it cannot be visualized as such. It re­ quires thinking about the balance as a symbol of creation by God—as it is in Isaiah—­and of judgment by men. Dame Nature herself ­w ill use it as such when she speaks of “all t­ hings” being “rightly waid.” When Artegal says “the ear must be the balance,” he means that the ear is a true test, a means of verifying or falsifying what only appears to be true. That is why we must not think of Nature gazing on the pageant brought before her with the same rapt attention we give it. I suppose Nature’s head is turned very slightly to the side, so that she can attend to how Mutabilitie speaks, leveling her ear and catching the insolence with which Mutabilitie says Now: “Now judge then (o thou greatest goddesse true.)” For Spenser, it is listening, not seeing, that is the privileged index for judging what flows into the mind; and it is speaking, not physically acting, that is the means through which thought flows out again into the world. Dame Nature’s judgment, as it is pronounced in words bringing relief to the ex­pec­tant creatures, is what Spenser means when he speaks of “the thought which from man’s mind doth flow.” When Mutabilitie concludes her harangue, ­there is a protracted and tense moment of silence: “silence long ensewed, / Ne Nature to or fro spake for a space, / But with firme eyes affixt, the ground still viewed” (FQ VII. vii.57). Of course, Nature is not viewing the ground at all; she is turning her eyes to the ground so that her ear ­will be turned ­toward what, as in a bal­ ance, she ­will weigh, which is not the spectacle she has seen but the voice she has heard: “What then should let, but I aloft should reare / My Trophee, and from all, the triumph beare?” (VII.vii.56). In hierarchical cultures close attention is paid to how t­ hings are said, to the habitus of tone. The tone of Mutabilitie, as we expect of a titan, is grating and obtrusive to Na­ ture, and also to Spenser, who made his own grating sounds. But Nature ­w ill ­counter with deliberate calm. It is not a question of justice, in our properly egalitarian sense of the word, but of merit. Mutabilitie ­doesn’t deserve to rule all t­ hings, although presumably Jove ­doesn’t ­either. And

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for the poet, like his judge, it is also a question of aesthetics: for Mutabilitie to rule all t­ hings would be nauseating, arousing what the poet w ­ ill call, in the first of the two stanzas of the “canto unperfit,” loathing. So Nature, looking down, is not ­doing what Mutabilitie tells her to do. Nature is not thinking about the visual spectacle of the whirling motions of the stars or of the tormented gyres of the planets or of the waning of the moon or of the turning of the year or of growing ­things fading in autumn and flour­ ishing in spring or even of the fish wavering in the currents of the sea as grass wavers in an uncertain wind. Nor is Nature thinking of the pageant of the life of humanity from birth to death and of the l­abors and terrors between. Nature is ­doing something that takes a moment: she is absorbing and testing, weighing in the balance of the ear the tone with which Muta­ bilitie speaks, which is why, when Nature answers at last, she does not say, “I well consider all that ye have shown.” She says, “I well consider all that ye have sayd” (VII.vii.58). During Nature’s thinking moment, when “silence long ensewed,” all the creatures pre­sent look anxiously at Nature’s downturned face, impa­ tiently awaiting what ­w ill follow, like the birds in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules: “Meanewhile, all creatures, looking in her face, / Expecting th’end of this so doubtfull case, / Did hang in long suspence what would ensew” (FQ VII.vii.57). I am struck by the repetition of the word ensue b ­ ecause, although Dame Nature seems to consider the m ­ atter in a state of calm ar­ rest that could continue in­def­initely, she is also ­doing something from which something must ensue: change. ­There resides in her very stability and calm a moment of instability that necessitates development from one state to another. This is not a question ­whether or not the moment of ar­ rest could ever be broken, although it is in­ter­est­ing to imagine the action freezing here, for Jove’s sake, for ever, so that centuries would pass as the creatures stare fixedly at Nature while she stares at the ground. The creatures would be blanketed by leaves falling in autumn and by the snows of innumerable winters, and like statues their very forms would erode in the wind and rain ­until Arlo Hill itself, on which they stand, is washed down into the valley and carried off in Mulla or Bregog—or the silver, shining Shure, in which, even in that ­future epoch, when ­human beings have dis­appeared from the earth and their ruins are no longer haunted, “are thousand Salmons bred” (VII.vi.55).

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We should imagine such a scene of arrest as part of the anxiety that the creatures feel. ­They’re worried that Mutabilitie may be right, but they are also worried about the opposite condition of the world, which is the ­giant’s unacknowledged goal: that nothing may ever change again, that every­thing w ­ ill freeze. It’s therefore not so much a question about change as it is a question of time signature—­and of tempo. It is above all a ques­ tion of who is in control of the tempo of thought, which is why it is impor­ tant that Nature not be seen to be forced to give an answer in any fixed period of time, still less that she answer when Mutabilitie says she should, which is immediately. The very silence that ensues, in that moment of thinking, is like an isolating, transparent container. That is why Nature must break it, releasing her answer as the fetus is released from its caul: “At length, she looking up with chearefull view, / The silence brake, and gave her doome in speeches few” (FQ VII.vii.57). In a classic article on the Mutabilitie Cantos, William Blissett draws at­ tention to the importance of Nature’s face at this moment, which having been formerly downturned and thoughtful now looks up with “chearfull view.”26 The purport of her answer is t­ here, in that look. It is a view in the active, not the passive, sense of the word: Nature is viewing her audience, which she is happy to see, since she has been gone for a moment, and her cheerfulness is part of the thought that ­will flow from her mind when she speaks. We know what she says. It’s one of the most famous stanzas in The Faerie Queene, as perfect in its musical organ­ization as that other ­little mas­ terpiece of sound, from a dif­fer­ent thinking moment, the numerological stanza describing the House of Alma, in which the complexity of the body harmonizes with the complexity of the cosmos, all of its parts sounding together in harmony to make “a goodly diapase” (FQ II.ix.22). Indeed, it says much the same ­thing as that other stanza, impelling the flow of a new kind of mutability, that is, of kinetic transformative difference through which thinking moments blend with one another in what Hegel calls the bacchanalian whirl.27 The bacchanalian whirl is prefigured in Spenser’s wild dance of the maidens on mount Acidale, the name of which suggests coming to a con­spic­u­ous point, an apex, like the truth. It is, however, con­ spic­u­ous as the truth not as the mere, mathematical apex of a hill, like the dead summit of Mount Everest. It is con­spic­u­ous by the dance that

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takes place on its summit (VI.x.8–10). So it is too with Nature’s statement: we are not supposed to grasp the meaning concealed ­behind or among the words. We are supposed to listen to the whirl of the words. Listen, for example, to how the rhymes come chiming in on one another at the end, imitating the effect of a sestina: I well consider all that ye have sayd And find that all ­things stedfastnes doe hate And changèd be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changèd from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselves at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate; Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne over Change, and doe their states maintaine. FQ VII.vii.58

So intense is this moment, occurring only a handful of stanzas from the end of The Faerie Queene, that the poet feels impelled to take up its stance in the final two stanzas, each of which has the word think in its first line and each of which is an instance of thought thinking itself into the world. Why then, we might ask, are t­ here two? Some of the language I have used to describe the convergence of con­ sciousnesses in reading ­w ill recall the phenomenological approaches to lit­er­a­ture, but I would emphasize ­here the difference between conscious­ ness and thinking, a difference not unlike that between aesthetics as “perception” (aisthêsis) and reading.28 Both are impor­tant to the experi­ ence of the poem, but thinking is a peculiar kind of work that is done with consciousness—if consciousness is involved in it at all. Whereas con­ sciousness modulates and changes, thinking advances. Whereas con­ sciousness is passive, thinking is active and vigilant, perhaps most of all when it seems to be relaxed, tentative, or playful. Poetic thinking does this work, which is at once relaxed in its attentiveness to the other and rigorous in its attention to itself, to accomplish several t­hings: to find something out about our moral nature; to enrich the wisdom we bring to reflection on that nature; to be in communion with the pres­ ences in the earth where we live—we might now say, to be “ecologically

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aware”—­and to build a ­temple of song to the gods, ­whether or not ­there are, objectively speaking, any gods to sing to. For it is part of our thinking nature to do so. ­Doing this asks much more of the poet, and of the poet’s audience, than merely being conscious in a poetical way. It demands the tougher work of thinking that Spenser does in ­every moment of The Faerie Queene . He calls on us to join him in this work.

Chapter 13

'

Courtesy and Thinking

“as a stranger give it welcome” are spoken in the last scene of the first act of Hamlet. The time is shortly before dawn—­“the glow-­ worm scents the matin to be near”—­and the ghost, having observed this, has just gone to ground, leaving the Prince of Denmark with the in­ junction to remember and revenge.1 Hamlet rejoins his companions and swears them to secrecy. Not content with a merely verbal oath, he de­ mands that they swear on his sword. Marcellus is offended: “We have sworn, my Lord, already” (I.v.157). But Hamlet insists, and the ghost, whom they—­and, indeed, we—­think has departed, startlingly reinforces this demand, crying from the earth, “Swear by his sword!” (I.v.161; my em­ phasis). At this, an astonished Horatio utters the gentlemanly oath, “O day and night but this is wondrous strange!”, to which Hamlet replies, “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome” (I.v.166–67). With his usual prac­ tice of arresting o ­ thers’ words, Hamlet torments a predicate adjective into a personal noun. What Horatio vaguely designates as strange becomes on Hamlet’s lips a stranger. It is a mild reproof, reflecting the prince’s instinc­ tive regard for the otherness of ­others: treat the ghost as a person, not as a ­thing: “as a stranger give it welcome.” It is a courtesy to do so. The verses Hamlet speaks immediately following this are better known: “­T here are more ­things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (I.v.168–69). This remark invites us to place the comment on strangeness and strangers in the context of philosophy or, rather, more broadly, in the context of thinking. Thinking is not to be T H E WO R D S

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restricted to the calculative grasping of t­ hings. Nor is thinking to be un­ derstood as theoria, the accurate repre­sen­ta­tion of what stands before the eye of the mind. Thinking is to be understood as an encounter with the strange as a stranger. Such an encounter ­w ill be dif­fer­ent from the tradi­ tional scene of thinking, in which the solitary subject grasps, ­handles, and manipulates conceptual objects. The language of the concept (L. conceptum, past participle of concipio, “to take or lay hold of to take in, to take to oneself, to receive,” ­etc.) enacts a meta­phorics of grasping.2 In­ stead, thinking is to be understood on a dif­fer­ent meta­phorical scene: that in which one moves into the presence of the unknown as if the un­ known w ­ ere not an object but rather another subject, a stranger. On this scene, accordingly, the meta­phorical model for thought is no longer the grasping of a ­thing but the exercising of courtesy. Such courtesy does not take possession, nor does it invade the object to discover what it is in its essence, so that a definition, an imposing of limits, can be formed. Cour­ tesy invites a partial disclosure and opens itself in turn to attention from the other, showing a welcoming openness to the strange. Courtesy does not seize the object or dive into its center: it moves into nearness with the otherness of the stranger. The model of the unknown to which thought is directed is not the physical object, a ­union of ­matter and form: it is in­ stead something—­someone—­that is not seized but approached. This model of ­going near to an unknown and yet attentive other is a  significant change of perspective when we reflect on the thought-­ character of allegory as a literary form that represents concepts as per­ sons. For the allegorical personification, like the structure of the person on which it is based, discloses some meaning while always holding more in reserve—­this reserve being ultimately the truth of the system as a ­whole. We read The Faerie Queene with a patient openness that allows for this reserve, not seeking to grasp the truth of the ­whole or to penetrate to the heart of the meaning of any single part. For t­ hese very acts of grasping and penetrating leave us, especially when we read The Faerie Queene, empty-­handed or in an empty place. The poem has receded and eluded us, as if offended, like the ghost in Hamlet. We are compelled, there­ fore, to relinquish the traditional thought-­models of grasping and pene­ trating and to read instead with courtesy, with a relaxed openness to the strange that allows the poem to disclose itself to us of its own accord and

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in its own time.3 The most ancient forms of courtesy, as we see in Homer, allow the stranger to remain strange even as this stranger is welcomed.

' suppose that the burden of the meaning of Ham­ let’s remark rests on the word more: ­there are more ­things to study. Phi­ losophy—in the broad, Re­nais­sance sense of the term as scientia—is the open proj­ect of explaining the ­things of this world. Many of the ­things of this world have not been explained; but they ­w ill be explained, or at least theoretically they can be explained, in the ­future. Keep an open mind about super­natural phenomena, such as ghosts. One day we ­w ill know all about them, including ­whether they are illusory or real. But if we suppose that this is what Hamlet intends, we miss the radical force of his remark. That force emerges in the second verse, when Hamlet characterizes the entire proj­ect of philosophy as a kind of dreaming. In par­tic­u­lar, he characterizes the philosophical concept of the ­thing as a dream. I hear Hamlet’s ironical stress on that word: “­There are more ­things in heaven and earth, Horatio.” Philosophy reduces the flux of existence, and the flux of our consciousnesses inside existence, to a gigantic array of hard-­surfaced ­things. It is an array of phenomena, of “appearances to consciousness,” as the word phenomena implies, that are also “thrown against” consciousness, which is why we call them objects. As the flux of existence is reduced to an array of ­things, so too is the flux of conscious­ nesses reduced to the solitary, contemplating subject. This subject grasps the phenomena as if they ­were ­things or as if they ­were tools—­useful ­things—­for adjusting and manipulating other t­ hings. The concept of the ­thing opens the way for the mathematical category of the unit. By the abstraction of flux into units, all t­ hings are subject to enumeration and mea­sure­ment. With mathe­matics as a tool, all the in­ teractions of the phenomena, all the events in our world, can be analyzed as the outcome of the physical laws governing ­things. Hamlet is calling the proj­ect of scientific and philosophical understanding into question—­ actually, he is being scornful of it in Horatio—­when he speaks of phi­ losophy as dreaming. The methodological point is that when we en­ counter the unknown and seek to make it known, we should take care not to assume that the unknown already belongs to the known as a ­thing. W E M I G H T AT F I R S T

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To assume the thingly character of the unknown is to make it likely that we ­w ill miss it completely, taking hold instead on a ­thing, like the eidôlon or false image of Helen, that reflects our presuppositions. Yet that is what we do: we assume that the strange is a t­ hing. For it is impossible not to make this assumption if we are to “think” in the familiar philosophical way, according to the rules. The assumption of the thingliness of the strange puts us off the track from the start. The result is that we are not ­really thinking. We are instead dreaming the philosophical dream, in which a solitary, conscious subject confronts a world of unconscious ­things. To do other­w ise—to assume that the unknown may be looking back into us as we look into it—is to be unscientific, superstitious, or re­ ligious. Yet that is what Hamlet invites us to do: to move into the pres­ ence of the stranger without taking hold, allowing the stranger to remain in some essential way hidden, reserved. Hamlet invites us not only to con­ sider the strange theoretically but to welcome the strange as a stranger. Such hospitality—­a word that in the Indo-­European languages enfolds aggression (hostility) as well as welcome—­declines to take hold of the stranger, the guest, as if the stranger ­were an object or a tool, even though that is what the traditional model of thinking demands: the grasping hold. The hospitality and the courtesy that one shows to the ghost allows the ghost to have the advantage of us, to look at us, to assess us, to anticipate us, even as we look ­toward him.

' in ­these remarks on Hamlet, and in par­tic­ u­lar on the characterization of philosophy as a kind of dreaming, the in­ fluence of Martin Heidegger’s claim that the task of thinking lies ahead of us still, that we have not yet begun to think and need to find out what thinking is before we can do it.4 But surely this is an outrageous claim. We have a proud tradition of philosophical thinking more than two and a half thousand years old. Phi­los­o­phers are professionally concerned with the nature, the reliability, and the limits of thinking as such. With what right—­more importantly, with what evidence—­does Heidegger slander philosophy as thoughtless? To understand this claim of Heidegger’s it is impor­tant to recognize at the outset what it does not mean. Heidegger’s claim that we have not yet R E A D E R S ­W I L L R E C O G N I Z E

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begun to think does not mean that no one t­oday is engaged in intel­ lectual activity of a high order, some of it—­particularly in the natu­ral sciences—of the highest order ever attained. Likewise, Heidegger’s claim does not mean that philosophy as it has been practiced since antiquity, and as it is practiced in the modern world since Descartes, is of no intel­ lectual value: on the contrary. The intense study of the history of philos­ ophy—­and few g­ reat phi­los­o­phers have been so preoccupied with the history of philosophy—is necessary if we are to find out how to under­ stand and escape the limits within which that history subtly but power­ fully encloses us. Nor does Heidegger’s claim mean that no one has ever thought. The poets have thought. The entire philosophical tradition has been the playing-­out of the consequences of some original, poetical thoughts, which are no longer vis­i­ble from within that tradition. Hei­ degger says that the poets, or some of them, have thought in the past and that some of them are d ­ oing so now. We must once again go to the poets to find out about thinking. B ­ ecause it is a craft rather than a calculation and b ­ ecause it is open to the otherness of the unknown—­asking not “what is it?” but “what does it say?”—­poetry is more nearly allied than phi­ losophy is to what Heidegger understands by thinking. That is the prop­ osition that Heidegger aims to explore in his ­later work on thinking.

' I H AV E A M O R E ­L I M I T E D A I M ,

which is to find out about thinking in Spenser and particularly in The Faerie Queene, a poem that, as a “continued allegory or darke conceit,” comes closer to thinking—to speculative rea­ soning about the ­human—­than any other work of lit­er­a­ture known to me. I have two claims to advance in re­spect of this poem. The first is that Spenser is not primarily a narrative poet but a poet whose concern is to think. Spenser thinks in subtle, allusive, indirect, and intuitive ways about prob­lems too complex to be dealt with in the isolating, linear fashion with which h ­ uman prob­lems are usually met. Romance narrative, the conven­ tions and iconography of allegorical expression, the deployment of epi­ sodes and characters are for Spenser all instruments of thinking, of ques­ tioning in regions that are only indicated by the terms with which he begins: holiness, temperance, and so on.

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This point can be made more directly and more polemically: in The Faerie Queene thinking actually happens. The Faerie Queene is not a repre­ sen­ta­tion of what has already been thought and then concealed or en­ coded or entangled in an allegorical narrative. T ­ here is nothing secondary about it. Instead, The Faerie Queene is thinking enacted as a creative, a poetic, event. This event of thinking does not occur on the model of what would become the classic situation for early modern philosophy, in which the subject contemplates a surrounding world of unconscious objects. The event of thinking in The Faerie Queene is instead an encounter between persons or, as we call them, personifications. The place of the subject, of thinking consciousness, is not in the author or not exclusively in the author. ­T here is a circulation of conscious energy, a noetic circula­ tion, that passes through the author into the work and through the work back into the author as composition proceeds. A similar pro­cess of no­ etic circulation occurs in the pro­cess of reading. But the main point is this: that thinking in The Faerie Queene is not a thinking about objects, a conscious reflection directed t­ oward unconscious ­things. Thinking in The Faerie Queene is an intersubjective encounter between persons, where one mind engages with and responds to another, and neither mind achieves a “grasp” of the situation in its totality. Instead of grasping a thought or a prob­lem, the model of thinking we encounter in Spenser is an approach to the other that still leaves the other alone, in its own space. For such encounters the model of grasping is no longer adequate to the nature of thought. We are in need of something like the model of cour­ tesy, of the encounter with the stranger who is welcomed.

' I advance, therefore, is that for Spenser thinking is an encounter with the strange to which courtesy is the key. Courtesy, the virtue of Book Six of The Faerie Queene, partly ­because it comes last, is usu­ ally regarded as the least profound of the virtues with which the poet contends intellectually in the course of his poem. Holiness and justice, for example, w ­ ill seem to us deeper, more fundamental virtues than cour­ tesy. Courtesy is usually thought of, in C.  S. Lewis’s exact phrase, as a “supervenient perfection.”5 Both words in this phrase tell: courtesy is T H E SECON D CL A I M

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supervenient ­because it comes from above and is laid on at the end; and courtesy is a perfection, in the sense of that word as a completion, ­because it is the last stage, the telos, of moral development. By courtesy the completed moral subject is given its finishing gloss. Understood in ­these terms, courtesy is attractive and graceful, but it is superficial too, having been laid on at the end. It is small won­der that the Legend of Courtesy comes last in the books Spenser completed, ­after the Legends of Justice and Friendship, which are surely more impor­tant social princi­ples than it. Yet b ­ ecause of the way Spenser thinks, it is dangerous to assume that that which comes last is least fundamental. The opposite is more often true. In traditional, constructive, propositional thinking the remotest conclusions are implied in, and follow necessarily from, the original premises. That at least is the ideal. But it is an ideal of absolute closure and reversibility. This aesthetically pleasing effect of philosophical method is captured, for example, in Paradise Lost when, at the end, Adam’s response to the angel Michael’s narrative, “Henceforth I learn that to obey is best” (XII.561), follows from the poem’s opening line, “Of Man’s first disobedience.” The last verses of Milton’s epic—­“ They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow / Through Eden took their solitary way” 6 —­ owe much of their force to our feeling that they complete on an emo­ tional level what the poet, at the outset, said he would do: “justify the ways of God to men” (I.26). In Paradise Lost, as in a philosophical treatise such as Hegel’s Phenomenology, it seems as if the entire arc of thought is contained in nuce in the opening moves. It seems, in short, as if the work is a repre­sen­ta­tion of thinking that has already been done and as if the work itself, as a structure of thought, is reversible. In contrast with this time symmetry, whereby new developments are implied in all previous states and in an original state, so that development is not real change but only a becoming more explicit of the origin, each book of The Faerie Queene begins, or places near its beginning, episodes that set forth the subject of the book in the most traditional and formu­ laic way, not in any way implying or containing in nuce the developments to come. T ­ hese are never implied at the origin, which is not an origin at all but merely a beginning, the slightly lazy, only half-­engaged, m ­ ental tugging at a pos­si­ble thought. Only as the poet proceeds, as the compli­

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cations of his narrative open unexpected resources and vistas, does orig­ inal thinking begin. The conclusions—or, rather, the open places the poet gets to by the end of each book—­are not reversible. That is, we cannot work back from ­those open places to the opening moves and see how the conclusions have been developed necessarily from origins. The opening moves seem like ­earlier, more naive stages in the thought, unre­ lated to the thought at the end. They seem so ­because they are. As Spenser works to fill out a thought by means of narrative, he almost inadvertently explores the thought more deeply. But rather than saying “inadvertently,” it is better to say that while the poet is concentrating on vari­ous delib­ erate m ­ ental actions—­among which is the complex, Spenserian stanza— he is moving instinctively, though on purpose, deeper into the prob­lems he raises. Where he gets to is unanticipated in his first thoughts.

' as in so many o ­ thers, Spenser stands in contrast to Milton. When we read through the arc of Milton’s epic achievement from Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, we feel that every­ thing pertaining to the thought, the dianoia of t­ hese poems, has been worked out in advance. Before Paradise Lost Milton wrote on church gov­ ernment, on marriage, on the state and its relation to citizens, on intel­ lectual freedom, on civil power, on logic, and on theology. He was about fifty-­seven years old when he completed Paradise Lost, having begun the poem in his late forties, when he had worked out all the fundamental structures of his thought. Artistic discoveries and choices are made in the course of Milton’s ­great poems, but their thought contains nothing the poet had not said before. In this sense, Milton’s poems are brilliantly di­ dactic achievements. They do not think: they teach what has already been thought. Spenser does not have Milton’s capacious, grasping, essentially discur­ sive conceptual power. He is an intuitive and, more importantly, an instinctively conservative thinker who proceeds by wandering, nonde­ liberate procedures into original, often radical thoughts. Spenser begins with commonplace formulations and ideas, commits them to the impul­ sive course of his narrative, introduces new iconographical material where it seems artistically appropriate to do so, and in effect allows ­those I N T H I S R E ­S P E C T,

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ideas to complicate and develop on their own before intervening again. By this pro­cess, which I have called noetic circulation, the poet is led into strange and unexplored areas of thought. If Milton could see farther than Spenser into any given issue—­and the “givenness” of the issue is impor­tant—­Spenser can take us into areas of thought of which Milton could not have suspected the existence. Milton is the poet of the W ­ ill as a rational proj­ect, grasping the truth and setting it forth with unmistak­ able clarity and irresistible force. Spenser is the poet of Gelassenheit, of composure and calm, but also of “releasement” or “letting go,” whereby the very relaxation of effort and of ­mental tension gives to his proj­ect an experimental character, allowing unexpected structures in thinking to emerge. In The Faerie Queene Spenser does not represent thinking that has already been done. He is thinking, so to speak, right in front of us, in the very course of writing the poem. Milton had to figure every­thing out. Spenser wanted to find something out.

' out is Spenser’s aim in the Legend of Courtesy. The virtue of courtesy, to which Spenser comes at the end, is the most indispensable, the most deeply rooted of all. He seems to sense this as the book opens, asking the muses to reveal to him “the sacred noursery / Of vertue” (FQ VI.proem.3), which the gods planted in the earth and care­ fully tended, having brought the seeds from heaven: TO FI ND SOM ET HI NG

Revele to me the sacred noursery Of vertue, which with you doth ­there remaine, Where it in silver bowre does hidden ly From View of men, and wicked worlds disdaine. Since it at first was by the Gods with paine Planted in earth, being deriv’d at furst From heavenly seedes of bounty soveraine, And by them long with carefull ­labour nurst, Till it to ripenesse grew, and forth to honour burst. Amongst them all growes not a fayrer flowre, Then is the bloosme of comely courtesie, Which though it on a lowly stalke doe bowre, Yet brancheth forth in brave nobiltie,

Courtesy and Thinking  319 And spreds itself through all civilitie: Of which though pre­sent age doe plenteous seeme, Yet being matcht with plaine Antiquitie, Ye ­w ill them all but faynèd showes esteeme, Which carry colours faire, that feeble eies misdeeme. FQ VI.proem.3–4

We note that the earth—­the rooted inculcation and growth of some­ thing derived from the stars—is more fundamental than the image from the previous book. Justice, Astraea, returns to the earth, in the person of her deputy, Artegal, but justice is not grown in the earth. Justice is the im­ position of abstract princi­ple on what­ever circumstances it finds on the ground. Justice is tempered by mercy but not by sympathy for or knowl­ edge of the other. Although courtesy is derived from the heavens, like jus­ tice, it grows up out of the ground. Justice is theory, courtesy is habitual practice. Justice must be learned, courtesy is bred. What we learn in of­ ficial institutions, when we are older and must pay for the knowledge, ­will seem more impor­tant to civil society than what is bred in us at home. Of­ ficial knowledge ­w ill also seem more impor­tant than what we learn in casual social exchange. Reflecting this initial, low estimation of courtesy, Spenser shows the flower of courtesy growing from a “lowly stalke” ­because it does not at first seem so exalted or impor­tant as justice. Yet even as its lowliness is acknowledged in this passage, courtesy branches out dramatically, spreading itself into “all civilitie,” that is, into ­every re­ gion of h ­ uman community. I repeat ­here the most relevant verses from the passage I have just quoted: Amongst them all [the flowers of virtue] growes not a fayrer flower, Then is the bloosme of comely courtesie, Which though it on a lowly stalke doe bowre, Yet brancheth forth in brave nobilitie, And spreds it selfe through all civilitie. FQ VI.proem.4

It is pos­si­ble to read this passage as saying that courtesy merely accom­ panies and lends grace to all the other virtues and in so ­doing deserves to share in the “brave nobilitie” of them all. The most superficial of the virtues must be given equal status with the rest, once the book on it

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begins, if only out of courtesy. But Spenser’s point h ­ ere is deeper: it is to contrast an initial estimation—­t hat courtesy grows on a lower stalk than, for example, justice or holiness—­and a l­ater, better judgment: that society, and indeed justice and holiness themselves, can exist nowhere without courtesy. Society can exist without justice (­there are socie­ties that are fundamentally unjust), and society can exist without holiness (­there are idolatrous socie­ties aplenty). But no society can exist without courtesy. The point is more apparent, perhaps, if we recognize that much of what we currently mean by culture, in the anthropological sense of the term, is embraced by what Spenser meant by courtesy. The episode of Briana and Crudor, in the opening canto of Book Six, anticipates the argument of Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked: the same dis­ tinction is explored by Spenser as the foundation of courtesy. Crudor, whose name is from the Latin for raw and bloody, crudus, is subdued by Calidore and instructed in virtue (“First that ye better s­ hall your selfe behave” [FQ VI.i.42]), and the erstwhile savage Briana prepares a meal: So all returning to the C ­ astle glad, Most joyfully she did them entertaine, Where goodly glee and feast to them she made, To shew her thankefull mind and meaning faine, By all the meanes she mote it best explaine. FQ VI.i.46

I would put this equivalence of courtesy with culture in the anthropo­ logical sense in more active terms: courtesy is grounded in the desire for community. Of course, the grammar of the statement—­“and spreds it selfe through all civilitie”—­does suggest that ­there was civil society first and courtesy ­after. But in this image Spenser is not so much representing the way ­things are as he is manifesting the pro­cess of thinking about the way ­things are. He is disclosing the order of assumptions by which he thinks about civil society: first, he sees its more evident structures, say, of holiness in churches or of law in the courts, and then, gradually, he recognizes that courtesy is indispensable to civil society. Courtesy is less obvious ­because it is not a formal institution of civil society. Courtesy therefore does not initially appear before the eye of the mind. But when one reflects more

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deeply on the conditions necessary to civil society, it grows on one, like a thought branching forth through one’s ­earlier thoughts, that courtesy is the most fundamental of t­ hese conditions. Courtesy is the most fun­ damental of the conditions necessary to civil society ­because the ground of courtesy, unlike any of the other virtues, is the w ­ ill to community. This is the thought that in Spenser’s mind “spreds it selfe through all civilitie.”

' I N OW S U M M A R I Z E what happens in the passage from the proem to the Book Six of The Faerie Queene. The poet asks the muses to reveal to him what he then reveals to us: the garden, or “sacred noursery,” of the vir­ tues, which the gods have planted in the earth with much effort (“with paine”), from seeds they have brought from heaven. Carefully nursed by the gods, the garden grows to maturity and blossoms in “honour,” achieving that fulfillment of the virtues by which they, the virtues, be­ come con­spic­u­ous as the flowering of an ideal social order: “And by them [the gods] long with careful ­labour nurst, / Till it [the “sacred noursery”] to ripeness grew, and forth to honour burst” (FQ VI.proem.3). The garden in flower becomes the image of the ideal of civil society. What is revealed next is the flower of courtesy, which I have said is rooted in the funda­ mental ­will to community. Courtesy is revealed as a blossom that, though on a “lowly stalke” and therefore closer to the ground than the o ­ thers, branches forth among them and rises to their height, entangled among them. None of the virtues can exist apart from courtesy, and b ­ ecause of its ubiquity and necessity, the flower of courtesy—we focus now on a single blossom instead of many—­rises up higher than the rest. No flower, we are told, is fairer than it, and no flower rises to a greater height of honor and “brave nobilitie.” But for all its exaltation, courtesy begins lower to the ground, sheltering itself ­there—­I take that to be the sense of the verb bowre—­and taking its strength from the earth. At first, courtesy appears to be spread out below on the ground, a h ­ umble but numerous flower making an attractive carpet, an enameled mead, against which the more striking flowers are seen rising above it and “bursting forth to honor.” Yet as the poet thinks about courtesy through this image of it as a bed of blos­ soms, the image grows in his mind, imitating the growth of the flowers. The floral carpet is the poet’s initial m ­ ental image of courtesy, being

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spread out in a thousand tiny, star-­like acts of inconspicuous grace be­ neath the soaring flowers of the higher virtues, giving to t­ hose nobler virtues—­holiness, justice—­a beautiful ground. But the floral background suddenly rises up and engulfs the higher flowers, branching and spreading “though all civilitie” u ­ ntil no other blossom can surpass courtesy in no­ bility and honor. I take this subtle but remarkable effect, which is so typical of Spens­ er’s hallucinogenic art and so unique to him, as an occasion to repeat my major claim. By means of the complicated, dynamic image of the garden of the virtues, in which a lower carpet of flowers suddenly rises up among the highest, Spenser is not representing his thought about courtesy: he is not representing thinking that has already been done. Spenser is showing us the pro­cess of his thinking as it develops. The referent of the garden image is not civil society and the place of courtesy in civil society. The referent is instead the pro­cess of thinking about civil society and of dis­ covering, by noetic circulation, the fundamental importance of courtesy in civilization. The “spreading” and “branching” to which Spenser refers, the rising up of the carpet of blossoms to become entangled in the flowers to which they w ­ ere formerly a background, is the spreading, branching, and rising up of Spenser’s thought. We are seeing Spenser thinking. The thinking is occurring not in the poet’s head but rather in the other place—­the heterotopia—of his poetic enterprise. Spenser is not grasping at the essence of courtesy but moving into nearness with the prob­lem of courtesy, treating the prob­lem itself in a courteous way by allowing it to disclose itself in its own time (and no more of itself than it wants to dis­ close). In his proem to the Book of Courtesy, Spenser is welcoming that virtue, which is as yet strange, as a stranger. It is a stranger that reveals itself to the poet as he writes and to which he w ­ ill respond as he presses on with his tale. We must remember, however, that although much is revealed in this passage about courtesy’s vital importance for civil society, its potent blossoms hold more in reserve, remaining inaccessible and strange. In this passage, courtesy and thinking about courtesy are one and the same.

' arrive at the thought of courtesy? He does so by a pro­cess of thought similar, though on a much-­larger scale, to what we H OW D O E S S P E N S E R

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have observed in the nursery image. The poet arrives at the thought of courtesy by thinking about the failure of his Legend of Justice. The failure of the Legend of Justice to be a theory of justice (notice that I do not say the failure of Book Five, which is a success) results from a failure to find an adequate ground for the theory. As I mentioned ­earlier, Spenser be­ gins with an Astraean theory of justice: justice descends from the stars, like the starry goddess returning to earth. This justice is imposed on what­ever circumstances it may find on the ground. In other words, the circumstances on the ground are not taken into account or allowed for. The result of this blind imposition of abstract justice on circumstances of which it is wholly ignorant—­the En­glish plantations in Ireland are never far from Spenser’s thoughts in this book—­can be predicted: the ceaseless, mechanical bloodletting for which Talus becomes the symbol. Spenser’s solution in the end, which comes a­ fter Book Five, was not better surveillance and sterner repression but an exploration of the w ­ ill to com­ munity. It was the writing of Book Five that taught Spenser that t­ here can be no justice where ­there is no under­lying ­w ill to community. Only where the subjects of justice desire to live together and to maintain order together can justice, which is protection against ­those who reject what the community assents to, begin to be established. As I have also said, Spenser’s word for this desire is courtesy. Spenser did not think this at the outset of his writing The Faerie Queene: at the outset he thought of holi­ ness as the foundational virtue. The Puritans (if we are to accept Ben Jon­ son’s interpretation of the Blatant Beast) made him think other­w ise. ­Earlier, Spenser appears to have supposed what most of us would sup­ pose at the start. Before one can worry about cultivating mere courtesy, the more necessary virtues must be established in the self, for example, temperance, or self-­control with re­spect to one’s appetites; chastity, or self-­control with re­spect to ­others’ appetites; and friendship, a balancing of concern for the self and the other. Courtesy, it is supposed, comes ­later in one’s breeding, being reserved chiefly, though by no means exclusively, for strangers. Yet when we think of child rearing, we see that courtesy be­ gins at home and actually comes first among the virtues. Courtesy is the basis on which the other virtues are raised. To resume Spenser’s terms, temperance, friendship, and even justice are impossible without courtesy; and holiness and chastity are disgusting without courtesy.

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' so far the reader ­w ill discern the influence of Martin Heidegger’s thought about thinking, especially in What Is Called Thinking? (Was heisst Denken?, 1954).7 But it is in the small, occasional book on thinking, Gelassenheit (En­glish trans.: Discourse on Thinking), that we see the early development of Heidegger’s radically nonmetaphysical and non­ scientific exploration of thinking. The first part of the book is the essay entitled Gelassenheit (“calmness,” “composure” in modern German but also a mystical “letting go” or “releasement”), which is a commemorative address on the composer Conradin Kreutzer (1780–1849), delivered in Kreutzer’s hometown, which was also Heidegger’s, Messkirch, on Oc­ tober 30, 1955. The second and principal part of the book dates back to notes taken in 1944–45. It is a dialogue between a Scholar, a Scientist, and a Teacher, which takes place as they walk on a country path and which breaks off incomplete, as they draw near to “­human habitation.” This discussion is meant to be, and it is, the esoteric portion of the book, although it begins with the unexamined assumption that thinking is the distinguishing mark of the essence of h ­ uman nature. Alluding to an ­earlier discussion, the Scientist asks the Teacher what is meant by the proposition that humanity’s nature is to be found by looking away from humanity. The Teacher replies that if thinking is the essence of humanity’s nature, then thinking itself can be seen only when we look away from thinking. Two senses of thinking are intended in this statement: on the one hand, thinking as re-­presenting and calculating; on the other hand, thinking in the sense to be explored in the dialogue. But t­ here is also a subtler, methodological point to the apparent paradox of looking away from thinking in order to see thinking, a point indicated in the set­ ting of the dialogue as a walk on a country path away from h ­ uman habi­ tation. To think about thinking is to proceed on assumptions about thinking that are themselves to be put into question. To find thinking, therefore, one must wander away from thinking itself, as one wanders on a country path away from ­human habitation. One must relax and wander at ease—­hence, Gelassenheit—if one is to release one’s grasp on former certainties. I N W H AT I H AV E S A I D

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A critical moment comes at the end of the dialogue when the Scholar mentions that t­ here is a single, Greek word that has often come to his mind in their discussion about thinking. But each time he was about to propose this word it seemed to fit less well with what drew near to them as the nature of thinking (“was sich uns als das Wesen des Denkens näherte”). 8 This is one of ­those in­ter­est­ing moments in the dialogue in which the speakers, who have gone out into the country to find thinking, have the feeling that something that they would call the nature or the essence of thinking, though it far exceeds any par­tic­u­lar naming, is stalking them. In the camouflage, as it w ­ ere, of “the Nature of Thinking,” something draws near to them, unseen, in the forest. In any event, the Sci­ entist observes that even if this single word, which the Scholar is with­ holding, is no longer suitable, the Scholar might as well reveal it, since they are approaching h ­ uman habitation and must break off their discus­ sion. The single word is all that remains of Heraclitus’s fragment 122, ἀγχιβασίη (anchibasiê), “near-­going,” or “moving into nearness,” “in-­die-­ Nahe-­gehen.” This allows one of the speakers to propose “In-­die-­Nahe-­ hinein-­sich-­einlassen,” “letting-­oneself-­into-­nearness,” a relaxed self-­ surrender, which allows one to approach without seizing and to think by being open to what reveals itself of its own accord. We see this in Spenser: the poet asks if he may receive from the other the disclosure of what was unknown: “Revele to me the sacred noursery.” To whom is he speaking? He tells us he speaks to the muses, the “sacred imps, that on Parnasso dwell” (FQ VI.proem.2). But it is also they who are stalking him, drawing near to him, in the forest of romance; and they are in the camouflage of thought. We note that the muses must be courted, courteously invoked. We note too that the poet, in thinking, does not think directly t­ oward the ­thing, the object of thought. The poet moves into nearness with the revealing muses who are moving into nearness with him. He moves into a personal relationship, in the hope they w ­ ill disclose some of their wisdom to him. But he hopes this without ex­ pecting that they w ­ ill or that they can disclose all. Moreover, he hopes the muses w ­ ill grant some of their wisdom to him without expecting that the wisdom w ­ ill be something he can grasp and apply to the world, as an instrument of power. The wisdom w ­ ill instead be some­ thing he w ­ ill take into himself only to send it out again into—­into what?—­

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into the developing proj­ect of The Faerie Queene, which is a throwing for­ ward and a releasing of the self into thinking, a very long, unimaginably complex, heroically sustained, yet delicate and courteous probing of the unknown. The Faerie Queene is Spenser’s ­actual thinking, which occurs in noetic circulation through the proj­ect in which he is engaged. The Faerie Queene is therefore an intellectual action: a poetic releasement of the self for moving into nearness with wisdom.

Chapter 14

'

The Thinking of History in Spenserian Romance

history contains a notorious but also, as is generally sup­ posed, an inconsequential ambiguity in re­spect of its subjective and ob­ jective meanings. On the one hand, history means events in the past, the res gestae, the ­things that ­were done. ­T hese are the objects of historical study, which are set apart from us by distance in time. On the other hand, history means just this historical study and, based on such study, the nar­ rative of t­ hings done in the past, the historia rerum gestarum. A historical narrative from the pre­sent moment of its own writing opens a subjective view on its objects of study. ­T hese objects are then qualified by it as historical.1 But is the ambiguity of the word history a serious issue in the practice of history? We readily suppose that the truth of facts and the art of their telling are separable t­ hings, that when we use the word history, we have only to specify which of the word’s two senses we mean: a subjective dis­ cipline, unfolding in narratives written in the pre­sent but concerned with the past, or objective events in the past. When, however, we begin to reflect on this past—to picture it—we discover that it survives only in incomplete rec­ords and indistinct traces, in memory, documents, and waste—­what Edmund Spenser called “memorials” or “moniments.” We discover, moreover, that this past can be brought to life as the sequential development we think of as “history” only through the literary mediation T H E WO R D

327

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of narrative. It has been held for some time, although not without con­ troversy, that ­there can be no purely objective historical study apart from our subjective deployment of princi­ples inherent to narrative. Even so, it seems reasonable to suppose that once we have allowed for the in­ evitable distortions of narrative, proper standards of historiographical rigor can be brought into force once again, at which point the ambiguity of the word history ­w ill be of no further interest. Hegel thought other­w ise. He claimed that the ambiguity in the word history reflects a deep truth about the discipline of historical study and about the nature of history itself. For Hegel, ­there can be no historical events without the writing of them as historical events, for the events— if they are to be more than mere occurrences—­are constituted as histor­ ical by the action of thinking about them historically and even, more strangely, by a kind of thinking that goes on within them. That is why Hegel said Africa has no history: ­because in his view events ­there do not exhibit self-­conscious development in time but are “still involved in the conditions of mere nature.”2 ­T here can thus be no history apart from the study of history, wherein subject and object are entangled with each other: “We must consider this coincidence of the two meanings [of history] as of a higher kind than a merely external accident,” says Hegel; “it should thus be maintained that historiography appears si­mul­ta­neously with properly historical acts and events: t­ here is an inner, common matrix [or “foundation,” Grundlage] driving them forward.”3 An inner, common matrix driving them forward? What foundation underlies both the historical events of the past and our historiographical view of the events of the past? This is to claim much more than that his­ torical writing and historical consciousness constitute past events as historical. The answer, as it happens and as we might expect from a phi­ los­o­pher of history, is a “reason-­principle” or “spirit” that is properly the concern of philosophy, specifically the Hegelian philosophy of truth as a development in time wherein events are taken hold of by concepts and turned into t­hose concepts’ expressions. Truth in the Hegelian system does not transcend history but is working through history from within. In the section of the Logic entitled “On the Concept [Begriff] in General,” Hegel says, “Philosophy is not meant to be merely a narrative of what has occurred [keine Erzählung dessen sein, was geschiet] but rather a

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knowledge of that which is true in what has occurred. Philosophy should comprehend [or “grasp,” begreifen] what in narrative appears as mere oc­ currence [was in der Erzählung als ein bloßes Geschehen erscheint].” 4 It is by the grasping and manipulative action of thought that historical study becomes phenomenological science, giving knowledge of what is real and true in the past. Even so, this real­ity is fulfilled not in the past but in us, when we apprehend the conceptual truth—­let us just say, the “thought”—­that is adumbrated by events in the past. So, Hegel. But when we are speaking of poetry or of creative work in general, in­ cluding poetic romance, we need better terms than the philosophical ones, subject and object, or at least dif­fer­ent ones. We do if we are to see how a poet such as Edmund Spenser can develop in narrative romance an im­ manent thinking of history that is comparable to the thought-­work—­ that conceptual grasping from within—­that Hegel sees taking place in history. We might replace subject, for example, with poiesis, the work of making or fashioning: production according to knowledge. Whereas the philosophical subject views the world of objects from a distance and is not directly involved with them, the creative artist reaches out to the world to change it with work. We see in this development the beginning of that ­union of subject and object in thinking that is shadowy and elu­ sive in Hegel. As to the term object, we might replace it with “the other,” to allo, or “something other,” heteron ti. Something other within the work of art—­a living, narrative voice, a speaking face, a heterocosm or fictional world, a hidden meaning—is other with re­spect to this work’s produc­ tion, its poiesis, and yet is entangled with this very production. Poetry and history seem to generate from within themselves a presence that is strangely other than themselves, a moment of heterogeneity that cannot be located anywhere outside them, although it has to do with the outside. Even so, grasping this inner, alien moment, this otherness arising from within that defines the historical and poetical arts, can make us wiser about what does lie outside ­these arts.

' is ambitious to grapple with the prob­lem of history, but the three greatest poets of the En­glish Renaissance—­Spenser, Shake­ speare, and Milton—­are intensely preoccupied with the phenomenon N O T A L L P O E T RY

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of history: Milton, the most ideological of the three, with the direction of history as determined by God; Shakespeare, the most worldly of the three, with the forces of history as determined by strug­gle; and Spenser, more primordially, with what it feels like to live in history at the pre­sent time. Spenser is concerned with the coming-­into-­appearance of the his­ torical as such and of the consciousness of living in history.5 Milton and Shakespeare are so fundamentally astounded by this phenomenon, by this coming-­into-­appearance of the historical past, that they gaze on it as on the face of Medusa, transfixed by a past that is set apart from them by distance in time. That is why Shakespeare brought this past into the theater, the place of “looking” and of theoria, and that is why Paradise Lost was initially conceived as a theatrical production. For Milton, the histor­ ical past is a single phenomenon unfolding from an origin, with provi­ dence as its guide and Milton himself as its observing subject, rendering transparent e­ very moment in the historical past between him and the moment presently selected for observation. For Shakespeare, the histor­ ical past is a series of phenomenal events with consequences known to us, that is, to the audience, but entirely unpredictable by the historical actors—­the perfect situation for dramatic irony and for a tragic view of history. It is not just distance in time but this ironic difference between the imperfect knowledge of the actors of history and the knowledge of the audience observing them that makes the actors of history into ironic objects. This irony also makes us into subjects. It would appear to be just this distinction between the subjective and objective meanings of history that Spenser uses romance to obscure, to the g­ reat enrichment of his thinking about history. Spenser’s sense of the past is altogether dif­fer­ent from Shakespeare’s and Milton’s b ­ ecause he does not set the past at a theatrical distance but entangles past and pre­ sent in the signifying procedures of allegory and in the randomizing pat­ terns of narrative romance. Just b ­ ecause romance effects what Jon Whitman, speaking of the rise of twelfth-­century romance from the he­ roic cultures of the ­earlier ­Middle Ages, calls an “introspective turn” away from large historical scenes, it proves to be useful for the thinking of his­ tory. For that introspective turn, combined with the multiple intercon­ nections of interlace narrative, develops narrative itself as “a way of thinking.” 6 Through this introspective turn romance enlivens the sub­

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jective side of the historical relation to the past, providing the circum­ stances within which to reflect on the moral truths that can be found in the past by rendering more flexible and vari­ous our sense of moral truth in ourselves. The fear of romance (as compared with epic or allegory) as a contami­ nant in the search for historical truth is therefore relevant when we con­ sider how Edmund Spenser uses romance, in his late sixteenth-­century Faerie Queene, actually to think about history.7 I am not so much concerned ­here with how Spenser uses romance allegorically to reflect or, in the terms he employs in the Letter to Raleigh, to “shadow” specific historical events in his own day or in the En­glish past, although he does so on numerous occasions. 8 I am concerned instead with how Spenser has begun to think of the experience of all such events as historical, rather than as purely re­ ligious, po­liti­cal, genealogical, or moral. For a Re­nais­sance author to think of the events of his own day as historical events, and to think of the consciousness of ­those events as historical consciousness, is to experi­ ence them as ungrounded in any secure moral princi­ple or in any meta­ physical truth, even if the search for such princi­ples and truths can never be relinquished. What I find striking about Spenser’s thinking is the way his opening thoughts do not govern the thoughts that come ­later. Spenser is a remark­ ably intuitive, experimental, and nonteleological thinker who allows the materials with which he works to undermine his early formulations and to lead him into newer and deeper ones. He is in this re­spect an archaeological thinker, rather than, like Milton, a thinker of the archê. Milton’s Adam and Eve are seen by Milton across a transparent temporal distance. But for Spenser, past events are pre­sent to him in their materials for rear­ ranging into moral significance. That is why reading The Faerie Queene feels like thinking. It feels as if we are collaborating with the poet in thinking through the prob­lems he so tentatively raises and so creatively explores— as in a sense we are.

' that of the three literary genres that converge in Spenser’s Faerie Queene—­allegory, epic, and romance—­romance is the least suitable for thinking about history and in par­t ic­u ­lar about the I T M AY B E S U P P O S E D

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momentous occurrences in Tudor times and the still more momen­ tous threatened occurrences, from the break with Rome and the estab­ lishment of the Church of ­England ­under Henry VIII to the brutal, Cath­ olic reaction u ­ nder Mary and Philip. That was followed by the turbulent but relatively stable reign of Queen Elizabeth, with its doomed attempt at a compromise in religion (radical in theology, conservative in ritual), its rebellions, assassination attempts, high-­profile executions, Irish uprisings, colonial adventures, and naval explorations. Through it all was the ever-­present threat of authoritarian, Roman Catholic, inquisi­ turient Spain, with its im­mense wealth from Mexico and, as Spenser calls it, “Indian Peru” (FQ II.proem.2) and its possessions in the Ca­r ib­ bean and the Pacific coast of South Amer­i­ca. Spain’s power was the first to be truly global in its reach—­Philip II was the first monarch ever to rule an empire on which, as was said at the time, the sun never set—­and the En­glish challenge to that power was in Spenser’s eyes, as in his friend Sir Walter Raleigh’s, heroic but undependable and chronically underfunded. ­England was threatened not only globally but also nearer home. Draw a circle passing through the lands surrounding E ­ ngland and you see it: Ireland, Scotland, the Low Countries, France, and of course Spain, with the Azores, ­were in varying degrees ­under the influ­ ence of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Pius V’s bull Regnans in Excelsis (February 1570) excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, declared her a her­ etic, formally released her subjects from their allegiance to her, and funded attempts on her life. Regnans in Excelsis was a huge po­liti­c al ­mistake, consolidating the En­glish b ­ ehind their queen and ensuring the more severe persecution of Roman Catholics to follow.9 In the de­cade following 1588, the year of the Armada, when Spenser was writing The Faerie Queene, ­England’s situation was felt to be as perilous as—­I would say more perilous than—­that of the twentieth-­century Western democracies during the Cold War. It was closer to the situation of ­England between 1939 and 1942, when invasion followed by bloody proscription was imminent. In ­these circumstances it is hardly sur­ prising that Spenser’s poem is an intensely engaged meditation on his­ tory, ­under the pressure of historical events unfolding in his own day, when his country seemed to stand on the brink of disaster and even of annihilation.

The Thinking of History in Spenserian Romance  333

Spenser does use ele­ments of the Virgilian, dynastic epic to understand the events of his day in historical terms, notably when the Briton prin­ cess Britomart visits the cave of the wizard Merlin, who delivers himself of a prophecy concerning her issue. The passage addresses long-­standing questions about how epic relates to romance and how literary genealo­ gies serve po­liti­cal policies.10 Spenser bases the episode with Merlin on the prophecy of Anchises, in Aeneid 6, foretelling the rise of the Julian ­house from the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia and the universal peace to be achieved ­under Augustus. Merlin tells Britomart that her love for Artegal, that “with sharpe fits [her] tender heart oppresseth sore,” should not dismay her: For so must all t­ hings excellent begin, And eke enrooted deepe must be that Tree, Whose big embodied braunches ­shall not lin, Till they to heavens hight forth stretchèd bee. For from thy wombe a famous Progrenee ­Shall spring, out of the auncient Troian blood, Which ­shall revive the sleeping memoree Of ­those same antique Peres, the heavens brood, Which Greek and Asian rivers staynèd with their blood. Renowmed kings, and sacred Emperours, Thy fruitfull Ofspring, ­shall from thee descend; Brave Captains, and most mighty warriours, That ­shall their conquests through all lands extend, And their decayèd kingdoms ­shall amend: The feeble Britons, broken with long warre, They ­shall upreare, and mightily defend Against their forren foe, that comes from farre, Till universall peace compound all civill iarre. FQ III.iii.21–23

­ fter a long history of the Britons with many vicissitudes, the ancient A spark of “Briton blood” (FQ III.iii.48) is freshly kindled on the isle of Mona (Anglesey), where—­although this is not explic­itly stated—­Henry Tudor, Queen Elizabeth’s grand­father, was born. In the final stanza of the prophecy Britomart is told, first, of universal peace between the warring nations on British soil, meaning the subjugation of Ireland and Scotland

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and the end of the Wars of the Roses. She is then told of the “royall virgin”—­Queen Elizabeth—­who ­w ill extend the white rod of her power over Belgium, that is, over the Low Countries, including the Netherlands, in which En­glish troops ­were then aiding the Protestant Dutch against the Spanish. (It was from the Netherlands, in the Armada year, that the main invasion force ­under the Duke of Parma was to come.) The royal virgin w ­ ill then, with the same rod, smite “the ­great ­Castle,” that is, the Spanish House of Castile, causing it to fall. What form this blow ­w ill take has been left deliberately unclear, but it falls in with the hopes of ­those at Elizabeth’s court who w ­ ere militating for direct confrontation with Spanish power even on the Iberian mainland, a most impracticable idea, which Elizabeth was too wise (and too frugal) to undertake. The brilliant Cadiz expedition of 1596, commanded by Essex, Howard, Vere, and Raleigh, had no valid military justification, although it did return with the books that would be the foundation of the collection of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The expedition to the Azores the following year made better military sense but ended ignominiously. Both ­these ad­ ventures ­were sops thrown to the war party and justified Elizabeth’s and her counselors’ defensive and conservative stance. Queen Elizabeth ­didn’t like war b ­ ecause it is expensive and men run it. H ­ ere is Spenser’s imaginative realization of the hopes of ­these men: Thenceforth eternall ­union ­shall be made Betweene the nations dif­fer­ent afore, And sacred Peace ­shall lovingly persuade The warlike minds, to learne her goodly lore, And civile armes to exercise no more: Then ­shall a royall virgin raine, which s­ hall Stretch her white rod ouer the Belgicke shore, And the ­great ­Castle smite so sore with all, That it s­ hall make him shake, and shortly learne to fall. FQ III.iii.49

This is thrilling but unrealistic. In the end, the triumphal formulae of the Virgilian, dynastic epic can offer ­little more than an ideological fantasy. It is a fantasy of total victory and moral certainty, leading to universal peace at home and abroad, on the model of the Res gestae divi Augusti, the

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g­ reat funerary inscription of the achievements of Augustus. This fantasy is based, according to the form of the dynastic epic, on a genealogy that is largely imaginary (the Tudors ­were brilliant newcomers, not ancient descendants of Arthur) and a quite unreal assessment of Elizabeth’s power. In short, the dynastic epic, despite its passionate concern with his­ tory, is inadequate to the thinking of history.11 As to allegory, especially in its more idealist, cosmographic forms, it is far better suited to reflection on moral concerns in the individual than it is to the thinking of history. Examples to the contrary may be cited: the historical allegory at the end of Dante’s Purgatorio and the politico-­ historical reflections in Piers Plowman, especially the first passus. But on the ­whole, allegory is a literary form that denies full real­ity to history and can engage history only when it is mixed with other genres, something allegory does very easily. That is what happens in The Faerie Queene: alle­ gory works together with romance (far more than with the less plastic form of the epic) to accomplish the thinking of history. In the romance narrative of the first book of The Faerie Queene histor­ ical allusions to con­temporary po­liti­cal circumstances in E ­ ngland are generally not so explicit as they are in the prophecy of Merlin. But for that reason the romance narrative is better suited to the thinking of history in a manner that does not degenerate into ideological wish fulfillment. The blending or the entanglement of allegory with romance renders the allegory less exactingly idealistic, more flexible, and more capable of pro­ ducing the unexpected. We see this especially in the rich episode of the House of Pride. The House of Pride is the allegorical-­romantic version of the “­castle” in Merlin’s prophecy that the royal virgin, merely by smiting it with her rod, w ­ ill cause to fall. It ­doesn’t fall in this episode. The House of Pride is a ruin that is for­ ever falling but never definitively falls, this being in itself an impor­tant thought about history. (Consider Gibbon: it is hard to find fall in the midst of decline.) Moreover, the Redcross knight, who in the historical allegory is Saint George, the patron saint of ­England, is implicated in the sinful­ ness of the House of Pride and barely escapes with his life. The rapacity of Castilian imperialism, which Spenser has the wisdom to see is driven not by greed alone but, more deeply, by pride, is a moral peril in which the En­glish nation also stands. It does so even as it heroically challenges

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that pride, represented by the g­ iant Orgoglio, whose name in Italian means “pride.” When the Redcross knight, accompanied by the witch Duessa, who calls herself Fidessa (­little faith), comes to the magnificent House of Pride, we are meant to think of the arrogant House of Castile. A g­ reat ­house should be founded securely on the rock of faith, not on the shifting foun­ dation of wealth recently acquired from the pillaging of gold and silver from the p ­ eoples of the New World. In Spenser’s day, wealth based on money rather than on land was regarded as unstable in itself and the cause of instability elsewhere, as indeed it was: the influx of gold and silver from the New World initiated a cycle of unpre­ce­dented inflation in Eu­rope and as far away as China. The “stately Pallace” of the House of Pride has “loftie towers,” like Philip II of Spain’s royal palace, the Escorial, but its beauty depends on its being surfaced with a covering of gold foil, which, like liquid assets, w ­ ill soon fall away, exposing the corruption beneath: It was a goodly heape for to behould, And spake the praises of the workmans wit; But full ­great pittie, that so faire a moulde Did on so weake foundation ever sitt: For on a sandie hill, that still did flitt, And fall away, it mounted was full hie, That ­every breath of heaven shakèd itt: And all the hinder parts, that few could spie, ­Were ruinous and old, but painted cunningly. FQ I.iv.4–5

Even t­ hose “hinder parts,” which signify the truth to which we come only ­after painstaking experience and reflection, are “painted cunningly” to conceal this truth. Entering into the h ­ ouse with the crowd, the Redcross knight sees the magnificent chatelaine Lucifera and observes the pro­ cession of the seven deadly sins. T ­ here, he is challenged by the enraged Saracen knight Sans Joy, or melancholic vio­lence, a suitable person to en­ counter in this home of Spanish pride. Redcross is challenged b ­ ecause he holds the shield of Sans Joy’s b ­ rother, Sans Foy (without faith), whom he slew. (With Sans Loy, ­these three Saracen knights are sons of Aveugle, or “blindness.”) In the knightly contest that ensues, Redcross eventually

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gets the better of his foe and is about to deliver the coup de grâce when the witch Duessa wraps Sans Joy in a cloud. When night comes, she car­ ries him to the underworld, to be healed by the classical god of medicine, Aesculapius. As Redcross recovers from his wounds received in the b ­ attle with Sans Joy, he is warned to flee: “For on a day his wary Dwarfe had spide, / Where in a dungeon deepe huge nombers lay / Of caytive wretched thralls, that wayled night and day” (FQ I.v.45). The moral allegory teaches us that the wretches have been confined t­ here, as we should expect, for covetousness, “wastfull Pride, and wanton Riotise” (I.v.46). We are startled to learn that the prisoners are not ordinary p ­ eople who have committed t­ hese sins: they are the g­ reat conquerors of history. Somewhat in the manner of a cubist collage, they are incongruously applied to the surface of the tale. We see Nimrod, Croesus, Antiochus, Alexander, and Caesar, all of them crammed together in the dungeon of the House of Pride. I take up the list at Alexander, the far-­reaching conqueror repeatedly portrayed in medi­ eval romance: ­There also was that mighty Monarch layd Low ­under all, yet above all in pride, That name of native syre did fowle upbrayd, And would as Ammons son be magnified, Till scorned of God and man a shamefull death he dide. All t­ hese together in one heape w ­ ere throwne, Like carkases of beastes in butchers stall. And in another corner wide ­were strowne The antique ruines of the Romanes fall: ­Great Romulus, the Grandsyre of them all, Proud Tarquin, and too lordly Lentulus, Stout Scipio, and stubborn Hanniball, Ambitious Sylla, and sterne Marius, High Caesar, ­great Pompey, and fierce Antonius. FQ I.v.48–49

The very compression to which the conquerors’ bodies are subjected (even Hannibal is thrown in with the Romans) has squeezed out the his­ torical time that once kept them apart—­Alexander in the third, Caesar

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in the first c­ entury bc. The romance of the Faerie Queene brings them together—­incongruously, as I said, with re­spect to historical time but also with re­spect to decorum—to entangle them in poetic thinking. What is the truth of history to which serial chronology and avoidance of anach­ ronism make a covering veil? Spenser’s poem thinks the phenomenon of the historical as it comes into appearance in the pre­sent time of his narrative, as the material re­ mains of the past. Unexpectedly, the historical flows out of the past into the pre­sent and is ­there all around the poet as well as under­neath him, to be excavated and meddled with now. The past is for him like an archaeo­ logical site or a “tell,” a heap of crushed cities in strata u ­ nder a hill, into which the poet can delve. The House of Pride turns out to be an earth ­house of this kind, the ruin of many civilizations, not of one. Its biblical symbol is Babylon, the flattened strata of ­every wicked city in time. But the House of Pride w ­ ill shortly be seen u ­ nder the image of something that is still more disturbing than a heap of crushed cities. It ­w ill be seen as a heap of dead bodies. By employing the conventions and stock situations of romance narrative—in this instance, of a knight escaping from a perilous c­ astle that seemed welcoming at first—­Spenser leaves us with this devastating final image of the historical past as a heap of the dead. The Redcross knight rises painfully from his bed and escapes by a “privie Posterne” (FQ I.v.52) at the back of the House of Pride. He must strug­gle to make way—­“Scarse could he footing find”—­through a killing field of rotting corpses ex­ tending ­behind the House of Pride, beside which more corpses have been raked into a heap: “A donghill of dead carkases he spide, / The dread­ full spectacle of that sad h ­ ouse of Pride” (I.v.53). Spenser is reminding us that the ­great conquerors, whom we have learned to picture to ourselves in some glorious way—­for example, as heroically mounted on a rearing steed, pointing the way to the ­future—­must come at last to such a “shame­ full end,” in abject corporeality, hanging from meat hooks or tossed into heaps. In the final image of them as heaped bodies they are not mentioned as conquerors b ­ ecause it is no longer pos­si­ble to tell them apart. We rec­ ognize with a start that the first verse describing the House of Pride tells us where it leads: “It was a goodly heape for to behould.”

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As for the ruin, so impor­tant in Spenser’s imagination as an image of the past, it is the architectural counterpart to the heap of dead bodies. For Shakespeare, the defining truth of the historical past—­from Richard of York to Caesar, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Prospero—is the strug­gle for power. For Milton, the defining image of the past is the paradisal garden at the beginning and the city at end of history, the place from which we fell and to which we ­w ill go. But for Spenser, the defining image of the past is the ruin as it is ruining now, collapsing over our heads into the ­future. It should always be remembered that Spenser translated Joachim Du Bellay’s antiquitez as “ruins,” in which he heard not just a reference to the substantive, ruins, as of fallen buildings, but to the verb ruere, “to collapse, to rush violently downward.” For Spenser, a historical moment of the past (for example, the moment, and it was a long one, of ancient Rome) is not set apart from us at a fixed distance in time but belongs to a continuous pre­sent, one that is forever collapsing into the ­future, as Troy collapses into Rome and Rome into Spenser’s Troynovant: “For noble Britons sprong from Troians bold, / And Troynovant was built of old Troyes ashes cold” (FQ III.ix.38). It is significant that the nations of Eu­rope conceived of themselves as rising Phoenix-­like from the ashes of Troy, and the connec­ tion between the event of ruin and what Eugène Vinaver called “the rise of romance,” specifically of Arthurian romance, is explicit in the opening stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and in the distributed Trojan nar­ rative of The Faerie Queene (II.x.5–69, III.iii.21–50, III.ix.33–51).12 That is how ruined Troy, Spenser’s favorite image of history, enters into the pre­ sent time of his narrative, collapsing from its highest point, literalizing the words of Virgil: “ruit alto a culmine Troia.”13 For Spenser, the task is to make poetry of ruins in such a way as to allow the pastness of the past to arise in the pre­sent. Spenser’s experience of history brings con­temporary events into ap­ pearance as historical events, engaging with them not as an observing subject but as a poet who creates from within them. Spenser thinks more fundamentally about history than Milton does just ­because he is con­ cerned with how the historical is revealed to us before he is concerned with the objective contents of this revelation. History thus becomes a

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moment of heterogeneity that arises in pre­sent experience and belongs as much to this experience as it does to the past. That is the more tech­ nical way of saying that Spenser is concerned with what it feels like to live not, primarily, in nature but rather in history. When I say that Spenser is concerned with what it feels like to live in history, I am simplifying drastically the complex engagement with his­ tory that is The Faerie Queene. The Faerie Queene is an allegorical epic em­ ploying the narrative forms of romance. Spenser planned The Faerie Queene to have twelve books, each of which would take up one of the twelve pri­ vate moral virtues “as Aristotle hath devised”—so Spenser says in the Letter to Raleigh, which he appended to the first installment of The Faerie Queene in 1590. The action of each book was to begin at the court of the Fairy Queen, Gloriana, where the knights who are to serve as the “pa­ trons” of the virtues are employed on their several quests to confront the monsters representing the opposites of ­those virtues. As the knights move outward from Fairy Court, a countermovement is opened in the narrative. The young prince Arthur, having seen the Fairy Queen in a vi­ sion, has gone in search of her in Fairy Land, entering, as it ­were, from the periphery. As he moves ­toward her capital, Cleopolis, Arthur encoun­ ters each of the knightly patrons of the virtues in turn, giving indispens­ able aid at a moment when the knight is overcome by some peril to which the virtue he sponsors is inadequate b ­ ecause less than the w ­ hole: “mag­ nificence,” which is “the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all.” “Therefore,” Spenser goes on, “in the ­whole course I mention the deedes of Arthure applyable to that vertue, which I write of in that book. But of the xii. other vertues, I make xii. other knights the patrons, for the more variety of the history.” Although Spenser projected a second series of twelve books on the public virtues, he in fact completed only six books and a part of the sev­ enth. T ­ here are, moreover, within the poem as we have it, a ­great number of deviations from the original plan, the chief of them being the trans­ position of symbolic values associated with Arthur and Gloriana onto Artegal (“Arthur’s equal,” and the knight of Justice) and the Briton prin­ cess Britomart (note that she is not a fairy), the martial maid and patroness of chastity. This transposition is achieved by the drift and complication typical of narrative romance, and the purpose of the transposition is to

The Thinking of History in Spenserian Romance  341

introduce history, British history, into the scheme of the ­whole. It may be pos­si­ble in narrative romance to think each of the virtues more or less head-on, in the manner Spenser describes, assigning one knight and one narrative to each and interweaving t­ hose smaller narratives with a larger one in which is “sette forth,” as Spenser says, the virtue that contains them all while not being merely one of their number. But for history to enter as ­matter for thought, since history is not conventionally thinkable at this time, it is necessary to exploit what I have referred to as a tendency in nar­ rative romance to drift and complication or, to put this in informational terms, to exploit randomness and noise in the signal. At close to thirty-­ five thousand lines (34,964, including verse canto headings and the three canceled stanzas), The Faerie Queene is a vast, speculative proj­ect in which Spenser’s ideas are continually changing as he writes. In the course of this work, Spenser discovered the appearance of history as something that is happening now. As I remarked ­earlier, he also discovered the sense of un­ groundedness that accompanies this appearance.

' may be concluded about this new phenomenon Spenser discovered as he wrote The Faerie Queene. They concern contingency, agency, and the dialectic of ethical reflection and po­liti­cal engagement. As to the first, I mean that the experience, new to the Re­nais­sance, of being in history is an experience of ungroundedness that is unlike the ex­ perience of being in the hands of God or even of one’s temporal lord. The second t­ hing to be said about the phenomenon Spenser discovered is in counterpoint with the first: it is that history is partly artificial, being something we make, and to the extent that we make history we shape contingency to our own ends. Our destiny is to some extent in our own hands; other­w ise, history would never call forth any effort from us and would never have the character of an idea. But how much is represented by that some is of course uncertain: the devil is in it. Utopian thinking, that humanist creation of the Re­nais­sance, attempts to make a ­whole truth out of the partial truth that history is something we make. But ­because history is dif­fer­ent from artifacts (­because it is largely out of our control, that is, ­because it is subject to contingency and to epochal determination) it opens us—­and this is the third point I wish to make—to the divergent T H R E E ­T H I N G S

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responsibilities of ethical reflection and po­liti­cal commitment. History can do so ­because it is partly artificial. We should recall Jakob Burck­ hardt’s profound insight that the defining event of the Re­nais­sance was the conception of the state—­that instrument of historical agency, that ­thing we make and that makes us in turn—as a work of art.14 It is out of the unpredictable events that engulf us in history that the positive ener­ gies of ethical reflection and po­liti­cal commitment emerge. I said that ­these ­things, ethical reflection and po­liti­cal commitment, are not harmonious with each other, and that too may be something Spenser discovered. Ethical reflection works against commitment ­because the de­ tachment it requires makes it hard to take sides. Neither side in a histor­ ical contest can be ethically pure, even if one of them is extremely less pure. Conversely, taking sides makes it hard to be rigorously ethical. It is necessary to wander a ­little, to err, like the hero of romance. Negotiating the difficult exchanges between t­hese imperatives when we are sub­ merged in a phenomenon the intellectual mastery of which can never be achieved is the thinking of history in Spenserian romance.

Chapter 15

'

Colonial Allegories in Paris

is bounded on the east and the west by two “woods,” in the manicured, French sense of the word—­all that remains of the ancient forests, Lanchonia Silva and the Forêt du Rouvre, now the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne.1 The river runs between them from east to west, passing to the south of the Bois de Vincennes on its way into the city and, as it leaves the city, turning north to embrace with its right bank the far side of the Bois de Boulogne. The westerly flow of the Seine is an emblem of how Paris works: following ancient patterns, ­those who supply ­labor and goods live upstream from ­those who receive and consume. On the coat of arms of the city is a ship with the motto, fluctuat nec mergitur: “Tossed by waves, it does not founder.” ­Until the Luft­ waffe bombed it, t­here had long been a huge wine market on the up­ stream right bank at Bercy, near the Bois de Vincennes, whence casks ­were floated on barges into the city and unloaded at vari­ous points, the best wines last. T ­ oday, the ring road tunnels beneath the Bois de Vin­ cennes and beyond it; in industrial Bercy, trucks unload in vast ware­ houses goods destined for the city. In Paris, luxury, power, and magnifi­ cent display flow inexorably downstream to the west, from the Bois de Vincennes to the Bois de Boulogne. With elegant ave­nues and palatial hideaways for the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, or Princess Di and Dodi Fayed, the Bois de Bou­ logne is in the westerly part of the aristocratic sixteenth arrondissement, formerly the suburb called the Faubourg Saint-­Honoré.2 The Elysée T H E C E N T E R O F PA R I S

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Palace, where the president is lodged, is on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-­ Honoré, as are many of Paris’s most elegant shops—­there and on the ad­ jacent Place Vendôme, neighboring the Ritz ­Hotel. The association of west Paris with con­spic­u­ous luxury began in the Re­nais­sance, when the unpop­u­lar, fiercely aristocratic second queen of Henri IV, Marie de Medici, disgusted by the rowdy populace around the fortress of the Louvre, ex­ tended the royal prospect westward from the Tuileries gardens, planting along the right bank of the Seine the treed alleys of the Cours-­la-­Reine and beside them the vast gardens that would become the Ave­nue des Champs Elysées, the Elysian Fields, the most elegant street in the world. In the days of Marie’s grand­son Louis XIV (who was born to the west of the city, in the g­ reat château of Saint Germaine-­en-­Laye), the nobles would travel still farther west, taking the Rue du Faubourg Saint-­Honoré out of the city on the way to Versailles. The Bois de Vincennes is at the other, east end of Paris, in the now hip but once unfashionable working-­class twelfth arrondissement, which oc­ cupies the southern portion of the old Faubourg Saint-­Antoine, cradle of the revolutionary mob. It seems right that while Rousseau was trav­ eling eastward, on the road to Vincennes, he would conceive the Social Contract. Although once a royal hunting preserve, the Bois de Vincennes, with its velodrome and its zoo, has long been associated with the ­people; Saint Louis is said to have rendered popu­lar justice ­there, ­under an oak. It was favored for hunting and also less vigorous sports by Marie de Medici’s much-­more-­popular husband, Henri de Navarre, the first of the Bourbon kings, who in 1594 ended the decade-­long Wars of Religion and won the capital by renouncing his Protestant faith, quipping, “Paris is well worth a mass”—­“ Paris vaut bien une messe.” He appears in Spenser’s Faerie Queene as Sir Burbon, the knight of the unfaithful Flourdelis (France). In trying to win her back, Sir Burbon shamefully abandons the shield of true religion given him by the Redcross knight: “That bloudie scutchin being battered sore, / I layd aside, and have of late forebore, / Hoping thereby to have my love obtained” (FQ V.i.54). The real Henri had ­little trou­ble in that department. To the north of the twelfth arrondissement, farther from the Seine, to which it is connected by the canal Saint Martin and the Arsenal Basin, is the eleventh arrondissement, the center of the old Faubourg Saint An­ toine, which at the time of the Revolution was outside the city walls,

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eastward from the heavi­ly fortified Porte Saint-Antoine. The most im­ posing part of ­those defenses was the eight-­towered fortress of the Bas­ tille, which was built to guard Paris’s vulnerable east flank and did so u ­ ntil its capture and dismantling in 1789, the only time it was ever attacked. The Place de la Bastille is still the main rallying point for Paris’s regular demonstrations and strikes, as it was for rejoicing in 1981, ­after the elec­ tion of François Mittérand’s socialist government. The socialists, in soli­ darity with their electoral base, rowed, as it ­were, upstream against the current of power by developing east Paris, building the im­mense Omni­ sports Palace and new edifices for the Radio and Tele­v i­sion Commission and the Ministry of Economy and Industry. Across the river from ­these, in the neglected and still-­more-­proletarian thirteenth arrondissement, ­there r­ ose like an apparition the stern ziggurat and towers of the Biblio­ thèque Nationale de France, Francois Mittérand, to give the new national library its full honors. In the Place de la Bastille itself, on its east side, an­ other vast structure was raised: the Opéra de la Bastille, the socialists’ answer to the t­ emple to bourgeois luxury raised during the Second Em­ pire. The building in which the new opera is ­housed exemplifies how out of place in east Paris official display feels. No one seems to pay much at­ tention to its impassive, stealth-­bomber surfaces, not out of dislike but from s­ imple inability to register its presence. All eyes are drawn instead to the ­great column at the center of the Place de la Bastille commemo­ rating the victims of the July Revolution of 1830 and surmounted by a winged, allegorical statue, the Genius of Liberty. Or they are drawn easily past the opera into the lively neighborhood of the Rue de la Roquette, with its outdoor markets; its long-­established African and Arab commu­ nities; its ateliers of artists, musicians, and fashion designers; and its youth-­culture paradise of motorcycle repair shops, grungy bar-­cafés, and loud bands. Yet it was in the extreme east of Paris, in 1931, at the entrance to the Bois de Vincennes, in what it would be a joke to call a run-­down neigh­ borhood, that France’s Third Republic (1870–1939) staged one of its most impressive official displays: the Exposition Coloniale. The ­grand exhibitions of the past, so impor­tant to the ideological work of official French cul­ ture and in par­tic­u­lar to that kind of ideological work called allegory, had always been held in west Paris. Of course, the French royalty, like most Eu­ro­pean monarchs and princes, followed the Italians in designing vast

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public allegories—­notably in the famous royal entrances of the much-­ traveled Catherine de’ Medici—to embody and nourish the ideological forms of their power. Revolutionary France was remarkable for its use of what we may call festive allegory, in which real p ­ eople are employed as signifiers of abstract ideas. At the height of the Terror, t­ here ­were huge allegorical pro­cessions on the Champ de Mars to the west of the city to honor the Goddess of Reason and the Supreme Being. By the centenary of the Revolution, which the Third Republic cele­ brated with the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the Supreme Being was Technology, enshrined in a vast Hall of Machines, sustained by a “Fairy of Electricity” and symbolized by the Eiffel Tower itself, also situated in the west, uniting the earth with the sky. The Exposition Universelle of 1900, on the Champs Elysées, deployed allegorical figures in still-­greater pro­ fusion, for example, on the new triumphal bridge dedicated to Tsar Al­ exander III, which opened a line of sight between the Invalides on the left bank of the Seine and, on the right bank, the astonishing metal and glass structures of the Petit Palais and the ­Grand Palais, raised for the occasion. The latter is surmounted by spectacular allegorical chariots, executed by the sculptor Georges Récipon: Harmony Overcoming Discord and Eternity Overcoming Time. Time with his scythe and Discord with her im­mense, withered dugs, her contorted visage, and her snaky hair, are in the purest iconographical tradition ­going back to classical times. Likewise, Har­ mony recalls the classical Apollo and Eternity Apollo’s s­ ister, Athena. The magnificent ­horses drawing the chariots have the sharp, swift lines of the ­horses from the Parthenon—on display then, as now, in the British Museum. Nothing less classical in idiom would be acceptable on the Ave­nue des Champs Elysées. But in east Paris a new kind of allegorical imagery—an imagery of the teratological and the exotic, reminding us of the Africa of Joseph Conrad and the South Seas of Herman Melville— was to enlarge the language for allegorical expression in the modern world.

' had been de­cided on as early as 1920, soon ­after the Pyrrhic victory of World War I, and was intended to assert the defining role of the Third Republic as an apostle of Enlightenment and T H E COLON I A L E X H IBI T ION

Colonial Allegories in Paris  349

of universal exchange g­ oing forth on the oceans of the world. The Ave­nue Daumesnil and metro line number 8 had to be extended just to reach the exhibition; the Bois de Vincennes was engrossed within the city of Paris; and the name of the Porte de Picpus was changed to Porte Dorée, “Golden Gate,” suggesting an opening out to the rest of the world. Beautifully de­ signed stamps and posters w ­ ere issued, showing pith-­helmeted French officers in exotic locations and also showing the colonial subjects in tra­ ditional costumes or in the uniforms of the French overseas forces: ele­ gantly mysterious Southeast Asians, tamed but still savage-­looking South Pacific islanders, stately Arabs on camels, and benevolent, towering black Africans near mud buildings in the western Sahara. In all t­ hese pictures on posters and stamps, the French flag, the tricolor, is flying somewhere in the background. On the grounds of the exhibition itself, around the Lac Daumesnil within the Bois de Vincennes, pavilions to French colonies in Asia, Af­ rica, and Polynesia ­were raised, the most impressive ones to the colonies to which France was most strongly committed: Morocco, Algeria, French West Africa, and Indochina, with a full-­scale reproduction of the vast Cambodian t­ emple of Angkor Wat. The other colonial powers w ­ ere pre­ sent, as well: Italy, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and the United States. Two miniature railways conducted visitors around the exhibition, and at its eastern extremity ­there was a new kind of zoological park, one in which the animals, separated from the spectators by invisible ditches, could be viewed in reconstructions of their natu­ral habitats, or what ­were supposed to be their natu­ral habitats: lions roared not from a savannah but from a rocky eminence, to the delight of the crowds (perhaps the lions’ feet hurt). Something on the order of three hundred thousand tickets w ­ ere sold in the first seven months of the exhibition. The exhibition’s one permanent structure, the Musée Permanent des Colonies, as it was then called, thus distinguishing it from the temporary pavilions of the Colonial Exhibition, was designed by the celebrated ar­ chitect Albert Laprade and is still considered a landmark of modern French architecture, especially for its revolutionary technique d’éclairage zénithale, lighting the space from above, instead of through win­dows. ­After the exhibition closed it was simply the Musée des Colonies. That name would eventually be changed, in deference to the inhabitants of ­those

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colonies, who had been accorded l­ imited French citizenship in 1946, to the Musée de la France d’Outre-­Mer, “Museum of Overseas France,” in keeping with the official alteration in that year of the name of the min­ istry in charge of the colonies. The colonies ­were no longer colonies—­and this was especially true of Algeria—­but “Overseas France.” The Musée des Colonies is decorated on the exterior by an im­mense, allegorical bas-­relief by Alfred Janniot and assistants, depicting spectac­ ular scenes from the French colonies throughout the world—­most fa­ mously, a hippopotamus hunt. It covers the entire facade and wraps around some distance onto the sides of the building. At about one thou­ sand meters square, it is, I believe, the largest bas-­relief in existence, a gi­ gantic fresco in stone, as it has been called. The interior of Laprade’s mu­ seum is finished entirely in colonial materials, design, and décor, including rhinoceros-­tusk door h ­ andles, gleaming tropical woods such as teak, and floor tiles of African and Arabic design. To bring in the light from above, the ­grand ceremonial hall, the Salle des Fêtes, is crowned by a gorgeous pagoda-­like lunette with a blue wave pattern, providing layers of indirect light that illuminate the hall evenly and without glare. The decoration of the walls bathed in this light is the original occasion for this chapter, which began as a footnote to Allegory and Vio­lence. It is a cycle of allegor­ ical paintings by Pierre Ducos de la Haille and his students from the École des Beaux-­Arts in the outmoded but demanding and resilient medium of true fresco, a technique, which by that date had been all but lost, for painting on wet plaster applied to the wall. The frescoes, usually referred to as “colonial allegories,” ­were executed between 1929 and 1931 and are on the subject of France in its relations with the continents of the globe: Eu­rope, Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and Amer­i­ca.3 The questions that first prompted me to write about the frescoes, which I had referred to but not seen when I wrote Allegory and Vio­lence, ­were ­simple but, to me, intriguing. How is a highly traditional, originally me­ dieval mode of expression, allegory, put into the ser­v ice of the ideology of global, colonial power in the modern age? What is at work in the al­ legorical repre­sen­ta­tion of the bodies of colonial subjects? A short time ­after t­ hese frescoes ­were made, from 1933 to 1939, Walter Benjamin was in Paris working in the Bibliothèque Nationale on the Arcades Proj­ect and arguing—­showing would perhaps be the better word—­that the sump­

Colonial Allegories in Paris  351

tuous, glassed-in arcades of nineteenth-­century Paris (many of which have ­today been restored), with their diminutive, elegant shops, are modern versions of older allegorical forms of expression. In the Paris ar­ cades, the luxury commodity replaces the allegorical sign. It was Benja­ min’s insight that the overdetermined character of the sign in medieval and Re­nais­sance allegory (the sign means what it says, but it also means something more, something mysterious that participates in the system as a ­whole) bears a striking resemblance to Marx’s famous analy­sis in Capital of the fetish of the commodity. Benjamin took this similarity to be more than accidental: it was historical. The ideology of princely power in Re­nais­sance allegory is given a total form in gigantic, allegorical works such as Albrecht Dürer’s Triumph of the Emperor Maximilian or Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te or Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In modern, cap­i­tal­ist socie­ties, however, ideology and capital power become entirely blended in the pre­sen­ta­tion of commodities in circumstances like ­those of the Paris arcades, more broadly, in what we call advertising, which in modern culture has taken over the psychological space that used to be occupied by iconography. Benjamin’s startling insight was that modern, com­ modity culture does not need to produce allegories in the old way, at vast expense and for a privileged few, b ­ ecause allegory has become incorpo­ rated in the total, economic structure of cap­i­tal­ist, commodity culture. Observing and buying luxury commodities in the Paris arcades af­ forded a sacramental experience of entering into a larger system of rich and mysterious meaning. In the demo­cratizing of the experience of al­ legory, coveting replaces reading and purchasing replaces interpretation. Seen in this light, the colonial allegories of Pierre Ducos de la Haille w ­ ere long out of date, even as they seemed to speak to France’s high destiny as an economic, colonial power. But one striking t­ hing about the alle­ gorical character of the commodity culture of which Benjamin speaks is its almost total occlusion of the body. In the colonial allegories, by contrast—­and I refer to Janniot’s ­great bas-­relief as well as to Ducos de la Haille’s frescoes—­the body is spectacularly on view. On this issue of the spectacle of the body, it is noteworthy that a­ ctual ­people, not just repre­sen­ta­tions of them, w ­ ere also on display for the crowds at the Colonial Exhibition, in cultural dioramas like ­those that ap­ peared in ­earlier exhibitions in Paris and London (one of which inspired

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W. S. Gilbert to write The Mikado), dioramas that ­were not so dif­fer­ent from the Paris arcades. ­T here ­were even preparations for a group of so-­ called cannibals—­anthropophages—to be viewed in the zoological park, near the roaring lions. But at the last moment t­ hese unfortunate p ­ eople, who had been transported to Paris from the South Pacific u ­ nder shock­ ingly false pretenses, ­were excluded from the Colonial Exhibition as in­ consistent with its higher view of humanity. Uninformed of their ferocity, and lacking any experience with anthropophagy, ­unless the Roman Cath­ olic mass may be counted (a g­ reat attraction for them was that they would be allowed to worship at the cathedral of Notre Dame, of which they had heard so much at school), they expected to perform their tradi­ tional dances a few times daily and practiced them for months on the long voyage to Marseilles. They w ­ ere promised warm clothing for the rest of the time, suitable for ­going around Paris and spending the pay they ­were also promised. They w ­ ere instead put on display in the Bois de Boulogne, where in cold, sometimes freezing weather, wearing only their traditional clothes, they ­were forced to perform all day long as subhuman savages, roaring and tearing at joints of raw meat. Some w ­ ere shipped off to zoos in Germany, to replace crocodiles that had died in transit from Egypt. But that is another story, a good one. Suffice it to say that the public display of exotic p ­ eoples in their cultural environments, weaving baskets and fashioning weapons, holding ceremonies, and so on, goes back to the mid-­nineteenth ­century in Paris, when anthropology was accorded rec­ ognition as a science and public education in this new science became the justification for what degenerated, in the Bois de Boulogne’s Jardin d’Acclimatation, into something like circus—­bad circus.4

' out of the Porte Dorée metro station t­oday, you see the first of two monuments that remain from the Colonial Exhibition: an impressive, gold statue on a marble plinth, the personification of “France Colonizing”—­La France colonisatrice. It is situated on a large traffic island at the entrance to the Bois de Vincennes. From ­under the plinth, which bears the ship symbol of Paris, a stream rushes forth to flow over a series of marble cascades and pools lined by palm trees (a surprising sight, in Paris), signifying the benefits of French culture flowing out to its W H E N YO U C O M E U P

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colonies on the oceans of the world. The statue itself is fashioned a­ fter the goddess Athena, complete with helm, shield, and serpent. She sup­ ports on one extended palm a small, winged daemon, or “genius of plenty,” who in turn holds a cornucopia. The allegorical message is expressed in iconographical language as traditional as that of Georges Récipon’s char­ iots on the ­Grand Palais: La France colonisatrice gathers material goods to herself from the ­whole world but returns benefits in greater abundance. The golden statue used to stand on the steps of the other monument of the Colonial Exhibition, which is a ­little farther on, to the left, just in­ side the Parc de Vincennes and set back a ­little from the Ave­nue Dau­ mesnil: the Colonial Museum itself, “the summit of colonial art,” as Dominique Jarrassé has described it.5 From photo­graphs, one can see why the statue was moved: its classical style is inconsistent with wilder and more exotic imagery of the museum, especially of the exterior. A broad staircase leads up to a portico, which extends the full length of the building, supported by slender, segmented columns that suggest the boles of palm trees, ­behind which, covering the facade and, as I mentioned, wrapping around onto the sides, is Janniot’s bas-­relief representing France and its colonies throughout the world but representing them in terms of the ­actual, raw materials they supplied to the metropolitan center. Around the main entry a personified France and her port cities appear, tradition­ ally draped, as in medieval allegory. But they are flanked by gigantic ele­ phants to the right and, to the left, the hippopotamus hunt with its vast, yawning animals pursued at a run by magnificent black African men with spears, while still more magnificent black African w ­ omen are engaged in vari­ous laborious tasks that put them in in­ter­est­ing postures. (Photo­ graphs show that Janniot worked with live models at the site, shielded from view by canvas curtains.) Such scenes are brilliantly juxtaposed to a background that is a map of the world, showing the French colonies and naming the raw materials (the words are actually carved in the stone) that ­those colonies supplied: gold and silver, of course, and ivory, of course, but also tin, lead, iron, manganese, coal, phosphates, graphite, leather, rubber, wood, cereals, silk, fruits, sugar cane, and cocoa. “While the public expected dreamlike exoticism,” Jarrassé writes, “it was necessary also to show it an empire that works, that produces goods, and that provides a profit on France’s investment, . . . ​but ­there must be

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no economic benefit to France without something returned, without a social gain for the colonized and, at the same time, a recognition of the indigenous culture of the colonized.” 6 That second gain—­recognition of the indigenous cultures—­was expressed in the pavilions and the co­ lonial museum itself, which ­were like allegorical moments from The Faerie Queene: picturesque, exotic, and teratological. But for the general public, and for most of the politicians of the Third Republic, the first gain was far more impor­tant. It was the shining forth (rayonnement) to the “inferior” ­peoples of the globe—so they ­were called in con­temporary newspaper accounts—of Eu­ro­pean, Enlightenment culture. The idea goes back to one of the ­great liberal figures of the Third Republic, Jules Ferry, who promoted colonialism in an 1885 speech to the National Assembly—in Tunisia, Madagascar, Congo, and Tonkin (in Southeast Asia)—as a moral proj­ect: “The superior races have the duty to civilize the inferior races.”7 This is the meaning of the racist bas-­reliefs and ori­ entalist frescoes of the colonial museum. As we pass from outside to inside, the pillaging of raw materials from ­these inferior races is revealed to be the conferring of pro­gress and even of history. While Alfred Janniot’s bas-­relief for the Musée des Colonies empha­ sized the material benefits that France’s colonies brought it, the colonial frescoes in the G ­ reat Hall ­were to emphasize the spiritual and cultural benefits France brought to its colonies, a structure familiar from the pal­ aces, chateaus, and enclosed gardens of medieval French allegory or the ­houses and ­castles of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The princi­ple is a classically allegorical one. As with the Sileni mentioned by Alcibiades in the Symposium and explicated by Erasmus, an allegory is like an ugly statue of the satyr Silenus, which when opened reveals a beautiful god within. T ­ here is meant to be a sharp contrast in sense, almost a reversal, between exo­ teric display and esoteric disclosure, between what anyone may observe on the facade of this building without and what the ­adept ­w ill see on the interior walls, in the protected spaces of the building’s penetralia. We ­shall see that the counter­parts in Pierre Ducos de la Haille’s frescoes to t­ hose raw materials on Janniot’s bas-­relief are the sails of the French trading ships, the caravels, bringing the light of French civilization to ­every corner of the globe.

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Another feature typical of allegory appears on the west exterior wall of the museum, around to the left as one ­faces the building, where the bas-­ relief ends. It is a roll of 160 names of the heroes of the “colonial epic”—­ l’épopée coloniale—­who are thanked in language that recalls the inscrip­ tion over the Pantheon, where France’s greatest heroes rest, making this building a sort of colonial pantheon: “A thankful France to her sons, who have extended the empire of her genius and made her name to be adored beyond the seas” (A ses fils qui ont étendu l’empire de son génie et fait aimer son nom au delà des mers, la France reconnaissante). Many such lists appear in allegorical works, for example, in the dungeon of the House of Pride in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which contains all the famous con­ querors of history, “Like carkases of beasts in butchers stall”: All t­ hese together in one heape w ­ ere throwne, Like carkases of beasts in butcher’s stall. And in another corner wide ­were strowne The antique ruines of the Romaines fall: ­Great Romulus the Grandsyre of them all, Proud Tarquin, and too lordly Lentulus, Stout Scipio, and the stubborne Hanniball, Ambitious Sylla, and sterne Marius, High Caesar, ­great Pompey, and fierce Antonius. FQ I.v.49

One is startled to see that this list of heroes from this épopée coloniale begins with Godefroy de Bouillon, 1058–1100, the leader of the first cru­ sade, and that it contains Saint Louis, that addict of crusading, as well. Names more familiar to France’s colonies follow, among them Cartier, Champlain, Richelieu, Colbert (for the reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the navy ­under Louis XIV), Talon, Frontenac, Montcalm, de la Vérendreye, Tallyrand, and on to the modern generals, explorers, scientists, colonial administrators, ethnographers, doctors, and engineers, including, of course, Ferdinand de Lesseps, for the “piercing” of the Suez Canal. ­There is one ­woman, Anna Marie Javoukey, 1779–1851, teacher and renderer of unspecified “assis­ tance” to the colonies. I w ­ ill confess to being thrilled at this roll call of famous and not-­so-­famous names marching down the centuries from the

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­ iddle Ages to modern times, punctuated with such evocative place M names: Brazzaville, Djibouti, Western Sahara, the kingdom of Tonkin, Mauritius, Niger, Dahomey, Tunesia, Melanesia, Tombouctou in the Sudan. With the intense traffic at one’s back, peering through an ugly fence over litter entangled in the ragged tree branches, one can still ex­ perience the intoxication of the day, the feeling of being embarked on a high enterprise that began almost with the origin of France itself, leading humanity into the f­ uture. It feels as if the dream of globalization, of uni­ versal harmony amid the greatest pos­si­ble diversity, has its origin ­here.

' of Pierre Ducos de la Haille’s frescoes in the ­Great Hall shows France, with a muscular Eu­rope in a toga beside her, holding the dove of peace and receiving tribute from the continents of the globe in return for French enlightenment, French liberty, and French cultural forms. Asia and Africa r­ ide ­toward France on their respective species of elephant, while Polynesia and Amer­i­ca are borne on fabulous sea h ­ orses with webbed front feet and serpentine tails, rearing from the waves. Polynesia is a voluptuous South Seas odalisque, reclining on her steed, her black curling tresses cascading about her. Amer­i­ca’s hair is cut in a short, sensible bob, and she seems to head t­ oward Polynesia instead of France, in a scene of inadvertent sexual threat, brandishing a skyscraper that rises from her lap. Ducos de la Haille was taken to task about that skyscraper, which seemed to suggest, among other t­ hings, that Man­ hattan is or ever was a colony of France. But the artist was immovable, and rightly so. France did have a remarkable—­and comparatively bloodless—­colonial history in North Amer­i­ca, and Manhattan symbol­ izes the height of North American civilization. Manhattan is also the symbol of the f­ uture. The skyscraper articulates a secondary theme in­ herent to the tradition of allegories of the continents, especially that of Giambattista Tiepolo, in Würzbug: the temporal narrative of h ­ uman pro­ gress from earth-­bound primitivism to the highest stage of civilization, which touches the sky with its buildings and, like the Eiffel Tower, sends electronic signals around the planet. On the other walls of the Salle des Fêtes are beautiful genre scenes, in­ terspersed with personifications (Commerce, Arts and Industry, and so T H E P R I N C I PA L TA B L E AU

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on), in which the exotic ­peoples of the French colonies in Indochina, Af­ rica, and Polynesia receive the benefits of French culture and enlighten­ ment. ­There are scenes of surveying in Southeast Asia, of medical science being imparted to the p ­ eople of Polynesia, of archeologists at work, of Chinese laborers loading ships, and of religion being taught to black Af­ ricans by a missionary who ­frees them from their chains, a deft confla­ tion of manumission from literal slavery and from the spiritual abjection of idolatry. The heroic repre­sen­ta­tions of the virtues, interspersed throughout the scenes from the colonies, are ­there to show what makes the colonial proj­ect pos­si­ble: Liberty, Justice, L­ abor, and Culture. Justice with her Her­ culean arms (shades of the Herculean Artegal) might have been better termed “Enforcement.” Following iconographic tradition, she is blind­ folded and holds a sword in one hand, although its point is planted in the earth, and she has no balances, which might have implied a judicious weighing of the claims of the colonial other. Instead, she grasps by the throat a huge python, the body of which arches over her shoulder and winds around her back to grasp the sword with its tail. The wisdom of the serpent urges restraint but not a fair hearing. B ­ ehind her is a huge American buffalo; and ­behind it, filling the background as they come over the horizon on a limitless sea, are the billowing sails of the French caravels. Only gradually does one notice that ­these beautiful sails are every­ where in the background, coming ­toward us from all directions on a continuous blue ocean encircling the pictorial space. T ­ hose sails on the ocean are the freest, the most delightful part of the design, promising re­ lease from the crowded jungles and docks of the colonial scenes into blue open spaces beyond. But the sails are all coming t­ oward us, as if the open spaces that attract us ­were being folded into the colonial allegories from which we have been promised a temporary, aesthetic escape. Where do they come from? Obviously, from France. But I am unable to say how many times I had visited the Salle des Fêtes before I noticed that, in the principal tableau of France and the continents, the dove of peace that France holds is multiplied in the fo­liage above her into many doves and that ­these are implicitly transformed into the sailing ships on the ocean ­behind her. Thus, in Ducos de la Haille’s iconographical design, the dove

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that France holds in her hand as an offering of peace multiplies and meta­ morphoses into all the ships we see on the ocean that encircles the globe.

' Ducos de la Haille’s genre scenes are beautiful, which they are. Also, it is pleasant to watch o ­ thers d ­ oing physical l­ abor one does not have to do oneself. But ­those scenes are also disturbing ­because, in a mys­ terious sense, all the happy bodies we see feel as if they are imprisoned. Such repre­sen­ta­tions of the body are often governed by what in Allegory and Vio­lence I called capture, the princi­ple under­lying personification. Al­ legorical capture gives us the sense that a living body, such as that of Fran­ cesca da Rimini in Dante’s Inferno, has been confined to an alien struc­ ture of meaning, one in which the ­human person has been reduced to performing the function of a sign in a system of signs—or partly so. Dante’s genius as an allegorical poet is in his ability to have characters re­ sisting this reduction and speaking against it, so that the reduction is never complete but is always a strug­gle. His characters are like caryatids that push upward against the im­mense weight of the meaning that is bearing down on them and of which they are the captive signifiers. But in its strug­gle to assert itself against an overbearing meaning, this hu­ manity is thrown into sharper relief than it would be ­were it not ­under such hostile pressure. On the other hand, the meaning exerting this pres­ sure is also thrown into relief ­because it is not static signification but meaning at work, meaning bearing down against a contrary force, which is ­human subversion. The vio­lence is directed both ways, as in an agon, a contest, each contestant striving to master and transform the other. Al­ though meaning in Dante’s Commedia is less readable than meaning is in the simpler kind of allegory that follows in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, where characters bear their labels unresistingly, such meaning is deepened by the strug­gle to assert itself against a humanity that is other with re­spect to it and that subverts it. The allegory shines ­because of this vio­lence, not in spite of it. The analy­sis I have just given of the strug­gle in the allegorical personi­ fication between meaning and humanity is of assistance in under­ standing the surging force of ­human and animal bodies in the colonial allegories of the Musée des Colonies. In the first place, the meaning of a I S A I D T H AT

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body is the work it can do: loading ships, digging mines, bearing loads. In the second place, as we saw when we observed the similarity between the allegorical sign and the commodity, the meaning of a body is its con­ tribution to the global system in which material goods are exchanged for cultural forms—­exchanged at a distance. The subversion of this meaning often is seen in the sexual allure of the bodies portrayed and the equally incidental allure of the exotic worlds in which ­those bodies live, appar­ ently so joyously and freely. We see the athletic, working breasts and la­ boring torsos of dark-­skinned ­people engaged in such energetic tasks as a hippopotamus hunt or riding on elephants or bearing goods in a pro­ cession or, as I said, loading ships and digging mines. Anticipating the global tourism industry and especially tourism of the kind described in Michel Houllebecq’s Platforme, we want to enter an exotic world of imag­ inary freedoms with the exotic bodies that live ­there. We do not want to bring them home with us as servants or to s­ ettle them in the suburbs of our cities. We want them to work where they are, fulfilling the colonial allegory while we stay at home to receive what they produce. But we also want to go where they are so they can put down their work for our sake, long enough to show us their world and themselves. I am not speaking just of what passes through the fantasies of the viewer of ­these allegories, although I am certainly speaking of that. I am also speaking of how the allegories are actually made and of what inspires the makers, as Dante was inspired by the story of Francesca da Rimini’s adultery, creating a character who is sexually attractive to us ­because his own creation was to him. So it is with the illustrators, paint­ers, and sculptors of the Colo­ nial Exhibition: they have an allegorical task to fulfill, but they also want to make alluring art; and this allure, which draws on our proclivity to sexual fantasies and unproductive travel, is subversive of the global ide­ ological scheme that the colonial allegories ­were expected to promote.

' of the Colonial Exhibition, performed by the president of France, Gaston Dommergue, took place on May 6, 1931, in the ceremonial hall of the Museum of the Colonies. The principal ha­ rangue was delivered by the director of the colonial exhibition, one of the g­ reat architects of France’s colonial adventure, Louis Hubert Gonsalve T HE FOR M AL OPENING

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Lyautey, Maréshal de France, resplendent in full marshal’s uniform, com­ plete with kepi, a visual reminder of what the exhibition was supposed to help the French forget: the generals of the ­Great War. Lyautey had served much of the war in Morocco, not on the Western Front, but he was minister of war in 1916–18. 8 To say the least, Lyautey was a complicated figure, a model, in part, for Marcel Proust’s homosexual reactionary, the Baron de Charlus. Educated at the elite École Polytechnique and the still more elite École Militaire de Saint-­Cyr (Charles de Gaulle would gradu­ate in 1912), Lyautey was a Catholic conservative and a monarchist—­ convictions that gave him, as he recognized, a spontaneous sympathy with and understanding of the deeply religious and hierarchical character of Arab culture of the day. But in contrast with his conservative tenden­ cies, Lyautey was prob­ably pro-­Dreyfus, or he was at least contemptuous of the populist anti-­Semitism whipped up by the anti-­Dreyfussards; and he was certainly, as I said, homosexual and not especially secretive about it. In a still more striking departure from the attitudes of many of his class and convictions, Lyautey translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf so the French could see what the Führer had in store for them (Hitler tried to block its publication). Lyautey acquired deep knowledge and appreciation of the colonized cultures in which he served for most of his c­ areer, not only that of Muslim North Africa, in par­tic­u­lar Morocco, where he was interred for a time, in Rabat, before being brought to the Invalides. But he was not lacking in ruthlessness ­either, as we ­shall see. Lyautey’s opening address at the Colonial Exhibition was the perfect expression of the dream of worldwide French empire. The purpose of the exhibition, he said, is to show “that t­ here are for our civilization other fields of b ­ attle, that the na­ tions of the twentieth c­ entury can now rival one another not in the quest for military domination but in the works of peace and of pro­gress.” 9 Another reason to hold the Colonial Exhibition in east Paris, a reason Lyautey acknowledged only in private, was that the working-­class pop­ ulace of east Paris was voting for the communists. (The communists and the surrealists nobly joined forces to mount a sparsely attended counter­ exhibition on the evils of colonialism.) The Colonial Exhibition would be a way of enlisting the working classes’ patriotic sympathy for the colo­ nial proj­ect and their material interest in it. Lyautey had initially opposed the location of the Colonial Exhibition in east Paris for the reasons we

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have seen: east Paris is a place of no honor, and west Paris is where the Third Republic had held its g­ reat exhibitions of the past, leaving in their wake, so to speak, the Eiffel Tower and the palaces on the Champs-­Elysées. But once the decision was taken for east Paris, Lyautey spoke of the proj­ect in a private letter with the enthusiasm of a civil engineer, which is what he was by training: “Is not the east of Paris a region of which it is com­ monly said that it is lost to communism? It may be worthwhile to culti­ vate our new, green shoots of colonialism [nos pousses coloniales] in the midst of this populist area. . . . ​I rejoice, for my part, to behold this popu­ lation and to enter into discussion with it [de voir cette population et de causer avec elle]. I am convinced that the exposition could be a ­great influence for social peace in this region of Paris.”10 Lyautey goes on in this letter to say that he is fired with the ambition to bring about this “social peace” by the “Haussmanization” of the area in a manner that would be “at once up-­to-­date and total,” treating the re­ gion as a “tabula rasa.”11 He had done so before with the Moroccan cap­ ital, Rabat, razing its labyrinthine Souk and laying the ave­nues out in the form of a modern French city. The term Haussmanization refers to the later-­ nineteenth-­century transformation of the Paris of the Second Empire by Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, who bulldozed the medieval build­ ings, narrow streets, and old parishes of the city to make room for the ­grand ave­nues that not only beautified Paris and let in the light but also made it pos­si­ble for troops to be transported rapidly from one neighbor­ hood to another and for artillery to have a clear field of fire. It was accom­ plished at enormous cost to the working classes, many of whom ­were forced out of the city to the east, where Lyautey now proposed to assist them by means of another displacement. As the reference to “social peace” makes clear, the authorities did not forget that public unrest and, occa­ sionally, full-­scale insurrection come to Paris from the east. I said that the Colonial Exhibition was intended to assert a defining role for the Third Republic ­after the disaster of the ­Great War. But this role was not new. The achievements of the Third Republic as a colonial power over the nearly seventy years of its existence, in the exploration, conquest, and administration of very distant lands and ­peoples, ­were determined and impressive. It was not called “the conquering republic” for nothing. By the 1930s, to judge by the sheer extent of the country’s territorial

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possessions, France had reached its apogee as a colonial power. Nothing seemed more certain than that it would now and in ­f uture go from strength to strength, consolidating its access to the raw materials and huge markets within its vast territories by conferring on the popula­ tions resident in t­ hose territories—­populations outnumbering by many times that of France itself—­the benefits of French law, language, and cul­ ture and at length of ­limited French citizenship. Colonization would drive the transformation of France from what was still largely an agri­ cultural society (a major reason for the military defeats it had suffered at Germany’s hands) into a modern, industrial economy operating on a global scale. Had it not already realized the dream of the Emperor Charles V—­the Holy Roman Emperor during Spain’s conquest of Mexico and Peru—of commanding an empire on which the sun never set? It was to set sooner than anyone at the time could imagine. Within three de­cades, a­ fter another world war brought down the Third Republic and the long-­drawn-­out agonies of Indochina and Algeria brought down the Fourth, the French dream of an empire lay in ruins. Colonialism was condemned by intellectuals on the po­liti­cal left, following Franz Fanon and Jean Paul Sartre, as a long series of rapacious thefts and crimes against humanity, which is to be expected in the early stages of global class strug­gle and the vindication of international communism, of which the Indochinese, Algerian, and Cuban revolutions ­were models. This was de­ lusional but not so delusional as the dream of the po­liti­cal right, the same one that animated the Colonial Exhibition: that it would be pos­si­ble to make loyal French subjects out of colonial subjects, despite the impos­ sibility of ever giving them more than ­limited citizenship if France itself was to survive. As Raymond Aron saw, ­there could never be a France outre-­mer, a France beyond the seas, of any size or significance. The in­de­ pen­dence of the former colonies was therefore both desirable and inevi­ table, although likely to be a catastrophe for them, as has proven to be true. When the dream of France beyond the seas lay in ruins, it left in its wake the intractable prob­lems associated with the second and third gen­ erations of immigrants from the colonies, crowded into the desperate, periodically incendiary high-­r ise suburbs surrounding the cities: the bandes de misère, or “rings of misery,” as they are called. France beyond the seas had imploded. Almost half a c­ entury ­later, France’s colonial history

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is still a subject of b ­ itter debate, and the social prob­lems left ­behind by that history (like the Hegelian restes or “leftovers” of Glas) are greater now than they ­were immediately ­after the collapse. And speaking of les restes, the mood in the banlieue is reflected in the words of the rapper N.A.P.: “Écoute l’histoire de Renoi, Rabza, qui ont grandi dans tes poubelles” (Hear the story of Kalb [Black] and Bara [Arab], who grew up in your gar­ bage cans).12

' of the ideology of the colonial proj­ect, the his­ tory of the Colonial Museum, the building generally referred to now as the Palais de la Porte Dorée, is instructive to follow. In 1960, at the begin­ ning of the Fifth Republic and at the instigation of President de Gaulle’s minister of culture, André Malraux, the Colonial Museum became the Musée Nationale des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. Making a trenchant, if not easily tenable, distinction, Malraux took the African and Oceanic col­ lections from the Louvre and sent t­ hose of chiefly ethnographic interest to the Musée de l’Homme at the Trocadéro, while selecting for the new museum works that merited analy­sis in the aesthetic language of abstract forms and plastic values and that seemed, in the light of such analy­sis, to rise above the primitive circumstances of their production to achieve uni­ versal value. With Algerian in­de­pen­dence, the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and the return of General de Gaulle, a museum of the colonies hardly went with the spirit of the times. But the material loss of France’s colonial possessions could now be reconceptualized as an aesthetic gain for the cultural heritage of humankind. Visitors to the museum w ­ ere in­ structed in the circumstances of the works’ origins in Polynesia and Af­ rica, as they w ­ ere also in the history of French colonialism, which was still presented in a positive light. They w ­ ere also informed of the influ­ ence of t­ hese works on the ­great modern artists, from Gauguin to Gia­ cometti and Picasso.13 In contrast with the logic of the frescoes by Pierre Ducos de la Haille that visitors now walked past on their way to see the works of African and Oceanic art, cultural forms ­were traveling in the opposite direction, like the ivory, manganese, and tin of an earlier age. Was this too not a new kind of colonialism? In any event, the museum, like the art from Gauguin (a notable allegorist in one of his most ambitious ­A F T E R T H E C O L L A P S E

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paintings), Giacometti, and Picasso, worked just the way allegory does, by capturing alien cultural forms within a new framework that cultivates mystery, suggesting that a kind of meaning, cloudy and obscure, like a magnetic field, stretches out from the material surface of the work. As was to be expected, the museum fell into greater obscurity and dis­ approval ­after 1968. But its end was assured only ­later, when a fever pitch of indignation was reached on March  15, 1990, in a manifesto pub­ lished in the left-­w ing newspaper Libération, signed by nearly fifty emi­ nent artists, authors, and anthropologists, including Michel Leiris, Mau­ rice Blanchot, Yves Bonnefoy, Hélène Cixous, Henri Cartier-­Bresson, Jean-­François Lyotard, Philippe Lacou-­Labarthe, and Jean-­Pierre Ver­ nant, attacking the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens, as it was also called, for sequestering the so-­called primitive arts in east Paris—­a place, as we have seen, of no honor—­and urging their return to the Louvre. The author of this document was the fascinating, shadowy figure of the late Jacques Kerchache (who died in 2001), a ­great collector and champion of “primitive” or “First ­Peoples’ ” arts (the first term is un­ intentionally derogatory, the second almost meaningless). Kerchache had been jailed in Africa for attempting to export art illegally, and that was just one of the swashbuckling adventures he made no attempt to conceal. Indeed, he gloried in what was intended to be an unflattering characterization of him as “the French Indiana Jones.” Kerchache was a personal friend of the French president Jacques Chirac, in whom he found a fellow enthusiast for primitive arts, and he used his influence with the president to discredit the ethnologists at the Musée de l’Homme, whose scholarly concerns—­w ith provenance, culture, ritual context, and the like, and of course publication—he regarded as a distraction from the pure aesthetic values embodied in the masterpieces of primi­ tive art. This is the man who was the animating force of a new museum of primitive arts to replace both the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens: the Musée du Quai Branly, the theater of which is devoted to his name. Kerchache was the purest expression of André Malraux’s noble intention to treat at least some of the religious artifacts of Africa and Oceania as being as worthy of veneration as the masterpieces of Eu­ro­pean art. He was also the purest expression of the

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confusions into which an unhistorical, decontextualized aestheticism can lead. For example, one of the more in­ter­est­ing tendencies of ­those in the de­ bate who ­favor the aesthetic in­de­pen­dence of the works of art from their cultural and ritual contexts is to transfer ­human qualities and rights from the makers of the works of art to the works of art themselves and to be­ come indignant on behalf of ­those works. ­These ­great masterpieces have been subjected, b ­ ecause of racist aggression against them, to a humili­ ating displacement from the Louvre, their rightful home, to the no­ whereland of east Paris. I do not exclude myself from t­ hose who take very ­great plea­sure in contemplating t­ hese works aesthetically—as no doubt ethnographers do. Even so, it is advisable to be aware of the danger of attributing to the works ­human qualities—­and, more to the point, ­human rights—­that allow ­those works to be substituted symbolically for real ­people. The height of absurdity is reached when the manifesto in Libération proclaims, “Masterpieces throughout the world are ­free and equal.”14 We saw that in 1930, at the Colonial Exhibition, a­ ctual persons ­were being presented allegorically, as works of art. Now, in 1990, the rights of per­ sons w ­ ere being accorded to works of art: masterpieces are born f­ ree and equal. A de­cade ­later, on April 13, 2000, President Chirac, standing in the pavillon des Sessions of the Louvre, would announce the “return” to this place of highest prestige of one hundred especially superb works of “primary” art, curated by Jacques Kerkache. Chirac acknowledges that the vari­ous qualifiers used over time—­primary, primordial, primitive—­ have meaning only from our point of view and, what is worse, deny history itself to the ­people whose arts ­these are—as we have seen Hegel deny history to Africans.15 The Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and the Musée de l’Homme at the Trocadéro ­were closed (in the latter case, not without a strug­gle) and a new museum planned in which the works could be displayed in the spirit of the exhibition at the pavillon des Sessions.16

' Africains et Océaniens closed officially in 2003. The works of African and Oceanic art ­were removed to a “work site” or T H E M U S É E D E S A RT S

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chantier du musée under­ground in the thirteenth arrondissement, near the Bibliothèque Nationale, for elaborate restoration and cata­loguing and in preparation for their transfer to a new museum, the existence of which I first learned in the winter of 2004, during a riverside walk on a winter night in west Paris on the Quai Branly. Meditating at the time on Pierre Ducos de la Haille’s frescoes, and only vaguely wondering what became of the works of African and Oceanic art that used to be in the same building, I was startled to come on a large work site with signs advertising a museum of primitive arts, legible in the lights blinking overhead from the Eiffel Tower. But the building that ­housed the Musée des Arts Afric­ ains et Océaniens remained open, u ­ nder the name the Palais de la Porte Dorée or, more simply, Aquar­ium, for that is what it also was from the beginning, on its lower level, where fish species from the colonies ­were displayed—­plus some crocodiles. I heard that some of the staff referred to the intellectual confusion resulting from attempts to define the mu­ seum’s mission as the problème des crocodiles. The association of the Palais with France’s colonial past continues to make it a po­liti­cal football. During France’s intense bid for the Olympics, the ­Great Hall held displays cele­ brating French athletes—­many of whom are descended from former co­ lonials, a point not missed in the displays—­and ­there ­were plans, since shelved, for an elite sports fa­cil­i­ty to be built in the Bois de Vincennes. To honor Albert Laprade’s innovations, the Palais was briefly destined to be a museum of modern architecture—­long enough for the books to be brought into the bookstore and then carted away. In January 2007, a­ fter an elaborate architectural redesign of the interior (not all of it happy), the Palais opened as the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, a proj­ect that Jacques Chirac had envisaged since his reelection in 2002 and that he announced in 2004. Not only do the exhibits in the Cité de l’Immigration celebrate the contributions of immigrants to French culture: they practi­ cally assert that immigrants—­very, very broadly defined for the purpose— are the creators of French culture in its totality. The model of rayonnement in the frescoes in the G ­ reat Hall below the Cité de l’Immigration has been reversed: France is now a destination for oppressed ­peoples around the world (none of whom have been oppressed by the French, of course), who bring cultural enlightenment with them. Even that g­ reat de­ finer and utterly ruthless savior of Re­nais­sance France, Catherine de’

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Medici, was an immigrant, ­after all. While it is true that ­these very favor­ able repre­sen­ta­tions of France’s treatment of foreigners do not forget what the Vichy government—­and the French who collaborated with it—­did to the Jews in World War II, it is as if the dark side of French colonialism never occurred, an astonishing omission in that place. In this re­spect, for all its benevolent inclusiveness, or ­because of it, the Cité de l’Immigration may be as ideologically blind as the Colonial Exhibition itself. As a cul­ tural institution it remains a po­liti­cal statement to a degree that is unusual even in France. It is no doubt partly for this reason that the f­ uture of the Cité de l’Immigration was uncertain ­under President Sarkozy, who had rather dif­fer­ent ideas about the contribution of immigrants to French cul­ ture. But two presidents l­ater, in 2018, the Cité de l’Immigration is still ­there in the Palais de la Porte Dorée, and, I am happy to say, a­ fter reviewing the mission statements and programs, the dark clouds that w ­ ere gath­ ering over the museum in 2009 have been dispelled. I am also happy to say that the Tropical Aquar­ium, a splendid resource for school groups, is still t­ here under­ground, with two new albino alligators. Allegorize that! ­T here is then another story to be told about the works of African and Oceanic art that ­were removed from the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and from the Musée de l’Homme for eventual inclusion—­ downstream—in the new museum, which opened in June 2006. In the manner of French presidents, the new museum is Jacques Chirac’s mon­ ument to his presidency, as the Pompidou Center is to Georges Pompidou and the National Library to François Mittérand. This is the sumptuous and prudently named Musée du Quai Branly (not a word about “primi­ tivism” or “First P­ eoples”), an extraordinary building designed by France’s most famous architect, Jean Nouvel, whose other ­great work along the Seine is the Institut du Monde Arabe. The Musée du Quai Branly is no less an ideological statement than was the Musée des Colonies, even if the pas­ sage of time has yet fully to unveil the extent to which this is so. But h ­ ere, at the end of this story, as a way of rounding it off, we may note the sym­ bolic location of the Musée du Quai Branly far downstream from the Bois de Vincennes, in west Paris, ­under the Eiffel Tower, where, as we saw at the outset, luxury and official display are at home.

Chapter 16

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Courtesy and the Graces

who adores Spenser for The Faerie Queene and regrets his early death in 1599 in his midforties w ­ ill be unfamiliar with William Camden’s account of his funeral, presumably a sumptuous one, paid for as it was by the young Earl of Essex, himself destined to pass from this world only two years ­later, at the executioner’s block. As the hearse made its way to Westminster Abbey, the most honored place of interment, it was attended by the poets of the day, whose mournful elegies, and the goose-­quill pens with which they wrote them, w ­ ere thrown into the tomb. The poet was laid to rest near Geoffrey Chaucer, in what would l­ ater be famed, a­ fter more poets w ­ ere laid in the vicinity, “Poets’ Corner.”1 Spenser had called Chaucer the “well of En­glish undefyled,” that is, the pure spring and source of our speech, who is worthy, therefore, to be placed on “Fames eternall beadroll” (FQ IV.ii.32). But Chaucer was buried in the abbey as clerk of the king’s works, having leased contiguous apartments, and no mention of his poetry appeared on his grave for a c­ entury and a half, around the time of Spenser’s birth.2 The phrase “well of En­glish undefyled,” as accurate as it is well known, has tended to obscure what Spenser also says of Chaucer in the same place, which accords less well with our modern image of the author of The Canterbury Tales: that he wrote “with warlike numbers and Heroicke sound” (IV.ii.32). That, of course, is the Chaucer of “The Knight’s Tale,” which has some bloody fighting in it, and above all the Chaucer of Troilus and Criseyde, despite its being a love story. With the ­great achieve­ ment of the Troilus Chaucer placed himself in the tradition of the “­matter NO ONE

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of Troy” and in the line of heroic poets descending from Homer. It is a line to which Spenser felt he belonged, as indeed he did and as many ­people felt he did, even if in our eyes his achievement is wider, more ex­ perimental, more philosophical, more speculative, more mythopoeic, more allegorical, more, as we say, “postmodern” than conventional poems in the epic tradition. He is, for example, the poet of what he terms—­that is, he uses the word in a technical sense, as a fundamental concept to build on—­courtesy. This is a word now largely out of fashion, at least in literary critical circles, as courtliness and courts are out of fashion. James Joyce’s description of one of his teachers, ­Father John Conmee, who appears in the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, as “a bland and courtly humanist” is often taken to be crueler than actually intended.3 F­ ather Conmee’s courtliness and humanism—­ and Spenser does associate humanist erudition with courtliness—­meant that he w ­ asn’t brutal and in par­tic­u­lar that he saved the young Joyce from canings. I wish us to preserve this understanding of courtliness—­a sense obvious enough in the royal courts of ­England and France, a­ fter civil wars in both countries—as an alternative to vio­ lence. This is the po­liti­cal sense of the word courtesy and of the thought of courtesy. Remembering that Book Six of The Faerie Queene comes ­after Book Five, we may include violent discipline, too, such as is practiced first in the school and then in the state, the brutality of the former inuring leaders to brutality in the latter. For the moment, in order to see where the thinking of Spenser’s sixth book is tending, we might perhaps translate his word courtliness with our more commonly used words civilized, civil, and polite, especially as t­ hese are employed in France for basic social decency, which I have on more than one occasion observed to be enforced by immediate and strongly expressed disapproval of uncivil be­hav­ior. The term is closely associated with citoyen, “citizen,” and so with the French state since the Revolution. To show civilité and politesse to all—­including strangers who address you in the street, for what­ever reason, if their approach is civil—is almost a po­liti­cal virtue. In the United States we tend to use the word nice, which is much further from Spenser’s sense of courtesy, and, unlike la civilité, nice­ ness does not carry with it the strong sense of a common and required standard of be­hav­ior. It is gracious to be nice, or a supervenient grace—to

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use C. S. Lewis’s entertaining phrase for how we moderns see courtesy— but it is not a necessity. If we take into account modern French civility and politeness—­both words having their roots in the city as a po­liti­cal entity—­and then add to it something like culture in the anthropological sense of that term, we draw closer to what Spenser means by that rich word courtesy. Culture in the an­ thropological sense may be described as the unconscious coding of values in everyday be­hav­ior, including eating, as in Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked, the relevance of which to Spenser’s book on courtesy may be seen in the original title, Le cru et le cuit. That emblematic opposite of courtesy, the knight Crudor—­“raw, bloody, uncooked”—­and the uncivil Briana (“a prouder Lady liveth none” [FQ VI.i.14]) are socially disciplined by Calidore in the opening episode of the book. Unlike Lady Munera, Briana is not dismembered by the instrument of law. She is “overcome with infinite affect / For his [Calidore’s] exceeding courtesie, that pearst / Her stubborne hart with inward deepe effect” (VI.i.45). Spenser’s “Legend of Sir Calidore or of Courtesie” is an effort to think about the unconscious grounds of ­human aggregation, following hard upon the effort—­not so successful in most views—to think about the conscious grounds of ­human aggregation in “The Legend of Artegal or of Justice.” The name Artegal contains the scales of justice in it, and notwithstanding the episode of the ­giant with the scales, it represents an approach to ­human society as calculatedly balanced and fair treatment ­under natu­ral law, en­ forced by righ­teous and unrestrained ­legal vio­lence. The name Calidore, however, means something like “golden gift” or “golden giving” or even, if we make a sentence from it, “giving is golden.” 4 But what is given, and what is received? The Graces as we see them in the culminating episode of the book are certainly, that is, iconographically and historically, about giving and gifts, “That good should from us goe, then come in greater store” (FQ VI.x.24). Good comes in greater store to us ­because in social life, in so­ ciety, we always receive more benefits than we can ever return.5 Courtesy for Spenser is about the gift, another socio-­anthropological category, made famous in Marcel Mauss’s classic work Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques (1925),6 “An essay on the gift: the form and logic of exchange in archaic socie­ties.” ­Every word of that title, including, emphatically, the word essay, could be the source of a study of Book Six of The Faerie Queene. Book Six is an essay in Spenserian social theory.

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A good society, a just society, is in itself a kind of gift, for if we are born into it, we have done nothing to earn it and must be grateful. Social life transcends the scales of justice, that image of equal apportionment, ­because, strangely, a good society gives more to each of its members than the sum of what each of its members contributes. T ­ here is an unexplained surplus of giving. But to repeat our question, what is given and what is received? We may find a partial answer in the Earl of Essex’s gift to Ed­ mund Spenser: the gift of posthumous fame, of dignity, and of courtly, which is to say social, recognition. ­Until the obsequies in Paris for Victor Hugo just shy of three centuries ­later, in 1885, Spenser’s funeral was perhaps the most impressive occa­ sion on which a Eu­ro­pean nation marked the passing from this world of its national poet—­for that is what Spenser had become, ­England’s national poet. Thomas Dekker ­imagined Spenser seated on the Fortunate Isles, at Chaucer’s right hand; and Thomas Nashe called Spenser “the Virgil of ­England.” But it was Milton’s schoolmaster, Alexander Gill, who said it in the fewest words when he called Spenser Homerus noster, “our Homer.”7 No poet of the modern world is more saturated in Homer than Spenser is, and yet no poet is more unlike him. Gill’s phrase is an assurance that ­there had indeed occurred in E ­ ngland a Re­nais­sance of antiquity. How ­else could one be sure of the fact, without an epic poem to prove it? And yet one is tempted to hear the stress on noster, “ours,” to emphasize dif­ ference from, rather than similarity to. Art itself is a kind of gift but a hard one to give. The throwing of the pens into the grave is a heartwarming gesture: its very naivety is touching. I think of them fluttering “downward to darkness,” as if plucked from the extended wings of song. But is ­there a countermovement upward, an es­ cape from this tomb into another place, as if the pens became wings again? If so, we may think of Spenser as being buried somewhere ­else, transcen­ dentally buried as it w ­ ere, in his Fairy Land, where t­ here are no other tombs. But the plumes falling into the grave call to mind Spenser’s locution “mine afflicted stile” (FQ I.proem.1). Gloriana is the “argument” of Spenser’s “afflicted stile,” literally, his thrown-­down pen. We are only thirty-­five lines into The Faerie Queene when the pen is thrown down b ­ ecause of the poet’s declared inability to do justice to his theme. Obviously, the pen ­will be resumed. Both gestures—­throwing down and picking up again—­ allude to a theme common enough among poets who have reflected on

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their art, as Yeats does in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”: poetry is born out of frustration and is continually giving up on itself, before resuming again. In contrast to the poet, the novelist needs a certain phlegmatic in­ sensibility to frustration, pressing onward stolidly through deserts of waiting blank paper. A dif­fer­ent kind of fortitude is needed, however, to withstand the rhythm of continual frustration experienced by the poet, a lifetime of throwing down and resuming the pen: “Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds / To blazon broad emongst her learned throng” (FQ I.proem.1). The poet must withstand the continual proof of inade­ quacy, together with the need to continue—­plus an invincible sense of importance. As we learn from Richard Ellmann’s study of Yeats’s unpub­ lished manuscripts, the poet labored for many years over his best poems, mumbling their verses to himself and forcing his song through countless variations and drafts, all variations except the last being cast down like Spenser’s “stile”—­and yet preserved for posterity to witness. 8 Spenser’s persona Colin Clout is a serial breaker and caster-­down of pipes. When still a “pensive boy,” in the “January” eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, finding that the muse no longer mitigates the anguish of his mind, he “broke his oaten pipe, and downe did lie” (76, 72). By “De­ cember,” Colin is old and has brought in the harvest of his verse, which he devastatingly refers to as “a weedy crop of care” (122). But with the res­ ignation of age—as contrasted with the youthful frustration expressed in the “January” eclogue—­Colin merely hangs his pipe on a tree, like Co­ rydon in Virgil’s seventh eclogue. His ­doing so may suggest something like poetic tradition, a “handing on,” the old poet leaving the pipe for a younger to find. Yet one cannot help thinking of the satyr who was fa­ mous for his pipes, Marsyas, and who was himself hung on a tree to be flayed by Apollo: ­ ere ­w ill I hang my pype upon this tree, H Was never pype of reed did better sounde. Winter is come, that blowes the b ­ itter blaste, And a­ fter winter dreerie death does hast. The Shepheardes Calender, “December,” lines 141–44

Lest we identify this speaker too closely with the poet, it’s worth remem­ bering that Spenser was about twenty-­seven years old when he wrote

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t­ hese lines. He had The Faerie Queene before him. Even so, he ­won’t soon be taking the shepherd’s pipe down from the tree: he w ­ ill change it for “trumpets sterne” (FQ I.proem.1). As Spenser loved imagining complete structures, it is inevitable that the poet represented in the cycle of The Shepheardes Calender should be old in its final lines, near the year’s mid­ night. But one feels also that something close to the heart of Spenser’s talent always wanted to be old, though he never made it, ­dying in his midforties. Imagining oneself to be old is another expression of vatic abjec­ tion. “Why should the agèd ea­gle stretch its wings?” said T. S. Eliot, when he was all of forty-­t wo.9 With no less than six “adieus,” Colin takes his leave of the pleasures of this world, and also of the love he never won: Adieu delightes, that lulled me asleepe, Adieu my deare, whose love I bought so deare; Adieu my ­little Lambes and loved sheepe, Adieu ye Woodes, that oft my witnesse w ­ ere; Adieu good Hobbinol, that was so true, Tell Rosalind, her Colin bids her adieu. The Shepheardes Calender, “December,” lines 151–56

“Adieu” starts e­ very line except the last, which it ends. We note the loos­ ened rhythm of the final line, with its pathetic falling cadence and the un­ stressed termination of that last “adieu.” We saw (p. 232) it can be heard quantitatively as well, if not at the same time, like the duck-­rabbit drawing: “TELL Ros a LIND HER COL IN BIDS her a DEEW.” The speaker of ­these verses seems near death and is enervated by the pathos of his condi­ tion. When he appears again, unexpectedly, sixteen years l­ater, in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), piping in the shade of “green alders by the Mullaes shore” (59), we are seeing an ­earlier episode in Colin’s life, before ­these successive and lengthening, sad adieus. We are still more surprised when we come upon Colin once again and for the last time, in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, not only ­because we have not thought of him belonging to Fairy Land but also ­because this moment appears to come a­ fter the time of the conclusion of The Shepheardes Calender. H ­ ere, Colin is in vigorous ­middle age, like Spenser him­ self, and, being married, the “jolly shepheard” is in a better mood. Jolly—­ joyeux, which is close to the sexual jouir—is surely the right word for a

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mature man piping to no less than “An hundred naked maidens lilly white, / All raunged in a ring, and dauncing in delight” (FQ VI.x.11). The vision has an inspiriting, a revivifying effect: “That iolly shepheard, which ­there piped, was / Poore Colin Clout (who knowes not Colin Clout?) / He pypt apace, whilest they him daunst about” (VI.x.16). Yet ­there again is that moment of abjection: even h ­ ere, Colin is “poore.” In the midst of t­ hese hundred maidens are “Three other Ladies,” the Graces. And “in the middest of t­ hose same three,” surrounded by them as they join hands, ­there is placed “Another Damzell, as a precious gemme, / Amidst a ring most richly well enchaced, / That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced” (FQ VI.x.12) Being “placed paravaunt,” the lady is “aduaunst to be another Grace” (VI.x.15, 17). She graces “all the rest” (by which rest Spenser means the one hundred maidens but not the Graces themselves) ­because, as we ­shall shortly be told, she excels them in beauty: “But she that in the midst of them did stand, / Seem’d all the rest in beauty to excell, / Crownd with a rosie girlond, that right well / Did her beseeme” (VI.x.14). It is a beauty that is enjoyed as far as beauty can be enjoyed b ­ ecause it answers the love that it ignites in the poet: she is “that iolly Shepheards lasse” (VI.x.16). It is hard to see the connection between this jolly shepherd and the aged one who says, “careful cold hath nypt my rugged rynde / And in my face deepe furrowes eld hath pight” (Shepheards Calender, “December” 133–34). It is as if the Colin before us has traveled backward in time since “De­ cember” and is living his life over again, but with more success and less complaining. Already in the “January” eclogue, on our first acquaintance with him, he breaks his pipe and throws himself on the ground. “Both pype and Muse,” he says, “­shall sore the while abye”: “So broke his oaten pype, and downe dyd lye” (71–72). When we encounter Colin again in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, it is small won­der that we are slow to rec­ ognize the shepherd who pipes before us now, so that the poet has to prompt us: “who knows not Colin Clout?” Unfortunately for the jolly shepherd, the connection between him and poor old Clout w ­ ill soon be made. For in just a moment his joyous vision ­w ill be broken by Calidore’s intrusion, whereupon the dancing ladies “vanisht all away out of his sight” (FQ VI.x.18). Far worse, his “lasse” van­

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ishes too. ­Will he see her again? Oddly, Colin seems to spend ­whole weeks in discussion with Calidore without any mention of her: In such discourses they together spent Long time, as fit occasion forth them led; With which the Knight him selfe did much content, And with delight his greedy fancy fed, Both of his words, which he with reason red; And also of the place, whose pleasures rare With such regard his sences ravishèd, That thence, he had no w ­ ill away to fare, But wisht, that with that shepheard he mote dwelling share. FQ VI.x.30

In a queer turn, Calidore is proposing to take up with Colin, in preference to his Pastorella. And Colin is now very unlike that shepherd who “broke his bag-­pipe quight, / And made ­great mone for that vnhappy turne” (VI.x.18)! The complaining Colin is the Colin we know. It is also the Spenser we know, or one of them. It seems right that Spenser should have published an entire volume entitled Complaints, and the sixth book of The Faerie Queene ends on a still bitterer note than does the vespertinal conclusion to The Shepheardes Calender, where all is turning ­toward silence and death. Now, all is turning to calumny, perpetrated by the monstrous Blatant Beast, symbol of the ample detraction and back­ biting that the poet endured b ­ ecause he wrote for the gods and did not “seeke to please” (FQ VI.xi.41). Yet we should not miss what Spenser achieves in the pre­sent scene of dancing. Even in its fleetingness, the dance of the ladies and the graces on the top of Mount Acidale—­according to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the name of a fountain in Boetia, where the graces bathed with Venus—­shows a rebirth of the spirit of poetry in erotic de­ sire. The name Acidale, which combines sharpness with standing out, recalls ekdēlos and suggests a rising up to shining conspicuousness. For this upward-­surging moment to occur a downward turn is required and is in some sense the engine of that contrary, upward, Acidalian surge. Just eleven lines from the end of Spenser’s poetic c­ areer, he is still per­ forming the gesture of complaint, loathing “this state of life so tickle”

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and casting away all “loue of t­ hings so vaine” (VII.viii.l). But he is d ­ oing so so that he may again take wing, this time to the “Sabaoths sight” (VII. viii.2). Perhaps this begins to explain why Spenser is so instinctively drawn to complaint. For poetry, at least for his poetry, the way up and the way down are, if not one and the same, then necessary to each other. ­Shall we call this trope of abjection or downturn by a name that honors its master: the colintrope? Trope is from the Greek trepo, “to turn,” and Co­ lin’s turn is downward. The colintrope is an abjection, a throwing down or a turning downward, but with the hope and expectation of a rising. If the gesture of casting down is performed in an open place, a clearing like the top of Mount Acidale, we might say that that rhetorical topos or place for this trope is a tilted one. Every­thing on its surface is imperceptibly sliding away into the abyss. Colin’s “fell despight” at the sudden disappear­ ance of the ladies, which makes him “[break] his bag-­pipe quight” (FQ VI.x.18), is a figure for the moment of sadness, the speck of dismay, that lives in ­every scene of beauty and of fully answered love, like the cypress bud, according to Milton, that appears among the roses that Hymen bears to the wedding of the Marchioness of Winchester.10 For the sake of alle­ gorical clarity, the sudden disappearance of the ladies speeds up and so exposes the insidious work of time. The colintrope is the self-­destructive but necessary acknowl­edgment within poetry of the dismay that haunts all our experience of beauty, definitively sung by François Villon, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?”: “but where are the ‘snows’—­the gleaming beauties—of yesteryear?”11 They are nowhere. And their being nowhere, having been cast down into the abyss, is a part of what they are even in the moment of their glory, on the top of Mount Acidale. For Spenser the negation of the means to make art belongs in some way to this art, such that true art continually destabilizes and transcends what­ ever temporary balance it achieves between the product and the means of production, the poem and the creation of the poem. Art is always re­ centering its energy on the edge of itself—­the Elizabethan word bias comes to mind—­because far from being for itself, art reaches for some­ thing beyond, as love reaches for something beyond or through its im­ mediate object. The appeal of art for art’s sake appears at times when ­either the usefulness of art for something e­ lse is vulgarly or, let us say, dis­ courteously insisted upon or when the haecceity or “thisness” of the art­

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work is sophisticatedly dogmatic—­opening the way to the another kind of vulgar discourtesy: the commodification of the artwork as luxury ob­ ject. In the former case, the transcendental use of art is too flatly stated as the ­whole truth, as if art ­were like justice instead of like courtesy, a ­matter of paying what is due rather than of a gift that gives and receives more than it gives. The breaking of the pipes belongs to the assertion of art’s inadequacy to itself. Breaking the pipes says that the center of this enterprise is elsewhere.

' of the gesture of throwing the pens into the grave, a­ fter the poems, and should we relate it to Colin’s habitual despair? The obvious meaning is affliction: poetry is dead. The poets might as well climb in t­ here with Spenser, following their plumes. It is a sinister image: “the dancers are all gone ­under the hill.”12 Speaking for the poets, Shelley says it more colorfully in Adonais: W H AT I S T H E M E A N I N G

We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.13

The g­ reat Spenser has died, taking poetry with him and the poets as well. Although the profusion of mourning songs and doleful lays may be taken to refute what they assert, the death of poetry with the death of the poet is a commonplace in the pastoral tradition, appearing in Spenser and ­others’ elegies for Sidney and again, a de­cade and a half ­after Spenser’s death, in 1614, in the outpouring of grief over the death of Prince Henry. The silence of the dead is contagious: cold hopes swarm in us like worms. But the second ­thing said by the gesture of throwing the pens into the grave is that poetry is alive. To quote Adonais again, The splendours of the firmament of time May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not; Like stars to their appointed height they climb And death is a low mist which cannot blot The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair

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And love and life contend in it for what ­Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live t­ here And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.14

How like Spenser, and unlike him, ­these two passages are! The first, with its charnel ­house worms wriggling in our living bodies, could have been spoken by a Spenserian character. Perhaps the best candidate is Despaire, whose dwelling ­under an overhanging cliff is like a “greedie grave, / That still for carrion carcases doth crave” (FQ I.ix.33). The second effusion by Shelley is a full stanza of centrifugal reflection such as Spenser often un­ dertakes at the beginning of a canto, looking back on the action of the previous one and philosophizing in general terms before reapplying it to the case in hand: The noble hart, that harbours vertuous thought And is with child of glorious ­great intent, Can never rest, untill it forth have brought Th’eternall brood of glorie excellent: Such restlesse passion did all night torment The flaming corage of that Faery knight. FQ I.v.1

The thought is put forward and turned over, developed, and then turned back on itself, ­either to be definitively rounded out in the final, longer line or, as ­here, to be a springboard for the narrative: “Still did he wake, and still did watch for dawning light.” Shelley’s stanza sounds like Spenser, having caught his tone and even in places his timbre; but when looked at more closely, the thought is very dif­fer­ent. Shelley is more often in the empyrean, Spenser in the moral center of the h ­ uman heart as it acts in the world: “Th’eternall brood of glorie excellent.” That Adonais is in Spenserian stanzas is a confirmation of the positive side of that gesture of throwing the pens into the grave: the pens become winds of light on dark and stormy air. T ­ here is a secret opening below, in the darkness of the tomb, an unexpected exit through which the winged spirit of poetry can pass. It is like the holes pierced in mortuary jars so that the soul can escape and go ­free.

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The death of poetry has become the negation of the possibility of making poetry in a par ­tic­u­lar way—in Spenser’s way. The followers of Spenser must now depart to become other than what they once w ­ ere. The inscription on the monument that would at last be raised (in 1620) over Spenser’s tomb, by Lady Anne, Countess of Dorset, captures the dialectic of the scene I have described. It reads, with italics I have added, “The Prince of Poets in his tyme.”15 From the early 1590s, well before Spenser’s death in 1599, Donne—­although we ­don’t know he was pre­sent in Jan­ uary 1599—­was writing poems with another pen, a sharp one.16

' is a poem ideally suited to the tastes of the industrial age, having no wasted motion. Despite the dense complexity of its eru­ dition, the passenger, delighted and astounded, is rapidly transported from beginning to end. It takes many readings—or the experience of ed­ iting the poem—­before one is able to slow down and study it locally. Allusion and semantic complexity create considerable re­sis­tance to the reader’s forward pro­gress, but the attraction of the local is overwhelmed by the forward impulse of the verse and the narrative. In contrast to Mil­ ton’s industrial epic, The Faerie Queene is a poem for the electronic age, in­ efficient by the standards of a work like Paradise Lost ­because of its super­ connectivity and its profusion of motions turning back on themselves, like eddies, resulting in many unexpected connections and serendipities. ­There are no doubt many historical, contextual, and biographical reasons for this difference between two g­ reat poems composed some eighty years apart from each other, but the most immediately apparent one is the con­ trast between the rhyming, stanzaic verse of The Faerie Queene, with a longer line closing each stanza, and the unrhymed blank verse of Paradise Lost, with its frequent enjambments and long periodic sentences. The Faerie Queene is like a rain forest extending out of sight in all directions and ascending out of sight on many levels: the ground-­level stanzas, the tree trunks of the cantos, and the canopy, not of the individual books but of the vastly extended, nourishing, and entangling system of the w ­ hole. Given that one tends to see every­thing in terms of the subject one is pas­ sionately engaged with, it is perhaps unsurprising that when I first looked PA R A D I S E L O S T

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into Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson’s magisterial and astoundingly complex study The Ants shortly ­after its appearance, it was not unlike reading The Faerie Queene. Wilson said that he could walk in less than one hundred yards from the edge of the Amazon rain forest and discover, in a square foot of jungle, enough work to do for many months.17 So it is with The Faerie Queene, a poem that it is pos­si­ble to read through in six days only when one is young and e­ ager to press on. The more experienced one is, the slower one goes, u ­ ntil one is nearly, as I said, at a standstill, all but im­ prisoned in a single room, a stanza. ­T here is far too much complexity in the poem for any one mind to grasp, including the mind of the poet. Like the trees soaring above Calidore as he approaches the hill of the graces, the canopy is far above, all but invisible from the ground. We attend in­ stead locally to the rich profusion of detail lodged in its many moments, which continually provokes the reader to venture far out along vectors of thought, which vectors nevertheless unexpectedly bend back to inter­ weave themselves with the canopy again in remoter locations. Only a brief journey into any moment of the poem yields extraordinary com­ plexity and variety, making it hard to penetrate farther, ­because the temp­ tation to remain in place and think is so strong. What sort of ordering occurs in the multilevel, deeply entangled rain forest of The Faerie Queene? Spenser is a poet of fragile hierarchies, as Sean Kane says in his wise book Spenser’s Moral Allegory, arguing that the revival of interest in Aristotelian ethics in the ­later Re­nais­sance promotes a flat­ tening of hierarchy onto a single plane of choice between opposite ex­ tremes, the neoclassical ideal of symmetry. The flattening and symmet­ rical distribution that is promoted in the Legend of Temperance and most clearly figured at the Rock of Vile Reproach and the Gulf of Greediness (FQ II.xi.3–8) is deconstructed in the following books, most fully in the Legend of Courtesy.18 But structures similar to benevolent hierarchies, which are top-­down, like the ontology of Paradise Lost, exist in the Legend of Courtesy in lateral arrangement as well, in a dense system of linked ecologies. Even Milton’s hierarchy of being—­“the grosser feeds the purer”—is softened and complicated by the reciprocal nourishing taking place within it, an intuition of the de­pen­dency of all species on one an­ other for the health of the system as a ­whole: “The Sun that light imparts

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to all receives / From all his alimental recompense / In humid exhalations, and at ev’n / Sups with the Ocean.”19 Spenser makes us feel that the count­ less “friendly offices that bynde” linking us to one another in the social world do so ­because they are grounded in the ecologies of the natu­ral world as well (FQ VI.x.23). The moral thinking in The Faerie Queene is sub­ tler, less definitive, more reflective, more speculative, and much more incomplete and unrealized than the moral thinking of Paradise Lost. But in following the questions that surround this one question—­how is one to be a self within the social world?—­Spenser works his way down to the roots of morals in the ­will to live together peaceably and well in one place. It takes him a long time to get to that unexpected place, and when he does, it may seem to us a strange place for moral thinking to start from, al­ though courtesy, with its tendency to devolve into rules, is not so far as we might suppose from Kant’s categorical imperative: act as if your ac­ tion ­were to become a general law. What Spenser means by courtesy usually emerges in the shadow of war, especially indecisive and endemic war, such as he saw in Ireland and such as we have seen in Vietnam and still see in the M ­ iddle East and Af­ghan­i­ stan. Guerilla warfare—­such as we have seen in Book Five, in the figure of Malengine—­forces into view the truth that no amount of force w ­ ill ever be enough. One must ­either find in all parties the ­will to live together peaceably and well in one place or, if one does not find it, leave. And yet leaving can prove impossible, too. In Ireland, it would be four centuries before something like the w ­ ill of all to live together peaceably and well in one place would emerge—if indeed it has.

' is that we should learn from the Graces, who are our most natu­ral teachers, the following ­things: S P E N S E R ’ S M O R A L M E S S AG E

comely carriage, entertainement kynde, Sweet semblaunt, friendly offices that bynde, And all the complements of curtesie.

Spenser is therefore not shy about saying that the Graces teach us—­note that teach is the operative word in this passage—­how to conduct ourselves

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“to each degree and kynde”: “They teach us how to each degree and kynde / We should our selues demeane, to low, to hie; / To friends, to foes, which skill men call Civility” (FQ VI.x.23). We seem to pause briefly over that word “civility,” redolent of Latin ad­ ministration. P­ eople nowadays, says Spenser, call courtesy by this new­ fangled, Re­nais­sance word expressing the ideal of the city, the Latin ver­ sion of the Greek-­based politeness, from polis, “city.” Spenser calls politeness and civility by the warmer term courtesy. Civility, which means observing the efficient forms of be­hav­ior in the midst of the rapid interactions of civic life, tends t­oward the treatment of ­others as the smoothly inter­ acting parts of a machine, like the letters on a printing press—­Aldus’s, for example—or like t­hose lists of words, isolated from syntax, in a dic­ tionary such as the popu­lar one of Calepinus. That seems to be the sense of Spenser’s reference to ­these works, through the knights Aladine and Calepine. I w ­ ill concede that Spenser is mainly looking for harmony be­ tween the terms civility and courtesy, but the difference is ­there all the same and is meant to be felt. The former uses ­people as means to an end—­though, to be sure, politely. The latter encounters p ­ eople as p ­ eople first. Courtesy acknowledges that the soul of the other is veiled and inac­ cessible to us, which means inaccessible to our knowledge and use. “Soul” is used ­here as an ethical concept and means the part of the person that is, like art, physically embodied and socially pre­sent while at the same time transcending embodiment and presence. The other is not reducible ­either to a body or to a social function. When courtesy is the operative virtue in a culture (and this is no more real, though it is more evident, in a court culture), indirect signaling takes place between the self and ­others, in tokens and signs that are like allegories. The Tale of Gengi by Lady Murasaki, set in the Heian culture in the imperial court of the early eleventh ­century in Japan, displays such signaling at the ex­ treme.20 The Faerie Queene itself is an allegory communicating with ­others, its readers, by arcana. It promotes the ac­cep­tance of veils not only between the text and its transcendental meaning but also between the text and its transcendental readers. T ­ here must be courtesy on our part with re­spect to the poem but also courtesy on its part with re­spect to us. We find in this word courtesy the difference between sixteenth-­ century reticence and modern privacy. All social relations, but espe­

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cially the relations of love, require distance and secrecy, the veiling the self from the other, and the transcendentalizing of desire. Once desire looks beyond its immediate object, courteous reticence is pos­si­ble. In love, as in society, more is always received than is given ­because what is received comes not only from the other but also from beyond. Perhaps this is why Spenser seems not to have regretted canceling the original, beautiful conclusion to the Book of Chastity and why he never reused t­ hose stanzas in which he describes the embrace of Scudamour and Amoret, ­after their ordeal, comparing them to a hermaphrodite: “So seemd t­ hose two, as growne together quite” (FQ III.xii.46; ed. 1590). They have lost all secrecy, all reticence: all the veils have fallen. They are en­ tirely sufficient to each other, a ­little depressingly. Angus Fletcher ob­ served that ­there is a tendency to androgyny in Spenser’s major charac­ ters, notably Britomart.21 But one must won­der ­whether Spenser ­favors such a development or sees it as a kind of degeneration and hence a danger, the danger of a loss of information, of structure, of discretely separating and organ­izing veils: a violent obliteration of difference. Yet even ­here, in the final stanza of the canceled passage, the poet seems on his guard against such a danger. The lovers “despoil” each other of “loves b ­ itter fruit” and do so with “sweet countervayle”—­a reciprocal action that is also, as Harry Berger remarks, a reciprocal veiling, as if their passionless, her­ maphroditic conjuncture w ­ ere lost and real love had returned.22 At the sight of the fulfillment of the desires that are awakened in this world being actually and entirely fulfilled, a kind of loathing arises. For their sakes, therefore, this moment being passed, we hear with relief that Amoret and Scudamour “Each other of loves ­bitter fruit despoile.” The image of the hermaphrodite fades to an indistinct memory, and by 1596 it has faded out altogether, like an ancient wall painting suddenly exposed to the air. ­There is a real hermaphrodite in the ­Temple of Venus, the goddess her­ self, although her status is distanced by report (“they say”) and her sexual organs are veiled, something for which we may be grateful. Other­w ise we would see the entire sexual cycle, from copulation to birth, enacted by the organs of a single body. This, on earth, is the end of sex, and it is raises the prospect not of transcendental desire—­that energy of philos­ ophy in the Phaedrus—­but of loathing at the too-­real presence of the fact

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of generation without ­either the veil of sexual difference or the veil of time: The cause why she was covered with a vele, Was hard to know, for that her Priests the same From ­peoples knowledge ­labour’d to concele. But sooth it was not sure for womanish shame, Nor any blemish, which the worke mote blame; But for, they say, she hath both kinds in one, Both male and female, both vnder one name: She syre and ­mother is her selfe alone, Begets and eke conceiues, ne needeth other none. FQ IV.x.41

Much as we may celebrate the exuberance of life and the desire that makes us wish to reproduce, Spenser seems to suggest that the hidden power we celebrate, if unveiled, dismays us almost as intensely as our loathing of decay and death. ­After all, the one implies the other: we reproduce ­because we die, so that death too is b ­ ehind the goddess’s pubic veil, which con­ ceals male and female organs and also the swarming of worms. Blind­ ness to that mysterious truth, or indifference to it, is what Spenser means by lust. Lust is the desire that might as well work in the dark, as Spenser’s monster of that name does, before killing and partially devouring his vic­ tims (IV.vii.5–12). Generation works in the dark, the darkness of the womb, informed with timely seed, as we hear in “Epithalamion,” but it is a darkness over­ seen by the light of the moon goddess, Cynthia, who has charge of “we­ mens ­labours” and “generation goodly.” Therefore, the poet prays, “En­ cline thy ­w ill t’effect our wishfull vow, / And the chast wombe informe with timely seed” (lines 383–86). The womb is a darkness from whence ­there is a passage out into the light. It is not a blind terminus, as in Er­ rour’s cave or Lust’s. ­T hese caves may recall to our minds the Marabar caves in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and in par­tic­u­lar Mrs. Moore’s meditation on the indistinction to which all values, all beliefs, all morals, all joys, all poetry, and all religion are reduced to the dull roar—­Boum!— of the echo produced by the enormous, dark, smooth-­walled cave.23 The

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opposites of darkness and indistinction are beauty, which must be seen in the light; desire, which must be felt as a distance; and spiritual power, which must be apprehended as the soul’s longing for the beyond. Surely the monstrous birth of the fraternal twins Ollyphant and Ar­ gante, copulating as they emerge from the womb, is a hermaphrodite in the making: ­These twinnes, men say, (a t­ hing far passing thought) Whiles in their m ­ others womb enclosd they ­were, Ere they into the lightsome world ­were brought, In fleshly lust ­were mingled both yfere And in that monstrous wise did to the world appere. FQ III.vii.48

We may be reminded as well of Aristophanes’s image, in Plato’s Symposium, of the original h ­ umans, who ­were in a perpetual state of copulation, joined at the genitals, with four arms and four legs on which they hap­ pily cartwheeled about—­until they w ­ ere separated and left ever ­after to search for their missing halves and resume copulation. 24 The image is richly comic, but with a turn of the screw it is loathsome. To be h ­ uman is not to be complete, and courtesy, as Spenser understands the word, is the virtue by which we acknowledge this incompleteness in ourselves and greet it in ­others, acknowledging a higher purpose that remains incom­ plete and ­w ill always remain so. His social vision appears to be based on thinking about courtesy and erotic desire. Both should open outward somewhere beyond generation and complacent social order. In “An Hymn in Honour of Beautie” Spenser has an in­ter­est­ing argu­ ment for beauty as a spiritual power not reducible to material combina­ tions. What we call beautiful—­“mixture made / Of colours faire,” “goodly temp’rament / Of pure complexions,” “comely composition / Of parts well measurd” (lines 64–70)—­are shared, he says, by flowers and other beau­ ties of nature. But ­these give plea­sure without awakening intense erotic longing for the other, without “mov[ing] such affection in the inward mind / That it can rob both sense and reason blynd” (lines 76–77). It is the love of hidden souls for each other that is the source of this divine mad­ ness, or mania—­another Platonic term—­and through the action of this

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spiritual love the bodies acquire the beauty that each sees in the other: “For of the soul the bodie forme doth take, / For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make” (lines 132–33). ­T hese famous lines suggest that the de­ sire awakened by beauty is like entering a cave and exiting from it in an­ other place. Desire w ­ ill take you in one side of the experience, which is longing, and out the other side, on wings. Desire goes right through the cave of generation, which to the lustful has no exit, ­because it exists for its own sake. Desire flies through its object to something beyond: to the wisdom of heavenly beauty, which “filles the heauens with her light, / And darkes the earth with shadow of her sight” (lines 228–29). Spiritual wisdom, which is where all love wants to end up, eclipses beauty’s sun. As for courtesy, it too flies out beyond its immediate object. The cour­ teous act refers to the person before one, but it has a transcendental referent as well.

' we approach the g­ reat tableau of the dance in the tenth canto of the Legend of Courtesy. We are warned ­here to re­ member, when we come upon the dance, as Calidore did, to attend to dif­ ference, separation, and secrecy—­and even to disappointment and loss— as ­things belonging to the transcendental power of desire and the transcendental vision of courtesy. T ­ hese are counterweights (as in a tre­ buchet) by the contrary power of which we are flung beyond what is im­ mediately before us. It is impor­tant that the dance unfold in the open and in the light, on grass, “th’open greene” (FQ VI.x.11). It is perhaps also impor­tant that ­there should be a hollow space in the ground below, res­ onating from the feet of the dancers: “many feete fast thumping th’hollow ground” (VI.x.11). As William Blissett observed, Mount Acidale encloses a dark cave beneath the open-­air labyrinth of the dance that unfolds on its summit: WITH T ­ HESE R EFLECT IONS

It is this groping “through the worlds wyde wildernes” that makes the pastoral episode such a marvelous breather, culminating as it does in the vision of the dance of the Graces on Mount Acidale. The ground on which the Graces dance is described as “hollow.” This

Courtesy and the Graces  387 word may mean no more than reverberant, but it flashes upon us that what would be dark groping if it took place in the hollow chamber below is unimpeded intricate movement in the open, above. The dance itself is the memory of the labyrinth in clear air and full sight—­a labyrinth for the feet of the dancers, for the eyes of the spectators, a maze without menace, time and space in friendship, the knot that holds but does not constrain, the fully answered riddle, the poem signed and delivered. . . . ​Nature’s doom silences Mutabil­ itie and turns her cantos and the w ­ hole poem into a transit maze— up and out through an exit surprisingly placed and suddenly disclosed.25

The scene of the dance of the Graces is aural as well as visual and, not­ withstanding the attractions of nakedness, perhaps especially the former; it is an acoustical paradise, where ­music is not only heard but made vi­ sual as well. We see its social opposite at the end of Book Five, the Legend of Justice, when Envy and Detraction attack Artegal and incite the Bla­ tant Beast “to barke and bay” With ­bitter rage and fell contention, That all the woods and rockes nigh to that way, Began to quake and ­tremble with dismay; And all the aire rebellowed againe, So dreadfully his hundred tongues did bray. FQ V.xii.41

The appalling, “rebellowing” noise of ­those hundred braying tongues complements the moral ugliness of Envy and Detraction. What is the an­ swer to excessive noise, on which Slander rides as in triumph? At one time or another, we have all thought of enforcement, or worse. The iron man, Talus, hearing Detraction’s stinging slanders, “Would her haue chastiz’d with his yron flaile, / If her Sir Artegall had not preserved, / And him forbidden, who his heast observed” (V.xii.43). The knight of Justice (following King David’s example with Shimei; 2 Samuel 16:5–13) lets De­ traction take its course unmolested, and for this forbearance he is only more abused: “So much the more at him still did she scold” (V.xii.43). We should expect that the reason for such forbearance is that slander and

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detraction are too wide spreading and adhesive, like tar, for punishment to apprehend them. But the reason given is that the knight of Justice is re­orienting himself ­toward the beautiful: “yet he for nought would swerue / From his right course, but still the way did hold / To fairy court, where what him fell ­shall ­else be told” (V.xii.43). We never hear “what him fell”: Artegall dis­appears from the poem at this moment, as he is heading back to the moral center of Fairy Land. This moment at the close of Book Five is responded to in the lines that immediately follow, in the proem opening Book Six, the Legend of Cour­ tesy. But the beauty we are now shown is not the central figure of the Fairy Queen. Indeed, this is the very book in which the poet w ­ ill apolo­ gize to the queen for presenting another, an alternative center in Fairy Land, which is the beauty he knows and cares about most, encountered in the “strange waies” (FQ VI.proem.2) of his Irish romance. Moreover, other accidental beauties captured on the way awaken the poet’s atten­ tion and give him strength to carry on the moral quest: The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde In this delightful land of Faery, Are so exceeding spacious and wyde, And sprinckled with such sweet variety, Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye, That I nigh rauisht with rare thoughts delight, My tedious trauell doe forget thereby; And when I gin to feele decay of might, It strength to me supplies, and chears my dullèd spright. FQ VI.proem.1

In Book Six Spenser ­w ill show a deeper commitment to the decen­ tering of beauty. ­Until now, just ­because we ourselves never see Cleop­ olis and Fairy Court, the beauty that we do see has been a fleeting t­ hing, like its personification, Florimell, a phenomenon glimpsed on the run and pursued but never stabilized and clarified in the line of our atten­ tion. Indeed, such stability as we do see in beauty ­earlier is typically an indication of danger, most obviously so in the Garden of Acrasia. But Bel­ phoebe is dangerous, and Florimell is too, although of course she d ­ oesn’t intend it.

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Book Five is the most per­sis­tently centered on Fairy Court, which is the place where beauty and justice coincide, as a result of moral work such as Artegal’s. In each of the four preceding books ­there is something indi­ rect about the connection between the virtue in question and the values represented by Cleopolis, most noticeably so in Book One. Holiness, tem­ perance, chastity, and even friendship, Re­nais­sance friendship, are not po­liti­cal virtues, and Fairy Court is a po­liti­cal place. Justice, however, is certainly a po­liti­cal virtue; it is the po­liti­cal virtue. But Spenser’s effort at seeing justice in terms of the generalized eroticism that the dynastic axis of the poem requires leads him, in the dream at the Church of Isis, to rep­ resent the meeting of the two (justice and desire) in terms that, to say the least, do not include beauty. In Book Five all beauty is from afar, allothi, at Fairy Court, which is always over the horizon. In Book Six all this is changed. Unlike any of its pre­de­ces­sors, the vision of beauty, the dance of the Graces and the maidens, is a real vision and not something far off and out of sight. Even so, the vision is not centered on itself—as beauty for beauty’s sake or courtesy for courtesy’s sake. It is always turning, like a heliotrope, ­toward something beyond. But this something beyond is no longer Fairy Court. That is one of the ­great differences between the bloody Legend of Justice and the pastoral Legend of Courtesy.

' “far from all ­peoples troad” (FQ VI.x.5) in a wil­ derness not unlike the “forest wide” (I.ix.12) in which Arthur had his noc­ turnal experience of the Fairy Queen and his vespertinal experience of Florimell, whom he ceases pursuing once darkness falls. Calidore gets a beautiful gift when he comes to Mount Acidale, one exceeding any gift he has himself given before. On the top of the mount he sees the Graces dancing with the “hundred naked maidens lilly white” (VI.x.11), and the vision seems to change him, to make him more philosophical, more ready to learn and not just behave. But this is to come upon the scene too quickly. It is an episode that requires a more leisurely approach to its culminating, fragile vision. The dance is the moving but still center of courtesy, and reaching that center means ­going through the energy levels around it. Height, sublimity, is a continual theme. Calidore first penetrates a wood “of matchless height, that seemed th’earth to disdaine” (FQ VI.x.5). In this CALIDOR E IS R A NGING

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forest grow “all trees of honour,” although, unlike the first episode of The Faerie Queene, the trees are not cata­logued for use. This is a sacred wood, where even the thought of putting the axe to a tree is a profanation. The trees are not t­ here for the taking. As Spenser says, they “stately stood” (VI.x.6). In contrast with the Wandering Wood, where attention is directed downward to the footprints on its forking paths, this wood continually draws the eye upward, as the eye experienced in forests often is. The branches bud in winter as well as in spring and are never bare; and the lower ones provide “pavilions” for the birds to nest and sing. The trees soar to such a height that despite their rooted standing they seem to dis­ dain the earth, like fir trees in a rain forest, where micro-­environments thrive far above the ground, and younger trees, growing in the forks and canopies of old ones, are rooted in the air. The crowns reach so far into the sky that hawks perched t­ here are as high up as if they w ­ ere actually on the wing at the apex, or “tower,” of their flight: It was an hill plaste in an open plaine, That round about was bordered with a wood Of matchlesse hight, that seern’d th’earth to disdaine, In which all trees of honour stately stood, And did all winter as in sommer bud, Spredding pavilions for the birds to bowre, Which in their lowest braunches sung aloud; And in their tops the soring hauke did towre, Sitting like King of fowles in maiesty and powre. FQ VI.x.6

Along the forest floor runs a stream that rises from the foot of Mount Acidale—as the Jordan River rises from a bracelet of streams at the foot of Mount Hermon. Only now do we learn that the forest is inhabited by nymphs and fairies, who likewise attend the stream and protect it, in re­ turn for which the stream gives them the note on which to tune their songs and then continues to accompany them. Except for that “king of fowles,” ­there is no subordination: the fairies protect the stream, and the stream accompanies their song; the forest crowns the stream, shading the

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singing fairies beside it, but towers over all. At this moment, on this scene, when the allegory of courtesy is seeking its ground in the natu­ral world, Spenser’s vision comes close to what we mean by ecol­ogy: a system of living exchange in which debts cannot be counted and no rec­ords are kept, so spontaneous, rapid, and generous are t­ hese exchanges and so deep is their reach into all the forms of life: And at the foot thereof, a gentle flud His silver waves did softly tumble downe, Unmard with raggèd mosse or filthy mud, Ne mote wylde beastes, ne mote the ruder clowne Thereto approach, ne filth mote therein drowne: But Nymphes and Faeries by the bancks did sit, In the woods shade, which did the ­waters crowne, Keeping all noisome ­things away from it, And to the w ­ aters fall tuning their accents fit. FQ VI.x.7

The stream, like the forest through which it flows, is set above the order of nature. Its rapid course is never slowed by ragged moss or silt; wild beasts do not approach it. It is f­ ree from ­human eyes and abusive ­human use: “ne filth mote therein drowne.” We are reminded of the innocence of moving ­water even when abused and also of its power to lift the mind beyond the pre­sent world, as does Helicon: “Not even man can spoil you,” says W. H. Auden, in the final poem of the sequence, Bucolics: should he herd you through a sluice to toil at a turbine, or keep you leaping in gardens for his amusement, innocent still is your outcry, w ­ ater, and t­ here even, to his soiled heart raging at what it is, tells of a sort of world, quite other, altogether dif­fer­ent from this one.

That is the w ­ ater we are seeing h ­ ere, at its streaming source, telling of a world altogether other, before any contact with h ­ umans. One purpose of Spenser’s stream is to tie the landscape together. “Arching your torso,” Auden says earlier,

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you dive from a basalt sill, canter across white chalk, slog forward through red marls, the aboriginal pilgrim,

at home in all sections, but for whom we should be idolaters of a single rock, kept apart by our landscapes, excluding as alien the tales and diets of all other strata. How could we love the absent one if you did not keep coming from a distance?26

We have seen that on the banks of Spenser’s stream, ­under the shade of the trees, nymphs and fairies make ­music to accompany the rhythm of the ­water’s pulsing, rustling flow. The stream is the source of poetry, a Celtic Hippocrene. But it also holds this landscape, this forest, together, joining this scene to the hill that rises beyond, from whence the stream gathers its ­water. On this scene, poetry is beginning to tell us what it is: a gathering together of the world and also a pointing beyond. Our attention is at last directed to the hill that the forest surrounds and that exists for the sake of t­ hose fairies. Its top is a level, “spacious plaine” to which ­those fairies and nymphs down below, seated by the stream, reg­ ularly ascend, emerging from the woods to dance t­here—­and to play the c­ hildren’s game prisoner’s base. It seems impor­tant that the hilltop be not just for exceptional use, as in the dance we are about to witness, but also for regular use, for games. From time to time it is assisted by Venus herself, who comes from her royal seat at Cytheron (the Aegean island of Cythera) to rest and play with the Graces: And on the top thereof a spacious plaine Did spred it selfe, to serve to all delight, ­Either to daunce, when they to daunce would faine, Or ­else to course about their bases light; Ne ­ought ­there wanted, which for plea­sure might Desired be, or thence to banish bale: So pleasauntly the hill with equall hight, Did seeme to ouerlooke the lowly vale; Therefore it rightly cleepèd was mount Acidale. FQ VI.x.8

Courtesy and the Graces  393

The forest would conceal the nymphs and fairies who sit in its shade by the side of the stream. But Acidale draws them upward, out of the forest and into the light.27 I think Spenser was also likening this hill to an island, in par­tic­u­lar the sacred island of Delos, which the name Acidale contains. The birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, Delos, which the gods call Asteria, the star, fell from the sky and floated freely for a time without connection to the bottom of the sea—­not ­until Leto came ­there to give birth to the twin gods and ­great columns reaching down from the underside of the island fastened it to the floor of the sea. Delos retains a stronger link with the sky than with the earth and still shines like a star, ­because Apollo was born ­there. According to Pindar, for the gods looking down from the heavens, the island appears as a far-seen star on deep-­blue earth.28 So it is with Aci­ dale. We know it is a hill grounded on the earth, even if it is hollow inside, a drum for the feet of the dancers. But we come to feel that its commerce is chiefly with the sky above, with the stars, which is why the culminating image for the orderly dance of the Graces and the hundred naked maidens is Ariadne’s starry crown. This hill is itself like a central star, a north star, shining in the firmament, around which the other stars move: “Through the bright heauen doth her beams display, / And is unto the starres an or­ nament, / Which round about her move in order excellent” (FQ VI.x.13). ­There is something loose and unconnected about this hill, which is per­ haps why Spenser does not at first bring the wood up to its foot—­let alone up its sides—­but has the hill “plaste in an open plaine” (FQ VI.x.6) before surrounding it with soaring trees. Calidore ­w ill closely watch the dance of Graces from “the couert of the wood” (VI.x.11). But at his mo­ ment of setting forth, Spenser intends the altitude of the trees and the al­ titude of Acidale to exist in dif­fer­ent registers of the sublime. That way, Acidale ­w ill be more “con­spic­u­ous” from afar as it seems “to overlooke the lowly vale” (VI.x.8)—­a vale of soaring trees. As Calidore approaches the summit of the hill, bringing the woods with him, he hears high above (“on hight”), as if the sounds ­were de­ scending from the air, a shrill pipe playing to the rhythm of “many feet fast thumping th’hollow ground” (FQ VI.x.10). It is a delicious-­sounding line for a joyful noise. As Calidore crests the hill, he at last sees the vision, although he is still concealed from ­those whom he sees:

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He nigher drew, to weete what mote it be; ­There he a troupe of Ladies dauncing found Full merrily, and making gladfull glee, And in the midst a Shepheard piping he did see. He durst not enter into th’open greene, For dread of them vnwares to be descryde, For breaking of their daunce, if he ­were seene; But in the covert of the wood did byde, Beholding all, yet of them unespyde. ­There he did see, that pleased much his sight, That even he him selfe his eyes envyde, An hundred naked maidens lilly white, All raungèd in a ring, and dauncing in delight. All they without w ­ ere raungèd in a ring, And dauncèd round; but in the midst of them Three other Ladies did both daunce and sing, The whilest the rest them round about did hemme, And like a girlond did in compasse stemme: And in the middest of ­those same three, was placèd Another Damzell, as a precious gemme, Amidst a ring most richly well enchaced, That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced. FQ VI.x.10–12

We w ­ ill learn that the three ladies are the Graces, “­daughters of delight” and handmaids to Venus who “are wont to haunt / Uppon this hill, and daunce ­there day and night” (VI.x.15). Added to them, to make a fourth, a quaternity, is a beautiful shepherdess, who is “­there advaunst to be an­ other Grace” (VI.x.16). She it is who is being celebrated on this occasion— it is, we recall, one occasion among many—­inspiring the ­music to which the dancers dance. Colin Clout pipes this ­music not from a place off to one side but in the midst of the dancers—­“He pypt apace, whilest they him daunst about.” We are afforded a vision of the artist in the midst of his art, creating his work from within rather than from without. Such a reading of the vision, however—­the dance as the poet’s signa­ ture and vision of his art—is too romantic in its elevation of art for art’s sake. The dancers are a vision of what the poem strives for in at once being

Courtesy and the Graces  395

itself and transcending itself. The poem strives to move into nearness with a beauty that is also transcending itself. For this reason poetry, if it is to succeed, has to be on the edge of itself, decentered and biased, how­ ever symmetrical it may appear to be from a formal point of view. It is communication with something beyond, t­ oward which it leans and hear­ kens. The graciousness of the poet invites beauty to return, like the Graces’ gifts, “in greater store” (FQ VI.x.24). That is what we mean by inspiration.

' of this vision of the supernal otherness of beauty is the shepherd lass, who excels all the ­others in beauty and is crowned with roses where she stands (FQ VI.x.14). It is noteworthy that she alone does not dance but is simply “placed” in the m ­ iddle of the dance: “But that faire one, / That in the midst was placed parauaunt, / Was she to whom that shepheard pypt alone” (VI.x.15). Alone! This “placing” is an a priori act of “setting up” (thêsis) or “positing,” stating that the other “Damzell” (VI.x.12) who has been thus “advanced,” being a mortal and a “country lasse” (VI.x.12), does not belong in the vision but has been put ­there by the poet as an act of the w ­ ill. She does not belong to the super­natural oth­ erness of beauty but is merely a h ­ uman instance in the h ­ ere and now of what does not belong, essentially, eschatologically, to the ­here and now. She is the poet’s wife, Elizabeth Boyle, who is accorded this magnificent compliment. But her presence among the Graces cannot be eternal. In another sense, however, an unintended one that may have startled the poet as he wrote and should startle us, this is not, a­ fter all, a merely temporary act of placing that must give way to the full and unadulterated otherness of the vision of beauty. Let us look at her again. The dancing, naked ladies lavish flowers and perfumes on her, and the Graces endow her with the more inward gifts of beauty: AT T H E H E I G H T

Such was the beauty of this goodly band, Whose sundry parts ­were ­here too long to tell: But she that in the midst of them did stand, Seem’d all the rest in beauty to excell, Crownd with a rosie girlond, that right well Did her beseeme. And euer, as the crew

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About her daunst, sweet flowers, that far did smell, And fragrant odours they uppon her threw; But most of all, ­those three did her with gifts endew. FQ VI.x.14

If poetry is a communication with something beyond, t­ oward which, as I said (actually, as Donne said), it leans and hearkens, and if poetry must therefore be on the edge of itself, why ­shouldn’t this bias of the poet ­toward his wife be the true apex of his vision and not just an accidental compliment, a “cameo,” as they say in cinema? It ­won’t do to idealize the vision too much or too far, as if it had ­little to do with us. To appear, beauty needs our cooperation, our desire, and our care. To make what we desire and what we care for merely an instance of transcendental beauty, as Neo­ platonism does, is to ignore the ele­ment of decision, of positing and placing, in the determination of beauty. It is by our h ­ uman choice that ­there is beauty in nature, as ­there are nymphs and fairies in nature. In­ visible as they are, they are pre­sent beside the stream whose “silver waues did softly tumble downe,” giving it that silvery beauty and also that mu­ sical sound, to which they “tun[e] their accents fit” (FQ VI.x.7). Only to the nonhuman is this sound noise. What the fairies do is what the poet does as well: he posits beauty in the world and tunes his accents to it. Spenser chose Elizabeth Boyle and tuned his accents to her through the Amoretti and Epithalamion, partly making her beauty, partly discovering it, and also saluting what was t­ here for all to see. What makes this event in The Faerie Queene something more than the daily experience of beauty is the poet’s decentering, his moving away from himself the complex act of positing beauty, of making beauty, of discovering beauty, and of sa­ luting beauty. Instead, the act of positing is transferred to ­those vi­ sionary beings dancing around the ­simple shepherd lass, showering her with blossoms. They are at this moment willingly subordinate to her and even accept to receive from her what­ever grace and beauty they have: And in the middest of ­those same three, was placed Another Damzell, as a precious gemme, Amidst a ring most richly well enchaced, That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced. FQ VI.x.12

Courtesy and the Graces  397

I asked if we might find Spenser’s transcendental burial site somewhere in his Fairy Land, so that The Faerie Queene becomes his gigantic, quivering, energetic tomb. I think it is h ­ ere. If the poet was borne away from West­ minster Abbey on wings formed by the plumes that w ­ ere thrown into his grave, he was carried h ­ ere and lodged within the Acidalian mount. T ­ here let him pipe forever below the dancers’ pounding feet, so that their “glad­ full glee” ­w ill sound in his ears, as it does in ours.

Chapter 17

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Night Thoughts on Mutability

to interpretation by the bibliographical status of Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos—­the fragment that appeared in 1609, a de­cade a­ fter the poet’s death—­are also opportunities for reflec­ tion on the thinking proj­ect undertaken in The Faerie Queene as a w ­ hole. To what extent does Spenser find what he thinks as he composes ­those preceding six books, and to what extent does he create what he thinks as he writes them? Does the thinking in The Faerie Queene belong wholly to the poetry, as something created, or is the thinking to be distinguished from the poetry in some way, as, for example, its content? Should we speak of the thinking of The Faerie Queene, or of thinking that is merely in The Faerie Queene for the time being, capable of being extracted and re­ stated discursively? ­T hese questions are brought increasingly into the open by the Mutabilitie Cantos, in which thinking as content, being static, like the Platonic ideas, is rooted in the Jovian princi­ple of identity, which reigns over change, whereas thinking as pro­cess is allied with the princi­ple of nonidentity, which is enacted in The Faerie Queene by the continual emergence of the unexpected in the course of its narrative. ­These ­matters also bear directly on the interpretation of the Mutabilitie Cantos them­ selves, on their subject m ­ atter, on what they are about, and especially on the metaphysical question they raise in the contest between Mutabilitie and Jove, which is as follows. Is identity more fundamental than altera­ tion, as traditional metaphysics supposes, or is pure alteration, the Hera­ clitean streaming, more fundamental than identity? Do t­hings have T H E D I F F I C U LT I E S P R E S E N T E D

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standing as what they are, as if ordained by ­legal statute, or are they merely like waves, disturbances in the under­lying flow? That question is given the form of a case at law brought by Mutabilitie against Jove, appealing to the God—or the Goddess—of Nature. Nature embodies the question she is to decide—or he is to decide—­being at once the unchanging identity of nature and yet surprisingly mutable, at least from our point of view: “­Great Nature, ever young yet full of eld, / Still moving, yet unmoved from her sted; / Unseene of any, yet of all beheld” (FQ VII.vii.13). She is neither one nor many, neither male nor female, nei­ ther old nor young, neither moved nor unmoved, neither seen nor unseen. When Mutabilitie first makes her appeal, she refers to Nature as male—­ “the highest him, that is behight / ­Father of Gods and men by equall might” (VII.vi.35)—­but when Nature “issues” before us, the poet refers to her then and thereafter as female—­“ Then forth issewed (­great goddesse) ­great dame Nature”—­although he admits that what she is “inly,” that is, essen­ tially, cannot be descried: “­Whether she man or ­woman inly ­were / That could not any creature well descry” (VII.vii.5). As to the metaphysical question raised by the Mutabilitie Cantos, it is usually understood as the tension in the created world between perma­ nence and change, between order and disorder, and between identity and difference (including sexual identity and difference). Which member of each of t­ hese pairs is the more fundamental of the two, the basis of the other? Stated this way, the question appears to take a classically philo­ sophical form, although the emphasis on decay and death suggests a more extreme devolution: “all this world is woxen daily worse . . . ​And death in stead of life have sucked from our Nurse” (FQ VII.vi.6). At the end, in the prophecy Nature speaks without understanding its meaning—­“But time s­ hall come that all ­shall changed bee / And from thenceforth, none no more change ­shall see” (VII.vii.59)—we seem to be in some undefined space between a classically philosophical meditation on “Order,” which Spenser personifies as “Natures Sergeant” (VII.vii.4), and a darker, Chris­ tian apprehension of the world as merely a period of time—­a saeculum— and as vitiated by original sin, “By which we all are subject to that curse” (VII.vi.6; cf. VII.vi.5).

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however, the issue raised by the contest between Muta­ bilitie and Jove is not religious but metaphysical, although the issue must be stated more radically than the terms order and disorder allow. It is the under­lying question of traditional metaphysical inquiry, analogous to the princi­ple of identity in logic: what is a ­thing? Once one attends to it, one is startled how often the word t­ hing appears in the Mutabilitie Cantos, usu­ ally in connection with change, from the opening verse of the ballad-­ measure heading to the first canto (“Proud Change (not pleasd, in mortall t­ hings, / beneath the Moone, to raigne)” [FQ VII.vi.argument]) to the second verse of the first stanza (“Change, the which all mortall ­things doth sway” [VII.vi.1]) to the opening of the crucial fifth stanza, with its mention of Nature’s statutes, or archai, ­those first princi­ples by which “earthly ­things” are what they are and not other than they are: IN THE MAIN,

For, she the face of earthly t­ hings so changed, That all which Nature had establisht first In good estate, and in meet order ranged, She did pervert, and all their statutes burst. FQ VII.vi.5

From the outset of the Mutabilitie Cantos we are asked to consider what concepts of the ­thing govern our judgment about the “statutes” of ­things and about the cruel perversion and bursting of t­ hose statutes by change, raising the outcry, “O pittious worke of mutabilitie!” (FQ VII.vi.6).1 It seems appropriate that the obscure bibliographical status of the Muta­ bilitie Cantos should raise no less perplexing versions of the same ques­ tion, as a consequence of the piteous work of Mutabilitie on the poet of The Faerie Queene, who died suddenly in his mid-to-late forties. Are the Mutabilitie Cantos one t­hing or many? Are they a fragment of a larger, unwritten book of The Faerie Queene? Do they continue The Faerie Queene or conclude it? What ­were Spenser’s plans for ­these cantos at the time of his death, at about the age Milton was (as I have mentioned) when he began Paradise Lost? Considered architectonically, within the well-­established conventions of the epic poem, The Faerie Queene stands before us as a ruin, one that might have been completed but was not. Considered musically and the­ matically, as a continuing pro­cess of questioning, an intellectual quest,

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The Faerie Queene seems to follow many “strange waies” (FQ VI.proem.2) at once, what Heidegger called Holzwege, or “paths that lead nowhere” ­because the thinking being followed is an end in itself, rather than aiming at a destination that lies outside thought, in the stillness of knowing. The Faerie Queene is a vast, fugue-­like structure—­but with less order than a fugue, with many more themes, and with new themes continually entering—to which ­there can be no formal conclusion. For any such conclusion—­one, for example, that would bring Arthur into the pres­ ence of Gloriana with the twelve knights ­behind him—­would be an im­ position, a forced termination of something that wants to go on. What wants to go on is a nonteleological, multithematic interweaving of con­ tinual reflections on the world—­the activity of a life that can end only with the end of that life. We might compare The Faerie Queene in this re­spect to Finnegans Wake, also a “Work in Pro­gress” published in install­ ments, which has a vaguely discernible architectonic structure but which is ­really or­ga­nized by its themes as they flow along in its “riverrun,” continually mixing with and separating from one another, a pro­cess to which t­ here is no conclusion, since the final sentence cycles back into the first. The Wake’s ordering princi­ple consists in a ­simple structure that is pre­sent throughout, that of the f­ amily, Finnegan, Anna Livia Plurabelle, HCE, Shem, and Sean, which gives a fleeting sense of order to the vast flow of information moving through the book. Likewise, with The Faerie Queene, a fleeting sense of order is given to the vast flow of information through the book by the idea of a Fairy Court from which knights are sent forth on quests and to which they return, having been aided by Prince Arthur at vari­ous points. A poetic proj­ect like The Faerie Queene cannot be viewed by its author as an object, as a shorter poem might be. It is path on which he has set out, a way of life, an environing world that be­ comes indistinguishable from the poet’s life and also indistinguishable from his mind. An enforced, architectonic conclusion, ­were such a ­thing pos­si­ble, would have turned The Faerie Queene into an object sepa­ rate from the poet, leaving him, in a curiously literal sense, out of his mind. Is, then, The Faerie Queene merely incomplete (it is already three times as long as Paradise Lost), ­because the plan was too large for a single life, espe­ cially one that ended early, in vigorous middle age? Or is The Faerie Queene essentially, ­because of its inner nature as a thinking proj­ect, uncompletable,

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an array of paths that lead nowhere, when leading somewhere is far from the point? Is The Faerie Queene a complex but discernibly architec­ tonic structure with an overall plan, a mere sketch of that plan having been given us in the Letter to Raleigh, which was appended to the 1590 publication of the first three books but omitted from the six-­book edi­ tion of 1596 and from the 1609 edition in which the Mutabilitie Cantos first appeared?2 Or is The Faerie Queene a thematic exploration bound up with the temporality of its own composition, one that, if its poet ­were immortal, would never cease drawing into itself new materials for combination and reflection, making the possibility of a conclusion in­ creasingly remote as this complexity grows? So long as this uncertainty remains unresolved—­and Spenser may never have resolved it himself, gradually altering his point of view from one model to the other or alter­ nating rapidly between them—it ­w ill be hard to know what we mean when we say that an unattached fragment such as the Mutabilitie Cantos is or is not an ele­ment of The Faerie Queene. The Mutabilitie Cantos there­ fore raise (or it raises) the more radical question, what is a ­thing, not only with re­spect to t­ hings in the world, the many t­ hings Mutabilitie brings to view as evidence in her case—­animals and plants, the four ele­ments, the times and seasons of the year, the planets in the heavens, the stars above the planets, and the Olympian gods—­but also with re­spect to the Mutabilitie Cantos as a work of art. What is a poem? Is a poem one ­thing or many? What gives a poem, a poiema or “piece of work,” the unity that allows us to call a series of verses one t­ hing? Is it a supervenient order, like the fourteen-­line rule of the sonnet, or is it an order that emerges from within, called forth by such rules? The plural title of the Mutabilitie Cantos, causing grammatical awkwardness when we try to write about them as a single work, is an irritant that continually forces such questions upon us. The role of the title in conferring unity on poems—on the Ho­ meric songs, for example, as much as on the poems of John Ashbery—­ invites reflection on the adventitious character of this unity, this thingli­ ness to the single work of art. For does not the unity created by the gesture of conferring a title obfuscate the true character of the work of art as a per­for­mance unfolding in time, an event or a series of events, a happening or a series of happenings? Is an event something other than a ­thing, or is an event a peculiar kind of ­thing, a temporal one? Titles are imposed ­later

Night Thoughts on Mutability  403

on bardic “songs,” or simply on verses, diacritical turnings, which unfold in punctuated units of time, a­ fter which the turnings become songs and the songs become books and the books are arranged (edited, composed) in a canon—­a canon made up of ­things, works. The tottering structure of thing-­like ­things of which The Faerie Queene is composed—­verses, units of time, stanzas, cantos, internal “books,” se­ ries of books, a poem containing t­ hose books, and the books containing that poem, thus contributing to a canon of books—is raised from the in­ secure foundation of the verse. For verse, as just mentioned, is a “turning” rather than a ­thing, a diacritical series of rhythms the essence of which is not to have an essence but to give itself over to change. If the “ever-­whirling wheele / Of Change, the which all mortall t­ hings doth sway” (FQ VII.vi.1) is ­enemy to the t­ hing, then the made ­thing, the poem, is founded on what is other than itself and inimical to itself.

' ­W H E T H E R T H E H E A D N O T E to the Mutabilitie Cantos was written by an editor or by Spenser himself, indulging in Nabokovian mischief, which I doubt, its conjectural tone is the basis for the only title the cantos have, except the r­ unning head over the text, “The Seventh Booke of The Faerie Queene.” The headnote reads, “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie: Which, both for Forme and M ­ atter, appeare to be parcell of some following Booke of the Faerie Queene, u ­ nder the Legend of Constancie. Never before im­ printed.” ­T hese words invite us to imagine an editor or publisher staring in perplexity over unattributed manuscript pages, wondering how and if they fit with Spenser’s poem or into Spenser’s poem. Are ­these pages, ­these stanzas, t­ hese verses, a unity to themselves, one constituted by their subject, mutability, or are they a “parcell of some following Booke” that is on a subject opposite to mutability, constancy? Do ­these cantos, like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (at least as Coleridge presented it to the world), belong only to a larger unity, one forever unrealized, prevented by cir­ cumstances from being brought to light? Or do they have, again like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” a mysterious unity within, partly accidental and partly formed by what Coleridge elsewhere called the shaping spirit of imagination?3 Are the cantos irreparably a fragment, or several fragments, or are they instead “a single, beautifully ­shaped poem,” as Northrop Frye

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claimed, that could never have formed “the core of a seventh book, u ­ nless that book was inconceivably dif­fer­ent in its structure from the existing ones”?4 The perplexity of the headnote unintentionally but aptly exemplifies the theme of the Mutabilitie Cantos, which is change and decay, the loss of information and the gradual increase of disorder. The general disaster of cosmic entropy, which is a modern way of stating the theme of the Mu­ tabilitie Cantos, is something we merely glimpse in the ­bubble of tempo­ rality captured by ­those prefatory words, “never before.” Between the composition of the cantos and their incorporation in a book, ­those words “never before” parcel up a quantum of time during which information has been lost—­information about the status of the cantos with re­spect to The Faerie Queene and also with re­spect to themselves. ­T hese bibliographical and theoretical perplexities about the status of the Mutabilitie Cantos are enriched by the deeper question we have seen that they ask. As the princi­ple of change, Mutabilitie denies the thingli­ ness of ­things ­because they are subject to change over time: “Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare” (FQ VII.vii.56). Jove concedes Muta­ bilitie’s point but claims for himself rule over Time, “who doth them all disseise / Of being”—­the them being “all ­things ­else that ­under heaven dwell” (VII.vii.48). When Dame Nature judges the case, she reduces Mu­ tabilitie to her proper sphere below the orbit of the moon, that is, “­under heaven,” where “all t­ hings stedfastnes doe hate.” But in mysteriously es­ chatological terms, Nature vindicates the existence of ­things in their “first estate[s],” in which they “[turn] to themselves at length” and “doe their states maintaine”: I well consider all that ye have sayd And find that all ­things stedfastnesse doe hate And changèd be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changèd from their first estate But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselves at length againe Doe worke their own perfection so by fate. Then over them change doth not rule and raigne But they raigne over change, and doe their states maintaine. FQ VII.vii.57

Night Thoughts on Mutability  405

Even that unlikely thinker Faunus, when he sees Diana naked, has some­ thing to contribute to this seminar on the ­thing, laughing “for ­great joy of some-­what he did spy,” a ­thing designated with an indefinite pronoun: the quidam or “something” of Diana herself (VII.vi.46).5 Hers is unchanging and virginal, but other t­ hings are penetrated by time, by the forces of gen­ eration as well as of decay, which mix them up with one another to the point that they come to hate—it is a strong word—­remaining what they are: “I well consider all that ye have sayd,” says Dame Nature, “And find that all ­things stedfastnes doe hate.” The ­things of which Nature speaks are traitors to themselves, opening themselves to time, dilating and flowing promiscuously. Even so, Nature says that this hatred of remaining the same is at last unsuccessful, failing to defeat what “all ­things” are in their “first estates.” Change does not govern them but only “dilates” their “being”—­whatever dilate means and what­ever being means. 6

' of something without annihilating it is to push that being off its center, making it nonidentical to what it is and so a l­ ittle less than what it is—­“for the time being,” as Nature might add. In strict logic, that is a contradiction: a t­ hing cannot be less than itself any more than it can be more than or other than itself. But the natu­ral world re­ quires a looser sense of t­ hings than logic allows if any change is to occur. The phrase “by their change their being doe dilate” appears in the most emphatic position of the stanza, the fifth line. Spenser may be thinking of the Aristotle’s steresis, or privation, lack, which is necessary for some­ thing to change and to decay. But in Aristotle the t­ hings that change below the sphere of the moon never return to themselves as they are whirled in the cycle of coming-­into-­being and decay, of genesis and phthora. Only in the heavens can ­things return to themselves, as the planets and stars change position but return to their original places, being always the same as they ever w ­ ere. (The m ­ istake ­here is supposing that change of position for a ­thing is a kind of change of state—­a lighter kind, so to speak. But change of position and change of state are totally dif­fer­ent.) Nature is saying that even ­things below the sphere of the moon may have the char­ acter of “sphere-­metal,” as with Milton’s University Carrier, Hobson (in the wittily titled poem “Another on the Same”), who into his seemingly T O D I L AT E T H E B E I N G

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unending old age drove regularly between Cambridge and the Bull Tavern in London, only expiring when forced by the plague to cease his motion. He has this stellar or planetary power of immortality depending on a con­ tinuous motion that is always departing from and returning to its orig­ inal state, as a heavenly body does to its original position: ­ ere lieth one who did most truly prove H That he could never die while he could move, So hung his destiny never to rot While he might still jog on and keep his trot, Made of sphere-­metal, never to decay ­Until his revolution was at stay.7

We should note that the comparison of sublunary bodies to heavenly ones unintentionally throws into relief the difference between ­those compared terms. For in Nature’s account, what the sublunary ­things are returning to when “turning to themselves at length againe” is not an orig­ inal position, such as the heavenly bodies return to. They are returning to an original state of which they have been deprived, having under­gone physical decay. Nature’s notion that ­things can “dilate” their being—­that is, lessen their being, thin out their being, disperse their being over a wider area, make their being a ­little less than it is or a lot less than it is, all of which are euphemisms for the ­dying and decay of bodies, especially ­human bodies—is contrary to what happens in the natu­ral world, in the sphere to which Mutabilitie is “put downe” at the end (FQ VII.vii.59) but in which she w ­ ill continue to rule. As in the prophecy she w ­ ill speak in the following stanza, where she refers to the apocalypse, Nature does not know what she is talking about ­here when she speaks of ­things returning to their first estates. In this ignorance she is a pure Neoplatonist. She is talking, however, about something, although it is beyond her under­ standing: the Christian doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead. In this doctrine, based on the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, surely one of the most impor­tant of the sources under­lying the Mutabilitie Cantos, ­human bodies “worke their own perfection so by fate” when they are resurrected in glory. Given the importance in this poem of the com­ parison of sublunary and superlunary bodies, we should hear Nature put­ ting the emphasis on their own perfection, as distinct from the perfection

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of the planets and the stars. For this point too is made in the Bible, where the word for perfection is glory: ­ here are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory T of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. T ­ here is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natu­ral body; it is raised a spiritual body. ­There is a natu­ral body, and ­there is a spir­ itual body . . . ​for the trumpet s­ hall sound, and the dead ­shall be raised incorruptible. I Cor. 15:40–52

The principal speakers of the poem, Mutabilitie, Jove, and Nature, all choose to consider the question of the ­thing in classical terms, where the ­thing is put ­under pressure by the concept of change, of metabolê, “throwing across.”8 Wild, natu­ral change is the throwing across of a t­ hing from one state into another, altogether dif­fer­ent state. Such change ap­ pears to be mirrored by the more controlled, artificial form of change we find in poetry: meta­phor, “carry­ing across.” Poetry, with its continual ver­ sificatory turnings, is about transformation, that is, about meta­phor in language and metamorphosis in repre­sen­ta­tion. But what is a t­ hing, if it can change? How much change can any ­thing endure to remain a ­thing, that ­thing, the first t­ hing it was, in its original state? We might ask this question of the image in poetry and especially of the image in allegory, where many such images are iconographically traditional, having been handed down through time, but are nonetheless difficult to hold in the mind; images fade. We may also put the question to the poem itself. What kind of ­thing is a poem, and when do we know—­more to the point, when does the poet know—­that this poetic ­thing is complete, that it has ended, having closed off one of the limits that defines it as a ­thing?

' Cantos are written in same peculiar stanza that Spenser in­ven­ted for The Faerie Queene as a ­whole. ­T hose stanzas are T H E M U TA B I L I T I E

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or­ga­nized into cantos of approximately the same length as the other seventy-­t wo cantos of The Faerie Queene, and they have the same ballad-­ measure headings that the other cantos have. As the poet prepares to tell the tale of Faunus and Molanna he refers to that Ovidian country tale as “ill fitting for this file,” where “this file” refers to “warres and Knights,” a clear reference to The Faerie Queene, for ­there are in the Mutabilitie Cantos no wars and no knights what­ever: And, w ­ ere it not ill fitting for this file, To sing of hilles and woods, mongst warres and Knights, I would abate the sternenesse of my stile, Mongst ­these sterne stounds to mingle soft delights; And tell how Arlo through Dianaes spights (Being of old the best and fairest Hill That was in all this holy-­Islands hights) Was made the most unpleasant, and most ill. Meane while, ô Clio, lend Calliope thy quill FQ VII.vi.37

Much has been said of Clio and Calliope in this stanza, the muses of his­ tory and of epic song, but it is more in­ter­est­ing that Spenser refers to the poem he is making as a file, a thread, a weaving meta­phor for elegant style, from Latin filum, as in Horace’s poems composed with fine thread, tenui deducta poemata filo, an expression that is something of a commonplace in Latin, as it still is in En­glish.9 The thread of an oration—or of a tale— is not so securely an object or ­thing, with closed bound­aries, as is an art object, or poiêma. Theoretically, a thread can be stretched out forever. The thread in antiquity also and more famously represents a lifeline spun out by the Parcae and violently cut off by Atropos. It must be cut off from without if it is to end ­because the thread has no second dimen­ sion to limit its length. The thread of discourse in the poem and the thread of the poet’s life, spun by Clotho and drawn out by Lachesis, are disturb­ ingly one and the same, both being ended by the dread fury with the ab­ horred shears. Is t­ here then any difference, so far as closure is concerned, between the poem and the poet’s life? Another sense of filum that Spenser starts into sight ­here refers to dif­ fer­ent textures or weaves, rough ones and smooth ones. The homespun

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texture of a tale about woods and hills may not fit well with the sophis­ ticated artistry by which wars and knights are depicted. In referring to what he is writing as a file and by suggesting he is composing it right now, as we read, Spenser is deemphasizing the status of the poem as a t­ hing and inviting us to experience the poem in time, as a per­for­mance. ­Were it not “ill fitting,” he would abate the sternness of his style, of his “stounds,” and then he does so anyway, signaling the change of texture with the homely introduction “Whylome” (FQ VII.vi.38). This performative ges­ ture removes the finished work of art from our sight and puts us ­there on the scene with the poet, in the developing event of composition. But do the Mutabilitie Cantos go into The Faerie Queene without residue, at the expense of their own specificity, their status as a relatively autonomous work? Or is ­there something in ­these cantos that resists assimilation to The Faerie Queene?

' this question through a poem is to recall that the class of all ­things is divided for us—­for ­humans—­into two categories, which are well known to Spenser criticism as “nature” and “art.” T ­ hese categories are worth reflecting on again in light of the basic concept of the ­thing. The first category is that of natu­ral ­things, of ­things given by the world: the mouse that the angry ­house­w ife traps in her dairy, for ex­ ample, meditating how she w ­ ill kill it (FQ VII.vi.48), or a mountain such as Galtymore, Spenser’s Arlo Hill, ­under the shade of which, in thick woods, lawless men rode out with impunity to ravage the Munster Plan­ tation, where Spenser lived. ­There are also ­those more abstract ­things ex­ isting in the aevum, as Frank Kermode called it, which Spenser’s allegory allows us to see as if they ­were persons, ­things such as the seasons and months of the year.10 Take “Aprill,” for example, who is “wanton” and “full of lustyhed” and rides on a bull, the same “which led / Europa floting through th’Argolick fluds”: TO T HINK ABOU T

Next came fresh Aprill full of lustyhed, And wanton as a Kid whose horne new buds: Upon a Bull he rode, the same which led Europa floting through th’Argolick fluds:

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His hornes ­were gilden all with golden studs And garnishèd with garlonds goodly dight Of all the fairest flowres and freshest buds Which th’earth brings forth, and wet he seem’d in sight With waves, through which he waded for his loves delight. FQ VII.vii.33

To see a month of the year as if this parcel of time ­were a ­thing it is nec­ essary to rearrange the more tangible ­things of this world, including that bull, whose horns are studded with gold and garlanded with flowers “which th’earth brings forth” and who seems to have been draped for the pro­cession with a cloth resembling waves, to recall the exploit by which he won Europa: “and wet he seem’d in sight / With waves, through which he waded for his loves delight.” We see in this bull—­who is part natu­ral being, part myth, and part decoration—­that nature and art may be harder to separate than they are in ­those gold-­studded horns, the emblem of civ­ ilization, something artificial inserted by force into something natu­ral, something dead piercing something alive. The mouse trapped in the dairy, the mountain forest bristling with out­ laws, the gold-­studded horns on a bull, and especially that parcel of time in the calendar—­a month—­can appear to us as t­ hings only by their being entangled with us, with our proj­ects and with our concerns. A mouse is ­there for us when we trap it; a month is t­ here for us when we mark it off in the continuum of time and make it a “parcell.” A mountain is t­ here for us when seen from a distance and framed by the sighting we take of it, though it ­doesn’t have the bound­aries that a ­thing is supposed to have. Once you approach it, the mountain becomes an undefined area within a larger massif, a high elevation, to be sure, the “highest head” (FQ VII. vi.36), as Spenser calls Arlo Hill, but one that is t­ here ­because of a r­ ipple in the crust of the earth. If you get too close to it or if you step away too far, into outer space, the mountain is no longer a ­thing. And what about ­those streams that flow down from the sides of this mountain, especially Molanna, who is drawn forth like a thread of dis­ course without conclusion, ­until she descends to the plain? For first, she springs out of two marble Rocks On which a grove of Oakes high mounted growes,

Night Thoughts on Mutability  411 That as a girlond seemes to deck the locks Of som faire Bride, brought forth with pompous showes Out of her bowre, that many flowers strowes: So, through the flowry Dales she tumbling downe, Through many woods, and shady coverts flowes (That on each side her silver channel crowne) Till to the Plaine she come, whose Valleyes shee doth drowne. FQ VII.vi.41

Like the rivers attending the marriage of the Thames and the Medway, in the eleventh canto of Book Four, Molanna has been made by personifi­ cation to appear as a defined entity rather than as part of a larger system, a watershed. It may be impossible for you to step into the same stream twice (the point of the Heraclitean maxim is that you can and you ­can’t, depending on your concept of the t­ hing), but Diana can; and she can also bathe in the same stream often: “In her [Molanna’s] sweet streames, Diana used oft / (­After her sweatie chace and toilesome play) / To bathe her selfe” (FQ VII.vi.43). Is one person bathing in another? We are caught at this mo­ ment between the two images of the stream: (1) the stream as “streames” of ­water, in the plural, into which you c­ ouldn’t step twice; and (2) the stream as the single nymph Molanna, who is the possessor of ­these streams but who is also identical with them and unifies them. The pro­cesses of the natu­ral world offer ­things to our sight when we im­ pose a certain thingliness on them, when we see the ­things as such, and the highest form of this seeing is vision such as we find in poetry. Vision sees the stream as a nymph, who springs out between two marble rocks and runs downhill through the groves and dales, gathering leaves and flowers on her current, as Belphoebe catches leaves and flowers in her hair: And w ­ hether art it w ­ ere, or heedlesse hap, As through the flouring forrest rash she fled, In her rude haires sweet flowres themselves did lap, And flourishing fresh leaves and blossomes did enwrap. FQ II.iii.30

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of ­things, one we have seen to be disturbingly entangled with the first, is that of artificial objects, t­ hose t­ hings we add to the world to build up a second nature, an environment more specially suited to ­humans. This second nature may be seen most simply as an ad­ dition to the world given to us, as a tool is an addition to nature, a hammer, for example, which lengthens the arm and hardens the fist. Or this second nature may be understood to be inside the world given to us, like a shelter or a skyscraper, which creates its own environment. Of t­ hings in this second category the most impor­tant to us are works of art, or poems. The Greek word poiêma, “a made ­thing,” has a broader sense than our word poem, but invoking this broader sense invites us to see in clearer outline the category of ­things to which poems belong. In Liddell and Scott’s lexicon a poiêma is “anything made or done”; “a work, a piece of workmanship”; “a poetical work”; “an act, deed.”11 The Muta­ bilitie Cantos ask us to think about what a poem is nearly as much they ask us to think about t­ hings, or rather they ask us to think about the no­ tion of the ­thing through the class of ­things known as poems. “All ­things stedfastnesse doe hate / And changed be,” says Dame Nature. If The Faerie Queene is a “made t­ hing,” does it change? And does it hate being a t­ hing, as the Mutabilitie Cantos appear to hate being one ­thing? The question of the ­thing is raised and, apparently, definitively an­ swered at the climax of the Mutabilitie Cantos, when Dame Nature pro­ nounces her judgment, her “doome,” in “speeches few.” Mutabilitie has just summarized her case in two lines, and it is significant that the word ­thing appears in each: “No­thing doth firme and permanent appeare, / But all ­things tost and turned by transverse” (FQ VII.vii.46; emphasis added). The nonce word transverse is a wonderful illustration of what she means: all ­things are carried across and turned upside down, transported and in­ verted. Nature utters the judgment we have already seen, implying that ­there is within t­ hings a final “turning” or peripeteia, a reversal contrary to expectation, which appropriately makes itself known in the sixth line of the stanza: “And turning to themselves at length againe.” The sixth line of the Spenserian stanza immediately follows the stan­ za’s mainspring, its double B-­rhyme, which in this instance is on the words estate and dilate. To what have we been brought by ­these words? The being of something is its presence, its estate or “standing,” and this being T H E S E C O N D C AT E G O RY

Night Thoughts on Mutability  413

is mysteriously thinned out by dilation. Is this thinning out of the ­thing, which ­w ill remind us of entropy, the beginning of the end for all ­things, when the last atom has used the last quantum of energy to travel as far as it can from the o ­ thers and is now frozen, as all o ­ thers are, at absolute zero? Or is t­ here a rebound? It comes with the introduction in the sixth line of the C rhyme, which ­will dominate the second half of the stanza in three of its four lines (againe, raigne, maintaine), including the longer, final line. Coming ­after the em­ phatic fifth, the sixth line of a Spenserian stanza effects a decisive turn, occupying new phonic ground and moving away from what was said be­ fore, preparing for what is to come, when ­things are at last “turning to themselves at length againe” and recovering themselves so that they “raigne over change, and doe their states maintaine.” ­T here is no explanation for how this eternal return w ­ ill occur. Nature ­doesn’t understand what she is saying when she tries to think above her domain, and in this she is subtly like Mutabilitie. Nor, indeed, can we be expected to understand what the phrases “turning to themselves” and “raigne over change” mean. Neoplatonic explanations have been rushed to the scene of emergency, but the concepts of Neoplatonism are in­ consistent with the Christian prophecy of the following stanza, which Nature also c­ an’t be expected to understand but which she utters none­ theless: “But time s­hall come that all s­hall changed bee, / And from thenceforth, none no more change ­shall see” (FQ VII.vii.49). What Nature can understand is what she says to Mutabilitie: that Mutabilitie’s trying to make herself a permanent princi­ple and rear aloft the trophy of her victory—­“ What then should let, but I aloft should reare / My Trophee, and from all, the triumph beare?” (VII.vii.46)—­w ill “disseise” Mutabilitie of being. A permanent princi­ple, which is what she wants to be, is the very opposite of what Mutabilitie is: the undermining of all permanent princi­ ples. “Cease therefore ­daughter further to aspire,” Nature says, “And thee content thus to be rul’d by me: / For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire” (VII.vii.59). This appears to be a most satisfyingly logical restitution of cosmic order. That Mutabilitie’s desire to be permanent would negate the very t­ hing she is reads like a statute according to which the titaness may be silenced and put back in her place below the sphere of the moon. But in a further turn of the screw Nature’s statement—­your desire to be other

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than what you are, if fulfilled, would destroy what you are—­must be false as well as true. What could be more natu­ral for Mutabilitie than to be the opposite of what she is, as well as what she is, that is, to be pure contra­ diction, “I” and “Not I,” the undermining of identity in its most absolute form? Poetry confers a visionary firmness, an identity, on the fleeting world of experience. But if we try to use poetry to pursue the truth too far, as Mutabilitie does, then Nature’s words to Mutabilitie may be applied to the proj­ect of The Faerie Queene as well: “thy decay thou seekst by thy desire.” But, as we have seen, this is only partly true or true only in a ­limited sense; and the limitation applies to poetry as well. For what could be more natu­ral to the materials of poetry—­diction, meter, rhythm, rhyme, en­ jambment, syntactical complexity, decaying and reforming images, stanzas, structures, stories, visions—­than for ­these diacritical ­things al­ ways to be longing to turn into one ­thing that is always better than them­ selves, such as the truth, even as they continually return to themselves?

Chapter 18

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Mutability Ascendant From the high ground of Arlo Hill perhaps more of Spenser’s total work can be held in conspectus than from any other vantage point.1

in mid-­January 1599, he was in vigorous middle age and could reasonably expect to finish in some way his elaborate de­ sign. The Faerie Queene was an incomplete epic allegorical poem of twelve intended books, six of which had appeared in two equal installments, three books in 1590 and three more in 1596, when the six books w ­ ere published together u ­ nder the title The Faerie Queene. Disposed into twelve bookes, Fashioning XII Morall vertues. Six more books ­were expected to complete this poem, which is set in an imaginary British and Arthurian past called Fairy Land and which proposes to offer an allegory of the twelve moral virtues. In 1596, at about forty-­two years of age, Spenser was still young enough to believe he would do it. But he died unexpect­ edly on January 13, 1599, a ­little over two years ­after the publication of the 1596 Faerie Queene. His funeral was a public event, ­under the auspices of the queen’s favorite, the Earl of Essex, although not for much longer, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer, the poets of the day casting their elegies into the grave as well as the pens with which the elegies ­were written. 2 ­England’s g­ reat national epic was now left half complete. Still, ­there was no reason not to expect materials from the promised second half of The Faerie Queene eventually to come to light. And so they did in 1609, a de­cade a­ fter the poet’s death, when the six completed books of The Faerie Queene w ­ ere published in a large folio edi­ tion. To t­ hese six books ­were added two more cantos and a two-­stanza W HEN SPENSER DIED

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fragment, ­under the following headnote: “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, which, both for Forme and M ­ atter, appeare to be parcell of some following Booke of the Faerie Queene, ­under the Legend of Constancie. Never before im­ printed.” The Mutabilitie Cantos w ­ ere prob­ably written in the twenty months between Spenser’s return to Ireland, early in 1597, and the end of September 1598.3 Let me briefly review the points already made in chapter seventeen con­ cerning the connection between the Mutabilitie Cantos and The Faerie Queene. We do not know for sure that constancy is the virtue Spenser ex­ pected to treat of in ­these cantos, but if that is an editorial guess, it is a good one, assuming, as is eminently reasonable, that the text before us is “parcell of some following Booke” intended to continue the Arthur-­in-­ Fairy-­Land narrative of the six preceding books. In the course of the Mu­ tabilitie Cantos, as Spenser is about to tell his pastoral tale, he refers to the larger epic poem to which ­these cantos belong, a poem of “warres and knights” in which he is to intrude a story set among “hilles and woods” (FQ VII.vi.37). It should also be said that the cantos of the Mutabilitie Cantos are identical in kind to the seventy-­two cantos Spenser wrote in the first six books of The Faerie Queene: they are composed in the special, nine-­line stanza in­ven­ted by Spenser for The Faerie Queene as a w ­ hole; they are above average length, at fifty-­five and fifty-­nine stanzas, respectively; and they are both headed by the four-­line “arguments” in ballad mea­sure that appear above all preceding cantos of The Faerie Queene. Following the two cantos is the fragment I referred to: two stanzas of an eighth canto bearing the heading, “the viii canto, unperfite,” where unperfite means “incom­ plete.” To count every­thing up, we have 116 Faerie Queene stanzas plus two, four-­line canto arguments, giving a total of 1,052 verses, all exactly conforming with the formal order of The Faerie Queene. With the final line of apostrophic prayer, “O that ­great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabbaoths sight,” the two stanzas of the “unperfite” canto, despite their fragmentary status, give what Frank Kermode called the sense of an ending.4 From this point of view, as Northrop Frye maintained in a classic article on The Faerie Queene, ­these two stanzas “could not have been the opening stanzas of an eighth unfinished canto, as the rubric sug­ gests”; and the Mutabilitie Cantos could never have been “the core of a seventh book, ­unless that book was inconceivably dif­fer­ent in its struc­

Mutability Ascendant  417

ture from the existing ones.”5 This intriguing possibility—­that the Mu­ tabilitie Cantos are, as Frye says on the same page, “a single, beautifully ­shaped poem” not intended to be part of any f­ uture book of The Faerie Queene—­can be no more than a c­ astle in the air, although c­ astles in the air must not be thought always unwelcome in poetry. But let us be clear about the facts ranged against it, in addition to t­ hose cited in the preceding paragraph. Many cantos of The Faerie Queene open with one or two retro­ spective stanzas of this kind, and even that final line of prayer—­w ithout doubt it is a moving final line—is not definitively final. Nothing in ­these two stanzas that close The Faerie Queene as we have it is inconsistent with the poet’s continuing on to finish the canto they open and to join it with ­others in a developing book of The Faerie Queene.6 Had Spenser lived, what ­else could he have done? The Faerie Queene is a highly unpredictable poem, and its most unpredictable event is its seventh book. Even so, we should acknowledge striking differences between the Muta­ bilitie Cantos and the rest of The Faerie Queene. For one ­thing, although the Mutabilitie Cantos would have formed the “allegorical core” of a Book of Constancy, they make a much-­longer “core” episode than any comparable one in the preceding six books.7 The themes, the intellectual framework, the physical setting, the tone, and the temporal orientation are all some­ what dif­fer­ent from The Faerie Queene. For the themes, t­ here is no mention of Prince Arthur, no mention of the Fairy Queen, no mention of the “an­ tique world,” and no mention of any of the moral virtues. The intellectual prob­ lem actually addressed in the Mutabilitie Cantos—­ continuance-­ within-­change—­belongs to metaphysics, not ethics. For the physical set­ ting, instead of taking us to Fairy Land, the action of the Mutabilitie Cantos unfolds in the heavens and then, unexpectedly, in the real landscape of Ire­ land, among named and identifiable places near the poet’s home. No other scenes in The Faerie Queene are set explic­itly in Ireland or any other identifi­ able landscape—or, for that m ­ atter, in the heavens. For the tone, the Muta­ bilitie Cantos are in a lighter, more ironical mood than the high seriousness we are generally greeted with in The Faerie Queene. This is to be expected in the pastoral comedy of the Faunus episode, but the mood spills over into the mighty cosmic contest between Mutabilitie and Jove. The two distinct ­faces of the Mutabilitie Cantos, of low farce and high seriousness, seem to meld in the comparison of the stately goddess Diana

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to an angry “huswife” who has caught a mouse in her dairy “and thou­ sand deathes deviseth in her vengefull mind” (FQ VII.vi.48). The conta­ gion of farce has already spread to the other Olympians, who are thrown into panic by an eclipse of the moon and who gape at Mutabilitie, “all astonied, like a sort of Steeres” (VII.vi.28). Spenser’s gods are closer to Homer’s serio-­comic Olympians than they are to Virgil’s sober powers. This is not unpre­ce­dented in The Faerie Queene, as when Venus casts a jaun­ diced eye on the vaunted beauty of Diana’s nymphs: “So saying e­ very Nymph full narrowly she eyde” (III.vi.23). In the Mutabilitie Cantos, how­ ever, the irony is not occasional but pervasive, affecting even the God­ dess of Nature. Fi­nally, for the poem’s temporal orientation, instead of looking back, as Spenser does in the rest of The Faerie Queene, from a de­ generate pre­sent to an idealized, antique world, the Mutabilitie Cantos look t­ oward a ­future in which the cosmos ­w ill fall slowly into ruin, ­until it is burned at the Last Judgment. To consider the Mutabilitie Cantos from what Roland Barthes called a “writerly” point of view8 —in this case, from the perspective of the working writer in the midst of his l­ abor—­they are indubitably a part of the ongoing proj­ect of The Faerie Queene, disastrously halted by the poet’s death in the prime of life. But for us the poet’s death has become part of the meaning of this poem, and this death confirms what the broken struc­ ture of the Mutabilitie Cantos bears witness to mutely: the incomplete­ ness of all our proj­ects in this world. In another classic article, from which the epigraph to this chapter is taken, William Blissett says that the Muta­ bilitie Cantos may be “now most patient of interpretation as a detached retrospective commentary on the poem as a w ­ hole, forming as they do a satisfactory conclusion to a foreshortened draft, a stopping place at which, ­after a seriatim reading, can be made a pleasing analy­sis of all.” 9 This com­ plex description shows the inseparability of Spenser’s work as a writer (note the phrases “retrospective commentary” and “foreshortened draft”) from our work as readers (note the words “interpretation” and “now”). For Spenser as well as for us the Mutabilitie Cantos are not quite an ending and not quite a continuation. They are a stopping place: a moment, with several smaller moments, or cameos, inside them. ­T here can therefore be no s­ imple answer to the question of the relation of the Mutabilitie Cantos to The Faerie Queene, any more than ­there can be a ­simple answer

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to the practical question w ­ hether to refer to the Mutabilitie Cantos in the singular or the plural. Nor would we want ­simple answers to e­ ither ques­ tion, for our uncertainty is not unrelated to the doubt raised in the Muta­ bilitie Cantos about the power of any t­hing in this world to escape change long enough to become an inviolable entity, as we commonly suppose ­great poems do. Like every­thing ­else, ­great poems decay (that is the reason we have philology), and the purpose of literary criticism is to slow that decay as much as pos­si­ble by giving the poems new life in our minds. Time and change have made the fragmentary text of the Muta­ bilitie Cantos almost—­not entirely but almost—an in­de­pen­dent poem, a peninsula attached to the continent of The Faerie Queene but wearing away. Perhaps by now the peninsula is an island, perhaps not. It depends on ­water levels.

' issues of identity, continuance, and change are raised in the Mutabilitie Cantos from a naturalistic point of view—­Nature is the judge of them—­w ith no reference, ­until the final stanza, to Chris­ tian hope or divine revelation. The main under­lying question is this: given that the world—­“this wide g­ reat Universe” (FQ VII.vii.56)—is composed of ­things that are the same as themselves but that also change and alter, which of t­ hese two princi­ples is the more fundamental: sameness (iden­ tity) or change, mutability? (Mutability is from L. muto, “to change,” related to moveo, “to move,” a point Spenser alludes to in the line “all that moveth, doth mutation love” [VII.vii.55].) A secondary question, although in Spenser’s narrative it is the main point of contention between the protagonists, Jove and Mutabilitie, is ­whether a dif­fer­ent kind of change exists in the heavens, above the sphere of the moon, from that kind of change—­decay—­that exists among us, in our world. Is change in the heavens a m ­ atter of recurrence, of t­ hings departing from themselves in order to return to themselves again, in per­ fection, a pro­cess reflected in the cyclical motions of the planets and even of the stars? That is the ancient, traditional view, as old as the Chal­ dean astronomers, which Jove upholds and Mutabilitie questions, arguing as she does that ­there is no difference between the irreversible decay that rules in our world and the change that occurs in the heavens. T H E M E TA P H Y S I C A L

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Mutabilitie argues this point by getting into motion. She ascends into the heavens and claims them for her own, violating the sphere of the moon, which marks the boundary between the two kinds of change. She ­doesn’t win this argument and is “put downe” (FQ VII.vii.59) at last, but that is not the poet’s point. It is rather to bring home to us the imperma­ nence of every­thing in our own world beneath the heavens, where t­ hings wear down and pass away and, if they are living organisms, die. True, new life replaces old, like spawn in the river Shure, “in which are thousand salmons bred” (VII.vi.54). But Spenser’s point is that the “flowring pride” of individual existence rests on an illusion. We are not ­really persons, having stable identities, as mere personifications do. We are ­little mo­ ments of turbulence in the under­lying flow of continual change, like ­those salmon. We meet the ­enemy, Mutabilitie, and she is us. This prospect leaves the poet filled with what Milan Kundera calls un­ bearable lightness or what with more heaviness we may term ontolog­ ical loathing, the feeling of not truly existing: Me seemes, that though she all unworthy ­were Of th’Heav’ns Rule; yet very sooth to say, In all ­things ­else she beares the greatest sway. Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle, And love of t­ hings so vaine to cast away; Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle, Short Time ­shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle. FQ VII.viii.1

In Aristotle’s Metaphysics, an impor­tant text for the intellectual back­ ground of the Mutabilitie Cantos (as is On the Heavens), all t­ hings below the sphere of the moon have e­ ither in­de­pen­dent being or freedom from change but not both. ­T hings enjoying freedom from change are the ob­ jects of mathe­matics; ­things enjoying in­de­pen­dent being are the objects of physics. Although a triangular object decays, triangles do not. But mathematical objects such as triangles ­aren’t quite real in the way phys­ ical objects are ­because they lack in­de­pen­dent being. Physical objects have being but lack permanence; mathematical objects have permanence but lack being. Aristotle reasoned that t­ here must be objects that lack neither permanence nor being, and the planets seemed the likeliest vis­i­ble in­

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stances of such objects, having in­de­pen­dent being, as they certainly do, and seeming to be ­free from decay ­because they return to their original positions unchanged. Aristotle called this class of objects theological, not for theological reasons but simply ­because the planets are named ­after the gods. By the sixth ­century ad, reflection on such permanent objects, and also on first princi­ples, such as time, space, motion, and substance, came to be called metaphysical, meaning both “what comes ­after the study of nature, or physis,” and “what lies beyond or above nature, or physis.” For Spenser ­there are two levels of nature, one above and one below the moon, called the superlunary and the sublunary realms. In the super­ lunary realm, objects, that is, planets and stars, change their positions with re­spect to one another, but they do not decay. In the sublunary realm, where we live, bodies die and objects (including dead bodies) wear down to nothing, to a scattering of salts. The moon was thought to be the boundary between the two realms ­because the side of the moon facing us undergoes vis­i­ble change in its phases and has markings that suggest it decays. But the far side of the moon, which is turned away from us, was supposed to be pristine and unchanging, half a perfect pearl. The telescope—­still a de­cade away from when Spenser wrote—­would reveal what the naked eye might well infer: that craters on the edge of the vis­ i­ble orb of the moon continue into the shadowy region between the light and dark sides of the moon and so very prob­ably continue on the dark side. An inviolable boundary is crossed. If Spenser was planning a Book of Constancy, that ethical virtue would have for its cosmic foundation the permanence of the heavenly bodies above the sphere of the moon. But recent scientific observations had thrown into question the dependability of the heavens as a model of con­ stancy. In the final stanza of the Mutabilitie Cantos, therefore, the lan­ guage of metaphysical speculation gives way to religious prophecy. To ensure the priority of permanence over change, of identity over noniden­ tity, it is necessary to go outside metaphysics and natu­ral philosophy to theology, in the Christian, not the Aristotelian, sense: “For, all that moveth, doth in Change delight; / But thenceforth all ­shall rest eternally / With Him” (VII.viii.2).

'

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I N C A N T O S I X the goddess Mutabilitie, who is also called Change and Alteration (arguments: FQ VII.vi.1, VII.vii.2), having wreaked havoc on earth, decides to seize the rule of the heavens. She climbs to the moon, strug­gles with the goddess Cynthia, trying to drag her from her chair (thus causing a lunar eclipse), and at the summons of Mercury ascends to Jove’s heavenly palace, where she challenges him directly. Mutabilitie claims that Jove has usurped her right to rule the heavens b ­ ecause she, Mutabilitie, is descended from Titan, the elder b ­ rother of Saturn, Jove’s ­father. Jove reaches for his lightning bolt to strike her down, as he has done to other descendants of Titan who threatened his rule. But seeing Muta­ bilitie’s beautiful face (for change is beautiful), Jove tries instead to seduce her to his party—­and to his bed. Brusquely declining, Mutabilitie appeals to the judgment of the “­Father of the Gods and men by equall right, / To weet, the God of Nature” (VII.vi.35). Jove is displeased but must comply. This means that Spenser sees the gods as nothing more than personifi­ cations of the powers of nature. But how firm are t­ hose powers? The case is appointed to be tried on the summit of Arlo Hill, the highest peak in the Galtymore mountains to the northeast of Spenser’s home: “the highest head (in all mens sights) / Of my old f­ ather Mole” (FQ VII.vi.36). The unexpected local reference occasions an inset tale of the etiological kind (from aitios, “cause”: a “just so” story telling how something came to be as it is), accounting for why Arlo, which was once a locus amoenus, or earthly paradise, “the best and fairest Hill / That was in all this holy-­Islands hights,” became “the most unpleasant, and most ill,” infested with wolves and thieves (VII.vi.37). B ­ ecause the tale relates to events in the deep past and is set not in Fairy Land but on local ground, and ­because the implicit subject of the tale is Queen Elizabeth’s declining to supply enough troops to pacify Ireland, Spenser signals the change of register by asking the muse of history to aid Spenser’s epic muse: Clio should lend Calliope her quill (VII.vi.37). Long ago, the goddess Diana loved to hunt on Arlo Hill and to bathe in the stream Molanna, who was also one of her nymphs, ­after which the goddess would repose naked “on the soft and downy grass . . . ​where none behold her may” (FQ VII.vi.42). Wishing to have sight of her naked, the wood god Faunus persuaded the nymph Molanna to hide him in a neigh­ boring bush, having corrupted Molanna with apples and cherries and

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with the promise that he would get her what she had longed wished for: the love of the stream Fanchin. But when Molanna conceals Faunus and Faunus sees Diana naked, he foolishly betrays himself, laughing with plea­ sure and blurting out his admiration. He is haled forth; and ­after more severe punishments are considered (they include gelding), he is covered in a deerskin, and the hounds are set on him as goddess and nymphs chase him over hill and dale. His fate is happier than that of the hunter Actaeon, who when he accidentally came upon Diana bathing was turned by the offended goddess into a stag and devoured by his hounds. Faunus, how­ ever, proves faster than his pursuers, whereupon they return to poor Mo­ lanna, who was already “shole” (VII.vi.40), or stony and shallow, and overwhelm her with stones. But Faunus keeps his promise and persuades Fanchin to accept Molanna to his bed (the stream bed and the marriage bed are meta­phor­ically conjoined), so that the two streams now flow to­ gether in Fanchin’s deeper course. As for the offended Diana, she forsakes Arlo Hill, “And all that Mountaine, which doth over-­looke / The richest champian that may ­else be rid [i.e., seen]” (VII.vi.54). That champian (cf. Fr. campagne, “countryside”) is the plain on which the Munster Plantation was situated, in which Spenser lived at Kilcolman as one of the En­glish “undertakers” or colonists.10 At parting, Diana lays a heavy curse on the entire place: that it be infested ever a­ fter with wolves and thieves, “Which too-­too true,” Spenser says with feeling, in the final line of the episode, “that lands in-­dwellers since have found” (VII.vi.55).

' is occupied by the trial between Mutabilitie and Jove on the following question: who should rule the universe, Jove, as the princi­ple of identity, or Mutabilitie, as the princi­ple of change? Is each ­thing a ­thing, or is thingliness an illusion and all so-­called ­things merely disturbances, standing waves in an under­lying flow? To judge this impor­tant question a mighty figure from late antiquity and the ­Middle Ages, the Goddess of Nature, is appealed to. She is introduced, in fully eight stanzas of spec­ tacular beauty, enthroned among flowers that spring up joyously beneath her. But should this natu­ral description of Nature seem insufficient, and it is anything but, Spenser refers us, with self-­mocking erudition, to books: Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae. CAN TO SEV EN

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In this flurry of erudition it is a won­der he did not add the common lit­ erary source for the figure of Nature, in the Late Latin poet Claudian’s De consulatu Stilichonis, without knowledge of which who can be well ac­ quainted with nature? From a l­ egal if not from a poetic point of view, it is surprising that Mu­ tabilitie does not build her case on her good genealogical claim, “From [her] g­ reat Grandsire Titan . . . ​Deriv’d by dew descent,” which she men­ tions at the trial only in passing (FQ VII.vii.16).11 Jove is “Saturnes sonne,” as Mutabilitie has pointedly called him (VII.vi.34), and Saturn is the younger ­brother of Titan, from whom Mutabilitie is descended. But the judge is Nature, not an En­glish magistrate, and good ­legal arguments do not impress her. Nature ­favors the young and the strong over ­those with good title but no courage to defend it. Queen Elizabeth was of much the same mind vis-­à-­v is the colonists of the Munster Plantation. Dame Na­ ture is ­there in the tsunami as much as in the flower. In Nature’s realm, where the seas can rise, carelessly effacing our property markers, posses­ sion is ten tenths of the law. Mutabilitie therefore builds her case on the less legally secure but more natu­ral argument that she already occupies what she therefore has the right to possess, or at least she occupies more of it than Jove: “I doe pos­ sesse the worlds most regiment” (FQ VII.vii.17). But does she? If she’s right, she w ­ ill win. For what Nature is judging is not ­whether Mutabilitie has a right to the heavens but ­whether Mutabilitie already occupies more of the heavens than Jove and should take the remainder by right of conquest. Mutabilitie’s argument may be specious, however, that is, fair appearing, being addressed to the eye, which reads surfaces, instead of to the mind, which penetrates below. It does not look good for Mutabilitie when she boasts to Nature that her argument “­Shall to your eyes appeare inconti­ nent,” that is, immediately, without reflection, and when she enjoins Na­ ture to “judge . . . ​by verdit of thine eye,” not by the verdict of her reason (VII.vii.17 and 27). In Book Five, in the debate between Artegal and the ­giant with the scales, Spenser has shown his contempt of arguments based on appearances. Artegal’s response to the g­ iant—­“But in the mind the doome of right must bee” (V.ii.47)—is the perfect gloss for the evidence (a word that means “bringing forth to sight”) that Mutabilitie ­will pre­sent. For Spenser, seeing may be believing, but belief is often false. Judging is

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another m ­ atter. Still, Mutabilitie makes a very strong case, as Nature w ­ ill acknowledge when the outcome hangs in the balance.

' opens with a magnificent description of tumult in the earth and in the four ele­ments below the sphere of the moon. “All that . . . ​ is ybredde,” she says, M U TA B I L I T I E

How-­ever fayre it flourish for a time, Yet see we soone decay; and, being dead, To turne again unto their earthly slime: Yet, out of their decay and mortall crime, We daily see new creatures to arise . . . . . . . . . . . . . So turne they still about, and change in restlesse wise. FQ VII.vii.18

Passing from substance to temporality, Mutabilitie then asks that t­ here be brought before the court “the rest which doe the world in being hold” (FQ VII.vii.27), the times and seasons of the yeare that fall, followed by Day and Night, the Hours, or Horae, and lastly Life and Death—­all the modes of temporality within which change unfolds. What follows in the next eigh­teen stanzas (VII.vii.28–46) is Spenser’s last ­great pageant. As in all Spenserian pageants, the plea­sure is as much in the succession of the figures as it is in the figures individually. But the individual figures are delightful: Spring with his garment of flowers and leaves, “In which a thousand birds had built their bowres” (FQ VII.vii.28); Summer “In a thin silken cassock, coloured greene,” with a garland on his head and a bow and arrows in his hands (VII.vii.29); Au­ tumn in yellow, “Laden with fruits that made him laugh, full glad / That he had banisht hunger” (VII.vii.30); and Winter, “Chattering his teeth for cold,” his breath making icicles in his beard and “dull drops” falling from his purple nose, “As from a limbeck” (VII.vii.31). A ­ fter ­these figures have marched by “in order” (VII.vii.32), the twelve months come in riding on the astrological signs. Day and Night follow, on white and black h ­ orses, with scepters on the tops of which the heavenly bodies are represented (VII.vii.44). The Hours, “faire ­daughters of high Jove,” come next. They are

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virgins of “wondrous beauty, fit to kindle love,” and from their station at Heaven’s gate they divide the twenty-­four hours of the day and night, each one waking and watching ­after the last (VII.vii.45). In the final stanza of the pageant Life and Death appear, Death with “most grim and grisly visage,” but ‘Unbodied, unsoul’d, unheard, unseene.’ Life comes before Death in the pageant. But still, Life is described last, as “a faire young lusty boy . . . ​Deckt all with flowers, and wings of gold” (VII.vii.46). Mutabilitie summarizes the meaning of this pageant: “for, who sees not, that Time on all doth pray?” (FQ VII.vii.47). We note that this argu­ ment is based on what we see. So far, Mutabilitie’s argument is directed at the lower world below the sphere of the moon, but she w ­ ill soon turn her eyes, and ours, to the heavens.

' able to get a word in edgewise, countering that he and the gods are the true source of time, pouring it out like ­water from heaven. The gods therefore have authority over all t­ hings that are sub­ ject to time, including Mutabilitie herself: O N LY N OW I S J OV E

But, who is it (to me tell) That Time himself doth move and still compel To keepe his course? Is not that namely wee Which poure that vertue from our heavenly cell, That moves them all, and makes them changèd be? So them we gods doe rule, and in them also thee. FQ VII.vii.48

This response is brushed aside by Mutabilitie as she carries her argument into the celestial regions. She alludes to recent, disturbing astronomical observations, especially of the planets and among them especially of Mars, the erratic movements of which would prove key, a­ fter Spenser’s day, to discrediting the earth-­centered Ptolemaic system: Now Mars that valiant man is changèd most: For, he some times so far runs out of square, That he his way doth seem quite to have lost, And cleane without his usuall sphere to fare;

Mutability Ascendant  427 That even ­these Star-­gazers stonisht are At sight thereof, and damne their lying bookes: So likewise, grim Sir Saturne oft doth spare His sterne aspect, and calme his crabbèd lookes: So many turning cranks t­ hese have, so many crookes. FQ VII.vii.52

Observed irregularities, or “crookes,” in the planetary motions and “turning cranks,” or epicycles, imposed on the planets’ orbits to save appearances—­that is, to save the earth-­centered, Ptolemaic system by adding complexity—­pose a grave threat to the immortal status of the Olympian gods with whom t­ hose planets are identified. Worse news is to follow. Many of the gods, not excluding Jove, have been born, and born on earth, too. ­Possibly, being born is as strong an argument against eternal existence as ­dying is. Mutabilitie puts the em­ barrassing question to Jove himself: Where w ­ ere ye born? Some say in Crete by name, ­Others in Thebes, and o ­ thers other-­where; But wheresoever they comment the same, They all consent that ye begotten ­were, And borne h ­ ere in this world, ne other can appear. Then ye are mortall borne, and thrall to me. FQ VII.vii.53–54

At last, Mutabilitie carries her argument to the stars, which are fixed on their single, turning sphere, the “starrie sky.” We might suppose that at least the stars are f­ ree from degenerative change, unlike the erring planets (the word planet is from a Greek verb meaning “to wander”). But the stars and the astrological signs that they form also move, although they do so together, on their sphere: Onely the starrie skie doth still remaine: Yet do the Starres and Signes therein still move, And even it self is mov’d, as wizards saine. But all that moveth, doth mutation love: Therefore both you and them to me I subject prove. FQ VII.vii.55

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We notice that Mutabilitie has equated change-­plus-­decay, which occurs below the sphere of the moon, with ­simple change, or motion—­the waving of grass in the wind, for example, or the movements of fish, which “doe at randon range” (VII.vii.21). Mutabilitie does so even where such motion, as is the case with the stars, does not entail decay. Formerly, it was thought that all the heavenly bodies above the sphere of the moon have both in­de­pen­dent being and freedom from change, so that they move in their cycles without decay. Mutabilitie has shown that this is not so, so far as the planets are concerned. But she has not shown that the stars in their collective motion decay. If the stars are the highest ­things vis­i­ble in the natu­ral world, and if motion, in the Aristotelian-­P tolemaic system, is imparted to the other spheres from the perfect motion of the “starrie sky,” then all is not lost: t­ here may still be a case for claiming that all ­things eventually return to themselves, just as the stars return eternally to their original places. The stars are the implicit model for Nature’s judg­ ment: every­thing is star-­like, Nature ­w ill say. In the meantime, Mutabil­ itie makes her triumphant summary: Then since within this wide ­great Universe Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare, But all ­things tost and turned by transverse: What then should let, but I aloft should reare My Trophee, and from all the triumph beare? FQ VII.vii.56

“Trophee” is an especially suitable word, from Greek treppo, “to turn,” ­because the monument to a victory that goes by this name is raised on the field of ­battle (or, for a naval engagement, on the nearest coastline prominence) at the exact place where, or moment when, the ­enemy was turned. Mutability is that kind of change, a disastrous turning (for her en­ emies, which are every­one) where she raises her trophy. What can Na­ ture make of this turning? Can she turn it back?

' of reflection during which “silence long ensewed” (FQ VII.vii.57), the Goddess of Nature pronounces judgment in ­favor of Jove: change is not the radical princi­ple: identity is. All t­ hings are not subject ­A F T E R A P E R I O D

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to change; change is itself subject to t­ hose ­things as they use change to “worke their owne perfection so by fate”: “Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne; / But they raigne over change, and doe their states maintaine” (VII.vii.58). The stanza of judgment is followed by one in which the story is tied up briskly: Mutabilitie is “put downe and whist,” that is, reduced to her station below the sphere of the moon, and silenced for now; Jove is “confirm’d in his imperiall see,” that is, allowed to con­ tinue to rule the heavens; the assembly is “dismist”; and Nature van­ ishes, “whither no man wist” (VII.vii.59), but not before delivering her­ self of an obscure prophecy: “But time ­shall come that all ­shall changed bee, / And from thenceforth, none no more change ­shall see” (VII.vii.59). The first of ­these lines seems to predict a victory for Mutabilitie in the long run, despite her disappointment t­ oday: “all ­shall changed bee.” But the second line heralds Mutabilitie’s annihilation. In the two stanzas of the eighth canto “unperfite,” the poet draws back a ­little from this summing-up to reflect on its consequences for him. True, Mutabilitie is “unworthy” to rule the heavens and has rightly been put down. Note that the poet says nothing about the justice of her claim: he says only that she is unworthy, however good her claim may be. He is judging morally and above all, as we ­shall see, aesthetically. But if the ti­ taness has been “put down,” she has been put down where he, Spenser, has to live, in a place where the fickleness of fortune continues to bear “the greatest sway” (FQ VII.viii.1). We saw that this recognition, which seems to controvert the judgment of Nature (all ­things “raigne over change”), arouses in the poet a loathing of life and a desire to cast away his “love of t­ hings so vaine.” Spenser does not say he wishes to cast away the t­ hings themselves but rather his love of them. That would include his love of the hard-­won Elizabeth Boyle and the child he had with her. It is the temptation, one not unknown to ­middle age, to live without feeling, ­doing your duty, but without love. In the final stanza, the poet remem­ bers Nature’s obscure prophecy of a time when “no more Change ­shall be,” and he concludes with a prayer to the God of Hosts (“Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight”) to bring him at last to the sight of the apocalyptic day of rest, the “Sabaoths sight” (VII.viii.2). Perhaps hope of that sight ­will give him the courage to love the good in life, however entangled it is with the bad and however l­ ittle time he has left in which to love.

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' four stanzas of the Mutabilitie Cantos are among the best in The Faerie Queene, having the vast force of the epic ­behind them and achieving the rescue of all ­things, so that we may love them, or some of them, before acknowledging their ultimate loss. How ­w ill Spenser bring the im­mense structure trailing ­behind him down to earth and land it? The four stanzas are the last two of the seventh canto and the two stanzas of the final, “unperfite” canto. Despite the canto change dividing them, they describe together the arc of Spenser’s landing. The first of ­these stanzas is Nature’s judgment. The second stanza is divided between Nature’s summary statement to Mutabilitie and the po­ et’s summing up of the tale, between which, in the fourth and fifth lines, Nature delivers herself of the obscure prophecy mentioned. The third stanza (FQ VII.viii.1) is the poet’s reflection on his own disillusioned ex­ perience. The fourth stanza (VII.viii.2), the last in The Faerie Queene, seizes on Nature’s prophecy and leaps beyond the frame of the metaphysical de­ bate as it has unfolded so far. The poet prays for the sight of eternity be­ yond change. This is the Apocalypse, and we should be clear that what the poet wishes to see ­w ill bring about the total destruction of the very world Nature has just saved—­when, as George Herbert says in his muta­ bility poem “Decay,” all ­things burn: THE FINAL

I see the world grows old, when as the heat Of thy ­great love, once spread, as in an urn Doth closet up it self, and still retreat, Cold Sinne still forcing it, till it return, And calling Justice, all t­ hings burn.12

In the stanza of judgment the rhymes in the first five lines, where the reasoning is a ­little more severe (sayd, hate, wayd, estate, and dilate), are sounded higher in the mouth than the deeper ones of the four lines with which the stanza draws to a close: againe, Change, raigne, and maintaine. Me­ dial rhymes are added as well, Change in line eight and, in line nine, raigne and change. Altogether, the rhymes ring like bells in a carillon, trium­ phantly affirming the victory of identity over change. All t­ hose brilliantly particularized figures we have been shown in the pageant of seasons and

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months are not perturbations in the long flux of change. They rule over change, and, in spite of change, they remain what they are: I well consider all that ye have sayd, And find that all ­things stedfastnesse doe hate And changèd be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changèd from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselves at length againe, Doe worke their own perfection so by fate: Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne over change, and doe their states maintaine. FQ VII.vii.58

We cannot help noticing—it is the most discreetly thrilling effect of this stanza—­that it is by their own power that the ­things seem to hold their identity, as the active verbs imply: dilate, turne, worke, and raigne. The system seems contained in itself, unaided by any invisible hand from the outside, ­unless it is fate in line seven. But in this context, fate can mean nothing other than natu­ral law, which belongs like every­thing ­else to the interior of the system. Nature continues to speak in the first five lines of the stanza following her judgment, first to Mutabilitie and then to all pre­sent: Cease therefore ­daughter further to aspire, And thee content thus to be rul’d by me: For thy decay thou seekst by thy desire; But time ­shall come that all ­shall changèd bee, And from thenceforth, none no more change s­ hall see. FQ VII.vii.59

The famous line “Thy decay thou seekst by thy desire” states the contra­ diction of Mutabilitie’s wanting to establish herself as the universal rule. For Mutabilitie to wish to be the universal rule is to wish to be the op­ posite of what she is. It is to wish to be “steadfastness” instead. If change is permanent, then change is no longer change; and if permanence is change, then permanence is no longer permanent. Poetry seldom attains to such logical tightness. But ­there is more to it than logic.

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­There is life in it, too, steering the verse in a dif­fer­ent direction, one that ­ ill disturb the self-­satisfaction with which we expose a contradiction w in someone ­else’s reasoning, oblivious to contradiction in our own. For is it not true that all living systems, in the very pursuit of what they de­ sire (to capture energy and to reproduce themselves), seek their decay? As you read it, you should experience a moment of surprise when the phrase “thy decay thou seekst by thy desire” is turned on you, like a loaded gun. We are Mutabilitie too, and Nature is talking to us. In the prophetic lines to follow a totally new concept of change is brought in. We have observed that the poem engages two kinds of change: (1) superlunary change-­as-­circular-­motion, or the eternal return of the same, the change that the stars seem still to have and that the planets no longer do; (2) sublunary change-­as-­decay, the alteration of “all ­things” into something e­ lse, without any hope of return: “man dieth and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?” (Job 14:10). But the new kind of change now being referred to is sudden, total, and final: “But time ­shall come that all s­ hall changed bee, / And from that time none no more change ­shall see.” Note how the metronomic beauty of t­hese lines imitates the precise divisions of time g­ oing for­ ward. In the Book of Job, shortly ­after the passage just cited, Job asserts his faith that he ­will recover the very flesh that rots from his body and is eaten by worms: “and though ­after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh ­shall I see God: whom I s­ hall see for myself, and mine eyes ­shall behold, and not another” (Job 19:25–27). It ­w ill be in my flesh, Job says, that I ­shall see God, and it ­w ill be with my own eyes, the ones I am looking through now, not with other eyes, spiritual eyes, that I ­shall see God. Job’s inspired utterance is echoed in Saint Paul, who proclaims the mystery of which Job has had a prophetic intimation: “Behold, I show you a mystery; we ­shall not all sleep, but we ­shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet ­shall sound, and the dead ­shall be raised incorruptible, and we ­shall be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51–52). In stanzas 58 and 59 the word change is sounded seven times and rhymed with other words four times. It would have been impossible for Spenser’s audience, it would be impossible for anyone who goes regularly to church, as Spenser’s audience did, not to hear ­behind the insistent repetition of this word the most power­ful

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statement of hope in the Bible: “we s­ hall be changed.” ­After this change “none no more change ­shall see.” Notwithstanding the good evidence against Jove, Nature confirms him as ruler of the heavens, for Nature, as we saw, ­favors the young and the strong, and Jove is both. Mutabilitie, having exaggerated her strength, is once again confined below the moon and “whist,” or silenced. In the last analy­sis, however, which we encounter in the third of t­ hese stanzas (FQ VII.viii.1), Nature’s judgment may not appear to be entirely about power, for Spenser puts his thumb on the scales and slyly adds a reason for put­ ting Mutabilitie down that is not metaphysical and not even moral: it is aesthetic. He ­doesn’t like her tone of voice, which is grating, irascible, and discontented, with a trace of the timbre of the Blatant Beast. Spenser hears this noise coming at him from the ­future. It is bad enough ­here on earth, Spenser thinks, in the social world of London as much as in Ireland, and the poets, the satirists, are picking it up, for discontented melancholy was the literary fashion of the ­later 1590s and would provoke official and futile suppression in 1599. Reverberating profoundly in Hamlet (1600–1601), its whining sound would continue on as the burden of the lit­er­a­ture of the Jacobean period. Nor is the poet who published an en­ tire volume entitled Complaints a stranger to its use, but he d ­ oesn’t want this noise coming down on him from the heavens: “Me seemes, that though she all unworthy w ­ ere / Of the Heav’ns rule; yet very sooth to say, / In all ­things e­ lse she beares the greatest sway” (VII.viii.1). Let the heavens, at least, be our imaginary refuge from the noise of the ­future. Let the heavens ring with the m ­ usic of the spheres while Jupiter is enthroned in his palace and the constellations move in state ­behind him. Still closer in, in our neighborhood, let Cynthia, the moon, reign unmo­ lested by change, enthroned in her bright palace, “All fairely deckt with heavens goodly story.” Let the stars attend Cynthia forever. And please do let her page, the eve­ning star, be a guide for us as well as for her: Vesper, whom we the Evening-­starre intend: That with his Torche, still twinkling like twilight, Her lightened all the way where she should wend, And joy to weary wand’ring travailers did lend. FQ VII.vi.9

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Note the enriched meaning of travailers: t­ hose who travel; t­ hose who are in travail in this world, who strug­gle in pain to bring something forth, like The Faerie Queene. If that is what our spirits need—­for a glory to be settled on this world, in spite of what we know—it is for the poets to bring that glory to our sight. So Spenser appears to have concluded at the end of his own weary travail, when his Fairy Queen, Elizabeth Tudor, was old and also near the end of her travail in this world. The queen had abandoned Arlo Hill and all the Munster Plantation it overlooks, including Spenser’s estate at Kilcolman, leaving them to be overrun by wolfish outlaws, secure in the dense forests u ­ nder Galtymore, by violent mobs and, at the end, by armies. It is true that to ­others it was Spenser and his fellow undertakers who stood among the wolves and the thieves. But Spenser was soon to join his “weary wand’ring travailers” at night on a road leading into the dark, perhaps bearing a dead child, and with a burning ­house ­behind him. All ­things burn.

Afterword: The Colossi of Memnon

of Memnon are two gigantic, originally monolithic statues some eigh­teen meters or sixty feet high, representing the eighteenth-­dynasty pha­raoh Amenhotep III. They are seated in the Egyp­ tian desert near the modern city of Luxor, west of the Nile, in the ne­ cropolis of ancient Thebes, guarding what was once the pha­raoh’s vast, personal mortuary complex. Both colossi look t­ oward the Nile, guard­ ians of the dead facing the source of life, as they have done for nearly three and a half thousand years. The colossi are very far from sculptural expres­ sions of the Greek ideal, according to which the body is aesthetically suf­ ficient unto itself. As Hegel says of them, they are closer to architecture than to sculpture ­because they refer to the universal without embodying it.1 Their gaze is imposing and implacable, the more so for their ­faces having been entirely worn away. Figures of masculine power, of faceless authority, the colossi nevertheless have on their thrones carvings in half relief of the pha­raoh’s ­mother and his wife and also, on the side panels, depictions of the androgynous figure of Hapy, who is male but with pen­ dulous breasts and sagging belly. Hapy is god of the annual flooding of the Nile, which ­until the completion of the Aswan dam in 1970 would occasionally rise to the bases of the statues, as if they had summoned its presence. The Greeks said the colossi ­were statues of Memnon, the black Ethio­ pian king who in the post-­Homeric tradition brought a vast army to the relief of Troy, only to be defeated and killed by Achilles. Famous for his T H E COLOSSI

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beauty, Memnon is named only incidentally in Homer, in the Nekyia epi­ sode of Book Eleven of the Odyssey, when Odysseus visits the under­ world and speaks with the dead. When addressing Achilles, he mentions the death of Eurypylus (Odysseus is listing for the proud ­father all the he­ roes killed by his son, Neoptolemos), who was the most beautiful man Odysseus ever saw, a­ fter shining Memnon.2 That reference to Memnon’s beauty stands b ­ ehind Milton’s mention of him in “Il Penseroso,” de­ scribing the goddess Melancholy as beautifully black: “Black, but such as in esteem / Prince Memnon’s ­sister might beseem.”3 Memnon was said to be nearly as skillful a warrior as Achilles, and like Achilles, he had one divine and one h ­ uman parent, his ­mother being the goddess Eos, the dawn, and his f­ ather Tithonus, a prince of Troy, who as lover of the god­ dess received the disastrous gift of immortality without eternal youth. Memnon and Achilles are slanted or imperfect but compelling reflections of each other, like twins: both beautiful men; both supremely skilled war­ riors; both the sons of goddesses, Achilles of the sea nymph Thetis and Memnon, as mentioned, of Eos, goddess of dawn. But they are images with differences, notably the difference between black skin and white. Memnon’s twinning with his killer seems to be repeated in the two Memnons guarding the entrance to the mortuary complex. Identity and difference are confusingly entangled between them, like Spenser’s Arthur and his “equal,” Artegal, or the Fairy Queen and her more active avatar, Britomart, or Belphoebe and Diana or Amoret and Venus or even Radi­ gund and Mutabilitie. Narrative poetry generates figures that appear to be incipiently identical, that is, moving into or t­ oward identity without ever arriving, as with meta­phor. The Memnons, which are very dif­fer­ent now b ­ ecause of the destruction wrought by time, are moving the oppo­ site way, from identity into difference and ­toward singularity. We can only wish that Spenser, whose increasing interest in ­things Egyptian is evinced in the Isis Church episode of Book Five (FQ V.vii.2–24), had lived to write an episode involving the Colossi of Memnon, perhaps for the unfinished Book Seven, on constancy. Especially alluring for Spenser, one imagines, is the legendary capacity of one of the colossi to sing (­until ­later antiq­ uity, when it was repaired and unintentionally silenced), at the moment it is struck by the first rays of dawn. On some accounts, ­Memnon sings to his m ­ other, Eos, lamenting his death.

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Or, if the colossus d ­ idn’t sing, exactly, it made a sound, like a blow or the breaking of a lute string or, in Jacques Derrida’s amazing book Glas (1974), the tolling (glas) of a funeral bell.4 For the Colossi of Memnon are a major theme of Glas, represented in its two parallel and, as it ­were, au­ tomatically interacting columns, the left column commenting on G. F. W. Hegel, the phi­los­o­pher of absolute knowledge, le savoir absolu, das absolutes Wissen, and hence of absolute po­liti­c al authority as well, but asking what remains of such authority, of “a” Hegel (the name sounds like ea­gle in French), the ea­gle that flies looking into the sun, so Pliny the Elder assures us, although lately his wings have grown heavy with lead. What remains of this Hegel, of the ruined authority of absolute knowledge, without which every­thing we have been able to think since would not have been pos­si­ble?5 Absolute knowledge lies in ruins, as does Spenser’s grandiose plan for The Faerie Queene. But it is from the ruins of this knowledge, not from any imag­ inary fresh start, that the power of thinking remains to us, in the long shadows cast by the huge fragments of this disarticulated structure. The right column of Glas concerns the major French dramatist, nov­ elist, and poet Jean Genet, orphan, vagabond, homosexual, cross-­dresser, dishonorably discharged soldier of the French Foreign Legion, method­ ical inverter of moral codes and values, affirmer of life, and author (among many other works) of the drag-­queen novel Notre Dame des Fleurs, which is much commented on in Glas, flowers being symbols of the phallus, the opposite of stony colossi guarding a tomb or an under­ground crypt, like Antigone’s. ­T hese are the simplest t­ hings one can say about Glas, this typograph­ ical won­der (it was produced a de­cade before word pro­cessors). The two columns have different-­sized type (the right, or Genet, side is larger), and each is encroached upon or entirely interrupted by inserted commentary and quotation in yet smaller type or, to paraphrase, two unequal columns, each the envelope or sheath of the other, each incalculably undermining, returning upon, replacing, commenting on, cutting into, and recuper­ ating the other. 6 Genet took his m ­ other’s surname—he never knew the identity of his ­father—­which is the name of a common flowering shrub, genêt, “broom,” which turns the roadsides yellow in the spring. T ­ here are curious reso­ nances, to my ear, between who Genet was and who Spenser’s Marinell

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failed to become, since Marinell is indifferent to Florimell at their mar­ riage, preferring to joust, and since he might have been more comfort­ able than Artegal was in w ­ omen’s attire. Marinell also has an Adonis-like fragile affinity with flowers (FQ IV.xii.34), rising and falling with their fortunes. When speared by Britomart, he falls like a sacrificed ox, its gaudy flowers stained with its blood (III.iv.17). Genet was a vagabond in youth and, once he became famous, a po­liti­cal activist in c­ auses not uniformly supported by the moderate liberal Left, including the Black Panthers, the Red Army Faction or Baader-­Meinhof gang, the Palestinians, especially ­those slaughtered at the Sabra and Shatila camps, and of course Algerians like his younger friend Jacques Derrida, who are mistreated even ­today—­but who in 1961, during a peaceful demonstration ­toward the end of the Algerian war of in­de­pen­dence, ­were beaten and drowned in the Seine and subjected to other outrages ­after being arrested and transported to many of the notorious holding places in which Jews w ­ ere put during the Second World War. One would have liked to have seen a ­future book of The Faerie Queene on the Legend of Queerness, with Marinell as patron of this virtue, agitating for the victims of Artegal and Talus.7

' column we have poetry; in the left, philosophy. Can one read poetry and philosophy at once, or must t­ hese activities, as phi­los­o ­ phers suppose, starting with Plato, be kept rigorously apart from each other, even to the point of banning the poets from the philosophical state, which is absolute knowledge’s po­liti­cal home? Before such a state is real­ ized and the ban is official, philosophy can simply and sublimely ignore poetry, which would subvert the authority of this state, making satires and popu­lar songs out of the very language of authority. Reading poetry and philosophy together and at once means not that t­ here ­will be an equal and reasonable exchange of goods—of concepts from philosophy and, from poetry, decorative meta­phors to lend emotional force to authority. Instead, the poetry w ­ ill continually interrupt and interfere with official philosophy, corrupting its purity, soliciting and shaking its structures, not playing by the rules, picking up and valuing t­ hose t­ hings that white male straight philosophy (so that its system ­w ill run cleanly) must repudiate as waste or at the very least ignore as extraneous and outside of thought, IN T HE R IGH T

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phenomena associated with the female, the homosexual, the black. 8 (One of Genet’s plays, The Blacks: A Clownshow—­Les nègres, clownerie—­had the white female characters played by black males in whiteface.) Yet ­these cannot simply be reincorporated into a hungrier system increas­ ingly capable of absorbing what­ever seems alien to it. Separate columns must be made instead. It is a classic Derridean practice, learned from and bearing a tribute to Jean Genet. Let us for a moment take up the point of view inside the book looking out, from the fold between its pages, or wings. Now, as seems right, it is the right-­w ing column, the Hegel one, that is home to masculine reason, which for the sake of its pro­gress ­will sacrifice the female (Sophocles’s Antigone, as we ­shall see). Among its many hierarchical arrangements, such as the placing of the male over the female, the right places thinking, for which the model is logic, over and above, and prior to, the mere repre­ sen­ta­tion of finished thought in writing. For the right side, writing is the technical recording of what has already been determined in thought. The left wing of Glas is home to the feminine energies of subversion, perver­ sion, destruction, and escape associated with writing, at least in some French authors. But a parallel figure, well known to Derrida, is Shem the Penman in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Derrida acknowledged that in Glas he was ambitious to compose his own Finnegans Wake, and in nothing is his debt to Joyce’s masterpiece clearer than in this strug­gle between the masculine affirmation of law and the female affirmation of life as a force that is impossible to rule, like the movements of w ­ ater, ­whether in the annual rhythm of the flooding of the Nile or in the cycles of evaporation, precipitation, and riparian flow that underlie Finnegans Wake—­and Spenser’s story of Marinell and Florimell.9 The cat-­and-­mouse game with meaning-­as-­presence that is played in Derrida’s early, terrific, and terrifying essay “La différance” seemed to me when I first read it—­having been alerted to it in the l­ ater 1970s in a bril­ liant lecture by Patricia Parker on difference and deferral in Re­nais­sance narrative—­comparable to the feedback system of the proj­ect of The Faerie Queene, in which an imaginary, centering structure, Fairy Court, is continually affirmed as a value that is pre­sent throughout but deferred. According to this allegorical promise of happiness, we ­will get ­there even­ tually, but not yet. We ­w ill grasp the full meaning eventually, but not

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now. The system appears at times to work as a system b ­ ecause it never gets close to the center that it pretends it is always heading ­toward and ­w ill eventually arrive at. Spenser’s stated plan, which has knights pro­ ceeding from Fairy Court on twelve successive days and returning ­after their adventures are accomplished, is never fulfilled ­because it is the par­ adigmatic idea of order by which the poem can seem to or­ga­nize itself as it goes along. Fairy Court is not a real center of an actually existing het­ erocosm. It is instead a pattern of information informing ­every stanza of the poem, as ge­ne­tic information in an organism informs e­ very cell. The structure of The Faerie Queene is not architectonic but cybernetic, not static but in motion. Yet even this cybernetic model, the one I fell upon as a gradu­ate student, is too optimistic an account of the poem. If The Faerie Queene is a self-­organizing event, it is one that is always in crisis and at ­every moment in danger of collapse. One of the farther aesthetic experi­ ences that await one in a lifetime of reading The Faerie Queene is the vague feeling that at e­ very moment the poem is secured by a slender cable in a violent storm at sea and that at any moment the cable may part.

' be said about the relation of philosophy to poetry in Spenser? I know of no other En­glish poet—­not Coleridge and not even Words­worth—­who in his poetry makes such a strong claim to philo­ sophical importance and yet fails at this narrower aim in ­favor of open thinking. It may seem to be pressing an analogy too far to say Derrida’s Glas is a strikingly Spenserian book, but the experience of reading Glas has many similarities to that of reading The Faerie Queene. Both books are profoundly learned, virtuosically allusive, and densely etymological to an intensity that resists rapid and effortless reading. The reader feels at many moments in both that in order to go forward it ­w ill be necessary to stop altogether and read something ­else, or rather to reread something ­else, and at considerable length, seeing old masterworks in a new light. The two columns of Glas are like the parallel narrative systems of The Faerie Queene, with their complex symbolic interactions. Derrida’s inserted notes in smaller type, invading the columns and confusing them, inter­ twining them, are like the paratextual ele­ments of The Faerie Queene: the book descriptions and canto headings, to be sure, and the dedicatory and W H AT M AY T H E N

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commendatory sonnets, but also the Letter Raleigh. In Spenser, however, ­these interventions are masculine efforts to exert control over the text from the outside—or is it from within? The Letter to Raleigh is addressed to a man and is the result of a discussion between men concerning a ­woman, the Fairy Queen, who seems to have other ideas about how al­ legory ­will work in this poem. Perhaps she is an African queen and painted up in whiteface, as Spenser’s queen was. We never see her, and we should have wondered before now ­whether it is the men, with Arthur at their head, who are having such a hard time getting to her or w ­ hether it is she who is evading them. She is perhaps evading the poet, with his nauseating flattery and his deadly allegorical gaze. The poem sets up before us the eternal strug­gle between an order that is trying to win and a disorder that is trying to escape. What could be more basic to our experience of life and our experience of thinking? As the Colossi of Memnon stand before a mortuary t­ emple, so the two columns of Derrida’s Glas—in one of the better-­known passages—­stand before the tomb of Antigone (her name means “against generation”). ­Because of the importance of Sophocles’s play to Hegel’s dialectical un­ derstanding of the opposition between divine and ­human law, the former associated with ­women and the latter with men, a feminist message is en­ coded in Derrida’s reading of Hegel. So Antigone can say to Creon, in Richard Claver­house Jebb’s justly hieratic translation, “nor deemed I that thy decrees ­were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of t­ oday or yesterday, but from all time, and no [one] knows when they ­were first put forth.”10 For Hegel, Sophocles’s Antigone—­w ith its opposition of the law of the state represented by Creon and the divine law of s­ imple decency repre­ sented by Antigone—­marks one stage or “moment” in the pro­gress of Spirit in history: ­toward its realization in the state. But, Derrida writes, “Nothing should have survived the death of Antigone. Nothing more should have followed or come of her, ­after her. The announcement of her death should have sounded the absolute end of history.”11 But the death of Antigone is callously repro­cessed by Hegel as a nec­ essary step in the systematic pro­gress of Spirit. The crypt holds what the system must reject as incapable of being assimilated by thought, and yet the loss cryptically makes the system pos­si­ble even as the real­ity of the

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loss is denied—so Derrida claims. The pro­cess is not unfamiliar from speaking with figures in authority—­and perhaps from listening to one­ self in authority. Do you not feel, just ­because of what you have been denied—in Antigone’s case, that would be life—­all the more a part of the system? We are in this enterprise together, and your sacrifice contributes to the ­whole; it makes you more intimately a member of this ­whole. It is with Antigone’s death as with war memorials and mass burial mounds: the double movement of exclusion and reincorporation makes pos­si­ble the pro­gress of reason and the continuity of the state. What is dead is in­ cluded in what is alive. The system appears to be digesting what is het­ erogeneous to it: Crypt—­one might have said the transcendental or the repressed, the unthought or the excluded—­which organizes the ground to which it does not belong. What speculative dialectic wants to say is that the crypt can still be incorporated in the system. The transcendental or the repressed, the unthought or the excluded, must be assimilated into the body of the ­whole, interiorized as a series of moments, ide­ alized even in the very negativity of their work. The pause, the mo­ ment of arrest, is nothing other than a stasis in the introjection of the spirit [into what only appears to escape it].12

­ here appear to be no sacred corpses in The Faerie Queene (­unless we T count Adonis) encrypted in its interior so that the allegorical system may work: so that the knights w ­ ill move; so that the monsters ­will rear up like black clouds; so that Arthur ­w ill jump like a distributor spark from one knight to another; so that the Garden of Acrasia, the Garden of Adonis, the House of Busyrane, the Church of Isis, and the dance of the maidens on Acidale ­w ill light up in turn and beam forth into the fringes of the ac­ tion, however far it roams; so that Britomart and Artegal w ­ ill pursue each other laterally through the ­middle books, with the promise of a mar­ riage to come, even if Artegal has been consigned in prophecy to an early death. In Derrida’s language, the Fairy Queen is a textual trace. We do not know ­whether she is dead or alive, ­whether she is a living, waiting womb or a mummified corpse in a pyramidal tomb and ­whether she is pre­sent everywhere or nowhere in the poem that bears her name and assem­bles itself ­under that name. But from this undecided state the Fairy Queen is converted into a transcendental referent—­the goal of the alle­

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gory, of reading—­and becomes a function within the text of the poem, holding the parts together in a “generalized structure of return” (une structure de revoi généralisé). H ­ ere is the relevant passage in full. I paraphrase at length—­too freely to deserve the name translation—­because the passage is among the most importance sentences written for the understanding of allegory: The inversion of the hierarchies lodged in Western metaphysics means that full presence, parousia, becomes merely the sign of a sign and the trace of a trace. Presence is no longer that which, in the last instance, gathers into itself e­ very tendency in its direction, e­ very ef­ fort to return its fullness. Instead, presence becomes a function in a generalized structure of signs that all appear to be returning to their original meaning. Metaphysical presence is thus reduced to a trace, a shadow of itself, haunting the places where it is still occupied with canceling the identity of what it once was. It traces the erasure of the trace.13

Perhaps the sacred corpse is the Fairy Queen herself. How do we know that she i­sn’t in a tomb or that it i­sn’t her magical voice from the tomb that sends the knights forth on their quests, like the voice of Merlin speaking out of his tomb in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso? Is t­ here a plot to hide from us the death of the Fairy Queen, like the plot to hide the death of Shingen in Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha? ­Will Prince Arthur arrive at Cleopolis to discover that the night he spent with the specter of Gloriana was also the night of her death or that the night of love came ­after her death? Is the Fairy Queen, like Antigone, “against generation,” so that Brit­ omart must take her place in the poem as the ­mother, the matrix of his­ tory? Perhaps this is no more than what William Blake calls “a memorable fancy.”14 But the absence of a Fairy Queen from The Faerie Queene is some­ thing more than a deferral, something more than a debt to be paid off ­later on, in Book Twelve, should the poet live to write it, which of course he ­didn’t. No, the absence of a Fairy Queen from The Faerie Queene is neces­ sary for its system to work.

' The Faerie Queene and Glas, frustrate our efforts to read them in the classical sense, they also do not allow us entirely to desist

IF T ­ HESE T EXTS,

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from that effort. Their lesson is that we must experience through them, again and again, the collapse of e­ very still-­emerging system back into the torrent of writing from which it arose, as ­whole civilizations fall back into the violent movement of p ­ eoples. This comparison might appear to be truer of Derrida than of Spenser, but it is a truth Derrida has to teach us about Spenser. It can at least seem so if we think of the restless movement of ­peoples in the Ireland that Spenser knew and of the poet’s view of the disasters of war, in a landscape of emaciated carcasses fought over by curs. I imagine something like this is Fredric Jameson’s meaning when he de­ scribes The Faerie Queene as at once the apotheosis of allegory and its de­ struction: “[The Faerie Queene] virtually destroys the w ­ hole allegorical arsenal in one ­great natu­ral disaster, vis­i­ble from miles in all directions.”15 Ireland is its manmade disaster. The Faerie Queene promises to take us to Fairy Court and to the sight of its queen, on which “primal scene” we are to expect a shining forth of the meaning, a parousia—­literally, a coming for­ ward of the essence. That is how its system is supposed to work and how it would work, so the voice of Hegelian authority says, if its poet w ­ ere only able steadily to gaze into its center, into the structural coherence of its im­ agery. But Spenser’s poem ends or, rather, it fails to end—­although we might also say that it fails to fail—­with the Mutabilitie Cantos.

' go over some of Edmund Spenser’s life. He died in Westminster, on January 13, 1599, in his midforties.16 He was a Londoner, of l­ower-­middling status, likely the son of a journeyman cloth maker but a gradu­ate of the Merchant Taylors’ School and of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Accomplished in languages, including Greek (less common in his day than Milton’s), a translator of Joachim du Bellay, a reader of Italian romances and Italian critical theory, he was also a cutting-­edge, experimental poet who raised En­glish verse to a new standard in 1579 with the publication of The Shepherds Calendar, just before his departure in 1580 for Ireland, where for a time he frequented advanced, continen­ tally orientated intellectual circles. His ­great work, The Faerie Queene—­ published in two installments, 1590 and 1596, plus a final portion ap­ pearing in 1609, a de­cade ­after his death—­raised the standard again, just as the rules of the game w ­ ere being changed by John Donne, Joseph Hall, L E T U S , AT T H E E N D,

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John Marston, George Chapman, Everard Guilpin, and Ben Jonson, to mention the most prominent figures in a de­cade that witnessed a new, satirical realism in poetry but also a greater degree of subjectivity, some of it fairly obscure, giving the impression that the act of writing itself opens the floodgates of passions beyond the author’s control. And indeed, at the end of Book Six of The Faerie Queene, Spenser does seem to be losing control, leading to the ­bitter final stanza. Most of Spenser’s creative years ­were spent to his chagrin not at court but in vari­ous colonial offices in Ireland—­very comfortably and profit­ ably so (he could never have held property like Kilcolman in ­England), ­until disaster overtook him and the entire Munster Plantation.17 At his death, less than five years before the end of Elizabeth’s long reign, he was out of touch with new literary fashions in the metropolitan center and incapable—or unwilling—to adapt to them, although the Complaints volume, the end of Book Six of The Faerie Queene, and the Mutabilitie Cantos do reflect the soured spirit of the times. But Spenser’s reputation was preeminent. On the poetic scene of the following ­century Spenser would become a revered but quite irrelevant figure, notwithstanding a school of “Spenserians” in the seventeenth c­ entury, including Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, William Drummond of Hawthornden, and William Browne of Tavistock. Even the young Milton may be counted in this loosely affiliated group of poetic tradition­ alists. In the eigh­teenth ­century, starting with the publication of John Hughes’s edition in 1715 and accelerated by the gothic revival, Spenser’s reputation would begin to climb again to a place just below that of Milton and Shakespeare. That is where it would remain for about two and a half centuries, although that preeminence would be challenged by the g­ reat romantics, Blake, Words­worth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats—­who revered him. Especially Shelley revered him, writing the very substantial Revolt of Islam, or Laon and Cythna, in fine Spenserian stanzas that still, to his credit of course, sound like Shelley, not Spenser. The same ­thing is even more true of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, where the Spenserian stanza be­ comes an entirely personal instrument of expression. When Shelley writes of Cythna being taken into Othman’s harem, he says she is to be fed “To the hyena lust, who, among graves, / Over his loathèd meal,

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laughing in agony, raves.”18 The obvious debt is to Spenser’s Hyena, a hid­ eous beast “That feeds on w ­ omens flesh, as ­others feede on gras” (FQ III. vii.22), which the witch sends in pursuit of the beauteous, ever-­fleeting Florimell. When she escapes the Hyena in the fisherman’s boat, the mon­ ster devours her unfortunate palfrey instead, disemboweling it, as Spenser says, “to fill his hellish gorge” (III.vii.29). Any port in a storm. But a subtler debt—­let us call it instead an inhabiting and an absorption—is to Spenser’s equally memorable figure of Malbecco, who becomes the crime that he exhibits, jealousy being, like lust, a sin that inflicts punish­ ment on itself for seeking relief from its longing. Inhabiting his cliff-­side cave, Malbecco feeds on poisonous toads—­jealous thoughts—­that de­ stroy his skin and corrupt his bowels, transfixing his soul, as the poet says, “with deathes eternall dart”: Yet can he never dye, but d ­ ying lives, And doth himselfe with sorrow new sustaine, That death and life attonce unto him gives, And painfull plea­sure turnes to pleasing paine. ­There dwells he ever, miserable swaine, Hatefull both to himselfe, and ­every wight, Where he through privy griefe, and horrour vaine, Is woxen so deform’d, that he has quight Forgot he was a man, and Gealosie is hight. FQ III.x.59–60

Malbecco is like the classical Greek statue in one re­spect: his meaning is embodied in what he is. Still more especially did Keats revere Spenser. He wrote what w ­ ere prob­ably his last verses in his copy of The Faerie Queene, fully inhabiting the person of Spenser—­and yet subverting the ­earlier poet’s intention— by composing an additional stanza for Faerie Queene, Book Five, canto two. As this canto concludes, Talus has pitched or rather “shouldered” the lev­ eling ­giant with his scales over the cliff onto the rocks below: “Approching night unto him cheeke by cheeke, / He shouldered him from off the higher ground, / And down the rock him throwing, in the sea him dround.” The sound of destruction is repeated in the rumbling of swells a­ fter a storm: “His timbered bones all broken rudely rumbled” (FQ V.ii.49–50). In a

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further action that cannot have pleased Keats, for it recalls the Peterloo massacre of August 16, 1819, in which crowds demanding expansion of the suffrage w ­ ere charged by cavalry with sabers drawn, Talus with his iron flail disperses the “lawlesse multitude” that has gathered in enthusi­ astic support of the ­giant, “like a swarme of flyes.” Seeing no further op­ position from the “raskall rout,” Talus returns to Artegal and they calmly depart (V.ii.52–54). Keats’s stanza not only sympathizes with the ­giant—­for the g­ iant symbolizes the coming demo­cratic multitude—­but also says that instead of scales, the instruments of logic, the ­giant should have had a printing press, the instrument of rhe­toric. Keats imagines a sage named Typographus putting the g­ iant together again, like Humpty Dumpty, and training the ­giant up as a poet capable of challenging arbi­ trary authority (for so Keats sees Artegal, not without reason) and exec­ utive vio­lence, symbolized by Talus: In after-­time, a sage of mickle lore Yclep’d Typographus, the G ­ iant took, And did refit his limbs as heretofore, And made him read in many a learned book, And into many a lively legend look; Thereby in goodly themes so training him, That all his brutishness he quite forsook, When, meeting Artegall and Talus grim, The one he struck stone-­blind, the other’s eyes wox dim.19

If The Faerie Queene is enacting the travail of system, we must consider the possibility that some ­things never fit in, are never pro­cessed by the alle­ gory, and are never rescued for meaning. But of course some of this wastage, this noise in the system, can be recuperated, as Keats did, al­ though at further cost to the ­whole. This is the noise that is ­behind the signal, its background, ­until they are flipped and the noise becomes the signal, the original tune lost in the background, as in the late ­music of John Coltrane. As cosmology seeks to “save the phenomena,” so allegory strives to let no moment escape being included as a part in the structure of the ­whole, as part of the signal. All ­w ill be captured and used for its own ends by absolute knowledge—or, as Derrida says, “à peu près” (al­ most). If we listen very closely (perhaps headphones ­w ill be necessary),

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we can just hear the noise of that breathy French phrase under­neath the signal of the allegory of The Faerie Queene, like the rumble of an old tape machine as its spindles revolve: almost, almost, almost . . . . . . à peu près, à peu près, à peu près . . . Perhaps the hard question to ask about The Faerie Queene is how much of this work escapes being won over for meaning and falls into the shadow of that almost.

NOT E S ACKNOWL­E DG MEN T S CREDI T S I NDE X

Notes

1. Other Poets 1. Three Proper, and Wittie, familiar Letters, in Edmund Spenser, The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and Ernest de Sélincourt (1912; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 628. ­T hese three ­were followed in the same year by Two Other Very Commendable Letters, although ­these letters date from October 1579. The series, hereafter referred to as Letters, is on pp. 611–41 in Poetical Works. See H. R. Woodhuysen, “Letters, Spenser’s and Harvey’s,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). For a fine example of Spenser’s “overgoing” Ariosto, concerning Cambina’s magic drink, nepenthe, see Thomas P. Roche, The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1964), p. 27. 2. For Harvey’s poetry, see the postscript to “E. K.’s” epistle to The Shepheardes Calender, urging him to pluck his “superexcellent” poems out of “hateful darkeness” and into “eternall light.” If the dedicatory poem to The Faerie Queene is by “Hobynoll”—­ Harvey’s nickname in The Shepheardes Calender—as it most likely is, then he was as gifted as many of the above-­average poets of the age, capable of playing the changes on commonplaces in structures that are metrically smooth, well or­ga­nized, and pleasing. It also makes handsome amends for the discouragement in his letters ten years before the first installment of The Faerie Queene was published. 3. Allan Gilbert, “­Were Spenser’s Nine Comedies Lost?,” Modern Language Notes 73, no. 4 (1956): 241–43. Opinions vary on how much of his proj­ects Spenser had completed at this time ­and later mortised into The Faerie Queene. See Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 121. 4. Letters, p. 628. 5. Richard Porson to Robert Southey, in Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations, in Works, vol. 1 (London, 1846), p. 80: “You poets are still rather too fond of the unsubstantial. . . . ​T he plain of Scamander, the promontory of Sigeum, the pal­ aces of Tros and Dardanus . . . ​seem fitter places for the muses to alight on than . . . ​ 451

452  Notes to Pages 22–26 fairy rings. But your ­great favorite, I hear, is Spenser, who fairly shines in allegory, and who, like an aerolith, is dull and heavy when he descends to the ground.” See Thomas De Quincey, “Notes on Walter Savage Landor,” in Essays on the Poets (London, 1853), p. 290, in which he sends back the aerolith (a meteor, literally a flying rock) as praise: “­T here is in this modern aerolith the same jewelly lustre, which cannot be mistaken; the same ‘non imitabile fulgur,’ and the same character of ‘fracture,’ or ‘cleavage,’ as mineralogists speak, for its beaming irridescent gran­ deur, redoubling ­under the crush of misery. The colour and corruscation are the same when splintered by vio­lence; the tones of the rocky harp are the same when swept by sorrow.” 6. Immerito, adverbial form of immeritus: “unjustly, innocently” and possibly “unde­ servedly,” but also “undeserving,” a characteristically Spenserian blend of modesty and resentment. Harvey is usually G. H. when addressed by Spenser and signs him­ self by one or the other initial. 7. Letters, p. 628. 8. For ­these, see Paul J. Hecht, “Prosody,” in Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Es­ cobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 204–13. 9. ­These quotations, including the postscript, are from the epistle addressed by E. K. to Gabriel Harvey himself, at the outset of The Shepheardes Calender. I follow the 1912 Clarendon text, as above for the letters; but see The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), pp.  212–13; and Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999). 10. Spenser, Poetical Works, p. 418. 11. I am grateful to my colleague Leah Whittington for written advice on this point, which is too well expressed not to quote verbatim: “[Ariosto’s] preferred models . . . ​ are Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Martial, and the Greek Anthology. Very ­little in the way of Vergil or nothing of the kind of pastoral that one finds in Petrarch, Man­ tuan, Sannazzaro, Pontano, Bembo, e­ tc. Scarcely a shepherd in sight. He does mention lying u ­ nder a strawberry tree while Corydon works in the fields and Charles VIII of France threatens to invade Italy. His friend Pandolfo sings on the lyre and pipes to Dryads and Fauns, while he stays in the city. In discussing his quest for a vocation, he suggests that his mind flits from genre to genre as his pas­ sion flies from one girl to the next. He does not, in general, meditate the rustic reed.” See Ludovico Ariosto, Latin Poetry, ed. and trans. Dennis Looney and D. Mark Pos­ sanza, I Tatti Re­nais­sance Library 84 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 12. For a comprehensive account of the development of ancient epic to Re­nais­sance romance, see Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1993). 13. The contrast between the two courts and the tales of adventures, that of Arthur, which includes love, and the ­later, sterner one of Charlemagne, is described in the opening three stanzas of canto eigh­teen of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, ed. and trans. Charles Stanley Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 588. Charlemagne’s court was not the same as, or not equal (non fo sem-

Notes to Pages 27–31  453 bïante) to, Arthur’s ­earlier one ­because it kept its doors closed to love and gave it­ self only to holy wars: “Perché tenne ad Amor chieuse le porte / E sol se dette alle battaglie sante.” Therefore, it could not boast the same worth and esteem as Ar­ thur’s: “non fo di quel valore e quella estima.” It is love that gives glory and makes an armed knight worthy and honored, and love that gives him strength and vic­ tory: “Peró che Amore è quel che dà la gloria, / E che fa l’omo degno ed on­ orato, / Amore è quel che dona la vittoria, / E dona ardire al cavalliero armato” (2.18.3). Boiardo, Tutte le opere di Matteo M. Boiardo, 2 vols., ed. Angelandrea Zottoli (Milan: Mondadori, 1936–37). Romance traditions in the ­M iddle Ages ­were divided in three branches: the matière de France, deriving from the epic Chansons de geste, in par­tic­u­lar the Chanson de Roland, and relating tales of Charlemagne’s knights, especially Roland, who in story becomes, upon crossing the Alps, Orlando; the matière de Bretagne, “­matter of Britain” (including Brittany), relating tales of King Arthur and his knights; and the matière de Rome, also referred to as the “romances of antiquity,” which included all romances, replete with fabulous inventions, very distantly based on ancient sources and legends. Among ­these are the twelfth-­century Roman d’Alexandre, the Roman d’Enéas (very loosely based on the Aeneid), the Roman de Thèbes, loosely based on Statius’s Thebaid, and the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-­Maur. See Patricia Parker, “Romance,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, and “Homer,” in the same work. The term romance appears to originate in mise en roman or “translation”—­translatio—of ancient sources into Medieval French. But translatio did not bear its modern sense of accurate rendering of the language. It meant carry­ing on the story from antiq­ uity and adding to it all other materials inherited from antiquity or in­ven­ted since to produce a total book. See Laurent Harf-­L ancner, introduction to Le Roman d’Alexandre, by Alexandre de Paris, Lettres gothiques (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994), pp. 16–17. The snowball-­like inclusiveness of the romance genre sits uneasily with the selectiveness of the heroic epic, as we see in Ariosto and Tasso, who tried to reconcile them—­although Tasso, of course, tried much harder. See Charles Ross, introduction to Orlando innamorato, p. 21. The rift continues in The Faerie Queene. 14. The nonstandard spelling of Gierusalemme with an i is from the first edition, ed. Febo Bonnà (Ferrara, 1581), and is intended to suggest the Greek adjective hieros, “holy.” Spenser follows the practice at FQ I.x.57: “Faire knight (quoth he) Hierusalem that is, / The new Hierusalem, that God has built.” 15. Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Heng’s remarkable study has an epi­ graph from Toni Morrison: “Romance, an exploration of anx­i­eties imported from the shadows of Eu­ro­pean culture” (p. 14). 16. Angus Fletcher, “The Daemonic Agent,” in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), pp. 25–69. 17. Stephen Greenblatt, in Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (New York: Norton, 2018), p. 35, shows, however, how a “fraudulent pop­u­lism” meshes with the fear of the cultural other. 18. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici 2.7, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, vol. 1, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1964), p. 80.

454  Notes to Pages 32–36 19. René Graziani, “Philip II’s Impresa and Spenser’s Souldan,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 27 (1964): 322–24. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2003). 20. Orlando and the Tartar king Agricane agree to a truce and recline in their armor, watching the stars. Peace is nearly made, ­until the Tartar king learns of Orlando’s love for Angelica, whom he also loves—as who does not at some time?—­and the fight resumes. Orlando wins, and the Tartar king is converted to Chris­tian­ity as he lies ­dying, baptized by Orlando himself. See Jo Ann Cavallo, “Talking Religion: the Conversion of Agricane in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato,” Modern Language Notes 127 (January 2012): 178–88; for a broader perspective relative to the pre­sent discussion, see Cavallo’s The World beyond Eu­rope in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 21. For the discontinuous character of Spenser’s allegory in practice, despite his as­ sertion to the contrary in the Letter to Raleigh, see Maria Devlin McNair, “The Faerie Queene as an Aristotelian Inquiry into Ethics,” Spenser Studies 33 (2019): 109; and William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 127–29. 22. Francesco Robortello’s In librum Aristotelis de arte poetica explicationes (1548), Greek text interspersed with Latin translation and commentary, the translation following but frequently correcting that of Alessandro de’ Pazzi’s, published in 1536. See Ber­ nard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Re­nais­sance, 2 vols. con­ tinuously paginated (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 66–68, 388– 99. Interest in the Poetics begins with Giorgio Valla’s translation, 1498. The Aldine Greek text appeared in 1508, and Erasmus’s Greek text in 1532. See Weinberg , History, p. 371. 23. Trissino says in the dedication to the Emperor Charles V, whom he elaborately compares to Justinian, “Avendo io adunque . . . ​co’ i precetti di Aristotele . . . ​e con la idea di Omero composto questo mio eroico poema, cosa che non si e fatta piu nella nostra lingua Italiana; ed essendo esso Poema di una notabillissima azione di Giustiniano Imperadore, ornate da me di varie digressioni, e di altre ingengnose, ed allegoriche fizioni . . . ​dedicarlo, e mandarlo a Vostra Maestà.” Gian Giorgio Tris­ sino, La Italia liberata da Goti, 3 vols. (vol. 1: Rome, 1547; vols. 2 and 3: Venice, 1548), xxxi; cf. xxvii. Trissino’s experimental orthography—in par­tic­u­lar, his use of Greek long vowels, e.g., Trissinω and Arηta—is regularized in ­later editions, Tutte le opere di Giovanni Giorgio Trissino, 2 vols. (Verona, 1729), and L’Italia liberata dai Goti, Poema eroico, 3 vols. (London, 1779). His unusually strong command of the Iliad was due to his having studied with Demetrius Chalcocondyles, the editor of the first printed edition of Homer (1488) and the teacher of Ficino, Politian, and Reuchlin. Trissino’s subject was prob­ably suggested by Chalcocondyles, who argued that the western states should liberate the East, in par­tic­u­lar, Constantinople, which had fallen to the Ottomans in 1453, just as the emperor Justinian, ruling at Constanti­ nople, liberated the West from the Goths. Spenser made use of Trissino’s allegory of Acratia and Areta in Books Four and Five, including the weeping fountain of Areta’s tears and the horrors of Acratia’s secrete parti, including two serpents for thighs, which are seen when the enchanted Trajano lifts her dress (1:169). The

Notes to Page 36  455 influence on Duessa and Acrasia is apparent. Areta with her allegorical maidens, Clemency, Chastity, Honor, Magnanimity, Courtesy, Liberality, and Glory, recalls the House of Holiness, and some of t­ hese names harmonize with Spenser’s general plan, notably magnanimity and glory (1:185). In Book Nine Jus­ tinian’s general Belisarius visits Saint Benedict outside Naples and is shown two mirrors, the one on the left showing the past, the one on the right showing the ­future, t­hese being, as Benedict says, a single mirror to the eye of God but ap­ pearing dif­fer­ent to us mortals: “Sebben paion diversi a noi mortali” (1:315). Belisarius is made to look in the mirror of the f­ uture so he w ­ ill not fall into error: “perch’ ei non caschi / Nell’ error” (1:317). An allegory of Doctrine, Truth, and Reason (1:318) may also have exerted an influence on Faerie Queene, Book One. Vezelin Kostic, “Trissino,” in Spenser Encyclopedia; Weinberg, History, 1:369–70. On the macchinose sovrastrutture allegoriche of the Italia liberata and its resemblance to a dissertazione archeologica, see Azelia Arici, “Trissino,” in Grande dizionario enciclopedico, 3rd. ed., vol. 18 (Torino: Unione Tipografico-­E ditrice Torinese, 1972), pp. 701–2. 24. The fullest allegorization of Ariosto is the two-­volume Spositione di M. Simon Fornari da Rheggio sopra l’Orlando furioso, 2 vols. (Florence: Torrentino, 1549–50). I give a long account of it ­here ­because Fornari’s ideas, such as the wood of error, became commonplaces that w ­ ere much in the air. For the phrase velata moralità, p. 3; for the multiple actions reduced ­under Charles or Agramante, pp. 5, 34–36; for the vir­ tues represented by the knights, pp. 7–8; for the defense of the Furioso as a com­ plex plot according to Aristotle’s model, like the Odyssey, but taking the passion of anger as its theme, as in the s­ imple plot of the Iliad, pp. 32–33; for the defense of romance as a modern epic form not enslaved to the example of the ancients, pp. 39–40; for the literal sense of the poem as a siren song, pleasing with the har­ mony of its language and the fascination of its vari­ous tales, while the hidden al­ legory is reached only with the wings of the intellect (con l’ali dell’intelletto), pp. 3, 14. The first volume is devoted to showing that despite appearances Ariosto’s poem follows Aristotle’s prescription that the plot be a unity, a “one.” The claim that the Furioso is allegorical throughout is made in the second volume, in which Fornari proposes to “unveil t­ hose exceedingly moral verses of the immortal Ariosto, con­ cealed b ­ ehind the clouds of allegory” (nascose sotto le nube allegoriche). He can do this ­because of his philosophical studies in Pisa, eating spiritual food in inviolable woods and singing of divine ­things (pp. 6–7). Fornari says it would be impossible to explicate verse by verse, as in the former volume, the famous episode of Rug­ giero’s abandoning Bradamante (divine love) to place his hopes in the beautiful, naked Angelica, ­because unveiling the thought within would be an infinite ­labor (p. 198). The beautiful, naked Angelica signifies the “transitory and fallacious plea­ sures of this life,” and b ­ ecause Ruggiero gave himself to them, it was very suitable (ben degno) that he lose “the ring of reason, and the hippogriff” (p. 200). The dark wood into which he is cast represents “the shadowy and wide ways of error” made of “the intricacies of the bonds of this dark and pathless life” (questa vita caliginosa e imboschita). Astolfo’s horn is divine eloquence, and also divine love, ­because it is red. When Angelica dis­appears (by putting the magic ring ­under her tongue), in

456  Notes to Pages 36–39 order to avoid being raped by Ruggiero, we are to understand this as enjoining us to look on this world not with carnal but with intellectual eyes, according to the proverb—­Erasmus’s famous adage is h ­ ere applied very inexactly—of the Sileni Alcibiadis: secondo quel proverbio de i Sileni Alcibiadei. Of the three fairy s­ isters, Alcina, Morgana, and Logistilla, two are transparently allegorical even in Ariosto, Alcina symbolizing vice, Logistilla reason, as her name implies (Gk. log­os). ­A fter Ruggie­ ro’s voyage to her, instructed in morals by an aged boatman, a vecchio nocchiero (Orlando furioso, 10.43–47), he is purified and remounted on the hippogriff. When Astolfo visits the moon to recover Orlando’s wits, he is met by the visionary figure of Saint John, who tells him, “Ogni effetto convien che corrisponda / In terra, e in ciel, ma con diversa faccia” (Orlando furioso, 35.18.3–4): each ­thing on earth corre­ sponds with another in Heaven but with dif­fer­ent appearances—­for which reason, says Fornari, drawing on the second preface to Pico della Mirandola’s Heptaplus, it is necessary both for the poet who makes allegorical verses and for the expounder of same to know the natures of the dif­fer­ent worlds (earthly, heavenly, and angelic) and the correspondences between them. See Thomas P. Roche Jr., The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1964), pp. 7–8; and Mindele Anne Treip, Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Re­nais­sance Tradition to “Paradise Lost” (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p. 328nn9–10. See Robert McNulty’s introduction to Ludovico Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso”: Translated into En­glish Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington (1591), ed. McNulty (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1972), xxvii. See p. 458 n. 34. 25. Aristotle, Poetics, 1451a36: “From what we have said it ­w ill be seen that the poet’s function is to describe, not the ­thing that has happened, but a kind of ­thing that might happen, i.e., what is pos­si­ble (ta dunata) as being probable (kata to eikos) or necessary (to anagkaion).” 1451b3–9: “Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas ­those of history are singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such or such a kind of man w ­ ill prob­ably or necessarily say or do (κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς ἢ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον)—­which is the aim of poetry.” Aristotle typically pairs the probable or likely, to oikos, with the necessary, to anagkaion, in order to limit the range of poetry to the imitation of a series of events that must (a) follow in all circumstances, for example, death from stabbing through the heart, or (b) be likely and plausible to follow, for example, weeping at the death of a friend. Poetry should not go outside the realm of what is pos­si­ble within a heightened but still realistic view of the world. Magic rings, winged ­horses, and enchanters do so. The only rescue for ­these in neo-­A ristotelian terms is to say that they are imaginary signs fashioned by the poet and intended to be interpreted by the reader as an “imita­ tion” of conceptual truth—­but not of real­ity. 26. For an account of this meeting and of o ­ thers like it, carefully recorded and intended to give the impression of a lively intellectual culture devoted to pacifying and civi­ lizing Ireland, see Hadfield, Spenser, pp. 179–82; and Willy Maley, “Spenser’s Irish Circle,” in Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 83–89. Sean Kane, in Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. 3–5, attributes Spenser’s declining to speak

Notes to Pages 39–40  457 on the subject (except, l­ ater, in poetry) as “the apprehension of a Christian Platonist of the old order confronted by an alarming reassertion of the classical ideal of per­ fectibility through virtue,” a dangerous form of pride. On Bryskett’s insertion into his translation of Cinthio a passage from Francesco Piccolomini on the vir­ tues, Kane says, “Spenser felt . . . ​unsettled by the meta­phors of conflict, empire, and power which Francesco Piccolomini, one of Bryskett’s familiars, quotes with approval from Seneca” (pp. 5–6). In a valuable discussion, including close compar­ ison of Bryskett’s text and Cinthio’s, showing Spenser’s contributions to be trans­ lations of Tasso’s in Cinthio; a discussion of Bryskett’s insertion of the virtues from Francesco Piccolomini; and some of the likely secondary sources of Aristotle’s vir­ tues, including Piccolomini, see John Erskine, “The Virtue of Friendship in The Faerie Queene,” PMLA 30 (1915): 831–50. Erskine is skeptical that the meeting Brys­ kett describes ever took place. I doubt the meeting was fabricated out of thin air, although what was reported to have been said came almost entirely from Bryskett’s translation of Cinthio, as Erskine shows in detail. Spenser’s own dialogue A View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland may be taken as an example of the genre. 27. Hadfield, Spenser, p. 179. Richard A. McCabe, “Bryskett, Lodowick,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1964). 28. Lodowick Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life: conteining the ethike part of morall philosophie: fit for the instructing of a gentleman in the course of a vertuous life (London, 1606), p. 27, composed around 1586, four years ­a fter the meeting described. See Had­ field, Spenser, pp. 179–81. The exact title of the three Italian dialogues by Giraldi Cinthio, which better reflects the subject of Bryskett’s symposium, is Dell’ allevare et ammaestrare i figliuoli nella vita civile, “on the raising and educating of sons in civil life.” It was originally published in the ­middle of the Heccatomithi. Simona Foà, “Giraldi, Giovan Battista,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 56 (2001), from the online encyclopedia Enciclopedia Italiana di scienze, lettere, ed arti, known as Treccani. One of the major Italian literary theorists of the mid-­cinquecento, Giraldi was better known to the world of letters by his nickname, Giraldi Cinthio, author of nine tragedies, of discourses on comic and tragic structure, on satire, and fa­ mously, on romance, defending the modernity and truth of the genre against the attacks of the neo-­A ristotelians, which w ­ ere directed mostly at Ariosto: “just as the Greeks and the Latins have derived the art of which they have written from their poets, so also we must derive it from our own, and follow that form which the best writers of romances have given us” (attenersi a quella forma che i migliori Poeti de i Romanzi ci hanno data). Discorso intorno al comporre de i romanzi (1554), as translated by Weinberg, History, p. 438 and pp. 433–38. 29. Bryskett, Discourse of Civill Life, pp. 26–27. 30. See Andrew Wadoski, “Framing Civil Life in Elizabethan Ireland: Bryskett, Spenser, and the ‘Discourse of Civill Life,’ ” Re­nais­sance Studies 30, no. 3 (2016): 350–69; more broadly, Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Willy Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism and Cultural Identity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); Elizabeth Fowler, “The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of Edmund Spenser,” Repre­ sen­ta­tions 51 (1995): 47–76. More than a dozen years ­after the discussion in Dublin,

458  Notes to Pages 42–43 when Spenser was completing the second and, as fate would have it, the last in­ stallment of three books, he addressed Lodowick Bryskett again, in the thirty-­third sonnet of the Amoretti (1595), regretting he had not finished for his “sacred Em­ presse” her poem, “Queene of faëry.” But the poet, still only in his early forties, asked “Lodwick” if he d ­ idn’t think such a poem was the work of a lifetime: “doe ye not thinck th’accomplishment of it / sufficient worke for one mans ­simple head.” I  am not inclined to agree with Hadfield (Spenser, p.  179) that this constitutes “a public acknowledgement that The Faerie Queene cannot be finished.” I think it says the poem may take the poet the rest of his life, which he had reason to hope would last longer than it did. 31. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 9.14–17. 32. Daniel Javitch, “Cantus Interruptus in the Orlando Furioso,” Modern Language Notes 95 (January 1980): 65–80. See also Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of “Orlando Furioso” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991); and Javitch, “The Disparagement of Romance . . . in Sixteenth-­ Century Italian Poetics,” in Jon Whitman, ed., Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 187–99. 33. Byron was an enthusiast for both poets, as is apparent in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, but his heart is with the dazzling and irreligious Ariosto. Galileo expressed his strong preference for the Orlando furioso, of which he was said to have had many passages by heart, for its purer language, its irony and wit, and its fantasy. Tasso’s style is gretto, povero, miserabile, “narrow-­m inded, impoverished, and low,” in contrast with Ariosto’s, which is magnifico, ricco, mirabile, “noble, rich, and won­ drous.” Whereas Ariosto’s style is limpid or morbido, like oil painting, Tasso’s is broken and discontinuous, like intarsia, which creates scenes by juxtaposing and gluing together ingeniously cut pieces of wood. ­T hese remarks come from Galileo’s Considerazione al Tasso (1589–95), quoted in the online Portale Galileo of the Museo Galileo: “Galileo Critico Letterario” (2010). In addition to this work he wrote Posille or notes to the Orlando furioso. See Peter de sa Wiggins, “Galileo on Characterization in the Orlando Furioso,” Italica 57, no. 4 (1980): 255–67; Crystal Hall, Galileo’s Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), reviewed by Erminia Ardissino, in Re­nais­sance Quarterly 68, no. 1 (2015): 268–70; Grazio di Staso, “Galileo letterato e critico di poesia,” online, I tesori delle biblioteche 193.205.156.4 (National University of Bari). See John Joseph Fahie, Galileo: His Life and Work (New York: James Pott, 1903), pp. 29–30. ­Behind all the details of Gali­ leo’s preference for Ariosto lies the essential contrast in spirit between the two poets, Ariosto proclaiming ­human liberty and ­free ­w ill, Tasso the subjection of ­human freedom to the purposes of God and the Church. One breathes the spirit of Re­nais­sance humanism, the other of the Counter-­Reformation. 34. Simone Fornari, La spositione sopra l’Orlando furioso, 2 vols. (Florence: 1549–50), pub­ lished in octavo by Lorenzo Torrentini, the ducal publisher, and dedicated to Co­ simo de’ Medici, duke of Florence, in 1549. The colophon, p. 798 (sig. Ddd7v) is dated 1550, with the privilege of the Pope, the Emperor Charles V, and Cosimo, Duke of Florence. The second, shorter volume, bound with the first but absent in some copies, is dedicated to Agostino Gonzaga, Archbishop of Reggio, and has

Notes to Pages 44–45  459 the same colophon, on p. 346 (sig. Z6v). The principal essay of the first part, “Apo­ logia Brieve sopra tutto l’Orlando Furioso,” pp. 31–58, concentrates on justifying the Orlando furioso in terms of Aristotle’s Poetics, making use of Robortello’s com­ mentary and translation, published two years before by the same publisher: Aris­ totelian unity exists b ­ ecause ­every episode involves a Christian knight u ­ nder Charlemagne—­Carlo Magno—or a pagan knight u ­ nder Agramante and thus re­ fers allegorically to one or the other of ­these “greater captains,” e si riferisce al maggior capitano. The principal action is Agramante’s crossing the Mediterranean Sea and laying siege to Paris, which is defended by Charlemagne and l­ ater by Orlando, ­after the latter has recovered his wits, which he has lost b ­ ecause of his passion for Angelica. The moral aim of the poem—­how Ariosto would have winced at this!— is to demonstrate, in the persons of the aged Christian emperor Charlemagne and the fiery pagan king Agramante, that enterprises undertaken without due consid­ eration and the counsel of prudent and grave men end unhappily. The worldly purpose of the poem is to celebrate the Este f­ amily in the marriage of its fictive an­ cestors, Bradamante and Ruggiero. For a summary of Fornari’s argument, see Weinberg, History, pp. 954–57. Weinberg seems not to have been aware of Fornari’s second volume, on allegorical interpretation, which is more Neoplatonic, aiming to draw back the veil not only from the text but from the mind of the reader (p. 198). The ­actual interpretations are often banal and commonplace, many of them to be found gathered in Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation, Orlando Furioso, Translated into En­glish Heroical Verse, ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1972), p. 200. 35. I have long thought this, reinforced by the writings of Gregory Bateson, which Sean Kane, in Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), em­ ploys in the analy­sis of The Faerie Queene, especially Book Two. But students of phi­ losophy ­w ill recognize the influence of the famous paper, and subsequent elabo­ rations, by Andy Clark and David J. Chal­mers, “The Extended Mind,” Analy­sis 58 (1998): 10–23, reprinted in The Extended Mind, ed. Richard Menary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), pp. 27–42. One elaboration follows in this volume, Andy Clark, “Memento’s Revenge: The Extended Mind, Extended,” pp. 42–66. Other terms for the thesis, as indicated by R. A. Wilson, in another essay from the same volume, “Making Meaning and the Mind of the Externalist,” are externalism, locational externalism, and environmentalism (p. 171). 36. Joanna Thompson, The Character of Britomart in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellon, 2001). 37. Spenser, Poetical Works, p. 628. 38. Blair Hoxby, What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), especially chapter two, “An Early Modern Poetics of Tragedy.” 39. Angelo Poliziano, Prose volgari inedite e poesie latine e greche edite e inedite, ed. L. Del Lungo (Florence, 1867), pp. 281–82, lines 8–9. The epistle was addressed to Poli­ tian’s humanist friend Paulo Comparini, whose students performed. Giovanni Parenti, Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 27 (1982), reproduced in Treccani. Jean Frédéric Chevalier, “Neo-­Latin Theatre in Italy,” in Neo-­Latin Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Eu­rope, ed. Jan Bloemendal and Howard B. Norland (Leiden: Brill,

460  Notes to Pages 45–47

4 0.

41.

42.

43.

2013), pp. 25–102, esp. 51–69. The volume shows the wide popularity of neo-­Latin comedy throughout Eu­rope at the time, corresponding with the northward move­ ment of Re­nais­sance humanism. On commedia erudita in Florence and Ferrara, see the introduction to The Comedies of Ariosto, trans. and ed. Edmond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi (Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, 1975), vii–­x vii. In 1502, in Ferrara, five comedies by Plautus ­were performed during the festivities for the marriage of Alfonso d’Este and Lucrezia Borgia (xvi), in which Ariosto performed (xvi–­x vii). Stefano Bianchi, “The Theatre of Ariosto,” in Ariosto ­Today: Con­t emporary Perspectives, ed. Donald Beecher, Massimo Ciavolella, and Roberto Fedi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 176–94. The story of Ippolito d’Este’s disdain for the Orlando furioso—­“ Messer Lodovico, dove mai avete trovato tante fanfaluche?” (where did you ever find so much airy nonsense?) is frequently told. But it is prob­ably a fic­ tion based on the cardinal’s ­later treatment of the poet. Ippolito generously paid for the publication of the Orlando furioso, leaving all copies to the poet to profit from. He is so extravagantly praised in Orlando furioso that his remark (of which ­t here are variants) is likely to have been a self-­deprecating jest. See Edmund G. Gardner, The King of Court Poets: A Study of the Work, Life, and Times of Lodovico Ariosto (London: Archibald and Constable, 1906), pp. 122–23. Gardner cites G. Campori, Notizie per la vita di Lodovico Ariosto (Florence, 1896), p. 36. The rumor gave distin­ guished and, for Harvey, irresistible example for deprecating Spenser’s Fairy Queen in ­favor of ­those nine, imaginary commedie erudite. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Re­nais­sance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1960), a translation of Die Kultur der Re­nais­sance in Italian: Ein Versuch (1860). This foundational work for Re­nais­sance studies (and for the notion of an entire society’s “culture,” opens with the chapter “The State as a Work of Art” (Der Staat als Kunstwerk). For dif­fer­ent views of class issues related to romance, see Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Re­nais­sance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Michael Murrin, Trade and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Claude Lévi-­Strauss, Le cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964), p. 24: “Au dessous des sons et des rhythmes, la musique opère sur un terrain brut, qui est le temps physi­ ologique de l’auditeur . . . ​L’audition de l’oeuvre musicale, du fait de l’organisation interne de celle-ci, a donc immobilisé le temps qui passe; comme une nappe sou­ levée par le vent, elle l’a rattrapé et replié. Si bien qu’en écoutant la musique . . . ​nous accédons à une sorte d’immortalité.” It has always seemed to me, since I first read him, that Lévi-Strauss’s rapturous account of music also describes the best mo­ ments in allegory. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, 9.5: numerus, finitio and collocatio. Arising from t­ hese three is concinnitas. “Beauty is a form of sympathy amid consonance of the parts within a body, according to definite number, outline, and position, as dictated by concin­ nitas.” On the Art of Building, in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). See also 4.2 and 7.4. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Re­nais­sance (New

Notes to Pages 47–54  461 York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 136; Panofsky, Re­nais­sance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 183. For the source of Alberti’s concinnitas in Ficino, see John S. Hendrix, “Alberti and Ficino,” Roger Williams University School of Art, Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation Faculty Publications 25 (2012), http://­docs​.­r wu​.­edu​/­saahp​_ ­fp​/­25. 4 4. John Milton, The Reason of Church Government Urged against Prelaty (1642), in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 1, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 1953), pp. 404–5. For discussion, see my “Milton’s Choice of Subject,” in Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 2006), p. 133. 45. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 298: “The romantic epic of Italy is one of the ­great trophies of the Eu­ro­pean genius.” Lewis points out Boiardo’s closeness to popu­lar poetry and his oral style (p. 298). For the continuing tradition of reciting—­improvising—­from Boiardo, see Giovanni Kezich, I poeti contadini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1986); Jo Ann Cavallo, The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Charles Stanley Ross, introduction to Orlando innamorato, by Matteo Maria Boiardo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 11–12. 4 6. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study in the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 4. 47. Jason Crawford, Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 155: “movement, for his knights, often means movement within a feedback loop of repetition.”

2. T ­ oward Fairy Land 1. Dryden’s preface to his opera King Arthur. See Joseph Addison, Spectator 419 (July 1712); and Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London, 1762). Thomas Warton defends the vigor of early En­glish writing, including romance, in his landmark History of En­glish Poetry (1774–81) and Spenserian romance in particular—­plus Spenserian allegory—in his Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (1754). 2. Perhaps too much is made of this term’s being the retrospective invention of Jules Michelet, taken up by Burckhardt. It appears in 1550 in Giorgio Vasari’s Vite, as rinascimento dell’ antichità, and the idea, if not the exact word rebirth, had been in ex­ istence since Petrarch. Erwin Panofsky, Re­nais­sance and Renascences in Western Art (1960; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1972). Chapter four takes its title from Vasari’s phrase “Rinascimento dell’ antichità: The Fifteenth ­Century,” pp. 162–210. See my essay “The Period Concept in Seventeenth-­Century Poetry,” in Periodization and “Early Modern” En­glish Temporalities, ed. Kristin Poole and Owen Williams (Philadel­ phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). 3. See David Scott Wilson-­Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2013); J. B. Lethbridge, “The Poetry of The Faerie Queene,” in Spenser in the Moment, ed. Paul J. Hecht and J. B. Lethbridge (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh

462  Notes to Page 54 Dickinson University Press, 2015), pp. 169–216; Andrew Escobedo, ed., Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 4. Matthew Zarnowicki, Fair Copies: Reproducing the En­glish Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 89–90. In “Publication and the Book Marketplace,” in Escobedo, Spenser in Context, pp. 53–71, Andrew Zurcher re­ fers to the “complicated textual pre­sen­ta­tion of Shepherds Calender, [which] art­ fully plays with its mise en page and incorporates textual effects in its construction of meaning,” which would have required collaboration with the publisher. Cath­ erine Nicolson, “Proper Work, Willing Waste: Pastoral and the En­glish Poet,” in A Companion to Re­nais­sance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2018) pp. 401–13. See also S. K. Heninger Jr., “The Typographical Layout of Spens­ er’s Shepheardes Calender,” in Word and Visual Imagination, ed. Karl Joseph Höltgen, Peter M. Daley, and Wolfgang Lottes (Nuremberg: Erlangen, 1988), pp. 33–71; Richard A. McCabe, “ ‘ ­Little booke: thyself pre­sent’: The Politics of Pre­sen­ta­tion in The Shepheardes Calender,” in Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception, ed. Howard Erskine-­Hill and Richard A. McCabe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 15–40. 5. “This our new Poete . . . ​unknown to most men, is regarded but of few.” “Epistle,” in The Shepheardes Calender, conteyning twelve AEglogues Proportionable to the Twelve Moneths (1579), in Spenser’s Minor Poems, ed. Ernest de Sélincourt (1910; repr., Ox­ ford, UK: Clarendon, 1970), p. 3. Andrew Hadfield takes the more complicated but in the circumstances moderate view that Kirk collaborated with Spenser and Harvey. T ­ here has been much speculation on this subject. See Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 122–23 and 467n27. For humanist self-­promotion through print culture, see Hadfield, Edmund Spenser, pp. 123–24; Richard Helgerson, Self-­Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Re­nais­sance Idea of a Literary ­Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); David R. Carlson, En­glish Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscripts and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); and Michael McCanles, “Shepheardes Calender as Document and Monument,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 22 (1982): 5–19. For the quest for patronage through “the rhe­toric of paratexts,” see Richard McCabe, Ungainefull Arte: Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially the discussion of Spenser, pp. 239–52, with its closing sentence, “It was amidst the debris of his patronal hopes that the Prince of Poets was fi­nally crowned.” Two studies hold in balance Spenser’s desire for The Shepheardes Calender to look like a classic text and his wish to express the energies of popu­lar culture and the plight of the poor: Lynn Staley Johnson, The Shepheardes Calender: An Introduction (University Park: Pennsyl­ vania State University Press, 1990); and Robert Lane, Shepheards Devises: Edmund Spenser’s “Shepheardes Calender” and the Institutions of Elizabethan Society (Athens: Uni­ versity of Georgia Press, 1993). Richard Mulcaster’s polemic in ­favor of En­glish, The First Part of the Elementarie, was published in 1582, preceded by Positions in 1581. See William W. Barker, “Merchant Taylor’s School,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C.

Notes to Pages 54–57  463 Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), and Barker’s substan­ tial introduction to his edition of Mulcaster’s Positions: Concerning the Training Up of ­Children (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 6. A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1967); J. B. Lethbridge, Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive Opposites (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). 7. Alessandro Barchiesi, “Calendar and Poetic Form,” in The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 47–78. 8. “Βουκολικαὶ Μοῖσαι σποράδες ποκά, νῦν δ᾽ἅμα πᾶσαι / ἐντὶ μιᾶς μάνδρας, ἐντὶ μιᾶς ἀγέλας.” In The Bucolic Poets, ed. and trans. J. M. Edmonds, Loeb Classical Library (1912; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), p. 2. This anony­ mous epigram from the Greek Anthology has been attributed to the grammarian Artemidorus of Tarsus, who collected the bucolic poets. 9. Moschus, “Runaway Love,” in Edmonds, Bucolic Poets; Propertius, Elegies 3.12–24. The runaway Cupid-­Amore, disguised in pastoral habit, speaks the prologue of Tas­ so’s Aminta, saying how hard it is to believe that ­under ­these pastoral garments, and in h ­ uman form, a god is concealed, and not one of the plebeian gods on earth but the most power­f ul of the gods in Heaven: “Ma tra’ grandi e celesti il più po­ tente.” Venus speaks the epilogue, saying she has descended from the third Heaven, which she rules, to search for her son, fugitive love: “Scesa dal terzo cielo, / Io che sono di lui reïna e dea, / Cerco il mio figlio fuggitivo Amore.” Spenser develops this frame story in The Faerie Queene, III.vi.11–26, notably in stanza twelve, which com­ presses Tasso’s epilogue and raises the allegorical potential of the moment. Venus leaves her “heavenly h ­ ouse,” which is “the h ­ ouse of goodly forms and fair as­ pects, / Whence all the world derives the glorious / Features of beauty and all shapes select / With which High God his workmanship hath deckt.” 10. Judith H. Anderson, The Growth of a Personal Voice: “Piers Plowman” and “The Faerie Queene” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); Jason Crawford, “Incarna­ tions of the Word: Piers Plowman,” in Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 82–109. 11. Jacques Derrida, “la différance,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 1–29. See also Derrida, “La structure, le signe, et le jeu dans le discours des sci­ ences humaines,” in Ecriture et la différance (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 409–29; Jonathan Goldberg, Writing ­Matter: From the Hands of the En­glish Re­nais­sance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 12. Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). “O what an endlesse worke have I in hand, / To count the seas abundant progeny” (FQ IV.xii.1). Cf. “O pittious worke of mutabilitie!” (FQ VII.vi.6). 13. For the epistemology of linear perspective and its shaping effects on Re­nais­sance culture, see Craig Plunges, “Vanis­hing Points: Perspectival Metaphysics in the En­ glish Re­nais­sance,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2016. 14. For the influence of the Roman de la r­ ose and Petrarch’s Trionfi in l­ater En­glish and Scottish allegorical writing, especially Gavin Douglas’s Palace of Honour and his translation of Virgil, see Priscilla Bawcut, Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study (Edinburgh:

464  Notes to Pages 58–63 Edinburgh University Press, 1976), pp. 40–51; for the Latin allegorical tradition de­ scending from commentary on the Aeneid through Boccaccio and Cristoforo Landino to the ­later ­Middle Ages, see pp. 73–76. Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Re­nais­sance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara Sessions, Bollingen Series 38 (1953; repr., Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton Uni­ versity Press, 1972), a translation of La survivance des dieux antiques, Studies of the Warburg Institute 11 (London: Warburg Institute, 1940). For the origins of alle­ gorical interpretations—or the hunt for hyponoiai, “undermeanings”—­see Félix Buffière, Les mythes d’Homère et la pensée grecque (1956; repr., Paris: Belles Lettres, 1973). 15. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936; repr., Oxford: Ox­ ford University Press, 1953), pp. 117–37. 16. See Maureen Quilligan, “Allegory, Allegoresis, and the Deallegorization of Lan­ guage: The Roman de la Rose, the De planctu naturae, and the Parlement of Foules,” in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield, Harvard En­glish Studies 9 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 184; and Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s “Cité des Dames” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­ versity Press, 1991). 17. Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contribution to the Cultural History of the Eu­ro­pean Re­nais­sance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Center, 1999). See Jerzy Miziolek’s review, in En­glish, in Biuletyn Historii Sztuki 62, nos. 3–4 (2000): S. 641– 49; E. H. Gombrich, An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970). For Botticelli’s fresco from the Villa Lemmi on the seven liberal arts, executed 1483–85 for a marriage uniting the Tuornabuoni and Albizzi families, see Louvre, Atlas, base des oeuvres exposées, entry 1185, exhibited in the Denon wing, room 706. 18. Stendhal: “La beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur.” This remark—­often slightly misquoted to assert a ­simple equation between its two terms: beauty is a promise—­appears in a note to the brief seventeenth chapter of Stendhal’s De l’amour (1822, 1833), ed. Xavier Bourdenet (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), p. 92. Stendhal l­ ater says something more unexpected: “Rappelons-­nous que la beauté est l’expression du charactère, ou, autrement dit, des habitudes morales” (ch. 18, p. 92). 19. For analy­sis of Book Four on ­these lines, see the pioneering study of Jonathan Gold­ berg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hop­ kins University Press, 1981); and J. K. Barrett, “The History of the ­Future: Spens­ er’s The Faerie Queene and the Directions of Time,” in Untold F­ utures: Time and Literary Culture in Re­nais­sance ­England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), pp. 62–103. 20. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), 8.22–29. 21. Derrida, in “la différance,” p. 17, speaks of the privilege accorded to the “living pre­ sent” in Husserl, which is the power of synthesis in assembling incessantly all the traces of meaning. This privilege, he says, is the ether of metaphysics: “Ce privilège est l’éther de la métaphysique, l’élément de notre pensée en tant qu’elle est prise dans la langue de la métaphysique.” 2 2. Following the sentence quoted in note 18, on beauty as a sign of moral habits, Stendhal writes, “Or, c’est de la passion qu’il nous faut; la beauté ne peut nous fournir que des probabilités” (De l’amour, p. 92).

Notes to Pages 68–70  465 23. Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Kath­ erine Duncan-­Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1973), p. 112. In Timber; or, Discoveries Jonson said, “Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no Lan­ guage, yet I would have him read for his m ­ atter; but as Virgil read Ennius” (i.e., for content, not style). In Ben Jonson, vol. 8, The Poems, the Prose Works, ed. C. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1947), p. 618. In Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden Jonson is reported being pleased neither with Spenser’s stanzas nor with his m ­ atter, i.e., his allegory. In Ben Jonson, vol. 1 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1925), p. 132. The context of the discussion in Discoveries is that of an educational program for the young (“I would have him read . . .”). Cath­ erine Nicholson, in Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the En­glish Re­ nais­sance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 120–22, points to the creative tension between archaism and “innovative strangeness” (p. 121). See Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 78. For Jonson’s annotations of the 1617 folio of Spenser’s works, see James A. Riddell and Stanley Stewart, Johnson’s Spenser: Evidence and Historical Criticism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995). In Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson, 2nd ed. (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 59–60, Richard S. Peterson notes Jon­ son’s much ­more ­favorable reference to Spenser’s “noble book” in his poem “An Epigram to My Muse, the Lady Digby on Her Husband, Sir Kenelm Digby.” Sir Kenelm, says Jonson, “doth love my verses, and ­w ill look / Upon them (next to Spenser’s noble book) / And praise them too.” In Ben Jonson: Poems, ed. Ian Don­ aldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp.  251–52. For a thorough analy­sis of unusual words in The Shepheardes Calender and the general theory of lan­ guage in Spenser’s day, see David Hadbawnik, “The Chaucer-­Function: Spenser’s Language Lessons in The Shepheardes Calender,” Upstart: A Journal of En­glish Re­nais­ sance Studies, June 16, 2014. As for The Faerie Queene, Catherine Nicholson shows how impor­tant it is to keep Spenser’s diction separate from his (supposed) orthography. Statistical analy­sis has shown that the orthography of The Faerie Queene is not so distinctive as is often supposed; and bibliographical study has shown that the spell­ ings are largely the product of the three compositors of the 1590 text, much al­ tered in 1596 but not in any meaningful way. Excepting a very small number of possibly significant spellings, such as geant, to indicate “earth” (Gk. gê), the “inno­ vative strangeness” is in Spenser’s diction, not in his spelling b ­ ecause the spelling ­isn’t his. Catherine Nicholson, “Old Spelling and the Forging of Spenser’s Readers,” Modern Language Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2017): 173–204; Martha Craig, “The Secret Wit of Spenser’s Language,” in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul J. Alpers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 447–72. 24. See the entry on Erasmus, by William W. Barker, in The Spenser Encyclopedia. 25. Edgar Wind, “The Flaying of Marsyas,” in Pagan Mysteries in the Re­nais­sance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 142–46, esp. 143. 26. Chaucer, The Hous of Fame, lines 655–58. This is the ea­gle speaking to Chaucer while bearing the well-­fed poet through the air and complaining of the weight. Exces­ sively studious, the poet lives like a hermit, but his abstinence from food is light: “And lyvest thus as an heremyte, / Although thyn abstynence ys lyte” (lines 659–60). See also the opening of The Parliament of Foules. Citations from The Works of

466  Notes to Pages 71–74 Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed., ed. F. N. Robinson (1933; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961). See notes to “Sir Thopas” as burlesque on the metrical romance, p. 736. 27. For a summary of po­liti­cal commentary in The Shepheardes Calender, see Hadfield, Spenser, pp. 131–40. See also Edwin Greenlaw, Studies in Spenser’s Historical Allegory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1931). For Mantuan’s influence and that of Clément Marot, see H. S. V. Jones, A Spenser Handbook (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1930), pp. 58–66; Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 174–78; and Bart van Es, “Spenserian Pastoral,” in Early Modern En­ glish Poetry: A Critical Companion, ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew  W. Hadfield, and Garrett A. ­Sullivan Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 79–89. 28. In Spenser’s Minor Poems, ed. Ernest de Sélincourt (1910; repr., Oxford, UK: Clar­ endon, 1970), p. 7. 29. Chaucer, “The Plowman’s Tale,” in Chaucerian and Other Pieces, vol. 7 in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. W. W. Skeat (1897; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 150, lines 85–92. 30. Horace, Odes 3.30.1–5; Ovid, Met. 15.871–72, cited with discussion in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas  H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 212–13n; and Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 574n. This epilogue is un­ numbered and appears in the “Glosse” by “E. K.,” who cites and partly quotes the passages from Horace and Ovid. 31. Statius, Thebaid 12.816–17. See Andrew Hui, The Poetics of Ruins in Re­nais­sance Lit­er­ a­ture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), pp. 102–3. 32. This is in the letter addressed to Gabriel Harvey, with much Latin compliment, from Immerito sui, mox in Gallias navigaturi, followed by, “Let me be answered, ere I goe: which ­w ill be (I hope, I feare, I thinke) the next weeke, if I can be dispatched of my Lorde,” e­ tc. Two Other very commendable Letters (London, 1580). Edmund Spenser, The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and Ernest de Sélincourt (1912; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 637–38. Sizars at Cam­ bridge, commonly the sons of tradesmen and yeomen, enjoyed lower fees and other emoluments in return for performing menial tasks, such as serving in hall, delivering “assizes.” Strictly speaking, “scholarship boy” would be an anachronistic term for Spenser’s time at the Merchant Taylors’ School—­one of the ­great educa­ tional institutions of its day, then situated in London, u ­ nder the innovative scholar Richard Mulcaster—­but his attendance was made pos­si­ble by a bequest from Robert Nowell, one of the wealthy patrons of the school. Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 51–53. See also Hadfield’s entry “Spenser, Edmund (1552?–1599),” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 33. “That what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and ­those Hebrews of old did for their country, I in my proportion with this over and above of being a Christian, might do for mine: not caring to be once named abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, but content with t­ hese British Islands as my world.” John Milton, The Reason of Church Government, in Complete Prose Works of John

Notes to Pages 74–83  467 Milton, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 812. On the previous page, he writes, “I applied myself to that resolution which Ariosto followed against the persuasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue, . . . ​to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest ­things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the m ­ other dialect.” 34. “Che più tosto volea essere uno de’ primi tra gli scrittori Toscani, che à pena il sec­ ondo tra ‘Latini, soggiungendogli, che ben’ egli sentiva à che più il suo genio il piegasse.” Giovan Battista Pigna, “La Vita di M. Lodovico Ariosto,” taken from Pig­ na’s treatise in defense of the genre of romance, I romanzi (1554), and reprinted in Orlando furioso di M. Lodovico Ariosto tutto recorretto, et di nuove figure adornato. Con le annotationi, gli avvertimenti, e le dichiarationi di Girolamo Ruscelli (Venice, 1562). This is the sort of edition of Ariosto that Spenser would have used. Ludovico Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso” Translated into En­glish Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington (1591), ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1972), p. 571. 35. See Andrew Fichter, Poetics Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Re­nais­sance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). The poems of Ariosto and Tasso both included genealogies of the Este rulers of Ferrara. 36. ἐρος / ἡρως. The words are unrelated but look the same when transliterated. 37. Virgil, Aeneid 7.71–80, in Vergil’s “Aeneid” and Fourth (“Messianic”) Eclogue in the Dryden Translation, ed. Howard Clarke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989). (En­glish being less compressed than Latin and rhyme enforcing still more spacious elaboration, Virgil’s nine lines become Dryden’s fourteen. In Dryden the passage begins some 120 lines into Book Seven, as compared to 71 lines in Virgil.) 38. Virgil, Aeneid 12.936–38, in The Aeneid of Virgil, 2 vols., ed. R. D. Williams (1973; repr., London: Macmillan, 1977). For a fine account of the stakes of this scene, see Leah Whittington, Re­nais­sance Suppliants: Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 77–80. For homoeroticism and heroism, see Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence (Chapel Hill: Univer­ sity of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 29. 39. Virgil, Aeneid 12.938–52, Translation from Vergil’s “Aeneid” . . . ​in the Dryden Translation. Michael C. J. Putnam, The Poetry of the “Aeneid”: Four Studies in Imaginative Unity and Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 199–201. 4 0. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. Cesare Segre, vol. 2 (1976; repr., Milan: Mon­ dadori, 2009), 46.140. 41. John Harington, Orlando Furioso in En­glish Heroical Verse (London, 1607), 46.123. The vigor of the writing belies Harington’s own allegorizing of the episode as teaching that “the unbridled heat and courage of youth” is “vanquished by marriage” (p. 404). 42. Virgil, Aeneid 6.792–93. See Wendell Clausen, “Augustan Ideology in the Under­ world,” in Virgil’s “Aeneid”: Decorum, Allusion, and Ideology (Munich: Saur, 2002), pp. 125–53. 43. Syrithe Pugh, “Epic Idolatry and Concupiscent Romance in Book I of The Faerie Queene,” in Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 42–76. 4 4. E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Re­nais­sance (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 82–83; Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Re­nais­sance, 85n; Buffière, Mythes d’Homère, pp. 297–302.

468  Notes to Pages 88–93 45. G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953); Elton, ­England ­under the Tudors, 3rd ed. (1955; repr., London: Routledge, Folio Society, 1997); Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-­C entury ­England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 46. Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and ­Others, ed. Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul (London: Penguin, 2011); Hyder Edward Rollins, Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928–29). See J. Christopher Warner, The Making and Marketing of Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013); and Stephen Hamrich, ed., Tottel’s “Songs and Sonettes” in Context (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013). Warner notes the presence of Spanish courtier poets at Mary’s court, left ­there by Philip II when he returned to the Continent, to leave the impression that he would return. He ar­ gues persuasively that their prestige, especially that of the neo-­Latin poet Niko­ laus Mameranus (although he was from Luxembourg), Philip II’s poet laureate, who published three volumes in London in 1557, stimulated Tottel’s patriotic response by publishing En­glish poets in the same year (Making and Marketing, pp. 74 and 86–94). 47. John Thompson, The Founding of En­glish Metre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 30, 53–55; C. S. Lewis, En­glish Lit­er­a­ture in the Sixteenth ­Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 233–34, 244; J. W. Cun­ liffe, “A Mirror for Magistrates,” in The Cambridge History of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, vol. 3, Renascence and Reformation, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (1909; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. 200; Henry Weinfeld, The Blank Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); see my review of Weinfeld’s book in Modern Philology 112, no. 1 (2014): 107–10. 48. Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Re­nais­sance Romance (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 2007), an invaluable study of humanist education as background for the works of Sidney and Spenser and in par­t ic­u ­lar of how narrative romance mimics the ele­ment of chance in life for the purpose of modeling the application of moral precepts. For the pre­sent purpose, see the chapter “Example: The 1590 Faerie Queene,” pp. 135–72. 49. Homer, Iliad 5.4–6.

3. In Ireland 1. See Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher, introduction to Edmund Spenser: Selected Letters and Other Papers, ed. Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xv–­x xx; and for the events of 1580, see “Chronology,” ibid., pp. 224–25; and Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 153–65. 2. Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret C ­ areer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher, “Spenser’s Secretarial C ­ areer,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 65–85.

Notes to Pages 93–94  469 3. Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 164. This work is especially valuable for its reflections on how Gaelic poets saw Spenser and the En­glish. See Stephen Greenblatt, Re­nais­sance Self-­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 43. Andrew Hadfield, in Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Savage Soil (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1977), in addition to pioneering the connection of Fairy Land to the enterprise of con­ quest and pacification in Ireland, notes the employment of imagery for savages from Theodore de Bry’s pictures of North American Indians and accounts of Pa­ cific Islanders (pp.  140–42). See Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: En­glish Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and the review of this volume by An­ drew Zurcher, Re­nais­sance Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2003): 916–19. Especially valuable for background information is Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Note that the opening date of Canny’s ac­ count is the beginning of Lord Grey’s Irish ser­v ice and hence of Spenser’s. Thomas Herron, “Colonialism and Irish Plantation,” in Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. An­ drew Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp.  72–82. It should not be forgotten that the po­liti­cal concerns of the Leicester circle, including a more aggressive and heroic prosecution of the simmering war with Spain, also lies ­behind The Faerie Queene and that this included giving ever more military sup­ port to the Protestant cause in the Low Countries. Where pos­si­ble, Elizabeth re­ sisted war b ­ ecause it is expensive and men run it. For a fine account of the intri­ cately tangled cultural, religious, and po­liti­cal background of the c­ entury that The Faerie Queene concludes, see Colin Burrow, “The Sixteenth ­Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to En­glish Lit­e r­a­t ure, 1500–1600, ed. Arthur Kinny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 11–28: “The poem enacts an unresolved ­battle of a characteristically Tudor kind between the wish to praise an idealized monarch and the urge to refashion the Queen’s image and redirect her policies” (p. 14). 4. Edmund Spenser, A View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland, in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, vol. 10, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–45), p. 158. The passage is discussed in Andrew Hadfield’s Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 153. I have regu­ larized spelling selectively. For wider background, see Canny, Making Ireland British; and Nicholas Canny, “Reviewing A View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland,” Irish University Review 26, no. 2 (1996): 252–67. The sharp rise since the 1990s of scholarship on Spenser and the En­glish colonization of Ireland is surveyed, with bibliography, in Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions, ed. J. B. Lethbridge (Madison, NJ: Far­ leigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), especially in the editor’s introduction, pp. 19–20; and Willy Maley, “A View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland (1596, 1633),” in A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, ed. Bart van Es (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 210–29, with bibliography. 5. John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Freccero, “Allegory and Autobiography,” in In

470  Notes to Pages 96–102 Dante’s Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition, ed. Dani­ elle Callegari and Melissa Swain (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 96–115. 6. Jeff Dolven, in Scenes of Instruction in Re­nais­sance Romance (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 2007), p. 214, observes Munera’s “unallegorical m ­ iddle, a surprising and touching detail.” It would be touching perhaps in another context. ­Here it seems to recall scenes of horror. 7. Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan ­England and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 28–29. 8. Ibid., p. 98. 9. Petrarch, Africa, ed. L. Pinguad (Paris, 1872), pp. 360–61, 9.454–57: “meliora super­ sunt / Saecula; non omnes veniet Lethaeus in annos / Iste sopor; poterunt dis­ cusssis forte tenebris / Ad purum priscumque iubar remeare nepotes,” ­etc. “­T here is a better age in store; this slumber of forgetfulness ­w ill not last forever. ­A fter the darkness has been dispelled, our grand­sons ­w ill be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past.” The translation is from Erwin Panofsky, Re­nais­sance and Renascences in Western Art (1960; repr., New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 10, from the chapter “Re­nais­sance: Self-­Definition or Self-­Deception?,” pp. 1–41. 10. Panofsky, Re­nais­sance and Renascences, p. 18; see also chapter four, “‘Rinascimento dell’ antichità’: The Fifteenth C ­ entury,” ibid., pp. 162–210; Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Design in Re­nais­sance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 49; Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke Univer­ sity Press, 1993), pp.  14–16; Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 11. Panofsky, Re­nais­sance and Renascences, p. 8: “the Antique, not designated (so far as I am aware) by a collective noun before, came to be known as antiquitas, sancta vetustas, sacra vetustas, even sacrosancta vetustas.” Cf. ibid., p. 181. 12. Samuel Daniel, “Defense of Rhyme,” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. 2, ed. G. Gregory Smith (1904; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 366–67. See Colin Burrow, “Combative Criticism: Jonson, Milton, and Classical Literary Criticism in ­England,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 490. 13. Ben Jonson, Timber; or, Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, vol. 8, The Poems, the Prose Works, ed. C. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1947), p. 567: “For to all the observations of the ancients, we have our own experience, which if we ­w ill use, and apply, we have better means to pronounce.” 14. See George M. Logan, The Meaning of More’s “Utopia” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton Uni­ versity Press, 1983). 15. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, first published in French as Surveillir et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 16. Hadfield, in Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience, p. 202, notes that the View pre­sents an optimistic prospect of pacifying and civilizing Ireland, The Faerie Queene a nega­ tive one. 17. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, to which is added The B ­ attle of the Books, and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 2nd ed., ed. A. C. Guthkelch and David Nicoll Smith (Ox­ ford, UK: Clarendon, 1958), pp. 231–35.

Notes to Pages 102–106  471 18. Εἰσὶ δὲ τῶν μύθων οἱ μὲν ἁπλοῖ οἱ δὲ πεπλεγμένοι. Aristotle, Poetics 1452a12. 19. Torquato Tasso to Scipione Gonzaga, June 15, 1576. In a letter to Luca Scalabrino, a frequent and familiar correspondent, Tasso says he regarded allegory as a trivial and superficial ­thing but de­cided to employ it as a shield to defend the loves and enchantments in the poem: “e con questo scudo cercherò d’assicurare ben bene gli amori e gl’incanti.” But, he adds, all the parts of his allegory hang together so well and likewise correspond so closely with the literal sense, and also with his poetic princi­ples, that he doubts if it ­isn’t true that when he began the poem, he had this allegorical conception of the w ­ hole: “Ma certo, o l’affezione m’inganna, tutte le parti de l’allegoria son in guisa legate fra loro, ed in maniera corrispondono al senso litterale del poema, ed anco a’ miei principi poetici, che quando comin­ ciai il mio poema avessi questo pensiero.” In the same month, on June 15, 1576, he writes to Scipione Gonzaga, confessing that when he began, “non ho avuto pen­ siero alcuno d’allegoria.” But the times, in par­t ic­u ­lar the Inquisition, made him begin to think of allegory as a means of solving all prob­lems—­w ith the authori­ ties as well as with his critics: “Ma poi ch’io fui oltre al mezzo del mio poema, e cominciai a sospettar la stretteza de’ tempi, cominciai anco a pensare all’allegoria come a cosa ch’io giudicava dovermi assai agevolar ogni difficoltà.” Torquato Tasso, Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence, 1854), 1:185, 456. See Cor­ rado Confalonieri, “Platone tra maschera e smascheramento: Una rilettura dell’ ‘Al­ legoria del poema’ di Tasso,” Campi immaginabili 48/49–50/51 (2013–14): 132–56, https://­w ww​.­academia​.­edu​/­9461814. For a learned and useful analy­sis of Tasso’s letters, marred by special pleading for the obviously mistaken thesis that the poet never changed his mind and knew what he was d ­ oing from the start, see Michael Murrin’s “Tasso’s Enchanted Wood,” in The Allegorical Epic: Essays in Its Rise and Decline (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 87–127; “The w ­ hole poem is allegorical and was allegorical from the very beginning” (pp. 87–88). For careful discussion of Murrin’s claims, see review by W. H. Herendeen in Re­nais­sance and Reformation  /  Re­nais­sance et Réforme 18 (1982): 224–29. 20. Bernard L. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Re­nais­sance, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 954–1073, for the quarrel over ro­ mance and epic, Ariosto and Tasso; Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Re­nais­sance in Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962); J. E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Re­nais­sance, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), especially chapter four, “The Theory of Epic Poetry,” pp. 107–24. See Irene Samuel’s introduction to Discourses on the Heroic Poem, by Torquato Tasso, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1973), xi–­ xxxiv. The best account in En­glish of Tasso’s life and work is by C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and of His Contribution to En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 21. This view of The Faerie Queene is indebted to Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979), es­ pecially the opening chapters on Ariosto and Spenser. 2 2. Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979). That arresting first phrase is from section five of Wallace Stevens’s An Ordinary Eve­ning in New Haven.

472  Notes to Pages 107–115 23. “La forêt de Brocéliande qui était aux fées.” Hugo’s last novel, Quatrevingt-­treize [sic], published in 1874. Cited in Gwenc’hlan Le Scouëzec, Brocéliande (Brest: Beltan, 2002), p. 5. 24. “I dremed al this nyght, pardee, / An elf-­queene shal my lemman be / And slepe ­under my goore [garment],” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson and F. N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), lines 786–88. In Skeat the lines are 1977–79 (4:192). For a pos­si­ble relation to Spenser, see The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Walter W. Skeat, 2nd ed. (1900; repr., Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1934), text, vol. 4; notes, vol. 5, pp. 189–90. Josephine W ­ aters Bennet, in The Evolution of “The Faerie Queene” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), argues that the Tale of Sir Thopas is the source of The Faerie Queene and Arthur’s Dream the first part composed. 25. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, 1.2317, 5.3769, 4.1321. 26. For Spenser’s relations with Irish poets and poetry, see Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Ox­ ford University Press, 2002). 27. It is likely that Spenser used Stow, according to Dana M. Symons, in her introduc­ tion to her edition, “Introduction, La Belle Dame Sans Mercy,” in Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints, Medieval Institute Publications (Kalamazoo: Western Mich­ igan University, 2004); Andrew King, “Spenser, Chaucer, and Medieval Romance,” in Oxford Handbook of Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 555–72; and “The Faerie Queene” and M ­ iddle En­glish Romance: The ­Matter of Just Memory (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 2000). See the classic essay of Wil­ liam Hazlitt from his Lectures on the En­glish Poets, “On Chaucer and Spenser,” from The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, vol. 5 (London: Dent, 1930), es­ pecially pp. 33–34; and David Bromwich, “Hazlitt, William,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 349–50. 28. John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad,” in Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (1956; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 350–51, lines 1–4. Fur­ ther citations are from this edition. 29. Preiddeu Annwyfn, “Spoils of the Underworld, or Otherworld.” “Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, / Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem.” Mansus, in John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2007), lines 80–81, and n. See also Epitaphium Damonis, lines 162–71 and nn. Annwfn is the Celtic underworld, or fairy otherworld, and the “spoils,” or Preiddeu, include a sacred bull and the magic Cauldron of Ceridwen— by some accounts a pre­de­ces­sor of the Grail. 30. E. K. Chambers, Arthur of Britain (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1927), p. 20. Geof­ frey of Monmouth, Histories of the Kings of Britain, trans. Sebastian Evans (London: Dent, 1911). The introduction by Lucy Allen Paton is valuable for the tradition as a ­whole. For the Latin text—­a lso with introduction—­see Galfredi Monumetensis Historia Britonum, ed. J. A. Giles (1844; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1967). For a ­later discussion, see John Jay Parry and Robert A. Caldwell, “Geoffrey of Mon­ mouth,” in Arthurian Lit­er­a­ture in the M ­ iddle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. Roger

Notes to Pages 117–123  473 Sherman Loomis (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1961), pp. 72–93. This volume is an ex­ cellent guide to the very complex and prolific traditions of Arthur, especially early Welsh tales, building on J. Douglas Bruce, The Evolution of Arthurian Romance from the Beginnings down to the Year 1300, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928). For an introduction to the romantic epic, Ariosto, Tasso, and epic theory, see Graham Hough, A Preface to “The Faerie Queene” (London: Duck­ worth, 1962), pp. 9–47. Ariosto, Orlando furioso 13.81: “di molte fila esser bisogno parme / a condur la gran tela ch’io lavoro.” Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. Cesare Segre, 2 vols. (1976; repr., Milan: Mondadori, 2009). E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), pp. 182–83: “Spenser, who takes the pseudo-­epic of the Re­nais­sance straight from the hands of Ariosto and Tasso, and turns it into a tapestry full of delicate iridescent hues, and of in­ congruous imagery, in which the personages of the classical Olympus stray hap­ pily among the settings of Arthurian romances, and the abstractions of mediaeval allegory lend themselves to the exposition of Elizabethan ideals of statecraft and churchmanship.” 31. Pindar, Nemean 1.67–69, 7.90; Pindar, Pythian 8.12–18; Euripides, Ion 205–18; Eurip­ ides, Heracles 177–80. A likely source for Spenser is the second-­century mythog­ rapher Apollodorus, 1.6.1–2, and, of course, Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.151–62. 32. Homer, Iliad 2.484–93. A verb of narrating, mytheomai, one of naming, onomainô (488), and one of a saying that joins the ele­ments together in an orderly fashion, ereô (493), are all used in this invocation, as Spenser would have recognized. The first two, narrative, or myth, and the specific knowledge of names, are more ob­ vious than the third, which is used at the conclusion of the invocation of the muses before the cata­logue of the ships: ἀρχοὺς αὖ νηῶν ἐρέω νῆάς τε προπάσας (I s­ hall say over all the ships and their captains). 33. Latin phrase quoted in Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 2nd ed. vol. 3 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1967), p. 1242. 3 4. For the Tudor po­l iti­c al use of the Arthurian story, see Charles Bowie Millican, Spenser and the T ­ able Round: A Study in the Contemporaneous Background for Spenser’s Use of the Arthurian Legend (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), especially “The Early Tudor Period,” pp. 7–36. For more specialized discussion of sources, see Carrie Anna Harper, The Sources of The British Chronicle History in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (New York: Haskell House, 1964). See Andrew Fichter, Poetics Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Re­nais­sance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 35. For how Spenser modified the Virgilian model, see Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Re­nais­sance Idea of a Literary C ­ areer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); David Scott Wilson-­Okamura, Virgil in the Re­nais­sance (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2010). 36. “Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus avena / carmen et egressus silvis vicina coegi / ut quamvis avido parerent arva colono / gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis / arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris / Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit litora.” The proemial lines are in no good manuscript of the Aeneid and on stylistic grounds are not by Virgil but from a l­ater age. For a full dis­ cussion of the weak evidence for ­these lines being Virgil’s, their inappropriateness

474  Notes to Pages 124–130 for an epic proemium, their poor style, and their deleterious effect on the opening, seven-­line periodic sentence of the poem, see R. G. Austin, “Ille Ego Qui Quondam . . . ,” Classical Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1968): 105–15: Ovid, Tristia 2.534, cites arma virumque as the opening words of the Aeneid and alludes to them comically in the opening lines of the Amores. He was preparing to sound forth on the subject of arms and the violent deeds of war, in weighty numbers, with ­matter suitable to the heroic mea­sure. Initially, therefore, the second verse in each pair was the equal to the first—­i.e., both ­were hexameters—­but Cupid with a laugh stole away one foot, reducing his verses to the alternating six-­and five-­measure lines of elegiac couplets. 37. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (1951; repr., London: Faber, 1980), p. 289. The essay originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 1921, as a review of H. J. C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyr­ics and Poems of the Seventeenth ­C entury: Donne to Butler (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1912). 38. “Derring-do” appears twice in The Shepheardes Calender, most significantly “Oc­ tober,” line 65, and twice in The Faerie Queene, the first in reference to Pyrocles, “Drad for his derring-do and bloody deed” (II.iv.42), the second in reference to the old hermit who was once “Renowmèd much in armes and derring doe” (VI.v.37). For Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s use of the word, see OED. 39. T. P. Roche, “Ariosto’s Marfisa: Or, Camilla Domesticated,” Modern Language Notes 103, no. 1 (1988): 113–33.

4. A Survey of The Faerie Queene 1. That Ireland is reflected in the books of the first installment of the poem as well is affirmed in Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). The trend ­toward seeing the violent scene of Ireland in The Faerie Queene goes back to Stephen Greenblatt’s “To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss,” in Re­nais­sance Self-­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 157–92. The now-­classic studies by the historian Nicholas Canny are The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–76 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976); and Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also his articles “Protestants, Planters, and Apartheid in Early Modern Ireland,” Irish Historical Studies 25 (1986): 105–15; “The Early Planters: Spenser and His Con­ temporaries,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 1, ed. Seamus Deane (Derry: Field Day, 1991), pp. 171–234 (with Andrew Carpenter); and “Ireland: The Historical Context,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). Patricia Coughlan, ed., Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989), including Coughlan’s contribution “Ireland and Incivility in Spenser,” pp. 46–74. Elizabeth Fowler, “A Vewe of the Presente State of Ireland (1596, 1633),” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 314– 32. Two essays in par­tic­u­lar are impor­tant for the theme of surveying, abstraction, and power: Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Mapping Mutability; or, Spenser’s Irish Plot,”

Notes to Pages 131–140  475 in Representing Ireland: Lit­er­a­ture and the Origins of Conflict, ed. Brenden Bradshaw, An­ drew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 93–115; and Joanne Woolway Grenfell, “Significant Spaces in Edmund Spens­ er’s View of the Pre­sent State of Ireland,” Early Modern Literary Studies 4, no. 3 (1998): 1–21. 2. See Wayne Erikson, ed., The 1590 “Faerie Queene”: Paratexts and Publishing, Studies in the Literary Imagination 38 (Atlanta: Georgia State University, 2005); and An­ drew Zurcher, “Printing The Faerie Queene in 1590,” Studies in Bibliography 57 (2005– 6): 15–50. 3. The average is fifty-­five stanzas for Books One to Three (1590) and forty-­eight stanzas for Books Four to Six (1596). The average between the two installments is fifty-­one and a half. The two cantos of Book Seven are a ­little higher than the av­ erage, with fifty-­five and fifty-­nine stanzas. 4. Gordon Teskey, “Arthur in The Faerie Queene,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 5. Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and their Posterity (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1966); Ronald Horton, “Aristotle and his Commen­ tators,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia; Joe Moshenska, “Aristotle and the Virtues,” in Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2017), pp. 282–92: “it is often unclear when judging a specific action ­whether it springs from a fully formed virtuous disposition, or w ­ hether it contrib­ utes to the formation of that disposition.” For a classic essay on Spenser’s debt for his moral virtues to Francesco Piccolomini, see J. J. Jusserand, “Spenser’s Twelve Moral Virtues as Aristotle Hath Devised,” Modern Philology 3 (January  1906): 373–83. 6. For a striking analy­sis of Book Four with its retrograde movements and complex literary allusions, see Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). 7. Melissa E. Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern En­glish Lit­ er­a­ture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Sanchez makes this argument generally and in chapter three applies it to “tyrannous seduction” in the House of Busyrane episode in The Faerie Queene. 8. “ἐγώ εἰμι πᾶν τὸ γεγονὸς καὶ ὄν καὶ ἐσόμενον καὶ τὸν ἐμὸν πέπλον οὐδείς πω θνητὸς ἀπεκάλυψεν.” Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 354C, in Plutarch’s Moralia, vol. 5, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1936). 9. Sean Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. 164. 10. Ibid., p. 169. Kane offers a deep, Augustinian reading of the episode. 11. I take this to be Coleen Rosenfeld’s meaning concerning the allegory as a w ­ hole when she writes, “simile is valued less for its capacity to represent this world than for its capacity to manufacture an altogether dif­fer­ent world.” Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (New York: Fordham Univer­ sity Press, 2018), p. 106. 12. The source, ­whether direct or through one or more Italian sources, is a dialogue by Plutarch, 985D, sometimes called “Gryllus” for short, on the use of reason by

476  Notes to Pages 149–158 irrational beasts: Περὶ το9 τὰ ἄλογα λόγῳ χρῆσθαι, a dialogue between Odysseus and one of Circe’s victims. See vol. 15 of Plutarch’s Moralia, 985D, in the Loeb Clas­ sical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); and Variorum Faerie, Book Two, p. 394. The tale had circulated enough to be proverbial, as it is in John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism: “It is better to be a h ­ uman being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a dif­fer­ent opinion, it is ­because they only know their side of the question.” Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter two, 3rd ed. (London, 1867), p. 14.

5. Allegory in The Faerie Queene 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures, 1808–1819: On Lit­er­a­ture, ed. R. A. Foakes, vol. 5, in two parts, of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1987), 2:409–10. 2. Among the numerous writings on this multidisciplinary subject, see J. N. Spuhler, “Somatic Paths to Culture,” ­Human Biology 31, no. 1 (1959): 1–13, reprinted in The Evolution of Man’s Capacity for Culture, ed. Spuhler (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959). For par­tic­u­lar discussion of brain-­hand coevolution, see in the same volume S. L. Washburn, “Speculations on the Interrelations of the History of Tools and Biological Evolution.” 3. Michael Murrin, The Allegorical Epic: Essays in Its Rise and Decline (Chicago: Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 102. See Lawrence F. Rhu, “From Aristotle to Alle­ gory: Young Tasso’s Evolving Vision of the Gerusalemme Liberata,” Italica 65, no. 2 (1988): 111–30. 4. See chapter one, note 41. 5. For the importance of bodily meta­phors for the poem and its object, and the elu­ sive ­wholeness the body represents, see David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 “Faerie Queene” (1991; repr., Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2014). For a remarkable study see Joseph Campana, The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); and Stephen Guy-­Bray, Against Reproduction: Where Re­nais­sance Texts Come From (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Guy-­Bray, “Queer Studies,” in A Companion to Re­nais­sance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2018), pp. 510–18; Melissa Sanchez, “Sex and Eroticism in the Re­nais­ sance,” in Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 342–50; and Kimberly Anne Coles, “Gender in the 1590 Faerie Queene,” in Escobedo, Edmund Spenser in Context, pp. 352–62. See also Paul Suttie, Self-­Interpretation in “The Faerie Queene” (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2006); and Harry Berger Jr., Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 6. Of interest for the theory of a georgic poetics is Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985), especially for our purposes the chapter on Spenser: “Poet of Work: Spenser and the Courtly Ideal,” pp. 35–70. 7. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 103. See Jane Grogan, The Persian Empire in En­glish Re­nais­

Notes to Pages 163–174  477 sance Writing, 1549–1622 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-­Macmillan, 2014), pp.  48– 50. For instructive images, see Grogan, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in “The Faerie Queene” (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); for temporal-­spatial effects, see Wayne Erickson, Mapping “The Faerie Queene”: Quest Structures and the World of the Poem (New York: Garland, 1996). See also the classic study of John B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1972). 8. Homer, Odyssey 8.266–366. For numerous allegorizations of the tale of Demod­ ocus, the Phaecean poet, concerning the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite, see Félix Buffière, Les mythes d’Homère et la pensée grecque (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1956).

6. For a General Theory of Allegory 1. Samuel Johnson, “Milton,” ed. Stephen Fix, in The Lives of the Poets, vol. 1, ed. John H. Middendorf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), p. 198. 2. Prudentius, Psychomachia, vol. 3 of Prudence, ed. and trans. M. Lavarenne (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1948), esp. lines 28–35. See Maclin Smith, Prudentius’ “Psychomachia”: A Reexamination (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1976), pp. 235–36, 262– 63. For the program of the Psychomachia in a passage from Tertullian (De spectaculis 29), in which virtues and vices fight for possession of the soul, see Aimé Peuch, Prudence: Étude sur la poésie latine chrétienne au IVe siècle (Paris, 1888), pp. 246–47. 3. Angus Fletcher, “The Daemonic Agent,” in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), pp. 25–69. 4. Gregory the G ­ reat, Moralia, sive expositio in Job 18.34.54, in Corpus Christianorum, Se­ ries Latina, vol. 143A, ed. D. Norbery (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1953), pp. 921– 22, commenting on Job 28:7, “For ­there is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s eye hath not seen”; in the Vulgate: “Semitam ignoravit avis nec intu­ itus est oculus vulturis.” Biblia Sacra Vulgata, published online by German Bible Society, https://­w ww​.­academic​-­bible​.­com​/­en​/­online​-­bibles​/ ­biblia​-­sacra​-­vulgata​/­. Gregory comments, “For the ‘vulture’ while it flies if it sees a carcass lying, drops itself down for the devouring of the carcass, and very often it is in this way taken in death, when it has come from on high a­ fter the dead animal. Rightly therefore is the Mediator between God and Man, our Redeemer, denoted by the appellation of a ‘vulture,’ Who whilst remaining in the loftiness of His Divine Nature, marked as it ­were from a kind of flight on high the carcass of our mortal being down below, and let Himself drop from the regions of heaven to the lowest places. For in our behalf He vouchsafed to become man, and while he sought the dead creature, He found death among us, Who was deathless in Himself.” Morals on the Book of Job by St. Gregory the ­Great, trans. John Henry Parker, J. G. F. Rivington, and J. Rivington, 3 vols. (London, 1844), 2:54, http://­w ww​.­lectionarycentral​.­com​/­GregoryMoralia​ /­Book18​.­html. 5. Emile Mâle, L’art religiux du XIIIe siècle en france: Étude sur l’iconographie du moyen âge et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 3rd ed. (1910; repr., Paris: Armand Colin, 1958); Suger, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-­Denis and Its Art Trea­sures, ed. and trans. Erwin Panofsky, 2nd ed. Gerda Panofsky-­Soergel (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979).

478  Notes to Pages 174–179 6. Robert Bringhurst, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World, Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers 1 (Vancouver, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 1999); Ghandl, Nine Visits to the Mythworld, trans. Robert Bringhurst (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Bill Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analy­sis of Form (1965; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, #43. He allows for exceptions. Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009). G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations,” vol. 1 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992). The description of what the commentators term “the Augustinian picture of language” accords well with the sign-­assumptions of allegory. T ­ hese are the assumptions of the allegorists and of the allegorizers, as well as of allegorical readers. But narrative is impor­tant, and an incoherent narra­ tive, as I said in Allegory and Vio­lence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), p. 5, is one of the indicators of allegory, demanding interpretation to make it cohere. For “the diegetic” in allegory, see Judith H. Anderson, Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 7. 8. Félix Buffière, Les mythes d’Homère et la pensée grecque (1956; repr., Paris: Belles Lettres, 1973), pp. 3–4. See the excellent review by Jules Labarbe in L’antiquité classique 26 (1957): 447–49. 9. “To conclude, allegories are the natu­ral mirrors of ideology”: Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, 2nd ed. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012), p. 369. 10. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009). In The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 164–66, Nicholas Halmi summarizes the thought of Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1819–21), part 1, paragraphs 35, 41, 70, 71, and 91, which places mythic narratives unfolding in stages in logically and historically secondary relation to symbols, t­ hese being potent concentrations of thought, or momentary totalities: “Whereas the symbol embodies the idea and thus reveals it directly and instanta­ neously, in a ‘momentary totality’ (momentane Totalität), allegory conveys an idea external to itself indirectly and sequentially, in a ‘series of moments.’ The oldest myths are nothing but ‘symbols made explicit’ (ausgesprochene Symbole), and many myths ­were brought into being as a result of exegetical interpretation of symbols” (p. 165). 11. See Patrick Labarthe’s Baudelaire et la tradition de l’allégorie, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Droz, 2015), which opens up the world of allegory in French poetry, especially from the Re­nais­sance to Baudelaire. The second edition has a substantial preface by Yves Bonnefoy, with its repeated phrase “l’allégorie n’est pas de ce monde,” “allegory is not of this world” (pp. 14–16). 12. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press,

Notes to Pages 180–181  479 1971), p. 169. The argument is that ideology is not something seen and assented to with the mind. It is instantiated in practices, including ritualized interpretation. 13. Stephen Greenblatt, “To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss,” chapter four in Re­nais­sance Self-­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 14. “Modus autem nullus est florentior in singulis verbis, nec qui plus luminis afferat orationi quam ἀλληγορία. Nam illud, quod ex hoc genere profluit, non est in uno verbo translato, sed ex pluribus continuatis connectitur, ut aliud dicatur, aliud in­ telligendum sit. . . . ​Sumpta re simili verba eius rei propria deinceps in rem aliam, ut dixi, transferuntur.” Cicero, De oratore 3.41.166–67, cited from De oratore, with En­ glish Notes (Boston, 1823), p. 280. I have declined in this instance to use the Latin text of the Loeb volume but have consulted its lively translation by H. Rackham, On the Orator, vol. 2, Book Three (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942). 15. Aelius Theon, Progymnasmata, ed. Michel Patillon, with assistance of Giancarlo Bo­ lognesi (Paris: Garnier, 1997). Dating is uncertain, but this author of the earliest of the progymnasmata prob­ably antedates Quintilian in the first c­ entury ce. See Pa­ tillon, introduction, ibid., viii–­x vi. For allegory, see section  81.7, p.  42; allegory gives stories a sense of mystery, of being kekrumenos, from kruptô, “to conceal.” Theon likes his definition of fable so much that he repeats it in his introduction: “a myth is a false tale imitating truth” (μῦθός ἐστι λόγος ψευδὴς εἰκονίζῶν ἀλήθειαν). “On the Fable,” ΠΕΡΙ ΜΥΘΟΥ, section 72, 27, p. 30. Cf. 1.21–22, p. 1. The passage was mentioned by Plutarch and ­others in connection with the idea that the ugliness or ridiculousness of a story is a signal to look for its allegorical meaning (p. 30n). Dionysius the Areopagite and the l­ ater Platonists, from Erigena to Ficino (in his commentary on the Symposium), would say this of the highest sym­ bols of God, which are beastly, or monstrous, teratological, to indicate transcen­ dence. René Rocques, L’univers dionysien: Structure hiérarchique du monde selon le pseudo-­ Denys (Paris: Aubier, 1954), pp.  178n2, 227–33; and Rocques, “Tératologie et théologie chez Jean Scot Erigène,” in Mélanges offerts à M. D. Chenu, ed. Andé Duval (Paris: Vrin, 1967), p. 429. See also Jean Pépin, “Plutarque et l’allégorie” and “La théorie du symbolisme dans la tradition dionysienne,” in La tradition de l’allégorie de Philon d’Alexandrie à Dante (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987), pp. 178–88, 200– 201. For connections between the allegorical tradition and the Bible, see, in the same volume, Pépin’s “La typologie de Saint Paul,” pp. 247–51; “La parabole dans les Evangiles synoptiques,” pp. 252–56, Jesus’s parables being allegorical “in the large sense of the term”; and “La παροιμία [riddling allegory] dans le quatrième Evangile,” pp. 257–59. Byzantine rhetoricians regularly repeat the formula that “al­ legory is an expression in which one t­ hing is apparent while another is thought alongside”: “άλληγορἰα έστὶ φράσις, ἕτερον μὲν τι δηλοῦσα ἑτέρον δὲ παριστῶσα.” Multiple references in L. Spengel, Rhetores Graeci, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1853– 56). Examples are mostly from beast fables starting with Aesop. In the fable, where the meaning is reserved for the end—­instead of interpreting as one goes—­the lit­ eral level is coherent for the persuasive purpose in rhe­toric. The fable, not the moral, is the most impor­tant part of the text, b ­ ecause the moral should be apparent

480  Notes to Pages 181–184 from the fable. “En raison du rapport logique qui lie la fiction et la morale, elle con­ duit aux exercices dont le fonctionnement est plus rhétorique que littéraire.” Mi­ chel Patillon, introduction to Progymnasmata, p. lv. 16. Livy, Ab urbe condita 2.32.9–12; Shakespeare, Coriolanus 1.1.222; cf. John Milton, Of Reformation, in Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 1953), 1:583–84. Roy Sellars, “Milton’s Wen,” Prose Studies 19, no. 3 (1996): 221–37. 17. John Freccero, “Infernal Irony: The Gates of Hell,” Modern Language Notes 99, no. 4 (1984): 769–86, reprinted in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA: Har­ vard University Press, 1986), pp. 93–109. See also Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Pre­sent (1987; repr., Cambridge MA: Har­ vard University Press, 1991), pp. 47–48. 18. De arte honeste amandi is by Andreas Capellanus. See C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 33–43. 19. Horace, The Odes, ed. Kenneth Quinn (London: Macmillan, 1985), 1.14 and pp. 150– 52. Eduard Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1957), pp. 154–58; Marcos Martinho, “A definiçâo de allegoria segundo os gramáticos e rétores gregos e la­ tinos,” Classica (Brazil) 21, no. 2 (2008): 252–64; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 9.2.46, cf. 8.6.44, the principal discussion. See also Cicero’s Ad Brutum Orator 27.94 (“iam cum confluxerunt plures continuae tralationes . . . ​genus hoc Graeci appelant ἀλληγορίαν”), and Letters nos. 39 and 40, in which he says that ­because of the po­ liti­cal danger he ­w ill speak the rest in enigmas—­“cetera erunt ἐν αἰνιγμοῖς”—­and obscure his meanings in allegories: “ἀλληγορίαις obscurabo.” For ainos, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, 2nd ed. (Bal­ timore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), pp.  238–40. See also Nagy, “Theognis and Megara: A Poet’s Vision of His City,” in Theognis of Megara: Poetry and the Polis, ed. Thomas J. Figueira and Gregory Nagy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 667–82. T ­ here is a play on words in stasis, which means civil war but, in nautical terms, the setting of the winds. For a brilliant discussion of the two Al­ caeus poems, see Anne Pippin Burnett, Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 150–55, 153–54. For being bewildered in the “strife of winds,” anemôn stasis—­“ἀσυννέτημμι τὼν ἀνέμων στάσιν”—­see p. 154n74. The unusual verb ἀσυννέτημμι is formed from συνετός, “prudent, wise.” 20. Jacques Derrida, “White My­thol­ogy: Meta­phor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 207–72, originally published in Poétique 5 (1971): 1–52; Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Meta­phor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 21. Charles S. Singleton, “In Exitu Israel de Aegypto,” in Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John Freccero (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1960), pp. 102–21; Eric Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of Eu­ro­pean Lit­er­a­ture (1959; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 11–76; Auerbach, Dante: Poet

Notes to Pages 184–187  481 of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). In the original German, “Secular” is irdischen, “earthly, worldly,” a tenden­ tious word to apply to Dante’s vision. 22. Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1968), pp. 5, 237; Konrad Müller, “Allegorische Dichterklärung,” in Paulys Realencyclopädie der classichen Altertumswissenschaft, ed. Wilhelm Kroll (Stuttgart: Metler, 1924), supplementary vol. 4, pp. 16–22. 23. Pindar, Pythian 4.176–77; Aristophanes, Frogs lines 231, 1035–36. 24. M. L. West, The Orphic Poems (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1983), pp. 75–115; Glenn W. Most, “The Fire Next Time: Cosmology, Allegory, and Salvation in the Derveni Pa­ pyrus,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 117 (1997): 117–35, esp. pp. 128, 130. For g­ oing “into the space for prophecy,” εἰς τὸ μαντεῖον, see Sarah Iles Johnston, “Divination in the Derveni Papyrus,” in Poetry as Initiation: The Center for Hellenic Studies Symposium on the Derveni Papyrus, Hellenic Studies, ed. Ioanna Papadopoulou and Leonard Muellner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 90, and p. 104 for similarity to the divinatory and theurgic practices of ­later Platonism, centuries ­later. 25. Héraclite, Allégories d’Homère, ed. and trans. Félix Buffière (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1962). See also Buffière, Mythes d’Homère; and Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: Les origines grecques et les contestations judéo-­chrétiennes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1976); Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Lab­ arthe, Baudelaire; Debarati Sanyal, “Auschwitz as Allegory: From ‘Night and Fog’ to Guantánamo Bay,” in Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 99–148. For Xenophanes and Theagenes, see Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2002), “Xenophanes and the ‘Ancient Quarrel,’ ” pp. 4–66, and “Allegory and the Traditions of Epic In­ terpretation,” pp. 67–89. 26. Jean Pépin, La tradition de l’allégorie de Philon d’Alexandrie à Dante (Paris: Etudes Au­ gustiniennes, 1987), vol. 1; and Pépin, Dante et la tradition de l’allégorie (Montreal: In­ stitut d’Etudes Médiévales, 1970). 27. Henri de Lubac, L’exégèse médiévale: Les quatres sens de l’écriture, 4 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64). See the review of the first volume by René Rocques in the Revue de l’histoire des religions 158, no. 2 (1960): 204–19. See also Stephen A. Barney, “Vis­i­ble Allegory: The Distinctiones Abel of Peter the Chanter,” Harvard En­glish Studies 9 (1981): 87–107. For an impor­tant study of Spenser and theology, see Darryl Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For a broader dis­ cussion of interlocking discursive regimes including religion, see Richard Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation ­England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). For more exclusive views on the biblical character of Spenser’s alle­ gory, see Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Margaret Christian, Spenserian Allegory and Elizabethan Biblical Exegesis: A Context for “The Faerie Queene” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). Walter Davis, in “Spenser and the History of Allegory,” En­glish Literary

482  Notes to Pages 187–188 Re­nais­sance 32 (2002): 152–67, argues that Spenser changed the course of medi­ eval allegory, inherited from his ­great En­glish pre­de­ces­sor Langland, by making it “secular and subtle,” thus bringing it in line with what Coleridge would term the “symbol.” Hence Coleridge’s opposition of allegory to symbol would accommo­ date Spenser on the latter side of that invidious distinction (Davis, “Spenser,” p. 153). For background, see Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in “The Faerie Queene” (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1976). The secularizing view of Spenser’s allegory tends ­toward Neoplatonism, following the classic study of Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (Geneva: Droz, 1960); Elizabeth Bieman, Plato Baptized: ­Towards the Interpretation of Spenser’s Mimetic Fictions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); Jon A. Quitslund, Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natu­ral Philosophy and “The Faerie Queene” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Kenneth Borris, Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2017); William Junker, “Plato and Platonism,” in Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2017), pp. 273–81; Sarah Howe, “Emblem and Iconography,” in Escobedo, Spenser, pp. 301–12; and Ayesha Ramachandran, “Cosmology and Cosmography,” in Escobedo, Spenser, 323–41. 28. Marylène Possamaï-­Pérez, L’Ovide moralisé: Essai d’interprétation (Paris: Champion, 2006). For vari­ous traditions of the Ovide moralisé, see Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), on the Ovide moralisé, pp. 52, 157–58n, and figure 16. For Ovid and Spenser see Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 231–42; and Colin Burrow, “Original Fictions: Meta­ morphosis in The Faerie Queene,” in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influence in Lit­er­a­ture and Art from the ­Middle Ages to the Twentieth ­C entury, ed. Charles Martindale (1988; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 99–119. For a strong reading of a classic Ovidian moment, the hermaphrodite image at the conclusion of the 1590 Faerie Queene, an image that invites “engagement and detachment” at once, see Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of “The Faerie Queene” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 70. For how alle­ gorical figures may comport themselves in imaginary space, laying claim to imag­ inary bodies, effecting the positing of concepts, see Kenneth Gross, “The Postures of Allegory,” in Edmund Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory, ed. Jennifer Klein Mor­ rison and Matthew Greenfield (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 167–79, esp. “[allegory] touches the ability of language to give us a world we can know, or a world b ­ ehind the world we know” (p. 167). 29. Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the ­Middle Ages, trans. E. F. M. Benecke (1895; repr., Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1997), p. 117n, with an introduction by Jan Ziolkowski. This is an abridged version of the 1895 translation of the classic two-­volume study on the bizarre proliferation of legends about Virgil in the M ­ iddle Ages: Virgilio nel medioevo, 2 vols. (Livorno, 1872). 3 0. Dante, De monarchia 3.15.30. Cited and discussed in “Virgilio” in Giovannni An­ drea Scartazzini and Andrea Fiammazzo, Enciclopedia Dantesca: Dizionario critico e ragionato di quanto concerne la vita e le opere di Dante Alighieri, 3 vols. (Milan:

Notes to Pages 188–198  483 Ulrico Hoepli, 1896–1905), pp. 2143–46. Seth Lerer, “John of Salisbury’s Virgil,” Vivarium 20 (1982): 24–39; Laure Hermand-­Schebat, “John of Salisbury and Clas­ sical Antiquity,” A Companion to John of Salisbury, ed. Christophe Grillard and Frédérique Lachaud (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 205–6. For the use of integumentum, a covering veil, see Edouard Jeauneau, “L’usage de l’integumentum à travers les gloses de Guillaume de Conches,” in “Lectio philosophorum”: Recherches sur l’école de Chartres (Amsterdam, 1973), pp.  127–92; Francine Mora-­Lebrun, “L’ecole de Chartres et la pratique de l’integumentum,” in L’ “ Enéide” médiévale et la naissance du roman (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), pp. 89–108; Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth C ­ entury: A Study of Bernard Silvester (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1972), pp. 49–62; Leslie George Whitbread, Fulgentius the Mythographer (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971); Peter Dronke, “Bernardus Silvestris, Natura, and Personification,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980): 53–73; Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth C ­ entury: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1972). 31. Robert Lamberton, Porphyry: On the Cave of the Nymphs (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1983). 32. Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, ed. James Willis (Leipzig: Teu­ bner, 1983), 2.136–38. For Martianus’s difficult Latin I have relied on Danuta Shan­ zer’s translation and commentary on the first book, A Philosophical and Literary Commentary on Martianus Capella’s “De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii” (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1986). For the second book, Luciano Lenaz, Martiani Capellae, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii liber secundus (Padua: Liviana, 1975). Both translators provide excellent discussions on the emergence of allegory in late an­ tiquity. For a learned survey of Martianus’s influence in art, see Raimond van Marle, Allégories et symboles, vol. 2 of Iconographie de l’art profane au moyen âge et à la re­nais­ sance (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1932), pp. 204–5. 33. Chaucer, trans., Romaunt of the r­ ose, vol. 4 in Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: With Poems Formerly Printed with His or Attributed to Him, 4 vols., ed. Robert Bell and W. W. Skeat (London, 1885–86), lines 538–612, 918–85. 3 4. Homer, Iliad 4.440, 11.73, 18.535. Cf. Hesiod, Theogony lines 223–30. 35. Homer, Iliad 9.502–12; cf. 19.91–94, Agamemnon’s apology, in which he describes swift-­footed Atê traveling over men’s heads, blinding them. See E.  R. Dodds, “Agamemnon’s Apology,” in The Greeks and the Irrational (1951; repr., Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1973), pp. 1–27. 36. Virgil, Aeneid 7.456–67. For daemons in late antiquity and their connections with allegorical personifications, see Fletcher, “Daemonic Agent,” pp. 24–68. 37. Andrew Zurcher, Spenser’s L­ egal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern E­ ngland (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2007), p. 237. 38. Bonna Westcoat, lecture at the National Humanities Center, 2015. 39. Labarthe, Baudelaire, p. 806. 4 0. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Athenaeum, 1985), pp. 272–77. 41. Ibid., p. 271.

484  Notes to Pages 199–213 7. Death in an Allegory 1. John Donne, Meditation XVII, in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-­Queens University Press, 1975). 2. John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” in Poetical Works, ed. H. R. Garrod (1956; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 206, lines 51–52. 3. Carolyn Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning in Narrative and Dramatic Allegory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 53. 4. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Pro­g ress from This World to That Which Is to Come, ed. James Blanton Warrey, 2nd ed., ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 309. 5. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), p. 166. Allegory confronts the observer with a vision of his­ tory as a death’s head, a “facies hippocratica”; history—­such as we see it in the dun­ geon of the House of Pride—­appears to the observer as an erstarrte Urlandschaft, a petrified, primordial landscape. In baroque allegory, life itself and allegorical meaning stand in a reciprocal relation b ­ ecause objects must be killed and petri­ fied in order to function purely as meaningful signs. So Benjamin says in the mem­ orable phrase “for Death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between nature [“nature” particularly as growth, the older Greek meaning of physis] and meaning”: “weil am tiefsten der Tod die zackige Demarkationslinie zwischen Physis und Bedeutung eingräbt.” Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt / M: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 343. 6. Compare “iacet ingens litore truncus, / avolsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.” Virgil, Aeneid 2.557–58. 7. John Heiges Blythe, “Ate,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (To­ ronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), citing A. Kent Hieatt, “Spenser’s Atin from Atine?,” MLN 72 (1957): 249–51. 8. Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1967), p. 275. 9. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Re­nais­sance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 40nn4–5, 48n1. The verb rapere, “seizing,” is used for this conversion, a literal translation of Greek harpazein in ancient Neoplatonic writings, such as the Chaldean Oracles and Proclus’s commentary on the Parmenides. See Proclus, In Parmenidem 5.1033.27, in Opera, ed. Victor Cousin (Paris, 1864). See also my Allegory and Vio­lence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 18.

8. Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh 1. Sigmund Freud, “The History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918). Original title: Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose, in Krankengeschicten, vol. 8 of Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Internationaler Pschoanalytischer Verlag, 1924), pp. 437–567. Quotations are from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth, 1955), pp. 17–122 (this pas­

Notes to Pages 213–219  485 sage on p. 29). See Whitney Davis, “Sigmund’s Freud’s Drawing of the Dream of Wolves,” Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 2 (1992): 70–87, esp. p. 84, on representing one’s subjectivity as an object. This has obvious bearing on the Letter to Raleigh, in which Spenser represents his subjective intention, his supposedly original and con­ tinuing plan, as an object he is in a privileged position to describe objectively. Likewise the unreliability of memories, which are continually and unconsciously revised, bears upon the inconsistencies of the Letter to Raleigh. 2. Freud, “History,” 17:34. 3. Stanley Fish, “Withholding the Missing Portion: Psychoanalysis and Rhe­toric,” in ­Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhe­toric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and ­Legal Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 525–54, first published in briefer form in Times Literary Supplement, August 29, 1986, pp. 935–38, but with what is to my mind a more accurate subtitle: “Power, Meaning, and Persuasion in Freud’s ‘The Wolf-­Man.’ ” 4. Fish, “Withholding the Missing Portion,” p. 526. 5. “A Letter of the Authors expounding his ­whole intention in the course of this work: which for that it giveth g­ reat light to the Reader, for the better understanding is hereunto annexed”: this is the headnote to the Letter to Raleigh. Many translations of Freud’s term Nachträglichkeit have been ventured, from après-­coup to deferred action, belatedness, and afterwardness. I would incline to ­later addition and distortion. A key early text is a letter to Wilhelm Fliess on December 6, 1896, in which Freud speaks of his hy­ po­thet­i­cal notion of the psychic mechanism as a pro­cess of stratification, Aufeinanderschichtung, by which memory traces of the same event or ­imagined event, Erinnerungsspuren, have been laid down over time and are subject over time to revision and reor­ga­ni­za­tion. He seems to be thinking of the extreme distortion, bending, and rearrangement of geological strata. Sigmund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Michael Schröter (Frank­ furt / M: Fischer, 1986), p. 217; Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 207. For background, see Friedrich-­Wilhelm Eickhoff, “On Nachträglichkeit: The Modernity of an Old Concept,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 87, no. 6 (2006): 1453–69; and Ben House, “The Ongoing Rediscovery of Après-­Coup as a Central Freudian Concept,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, October 2017, 773–98, which is particularly good on translation. A critical moment in the analy­sis is the recognition that the primal scene may not be a real event but rather a constructed memory. The same may be said of Spenser’s spiritual “vision” and allegorical “conceit” of The Faerie Queene. Ra­ leigh’s sonnet “A Vision upon this conceipt of the Faery Queene” is the first of the “Commendatory Verses” following the Letter to Raleigh. In The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, p. 409. See A. C. Hamilton’s notes, The Faerie Queene, rev. 2nd ed., pp. 719–21. 6. James Norhnberg, The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton Uni­ versity Press, 1976), xii. 7. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Alexander Grosart, vols. 5–8 in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser, 9 vols. (London, 1882–84), 5:3. At 8:14

486  Notes to Pages 219–221 Grosart states that the Letter was affixed to the poem in 1590 and in 1596. It was not published in 1596; the 1596 edition was in two volumes, the first a reprint of 1590 with the original ending of Book Three changed, the second containing Books Four to Six but no Letter. It is in­ter­est­ing that Grosart says the Letter was reprinted in 1596 “at close of Vol. 1. (Books I.–­III.).” Such a positioning of the Letter in the ­middle of the poem, had it occurred, would have affirmed its writerly char­ acter as emerging at one moment in the composition of the poem. That is in con­ trast to its standing apart outside the poem, commenting on it authoritatively. Gro­ sart himself de­cided to place the Letter ­after Book Six. 8. For the writerly text, see Roland Barthes, SZ (Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 11: “Le texte scrip­ tible est un présent perpetuel, sur lequel ne se poser aucune parole conséquente (qui le transformerait, fatalement, en passé); le texte scriptible, c’est nous en train d’écrire, avant que le jeu infini du monde (le monde comme jeu) soit traversé, coupé, arrêté, plastifié par quelque système singulier (Idéologie, Genre, Critique) qui en rabatte sur la pluralité des entrées, l’ouverture des réseaux, l’infini des langages.” See Barthes, S / Z, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1974), p. 5. 9. See headnote to the Letter to Raleigh in The Faerie Queene, rev. 2nd ed., ed. A. C. Hamilton, textual editors Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (2007; repr., London: Routledge, 2013), p.  713. See textual note by Yamashita and Suzuki, pp. 21–25. Torquato Tasso’s “Allegoria del poema,” a most likely model for Spens­ er’s letter, was not placed before the text of the Gersualemme liberata in 1581 but ­after. For an expert account with bibliography of extensive discussion of the placement of the dedicatory poems, see Andrew Zurcher, “Getting It Back to Front in 1590: Spenser’s Dedications, Nashe’s Insinuations, and Ralegh’s Equivocations,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 38, no. 2 (2005): 173–240: “The most con­spic­u­ous feature of the back m ­ atter of the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene is that, of course, it is not at the front. Dedications, epistles to patrons, commendatory sonnets, and other ancillary ­matter in this period typically preface a work, framing and posi­ tioning its contents: by interposing this m ­ atter between the reader’s first, generic impressions of a book (from its binding and title page), and the subsequent expe­ rience of reading its par­tic­u­lar content, printers and authors sought to realize a range of rhetorical, po­liti­cal, and financial ends” (p. 173). For a masterly study of the entire scene of literary patronage in relation to textual front ­matter in the Re­ nais­sance, especially Italy and E ­ ngland, see Richard A. McCabe, “Ungainefull arte”: Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 10. Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Kath­ erine Duncan-­Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1973), p. 79. Torquato Tasso, Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence, 1854). In June 1576, in a letter to Scipione Gonzaga, Tasso says that when he began his epic, he had not a thought of writing an allegory: “Non ho avuto pensiero alcuno de l’allegoria.” But in the same month, ­after completing his prose explanation (which he says he wrote in one day), the “Allegoria del poema,” Tasso says (in Letter 76) that all the parts of his allegory consist so well together and conform so well with the literal sense that he won­ders if it ­were not true that when he began the poem,

Notes to Pages 222–229  487 he already intended it as an allegory. See p. 471 n. 19. It is of the nature of the alle­ gory, which improvises its own meaning, also to improvise the illusion, in the au­ thor’s mind as much as the reader’s, of there being such an originative moment. 11. William Blissett, “Spenser’s Mutabilitie,” in Essays in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture from the Re­nais­ sance to the Victorian Age, Presented to A.  S.  P. Wood­house, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), p. 39. 12. John Hughes’s edition, The Works of Edmund Spenser in Six Volumes (London, 1715), puts the Letter to Raleigh at the back of The Faerie Queene, ­after Book Six. 13. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas Birch (London, 1751). 14. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Ralf Church, 4 vols. (London, 1758–59). 15. Analy­sis of the position of Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh, where a position is at once a place and a positing, a “setting up” or thesis of the original intention, bears on its complex and intertwined paratextual relationship with the primary text, The Faerie Queene, which it purports to stand outside and describe. The analy­sis is indebted to the discussion of Hegel’s prefaces to the Phenomenology of Spirit as hors-­texte (“out­ work,” in Barbara Johnson’s good translation) in Jacques Derrida’s La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 9. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone, 1981).

9. Allegory and Re­nais­sance Critical Theory 1. Rita Copeland, Rhe­toric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the M ­ iddle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Karl Young, “Chaucer and Geoffrey of Vinsauf,” Modern Philology 41, no. 3 (1944): 172– 82; James J. Murphy, “The Arts of Poetry and Prose,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2 The ­Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp.  42–67. For literary theory and Spenser, see Robert Matz, “Theories and Philosophies of Poetry,” in A Companion to Re­nais­sance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), pp. 154–65; and in the same volume, Patrick Cheney, “Genre: the Idea and Work of Literary Form,” pp. 183–98, and “The Sublime,” pp. 611–27. 2. Chaucer, “The Clerk’s Prologue,” in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson and F. N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), lines 31–33. 3. William Ringler, “Poeta nascitur non fit: Some Notes on the History of an Apho­ rism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1941): 497–504; Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-­Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1973), pp. 73–121 and 111. The postclassical origin of this proverb is uncertain. 4. I refer to Tasso’s famous “Poetic Letters.” In, for example, a letter to Scipione Gon­ zaga dated from Ferrara on the fifteenth of June 1576 (Letter 76) Tasso writes, “to confess the truth frankly to your most illustrious Lordship, when I began my poem I had not a single thought of allegory, which seemed to me an empty and super­ fluous l­ abor, . . . ​but when I had got beyond the midpoint of my poem, and began to be anxious about the strictness of the times, I then began to think of allegory as a ­thing I judged would finesse ­every difficulty.” “Io, per confessare a V. S. illustrissima

488  Notes to Pages 229–230 ingenuamente il vero, quando communciai il mio poema non ebbi pensiero al­ cuno d’allegoria, parendomi sovverchia e vana fatica. . . . ​Ma poich’ io fui oltre al mezzo del mio poema, e comminciai a sospettar della strettezza dei’ tempi, com­ minciai anco a pensare all’ allegoria, come cosa ch’io giudicava dovermi assai agevolar ogni difficoltà.” He goes on to say that ­after some Platonic and above all Neoplatonic studies, including Pico della Mirandola, and ­after meditating on the task of reconciling classical philosophy with Christian truth, he began to see that an allegorical intention of sorts was t­ here in his poem from the start and thought of printing an allegorical explanation at the front of his poem (in 1581 it would appear at the back). Moreover, it is not necessary to think of every­thing in the poem as allegorical. He quotes Augustine, as cited by Ficino in his commentary on the Symposium, that only the ploughshare cuts the earth, but for this to happen the en­ tire apparatus of the plough must be attached; and so it is with allegory: only certain key ele­ments of an allegorical poem w ­ ill have an “other” meaning. Tasso, Lettere poetiche, in Prosatori del secolo XVI, vol. 11 of Biblioteca enciclopedia italiana (Milan, 1831), pp. 433–44. Angelo Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, 3 vols. (Torino, 1895), 2:233–34. Boiardo and Ariosto used allegory in places, and critics allegorized the erotic parts “to save appearances (per salvare le apparenze). Tasso went on to do for his poem what the critics had done for Boiardo and Ariosto and ­others. See Let­ ters 76 and 79 in Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence, 1854), 1:192–96. See p. 471 n. 19. 5. Gordon Teskey, “Milton’s Choice of Subject in the Context of Re­nais­sance Critical Theory,” ELH 53, no. 1 (1986): 53–72. 6. Francesco Robortello, In librum Aristotelis De arte poetica explicationes (Florence, 1548). See “The Tradition of Aristotle’s Poetics I: Discovery and Exegesis,” in Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Re­nais­sance, 2 vols. (Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, 1961) 1. 349–423, summarized on pp. 422–23. See also Peter V. Marinelli, “Narrative Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Lit­er­a­ture, eds. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 241 and 249. 7. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1997); Culler, The Literary in Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 8. Ovid, Fasti 6.5–8: “est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo: / impetus hic sacrae semina mentis habet. / Fas mihi praecipue voltus vidisse deorum / vel quia sum vates, vel quia sacra cano.” “There is a god within us. It is when he stirs us that our bosom warms; it is his impulse that sows the seeds of inspiration. I have a pecu­ liar right to see the faces of the gods, whether because I am a bard, or because I sing of sacred things.” Trans. James G. Frazer, rev. G. F. Gould (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 9. Plato, Ion 534b–­d; Plato, Phaedrus 245; Plato, Symposium 209a; Plato, Republic 398a; Plato, Laws 817b–­d; T. V. F. Brogan, “Poetic Madness,” in New Prince­ton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, T.  V.  F. Brogan, et  al. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993).

Notes to Pages 232–235  489 10. Richard Mulcaster, Positions Concerning the Training Up of ­Children, ed. William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 11. Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), translated by Jan E. Lewin as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 12. Sidney, Defence of Poetry, p. 112. See editors’ introduction, pp. 59–62. 13. The Shepeardes Calender is dedicated “To the Noble and Vertuous Gentleman most worthy of all titles both of learning and chevalrie M. Philip Sidney.” In Edmund Spenser, The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and Ernest de Sélincourt (1912; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 415. Sidney, Defence of Poetry, p. 112. 14. George Puttenham, “Of Proportion,” Book Two of The Arte of En­glish Poesie, ed. Ed­ ward Arber, En­glish Reprints (London, 1589), p. 80. In the critical edition, The Art of En­glish Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 155. 15. A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 107. 16. Milton, Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 3, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 362, describing Sidney’s Arcadia, which is in prose, as a “vain amatorious Poem.” 17. Robortello in 1548 (see note 6 above) and Ludovico Castelvetro in 1570: Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata, et sposta (Vienna, 1570). 18. The rhetorical theorist Dionysius of Halicarnassus changed the concept of mimesis from imitation of nature to the stylistic imitation of literary models and in this was followed by Quintilian and in the Re­nais­sance by Erasmus, in De copia. K.  K. Ruthven, Critical Assumptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 103–4. For Puttenham and mimesis see A. Leigh DeNeef, “Poetics, Elizabethan,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 552; Derek Attridge, “Puttenham’s Perplexity: Nature, Art, and the Supplement in Re­nais­sance Poetic Theory,” in Literary Theory  /  Re­nais­sance Texts, ed. Patricia A. Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 257–79. 19. Aristotle, Poetics: systasis, “standing together of events in the plot,” 1450a1–5; mimesis, “imitation of actions,” 1450a16–17, 40–41. Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhe­toric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-­C entury ­England (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1986), p. 276. 20. Ludovico Ariosto, Cinque Canti / Five Cantos, trans. Alexander Sheers and David Quint, introduction by Quint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 21. Torquato Tasso, Discorsi del poema eroico (1594), edited and translated by Mariella Cavalcanti and Irene Samuel as Discourses on the Heroic Poem (Oxford, UK: Clar­ endon, 1973). The “Allegoria del poema” was published in the 1581 edition of the Gerusalemme liberata, edited by Febo Bonà, perhaps a pseudonym for Batista Gua­ rino. It is translated in Edward Fairfax’s translation, Jerusalem Delivered. See Tasso, Godfrey of Bulloigne: A Critical Edition of Edward Fairfax’s Translation of Tasso’s “Gerusalemme Liberata” Together with Fairfax’s Original Poems, ed. Kathleen M. Lea and T. M.

490  Notes to Pages 236–239 Gang (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1981). See also Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. An­ thony Esolen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 2 2. Weinberg, “The Quarrel over Ariosto and Tasso,” History of Literary Criticism 2. 954–90 and 991–1073. 23. Simone Fornari, La spositione sopra l’Orlando furioso, 2 vols. (Florence, 1549–50). For­ nari argues that any part of the poem not fully integrated into the plot in Aristote­ lian terms, and any part that does not meet the standard of probability, is allegorical. See pp. 455–56 n. 24 and 458–59 n. 34. 24. Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979), pp. 24 and 246 n. 13, citing the opening stanza of Gerusalemme Liberata, lines 7–8. The poet says his hero Goffredo, the leader of the Christian army, w ­ ill unite erring knights u ­ nder Christian banners: “e sotto a i santi / segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti.” Gerusalemme Liberata, ed. Lanfranco Caretti (Milan: Mondadori, 1957), p.  2. In Edward Fairfax’s translation, “he brought againe / ­Under one standard all his scatt’red traine.” Edward Fairfax, Godfrey of Bulloigne, eds. Kathleen M. Lea and T. M. Gang (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 94. See Sergio Zatti, The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso, trans. Sally Hill and Dennis Looney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); and L’ombra del Tasso: epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), pp. 14–22. 25. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993), pp. 405–6n8. See also Quint’s remarks on Trissino in “The Anatomy of Epic in Book Two of The Faerie Queene,” the Hugh Mac­ Lean Memorial Lecture, 2002, Spenser Review 34, no. 1 (2003): 28–45. 26. Tasso speaks of a malign ­little sprite haunting him, a foletto, stealing his money— he is unable to say how much—­disordering his papers, turning his books upside down, opening his chests, and disordering his possessions, so that he can keep track of nothing. Delle lettere familiari di Sig. Torquato ai Tasso, vol. 2 (Bergamo, 1588), p. 95. Torquato Tasso, Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence, 1854), 2:174, composed on Christmas Day 1586, as he mentions in the opening sentence. He began to suspect himself of committing heresy in his epic and demanded to be examined by the inquisition. For summary and translations, see Richard Henry Wilde, Conjectures and Researches Concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso (New York, 1842), pp. 217–25. For an account of t­ hese t­ rials, see C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and of his Contribution to En­glish Lit­e r­a­t ure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 19–24. 27. Michael Murrin, “Tasso’s Enchanted Wood,” in The Allegorical Epic: Essays in Its Rise and Decline (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 127. 28. See Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, trans. and ann. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2006); John Mulryan, Natalis Comes’ Mythologiae: Its Place in the Re­nais­sance Mythological Tradition and Its Impact upon En­glish Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ ture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Elizabeth Sawtelle Ran­ dall, The Sources of Spenser’s Classical My­thol­ogy (1896; repr., Norwood, PA: Norwood, 1978); Henry Gibbons Lotspeich, Classical My­thol­ogy in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1932); Douglas Bush, My­thol­ogy and the Re­nais­sance Tradition in En­glish Poetry (1932; repr., New York: Pageant, 1957); Jean

Notes to Pages 242–249  491 Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Re­nais­ sance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara  F. Sessions (1935; repr., Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1995); De Witt T. Starnes and E. W. Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Re­nais­sance Dictionaries (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro­ lina Press, 1955); Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Re­nais­sance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958); Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Eliza­ beth Jane Bellamy, Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).

10. A Field Theory of Allegory 1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, introduction to The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books, 2001), p. 47. A title closer to the orig­ inal would be “Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.” 2. τὸ εἰκός, “the probable,” a recurring term in Aristotle’s Poetics. The key passage is 1451a36–38. 3. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. E. Sanguineti and M. Turchi, 2 vols. (Milan: Garzanti, 1964), 1:8, 1.22. For Spenser’s habitual serious adoption of the comic or ironic in Ariosto, see R. E. Neil Dodge, “Spenser’s Imitations from Ariosto,” Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) 12, no. 2 (1897): 171–72. For the Italian critic, see Giuseppe Pecchio, Da Chaucer sino a Milton, 1398–1674, vol. 3 of part 2 in Storia critica della poesia inglese (Lugano, 1835), p. 172. In Statius’s envoi to his epic, he tells his book (­after noting with pride its fame and its ac­cep­tance by the emperor Domitian) not to challenge the divine Aeneid but to follow always in its footsteps and adore them from afar; Thebaid 12.816–17: “Vive precor; Nec tu divinam Aeneida tempta / Sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora.” This is imitated by Spenser in the envoi to The Shepheardes Calender, referring both to Chaucer and to Langland, “the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde a while”: “But follow them farre off, and their high steppes adore.” Verses are unlineated and contained in the “Gloss” to December. 4. From the 1758 edition of Ralph Church, The Faerie Queene, 4 vols. (London, 1758), cited in John Upton’s variorum edition, The Works of Edmund Spenser, 8 vols. (London, 1805), 4:249n. Of course, Elizabeth’s royal coat of arms, like the British royal arms ­today, had three gold lions on a red field. 5. Charles Ross, The Custom of the ­Castle: From Malory to Macbeth (Berkeley: University of California Press). 6. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author Sir Charles Grandison, 2nd ed. (London, 1759), p. 38. 7. Kathleen Williams, Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”: The World of Glass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). See also Williams, “Vision and Rhe­toric: The Poet’s Voice in The Faerie Queene,” ELH 39 (1969): 131–44; and Williams, “Spenser and the Meta­ phor of Sight,” Rice University Studies, 1974, pp. 153–69, especially p. 163 on the eye feeding the mind: “Britomart . . . ​moves in an atmosphere of vision.” 8. W. L. Renwick, Edmund Spenser: An Essay on Re­nais­sance Poetry (1925; repr., London: Edward Arnold, 1949); Janet Spens, Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”: An Interpretation

492  Notes to Page 250 (London: Edward Arnold, 1934); C. S. Lewis, “The Faerie Queene,” chapter seven of The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1936); Lewis, “Sidney and Spenser,” in En­glish Lit­e r­a­t ure in the Sixteenth ­C entury Excluding Drama (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1954); Graham Hough, A Preface to “The Faerie Queene” (New York: Norton, 1962); Thomas P. Roche, The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton Uni­ versity Press, 1962); William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: A Study (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1967); A. Bartlett Giammatti, Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1975); Isabel MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1976). This chapter began life as the Kathleen Williams Memorial Lecture, delivered to the International Spenser Society at Ka­ lamazoo, Michigan, in 2017. This circumstance ­w ill account for my perhaps over­ specialized tracing of a line of Spenser interpretation in the twentieth ­century for which Williams’s study is a distinguished example, a line that comes to an abrupt end in James Nohrnberg’s Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1976). To Spenserians it ­w ill seem that the differences between the authors and works I mention are more striking than the similarities, especially as regards Alpers’s. It ­w ill also appear, perhaps in contradiction to this last point, that I have left many impor­tant studies out. James Nohrnberg’s The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1976) is an effort to re­ veal the structure of the poem by exhausting its interpretative potential through the flexible instrument of analogy. But this is not at all a work for the general reader, intriguing as many of its interpretative moments are, as when the loss of Florimell’s girdle “may represent the defoliation that marks the coming of winter” (p. 578) and Serena’s pleading with Turpine, in Book Six, is interpreted through Una’s pleading with Sansloy for the fallen, suppositious Redcross, who is actually Archimago (p. 685). Such readings may be improbable from the point of view of explicating what the poet intended. But if what the poet intended was to proj­ect a field for in­ terpretation, then t­ hese readings only add to the richness of that field. For similar cases, see John Freccero, “Allegory and Autobiography,” in In Dante’s Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 96–115, in which the Geryone episode is connected to “the wild flight,” il folle volo, of Odysseus and his shipmates beyond the pillars of Hercules, in part ­because the voyage of Odysseus was interpreted since antiquity as the edu­ cative journey of the soul. The descent on the back of Geryon is like Virgil’s de­ scent of Aeneas, again connecting to Augustine, such that Odysseus’s sailing voyage and Dante and Virgil’s journey on Geryon’s back are one and the same with re­spect to their meaning. From the point of view of philological interpretation, this tissue of connections proves nothing. But it is just the sort of response, and at a high level, that an allegorical work is expected to produce within its field. 9. Williams, Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” xiii. See also Maurice Evans’s review, in Review of En­glish Studies 18, no. 72 (1967): 452–55.

Notes to Pages 251–269  493 10. A. S. Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation, 2:42, cited in OED ­under “field”; J. Clerk Maxwell, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electro-­Magnetic Field,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 155 (1865): 459–512. “The electro-­magnetic field is that part of space which surrounds bodies in electric or magnetic conditions” (p. 460). 11. Robert Oppenheimer, “On Albert Einstein,” New York Review of Books, March 17, 1966: “The second and equally deep strand . . . ​was his total love of the idea of a field: the following of physical phenomena in minute and infinitely subdividable detail in space and time. This gave him his first ­great drama of trying to see how Maxwell’s equations could be true. They [Maxwell’s] ­were the first field equations of physics; they are still true ­today with only very minor and well-­u nderstood modifications. It is this tradition which made him know that ­there had to be a field theory of gravitation, long before the clues to that theory w ­ ere securely in his hand.” 12. Coleridge’s is a very reductive account of David Hartley’s Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations, 2 vols. (London, 1749). In chapters five to nine of the first volume of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge rec­ords in detail his fasci­ nation with Hartley, a­ fter whom he named his first son, and his subsequent philo­ sophical disillusionment, having been taken up in Kant’s ­giant hand. Mechanistic psy­chol­ogy is associated with the mechanical character of allegory, as opposed to the organic character of the symbol. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Bollingen Series 75, 2 vols. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1983). See James Engell, “Biographia Literaria,” in The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2006), pp. 65–66. For Hartley, see Joan Walls, “The Psy­chol­ogy of David Hartley and the Root Meta­phor of Mechanism: A Study in the History of Psy­ chol­ogy,” Journal of Mind and Be­hav­ior 3, nos. 3–4 (1982): 259–74. For the rich intel­ lectual background to Hartley’s psy­chol­ogy, see Robert B. Glassman and Hugh W. Buckingham, “David Hartley’s Neural Vibrations and Psychological Associations,” in Brain, Mind, and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-­Century Neuroscience, ed. Harry Whit­ taker, C. U. M. Smith, and Stanley Fin­ger (Boston: Springer, 2007), pp. 177–90. 13. Plato, Republic 378d; Plutarch, Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debeat 19e–­f. 14. Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Jan van Dorsten and Katherine Duncan-­Jones (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1973), p. 120. Cf. pp. 75–79, where Sidney develops the theme of philosophy being concealed in poetry and of the poet as vates, “sacred seer,” before Sidney turns to the rationalist and technical Aristotelian tradition. 15. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), 10.246–48 (emphasis added).

11. From Moment to Moment 1. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, Collected and Uncollected Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer­ sity Press, 2015), 5.6–7.

494  Notes to Pages 275–286 2. Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1967), with a second edition issued from the University of Missouri Press in 1982; Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964); Northrop Frye, “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,” University of Toronto Quarterly 30 (1961): 109–27. See also Alpers’s introduction to Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), registering his antipathy to Frye’s large-­scale, mythopoeic approach. For a discussion of the book in which Alpers is most concerned with genre, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), see Christopher Warley, “Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral?,” Spenser Review 43, no. 2 (2013). 3. Jeff Dolven, “The Method of Spenser’s Stanza,” Spenser Studies 19 (2004): 17–25; and in the same issue, Kenneth Gross, “Shapes of Time: On the Spenserian Stanza,” pp. 27–35. Gross’s essay treats the stanza, very sensibly and usefully, as having this momentary quality of binding together continuity and transformation. 4. Statius, Thebaid 3.657–59: “tua prorsus inani / verba polo causas abstrusaque momina rerum / eliciunt!” D. R. Shacketon Bailey translates: “For a certainty your words draw c­ auses and hidden impulses of t­ hings from the open sky.” Statius, Thebaid, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 196–97. 5. References may be found u ­ nder momentum and cognates in The Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. G.  P.  W. Glare (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1968–82). Statius, Thebaid 3.658; Lucretius, De rerum natura 2.1169, 3.144, 3.188. Also of interest for momentum, momentiolum, momentalis, and momentana (fem.), “a set of scales,” is Revised Medieval Latin Word List from British and Irish Sources, ed. R.  E. Latham (London: British Acad­emy and Oxford University Press, 1965). 6. Homer, Iliad 8.69–74, 22.209–13. Personified elsewhere as blood-­drinking demons that haunt the battlefields, in Homer the word κήρ is all but synonymous with death. B. C. Dietrich, “The Judgment of Zeus,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie n.s. 107, no. 2 (1964): 97–125, esp. p. 104. For the term kerostasia for the “weighing of the fates,” see p. 100. 7. Livy, Ab urbe condita 3.27.8. Compare Seneca, Epistulae 90.24, where a fish with a small motion of its tail, levi momento, ­causes its entire body to turn. He is of course describing the princi­ple of the lever. 8. The tele­v i­sion miniseries was produced by RAI Radiotele­v i­sione Italiana, with the collaboration of Nuovi Orientamenti Cinematografici, and directed by Luca Ron­ coni and Massimo Sanguineti, released in February 1975. The speaker was my dis­ sertation adviser, William Blissett. 9. Augustine, De civitate dei contra paganos 6.9.

12. Thinking Moments in The Faerie Queene 1. Paul Alpers, “The Poet’s Poet,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 551b. 2. William Words­worth, The Prelude (1805), in Words­worth’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Nich­ olas Halmi (New York: Norton, 2014), p. 201, 3.279–82.

Notes to Pages 287–295  495 3. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the En­glish Poets, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, vol. 5 (London: Dent, 1930). The quotations from Hazlitt in this paragraph and the following one are taken from the discussion of Spenser on pp.  34–44. See David Bromwich, “Hazlitt, William,” in Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 349–50. 4. Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations, in Complete Works of Walter Savage Landor, ed. Earle Welby, vol. 5 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1927), pp. 204–5. 5. John Keats, “To Charles Cowden Clarke,” in Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (1956; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 30, lines 33–34. See Greg Kucich, Keats, Shelley, and Romantic Spenserianism (University Park: State University of Penn­ sylvania Press, 1991), p. 142. 6. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Preface to The Revolt of Islam,” in Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: Modern Library, 1994), pp. 37–38. 7. James Merrill, The Book of Ephraim, in The Changing Light at Sandover (1980; repr., New York: Knopf, 1982), p. 4. 8. John Milton, “Of Education,” in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 277. 9. Franion usually means a wanton male companion (OED). Spenser applies it to a ­woman ­here and also, as OED notes, at V.iii.22, where it refers to the False Florimell. 10. Sean Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. 57–59. 11. Jean-­Paul Sartre, Huis clos: Pièce en un acte, ed. Keith Gore (1987; repr., London: Rout­ ledge, 2000), p. 95: “Pas besoin de gril: l’enfer, c’est les Autres.” 12. Sherwin B. Nuland, The Art of Aging: A Doctor’s Prescription for Well-­Being (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 230. Nuland attributes the phrase “compression of mor­ bidity” to the Stanford gerontologist James Fries. 13. James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton Uni­ versity Press, 1976). Joseph Butler argues in Analogy of Religion, Natu­ral and Revealed (1736) that t­ here is “a general analogy between the princi­ples of divine government, as set forth by the biblical revelation, and ­those observable in the course of nature,” warranting the conclusion “that t­ here is one author of both.” For the connection with Bishop Butler, see William Blissett, “The Longest Study of Spenser,” University of Toronto Quarterly 48 (1979): 76–80, esp. p. 80. 14. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1938), p. 358. 15. Ibid., p. 447. 16. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), p. 198, on the religious quality of the Hegelian Absolute, and pp. 210–11: “I was now teaching philosophy (I suspect very badly) as well as En­glish. And my watered Hegelianism w ­ ouldn’t serve for tutorial purposes.” One side of Lewis’s nature was strongly attracted by the uncompromising rationalism of logical positivism, the other by the spiritual character of an unsatisfactory Hegelianism, although it was Bishop Berkeley whom Lewis actually preferred. It was with poets, especially Spenser, that Lewis supplied his loss of faith in Hegelianism, and at this juncture

496  Notes to Pages 296–304 Lewis’s old En­glish tutor at University College, F. P. Wilson, urged him to turn from philosophy to En­glish, in response to which Lewis proposed “a study of the ro­ mantic epic from its beginnings down to Spenser,” the first indication of what would become The Allegory of Love. A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Collins, 1990), pp. 85–89. 17. “­T hose who put forward such an assertion also themselves say the direct op­ posite of what they mean.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 65. This is section 3.4, para­ graph 109. 18. Kenneth Gross, “ ‘Each Heav’nly Close’: Mythologies and Metrics in Spenser and the Early Poetry of Milton,” PMLA 98, no. 1 (1983): 21–36; Gross, “Shapes of Time: On the Spenserian Stanza,” Spenser Studies 19 (2004): 27–35; Jeff Dolven, “The Method of Spenser’s Stanza,” Spenser Studies 19 (2004): 17–25; Theresa Krier, “Time Lords: Rhythm and Interval in Spenser’s Stanzaic Narrative,” Spenser Studies 21 (2006): 1–19; Julia MacDonald, “Keeping Time in Spenser and Shakespeare: The Temporality of Spenserian Stanza and Shakespearean Blank Verse,” Ben Jonson Journal 22, no. 1 (2015): 83–100. 19. See Simon Jarvis, Words­worth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), a meditation on Words­worth’s poetry as thinking that is not “philo­ sophical” in the formal sense of the word (as Coleridge had expected) but is so in a manner peculiar to poetry. 20. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 91. 21. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (German title: Gelassenheit), trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). 22. Joachim du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language”: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). For the importance of du Bellay for the young Spenser, who translated some of his poems, see pp. 34–36. 23. This book Paradise Lost, says the author (prob­ably Samuel Barrow), contains all ­things and the originative princi­ples of all t­ hings, their fates and their ends: “Res cunctas, et cunctarum primordia rerum / Et fata, et fines continet iste liber.” “In Paradisum Amissum” (1674), lines 3–4. The poem was published as a preface (pre­ ceding Andrew Marvell’s more famous “On Paradise Lost”) to the second and, in Milton’s lifetime, the final edition of Paradise Lost. For text with translation, see John Milton, Paradise Lost, 2nd rev. ed., ed. Alastair Fowler (2007; repr., London: Rout­ ledge, 2013), pp. 51–53. For critical discussion of the poem and its authorship, see Michael Lieb, “S.B.’s ‘In Paradisum Amissam’: Sublime Commentary,” Milton Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1985): 71–78. 24. David Jones, The Anathémata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p.  20; “The Myth of Arthur,” in Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), p. 190. 25. The ambiguity is the theme of Kenneth Gross’s Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

Notes to Pages 307–312  497 26. William Blissett, “Spenser’s Mutabilitie,” in Essays in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture from the Re­nais­ sance to the Victorian Age, Presented to A.  S.  P. Wood­house, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 39–40. 27. “The True is the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk.” G. F. W. Hegel, preface to Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), trans. A. V. Miller, ed. J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 27. Revel, as opposed to whirl, strikes me as too general for Hegel’s meaning, which is that the True depends on a dynamic interaction of members (not of merely assembled parts) where each is supported by the o ­ thers and all must keep moving to stay upright. In the German text, “Das Wahre ist so der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied nicht trunken ist.” Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke, vol. 3, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 46 (emphasis added). The noun Taumel, “frenzy” (from the verb taumeln), suggests movement, whirling and even staggering, where another step is always necessary to maintain balance. It derives from a verb in Old High German meaning “to turn.” See Friedrich Kluge, Etymological Dictionary of the German Language (1891), trans. John Francis Davis, https://­en​ .­w ik isource​.­o rg​/­w ik i​/­A n​_ ­E ty mological​_ ­D ictionar y​_­o f​_­t he ​_­G er man​ _­Language. As to the drunkenness, it is not the abject state to which that word usu­ ally refers. Hegel means us to understand it in the specific context of ecstasy and transcendence in Bacchanalian rites. The significance of the choice of Glied, “member,” over Teil, “part,” is observed by Tilottama Rajan in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (1830): “Crucial for Hegel is his distinction of ‘parts’ (Teile), which come to­ gether only as aggregates, from ‘members’ (Glieder), which contribute to a w ­ hole that determines them.” Rajan, “Blake, Hegel, and the Sciences,” Words­worth Circle 50, no. 1 (2019): 25. 28. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), especially “Kant and Schiller,” pp. 129–55; Jonathan Culler, “Paul de Man’s War and the Aesthetic Ideology,” Critical Inquiry, Summer 1989, 777–83, with its concluding sentence: “His ­later writings offer some of the most power­f ul tools for combating ideologies with which he had e­ arlier been complicitous.”

13. Courtesy and Thinking 1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al. (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 2005), I.v.90. Subse­ quent citations are from this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. 2. C. T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1951). In many of the Indo-­European languages manual grasping is linked, understandably, to understanding. 3. See Angus Fletcher, “Iconographies of Thought,” in Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 15– 34. In the same book Fletcher refers to “the extreme situation” (244), which is the moment when figuration presses at the bound­aries of the conceivable. In Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), Sean Kane discusses

498  Notes to Pages 313–327 how Spenser manages to think outside traditional, binary oppositions intended to grasp intellectual mastery and power. 4. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking, trans. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 3, a translation of Was Heisst Denken?, published in 1954. See also Hei­ degger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), a translation of Gelassenheit (Stuttgart: Neske, 1959), based on notes dating from 1944–45; Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), the title essay of which, based on a lecture given in 1955, appears in Die Technik und die Kehre and Vorträge und Aufsätze. Relevant discussion also occurs in Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Prob­lems” of “Logic,” trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), a translation of Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logic,” published in 1984 and based on lectures given in 1937–38. 5. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 351– 52, cited with discussion in A. C. Hamilton’s introduction to The Faerie Queene, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 2001), p. 14. 6. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), 12.648–49. 7. Heidegger, Gelassenheit, p. 68; Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 87. 8. Heidegger, Gelassenheit, p. 70; Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 89.

14. The Thinking of History in Spenserian Romance 1. The nineteenth-­century historian Leopold von Ranke famously said that the goal of the historian should be to understand “how it actually was at the time.” Ranke developed positivist historiography in reaction to the domination of his­ torical studies in the German-­speaking universities by the followers of Hegel. The high points of the debate in modern historiography appear in the Marxist historian Edward Hallett Carr’s What Is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961), on the side of Hegel against Ranke, and the Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton, defender of “empiricist and non-­ideological history.” See Geoffrey Roberts, “Geoffrey Elton and the Philosophy of History,” Historian 57 (1998): 29–31, citing Elton’s review in the Historical Journal 31 (1988): 761–64; see also Roberts, “Postmodernism versus the Standpoint of Action,” History and Theory 36 (1997): 249–60; and Keith Jenkins, On “What Is History?”: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London: Routledge, 1995). For the argument that historical narrative follows the general rules of fictional modes including romance (in Northrop Frye’s typology), see Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­C entury Eu­ rope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), especially chapters three to five: “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” “Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination,” and “The Fictions of Fac­ tual Repre­sen­ta­tion.” See also the essays in Paulina Kewes, ed., The Uses of History

Notes to Pages 328–342  499 in Early Modern E­ ngland (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2006), in par­tic­ u­lar Kewes’s “History and Its Uses” (pp.  1–30) and Blair Worden’s “Historians and Poets” (pp. 69–90). 2. See Timothy Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography a­ fter Hegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 69. 3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), p.  83; Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1991), pp. 60–61; Ian Balfour, “Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin’s History),” Modern Language Notes 106 (1991): 622–47. I am indebted to Balfour’s article for what I have to say h ­ ere on Hegel. For valu­ able reflection on Hegel’s complex sense of history, see Sarah Clift, “Speculating on the Past, the Impact of the Pre­sent: Hegel and his Time(s),” in Committing the ­F uture to Memory: History, Experience, Trauma (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 132–71. 4. “Die Philosophie soll keine Erzählung dessen sein, was geschieht, sondern eine Erkenntnis dessen, was wahr darin ist, und aus dem Wahren soll sie ferner das be­ greifen, was in der Erzählung als ein bloßes Geschehen erscheint.” Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik 2:260, vol. 6 of Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71). 5. See Michel Henry, De la phénoménologie, vol. 1 of Phénoménologie de la vie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), pp. 60, 62; Simon Jarvis, “What Is Specu­ lative Thinking?,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 227 (2004): 69–83; and Brenda Machosky, Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Lit­e r­a­ture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 6. Jon Whitman, “Thinking Backward and Forward: Narrative Order and the Begin­ nings of Romance,” Partial Answers: Journal of Lit­er­a­ture and the History of Ideas 4 (2006): 131–50. 7. The Faerie Queene was published in quarto installments in 1590 (Books One to Three) and 1596 (Books Four to Six). In the first folio edition of the poem, pub­ lished in 1609, ten years ­after the poet’s death, two cantos and two stanzas of a sev­ enth book w ­ ere added; ­these are known as the “Mutabilitie Cantos.” 8. On the diversity of Spenser’s views of the past, see Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 9. G. R. Elton, ­England ­under the Tudors, 3rd ed. (1991; repr., London: Folio, 1997), pp. 298–301. I have relied more broadly on Elton’s invaluable account of the eigh­ teen years of war at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. 10. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993). 11. Andrew Fichter, Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Re­nais­sance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 12. Eugène Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 13. Virgil, Aeneid 2.290. Cf. Homer, Iliad 13.772–73. 14. See chapter one, note 42.

500  Notes to Pages 345–352 15. Colonial Allegories in Paris 1. Thirza Vallois, Around and about Paris, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Iliad, 1998) 2:178. Much of the factual information in this chapter comes to me from Vallois directly or from following up on ­things seen during walks over several years with her vol­ umes in hand. Other basic information can be found in the Guide Bleu de Paris and reference works at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris. My references to ongoing public discussion of French colonialism and the public use of colonial artifacts and persons—to say nothing of the confusion be­ tween t­ hose two categories—­are from sources too numerous to name or even, admittedly, to recall a­ fter several years of immersion in a subject not unlike Spenser’s Fairy Land. They include newspaper articles; public notices; tele­v i­sion programs on the French cultural channel Arté; museum websites, including that of the new Musée du Quai Branly, before and ­after its opening; news bulletins of the twelfth arrondissement; old maps on display in the Louvre; numerous ob­ jects and artifacts, including a model of the entire Colonial Exhibition, still on display at the Palais de la Porte Dorée; posters, stamps, and books from the mar­ velous third-­world bookstore L’Harmattan, on Boulevard Saint Germain, and Penelope Fletcher’s The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore, where I found Vallois’s vol­ umes and had many conversations with visitors on French colonialism, French immigration, the crisis in the banlieues, and French state’s endorsement of “primi­ tive arts.” The cause of this chapter was a single reference to the Musée des Colonies in my Allegory and Vio­lence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 117. I had made a point of seeing in situ e­ very visual work referred to in that book but had neglected the frescoes in what is now called the Palais de la Porte Dorée. Guilt in­ spired me to go see them ­after Allegory and Vio­lence was published, and I was unex­ pectedly astonished and hooked. I am grateful to Brenda Machosky for inviting me to give a lecture on the frescoes at her Stanford conference on allegory, ­later published in Thinking Allegory Other­wise. Dr. Uta Kriesten, a proud resident of the twelfth arrondissement, cheerfully fulfilled many requests to verify information and in the course of ­doing so found more. 2. The arrondissements are the administrative regions of Paris that spiral outward from the center, the Isle de la Cité. A faubourg, or “false town,” is the old word for a suburb, an area outside the old city walls. On old maps the large faubourgs enclosing Paris on the east and west respectively are the Faubourg Saint Antoine and the Fau­ bourg Saint Honoré. The modern word for a suburb is banlieue, an administrative region having the right of ban or proclamation. 3. Catherine Bouché, “Allégories Coloniales,” L’Objet d’Art, April 1988, pp. 88–97. 4. See Joël Dauphiné, Canaques de la Nouvelle-­Calédonie à Paris en 1931: De la case au zoo (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). An entertaining novel on the subject is Didier Dae­ ninckx’s Cannibale (Lagrasse, France: Verdier, 1996). Some poetic license is taken. The Kanak “cannibals” ­were never lodged on the grounds of the Colonial Exposi­

Notes to Pages 353–368  501 tion to perform their dances but w ­ ere transferred to the Jardin d’Acclimatation. In the novel, they are imprisoned on the grounds of the Colonial Exposition. Two escape into Paris and have adventures, which turn darker when the girlfriend of one is among ­those transported to Germany to replace the Nile crocodiles. 5. Dominique Jarrassé, “Un programme idéologique et didactique,” in Le Palais des Colonies: Histoire du Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, by Germaine Viatte and Dom­ inique François (Paris: Ré­union des Musées Nationaux, 2002), pp. 87–88. 6. Ibid., p. 87. 7. Cited in Le Monde, January 21, 2006, “Dossier,” an eight-­page insert on France’s co­ lonial history. 8. See the article on Lyautey in the French Wikipedia, https://­fr​.­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​ /­Hubert ​_ ­Lyautey. 9. Quoted in Viatte and François, Le Palais des Colonies, p. 24. 10. Ibid., p. 27. 11. Ibid., p. 28. 12. From the song “Si loin, si proche,” on the ­album La fin du monde (High Skills / BMG, 1998). In the argot code language, Verlans (i.e., envers, backward), renoi and rabza are, respectively, Noir (Black) and Arabe. 13. Jobic Lemasson, in a personal communication, told me he took his ­children to the museum on numerous occasions to learn about modern French art. 14. Jacques Kerchache, Pour que less chefs d’oeuvre du monde entier naissent libre et egaux, re­ produced on the website for the Musée du Quai Branly (http://­quaibranly​.­fr​ /­kerchache). 15. Jacques Chirac, “Discours prononcé . . . ​lors de l’inauguration du pavillon des Sessions au musée du Louvre.” Paris, April 13, 2000. http://­w ww​.­jacqueschirac​ -­asso​.­f r​/­a rchives​-­elysee​.­f r​.­elysee​/­elysee​.­f r​/­f rancais​/­i nterventions​/­d iscours​_­e t​ _­declarations​/­2000​/­avril​/­fi002646​.­html (accessed July 21, 2019). 16. See Bernard Dupaigne, Le scandale des arts premiers: La véritable histoire du Musée du Quai Branly (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 1986). For an En­glish account of the genesis of the museum, see Sally Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

16. Courtesy and the Graces 1. “Interred at Westminster, near to Chaucer, at the Charge of the earl of Essex; his hearse being attended by Poets, and mournfull Elegies and Poems with the Pens that wrote them thrown into his Tomb.” William Camden, in Thomas Browne’s translation (1629), quoted in Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2004), p. 394. For the very compressed account of Spenser’s life, the destruction of Kilcolman and loss of his goods, his death in poverty and his fu­ neral, plus an assessment of his reputation in comparison with Chaucer and the remark that it is the fate of poets to be burdened with poverty, see William Camden, Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum, Regnante Elizabetha, vol. 2 (1615), pp.  171–72. Noting the deaths of three learned men in 1598 (old-­style dating),

502  Notes to Pages 368–372 Camden expatiates on Spenser: “Edmundus Spenserus, patria Londinensis, Can­ tabrigiensis etiam Academiae alumnus, Musis adeo arridentibus natus ut omnes Anglicos superioris aevi poetas, ne Chaucero quidem concive excepto, superaret. Sed peculiari poetis fato semper cum paupertate conflictatus, etsi Greio Hiber­ niae proregi fuerit ab epistolis. Vix enim ibi secessum et scribendi otium nactus, cum a rebellibus e laribus eiectus et bonis spoliatus, in Angliam inops reversus, statim expiravit, et Westmonasterii prope Chaucerum impensis Comitis Essexiae inhumatus, Poetis funus ducentibus, flebilibus carminibus et calamis in tumulum coniectis.” 2. See Westminster Abbey, “Geoffrey Chaucer,” https://­w ww​.­westminster​-­abbey​.­org​ /­abbey​-­commemorations​/­commemorations​/­geoffrey​-­chaucer. 3. Margot Norris, “The Larger World of ‘Wandering Rocks’: The Case of ­Father Conmee,” in Virgin and Veteran Readings of “Ulysses” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 69, citing Richard Ellman, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 29. 4. Catherine Bates, The Rhe­toric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Lit­er­a­ture (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 153. 5. On the iconography of the graces, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Re­nais­sance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958); Stella P. Revard, “Graces,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 6. Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés ar­ chaïques,” L’Année Sociologique, 1925. 7. Alexander Gill, Logonomia Anglica (London, 1621), pp. 124–25: “Iam fateris ad ser­ monis ornatum nihil a nostris praetermissum. Neque enim solus est in hoc ge­ nere Homerus noster; exiguum dixi, Spenserus noster; nam et sermonis cultu accuratior est; et sententiis ut crebrior, ita gravior; et inventionis varietate locu­ pletior; et materiae cognitione multo utilior; utpote qui morales virtutes, se­ cundum omnes suas circumstantias, aptissime et copiosissime, iucundissimis figmentis poeticis descripsit.” Thomas Dekker, A Knights Conjuring Done in Earnest: Discouered in Jest (London, 1607), sig. K4v. ­A fter Chaucer places “Grave Spencer” at his right hand and calls him his son, the muses fall ­silent to listen to him sing the rest of his Faerie Queene. Thomas Nashe, Strange News, or the Intercepting of Certaine Letters (1592), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald Mc­ Kerrow, 5 vols. revised by F.  P. Wilson (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1958), 1.299: “Chaucer and Spenser, the Homer and Virgil of E ­ ngland.” Cf. Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Dev­il (1592), 1.243–44 and 1.281–82. Charles Fitzgeffrey, Sir Francis Drake (1596), sig. B5: “Spenser, whose hart inharbours Homers soule.” The theme is a very common one, frequently repeated across the 180 tightly packed pages of Spenser allusions from 1580 to 1625, in Spenser Allusions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Compiled by Ray Heffner, Dorothy E. Mason, and Frederick M. Padelford, Studies in Philology, Part I: 1580–1625, ed. William Wells (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971). 8. Richard Ellman, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). For deeper study of Yeats’s intense labor at his formal art, see Helen Vendler,

Notes to Pages 373–383  503 Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 9. T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), line 6. 10. John Milton, “An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester,” in John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1997), line 22. 11. Francois Villon, “Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis,” refrain, French ­Today, https://­w ww​.­frenchtoday​.­com​/­french​-­poetry​-­reading​/­. 12. T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets, in Poems of T. S. Eliot, final line in section two. 13. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, in Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy (London: Penguin, 2016), p. 503, 39.348–51. 14. Ibid., p. 504, 44.388–96. 15. “Heare Lyes (expecting the Second comminng of our Saviour Christ Jesus) the body of Edmond Spencer, the Prince of Poets in his tyme; whose divine spirrit needs noe othir witnesse then the works which he left b ­ ehind him.” Quoted in Willy Maley, “Spenser’s Life,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 27. 16. Spenser is beginning to be studied for points of common enterprise, rather than purely for contrast. See Yulia Ryzhik, “Complaint and Satire in Spenser and Donne: Limits of Poetic Justice,” En­glish Literary History 47, no. 1 (2017): 110–35; and the col­ lection of essays edited by Ryzhik, Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2019). 17. Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Ants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). For the square foot of rainforest, see “Interview with E. O. Wilson,” in the online course “The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science,” Annenberg Learner online, accessed May 30, 2019, https://­w ww​.­learner​ .­org​/­courses​/­envsci​/­scientist​/­transcripts​/­w ilson​.­html. I have been unable to relo­ cate where exactly I first read Wilson’s saying at more length that in contrast to other scientists who had to travel far, with boats and equipment and the enormous preparation these required, a square foot of space less than a hundred yards from the edge of the rainforest gave him enough research for a year and that within a short time he could discover unclassified species. 18. “The Aristotle who appealed to the ­later neoclassical Re­nais­sance, ­eager for binary division and impatient with hierarchical fragilities, is the thinker for whom belief in dichotomy and equivalent opposites is fundamental.” Sean Kane, Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. 65. That is, the belief is thought to be fundamental by Aristotle’s Re­nais­sance interpreters. 19. Milton, Paradise Lost 5.416, 5.23–26. 20. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji: A Novel in Six Parts, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Modern Library, 1960). 21. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1964), p. 356n. 22. Harry Berger Jr., Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1988), p. 194.

504  Notes to Pages 384–402 2 3. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, ed. Oliver Stallybras (London: Penguin, 2005), part two, chapter fourteen, p. 139. Originally published in 1924. 24. Plato, Symposium 189c–193e. 25. William Blissett, “Caves and Labyrinths in The Faerie Queene,” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Re­nais­sance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 310–11. 26. W. H. Auden, “Streams,” in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, rev. ed. (London: Faber, 2007), pp. 566–67. “Streams” is the last in a sequence of seven poems enti­ tled Bucolics, published in The Shield of Achilles (New York: Random House, 1955). 27. Milton took some inspiration from this scene for his distant prospect of the hill of paradise crowned with ­great trees: “Insuperable heighth of loftiest shade.” Paradise Lost 4.138. 28. τηλέφατον κυανέας χθονòς ἄστρον. Pindar, fragment 87, “Prosodion to Delos,” 1.

17. Night Thoughts on Mutability 1. The inquiring reader may consult Martin Heidegger, What Is a T ­ hing? (Die Frage nach dem Ding), trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Gateway, 1967). See also Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes), in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 19–32. The motto on Elizabeth’s coat of arms was semper eadem, “always the same”—­the very opposite of mutability—­but a favorite expression of the queen’s was “per molto variare la natura è bella,” nature’s beauty is in frequent change, or mutability. See William Blissett, “Spenser’s Mutabilitie,” in Essays in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture from the Re­nais­sance to the Victorian Age, Presented to A. S. P. Wood­house, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), p. 36. 2. The Letter to Raleigh would be published in the Lownes printings of the Works (1611–17), sometimes b ­ ehind The Faerie Queene, sometimes separated from The Faerie Queene by the minor poems. In the printing by Roger L’Estrange in 1679, the Letter is in the m ­ iddle of the minor poems, following “The Visions of Petrarch” and preceding Phineas Fletcher’s Brittains Ida. Only in the eigh­teenth ­century, with the scholarly edition of John Hughes (1715), is the Letter unambiguously placed—at the front—so as to represent the plan of The Faerie Queene. Despite the caution of the headnote, which refers to “some following Booke of the Faerie Queene” (em­ phasis added), the Mutabilitie Cantos have been set up in print as the seventh book of The Faerie Queene. Without any title page to themselves, t­ hese cantos immedi­ ately follow the final page of Book Six (p. 352, sig. Hh3v), beginning on p. 353, sig. Hh4r, and are referred to in the ­r unning heads as “The Seventh Booke of The Fa­ erie Queene” (“Seaventh” on sigs. Ii1v–­Ii2r.) On the recto of the final leaf (sig. 2I3), in very large type, is the word “Finis,” putting finis to The Faerie Queene as a w ­ hole. The verso of this leaf has a colophon, reading “1609. At London, Printed by H. L. for Mathew Lownes.” See Andrew Zurcher, “The Printing of the Cantos of Mutabilitie in 1609,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010). See chapter 8.

Notes to Pages 403–408  505 3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Kubla Khan with the account of his interrup­ tion during its composition by a person from Porlock, thus causing him to lose the complete poem as he had seen it in his mind: “all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.” Coleridge, “Of the Fragment of Kubla Khan,” in Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep, 2nd ed., ed. William Bulmer (London, 1816), pp. 51–53, reproduced in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 1:295–97. For “shaping spirit of Imagination,” see Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” in Works, 1:366: “each visitation [of afflic­ tions] / Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, / My shaping spirit of Imagina­ tion” (lines 84–86). 4. Northrop Frye, “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,” in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic My­thol­ogy (1961; repr., New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 71. 5. James Nohrnberg, “Britomart’s Gone Abroad to Brute-­land, Colin Clout’s Come Courting from the Salvage Ire-­land: Exile and the Kingdom in Some of Spenser’s Fictions for ‘Crossing Over,’ ” in Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions, ed. J. B. Lethbridge (New York: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), pp. 272–73. See also Nohrnberg, The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton Uni­ versity Press, 1976), p. 749. 6. See Patricia A. Parker, “The Dilation of Being,” in Inescapable Romance (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979), pp. 54–64. 7. John Milton, “Another on the Same,” in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), pp. 35–36, line 5. This is the second of Milton’s comic ele­ gies for Hobson, the first bearing the explanatory title “On the University Carrier, who sickened in the time of is vacancy, being forbid to go to London, by reason of the plague.” 8. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1911b, 1046a34: “in certain cases if t­hings which naturally have a quality lose it by vio­lence [βία, “a force coming from outside themselves”], we say they suffer privation.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, trans. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1984). The three princi­ples of change, metabolê, governing coming-­to-be and passing-­away, of which sterêsis or “privation” is one, are analyzed in Aristotle, Physics 191a 3–21. See metabolê and sterêsis in F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York: NYU Press, 1967). Spenser would have translated metabolê as mutability, from L. mutabilis, “changeable”; mutatio, “change”; muto, “to move,” from moveo, which Lewis and Short define as “to move, stir, set in motion, shake, disturb, remove”—­not a bad description of the character of Spenser’s titaness. C. T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (1879; repr., Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1975). 9. Horace, Epistulae 2.1.225, i.e., “poems spun out in a fine thread” or written with a finer style, subtiliore stylo scripta. Ducere, “to lead,” and deducere becomes “to write or compose,” as in Virgil’s deductum dicere carmen (Eclogues 6.5). Alexander Adam, Roman Antiquities, or, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Romans, 6th ed. (Glasgow, 1935), pp. 453–54.

506  Notes to Pages 409–430 10. Frank Kermode, “Between Time and Eternity,” in Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism, 1958–2002 (1967; repr., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), pp. 32–33. 11. A Greek-­English Lexicon, 9th ed., comp. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, re­ vised and augmented by Sir Henry Stewart Jones with the assistance of Roderick Mc­Ken­zie (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1996).

18. Mutability Ascendant 1. William Blissett, “Spenser’s Mutabilitie,” in Essays in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture from the Re­nais­ sance to the Victorian Age Presented to A. S. P. Wood­house, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), p. 22. 2. William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: A Study (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 1963), pp. 10, p. 316n9, citing William Camden, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of the Most Renowmed and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth (London, 1630), Book Four, p. 135. Camden’s original Latin edition published in 1615. See Andrew Had­ field, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 392–99; Wyman H. Herendeen, William Camden: A Life in Context (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2007). See p. 501 n. 16. 3. Hadfield, Spenser, p. 369. 4. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Ox­ ford University Press, 1967). 5. Northrop Frye, “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,” in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic My­thol­ogy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 71. 6. Nelson, Poetry of Edmund Spenser, p. 296. 7. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1938), p. 353. 8. Roland Barthes, SZ (1970; repr., Paris: Seuil, 1976); En­glish trans.: S / Z, trans. Richard Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1974), p. 4. “Writerly” is Miller’s excellent translation of Barthes’s neologism scriptible, writerly texts being engaged (like Finnegans Wake) in a perpetual pre­sent of multiple codes, concerned with the infi­ nite play of the world, the openness of all networks, and the infinity of languages, putting readers in the position of writers as well (to paraphrase Barthes’s text, p. 11). This is of course an excellent description of the kind of work we encounter in The Faerie Queene, as compared with “classical” and, to use Barthes’s coordinate term, “readerly” epics such as Paradise Lost or the Aeneid. Barthes’s discussion gives us insight into why The Faerie Queene feels more attuned to modern art, lit­er­a­ture, and m ­ usic than Paradise Lost. 9. Blissett, “Spenser’s Mutabilitie,” p. 26. 10. Patricia Coughlan, “The Local Context of Mutabilitie’s Plea,” in Spenser in Ireland: “The Faerie Queene,” 1596–1996, ed. Anne Fogarty, special issue, Irish University Review 26, no. 2 (1996): 320–21. 11. Colin Burrow, Edmund Spenser (Plymouth, UK: Northcote, 1996), p. 99. 12. George Herbert, “Decay,” in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Ox­ ford, UK: Clarendon, 1941), p. 99, line 20. See “Vertue,” pp. 87–88: “Only a sweet

Notes to Pages 435–438  507 and vertuous soul, / Like season’d timber, never gives; / But though the ­whole world turn to coal, / Then chiefly lives” (lines 13–16). The standard edition, not presently available to me, is now that of Helen Wilcox, The En­glish Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 314 (“Vertue”) and 356–57 (“Decay”).

Afterword: The Colossi of Memnon 1. G. F. W. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics 3.1.1.2: “­T hese ­were two colossal ­human fig­ ures, seated, in their grandiose and massive character more inorganic and archi­ tectural than sculptural; ­after all, Memnon columns occur in rows and, since they have their worth only in such a regular order and size, descend from the aim of sculpture altogether to that of architecture. . . . ​­T hese huge constructions should ­really convey a more or less distinct idea of something universal. The Egyptians and Ethiopians worshipped Memnon, the son of the dawn, and sacrificed to him when the sun sent forth its first rays, and in this way the image greeted the wor­ shippers with its voice. Thus by sounding and giving voice it is not of importance or interest on the strength of its shape, but b ­ ecause in its existence it is living, sig­ nificant, and revealing, even if at the same time it indicates its meaning only sym­ bolically.” For Hegel, the ideal sculpture has its ­human meaning in itself—­“living, significant”—­whereas the architectural is “symbolic” (not in the romantic sense of that word) ­because it points to a meaning that is away from itself. “Hegel’s Lec­ tures on Aesthetics. Part 3,” Marxists Internet Archive, accessed June 10, 2019, https://­w ww​.­m arxists​.­org​/­r eference​/­a rchive​/­hegel​/­works​/­a e​/­part3​-­section1​ .­htm. This chapter began as a review essay in the Spenser Review, which elicited a most valuable response from Joe Moshenska, “Why C ­ an’t Spenserians Stop Talking about Hegel? A Response to Gordon Teskey,” Spenser Review 44, no. 1 (2014). I thank him for insights that have helped me to compose the pre­sent text. 2. Homer, Odyssey 11.522: κεῖνον δὴ κάλλιστον ἴδον μετὰ Μέμνονα δῖον. 3. John Milton, “Il Penseroso,” in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd  ed. (London: Longman, 1997), lines 17–18. 4. Jacques Derrida, Glas (1974; repr., Paris: Galilée, 1995), p. 7. A new edition appeared from Galilée in 2004. ­T here is a heroic and indispensable En­glish translation by John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). In the same year Leavy published a commentary and guide, with texts by Gregory L. Ulmer and Jacques Derrida: Glassary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Also of ­great value is the online site Derridex by Pierre Delain: http://­w ww​.­idixa​ .­net​/­Pixa​/­pagixa​-­1611221138​.­html. 5. Derrida, Glas, p. 7. 6. Ibid. In the Leavey and Rand translation, “Two unequal columns, they say distyle [disent-­t’ils], each of which envelope(s) or sheath(es), incalculably reverses, turns in­ side-­out, replaces, remarks, overlaps [recoupe] the other” (p. 1). 7. For the relationship between unacknowledged desires and po­liti­cal tyranny, see Melissa E. Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern En­glish Lit­ er­a­ture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

508  Notes to Pages 439–443 8. Roy Sellars, “Waste and Welter: Derrida’s Environment,” Oxford Literary Review 32, no. 1 (2010): 37–49; Sellars, “Theory on the Toilet: A Manifesto for Dreckology,” Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1997): 179–96. For Hegel, the black African is a kind of ­human remainder, being ignorant of his humanity and totally unphilosophical. The black African is immersed in the conditions of nature and in the awareness of self only as an individual, without any general concept of the ­human, being therefore inca­ pable of philosophical reflection. As a result, the black African also has no history in the proper, philosophical sense, which means progressive history. “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still in­ volved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented h ­ ere only as on the threshold of the World’s History.” Hegel, “Philosophy of History,” Marxist Internet Archive, accessed June  16, 2019, https://­w ww​.­marxists​.­org​/­reference​ /­a rchive​/­hegel​/­works​/­hi​/­i ntroduction​-­lectures​.­htm. This sentence summarizes Hegel’s extensive and notorious remarks on Africa and Africans in the section “Geo­graph­i­cal Basis of History” in the introduction to The Philosophy of History. As an Internet search w ­ ill reveal, t­ here is an extensive lit­er­a­ture by African phi­los­o ­ phers on Hegel’s discussion of the absence of philosophy from Africa. 9. William Blissett, “Florimell and Marinell,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900, 5, no. 1 (1965): 87–104. 10. Sophocles, Antigone, trans. R. C. Jebb, ed. P. E. Easterling and Ruby Blondell (London: Bristol, 2004), pp. 88–91, lines 454–57. The text and translation are facsimile re­ prints of Jebb’s original edition with his translation and commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900). The translation is Jebb’s, but I have changed “man” to “one,” since that is what Antigone means, and added in brackets “and an­ cient customs” to better capture the meaning of nomima as distinct from nomoi. Jebb notes in his commentary that the phrase “unwritten statutes” (ἄγραπτα . . . ​ νόμινα) ­really means “observances sanctioned by usage,” the word νόμοι being re­ served for written laws (p. 90n). 11. Derrida, Glas, pp. 164–65. En­glish translation, p. 145. See also G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, ed. J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1977), paragraphs 437, 446–63. 12. Derrida, Glas, p. 187. 13. “La trace n’étant pas une présence mais le simulacre d’une présence qui se disloque, se déplace, se renvoie, n’a proprement pas lieu, l’effacement appartient à sa struc­ ture. . . . ​Le présent devient le signe du signe, la trace de la trace. Il [le présent] n’est plus ce à quoi en dernière instance renvoie tout renvoi. Il devient une fonction dans une structure de revoi généralisé. Il est trace et trace de l’éffacement du trace.” Der­ rida, “la différance,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 25. The essay was first given as a lecture to the Société française de philosophie on January 27, 1968. It was published si­mul­ta­neously in the Bulletin de la société française de philosophie (July–­September  1968) and in Théorie d’ensemble, collection Tel Quel (Paris: Seuil, 1968). Derrida is commenting on Heidegger’s cele­bration of the emergence of being in early Greek thought (before metaphysics covered it up again) as a pres­ ence in language. Being speaks everywhere and always in language—so Hei­ degger says Anaximander says. See “Der Spruch des Anaximander,” in Holzwege

Notes to Pages 443–447  509 (1952; rpt. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1957), pp.  296–343. En­glish translation, “Anaximander’s Saying, 1946,” in Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 242–81. 14. Blake places this subtitle over five infernal visions in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, at lines 24, 102, 117, 132, and 152. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in William Blake’s Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley Jr., vol. 1 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1978). 15. Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), p. 218. 16. Spenser was born prob­ably in 1552 or 1554, on what day we do not know. But it’s probable that when he died in January 1599, it was before his birthday. 17. Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 403. 18. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Laon and Cythna, ed. Jack Donovan, in The Poems of Shelley, vol. 2, 1817–1819, ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews (2000; repr., London: Routledge, 2014), p. 106, 2.36.98–90. 19. John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. D. Garrod (1956; repr., London: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1970), p. 393; see 469n.

Acknowl­edgments

I owe many debts of gratitude—­these being “exceeding spatious and wyde”— to the community of Spenserians, one such as the poet i­ magined in the Book of Courtesy, or a rather better one than that, lacking pirates and anthropo­ phagi. My first teacher of Spenser was Sean Kane, whose approach was star­ tlingly open; my second, William Blissett, Jonsonian humorist, master of criti­ cism. But I first read Spenser years before, with my ­mother, when we ­were studying for our respective high school degrees. I recall her marveling—it was my earliest Spenserian moment—at Neptune’s sea h ­ orses, the salt blast of their nostrils causing “the sparckling waves to smoke / And flame with gold.” I wish to remember h ­ ere Angus Fletcher, a great critic whom I miss, as I do also the ­great and greatly generous editor, annotator, and encyclopedist of Spenser, A. C. Hamilton. My own work on Spenser has benefitted, though not always in obvious ways, from that of Jane Bellamy, Harry Berger Jr., Patrick Cheney, Roland Greene, Patricia A. Parker, Judith Anderson, Kenneth Gross, Teresa Krier, David Lee Miller, James Nohrnberg, Anne Lake Prescott, David Quint, Thomas P. Roche, and Jon Whitman. It was an honor to be invited by the Spenser committee at the International Congress of Medieval Studies, in the person of its chair, David Wilson-­Okamura, to give the Kathleen Williams Memorial Lecture. William Oram provided valuable commentary. I owe more than I can express to my students over the years, both under­ graduate and gradu­ate. I thank them for their enthusiasm in the adventure of reading this poet of “other thinking” in innovative ways. I would mention among undergraduates Ana Acosta, Elise Cavaney, Nicholas Halmi, Thomas

511

512  Acknowl­edgments Hawks, Seth Herbst, Giulio Pertile, Palmer Rampell, and Michelle Marie Stern. My former doctoral students of Spenser, now teachers of this fabulous poet, are Joseph Campana, on pain and suffering; Jason Crawford, on allegory; Maria Devlin McNair on ethics; Galena Hashhozheva, on the intellectual virtues; Paul Hecht, on the poetics of The Shepherd’s Calender; Jamey Graham, on the changing concept of character in the Re­nais­sance; Yulia Ryzhik, on Spenser and Donne as thinking poets; and Misha Teramura on Chaucer. My pre­sent doctoral stu­ dent, Elizabeth Weckhurst, has provided valuable insight. I owe much to some noble institutions, including the En­glish departments of Cornell and Harvard Universities. I thank Harvard College of Arts Dean Mi­ chael Smith and his pre­de­ces­sors, William Kirby and the late Jeremy Knowles, as well as our former and current associate deans for the humanities, Diana Sorensen and Robin Kelsey. I salute my Spenserian colleagues Marjorie Garber, Stephen Greenblatt, and Leah Whittington; plus my fellow teachers of poetry Stephanie Burt, Daniel Donoghue, James Engell, Jorie Graham, Elisa New, Peter Sacks, James Simpson, Elaine Scarry, and Nicholas Watson. It has been my privilege to have Helen Vendler for my office neighbor, a brilliant advo­ cate, by her example as a critic, for the teaching of poetry as essential, like ­music, to life. Friends and colleagues to whom I am indebted include William Altman, Ian Balfour, Catherine Bates, Colin Burrow, Glenda Carpio, Sheila T. ­Cavanagh, Cynthia Chase, Jonathan Culler, Jeff Dolven, Milad Douehi, K ­ atherine Eggert, Andrew Escobedo, David Galbraith, Jane Grogan, Elizabeth D. Harvey, Mary Jacobus, Simon Jarvis, Julian Lethbridge, Joe Moshenska, Catherine Nicholson, Michael Schoenfeldt, Regina Schwartz, Nigel Smith, Lauren Silberman, Roy Sellars, Ramie Targoff, Olivier Wahl, and Christopher Warley. T ­ here are more whom I ­shall regret having failed to remember on this bank and shoal of time. My thanks go out to an anonymous reader for Harvard University Press. Another reader for the press, Melissa E. Sanchez, commented on inter­ pretive questions with acuity and generous insight. Deficiences and ­mistakes remaining are of course my own responsibility. Some of the writing of this book was done while holding a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, for which I am thankful. I also thank Geoffrey Galt Harpham, director of the National Humanities Center during the year I spent in residence ­there. John Fraser welcomed me to Massey College for a brief, intellectually memorable stay. My warm thanks are again due to the Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford, for many kind­

Acknowl­edgments  513 nesses and as many conversations. I would mention in par­tic­u­lar my host, Professor Richard McCabe, master Spenserian. I am as always grateful for the libraries in which I have been privileged to work, and grateful to their helpful and dedicated staff. I mention first Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard, with special thanks to James Capobianco, Susan Halpert, and especially Ann Robinson; Fisher Rare Books library in To­ ronto; the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.; the Bodleian li­ brary at Oxford; the British Library in London; and the library of the Fon­ dazione Giorgio Cini, in Venice. I am grateful, as always, to Lindsay W ­ aters, Joy Deng, and the staff of Harvard University Press, and of course to the syndics of the press for their confidence in this proj­ect and their care for its realization. Andrew Katz and Angela Piliouras took charge of copyediting and production, greatly to the benefit of this book. My deepest gratitude must be to Spenser, of course, a constant companion over the years and yet, as it seems to me, a more remote and fi­nally unknow­ able one than, say, Milton or even the supposedly elusive Shakespeare, whose mind I think we know pretty well. Spenser’s we do not—at least u ­ ntil the Mu­ tabilitie Cantos. His occasional shallows can obstruct our view of his depths, which are considerable. The questions he raises, about justice and courtesy for example (for courtesy, let modern readers substitute the social), strike me as more open to thinking about our pre­sent condition on earth than does the more co­ herent but also more rigidly ideological and retrospective system of Milton. With a l­ ittle thought, this poet of damsels on h ­ orses and knights in distress, this exposer of what, ­under normal conditions, is the terrifying resemblance of gigantic fraud to the truth, this prophet of ecological disaster at the end of nature, is one who speaks to our moment. I owe more than I can say to Anna, who listened keenly, with a discriminating ear, as I read to her the entire Faerie Queene aloud.

Credits

An ­e arlier version of Chapter 4 was first published as “Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,” in A Companion to Re­nais­sance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), pp. 201–13. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. An ­earlier version of Chapter 6 was first published as the entry for “Allegory,” in The Prince­ton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed., ed. Roland Greene (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012), 37–41. Copyright © 2012 by Prince­ton University Press. Chapter 7 was first published as “Death in an Allegory,” in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (Bas­ ingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 65–77. Copyright © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2003. Chapter 8 was first published as “Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh,” in Craft and Tradition: Essays in Honour of William Blissett, ed. H. B. de Groot and Alexander Leggatt (Cal­ gary, AB: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 35–46. Copyright © 1990 by H. B. de Groot and Alexander Leggatt. The notes and some text have been revised. ­ arlier versions of Chapter 9 ­were first published as “Re­nais­sance Literary Theory,” in E Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. Andrew Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 158–64, copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2017; and as “Re­nais­ sance Theory and Criticism,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Copyright © 1994, 2005 by The Johns Hopkins Uni­ versity Press. An e­ arlier version of Chapter 10 was delivered as the Kathleeen Williams Memorial Lecture, “A Field Theory of Allegory,” to the Spenser Society at the International Me­ dieval Congress, Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2017.

515

516  Credits Chapter 11 was first published as “Notes on Reading in The Faerie Queene: From Mo­ ment to Moment,” in Spenser in the Moment, ed. Paul J. Hecht and J. B. Lethbridge (Mad­ ison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015), 217–34. Copyright © 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Chapter 12 was first published as “Thinking Moments in The Faerie Queene,” in Spenser Studies: A Re­nais­sance Poetry Annual 22 (2007): 103–25. Copyright © 2007 AMS Press, Inc. Chapter 13 was first published as “ ‘And therefore as a stranger give it welcome’: Cour­ tesy and Thinking,” in Spenser Studies: A Re­nais­sance Poetry Annual 18 (2003): 343–59. Copyright © 2003 AMS Press, Inc. Chapter 14 was first published as “The Thinking of History in Spenserian Romance,” in Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period, ed. Jon Whitman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 214–27. Copyright © Cam­ bridge University Press, 2015. Chapter 15 was first published as “Colonial Allegories in Paris: Ideology and Primitive Art,” in Thinking Allegory Other­wise, ed. Brenda Machosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 2009), 119–41. Copyright © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Ju­nior University. Some sentences in Chapter 16 have been borrowed from “Let’s Get Spenser on the Un­ dergraduate Syllabus Everywhere,” the Hugh Maclean Memorial Lecture, Interna­ tional Spenser Society, December 2007, Spenser Review 39, no. 1 (2008): 9–31. Copyright © The Spenser Review, 2008. Chapter 17 was first published as “Night Thoughts on Mutability,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010), 24–39. Copyright © Manchester University Press, 2010. Chapter 18 was first published as “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609),” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 333–48. Copyright © Oxford University Press, 2010. An e­ arlier version of the Afterword, now almost entirely changed, was first published as “Edmund Spenser Meets Jacques Derrida: On the Travail of Systems,” in Spenser Review 43, no. 3 (2014). Copyright © The Spenser Review, 2014.

Index

Abstraction, 8, 61, 130–131, 137, 194, 239, 273, 294; personification and, 150, 193, 195, 196, 211, 284, 312; in Hegel, 275 Acidale, 307, 376, 386–387, 389–392, 442; name, 375, 393 Acrasia, 9–10, 87, 105, 140, 388, 442; name, 36, 86–87, 131, 162; island of, 81, 84; and Tasso, 105, 238; bound by Guyon, 140, 221–222, 238, 241, 271 adventure: in plan of FQ, 8, 9, 10, 28, 84, 134, 221, 295, 440; in Ariosto, 28, 37, 44, 105; and romance, 47, 110, 154, 122, 123, 134, 243, 246; of Britomart, 67, 132, 141–142, 271; of Arthur, 114; contrast with army, 122–123; allegorized, 154, 274 Aeneas, 33, 76, 77, 82, 115, 125, 154; dynastic epic, 150, 161, 239, 333. See also Virgil Aesthetics, 2–3, 10, 11, 12, 109, 175; Re­nais­sance, 51–56, 60, 74, 89; politics and, 101; interpretation and, 175; dissonance and, 189, 274, 440; subtheological, 231, 240, 278, 284; purity, 286, 435; moral judgment and, 306, 429, 433; reading and, 308; symmetry and closure, 316; ideology and, 357, 363, 365

Alberti, Leone Battista, 22, 45–46, 100 Allegorical interpretation, 43, 57, 160, 187, 217, 255; antiquity, 83, 161, 172, 185, 188; as field, 165, 169, 180, 257, 267; as ritual, 175–176 Allegory, 1, 4, 8, 10; continued, 6, 11, 22, 35, 42, 45, 57; ideology and, 12, 179, 180, 234, 347, 350; romance and, 14, 48, 244, 247, 330, 331, 335; eighteenth-­ century critics and, 14–15; and thinking, 28; and psychomachia, 31; Italian critical theory and, 36–38, 43; moral, 40, 133, 337, 415; as field, 44, 48, 242–243, 249, 250, 251, 257, 262; and moment, 50; encyclopedism and, 58; satire and, 71, 101; and herme­ neutic anxiety, 73; and epic, 91, 120; vio­lence and, 94; and Tasso, 103, 104, 154, 216; Spenser’s darker version of, 105, 137; dreams and, 109; mystery and, 140, 151, 181, 183–184, 196, 238, 254–255, 364; Coleridge and, 149; as sub-­heroic, 152; telos of, 152, 156–157, 158, 245, 284; politics and, 158–159; love and, 160; secondariness and, 165–167, 169; and daemons, 170; distinguished from allegorical interpretation, 171; and rhe­toric, 173,

517

518  Index Allegory (continued) 180–181, 253, 254; looser composition of, 174–175; Wittgenstein and, 176; romantic criticism of, 177, 286–288; and trancendence, 178, 382; medieval, 182; personification and prosopopoia and, 188–196, 311, 353; and gender, 197–198; death and, 199–200, 210; and force, 201, 358, 444; as “other speaking,” 211; and mimesis, 234; and abstraction, 239; and thinking, 252, 262, 314; of temperance, 292–293; entanglement, 294; paralysis of attention, 298; festive, 348; and commodity fetishism, 351; and capture, 358, 447; and colonialism, 359; and ecol­ogy, 391; imagery, 407, 409; and presence, 443; and signal, 447–448 Alma, 115, 176, 271, 289, 293, 307 Alpers, Paul J., 249–250, 274–275 Althusser, Louis, 178–179 Amavia, 210, 293 Amoret: torture of, 10, 257; embrace, 60–61, 62, 140, 383; Arthur’s protec­ tion of, 61, 134; in ­temple of Venus, 62, 135; in second installment of FQ, 133–134, 141; and marriage, 160, 165, 252; presence in masque, 257–260 Anagogy, 187, 255, 284 Analy­sis, 8, 41, 42; psycho-­, 213–215; objectivity of, 217–218 Androgyny, 383 Apollo, 22, 51; as order, 53; and classical aesthetic, 57; and Marsyas, 69, 372; and muses, 116; war with g­ iants, 116–117; as harmony, 348; and Delos, 393 Archimago, 27, 82, 105, 206, 207, 304 Architectonic structure, 3, 12, 13, 14, 401, 420–421, 440 Ariadne, 56, 393 Ariosto, Ludovico, 4, 22, 35, 36–39, 44, 74, 270, 433; and heroic poem, 26, 28, 30, 79–80; and Boiardo, 26, 30, 32, 42, 46; allegorization of, 36–37, 43–45,

237–239; romance and, 41, 50, 52, 56, 79, 82, 106, 244, 274; Tasso and, 104–106, 120, 154, 235 Aristotle: ethics, 7, 39–40, 94, 133, 135, 153, 289, 360; Poetics, 9, 17, 35–36, 37, 45–46, 47, 49, 52, 101–104, 175, 229, 234–235; phthora, 130, 405; “On the Heavens,” 142, 420; politics, 153–154; Metaphysics, 420–421 Arlo Hill, 111; Re­nais­sance, 51–56, 60, 74, 89; scene of judgment, 306, 415; Diana and, 408, 422–423; and Ireland, 409, 410, 434 Artegal, 5–6; name, 5–6, 85, 98, 108, 154, 239, 245–246; and Lord Grey, 38–39, 92, 108, 141; lover of Britomart, 62, 64, 245; in ­women’s clothes, 65, 66, 81, 137, 438; and vio­lence, 66, 96, 246, 447; and Spenser’s design, 67; in structure of FQ, 132, 134, 239; and politics, 137; as crocodile, 139; abused by Envy and Detraction, 141, 387; random movements, 242, 245; Britomart’s love of, 247, 268; and leveling ­giant, 304–305, 424; justice and, 319, 370, 389 Arthur: in plan of FQ, 5, 6, 7, 26, 41–42, 63, 67, 83–85, 239, 241; King, 26–27, 41; protector of Amoret, 61, 134; Gloriana and, 63, 242–243, 245; rescues Redcross, 65, 125; Britomart and, 67, 132; heroic love, 83, 85, 112, 113, 161; dynastic forbear of Queen Elizabeth, 90, 118–119, 120, 121; Celtic tradition and, 107, 109, 114–116, 118, 123; po­l iti­c al virtue and, 133, 152, 153–155; magnificence and, 149, 151, 160; Guyon and, 201–209, 241, 271, 246, 272; pursues Florimell, 246, 267–268, 278, 389 Arthurian legend, 8, 27, 74, 107, 114, 115, 120, 122–123, 301, 339, 415 Artist, 21, 167, 177, 193, 204, 329, 363, 394 Astraea, 137, 143, 190, 262, 319, 323 Ate, 135

Index  519 Atin, 206, 207 Auden, W. H., 391–392 Augustine, Saint, 251, 280–283, 284 Aveugle, 336

Bacon, Sir Francis, 98, 156 Barthes, Roland, 418 Baudelaire, Charles, 56, 177, 196, 197 Beauty: po­liti­cal, 10–11; Stendhal and, 60–61; as promise, 62–64; and truth, 67, 306; of Mutabilitie, 78, 423; fairy 110; robotic, 134, 191; Florimell as personification of, 159–160, 165, 267–268, 270, 272, 274, 284; of queen, 166–167, 245, 388; of Acrasia’s garden, 238; perverted, 271; of Spenser’s wife, 374; and death, 376; in “Hymn in Honour of Beautie,” 385–386; and transcendence, 389, 395–396; of the Hours, 426; of Memnon, 435–436 Belphoebe, 85, 135, 159, 165, 287, 292–294 Benjamin, Walter, 196, 204, 350–351 Bible, 42, 126, 127, 144, 158, 237, 407, 433; interpretation of, 173, 186–187, 201; allegory in, 186 Blatant beast, 14–16, 85, 141, 171, 323, 375, 433 Blissett, William, 222, 307, 386, 418 body, 10, 18, 60, 63, 166; composite, 152, 181, 237; capture and, 195, 197, 351–352, 358–359; death and, 205–206, 208, 210, 211, 293; physics, 251, 259, 276, 406; aesthetic, 293, 435; House of Alma as, 307; the other as, 382; reproduction and, 383; glorified, 407, 432 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 26–27, 32, 42, 46, 47, 202, 244, 274 Braggadocchio, 292, 294 Briana, 320, 370 Britomart, 5–7, 8, 10, 18; Bradamante and, 37, 44, 105, 238; relation to Arthur, 41, 132, 153; fight with Scudamour, 61; love of Artegal, 62, 64, 65, 81, 247, 442; fight with Marinell, 63,

135, 438; Spenser banishes her, 66–67; and po­liti­cal order, 84, 137, 163; and history, 85, 119, 133, 150, 333; martial, 124–125, 131, 159; at Isis’ Church, 137–139; ending of 1590 and 1596 FQ, 140–141, 266; and Gloriana, 160, 164–165; at ­c astle of Malecasta, 164, 246, 271; displacement of Gloriana and Arthur onto Britomart and Artegal, 239; British arms and, 245; Merlin’s glass, 247–249; passes through fire, 255–256; masque of Cupid and, 257; Ollyphant and, 257, 258; chastity, 269 Britons, 41, 97, 105, 114, 115, 119, 333, 339 Brute, 114, 115, 244. See also Britons Bryskett, Lodowick, 39, 40, 52 Bunyan, John, 193, 200, 201 Burbon, Sir, 346 Burckhardt, Jacob, 46, 152, 342 Burghley, Lord, William Cecil, 1st Baron, 141, 159, 163 Busyrane, 10, 63, 67, 131, 252, 253, 257, 258, 259

Cadwallader, 109, 120. See also Britons Calepine, 85, 382 Calidore, 14–16, 56, 84–85; civilizer, 320, 370; and dancing graces, 374, 380, 386, 389, 393; wants to live with Colin, 375. See also Pastorella Cambina, 95, 135 Camden, William, 107, 368 Castiglione, Baldassare, 141 Celtic culture, 41, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 114, 140, 139, 248. See also Gaelic change, 56, 106, 199, 201, 278; po­liti­cal, 1, 177–178, 423; improvisation and, 17; Mutabilitie named as, 78, 151, 400, 422; narrative and, 106, 235; metaphysical, 142–144, 150–151, 308, 399, 407, 417, 419–420, 423, 451; Daoism and, 145; in allegory, 191, 199, 201, 210, 227, 243, 268, 270, 292, 316; and moment, 297–298, 307; in Hegel, 298; stars and planets,

520  Index change (continued) 303, 421, 426–428; thinking and, 316, 398–399; exchange, 349, 359, 370, 391, 411; character, 389; apocalyptic, 399, 429, 430, 432–433; and poetry, 403, 407, 412, 419; decay and alteration, 404, 419–420, 425, 432; neoplatonic dilation and, 405, 413, 429; beauty of, 422; versus identity, 423; change not identical with itself, 431 Chapman, George, 286, 445 Character, 7, 32, 62, 67, 86, 87, 105; of Arthur, 115; in Tasso vs. Spenser, 152; distributed, 160; allegorical, 160, 191, 199–201, 203–204, 206, 269; in field, 248; in Dante, 358–359 Charissa, 125–126 chastity, 8, 41, 131; in system of virtues, 133; girdle as chastity test, 134; virginal and married, 149; as a composite virtue, 165–166; super­natural, 168; as field of thought, 252; thinking about, 300; and courtesy, 323 Chaucer, 54, 55, 57; as example, 23, 91; language of, 69; as learned poet, 70; as Tityrus, 71; “Tale of Sir Thopas,” 109, 160; Chauceriana, 112; copiousness, 120; “Squire’s Tale,” 135; translator of Roman de la ­rose, 191; Petrarch and, 228, 229; Sidney’s assessment of, 233; Troilus and Criseyde, 233–234, 368; Parlement of Foules, 306, 423; buried in Westminster Abbey, 368; “Knight’s Tale,” 368; Spenser as new Chaucer, 371; Spenser buried near, 415 Cicero, 180, 186, 255, 280 Civil felicity, 152, 154, 161, 237, 238 Cleopolis, 7, 41, 63, 127, 152, 157, 216, 389, 443 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 149–150, 253, 403 Colin Clout, 23–25, 56–57, 58–60, 68, 232, 372–377, 394 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, 11, 25, 39, 373

Colonialism, 130, 180, 362; French, 354, 360, 361, 363, 367 Comedies, 21–22, 45, 51, 189 Concept: in allegory, 8, 35–37, 174, 189, 191, 253; of history, 98; idea of FQ, 216; as grasping, 216, 311; confers unity, 236–237; of field, 250–251, 262; in Hegel, 275, 328–329, 438; of system, 294–295; thinking, 298; of the ­thing, 312, 400, 409, 411; of the state, 342; of courtesy, 369; of the soul, 382; of change, 407, 432 Connectivity, 242, 244, 379 Constancy, 299–300, 416, 436; Legend of, 145, 403, 417, 423 Contemplation, 8, 17, 277; as a character, 147, 157–158 Continents, allegory of, 350, 356, 357 Courtesy, 16, 141, 299, 300, 313; Legend of, 142, 154, 318; as moving into nearness, 311; non-­conceptual, 312; and the stranger, 312; as encounter with the strange, 315–316; as habit, 319–320; as culture, 320, 370; as ground of community, 321–323; as basis of other virtues, 323; as alterna­ tive to vio­lence, 369, 381; and art, 377; and ecol­ogy, 381, 391; distinguished from civility and politeness, 382; and desire, 385–386; and incompleteness, 385–386; transcendental, 386, 389

death, 9, 32, 63, 33–34, 59, 112, 399; allegorical figures and, 170–171, 199, 210–212, 246, 425–426, 446; in Homer, 194–195, 208, 276; as event, 199; as revelation of meaning, 200–206; heroic, 209; and temperance, 293; Colin Clout and, 372–373, 375; of the poet and of poetry, 377, 399; generation and, 384; of Antigone, 441–442; of the Fairy Queen, 443 decay: metaphysical, 130, 426; in the heavens, 142–144; Whirl­pool of, 278;

Index  521 generation and, 384; in nature, 399, 404, 405; of Mutabilitie, 413–414; and poetry, 414. See also Aristotle: phthora “Decay” (poem), 430 Delacroix, Eugène, 177, 196–198 Derrida, Jacques: “la différance,” 55–56, 57, 439; Glas, 437, 439, 440, 441; Algerians, 438; Antigone, 442; system collapse, 444; absolute knowledge, 447–448 Despair, 108, 171, 378 Diana, 138, 159, 405, 411, 417–418, 456; and Arlo Hill, 422; and Faunus, 423 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 176 Digression, 16, 36, 43, 165 Diodorus Siculus, 139 Dragon: Redcross’s agon with, 37, 81, 82, 87, 106; of Cadwallader, 115, 120; as sedition, 127–128; as original sin, 151, 157; Cupid’s, 256 Dryden, John, 51, 77 Du Bellay, Joachim, 301, 339, 444 Duessa, 27, 82, 284, 336, 337 Dürer, Albrecht, 351

Earl of Ormonde and Ossory, dedicatory sonnet to, 117–118 Ecol­ogy, 151, 300, 291 Eden, 157–158, 188, 302 E. K., 23, 24, 25 Eliot, T. S., 24, 54, 124, 229, 373 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 95 Empire, 28, 159, 352, 353, 355, 360, 381–382 Enchantment, 3, 17, 112, 152, 182, 236–237, 252 Entanglement, 60, 216; as polysemy, 294; noetic, 295, 297; romance narrative and, 335 Erasmus, 69, 75, 354 Errour, 94, 128, 183, 190 Essence, 199, 201, 284; and definition, 311, 342; of h ­ uman nature, 324; of thinking, 325; nonessentiality of verse, 403; of FQ, 444

Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of, 11, 72, 89, 334, 368, 371, 415 Ethics, 11, 90, 122, 139, 151, 417. See also Aristotle Exposition coloniale, 347, 348, 361

Faerie Queene: as proj­ect, 2, 16–17; flexible structure, 4, 28; moments, 5, 18; plan, 5, 67, 84; Arthur as unifying princi­ple of, 6, 41; aesthetics and politics, 11–12; literary theory and, 12, 36–38; discussion with Harvey, 21–22, 25; orientalism and, 27, 29–32; discussion with Bryskett, 39–40; allegory and romance in, 48–49; fantasmatic center, 56, 60; identity of beauty and virtue, 62; distrust of love in, 64, 79; for po­liti­cal elite, 74–75; romance and epic in, 80–81; reflection of character, 88; ideology and, 90; ­union of morals with po­liti­cal theory, 90; second install­ ment, 95; Ireland inspiring, 98; modernity and, 98, 100; premature conclusion, 102–103; Tasso and, 105, 107; Ariosto and, 106, 238; Brittonic origin and, 108; Fairy Land as colonial Ireland, 108, 130; Homer and, 116; Queen Elizabeth and, 118, 124; Virgil and, 121, 122, 125; publication and editions of, 131, 133, 142, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 232, 271, 279; abstract design of, 132; Plutarch and, 139; power and eroticism in, 139; ideal court and, 152; plans for, 155; medieval tradition and, 160; love and martial valor in, 161; ontic signifiers, 171; knowledge and, 190; personifications and, 191; death in, 201, 210, 212; interpretive cir­cuit of, 217; elevation of poetry in, 230; the Christian God in, 231; telos of, 232; poetics of, 234; style and structure of, 239, 401, 402, 403, 440; the reader and, 249, 262, 269, 270, 294, 311, 382; episodes and moments,

522  Index Faerie Queene (continued) 266, 267; genre of, 273, 274; unit of composition, 275; numinous power in, 284; as intellectual action, 326; the electronic age and, 379; as entangled rain forest, 380, 390; as transcendental burial site, 397; as a ruin, 400, 437; as a “made ­thing”, 412. See also Allegory; Field; History; Poetics; Romance; System; thinking Fairy land, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 119; Ireland as, 122; fame and, 127; as “­mental space,” 149–150, 261; metaphysical fluidity, 151; po­liti­cal virtue, 154–155; otherness of, 165, 389; as moral center, 200, 388, 439; countries in, 241; collapses into Fairy Queen, 242; as field, 243; goal of system, 274, 440, 444 Fairy Queen: feast, 5; glory, 7, 41, 159; court, 10, 56, 84–85, 130, 401; elusive­ ness, 13, 67, 106, 436, 441; assigning quests, 16; and Queen Elizabeth, 22, 42, 140, 434; and Arthur, 26, 132, 160; ­battle with Pagan King, 37, 83, 105–106, 156, 200; ideal beauty and, 62; displace­ ment onto Britomart, 132–133, 239, 340; portrait, 202; as trace, 442; as corpse, 443. See also Cleopolis Fanchin, 145, 423 Fanon, Franz, 362 Faunus, 405, 408, 417, 422–423 Field, 3, 46–49, 57, 67; of meaning, 60, 218, 364; of allegorical interpretation, 165, 169, 175, 180, 254; cultural, 179; theory of allegory, 242, 243–245, 249, 250–252, 255–262, 267 Fish, Stanley, 213–215 Florimell: fleeting, 51, 62, 63, 267; as beauty, 61, 159–160, 165, 270–271, 274; Arthur’s pursuit of, 63, 246; and Marinell, 64, 84, 134, 136, 137; sudden­ ness of, 111, 246, 268, 269, 272; False Florimell, 134, 268; as moment, 268, 269, 270, 277, 278, 284

Fornari, Simone, 43, 103, 236–238 Foucault, Michel, 101 France, Third Republic, 347, 348, 374, 361, 362 Freccero, John, 94, 182 Freud, Sigmund, 213–215, 216 Friendship, 94–95; basis of male po­liti­cal order, 134–135; vio­lence and, 137; thinking about, 300; and po­liti­cal virtue, 389 Frye, Northrop, 229, 275; on Mutabilitie Cantos, 403–404, 416, 417 Furor, 171, 192, 193

Gaelic, 40, 93, 111 Galileo, 42, 45, 142, 235 Genet, Jean, 437–439 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 26, 97, 115, 118 Gerioneo, 34 ­Giants, 85, 108, 115, 116, 117; with scales, 304, 307, 370, 424, 446, 447. See also Orgoglio Giraldi, Giovanni Battista (Giraldi Cinthio), 39, 45, 52 Giulio Romano, 351 Gloriana. See Fairy Queen Gods, 31, 109, 116, 117, 143, 145, 172, 174, 178, 185, 186, 189, 194, 200–201; Plato and, 254 –255; loves of, 256, 257; minute gods, 280–284 Goldberg, Jonathan, 56 Graces, the Three, 98, 372, 374–375, 381–386, 389, 392–397 Greenblatt, Stephen, 179–180 Grey, Arthur, Lord, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton, 38, 92–93, 108, 141 Guerilla warfare, 35, 141 Gulfe of Greediness, 278 Guyle, 35 Guyon, 9–10, 41, 81, 86–88, 111, 140, 163; defended by Arthur, 206–212, 238; fights Britomart, 245–246, 272; follows Florimell, 267–269, 272; fight with Huddibras and Sansloy, 292–293

Index  523 Hamilton, A. C., 206, 210 Harington, Sir John, 74, 80 Harvey, Gabriel, 21–25, 38, 40, 45, 51, 53, 72, 73; as Hobbinoll, 25, 71; poem by, 25–26, 220 Hazlitt, William, 286–287 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 275–276, 278, 295–298, 307; on concept of history, 327–329 Heidegger, Martin: poetry and philos­ ophy, 298; poets and thinking, 313–314; thinking, 324–325, 401 Henri IV, King of France. See Burbon Henry VII, King, 88, 115, 120, 245, 333 Henry VIII, King, 88–89, 245, 332; Crown of Ireland Act, 129 Heraclitus (allegorist), 186 Heraclitus (phi­los­o­pher), 345 Hermaphrodite, 60, 62, 383, 385 Hesiod, 116, 135, 143, 170–172, 204–205, 213, 250 History, 28, 85, 98, 104, 292; as deposits, 107; chronicle, 116, 119, 142, 150; Milton’s conception of, contrasted with Spenser’s, 302–303, 329–330; romance and, 332–334, 341, 342; allegory and, 335–338; as ruins, 339; French colonialism, 355, 356, 362–363; end of, 441 Hob­goblin, 22, 51, 53, 56 Holiness, 125, 158, 231, 299–300, 315, 320, 323; Legend of, 84, 157 Homer, 4, 18, 36, 62, 100, 109, 116, 117; Eris, Atê, and the Litai, 135, 194; allegorizing of, 171–172, 177, 184–186, 239, 254, 332; gods and daemons in, 193, 418; Memnon, 436 Honor, 7, 67, 241–242, 321–322, 361, 388; love and, 161; Belphoebe and, 294 Hunt, Leigh, 286

Icons, iconography: icones symbolicae, 8, 90, 176, 270; puzzle, mystery and, 16, 69; Re­nais­sance, 83, 231; traditional,

126, 191, 192, 348, 407; moment, 203; thinking, 270, 314, 317–318; adver­ tising as, 351; of colonialism, 353, 357; of the graces, 370 Idea(s): realm of, 8, 178, 418; of poem, 28, 35, 36, 37, 57, 114, 167, 216–219, 241; idealism, 50; aesthetic, 51, 52, 74, 316, 380, 435; of beauty, 62, 396; of love, 84; of friendship, 95; modern, 98; of the poet, 124; of Fairy Court and Gloriana, 130, 160, 421; and abstraction, 150; of allegorical figures, 170–171, 178, 180, 194, 217, 247; and ideology, 177–179; and vio­lence, 211; in contrast to m ­ iddle way, 278, 291; ­people embodying, 348; paradigm of order, 440 Ideal city state, 46, 99–100, 122, 152, 157, 185, 237, 254, 382 Ideal prince, 61, 87, 153 Identity: of beauty and virtue, 82; and change, 143, 398–399, 419, 422–423, 428, 430–431; allegorical, 258; turbulence and, 283; of poetry and thinking, 286, 300, 398–399, 400; in logic, 400; of the ­thing, 400; and poetry, 414; and difference, 436, 443 ideology, of romance, 50; Arthuro-­ Trojan, 65, 114; humanist, 75; gender, 124–125; allegory and, 177; as practice, 178–179; colonial, 350, 363; adver­ tising and, 351; of princely power, 351 Imagination, 261, 282, 289, 295, 403 Improvisation, 1, 17 Information, 129, 252, 256, 341, 383, 401, 404, 440 Ireland, 6, 32; pacification and coloniza­ tion of, 38–40, 108, 120, 127, 130, 323, 381, 422; military and administrative ser­vice in, 92–98; View of the Pre­sent State of, 93–94, 101, 104, 129; as Fairy Land, 108; foreign policy and, 119–120, 132, 137, 332–333; Mutabilitie Cantos set in, 417, 422; disasters of war, 444 Isis, 137–138, 139, 284, 389, 436, 442 Islam. See Muslims

524  Index Jonson, Ben, 99, 445 Jove, 78–79, 108–109, 143, 422–448, 453; loves of, 256; as identity, 398–399; as order, 400, 404; and stars, 419 Joyce, James, 54, 369, 459 Justice: subjugation of w ­ omen as, 66, 163; Lord Grey and, 92; and sedition, 116; and Astraea, 137, 143, 320; and vio­lence, 137, 157; and Osiris, 139; scales, 154, 370, 371; and the prince, 246; thinking about, 300; theory of, 320–323; colonial, 357; as po­liti­cal virtue, 389

151–154, 159; po­l iti­c al elite and, 75, 125, 158; as cybernetic control, 130; and self-­interpretation, 216–220; publication of, 220–221, 223–226 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 46, 320, 370 Lewis, C. S, 57–58, 145, 295–296, 315 Literary theory, 12, 46–47, 220; Re­nais­sance, 39, 52, 100–101, 228–235, 239–240 Lucian, 100, 172, 253 Lucifera, 336 Lydgate, John, 23, 55, 58, 234

Kane, Sean, 139, 380 Keats, John, 112–113, 308, 446–447 Kilcolman, 92, 111, 150, 423, 434, 445

Malbecco, 171, 446 Malecasta, 131, 132, 247, 257, 291 Malengine, 55, 141, 381 Malory, Sir Thomas, 14, 109, 115, 118, 120, 123, 216 Mammon, 81, 87–88, 108, 110, 131, 210, 238 Mantuan, 25, 71 Marinell: wounded, 17, 18; languishing, 63–64, 66; love of Florimell, 84, 85, 135–137; regression to nature, 85, 234, 438, 439 Marlowe, Christopher, 88, 131 Marot, Clément, 26, 70 Mars, 123; overmastered by Venus, 83, 161–162; as planetary deity, 426 McCabe, Richard, 93 Meaning: and thought, 4; allegorical, 36, 43, 58, 63, 72–73, 91, 94, 123, 165, 171, 191; “undermeaning,” 44, 186, 254–255; field of, 49, 60, 242, 257, 364; transcen­ dental, 55, 62, 274, 331, 382; quest for, 57; in Letter to Raleigh, 133, 216–218, 222; nature and, 174; as use, 176; and meta­phor, 183–184; Biblical, 187; and death, 199, 223, 438; force and, 201, 204; Neoplatonism and, 211; as unifier, 236; retrospection and, 269; entanglement and, 294, 329, 358, 446; commodities and, 351, 359; as presence, 439, 443; system and, 447–448

Landor, Walter Savage, 287–288 Langland, William, 55, 68, 72, 171, 181–182, 213 Language, 4; aggression and, 14, 29; En­glish, 23, 46–47, 99, 68–69; Italian (Tuscan), 74; Ireland and, 93–94; Celtic, 107–108, 111; gender inclusive, 152–153; inadequacy of, 166–167; personification and, 172, 195; Wittgenstein and, 175–176; evolution of, 178; Neoplatonism and, 211; poetry and, 231–235, 414; French, 362; and meta­phor, 407; Spenser’s, 447 Law: of the sword, 33; of chivalry, 81–82; in Ireland (Brehon law), 93, 129; and abstract thinking, 194; physical, 312, 431; French, 362; Mutabilitie and, 399; possession and, 424; masculinity and, 439; divine, 441; vio­lence and, 447 Lepanto, ­battle of, 28, 31. See also Ottomans Letter to Raleigh: as program for FQ, 2, 5–7, 90, 222, 226–227; inconsistencies with FQ, 9–11, 132, 221–222; and Arthur, 41, 109; and Tasso’s Allegoria, 42, 104; allegory and, 57, 88, 133, 149,

Index  525 Memnon, 435–437, 441 Merchant Taylors’ School, 72, 74, 444 Merlin, 7, 85; in legend, 114, 118; prophecy and, 119, 133, 138, 333, 335; looking glass, 247–248, 250; tomb of, 443 Meta­phor, 4; continued meta­phor, 14, 173, 180–184, 253, 257; meta­phors of thinking, 311; meta­phor as metabolê, 407; as nonidentity, 436; in philosophy, 438 Metaphysics, 62, 87, 163, 398–399, 437, 421, 443 Meter, 99, 232, 414 ­Middle Ages: romance in, 46, 50, 52, 330; allegorical sign in, 172–174; allegory in, 177, 181, 189; Biblical interpretation in, 187; poetry in, 229–230 Mill, John Stuart, 476 Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 2, 4, 91, 336; contrasted with Spenser, 12, 13, 50, 42, 88, 231, 288–289, 301, 317, 339; angelic love, 60; serpents, 107; ideas for epic, 114, 167; Paradise Regained, 158; Sin and Death, 170–171; on bishops, 181, 234; and Re­nais­s ance critical theory, 229; and thinking, 301–302, 317–318; and history, 329–330; hierarchy of being, 380–381; “On the Marchioness of Winchester,” 396; “Another on the Same,” 405; “Il Penseroso,” 436; reputation, 445 Mimesis, 36, 165–167, 189, 235, 237, 296 Mirrour for Magistrates, 233 Molanna, 408, 410, 411, 422, 423 Moment, 1, 3, 12, 17, 18, 33, 43, 48; architecture of, 50; love, 82–83; descriptive, 135; allegorical, 170; thinking in, 183, 309; Nike of Samo­ thrace as, 196; of death, 199, 200–206, 211, 212; phantasmatic, 216; Spense­ rian, 243–244, 440; vector of, 256; triumph of Cupid as, 259; as array, 266–267; Florimell, 268–270, 277–278; kinesis and stasis, 270–272; versus genre, 273–274; Hegel and, 275–276,

297–298, 307, 441; balance scales as, 276, 304; kinestasis, 277, 283; as ek-­stasis, 282, 284; fluid dynamics, 283; Belphoebe, 287; Medina, 292; heterogeneity within, 293, 329, 340; entanglement and, 298; stanza as, 299; thinking and, 300; Mutabilitie and, 303–304; Nature and, 305–308; pavilions as, 354; of abjection, 374; as Acidalian surge, 375, 376; entangled, 380; hermaphrodite as false moment, 383; as ecological, 391; Graces and, 396; Letter to Raleigh as, 426; trophy as turning, 428; crypt as, 442; in absolute knowledge, 448 Months, 323, 409–410, 425, 430–431 Mortdant, 293 Mulcaster, Richard, 74–75, 232 Mulciber, 254 Munera, 96, 171, 370 Munster, province of, 92, 94, 96; Munster Plantation, 122, 409, 423, 424, 434, 445 Muses: nine, 21, 22, 116, 318; Calliope, of epic poetry, 37–38, 83, 106, 156; bucolic, 54, 168; Homer and, 117; sacred, 124, 155, 230, 321, 325; on Helicon and Parnassus, 231; as ­daughters of Memory, 303; Clio and Calliope, 422 Muslims, 29, 31, 52 Mutabilitie, 78, 79, 144; case against Jove, 303, 307, 399, 422, 424, 426–428; her speech, 305–306; striving for permanence, 413–414; as threat, 418; motion and, 420 Mutabilitie Cantos, 38, 78, 98, 130; Ireland and, 142; metaphysical question of, 143, 399, 419; relation to FQ, 222, 398; publication of, 223, 416; question of the ­thing, 400–407, 412, 423; integrity of, 403–404, 407–409, 416–417, 419; bodily resurrection of the dead in, 406–407; residue, 409; as “writerly,” 418; prophecy, 421; final stanzas, 430; power and, 433; failure of, 444; satire and, 445

526  Index Narrative, 4, 12, 18, 42, 43, 44; random­ izing power of, 48; romance and, 51, 102, 340–341; as field, 60; as medium, 94; complexity and, 105; in allegory, 200–201, 210, 212; and unity, 235, 244; as array, 266–267; versus symbolic tableau, 298; as thinking, 317, 330; the unexpected, 398; difference and deferral in, 439; narrative systems, 440 Nature, 308, 399–400, 404; ignorance of, 399, 406, 413; tradition of goddess of Nature, 424; prophecy of, 429; ­favors the young and the strong, 433 Neoplatonism, 130, 154, 188, 231, 406, 413 Neptune, 18, 256 Nicholas of Lyra, 187 Nohrnberg, James, 217, 250, 294 Noise: and signal, 341, 448; of slander, 387; ­r unning stream, 396; of the ­f uture, 433; in the system, 447

Occasion, 171 Ollyphant, 257, 258, 385 Orgoglio, 36, 80, 108, 125, 131, 336 Orientalism, 27 Orpheus, 184–185 Ottomans, 28, 31. See also Lepanto, ­battle of

Pagan King, 26, 83, 106, 155–156, 220 Pagans, 31, 114, 202 Pastorella, 85, 375 Paul, Saint, 9, 186, 432 Peterloo massacre. See Talus Petrarch, Francis, 98–99, 191, 228 Philip II, king of Spain, 32, 133, 155, 159, 336 Phlegra, 116, 118 Pindar, 116, 184, 298, 299, 393 Plato, 36, 69, 156, 159, 172, 230, 255, 297, 318, 385, 398, 438 Plutarch, 139, 186, 255 Poetics: Aristotle’s, 9, 35, 37, 45, 46, 173, 229; and Italian critical theory, 49, 52, 100, 102, 103, 234, 289; Spenser’s, 234

Politics, 6, 10, 11, 17; geopo­liti­cal anxiety of the West, 29–32; Aristotle and, 39–40, 153; aesthetics and, 53; classical morals and, 74; po­liti­cal elite, 75; new order set up by Britomart and Artegal, 84–85; morals of FQ and, 90; politics of friendship, 94–95; Ireland and, 101; legitimacy and, 119; eroticism and, 139; Tasso and po­liti­cal virtue, 154–155; thinkers of, 158; po­liti­cal prob­lem, 159; Gloriana and, 160, 161; of culture, 179–180, 333; allegory and, 181; po­liti­cal telos, 237; commitment, 342; left, 362; City of Immigration, 367; courtesy as po­liti­cal, 369–370; justice and, 389; absolute authority, 437; activism, 438 Ponsonbie, Edward, 131, 133 Porphyry, 188 Priamond, Diamond, Triamond, 95 Propertius, 55 Proteus, 133–134 Pscyhomachia, 7, 155, 172, 189, 200, 201, 237 Puttenham, George, 233 Pyrocles and Cymocles, 86, 201, 203–231

Quintilian, 173, 181, 182, 253–254

Radigund, 6, 64, 66, 67, 81, 131, 137, 181 Reading: anxiety, 72–73; active, 152, 175; region of, 155; as ritual, 172, 178; use of signs in, 176; in a field, 258, 261, 267; in moments, 269, 270; as noetic circulation, 315, 443 Repentance, 126 Rock of Vile Reproach, 278, 380 Romance, 6, 8, 10, 13; Greek, 15, 16; fairy, 22; medieval, 26, 42, 46, 50, 123, 248, 337, 339; re­nais­sance, 27–28,120; orientalism and, 30–32; re­nais­sance debate over, 35–37, 45, 51–52, 101–102, 235–237; and epic, 41, 49, 79, 81; and social class, 47; and moment, 48; viscosity of, 49; Atlante’s palace as

Index  527 figure for, 56; Ariosto and, 79–80; Spenser and, 81–85, 91, 105–106, 116, 254, 314–315; connectivity and, 243–244; allegory and, 247, 335; and FQ, 274, 340; and history, 329–334, 358; and thinking, 341, 342 Ruddymane, 29, 293 Ruins, 142, 281, 302–303, 339, 437

Sans Foy, Sans Joy, Sans Loy, 34, 86, 238, 290–293, 336, 337 Saracens, 26–28, 31, 46, 80. See also Orientalism; Pagans Sartre, Jean Paul, 291, 362 Scudamour: Britomart takes over his quest, 6, 132; inconsistency in plan for FQ, 10, 221–222; embrace, 60–63, 383; gives account of winning Amoret, 61, 155; as regression to nature, 85; missed opportunity for reunion with Amoret, 133–134; leaves the scene with Glauce, 134, 141; in eros environment, 252; unexplained knowledge of Amoret’s torture, 255–259 Seneschall, 34 Serena, 10, 85 Shakespeare, 28–31, 47, 54, 88, 90, 181, 223, 289, 330, 339, 465 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 288, 289, 377, 378, 445–446 Sidney, Sir Philip, 68, 99, 121, 155, 158, 221, 228, 233–234, 239, 255, 302, 377 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 109–110, 115, 339 Smerwick, 92, 93, 96 Social order, 40, 95, 130, 137, 321, 369, 385 Social theory, 370 Soldan, 32 Sophocles, 441 Spenserians (poets), 445 Statius, 72, 276 Sublime: Apollonian, 51, 117; epic, 121; Heavenly Jersualem as, 127; “Liberty Leading the ­People” as, 197; ancient

treatise on, 234; poetry, 240; Gloriana as, 245; Belphoebe as, 294; Acidale as, 393; absolute knowledge as, 438 Suger, Abbot of Saint Denis, 174 Suleiman the Magnificent, 32. See also Soldan Super ­natural: “marvels,” 43, 44, 52, 102, 104, 105, 108; fairies as, 110; daemons and gods as, 189; inspiration as, 230–231, 240, 303; ghost in Hamlet, 312; beauty as, 395 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 55, 89, 90, 232, 233 Swift, Jonathan, 52, 101 Symbol: icon as, 8, 83, 90, 176, 270; Hob­goblin as, 22; Saracens as, 28; of Arthur as ideal prince, 41, 239; romance as, 42; of Gloriana and Arthur, 65, 132, 134, 160, 340; Pyrocles and Cymocles as, 86; Munera as, 96; Bacon’s Atlantis as, 99; Ate as, 135; of Isis and Osiris, 137–138; Mercilla as, 159; captured figures as, 167; and allegory, 170, 177, 240; natu­ral, 174; place as, 286, 298; Talus as, 323; Babylon as, 338; Manhattan as, 356; artworks as, 365; Blattant Beast as, 375; ­giant as democracy, 447 System: poem as, 4, 12, 44, 130, 358; of aesthetics, ethics, and politics, 11; city as, 46; and time, 47; of allegory and romance, 48, 91; meaning in, 56; differential play in, 58; of ecol­ogy, 150–151, 391; of Spenser’s allegory, 175, 205, 242–243, 252, 311, 379–380, 440, 443; as field, 175, 255; of classical physics, 251; of Florimell, 277–278; and thinking, 295; Hegelian, 328; and the commodity, 351; of global colonialism, 359; watershed as, 411; Ptolemaic, 426–428; Nature’s, 431; white male straight philosophy, 438; expansion versus opposition of, 439; Hegelian, 441–442; collapse of, 444; travail of, 447

528  Index Tablet of Cebes, 172 Talus: as vio­lence, 66; as En­glish army, 92; and Munera, 96; as Corineus, 108; and Detraction, 141; and Malengine, 141, 387; and mechanical bloodlet­ ting, 323; Marinell protesting against, 438; and g­ iant, 446; and Peterloo massacre, 447 Tasso: Aristotelian theory and, 3, 101, 104, 228–229; influence on Spenser, 22; first crusade as epic subject, 27; and Islam, 30–33; and romance, 35, 50, 80; Aminta, 36, 55, 101; “Allegoria del poema,” 39, 42, 105, 152; Gerusalemme Liberata, 39, 101, 102–103, 236; in Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh, 41, 153, 221, 238, 239; epic rules and pacifica­ tion of Ireland, 101, 104; discourses on the heroic poem, 103–104; “Poetic Letters,” 103, 216, 236, 237; influence on FQ, 105, 151, 153, 235 Temperance, 8, 61, 86, 87, 140, 183, 238; and Medina, 290; and death, 293, 300; Belphoebe and, 294; and courtesy, 323, 380 Temporality, 50, 60, 402, 425 Thames and Medway, marriage of, 81, 84, 136, 411 Theagenes of Rhegium, 205 Theocritus, 54, 68, 70 Theon, Aelius, 173, 181 thinking, 1, 3, 4, 12; allegory and, 28, 37, 247, 252; Letter to Raleigh and, 88, 159; and vio­lence, 108; on friendship, 135; utopian, 139, 178, 341; open, 151; of the martial and the erotic, 161; self-­interpretation and, 163; and l­ egal abstraction, 194; poetic, 243, 285–286, 298, 308, 309, 338; field and, 252, 261; between allegorical tableaux, 279; and Faerie Queene, 289, 295, 314, 316–317, 326, 398, 401, 440–441; noetic entanglement and, 294–295; and moment, 297; thinking as letting go, 299; Hegel and, 299, 327–329, 437,

439; as impoverishment, 300; accident and improvisation, 301–303; in Milton, 302, 316; non-­visual, 305–306; thought thinking itself, 308; and philosophy, 310–311, 313; and courtesy, 315, 369, 385; Milton and Spenser, 317–318, 381; and civil society, 320, 322; as pro­cess, 322; Heidegger and, 324–325, 401; the other and, 329; and romance, 330–331, 335; inadequacy of dynastic epic to, 335; romance and allegory, 335; of history, 342; and transcendence, 385; and ruins, 437 Tiepolo, Giambattista, 236, 356 Timeas, 246 titans, 78, 143, 144, 192, 305, 413, 422, 424 Tools, 299, 312 Torture, 165, 257, 259 Tragedy, 35, 67, 99, 175, 199, 230, 290 Transcendence, 50, 156, 198 Trissino, Gian Giorgio, 35–36, 104, 236 Typhon, 138

Una: bliss, 61, 82; suspension of marriage, 83–84, 140; saves Redcross, 125; conquest of Ireland and, 127, 157; Redcross inspired by love of, 162; called errant, 242; attacked by Sansloy, 292 “Unperfite” canto, 143, 306, 416, 429, 430 Upton, John, 5, 161 Utopia, 100, 127, 139, 152, 158, 341

Vasari, Giorgio, 22, 52 Venus, 126; ­temple of, 62, 135, 160, 383; in Augustine, 282; and Acidale, 375, 392, 394; eyeing Diana’s nymphs, 418. See also Mars Virgil, 4, 24; Cumaean Sibyl, 29; epic of arms, 38; Eclogues, 59; learning, 70; masculinity and, 75, 82, 161; dynastic epic, 100, 333–334; ascent from pastoral to epic, 121–125, 155; allegorization of, 187–188, 239; and

Index  529 genre, 273–274; ruins of Troy, 339; Spenser as En­glish Virgil, 372; Virgil’s gods, 418 Virtues: in plan of FQ, 7, 37, 41, 133, 340; discussion of in Dublin, 39–40; politics of, 74, 108, 153, 154, 155, 389; represented by Giotto, 87; knights as “patrons” of, 90; Aristotle and, 100; cultivation, 127; social virtues, 141; Arthur’s relation to, 151, 245–246; projection of, 159; tradition of, 189; in Tasso’s allegorization, 237; courtesy as deep virtue, 315–316, 319, 320–323; and colonialism, 357; absent from Mutabilitie Cantos, 417

Warner, Marina, 197–198 Wars of the Roses, 88, 120, 334 West, the, 29, 30, 195, 332, 443 Williams, Kathleen, 69–70 Winckelmann, Johann, 51 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 175–176, 179 Words­worth, William, 286, 440, 465 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 89, 232

Xenophanes of Colophon, 185 Xenophon, 158, 159

Yeats, William Butler, 372